WICK

CHAPTER 35

They decided to set up camp on the lee side of a hill that was covered thickly with trees and brush. As they moved, silently and harmoniously, their activities displayed their growing experience at surviving in this new world. They were now veterans in landscape that showed no quarter to stupidity or inexperience.

Ace grabbed a black, nylon ammo pouch from the stack of gear they’d recently scrounged from a shot-up Humvee. He nodded at Peter, and then disappeared silently down into a small valley to the southeast. Experience told Elsie that Ace was heading out to find a good sniper roost on the opposite hill so that he could stand guard while Peter and Elsie prepared supper. It was a good plan, practiced and perfected, and it worked. An added benefit was that Peter and Elsie would have time to talk. Ace had grown sensitive to Peter and Elsie’s growing affection for, and reliance on, one another.

Peter took out a Geiger counter that he’d liberated from the Humvee, and he turned it on and checked their immediate area. He’d informed Elsie and Ace that most of the fallout from both New York City and Philadelphia must have been pushed out to sea by the jet stream and the prevailing winds. Elsie watched Peter move around and through the brush with the Geiger counter. She thought of how he always looked like a bear, the way he hunched over, and she laughed.

“What would you do if that thing went off, Peter? What if it just pegged to the highest reading?” she asked.

Peter shrugged. “When I was just a boy in training, the instructors told us that if that happened, we were to radio the readings back to base, then set the machine down and go prepare for our funerals.”

Elsie blinked, but didn’t look away. “A boy? In training? What boy trains for this? It seems there is so much about you that I don’t know, and don’t understand.”

Peter stood with the Geiger counter and shifted his weight. He scanned the area again with his eyes, and then looked back at Elsie. He stared into her eyes, trying to communicate what he could not say.

“One day,” Peter said, “after we’ve found a place that is relatively safe—“

“I know, Peter.”

“One day,” Peter said, and smiled.

“So…,” Elsie said, returning the smile, “…as a boy you were practicing for this? That’s heartening. My son was riding a skateboard, killing zombies on his iPhone, and talking to his friends with his thumbs.”

Peter swept the valley again with his eyes, looking for movement, or anything that didn’t seem right. His mind had become practiced at scanning the distance, examining the space for unnatural angles, artificially straight lines, man-made protuberances, or anything at all that didn’t fit. He’d learned to listen to the birds and the animals of the forest, eliminating immediately all sounds or sights that fit with what he expected, and quickly cataloging everything else so that it could be compared with tell-tale indications of danger or threats.

“Why does that counter even work?” Elsie asked, “Wouldn’t it have been destroyed by the EMP?”

“I can’t say. Perhaps it’s internally shielded, or maybe they had it in some kind of Faraday box when the EMP went off. Hard to know.”

“What good does it do?” Elsie asked.

“Well, at least we know we haven’t received any lethal dosages. We’ve been highly blessed by God, I think. This thing isn’t totally useless. If we were to receive a faint reading, you know, just enough to register on the counter but not enough to do any permanent damage, then perhaps we could alter our course and pick a different direction to walk.”

Elsie sat down on the ground and looked up at Peter.

“I didn’t know you were religious, Peter.”

“What?” Peter said.

“You said, ‘We’ve been blessed by God.’”

Peter thought of the many nights in that previous life that he’d spent praying for his family. Not knowing where they were or what might have happened to them.

“Of course, I am. I’ve always been a believer.” He waved his hand as if he was dismissing the whole topic out of hand, but he continued. “I gave up on the ikons and the saints and all of that stuff. I’ve lost a lot of what I used to call ‘my faith,’ but I still pray. Anyway, I don’t pray to saints or pictures any more. Now I just talk to God directly.”

“You talk to God? What does he say?”

“He doesn’t say anything. He just listens.”

Shortly after the bombs dropped, the flow of refugees from the east came to a near stop. The stream of humanity from the west and south slowed drastically too, or at least most of it did. There were still homeless people and bandits about, and the Missouri National Guard (MNG)—those who hadn’t left to join their enemies in the Free Missouri Army (FMA)—were still a reality and a persistent threat, but the endless hordes of helpless, desperate refugees had finally become only a trickle. At this point, everyone was either friend or foe, and the three travelers had become experts on recognizing foes from a distance.

With Ace off at his roost, Peter and Elsie slipped effortlessly into their friendly and familiar conversation. As they talked, they worked together to set up their supplies and tools for providing supper, but Peter, having learned from the costly mistakes of the past, never let down his guard. His eyes and ears were constantly working, scanning the area for threats.

After they were finished arranging the camp, Peter moved over near a tree to scan the forest again. When he looked back at Elsie, he found her staring at him.

“What?” he asked.

“I’m just wondering.”

“What are you wondering?”

Elsie looked down for a moment, and then looked back up at Peter. “I’m wondering if your wife is still alive… somewhere… out there.”

“I hope she is,” Peter said. He held Elsie’s gaze, and he felt like he should say something else, but then the pressure got to be too much for him, and he looked away again.

He scanned the valley again, not wanting to miss seeing anything that might mean danger. It was for this reason that a flash of movement through the trees caught his eye, and when it did, he held his hand out in a practiced signal to make sure that Elsie knew something was up, and that they needed to be silent. Four men approaching. The men used military tactics as they moved through the trees towards the camp from the west. Peter identified the movement as aggressive and not defensive, and he recognized that the men were in assault mode.

Foes.

Snatching up the AK-47 from where he’d left it leaning against the tree, just within reach, he spun around, grabbed Elsie with his free hand, and had barely pulled her down into a small depression in the hill when bullets began to thump into the ground and the brush near where the two had just been standing. He pushed the safety up with his thumb, and he had just raised the rifle to aim when he saw the point man among the attackers fall, struck by a bullet to the head. The other three men dove behind trees but not before Peter was able to pick off the second man with three rapid-fire shots from the AK.

The Russian battle rifle was not configured to fire fully automatic, which was fine by Peter—he didn’t want to waste ammo on un-aimed shots—so he took his time and popped off rounds only when he thought he might actually hit a target, or for effect, to keep the attackers from moving any closer.

The two remaining gunmen hunched behind cover, and once they’d located the direction from which Peter was shooting at them, they slowly shifted their position behind the trees in order to protect themselves from his fire. This, it turned out, was a fatal decision for both of them, but their position was such that they couldn’t avoid the danger. Trapped in a killing field between Peter and Ace, when they moved to hide from Peter, the battle rapidly ended. With two well-aimed shots fired only seconds apart—just long enough for him to cycle another round and reacquire his target—Ace felled the last two attackers with headshots from the other side of the valley.

Peter and Elsie stayed in their earthen depression. They waited and watched. Peter didn’t know if these men were just an advance scouting party for a larger group, and he wasn’t going to move until he knew that more attackers weren’t coming. Elsie looked at him, and he gathered strength from her glance. She smiled, and when she looked back out in the direction from which the attack had come, the smile remained on her face. It was not a smile of smugness or arrogance. Death was very real, and not something to be scoffed at or enjoyed. It was a smile of complacency—not in its modern definition—but in a way that means ‘restful satisfaction.’ It meant that all that could be done was being done. For now, things happened to be working out.

After about five minutes of lying perfectly still, Peter pulled a red handkerchief from his pocket and waived it so that Ace would know that all was clear.

Ace’s silence was as complete and pervasive from a distance as it was in person. The red handkerchief waving in the distance answered in kind, and Peter saw it. He thought of how some men hear silence, and they see it as a bull sees a red cape. They mistrust it. Peter kind of liked it.

After all, Ace had already spoken.

Three of the four dead attackers testified to Ace’s declaration, the red blood from their exploded skulls splashed across the snow like exclamation points at the end of his very efficient sentence.

CHAPTER 36

The Farm. Before the Bombs.

“Somewhere in the jungles of the Amazon or over there in Papua New Guinea—somewhere out there—there are uncontacted tribes that, even at thisvery moment…” He paused and looked across the distant horizon and saw the purpling sky. He thought of the dust, the smoke, and the civil war in the distance. “Even now, there are tribes that do not yet know that the world has fallen apart.” Clive Darling stopped mid-thought, and indicated with his hand outward, in the direction of the horizon, as if to say way over there somewhere. It was only a small flick of his fingers, as if he was conserving his energy. Then he continued, his Savannah accent fully evident as he held court.

“The members of such tribes don’t know anything about this tragedy being poured out across this country and the rest of the world. Their daily lives have not suddenly changed. Over the course of the last several days and weeks and years and millennia, they’ve simply gotten up in the morning just as they always have. They’ve fed their children, gathered and hunted their food, sang their songs, taught their customs, and protected their territory.” He stared out at nothing in particular. “Life, for them, just goes on.”

Clive paused and smiled to himself. To anyone else it was only a flash of his eyes, but under his mustache, he smiled. He thought about other moments during his life when he’d told that story—or had told one like it.

Clive spoke and Pat Maloney listened. It was five a.m. The two men were sitting in the drawing room of the farmhouse, talking over the last vestiges of a candle. It was unclear whether they were up early for the new morning or still up late from the night before. It had been unclear for days, in fact, whether these two were coming or going. They simply moved in tandem, and all the while appeared to have been merely passing the time. They talked like old friends would. Clive’s Sam Elliott mustache and Pat’s red beard. Cowboy and leprechaun.

Pat scratched his red beard and contemplated the thought, too. He said what Clive was thinking. “Life governed by the sunrise. Their only clue on a morning like this that something is different…” He motioned toward the window, and continued, “…is that, at the moment, the sunrise seems more vivid. More dust in the air.” Red Beard waved his hand before his face, stirring the dust. He paused.

“Imagine it.”

Clive did imagine it, as Pat let the thought hang in the air like the smoke and the dust.

“Life as a kind of perpetual communion with the earth. Somewhere out there those tribes are waiting for the next sunrise, the next day’s work. Their only job is to survive and to pass what theyare along to the next generation,” Red Beard said.

Clive reached into a bowl at his feet and fished out an orange. He offered one to his friend, but Red Beard waved it off. Clive massaged the orange as he picked up the thread of the conversation.

“Can you see it?” Clive said. “Passing their mortality and their immortality along through their genes to their children? And their customs? And their languages? And their history? And their very practical survival knowledge?”

Red Beard spread his hands as if to indicate that, although he agreed, there was more to be said. He’d noticed that Clive had not mentioned the state. Red Beard finished the thought. “What do such tribes know of war?”

“With nuclear winter coming on?” Clive said, leaning to his right and grabbing a knife from a side table. “Probably more than you’d think, my friend. Probably more than you’d think. They know plenty of war, but war in a primitive state is explicable.” He dragged out this word ‘explicable,’ to emphasize its importance. “Everyone has a very plain and simple reason for fighting. You fight because you want his wife, or he stole your orange, not because someone you don’t know wants you to fight some people you’ve never met over something you could never grasp or hold in your hands. Propaganda and brainwashing doesn’t enter in to it.”

