It's Better This Way (3 page)

Mormon cellars were wonders to behold. All you had to do was find a family that was of the Mormon faith and then go into their house. A basement was almost always a feature of their houses, and there would always be a very large room that was stocked floor to ceiling with all the essentials like water, cornmeal, canned goods, jars of vegetables, jerky… you name it, they had it if it could survive the apocalypse. I was glad that whoever had been looting the neighborhood either didn’t know about Mormons or didn’t have the capacity for sane thought to even grasp such a concept. Whoever had killed the husband, wife, and three young children upstairs couldn’t have been sane. But a Mormon cellar was a Mormon cellar, and this one was untouched.

I had no luck with finding guns though. Guns were worth more than food. I found a couple of shotgun shells and four bullets that said ‘9mm’ on the flat part, but nothing to load them into. Not that I would have been more dangerous than if I was unarmed. I would probably end up blowing my foot or head off, but I could at least scare someone. Unless they had a gun and knew how to use it, then I’d be holding my guts in while they rifled through my belongings. I found a couple nice knives and sheaths to strap onto my new canvas camo pants. Sunglasses, beanies, gloves, enough food to last… a couple of weeks? I had no idea, I wasn’t a survivalist. I’d been camping a total of three times. I thought about grabbing a fishing pole and some tackle, but gave that idea up. Boise might not have been a major city, but it was big enough to keep me active without ever engaging in things like camping, fishing, hunting, or riding horses more than a few times at best.

Sandra was what burned in my mind for the week I spent prowling the old neighborhoods. When I’d gathered everything I could find, including a handy pocket map, I tried to mount the bike I had appropriated from our next door neighbor. Food and guns were still more important than bikes, but that would change at some point when there weren’t as many mouths to feed or humans left to shoot. I swung my leg over the seat and fell over backwards with a crash. I cursed through the entire hour it took me to sort everything, throwing out two-thirds of it as too heavy, too bulky, or unnecessary for survival. I even left behind the little plastic wind-up radio. It still worked somehow, but for six nights I spent a couple hours before going to sleep slowly rolling the dial through the AM, FM, and Emergency bands. There was nothing but white noise.

It took me almost a year to get to Corvallis, but by the time I wheeled into the edge of town, there was nothing left of it. It looked like every single building had been burned down or demolished. As I rode into town, I noticed heavy track marks everywhere and almost no building left standing. More worrisome was the lack of rubble. I’d looked at tons of old World War II pictures, of what was left of European and Japanese cities after major bombing campaigns, and the amount of rubble always fascinated me. Corvallis was devoid of it. I looked at my little pocket map, but there was no inset of the city. Portland and Salem yes, but not Corvallis, nor even Eugene.

I spent the next fifteen years traveling the coast looking for her. I didn’t even have a picture to show anyone friendly enough to talk to about her. There were lot of females named Sandra, but none of them turned out to be my sister. I spent too many nights curled into a ball, crying in fury and despair over not being able to find her, refusing to give up and admit she was most likely dead. I would play conversations over in my mind that we’d had, or even the times when I was a little shit and stole her tampons without understanding what they were, parading them around to all my friends at elementary school until a teacher saw what I was doing and freaked out.

I would remember when she turned nineteen and I was just about to hit fifteen, how she came out to me. She was too ashamed to tell Dad, even though he wasn’t a raving homophobe lunatic. That was our mother. Sandra had tried to tell her when she was sixteen that she wasn’t going to the prom or any of the dances with boys because she liked girls instead. Our mother was so indoctrinated to believe that it was a sin that she refused to even entertain the idea that her own daughter was a lesbian. Our mother was the type that liked to put her fingers in her ears and repeat ‘la la la la’ instead of hearing something that was the polar opposite of what she had been raised to believe. It was a big reason why Mom and Dad were divorced and we’d stayed with Dad.

Sandra bawled her eyes out when she told me all of it one night the week before she left for Oregon State University.

