New Title 3 (20 page)

We crawled back to the safety of our friends, gunfire now sparse and distant. On our final approach, I whispered loudly, “It’s us. Grab John- he’s got a broken ankle.”

Earl lifted John over the cliff while Freddy and Connor helped me to the top. We stayed there no longer than the brief time it took for Freddy to immobilize John’s ankle by splinting it with sticks and wrapping it with one of the dead men’s shirts. I checked my own wound by tearing open my pant leg and examining the blood soaked dressing. It looked worse than it probably was.

The shooting had stopped completely now. “Time to go back,” I said. “But not to submit to Gareth’s goddamned questions. What do you say? We fight?”

“
Damn right!” Earl had never been for surrender. “Why waste all of this adrenaline?”

“
Agreed!” John whispered through clenched teeth.

Connor nodded. So did Fred. We were experiencing such powerful adrenaline surges right then that not much would stand in our way. Not a broken ankle, not a damaged leg. We were a ragtag band of brothers, covered in the enemy’s blood, armed to the teeth.

And
ready.

A
rriving at Gareth’s mobile home, we listened for voices, but no sound issued from within… or without, for that matter.

“
Where is everyone?” Freddy wondered.

“
Maybe they’ve moved into the house. Maybe they’ve got the others trapped!” Earl’s mouth tightened at the thought.

“
Alright, let’s make our move to the garage,” I ordered. “From there we’ll go straight up the stairs to Skylab.”

We got into the garage without being detected despite our injuries. The trek up to the addition was quiet and measured at first, but gradually became louder as the wooden stairs became creaky near the top. We flinched.

“
Joel?!” It was Sara. “Joel, is that you? We’re in control of the situation.”

“
It’s me, Babe,” I answered. We climbed the remaining five stairs and discovered that our team was indeed in control of Gareth’s depleted army. He’d taken a major loss, as there were no more than twenty of his followers left, and these survivors were now disarmed and disheartened.

Sara threw herself into my arms. Caroline reacted to John’s injured foot by assisting him to a sofa and hugging him, and Julia kissed Connor while tears of relief coursed down her cheeks. When I released her, Sara directed John and Caroline into our bedroom so she could treat his ankle. I approached Gareth and looked him up and down. He and his remaining people were huddled in the north end of Skylab, under heavy guard.

“
Is this all of them?” I asked Sonny.

“
Every last one of ‘em,” he assured me. I couldn’t help but smile. Then I turned back to Gareth and reclaimed our lives.

“
We do not agree to your game plan any longer,” I informed him. “We will not be subjected to your questions and we will not be bullied against our will to join your morally bankrupt bullshit ideal!” My voice raised in pitch as each word drilled into Gareth’s ego.

“
We will not harm you, as justified as we may be in doing so. You promised that you would help us protect this house, and you did.” I paused, giving my words time to sink in and make them understand who was in charge now. They were stunned at their loss; frankly, so was I. They’d come with over fifty people comprising their ranks, and now only twenty remained. That was still more than our side had, but they were weaponless and exhausted. “We will let you go, and extend an invitation for any of your people to stay should they wish to. But that doesn’t include you, Gareth. You are not to return to this house: you are not welcome here.”

Gareth listened quietly, even meekly, at first. But when none of his followers accepted my offer to shelter them, his crooked smile returned and the uncertainty disappeared from his eyes.

“
I’ll be back,” he warned, ignoring the weapons trained on him. “This hostile action your group has taken will not be forgotten. I have little doubt that there is a sympathizer in your ranks. But you can still be saved from my wrath, Joel. I stand by my decision that you are clean of this sin.” His finger was now in my face. Sonny and Seth approached, guns ready, but I waved them off, knowing that deep inside Gareth was desperate. He was embarrassed to have lost control.

“
I made a deal with the devil once, Gareth. I did it to avoid a confrontation and play the odds that we’d all come out of this inquisition of yours unscathed. I see you in a different light now. I see you for what you really are: a small man, an angry man, a man possessed. You wouldn’t have been happy coming here and questioning us without having fabricated something from nothing and sacrificing one of us to satiate your sick sense of self-worth.”

Now
my
finger pointed sharply at
his
face. I must have presented a menacing sight. Dried blood caked my face and neck, dirt covered my forearms and knees, and the tear in my pants exposed the old yet newly bloodied wound.

“
Shit! I get it, Gareth. These people latched onto you because you promised them something magical. You fed off of their personal tragedies, tragedies we all share, our common leveler. Deep inside you know damn well that most people would love to get the Reaper in a room for five minutes. But when someone crosses you, you declare them a sympathizer and murder them. How many innocents have you murdered? You’re grasping at nothing to have a purpose. Well, I’ll give you a purpose – to stay alive.”

My piece said, I stepped back and pointed at the stairs. The dull, passive eyes of Gareth’s followers were fixed on him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. They acted as if they hadn’t heard a thing I’d said.

Earl added his own parting speech to the group. “A foolish faith in authority is the first enemy of truth.” A quote from Einstein, he later told me. Fitting.

Gareth glanced scornfully at Earl before facing me again. “I have every right to come here and order your people to prove their innocence! You have all made a grave mistake in defying us. We are not evil people, but we do represent a necessary evil.” He headed for the stairs. “Soon there will be far more than the mere fifty-three members I brought to your home, and you will have no choice then. You will be judged.”

The rest of his group fell into line behind him. Sonny whispered to me, “We don’t have to just let him go like this, Joel. I’ll do the fucking prick right now!”

“
We won’t see him again. He knows that we’re stronger than he is, stronger than he’ll ever be. Make sure they leave.”

“
Damn straight!” Sonny and the others walked the flag bearers downstairs, out of the house, and into their motor homes. With fewer people left to drive, we gained what vehicles they could not pilot, as well as several more weapons and ammunition stores.