He began to peel the orange in neat little spiraled strips, beginning each portion by plunging the knife’s sharp edge into the wrinkled skin of the fruit, noting how the veins in the rind made the thing look like a fist-sized brain. He carved each strip, and then peeled back the rind. The juice squirted out into the air, and the orange spray smelled nice in the warming air of the drawing room.

Clive and Red Beard saw the candle flicker and noticed, in the flickering, their shadows dance on the wall. They looked up, and in the hallway, the figure of Veronica flashed by, going down towards the kitchen to make her morning coffee. Red Beard lifted his chin in the direction of the hallway. “She turned out to be a good one,” he said. He thought of how Veronica had seemed to fit perfectly into their little household. Had it only been a week ago? Only a week?

Clive reached up, pulled at the corners of his mustache and nodded his head in agreement. “She sure did,” he said. His head nodded even more emphatically. “A strong, smart woman.”

They listened as she bustled around in the kitchen down the hallway humming to herself as the pots banged in the glow of her camping light. Clive and Red Beard were just about to blow out the candle to preserve the little bit of wick left for some other talk, some other morning, when Veronica called down the hallway to see if either of them wanted coffee. The suggestion in her tone indicated that she had asked this question before and that she knew what the answer would be. She was right.

“No, ma’am. We’ve got to get moving.” The reply was in precise, practiced unison, and with it, Clive and Red Beard were out the front door of the farmhouse.

To where? Where were they going? These two had been veritable whirlwinds of activity during the last week. Had it been a week already? They’d been inseparable as they went about their work, preparing some business of Clive’s—some business known only to themselves—and in their activity they had burned their candles at both ends.

It was never clear to anyone else just what, exactly, the friends were up to. The two were everywhere: directing the militia who patrolled the farm; arranging a number of convoys in and out of the complex; loading unspecified goods and materials onto and off the trucks; leading the convoys along the grid of farm roads and down a ridge of trees to… who knows where? No one knew. Or, no one was telling if they did know.

This was what happened every day, this coming and going, and everyone else watching, working, and not knowing.

In the evening, Clive and Red Beard discussed philosophy. They cooked meals and organized chores and played hosts to their guests. The two men had also taken to sitting up in the evening, having a scotch, and smoking cigars. That’s what they called it. Having a scotch. It had become a private joke between Clive, Red Beard, and Veronica. “You ‘drink’ water, or tea, or juice,” Clive was fond of saying, “but you ‘have’ a scotch, just like you ‘have’ coffee. It implies relationship, and a time set aside for something more than just refreshment or sustenance.”

Last night, they ‘had a scotch’ well into the night. Veronica joined them, and they’d argued (in a friendly way) about just exactly where one might find the world’s Archimedean point. It was the first real conversation the two men had had with Veronica. They found themselves looking forward to more.

They’d reached a happy little moment when preparations were just coming into order. They could see the results of, and perhaps an end to, their work, and they redoubled their efforts. The two men pushed themselves to feats of durability they had not previously thought possible. They didn’t sleep much. Truth be told, neither man seemed to notice the strain. They were just two friends, passing time, talking about ideas, going about their business.

The odd little community of Clive, Red Beard, Veronica, Stephen, and Calvin, had formed in a weirdly organic way, in the way that such communities must form in the end times. Everyone naturally fell into a specific role, using his or her own talents, insights, and experiences. Clive and Red Beard had their private business, and they didn’t feel the need to talk about it. The others didn’t feel the need to ask them about it either. The two odd friends seemed to be directing and steering some larger concern—a global one maybe—and all the time they held firm hands on the tiller of their local preparedness. Veronica, Stephen, and Calvin had their own small little family to contend with—a family within the larger family. Everyone knew that the group was preparing themselves around the farm for something, and knowing that fact gave impetus to their activities. They were all preparing… but, for what?

During the talk over scotch from the night before, Veronica argued a theory that botany would necessarily play a role in leveraging the future. “Talk about your Archimedean point!” she’d said.

She spoke on like she was giving a TEDTalk, but with nothing to show for slides. She was convinced—still—that knowledge of plants held the key to the future. She said that, whether in foraging for food in the forest, or planning a nursery, or feeding a population, all of these things would require knowledge, and an understanding, of plants. She was passionate about this. Clive and Red Beard were impressed by both her ideas, and her passion.

“And also…” Red Beard said, interrupting the thought. “Calvin especially interests me. For some reason I feel very fatherly toward him.”

Clive smiled under his mustache. He, too, felt a paternal urge toward the young man. He’d heard Calvin tell stories about his childhood; how his father had come to be persecuted by the Chinese for his participation in Falun Gong; how his father had died rather than take a kidney offered by the state, because he thought it was an organ taken from one of his brethren. Calvin had called his father a “kind of hero.” Clive recognized the hurt in the boy’s voice when he discussed his father. Like Red Beard, he’d felt the desire to give fatherly advice to a bright young man who’d lost his father.

Last night, finishing off their scotches, Clive had also thought of the church, and the jails, the government, and the state. It had occurred to him that all of them, in one way or another, were giving fatherly advice to young men who had lost their fathers. There is a world of difference between advice given by someone who cares for you, he thought, and advice given by an institution interested only in its own preservation.

“Yep. I agree,” he had said in reply to Red Beard, and the southern drawl came out. “Jonathan Wall done good when he sent that young’un.”

Observing that it was ‘never clear’ whether Clive and Red Beard were coming or going — it should be noted, of course, that this is not to be taken as exhaustively true. If one were watching carefully and paying attention, one might have figured something out.

A person, invisible, watching from the tree line at the crest of the hill, might have surmised things by the movements of the odd-shaped RV on its many ventures in and out of the farm complex. Sitting just above the tree line beyond the northwest fence of Clive’s farm, one might have seen that the two friends had, in fact, been coming and going. There, nestled along a stand of trees that started near the river and stretched along the edge of the farm where it rose in elevation, one would have been able to see, without obstruction, the amount of activity going in and out of the farm. Standing there in the snow and paying close attention, one would have seen all of the coming and going, and would have known without any doubt whatsoever, that something was about to occur. Something Big Was Coming.

Whatever it was hadn’t come yet.

Still, all of this is speculative, because there was no one there yet, standing and watching among the trees, to try to put it all together. There was only the buzz of the whirlwind, the military precision of the convoys, the crisp intersecting lines of the field at the fences, covered in snow, as the cold hung in the air like a mystery.

CHAPTER 37

Burying thousands of bodies in the frozen earth by hand had become untenable with only human labor and rudimentary tools, so, instead of digging thousands of smaller graves, the commander of Carbondale had ordered the planters to work for days digging one very large one. Then, he’d ordered them to fill the hole with bodies, and then to burn the bodies. This would serve to warm and thaw the earth. The planters would then be ordered to dig both the remains of the bodies, and more of the dirt out again, in order to make the pit deeper. The ashen remains were then separated out, when possible, and formed into smoldering piles to serve as kindling for the next fire. When the warmed earth was sufficiently turned over and dug out, the hole was again filled with bodies, doused with fuel, lit afire, and the process would begin again. Eventually, in this way the commander had built an efficient human incinerator. On the grounds near the burning pit, piles of waiting bodies spread out like spokes from the fire that burned at the center, hot like Gehenna, or hell itself. The bodies of the dead, piled and waiting, sent the stench of decaying flesh across the valley. In addition, there was the problem of the ashes, floating gently down, adding to the air’s aroma, sticking in the nostrils.

Most of the planters had become draggers, and rather than digging holes sixteen hours a day, they were engaged for the same number of hours in dragging corpses and stacking them in piles where they waited for their turn in the huge burn pit.

Natasha Bazhanov and Sergei Dimitrivich Tupolev worked as a team in body dragging duty. Despite the natural enmity that Natasha had for Sergei (for security reasons she still called him Steve when she needed to speak to him), she, strangely, felt more comfortable working with someone from their hometown of Warwick. If she had to make the choice, she would rather work with Steve than with a complete stranger. At least she knew what Steve was, and she didn’t constantly have to evaluate his behavior for signs that he would turn aggressive. She didn’t have to worry that he might turn out to be some kind of pervert or something. Besides, Steve hardly ever talked, and when he did, he was all business.

Natasha adjusted her facemask. The two Warwickians grabbed another corpse with gloved hands and hauled it to the wait pile. Natasha could feel the slip of the flesh against the wet slick surface of her glove.

It was days ago when the announcement had arrived that most of the planters would become draggers. How many days ago was it? She couldn’t say. The camp commander had simply done what commanders do. He’d commanded. He’d walked to the center of the crowd near the burn pit and announced that they would now stop digging individual graves and begin wholesale burning. Even his guard detail had bristled.

Eventually, there was a lot of gagging and even vomiting among everyone on burial duty, including the soldiers who had to watch over everything. Historic images had come to their minds, and none of the guards desired to be compared or likened unto the monsters of the past. Each guard, though, was able to rationalize his position, because the human mind can rationalize any behavior if it wants to badly enough. This was nothing like Nazi Germany, they told themselves. They weren’t killing these people (they said to themselves) — at least, not most of them. These people were dying from disease, cold, and malnutrition. What the guards did not admit to themselves, was that the people were actually dying of a more deadly contagion. They were dying of spiritual entropy and unviability, a condition that evidenced itself in a sense of entitlement, helplessness, and a severe deprivation of the basic survival intelligence that man had developed over the millennia.

Most of the dead had been raised in the modern world to believe that it was someone else’s duty to take care of and protect them, and based on this fallacy, they’d decided that life was more dangerous and deadly outside the wire. That disease—the disease of dependency and unviability—was what was killing these people. But none of the guards admitted that fact to themselves. Instead, they dodged responsibility, no matter how sick the whole thing made them feel. Any tyranny, any abuse, any apostasy, any atrocity, can be rationalized if those in power can only convince the people that the alternative would be much worse.

As bad as everyone had it, the draggers had it the worst. After all, they didn’t have a choice. In addition to the filth and disease that came with the job, the draggers had the certain knowledge that the snapping underneath their feet was the crackling of human bones that hadn’t burned in the last fire.

Back when they were planters, they’d only had to worry that if they paused too long to arch their backs from the strain of overuse, the guards would threaten them. Now, as draggers, they had it still worse. While both jobs were physically strenuous, draggers had to contend with the fact that disease was already making headway and cutting the numbers of available draggers day by day. Hour after hour they dealt with the grotesque task of hauling decomposing and rotting human corpses, piling them up to be burned, leaving them in lines as if the bodies were waiting patiently for a bus—in the last queue they’d ever form on earth. The decaying skin of those corpses often pulled free from arms and legs. Sometimes, heads fell off. It was too much to think about, and so, after a while, one didn’t.