“Relax, Sis,” I said to her. “So you’re a lesbian. You’re going to Lesbian State University aren’t you?” I asked smiling.

“Shut up, Evan,” she said, trying to hit me, but also trying not to smile.

“Imagine all the hot girls that go to school there,” I told her. “I see them every day on the internet.” My wink told her that the websites I had been looking at weren’t likely to be the type where the girls kept their clothes on.

“God, you’re a little perv,” she said, before adding, “I hope there’s a lot of girls like me there.”

“Sis, it’s college. There’s bound to be at least one fat, sweaty, pimply dyke for you to bang.”

“Oh my God, Evan, grow up!”

“But I bet there’s some really hot blonde—”

“Brunette,” she interrupted, already forgetting that I was a sex-starved teenager fantasizing about the same girls she would likely be attracted to.

“—brunette that has a nice rack, likes lacy thongs, and has a tongue like a jackhammer.”

“Just when I think I’m going to miss you, you cure me of it,” she said, punching me in the leg as hard as she could. It was an old game that we’d played since I was old enough to walk.

A week later she was off to school and I was beginning tenth grade. We sent each other emails almost every day. She posted pictures of the girl she was dating soon after starting classes, followed a few days later by a new picture of a new girl she was dating. Followed again a few weeks later by yet another girlfriend. I called her a rug-munching slut and she called me a shamelessly furious masturbator. Then the bulls arrived and I never heard from her again. I never got to tell her how much I loved her.

CHAPTER 5 - Arrival

We passed the first set of sentries just before noon. We came off the scrub and onto Bander Road after we rounded Waldo Lake below Upper Rigdon Lake. It used to be called something like ‘NF-5898’ but now we just called it ‘Bander Road’. I had no idea why it was given that name. I just knew that it led us down to The Farm. In an hour we’d be at the official gates, the ones that had been built back when the turmoil was still igniting power struggles and cities were slaughterhouses. La Pine was the nearest real city, about ten miles off to the east, but there wasn’t much left of it except a lot of ashes and rusted metal.

The wall around The Farm was ten feet high and about five feet thick. The interior and exterior walls were stacked pine trunks, and the middle had been filled with gravel and dirt. The walls extended for more than a mile in total around The Farm, though the lands for about three miles on each side were part of the complex. The residents didn’t like it when you called it a city. It didn’t have an official name. Everyone just called it ‘The Farm’. I didn’t really understand this, but I didn’t antagonize them by calling it anything other than ‘The Farm’ or ‘the complex’. I wasn’t one to make waves in a place that could vote to strip you naked and send you on your way.

The main gate wasn’t really a gate, just a large opening that had armed guards on the outside and on the inside. There really wasn’t much to guard. Our enemies were either in the ground or long gone. But once you had been assigned a job, you did the job. Guarding the inner perimeters of The Farm was only hazardous if you were allergic to boredom. I’d been lucky in my nine years by never having drawn that assignment. I’d been a gardener for the first three years, and I’d enjoyed it. It was hard work, but you got extra calories as a gardener, and you damn sure got in shape. Plus it was a probationary period to see if you could hack it. Most people that couldn’t hack it walked off The Farm in the first year.

That was the thing. You could leave at any time if you didn’t like it. You could even take your weapon and whatever you could carry on your back, as long as you didn’t steal it from anyone else. If you left, you could even come back if you’d been a good citizen in good standing. That was one of those things that got a full vote by the entire membership. There had only been a few that had walked off and then came back later during my time here. Sometimes farming or teaching or ranching or whatever you got assigned with just wasn’t working out and you thought you could strike out and do better. I could never figure out how anyone would think it was better outside of the The Farm’s range of influence. Then again, most of us had arrived here with nowhere else to go, but with the will to live and be productive members of any society that wasn’t full of religious nuts or ruthless dictators.