I sent Sonny and Connor to follow the flags as far as the next intersection and watch them continue north until they disappeared from view. An hour later they returned and helped clear away the dead. The smell of blood was thick enough to almost see. The spotlight remained on as we hurried through the grisly work, but we treated it as such- work- and were becoming rather efficient at ignoring the lumps of flesh we dragged to the pit, save the ones that moved or moaned despite their mortal wounds. When that happened, gunshots broke the darkness with flashes of orange light. I couldn’t pull the trigger on these survivors, so that horrible task fell to Earl and John.

Sara dropped down and buried her head between her knees when she heard the shots, hands pressed tightly against her ears. Earl went about the executions coldly, his face expressionless. He assured us he did it to end their suffering, but nonetheless it was a chore I could not bring myself to do. Thank God he was there.

After we threw the last corpse into the pit, I decided to send Connor, Sonny, Seth and Freddy to the barn to ensure that Gareth didn’t show up there to steal our food and sabotage our efforts. Earl and Kevin finished up outside, tossing earth over the pile of what had once been survivors like us.

*****

During our looting of the abandoned RVs, Sidney apologized yet again for his reckless actions on the battlefield. I told him not to sweat it.

“
Shit, Sid,” I said, ducking one of the many archways in the motor home and narrowly escaping another bump on the head. “Any one of us could have lost it over anything out there. What you have to understand, though, is that she’d have killed you if the opportunity had presented itself. Christ, they weren’t here to sell us vacuums. You’ve got to think like that.”

“
I know, Joel. But in hindsight I can’t stop thinking how you guys could have been discovered because of my-”

“
Forget it, Sid. You lost it. End of story. We won in the end, so look at it that way. You keep playing it over and over again in your head and you’ll go nuts.”

“
It was a bizarre scene, that’s for damn sure.” He put down his Coke, one of a dozen we found in the vehicle’s undercarriage storage. “You know, I don’t think I told you everything that happened after I bolted.”

“
Tell me now.”

Sid smiled. “It’s not a long story.” He leaned against the RV’s kitchen counter and began.

“
So, obviously, my head was in a bad place right? I kept running until I reached the edge of the field. The noise of gunshots was still behind me. When I looked back, I wiped out on an old corn stump or something. There I was, lying face down in the dirt, bawling my eyes out for that woman, or girl or whatever she was. She was all I could think of.” He stopped for a minute. I could see that the memory still pained him.

“
Anyways, I rolled onto my side and looked into the back yard through the pines, and there they were, the flag army, what was left of them, all huddled behind the planters.” He stopped again, studying the cabinet above my head, not looking at it, but rather looking through it as though he were back in the moment. “Then I saw the strangest thing.” Again he stopped.

“
What, Sid? What did you see?” I leaned forward.

“
I saw myself in action before I actually did anything. I hit my head pretty hard when I fell
,
so maybe it was a concussion. But somehow I knew I was being guided, shown what I had to do. I saw myself move in on Gareth’s people. I saw that they needed to surrender to us. And so I did it. I grabbed the nearest one, and stuck my rifle into his ribs Then Sonny and Seth came out of the basement and saw what I was doing. They raised their guns and ordered the group to drop their weapons. And every one of them was so shocked, they did exactly what they were told.” Sidney beamed. “It was the angel wasn’t it? He guided me.”

The story truly lifted my spirits. Back in the house, I made sure that Sidney relayed his experience to everyone else, so that they could hope too. After a day like this one, hope was a commodity we couldn’t live without.

E
xhilaration. Joy. Glee. During the early hours of the morning after our victory over Gareth, we finally found ourselves able to discern day from night. The sun, that iridescent sphere of warmth, had returned.

While I tore through the house, frantically waking all sleepers, John and Sara remained in Skylab, watching the clouds break apart. As sunlight penetrated the grey blanket and illuminated the landscape, I realized that we’d been living in black and white, like we’d been locked inside one of Kevin’s chalk drawings.

We all gathered on the front lawn, awestruck at the combined beauty of colour and light. As the soil warmed, steam rose from the earth as if it were exhaling, emitting a great sigh of relief. When the sun completed its rise, the cloud that had been holding it captive for months drifted south, exposing a brilliant blue sky.

For the rest of the day, we kept interrupting our tasks to raise our faces and hands to the sun’s healing rays. When it finally set, we were just as bewitched by the arrival of the moon and stars. Standing in Skylab, eyes never leaving the night sky, I picked a star….

“
Reminds me of a painting.” Kevin took a haul off the Sweet Bitch, and then passed her to me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such brilliant stars.”

“
Is it any wonder that so many civilizations worshipped them?” Caroline wiped away tears.

It was a cool evening, crisp even, so blankets and pillows were collected from beds, brought outside, and suddenly we were all camping again. We were inspired by the night sky, lost in its vastness, once again able to see beyond our own borders and reclaim our dreams. Gone was the heavy ceiling of despair that had hung over this house for months, that crushing, suffocating ceiling. Seeing those stars made me feel as if I’d been granted a pardon from a life sentence. If I could see the stars, anything was possible.

The sunrise woke us as we slept on the black, sooty lawn. A new day had begun.

*****

After breakfast, which we cooked and consumed outdoors, we held a group meeting in the addition. Earl outlined a new mission that he had proposed to me earlier, in response to the sun’s return.

“
We need to continue being proactive,” he explained. “We need to know what, if anything is up north. Is the military there? Are those bands of people we’ve seen headed in that direction alive? Have they created a community?”

I stood. “These are important questions to answer. What if there is some semblance of community there? What if the government has taken those people in and sheltered them all this time? It’s an information-gathering mission.”