Most of the time, Natasha was able to stop thinking of the bodies as human remains. No matter how good she got at pretending though, the thoughts were always there, just under the surface, waiting to overwhelm her. On those occasions, her mental defenses would slip, and she’d notice a little girl’s dress, or a man’s tattoo. She would start to wonder who these people were, what their lives had been like before it all came to an end. She wondered that now.

Natasha was glad that Cole wasn’t here. Her brother didn’t have the make up for it. Dragging duty, if you avoided dying from disease, or crumbling with insanity, was a sure ticket to a lifetime of nightmares, and probably to a permanently damaged mind.

Having been born and raised in Warwick, a Russian spy school in the heart of America, she’d learned to reject the erroneous and dangerous idea that life was supposed to be ‘fair.’ Still, she couldn’t really get her mind around the absolute and complete lack of any vestige of fairness at all in the world. As she dragged bodies, she thought about people who had lived their whole lives within the historically rare epoch of American prosperity. So she imagined a nameless, faceless someone. The face she summoned was just someone she made up so that she’d have some element for comparison. It was almost exclusively through her imagination that she’d managed it, since she’d been born in a time and place that did not allow for direct experience.

The person Natasha imagined was a woman, born in New York City in 1963. Perhaps she’d died under the mushroom cloud that had recently erased The Big Apple from the map of history. This imaginary woman had lived her entire life in relative prosperity. Period. End of Sentence. Don’t even bother arguing the point. Doesn’t matter what problems the woman had faced in her life. Doesn’t matter if she’d struggled to find a job, if she’d had relationship problems, if she’d developed cancer, or if she’d lost a finger in a trash compactor. In the big scheme of things, her hardships were inconsequential. This woman that Natasha was imagining had never been tasked with dragging rotting corpses to a hole to be incinerated. Hundreds of rotting corpses. Thousands. That woman had lived in luxury her whole life, and then she was incinerated in a flash of light.

Why were some people subjected to horrors beyond imagination, while others lived in relative comfort, and then disappeared into light, without such suffering? Why were many people still out there somewhere, going on with their lives as if nothing had happened? Natasha could not easily comprehend this detail, this suffering. She wasn’t foolish enough to demand fairness, but she did feel like she had a right to ask why.

Anyway, she was glad that Cole was not a dragger. That bit of unfairness she could appreciate. Cole’s billet wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, but there was no job worse than that of dragger, and she was relieved that her brother, at least, had escaped death duty. Cole had drawn garbage detail. He was hauling trash (mostly human waste and kitchen refuse.) Not human bodies, though. The stench in Cole’s job was bad too, she imagined, but his job had the advantage that he wasn’t hauling bodies that would come apart and spill their contents across the ground, causing you to slip in the guts as you dragged the lumps of flesh to the fires. Handling kitchen refuse was worse than the worst day of any job ever held by the imaginary woman in New York City who’d died in the flash of light, but at least Cole didn’t end up covered from head to toe at the end of the day with gooey remains of what once were people. Natasha thought about the fairness of that and how fairness didn’t even matter when it came to her brother. Humans are capricious and hypocritical that way — always demanding fairness and justice, but never really wanting it.

She wasn’t ignorant of this hypocrisy in herself, so she just hauled bodies all day.

Mike, she thought. Mikail Brekhunov. Talk about unfairness. Mike was another thing altogether. Being a master manipulator, after only a few days in the camps, he’d already wormed his way into a position of power. Cozying up to authority, he’d gotten in with the guardsmen. He’d done it with a pack of cigarettes here, a pretty prisoner girl there. Perhaps someone needed a payback murder or a targeted beating—Mike knew how to get those things done if the right person needed it. His years of practice covering his tracks benefited him greatly now, as he found ways to work his agenda without ever letting anyone know his true intentions. Now, he very nearly ran the place. He was the official spokesperson for the prisoners, even though not a single prisoner trusted him. He’d found that he could do without trust recently. He preferred rather that the people fear him. If the prisoners feared him, he cared not whether they trusted him.

Wait, that word isn’t to be used. It is not ‘prisoners.’

Natasha laughed to herself as she thought of it. They’d been told over and over again that no one here was a ‘prisoner.’ Mike was the official spokesperson for the refugees. Or the settlers. Those terms were officially acceptable. In any case, Mike Baker (that was Mikail’s name… for now. Names become fluid when the world melts down.) was the man in charge.

So, they were all now to be called settlers because Mike preferred it. Mike reminded everyone that as soon as things were safe, and as soon as order could be restored, the people in the ‘resettlement camp’ would be ‘settled’ on land where they could grow crops and live out their lives in peace. Right, she thought. That’s what they’d all been told. Nobody believed it. No one believed that anyone was going to live long enough to be resettled.

Actually, that part about nobody believing the lies probably wasn’t entirely true. Ignorant hope still thrived in most of the settlers, even the kind of hope that was pie-in-the-sky. Especially that kind. There were many who, with empty heads filled with fairy tales, thought that things were going to get back to normal. Unhappily, despite promises of land and freedom, hundreds of prisoners died every day from disease, hopelessness, and violence.

Yes, there was violence in the camps. This prison camp was no safer than the chaotic world outside the wires. Still, there’d been no wholesale escape attempts or riots. Victim psychology—a communal Stockholm syndrome—convinced the prisoners that inside was better than outside, even if that statement was objectively not true. Natasha had been outside, and it was no picnic, but life in the Carbondale camp was a nightmare that seemed to never end. Violence in the camps was especially common against women. Natasha shook her head when she thought about it. A man had to be either crazy or criminally ignorant willfully to bring his wife or daughters into a refugee camp.

Still, women were not the only victims. Men were also attacked and beaten, sexually assaulted, and even killed. Such things happen in jails. Gangs of miscreants operated freely inside the wired walls of the Carbondale camp.

Natasha had been kept safe, mostly because she never went anywhere without Steve or Cole by her side. She also suspected that Mike had something to do with the gangs leaving her alone. If it were true that he’d put out a do not touch order on her, she hoped he didn’t expect her thanks for it.

The two Warwickians grunted and heaved the torso of a young man onto the growing pile. Sometimes they’d handle the same body twice in the same day, once with the dragging, and again when it came time to stack more bodies into the burn hole itself. For now, they were glad to be done with the burden of that particular moment. Natasha had stopped counting individual bodies, but her mind kept track of the size of the piles. She quickly estimated how much more work was left to do. It always seemed, somehow… endless. She scowled as she heard the thump of another torso plopped into a pile. More fleshy residue now ready to be combed through by the pickers.

Natasha used her forearm to wipe the sweat off her brow. Despite the cold temperatures and the snow on the ground, dragging made you sweat. Sometimes this complicated things, because whenever a rare rest break happened, the sweat would bring on chills, and sometimes the cold would weaken a dragger. Corpses, blood, and waste held diseases that could multiply easily, even in the cold, and sickness often worked to weaken them as well. Dragging duty was not just a ringside ticket to death and decay—sometimes it was a death warrant in and of itself. Natasha personally knew of four draggers—men and women she’d worked with—whose bodies were now either in this pile, or had already been burned into ashes and bone in the bottom of the burn pit.

She looked towards the fence where five guardsmen were overseeing the pickers. It was the picker’s job to go through the piles of the recently deceased and remove any items of value from the corpses. Wedding rings, earrings, jewelry, necklaces, pocketknives, lighters, etc. Pickers sorted all of these things into rubber bins, and hauled them off to the Commander’s office. What he did with the valuables, lowly draggers could not know, but they certainly did speculate. There was no shortage of gossip on the many ways and means available to the Commander for enriching himself with goods looted from the bodies of dead prisoners.

Natasha looked over at Steve and laughed scornfully. She was feeling mean, and when that happened, she usually directed her anger at Steve.

“Why were you stuck with dragger duty, Steve? Isn’t Mike your best friend?”

“Mike doesn’t have friends,” Steve replied. “He has supplicants.”

“So, why do you put up with it? Why be his stooge when he treats you like this?”

“He said he’s teaching me discipline,” Steve answered coolly, and with a hint of irony.

“Discipline? Dragging duty is not discipline, Steve. Dragging duty is just another form of the death penalty.”

“I know,” Steve said. He didn’t look ashamed, and he did not look away. He stared at Natasha and betrayed neither thought nor emotion. “You can’t say that I don’t deserve it though.”

“I don’t understand you,” Natasha said.

“That’s because I’m Russian.”

“So am I,” Natasha replied.

“No you’re not. You speak Russian, Natasha, but you are something else entirely. I can’t say that I’ve figured you out, but you are definitely not Russian.”

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

“Because of this,” he indicated with his hand everything around them. “This dragging of bodies, senseless war, deprivation, tyranny, authoritarianism, duplicity, horror… acquiescence. This is what it is to be Russian down deep in your soul.” He looked back at Natasha, and for the first time that she could remember, he actually smiled. “Everyone from Warwick spokeRussian. But not everyone from Warwickwas Russian.”

“Well, I am Russian,” she said, leaning into the noun. It was all she could say to that.

“No you aren’t, Natasha, but don’t take that truth the wrong way. It’s not an accusation. Perhaps you have the best parts of being Russian somewhere within you. Maybe you have persistence, and optimism, and poetry, and music. Surely, you have pain and suffering. Those things are truly Russian. But the rest of it, the bad parts, those you don’t have.”

Natasha looked at Steve and couldn’t speak for a minute. She looked down at her boots, covered in mud, blood, and guts. Then she looked back up at Steve. “So why did he punish you this way?”

“God? Or Mike?”

“Is there a difference right now?”

“There is a difference, Natasha.”

“Mike.”

“I angered him.”

“What did you do?” Natasha asked. She felt the sweat beginning to cool her body temperature, and she stomped her feet in the snow, hopping up and down a little to get her blood pumping again.

“He wanted me to work with him—to help him take over the camp.”

“He’s already done that. And you wouldn’t help him?”

“No. I refused. He hasn’t done all he wants to do yet. He wants to do more than run things for the people in charge. He wants totake over the camp. He’s going to overthrow the commandant and take control.”

Natasha looked again at the guts on her boots and felt them slip under the soles of her feet as she shifted her weight from side to side. Did it really matter who is in charge? She decided to play along. “How is he going to do that? I mean, these National Guardsmen are military people. They are not a bunch of Russian villagers!”

“He’ll do it. Don’t doubt that. He learned a lot from his failures in Warwick. He’s already triangulated the leadership. It’s as good as done.” Steve stomped his feet and clapped his hands together rapidly. “I’ve had enough of his posturing and manipulation. I told him that he’d have to move forward without me.” He looked around the camp and gestured with his hand as if he were unveiling some exciting prize. “Ergo, I am on dragging duty.”

“Well,” Natasha said, as she walked over to the stack of bodies the pickers had just finished looting, “with friends like Mike, who needs enemies?”

CHAPTER 38

The mysterious activity at Clive’s place seemed particularly fervent that morning. The farm, its winding road lined with traffic whirring out of the complex and onto the grid of curving country roads (headed who knows where,) was abuzz with activity. At the end of a line of military-style vehicles pouring out onto the roads, was the command RV. In the cab of the RV, a cowboy and a leprechaun sat intent on the duty at hand.