There had been power struggles in the history of The Farm. Two years after the invasion, three of the co-founding men tried to imprison Mom and about ten others. The Farm was only a year and a half old then, with barely fifty residents, but to a person they swamped the three and killed them. Seventeen humans died that day by the hands of fellow humans, but everyone that was still breathing became even more committed to keeping that kind of horror from ever happening again. The walls hadn’t come until about eight years later. Two years after that, two of the council members had let in a band of twenty seven bandits that they’d been dealing with in secret, and the entire complex had nearly been destroyed. Twenty seven dead bad guys and sixty dead good guys taught everyone at The Farm another important lesson.

These days things were running smoothly, internal threats non-existent after twenty years of seeing what was beyond the central wastes. External threats were rooted out by scouts like me and my silent partner Tony. Old relics that had use or value streamed in via the scavenging crews. The council would get together with Mom and decide what could be traded on the outside for things of value that we needed and couldn’t produce or scavenge for ourselves. Whenever the scavs would come back with school textbooks, we would keep a stack of them and trade off the rest to the Reds up in Redding or the Kaisers and the Santanas over in Cottage Grove for things like pre-invasion tools, bailing wire, and medicines reclaimed from pharmacies and hospitals.

The medicines were sketchy these days, with most everything having expired a decade or more ago. Syringes and latex gloves in sealed bubble packs along with sealed sterile bandages, scalpels and needles were always in need. We had a blacksmith and a forge, but creating medical-grade metals fine enough to do surgery with wasn’t really an option. Dredge spent most of his time forging new axles, bolts, nails, and bindings from the metals the scavs transported back to The Farm.

The specialized stuff mostly came from the Santanas, and only because they were the only ones brave or crazy enough to venture into Eugene. Sometimes the Kaiser crews would go with them, but most of the time the two groups were in some kind of dispute. They were wise enough to keep the dispute away from legit traders like us and the Reds and a number of other small groups on the western side of the Cascades, but they would have big blowouts over ridiculous things, and within a few days both clans would be ten or twenty members fewer.

“Welcome back, ladies,” Arn said as we passed through the inner gate. Arn was a pretty funny guy, but we were too intent on telling Mom and the council about the crashed dropship.

“Stuff it, Queenie,” Tony said to him as we passed by, and I nearly stopped in my tracks. Arn smirked at him and winked at me.

“Did you just call him Queenie?” I asked Tony in a whisper as I kept pace with him.

“We dated for a while, but he wasn’t what I was looking for,” Tony replied without looking at me.

“You two dated?” I asked, louder this time.

“Yes, Evan. We dated. We fucked. We exchanged bodily fluids. Would you like to know anything else?” he said, loud enough for Arn and Kenny, the other interior guard, to hear us.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” I said, my face burning with shame as I noticed that Kelly and Danielle from the kitchen crew also heard him. “I just… I don’t know anything about you. I didn’t know you were… uh…”

“Gay? Is that what you’d like to know?”

“No, I kind of got that now,” I said, trying not to fumble more words like an idiot. “I just meant we’ve been partners for almost eight months, and we never really say a lot.”

He stopped and looked at me. “Does that bother you?”

“No, I just meant… No, that doesn’t bother me. I think we get along well, and we’re good at what we do.”

“Good. I didn’t think you were the type to get upset from lack of conversation. Is that all you wanted to know?”

“No,” I answered. “What I really have been wanting to ask you for months is if you have a last name and where did you come from.”

Tony’s face grew dark, pained for a second before he answered, “Galliardi. And I’m from Philadelphia originally.” He looked at me for a moment to see if I was going to ask anything else, and when I didn’t, he started walking again to the main house.

I caught up to him and tried again. “I’m sorry Tony. I imagine your story is probably shitty like everyone else that wasn’t born into The Farm. I was just curious.”

“It’s fine,” he said, giving me a sideways smile. “I just don’t like remembering how I got here. So what’s your last name?” he asked, changing the subject.