The RV lumbered forward on the uneven road. It wasn’t much of a road, really, just two dirt slits cut into the field leading out to the county road. From its exhaust pipes, the odd-shaped RV that Clive called ‘Bernice’ emitted two little trails of steamy smoke. One trail rose from each corner of the back of Bernice, and the puffs lifted up along the sides of the vehicle and out into the inky, fluid light of dawn. The rocking of the RV sent the smoke up in minor turbulences, shaking the trails into tiny little spirals. The wheels peeled through the dug-in trench of a road, and the earth, clay-like and primal, clung to the tires in desperation, or hope, or just curiosity. The smoky spirals rose up like dust devils into the cool winter air.

Veronica D’Arcy lifted the plastic lid off the coffee can and stuck her nose down into the aroma, bringing it into her body. She already had a fire going in the black, cast-iron stove, and she sat a pot of water on the grill. She thought about how nice it was to ‘have’ coffee, even if it was campfire gritty. She ran her tongue across her teeth, thinking about how, during the long bike ride out of the city, and the excitement thereafter, she had lost all sense of time. At one point, she couldn’t even remember when she’d last brushed her teeth. The loss of that kind of luxury, of some connection to what once was a ‘normal life,’ occurred to her, but she did not feel the worse for the loss. She had, very recently, experienced a world of debris—bricks and stones, wreckage, gaping wounds on corpses, and blood running from limbs, and all of that, but the indignity of perhaps losing herself in the mix was a new concept for her. The loss of connection to a body in time—that was something to consider, so she thought about that.

In this new world, a person grew attuned to smells. The eyes are not the only sense used to determine the truth of things, after all. Before this new world, back in the world of Mad Men commercialism and extraordinary excess, brushing one’s teeth seemed to be a duty. Time was something measured only by a clock on the wall, or the television schedule, or the boss at the office, not by the sunrise or the next meal.

That old world seemed to her to have utterly vaporized. Her old lifestyle was becoming increasingly unimaginable, as if it had only been a dream.

She took a drink of the coffee and really tasted it. It was good because of, not in spite of, the grit. She felt the heat radiate from the stove and was thankful that they were in a secure location. In the old world, security was rarely a consideration because, in the end, it was always someone else’s responsibility. The city. The Mayor. The cops. The government. The President. It was their job to see to security. They existed to keep people from panicking. Insecurity leads to panic, so security was necessary to insure that business could go forward. You need business to flow freely if you are going to feed four-hundred million people on the productive capabilities of only a few thousand. Security is necessary to guarantee the free flow of cheaply made goods at market prices. So what happens when those transient forms of security evaporate?

She heard a sound down the hall and wondered whether it was Stephen.

She’d spent a great deal of time during the past week with Stephen and Calvin, watching them grow together like brothers. Every day, Clive and Red Beard went off to their business, she woke the boys, and they went about making themselves useful. Mostly, they’d spent their time picking through the out-buildings on the farm. Looking in sheds, attics, lofts, nooks and crannies, cupboards, anywhere they could think of, seeking to scavenge anything they thought might be valuable.

The barns and sheds were old, but not dilapidated or abandoned. The two young men found many handy items in their searches, focusing on multipurpose things that they could easily carry, along with any materials with specific, useful properties. Old rolls of fencing, chicken wire, screws and nails were particularly valuable. Pieces of old rubber inner tube, aluminum flashing, piles of feathers — all of these things were becoming more and more valuable in a world without industrial manufacturing.

In this world, like the last, they found imagination to be a powerful thing. It was a form of training for them to look at a thing and study it, determining what it was, and what it could be in the future.

They sorted these items and prioritized them. Veronica directed them to find, organize, and lay out tools and materials, and she would teach and entertain them while they worked.

Clive and Red Beard were less than open in sharing any future plans, and she didn’t know how long they’d need to stay—to live and prosper—at the farm, so she ran the salvage and re-purposing department like they might be there for the long haul.

“After 9/11,” Veronica had told the boys, “I heard some author on NPR or somewhere discussing the skills people need for survival in the end times. The ability to scrounge was at the top of the list.”

Stephen had caught her looking at him, and he’d smiled the smile of a son who knows all of his mom’s lectures. They’d developed a shorthand way of communicating that rarely required words. He knew then what was coming next.

“Stephen, what do we do?” It was a quiz question. She was testing him.

Stephen had looked at Calvin, and then told his friend what she meant for him to say. “Don’t look at what it is. Look at what it can be.”

“That’s right.” Veronica had said.

“Re-purposing is a talent that can be learned. I’m glad to be a scrounger, but in truth all single mothers, artists, and botanists are scroungers. I just happen to be an artist/botanist/single mom, so that means I’m the best expert there is!” She’d flung her hand outward toward the field, and Calvin had followed her gesture with his eyes…

And farmers, he’d thought. Farmers have to be excellent scroungers. That’s why there are all of these out-buildings full of stuff.

Veronica then told Calvin how she and Stephen used to always search for castaway objects for art projects, or materials for homework assignments, or broken down (but free) furniture that might be fixed up, or neglected plants that could be nursed back to life. “The key is to think about what the thing might do, or become, or adapt to be. An old can might become a small cook stove. A piece of rubber might help you make a slingshot for hunting. Think about the various things you might carry with you in a backpack. Think about things that might have value if you need to cook, to defend yourself, or to use them for barter. Look for value in terms of how it can enhance your life going forward.”

Veronica had rambled on like this, as mothers will, for a while. Stephen eventually had cut his eyes towards Calvin and pulled his finger across his throat, as if to say that he would slice his own throat rather than hear another word. It was all in mock fun. Veronica smiled at this, but paused only long enough to begin again. “And so you need to look for materials that are durable and flexible and serve as tools or anything that can be used to increase comfort…” Blah blah blah.

Stephen hung out his tongue and cocked his head to the side. He held his hand over his head like a pivot and mock swung his head on a rope, as though he would rather take a hanging. Calvin grinned and they all laughed.

Now, Veronica stood alone, drinking her coffee. She thought about all of that. She considered that day, the week itself, the trip out of Brooklyn, their newfound home, and the weird duo of Clive and Red Beard, the gracious hosts who had made their farm so welcoming and available. And, the coffee this morning—she thought about that, too. She took a sip, feeling the grit in her teeth. She remembered the broadcast of NPR like it was yesterday. She remembered her son at her feet. She thought about how she once sat and made lists on such mornings of things to do that day. She thought about how Stephen and Calvin told her last night, before they went to bed, that they were going to go on a new scrounging expedition today. “We want to go around the perimeter of the farm,” Stephen had said. They’d completed cataloging all of items found in the barn and thought they might find something useful on the far field, adjacent to the next farm over.

Veronica thought of all these things on this morning, how it all had the feeling of normalcy, and how if things could just stay the same, maybe everything would turn out alright.

There had been, for most of the week, a preternatural stillness—the kind of stillness that knew ancient stirrings. Not the absence of sirens or the silence of screams; not the sudden awareness of the quiet after closing a door; but a silence that one might feel when standing out under the stars, staring up into the night sky. Such a quiet is not entirely divorced from noise, of course, and this is perhaps especially true in farm country. The silence waxes and wanes with the light in the sky, the pull of the moon. Even the stirring of the livestock is motivated by those gravitational pulls, their motions and life cycles waxing and waning with the moon. The wobbling of the planet against the moon and the sun; all of it works in harmony on some nights.

There had been several such nights recently, disturbed only by the movement of vehicles. She thought of those moments of stillness, when all the forces come into alignment, when the air is just the right temperature, when even the pigs cease their nervous motion, and the farm becomes, briefly, utterly quiet, as if quiet is a state of being and not merely a description of a condition—asif nature has entered her holy moment and taken a vow of silence.

This was such a moment. Veronica sat and held her gritty cup of coffee and looked out over the farm. It was winter, and though it was morning, it was also still night, and quiet.

Veronica imagined the farm by day, in spring. She painted the pale grey canvas of the predawn moment with the vividness of her artist’s eye. She imagined the rows of corn or cabbage, their striated patterns across the thick green bands of verdure. She imagined the fields beyond it. Her mind considered the fertile land and the crops that exist in imaginative possibility. She thought of other fields, other cups of coffee, and she wondered whether her friend Clay was sitting on his porch in Ithaca, drinking coffee. She thought of her folks back in Trinidad. She listened out across the quiet of the air and she heard the quiet, but only for an instant—a butterfly’s wings on the air.

Then, the rooster began to ruffle his feathers. The light in the sky began again.

The sky was the color of an almost purple. It was the hour of dawn. Clive and Red Beard let the screen door slam as they walked out the door, and it made a sharp crack across the silence of the cool air of the farm complex. The fireball in the sky that heats our planet, and threatens it always with its ever-present violence, had just begun, with the faintest tremors of the slightest waves of light, to push across the lightening atmosphere. It was as inevitable as the tide, really, the light.

The eastern sky began to glow, and the light slowly crept into the outer reaches of the gaseous firmaments, and it crept in and invaded even the night. The earth, Veronica thought, was moving out of its own shadow.

This is a day, she thought, of import. She could not say why she thought that.

It was as if the death and destruction taking place in the distance, out beyond the boundaries of the farm, and beyond that the county, and beyond that the country, rising up like smoke into the stratosphere and filling the middle horizon, was just a part of the magical reality of now. It was as if all of that—the smoke and the dust particles hanging there, filling the sky with a rich purple hue, well… it was all beautiful. Maybe, none of that, the thing outside the fence line, had occurred after all. Maybe it had never happened. It was as if the farm was in Clive’s Amazon forest somewhere, or in one of those ancient tribal locations where news of the world’s end had been slow to reach, or where it wouldn’t have mattered if it had reached there.

Such, on that morning, was Lancaster County.

She finished her last swig of coffee and wondered what that portentous day would hold, and if the earth even cared.

CHAPTER 39

Peter and Elsie checked the bodies of their attackers to make sure the men were dead. They were. All four of the slain wore the worn and soiled uniforms of the MNG. Without a word, Peter and Elsie went through their pockets and pouches for valuable items. In this way, over the last few days, the three travelers had steadily upgraded their own equipment. Up until now, Peter, mostly through personal preference, had stayed with the Russian AK-47 that he’d taken from an accountant who had attacked them ages ago. Now, he picked up the AR-15 from the fallen point man. Maybe, he thought, it’s time to make a change. Most of the rifle ammo they were coming across was in the .223 caliber utilized by the AR-15, or a larger caliber, like the .308 used in many sniper rifles. He liked the AK, and felt a bit nostalgic for the weapon, since it was the rifle he’d been trained to use as a young man and in his years as an instructor in the Charm School. Still, wisdom dictated that he use the weapon for which he had access to the most ammunition. The AK would have plenty of value in trade, or as a gift weapon to the FMA.

Ace had taken three lives with perfect headshots from several hundred meters, and the men’s deaths had been immediate and without suffering or drama. Ace, the silent sniper who almost never talked, and rarely ate, had become… well… an Ace in the Hole, and Peter couldn’t even imagine what life would be like if they hadn’t found him.

Peter grabbed a web bag that held seven full magazines for the AR-15 from one of the corpses, and hauled the weapon and the ammo up to the camp.

Elsie gathered up handguns, magazines, and useful gear from the other fallen soldiers and added them to the increasingly heavy bag of weapons and gear the three travelers had acquired in the past few days. She also took the jewelry — the rings and necklaces and watches. Most of the gear would end up with the FMA, once their reconnaissance scouts came around. The other valuables would stay with the group.

This region of Pennsylvania had become home to a cat and mouse war between two opposing forces of former National Guardsmen. Every day or so they’d run across a military unit that was made up of friends and not foes. The Free Missouri Army, acting as a guerrilla resistance force, had patrols out searching, looking for and hoping to engage MNG units. Peter tended to like the men from this group. The FMA had shown themselves to be mostly benevolent. There had been incidents—things that will happen in the fog of war—but for the most part the FMA had proved to be good guys — better guys at least — in the battle that now raged throughout the area.

Nobody wanted to run into an MNG unit. If refugees were spotted by the MNG, the situation immediately became a choice between ‘fight’ or ‘flight.’ No one expected good treatment from the Missouri National Guard troops. The MNG soldiers usually shot first and asked questions later, but anyone they did manage to capture they sent by horse cart to Carbondale.

The word “Carbondale” had become a byword among the few refugees that still traveled through the area. When Peter, Ace, and Elsie would run across other folks moving from place to place, the object of universal scorn was the MNG. The two terms had become synonymous with death, both the place where the group was headquartered, and the army that might show up at your door to send you there. “You’d rather be dead than to end up in Carbondale,” people would say.

By contrast, whenever the travelers would come upon an FMA unit, they’d barter their excess guns and ammo for food or supplies. If the FMA group didn’t have anything to trade, Peter would just give them the guns and ammo anyway. Carrying the bag of weapons had become another burden, but Peter was firmly against leaving valuable weapons on the ground, when he knew the MNG might find them, and he knew that the FMA could use them. The FMA recruited heavily from among survivors they came across, and they were always in need of more battle tools.

Kolya Bazhanov, who had taken to himself the nameCole, was knee deep in garbage, going through it with stoic disinterest and gloved hands, separating items into different rubber bins. He and ten other prisoners stood yards apart from one another amid the piles, processing the seemingly endless supply of trash and waste. Everything was reused in the camp. Paper, depending on the shape it was in, its type and condition, could be composted, used to start fires, or bundled and hauled to the waste buckets to be used as toilet paper. Aluminum cans were washed out, and the soft aluminum would be re-used for dozens of alternative purposes.

The buckets full of human waste had been composted for a time, but now the sheer amount of the stuff had overwhelmed the garbage detail, and most of it was being burned in open pits dug for the purpose. Human urine was hauled in buckets to a location that was set up for the manufacture of saltpeter and gunpowder. The amount of waste that thousands of imprisoned humans could produce was beyond anything Cole could ever have imagined. This is saying something, since Cole was a man of vivid imagination. He was imagining it now, the sheer amount of it all. Simply mind-boggling, he thought. Most of the waste still consisted of consumer goods manufactured before the crash, but there was a lot of it. More, since the MNG was constantly on the move in the area, confiscating goods wherever they could be found. In this way, Carbondale had become like ancient Rome or Athens before those cities had collapsed. Armies were forever on the move, seizing goods out there to be used by the people in here who consumed, but didn’t produce much of anything at all.

Cole threw an aluminum can into the rubber bin marked cans, and then turned to the man next to him with a smile on his face.

“Robert! I have a question for you,” Cole said.

“It’s not going to lead to you quoting Whitman or Emerson is it?” the older man working next to Cole replied as he bundled up some cardboard and tied it with a short piece of string.

In the old world Robert had been a grade school teacher, and during the days spent among the garbage, he would usually work his way until he was somewhere near Cole, because he secretly appreciated the generally higher quality of conversation. He liked Cole a lot, but he always acted like he was frustrated with Cole’s constant and humorous banter.

“I assure you, good sir, it will not.” Cole paused as if to take a little silent bow.

“Okay, what’s the question?”

“Right now, would you rather have money, or a good and honorable name?”

Robert paused and pondered the question for a moment before completing the knot he was tying in the string. “Neither one means much to me in here.”

Cole frowned at Robert, and then broke into a smile. “You aren’t playing correctly, sir. If you had to have one or the other, which would it be? Choose! Money? Or a good name?”

“Money, I suppose.”

“Well, your first answer was right. Neither one does us much good in and amongst this trash; but, since we’re just talking, and since you have forbidden me to quote from Whitman or Emerson, let’s hear from the Bard on the subject…”

Robert rolled his eyes, but smiled. His protest was weak and amiable. “Ahh, man! No!”

Cole dropped the paper he was holding in his gloved hand, and spread his right arm out with the palm facing upward, in the manner of orators of old.

Robert sighed deeply and Cole smiled.

“That, dear man, is from Shakespeare. Othello, I think,” Cole said.

“I wonder if Shakespeare ever had to shovel garbage,” Robert sneered, light-heartedly.

Cole thought of a few of the minor plays. “I suppose he did on occasion.”

Cole did not notice that Mikail Brekhunov, now known as Mike, had approached and was standing behind him.

“Bravo, Cole. I see you’re keeping the settlers entertained,” Mike said. His eyes did not betray his intent, and his delivery was deadpan.

“Settlers?” Cole spat the word out, sarcastically. “I see you’re piping that tune, too.”

“I am,” Mike replied, and something in his voice suggested that in fact he was doing more than merely piping the tune—that he was also writing the music. “I’m not going to argue with you about it. Words are powerful tools. You of all people should know that. You, too, should call us ‘settlers,’ if you’re smart enough to know how perilous your position is here.” Mike waived his hand dismissively at the muck covered floor as if to suggest that there was a level even lower than that.

Cole either did not see the implied threat, or did not care, and he pressed his case. “Yes, words are important, Mike, but in the end, isn’t it something more that is needed? Something more.” He emphasized the words, indicating that what he was saying was actually the something more of which he spoke. “Like the more powerful cousin of words… action? Or… well…”

He was about to say “truth” but he didn’t get the chance. Mike snapped at him and showed some wit of his own.

“What does Orwell have to do with it?”

Mike patted the gun at his side as he said it, and Cole flinched. “I tire of your quibbles, Cole. It’s ten o’clock, and your crew was supposed to be done with this load twenty minutes ago. We get behind, and we get buried in garbage. You do understand, right?”

Cole smiled, as if to offer a silent bow.

Mike did not smile or laugh. He stepped closer to Cole and stared into the younger man’s eyes.

“‘All the world’s a stage…,’ blah, blah, blah. Get it done, Cole.”

Mike spit his angry, rancid breath into Cole’s face from a distance of inches. Cole noticed that detail because it was the only one that really made him uncomfortable. He could deal with the threats, but that breath…

“You’re wearing down my good will and patience, my friend,” Mike leaned into the last word.

Cole clicked his boots. There was a slight mockery in the motion. “We will re-double our efforts, Comrade Mike.” He said the whole sentence with a smile. He then removed a glove, pulled off his glasses and cleaned them with a small corner of cloth he’d found in the trash. He noticed the smell of urine. Really, it is mind-boggling, the amount of waste this place produces, he thought, his mind already turning back to his work.

Mike stood and watched him and glared at him. “One day. One day soon, Cole—,” he let the threat dangle before his prey, “—your mouth will get you into trouble that your charm and wit cannot get you out of.”

“Yes, Mike. You are undoubtedly correct. And, when such a day comes, I hope to have enough grace to accept it.” He spat on the ground and then looked back up at Mike. A small bit of spittle still clung to the corner of his mouth.

Mike wheeled on his heels and walked back towards the administrative tents. His bulldog walk was emphasized by the way he worked his jaw as if rehearsing some argument. The effect made him look like he’d sunk his teeth into something, and his shoulders hunkered over slightly as he tracked his way back down the small slope through the snow.

When he was gone, Cole looked over at Robert and shrugged.

“He thinks I’m charming and witty,” Cole said, laughing. He put out his hand again, and this time he spoke with a British accent.

Peter, Elsie, and Ace were now safely behind the lines of the FMA. A hard half-day’s walk brought them to an FMA encampment only ten miles from Lancaster County.

While “safely” had most certainly become a relative word, they knew that they now could feel more comfortable bunching up in a group, talking, and going through their gear. They’d traded their entire stash of extra guns and ammo—including the AK-47—for twenty pounds of dried sausage and a bag of key limes. In the old world, such a trade would have been ludicrous. In this world, Peter almost felt like he’d taken advantage of the FMA officer with whom he’d bargained. The sausage would come in handy as a means of getting protein and quick calories while on the run. The limes would help keep them from getting scurvy, or any of a dozen other diseases and afflictions that are caused or exacerbated by a lack of Vitamin C. Peter had tried to get a roll of baling wire thrown in with the bargain, but the officer had just laughed at him. Peter would have to deliver him a battle tank, the man said, in working order and loaded with fuel in order to get a roll of baling wire. Some things couldn’t be had at any price.

Matches, duct tape, aluminum foil, aspirin, and chocolate—these were gotten in dreams, not often in reality.

“Getting that dried sausage was a Godsend, Peter,” Elsie said.

Ace just nodded his head in agreement, as he sucked the juice out of a key lime.

“We did well to get so much for those guns. With all the deaths and sickness and so many battles, guns and ammo are going to be easy to get for a while. Someday, they’ll be precious again, but right now, they’re out there lying around for any scavenger willing to go spend a day looking for them. Glad we found a man who didn’t over-value his meat supplies.”

“What news did you hear from them, Peter?” Elsie asked.

“They said another ten miles and we’d be rolling into Amish country. There are heavy-duty checkpoints on every point of ingress into the area, even the back roads. Some militia—a well-funded and highly able group—has taken it upon themselves to protect the Amish. Probably it’s a brilliant idea, and that’s something that Uncle Volkhov hinted at before the crash. He thought that somebody with resources might realize that it was in everyone’s best interests to keep the Amish alive and working. Neither the FMA nor the MNG are messing with these militia guys.”

“That sounds frightening, Peter,” Elsie said. “What will we do?”

“The officer I traded with said that these militia guys are hard core, but reasonable. He said they’re letting people in who belong there, who know someone in the area, or who have verifiable business with the Amish.”

“You think they’ll let us in?”

“I have no idea,” Peter said, shaking his head. “He says that from here on in—since they’ve pushed the MNG to the north—we should be able to travel on the main road and not have to go cross country.”

“Do you think that’s so? Is that a good idea?”

“I trust him. He says it’s dangerous to go cross country into Amish country. The militiamen guarding the area are more nervous about people trying to sneak in than they are about folks who just come up to a checkpoint and make their case.”

“That makes sense.”

“What do you think, Ace?” Peter asked.

“I’m with you,” was all Ace had to say about that. He smiled, though, which was as rare as hearing his voice.

“Okay,” Peter continued. “The guy said there is a town up ahead. Only a few miles up the road. It’s a mess, but we have to go through it. It’s been the focus of a few major MNG offensives, but the FMA holds the town now. To try to skirt the town by going through the forests or the fields is way too dangerous. So we’ll just try to get through it as fast as we can.”

“I’ve grown to hate towns,” Elsie said. “And don’t think I don’t get the irony of me, of all people, saying that.”

CHAPTER 40

Veronica continued her solitary watch, standing on the porch as the atmosphere slowly turned from purple to blue, then yellow, and then pale white, and then pale white turning golden. These colors splashed across the atmosphere as the morning wore on. The air shimmered in iridescence. Veronica blinked. As the light expanded, the horizon turned brown, green, and red. These colors in the distance slowly came into focus. The red, is the neighbor’s barn. The brown, she thought, was the shingled roof of his farmhouse. An Amish farm, Clive had informed her. It was beautiful, in the distance, in the white morning light. The smartly constructed barn and outbuildings stood in crisp relief against the natural elements. She admired how the farm didn’t have all the dissecting and diagonal power lines leading up to the house to mar the natural beauty of the objects, and she thought of the farm’s value as a canvas, wondering how Van Gogh would have painted it at just that moment. She admired it as a rural landscape, and then wondered if art would even be possible to imagine in this new world. That thought caused her to make a mental note. She’d have to take the boys out in the spring and teach them to pick berries to mix up some paints.

In some of the farthest corners of the field, along the fence line, the slightest dusting from the black soot in the atmosphere sat on the tops of the snow, a distant reminder of what was going on over there, beyond this tribal region. The tiny dots along the horizon seemed to stand as if in a snow globe. The smoke kicked into the air from the recent dustups over in the cities, with the civil war and anarchy and lawlessness breaking out in the world — there had been… all of that.

Still, the light breaking through on the horizon was beautiful. The earth was now fully out of its shadow.

Stephen D’Arcy lay twisted among the sheets of the sofa-bed. He’d slept roughly last night—when he’d slept at all. He kept waking up with his back hurting him. Even at his young age, his back hurt him. He hadn’t realized how deeply the muscles in his shoulders had ached from the bike ride and all of the excitement after that. He’d realized it last night, however. So much sleeping on the ground, floors, and tables recently had taken its toll.

The scrounging was hard work too, and had added to the soreness. The tension in his flesh, the little tears in the fibers of his unused muscles, made them tender from overstrain. The soreness radiated out across his young shoulders and down his back, into his deltoids. He was sore even in his bones. The sheets were tangled like vines around his legs as he lay. He’d tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable place to rest his body against the strange shapes of the fold-out couch that he’d shared with Calvin for the past week. The couch, for its part, didn’t care about his comfort, or lack thereof.

Both boys had risen early each day to get ready for their scrounging duties. Today they were making a run to the outer limits of the property line. Stephen stretched his back and yawned, and wondered if Calvin was just as sore. He arched backwards to roll his shoulders forward fully, looking to find the range of motion so he’d know just where the pain would hit.

He looked around and got his bearings. He still was not completely used to living at the farm. Through the open door, he could see that his mother was already up. The rest of the fold-out was empty, and that meant that Calvin was up too. He felt for his boots and sat up on the edge of the bed.

Mom has been sleeping roughly too, he thought as he dressed.

They’d sat up talking last night, just the two of them, as they did at the end of every day. She talked with him about where they might go in the future, and what they might do. He felt that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what she feared was coming. All she’d said was that they should stay put.

This is a good place, she’d said. At least for the moment. Even with the weird relationship that they’d established with Clive and Red Beard, it was a good place. His mother liked the men personally, and she’d left no doubt about that. She was concerned, however, that there seemed to be a tension between them all. Stephen had noticed the tension, too. They all had developed some sort of unspoken arrangement, and it must be admitted that the arrangement allowed everyone to live peaceably—that much was certain. However, his mother was still too new at all of this to entirely trust the two older men. She wasn’t sure she was fine with the arrangement, and told him that she wasn’t completely comfortable with people who kept secrets. She made motions in the air, putting air quotes around the word “secrets.” However, they were guests, after all, and she’d told him that she understood everything that being a guest implied.

Maybe it was just her motherly instincts towards Stephen and now, by extension towards Calvin, who seemed like he was close enough to be Stephen’s brother. Stephen could see that. He knew why his mother liked Calvin so much. Calvin had an old soul. There was something in his manner and presence that suggested that he was a man who ought not be slighted or treated like a youngster, merely because of his youthful appearance. He exuded a kind of wisdom born from experience. Where, Stephen wondered, did his new friend get such wisdom? He was clearly too young to have had much experience. It was a mystery.

Veronica had said all of these things, and Stephen had listened. Stephen listened to her and thought that maybe his mother had been saying that Calvin was somehow more mature, more capable than he was. He laughed to himself when he thought of this. He didn’t see it that way at all. He saw Calvin as a brother, as an equal. They were two brothers who had lost their fathers — misunderstood, as all youth are.

The morning was cool and light and Stephen couldn’t help thinking of the way his mother looked as she stood at the fence line while he and Calvin headed out to their day’s work. She stood and watched as if she were waiting for something, just as she had on his first day of school, when she’d sent him down the hall towards his classroom. His mother perennially had that look of a mother sending her child off to the danger of the world. Even now, in the midst of catastrophe, she had it.

As the two friends walked off to work, Stephen saw Calvin look back at Veronica over by the fence, and noted that his friend saw the look too. Calvin glanced back at him and smiled. Stephen smiled back and changed the subject that had never been spoken aloud.

The three of them, as a family, bonded as the scrounging project progressed. It was important for Stephen, as a youth still growing in his maturity, to have someone his own age to talk to. Someone who spoke his language. Someone who was member of his tribe. He had often leaned on Calvin’s guidance. He did that now.

“So what’s the plan?” He asked.

“Okay, dude,” Calvin said, “you head out along that south fence line over there where it looks like there was a chimney that got burned out.” Calvin pointed out shapes across the field to Stephen as he talked. He directed his friend’s attention toward the distance. “Usually those kinds of places are picked over pretty well, but sometimes they were picked over in a different time, by people with a different mindset. You might find things that appear useful now that wouldn’t have meant anything to people then, back when the last set of looters went through it.” He leaned into the word “looters” and pointed across the land as if ironically. He winked at Stephen. “I’m going to go along that ridge over there. I’ll circle back down to you. Okay, bro?”

“Cool.” Stephen said. He looked up in the direction of the chimney. Like his mom, he saw triangles and boxes of color. He knew there would be bricks, boards, who knows what else…

Calvin walked out of the field, then up and along the fence line. He followed the fence for about fifty yards, stopping here and there to mend it when he could, when it poked out of the snow piles occasionally. He came out to a stand of trees at the northwest corner of the field and entered onto a rocky clearing. There, under the trees, he saw a couple of heavy boulders. Where, in such a landscape, could large boulders like those have come from? Calvin wondered. He thought of Stonehenge for some odd reason. He thought of the pyramids, and of Easter Island.

The boulders were huge and stacked on each other, and he walked under the trees as his eyes adjusted to the light and to the distance. There was a man sitting on one of the boulders. The man was peeling an apple in the cold morning air. He gave Calvin a little wave. Calvin looked at the craggy features of the man sitting on the boulder, and he knew who it must be. Until that very moment, he had never before seen an honest-to-goodness Amish man. Calvin looked at the man, and the man looked at Calvin, and then they exchanged head nods.

“You must be Jonathan Wall’s man.”

“Yes, Mr. Stolzfus. Calvin Rhodes. It’s nice to meet you.” Calvin had heard Clive and Red Beard talking about Henry Stolzfus, and figured that this had to be the man himself.

Henry Stolzfus waved off the offer of a handshake. He made a motion as if to say he would offer an apple if he had another.

“Good to meet yu’uns.” He looked Calvin up and down. “Is everything okay with Mr. Wall, then?”

“Yes sir,” Calvin explained, nodding his head. “We’re managing down in Texas. About as good as can be expected, I guess.”

“Good. Well, I appreciate the risk you ran in bringing up this package all that way. The medicines especially were much appreciated. The gold was important too, and you tell Jonathan that we’ll store the amount he said for him until he wants or needs it. Tell him we’re thankful for the help.”

“I will, Sir.” Then, Calvin snapped his fingers. He’d just remembered something he was supposed to tell the Amish man if he saw him. “Mr. Darling said he’d bring your shipment over in stages.” He paused to get the man’s reaction.

“Yes, well…” Stolzfus nodded his bearded chin. “It’s true. We’ve received some already. We need one or two more, I expect. I don’t foresee any problems.”

Calvin nodded his head and then moved to make his departure. “Okay. Well, then, thanks. We sure appreciate everything you’re doing. If you get down to Texas, you know you have a place to stay.”

“I know it, yung’un. Y’uns take care.” With that, Henry Stolzfus turned his head back toward his own field and rested his feet on the boulder. The conversation was over. He turned again, after a while, and watched the young Chinese man disappear into the shadows. What an odd choice for Jonathan to have made there, he thought. He watched as Calvin walked into the field, followed along the fence, and then dropped down into Clive’s place. Henry Stolzfus looked across the field toward his own farm again and pushed the last piece of apple into his mouth. He tasted it, pushing the piece around on his tongue, before standing and walking back down toward his own valley.

Calvin was just coming up along the fence line, across the field where they’d first sighted the chimney, when he saw Stephen in the distance.

His friend was standing, shaking his leg, tripping out from some woodpile or something. As he watched, he began to make out what was going on. Stephen was hopping, and then Calvin heard a series of bloodcurdling howls. Stephen fell backwards and caught himself against the pile, stumbling around, and from a distance, Calvin finally saw what it was. Stephen had a board attached to his foot. Sparked into motion, Calvin ran toward the screams, and as he ran, he stared into the middling distance watching the drama unfold. He saw Stephen drop like a rock, or like a man that was dead.

Stephen’s boot had a board attached to it. There was no getting around it. Stephen was passed out and Calvin was looking at his boot curled up under his foot, wrenched at the end of his leg in an agonizing position. Calvin wondered if anything was broken, and he saw on the other end of the board another nail, like the one in Stephen’s foot. He saw the gauge of the nail, its rusty length protruding ominously from the board. It likely went all the way through the foot, Calvin thought. He saw the nasty hook at the end, where the tip of the nail had broken off in a jagged slice of rust. He calculated that Stephen had slipped or stumbled backward and landed on a trashed piece of barn siding that was still home to the nails that had once attached it to an even older Amish barn or out-building. No doubt about it. Stephen’s foot was definitely nailed to the board.

Calvin reached down and woke Stephen, shaking him firmly by the shoulder. Stephen stirred and looked up at him, but the two brothers didn’t speak. The pain hit again just as he helped Stephen up. Pain gripped Stephen’s face, as the two brothers clasped one another tightly and nodded. They knew what they needed to do.

In the old world, they might have secured the board so that the weight of it wouldn’t do more damage, tearing flesh, dislocating bone, or maybe cutting a vein. They might have called an ambulance with paramedics on board that could come and immobilize or remove the board more professionally. But this wasn’t the old world.

Stephen put his weight into Calvin’s shoulder. Calvin placed his arms underneath the shoulders of his younger, new-found brother. Together, they lifted.

There was a vicious sound, unlike any that Calvin had ever heard. What was going on inside the boot—inside the foot—he could not know. Outside the boot, all he heard was a thud and a thwack of rubber and wood and snow. And screams of pain.

Then Calvin felt Stephen pass out in his arms.

“Dude, you should have seen yourself.”

Calvin was sitting next to Stephen, who was coming groggily back to life.

“You were doing this little dance with this board. I thought you were trying on skis, or waving your arms all James Brown like. I thought maybe you had stepped on a snake!”

Stephen looked down at his foot and began to inspect it while Calvin joked, trying to keep his friend’s mind off the pain. Laughter was the only medicine Calvin had with him. Stephen tried to see whether there were any broken bones first.

Stephen stopped Calvin and pointed to the pile of wood about ten yards away. “Yeah, I jumped across that pile over there. I should have taken the time to walk around it. My foot kind of slipped through a rotted piece of wood, and my weight came down directly on the nail.”

He looked down again at the foot. “Ouch.” Ouch! The skin was all blue on the top of the foot. The nail hadn’t quite punctured the skin on top, but had gotten… just … that… close. Blueish-black blood was already coagulating just under the skin, and there was a tiny circle of deepening hues where the nail had nearly come through. The bruise moved outward in concentric circles of purple. The pain, too, radiated outward.

Stephen looked up at Calvin, who tried his best to smile at his friend sheepishly.

“You want to put the boot back on or hobble with it off?” Calvin asked.

“On.” Stephen said. “Maybe it will help hold down the swelling.” He put the boot back on and they headed back across the field toward the farmhouse.

Veronica was standing in a cornfield, thinking about the harvest that this field might bring in the spring. She’d always read about Pennsylvania farmland and its rich soil, and its suitable climate. She looked around and thought, it has other advantages, too. She’d read that Pennsylvania has more miles of rural roads than any state in the nation—miles of roads running through cornfields or dairy farms. Back ways. Away from the huddled masses, yearning to… well… to live. Many of the Amish farms were connected, one to another, fence to fence, for miles in every direction.

She looked across the field now, examining it forensically, with her artist’s eye. She’d always liked the way snow looks against the line of the sky. The field was white but splattered here and there with broad swaths of color. The fence line cut a grid across the fields, and Veronica was trailing her eye along that fence line, and then along the fence by the river, when she saw Calvin helping Stephen along. She could see that Stephen was hurt. Something in the pit of her stomach made her know that it was bad. The birds in the tree above their head scattered, chirping madly as they flew away in the opposite direction of the two approaching boys.

She ran, her arms outstretched, unconsciously open like a hen wanting to gather in her chicks. She was running toward them, eyes wide open, panic gripping her heart, when there was a blinding flash, as if someone had flipped on a light switch, amplifying the light and making it ten times brighter. Day. No. More than just day. Daylight itself, as if the world had just been put under a magnifying glass. The light was intensified.

It almost blinded her with its intensity. Had she been looking just a few clicks further to the right, it certainly would have blinded her—at least temporarily. As it was, it knocked her to the ground. She rocked, feeling as if the flash of light had sent a wave under her feet. She heard a boom. No, it was more. It was a BOOM! She was on her knees and trying to get to her feet.

The thing she’d most feared had happened.

She stood up again and continued running toward the boys. She saw Calvin helping his brother along, with Stephen’s arm slung over his shoulder. Stephen, her son. He looked like a wounded soldier whose friend was helping him hobble back from the battlefield.

She saw them come over the hill and she was running. When she’d been knocked to the ground by the blast, something in her had changed. There’d been an almost instantaneous realization, as if God Himself had stepped out of the clouds to speak the awful truth.

The world would never be the same. There was no going back. The decision was final. She looked into the assembling clouds and saw the sky open up and the wind rush out, and she ran toward the nothingness.

The odd-shaped RV was barreling down a road emptied of military style vehicles for the first time in many days. In the cab, the cowboy was spitting and cursing, and the leprechaun was listening. “Damn it all, damn it all.” Clive spat again, angrily. “Those bastards did it!”

This was the bomb that took out Philadelphia.

Across the adjacent field, they could see the woman who they’d brought into their home, and she was running towards the boys. The RV had been a hundred yards up the road when the flash split the morning sky. Now, Clive and Red Beard pulled up to the farmhouse and stopped. “Damn it all.”

Veronica reached the two young boys, and she knew that there wasn’t time for explanations. A storm was coming. A new kind of storm. She put her arm around Stephen and threw his left arm over her shoulder. With two of them taking the weight off of Stephen’s foot, the three of them picked up the pace.

All five of them got to the house at about the same time. Clive and Red Beard told them to follow, and they all spilled into the farmhouse’s drawing room. They pulled back the table, and then rolled back the rug. Clive bent down and picked up a slatted door made as a cutout in the floor. “I was hoping not to have to do this,” he said, “but we don’t have much choice now.”

He pointed to the stairs leading down to a dark steel door.

“In you go.”

Calvin went first, and he helped Stephen limp his way down the steep stairs. Clive and Red Beard stood and waited for Veronica to go, both of them looking unsure as to whether she would actually go or not. She did. She didn’t even think to ask why.

CHAPTER 41

The Farm. After the Bombs.

Taking a bigger look at things, from space, the planet rolled on. It was now dimpled along its surface by a number of pockmarks, and in its atmosphere was a cloud of dust so thick that, in many places, it might occlude much of the sun for years. Still, the earth rolled along, pushing through the roiling violence of space as if the dimples hardly mattered. It swung its wide arc around the solar system as if the dust was only a hiccup in its calendar. In many places on earth, someone gazing into the nighttime sky would have looked in vain for stars, but still the stars were there. For those seemingly trapped under the darkened blanket, the stars would be seen another night, after the winds would blow in and sweep the skies clean. In some regions, the dust effect would linger, causing drastic temperature drops over the next year, killing crops that weren’t already lost to disease and the poisoning of the soil. Other locations would see wild and unnatural temperature swings and difficult growing conditions. Still other places in North America and around the world—areas where the jet stream protected the earth from dust and fallout—would actually benefit from the cooler temperatures that would bring more rains than normal.

From above the eastern portion of North America, the ethereal clouds that hung between earth and space, the clouds that were even now diminishing, were made up of ash and smoke—remnants of The City. Not just a portion of the city, like what had happened at Ground Zero when the twin towers fell in New York — this cloud consisted of the entirety of a cultural and social construct we call The City.

Mirroring the reality of the intermittent pyres of global thermonuclear war, from a nearer view, on earth, the phenomenon of fire as a tool and hub of society had returned to the world, spreading outward in webbed fingers into the night. These were the fires of humanity—of humanness. Gathering around campfires, people huddled ever closer together. Shell-shocked. The fires stretched across the landscape in waves. Nearer the old population centers, they increased in number slightly and then spread out toward the horizon where they diminished, and disappeared into the unpredictability of the wilderness.

There were many hunks of metal hanging in the pull of earth’s orbit. These metal objects once served as communication satellites, but now their only purpose was to bide their time in gravity’s tug until they all, in the coming years, and in their turn, would become streaking stars across the earth’s skies. Looking at the earth from one of these satellites, we would have seen through the haze of the clouds and dust that, as time passed, the number of fires on the surface of the earth was dwindling. Immediately after the blasts, though, the pockmarks on the earth—those that we mentioned earlier—shimmered like trinkets in the light of heaven, or mirrors reflecting back, flashing a signal code. It was strange, this reflected light. Then, studying it closer, we might have read the code and understood. The blinking was coming from the center of each of the blasts. The superheated gas had turned the surface of the earth in those pockmarks to glass.

As the sunlight expanded across the valley, had one been standing along the ridge overlooking Clive’s farm, one might have wondered whether the smoke blocking out some of that sun was also made of pulverized human bones. One might consider the possibility of cancer-causing chemicals and radiation in the smoke. One might pause, watch the sunrise, and ask, “Was all of this necessary?”

It is, in the end, a matter of perspective. Some would surmise, not without ample evidence, that humanity’s crimes were immense, and that the inevitable justice for such crimes was only now being meted out by some unseen hand. Or perhaps one would have thought that even then, in that moment of most terrible devastation, the earth was bigger than humankind. “Look what I can do,” says the child, bending the rules of nature, spreading his havoc. The Earth stands with her hands on her hips, threatening with age and experience. She yawns at the antics, as she yawned at the dinosaurs. She will outlast these tantrums. Earth, in this scenario, simply keeps rolling toward the light in the horizon, as inevitable as the tide. Perhaps one might have considered that both realities were simultaneously true.

Just now, these considerations were just speculations. There was no one there yet, standing on the ridge, to consider them. There was only the farmhouse down in the valley, which seemed for the moment to be protected. Prevailing winds had taken the bombs’ immediate toxic cloud out to sea. The farm was peaceful, resting and quiet. The only noise of discomfort came from the barn, from animals that hadn’t been fed yet.

The farmhouse, too, was quiet. Occasionally, an electronic blip sounded, emitted from a source in the old farm’s drawing room. In that room, in the middle of the floor, just to the side of a hidden floor panel that covered the entry door to the bunker, was a Geiger counter. Clive Darling had left it there as he’d descended the steps on the day when they’d entered the bunker. He’d herded everyone into the cellar, and then he’d placed the Geiger counter on the floor, hastily wiring it up according to his plan.

Completing the task with the counter, he’d then pulled the flooring into place. All of this occurred in only a few moments after the bomb went off. He felt certain that they were all going to be in good shape, but he needed to get some readings before he could be confident. The Geiger counter sent active readings down into the basement.

Now, down in the bunker, Clive sat at an antique oaken table lighted by a wind-up lamp, and fiddled with a slide rule. He made calculations, and occasionally he reached up to grab the lamp to wind the small handle and generate more power. The sound of the lamp’s whirring dynamo filled the bunker, echoing off the walls. Despite the noise, Clive sat alone. Everyone else snoozed silently, not even stirring at the sound of the small machine being cranked back to life.

Clive stroked his mustache, leaned in, and tapped the window of the read-out dial on the counter. He waited for a moment and then flipped through a number of sheets in a small spiral notebook he kept in his front pocket. He made a mark on a page and then flipped back to a different page, where he made another kind of mark. On a whim, he thumbed back in his notebook, and his eye caught an entry. He stopped and stared at the page for a moment.

The note was from the day he’d met the traveler—the man he’d called Ned Ludd. Clay was his real name. He smiled at the thought, and he wondered what had happened to old Ned Ludd. Somewhere in Upstate New York, I reckon, trying to get by.

Now, another man stood his turn at the lonely vigil. He was wide-awake, and his mind raced through a well-worn philosophical maze. He enjoyed these nights alone. He fiddled with his red beard and pondered.

Red Beard paused his thoughts for a moment. He leaned his head against the cool of the concrete and found that he liked the sensation. Soon enough, his thoughts continued…

Red Beard was right about one thing, even if he was wrong about others. The systems that had eradicated the importance of concepts like day and night (all except for that most persistent of human requirements… sleep,) disappeared in the blink of an eye. Once again the natural cycles of life would reassert themselves. Day. Night. Seasons. Age. Life. Death. Frailty. All of these realities were rising again to insist upon recognition by humankind. From the hustle and bustle of the 21st Century, in a crystalline moment, the brakes had been applied, and now time would be experienced more purposefully, even down in the depths of a fallout bunker.

Red Beard leaned back in his chair and checked the dial. He made a mark in a notebook. He leaned his head against the concrete again. He thought, somehow, of prisons, of caves.

Time passed. Inside the bunker sat a group of people brought together by whatever forces ruled the universe. God, chance, luck. Everyone in that bunker didn’t believe all the same things, and individually they conceived of different motivational powers at work in the universe. They did, however, share one commonality: Together, they waited in the bunker for the smoke to clear.

Time is experienced in both small and large increments in such confined, underground spaces. The scenes flashed by in bursts, like blips from the Geiger counter on the floor above them in the farmhouse. Long, lazy hours of conversation coupled with short bursts of emotion. Living underground can be like being in the warm enclosure of a womb, or the cold, dark grip of a dungeon, but, either way, one can only sleep so much. One can only read so many books. The body gets weary in such a prison, such a grave. Time becomes a vanity. Moments are measured by the hunger in one’s stomach, the tension in one’s legs. There is a feeling of wanting to run unfettered across a field, just as there is a need to sit and explore the inner quiet of one’s own nature. Time becomes meaningless in such moments, and it becomes everything.

Here we find Clive and Red Beard sitting and talking. There, Veronica is doctoring her son’s foot. Time goes on like this for a while. Now, Calvin is joining Clive and Red Beard in animated conversations and arguments. He is sitting with his back against the wall, polishing some tool he fashions for purposes that only he seems to care about.

Again, Veronica is tending to her son.

There, Red Beard is trying to get her to eat something.

Over here, Clive and Calvin are quietly discussing something in the corner.

The time passed on like this, the intermixing of the people in the bunker, the boredom being embraced, the moments being measured in swirls in the coffee cup. The scenes rolled by in endless succession. Time became both meaningless and endless. The Geiger counter was registering. Its dial showed clear, as it had since they first burrowed into the ground. Still, they were waiting, seemingly forever.

For what?

Only Clive Darling knew exactly what they were waiting for, and as per usual, he wasn’t talking.

Clive had purchased the piece of property in Lancaster County years before. The property suited his purposes, and it had the added benefit of being a stunningly beautiful piece of Pennsylvania. It rested along the river, which was lovely in its own right, and the river’s wide, unnavigable waters served as a kind of natural barrier to the western edge of the property boundaries. Clive had bought the property because he liked it, but he’d also bought it because it was the closest farm in the county to a man he sincerely wanted to know. That man’s name was Henry Stolzfus.

Clive had met Stolzfus by placing himself in the right booth of the right coffee spot—one that Henry Stolzfus frequented. This act of buying land next to a man in order to meet him and create a bond with him might be considered particularly manipulative or scheming, and one would be forgiven for thinking that all hidden motivations are inherently guileful. Clive, however, looked at the reality of the situation and excused his own behavior. How else would such a partnership come to be—between a rich worldling and a religious separatist?

The meeting of these two men took place at Smarty’s, a shiny, stainless-steel enclosed box of a diner on a shady back road in the southern center of the county. Every Monday at 8 a.m., many of the men from the local Amish community would meet at Smarty’s and exchange news. Clive spent some time scouting the area, and it didn’t take long for him to notice that the buggies were lined up deep around the diner on Monday mornings.

Clive had goals to be sure. He wasn’t just looking for friendship with like-minded individuals. Those many years ago, he’d been looking to secure a ready and available food source at a time when the Cold War was raging and the future had looked particularly bleak. Moving forward, Clive would need a sustainable source of food supplies for his men, and for the groups that he financially supported throughout the country. Considering all the factors, and counting into the equation his own long-term geopolitical goals, it seemed to him that collaborating with the Amish seemed like the best plan for getting his needs met. But how to strike the bargain?

On the first day of Operation Stolzfus, Clive walked into the diner to watch and learn. He noticed how the other men treated Henry, as if he was the man to know. The next Monday, he arrived early and sat down in Henry’s favorite booth. He’d learned something by watching the Amish man, and had decided the straight-forward approach was probably the best tactic. It turned out that Clive was right.

There was a reason that, in one of the most renowned Amish counties in the country, one of the most respected Amish men lived on the edge of society. Henry Stolzfus lived as far west as one could go and not be in the river or out of the county. Clive decided he might have a friend and confidant in such a man.

“You know, the problem is, people came to love the bomb.” It was Red Beard talking. Long soliloquies and spoken-word performances had become just another way to pass the time. This conversation happened not long after the nuclear blasts took out Philly and New York. Red Beard was sitting with Calvin and filling the air with words, which was something he loved to do.

“I mean, it goes way back—even before that song about wearing your sunglasses at night. You remember that one? Probably not. Or the one that talks about the future being so bright you gotta wear shades?” He hummed the tune from the song, but it didn’t sound like much to Calvin.

“It became cool to love the bomb. The country suddenly became that guy from the What? Me Worry? generation. I don’t have to look at the military-industrial complex to see some bomb fetishization going on. It was all over the media, too. You can go back to Dr. Strangelove at least, but when it happened, it happened. The country fell in love with the bomb, either in an actual way, by wanting more and bigger ones or, ironically, by mocking more loudly and derisively. We loved it or we hated it, but either way we thought about it (that is what love is, after all), and in time we all accepted the bomb as a reality not to be questioned. That’s how we became fallout kids, all of us. Besides, what could we do about it, anyway?”

Calvin didn’t usually know exactly what Red Beard was saying, but the words passed the time, and sometimes the words were interesting. Not always, but sometimes. Calvin had come to think of Red Beard’s dissertations as extended poetry recitations that didn’t need to make sense to be art.

Red Beard was talking to Calvin while Clive, who had been napping in the corner, awoke and began shaking off the sleep. None of them had any idea what time of day it was at that instant. Time was irregularly kept by events, and not by machines making declarative statements about subjective concepts. In the morning, or thereabouts, they had breakfast. Then there was the time period known as “after breakfast.” There were other periods of the day known by names such as “dinner,” and “after dinner,” and “reading time.” People cleaned up behind a sheet hung in the corner.

Red Beard was talking and Clive was yawning and stretching when they all heard a knock at the door upstairs. Even from where they were in the bunker, they heard the vibrations of sound from the knocking coming from above them. Then there was a bloodcurdling scream. Someone had entered the farmhouse. The person up there had found their way to the trapdoor and now he was pleading for his life. They heard the banging of fists onto the outside shell of the steel door until the thud of the fists made them sound meaty in their return. There was no threat of violence in the pounding, only the sound of pleading. After a while, they made out the reason why.

The person pounding on the door had the voice of one who had come to know the bomb intimately—someone who had survived its blast close up. The person pounding on the door was a temporarysurvivor, one of those stumbling this way from the east, irradiated by a bomb that, Red Beard was convinced, the people had decided to love.

There was no love in the sound of the pounding.

Days later…

“Here is what happened in the city at that moment.” Now Clive was talking to Calvin. Calvin had been cleaning his tools, and he’d asked the older man about a nuclear blast.

“At the point of detonation—well, imagine that there was a dot on the map about the size of a dime. That dime marks the area where a large hole, three quarters of a mile across, opened up. The devastation within that circle would have been total. Zero survivability. Imagine 9-11, but instead of planes, they had nuclear bombs. Lower Manhattan? All of it vaporized.

“Out beyond that, compare it now with a circle about the size of a nickel—this circle is the blast radius. Anyone and anything in its path would have turned to flames. If there were any survivors, they would soon have had acute radiation poisoning. The person out there a while ago? The man knocking on the door trying to get in here? He would likely have poisoned us with toxic radiation if we’d opened the door. How he got here so fast has me concerned, but…” he let his thoughts trail off.

Calvin was starting to get the picture. They weren’t in the bunker to escape radioactive fallout. They’d pretty much determined that the fallout cloud had been pushed out to sea. Clive had them in the bunker to escape those who hadn’t avoided radioactive fallout. He was waiting for those who were irredeemably poisoned, to die off.

In other places, people didn’t need a bunker, or didn’t have one. Maybe they didn’t run into irradiated refugees, or maybe they had fallout suits and just shot strangers… or maybe they didn’t know any better, and got poisoned, and would die ten or twenty years hence from cancer.

“Okay, for the next radius, think of a circle about the size of a quarter or a one ounce gold coin. If you placed that coin on a map and looked at the concentric circles and the diagrams of all the blast patterns—that circle is the radius wherein the air is going to be highly toxic, and the soil is going to be spoiled. We’re outside that circle, or at least we hope we are. None of us really knows the megatonnage of the weapons that were used, so all of this is speculation, you know? And, we should be happy about that—that we’re outside the worst of the problems. Anyway, the fact that we were able to stand and see what we saw, and still get down here to safety in time… Well… We did okay.”

Clive flashed his best Sam Elliott smile. “The point is that if you were close enough to survive and you did, you had to keep going. You had to do what was necessary to do.”

“Yeah,” Calvin said. “It’s hard to imagine. I think I’ve always just thought of it as something that either happens or it doesn’t. A bomb going off, I mean. I either survive or I don’t.”

“Yes, Calvin, but in Dante’s deepest pit of hell, it is coldest winter,” Clive said. “It’s hard to imagine that, too, until you take a look around. Once the money has been accounted for, the imagination of man is the root of most evil.” He pointed at everyone in turn, and then tapped on his own chest. “They call that the ‘heart.’ Desperately wicked. Who can know it?” He nodded his head as if he knew it.

Clive motioned around them. Red Beard was talking with Veronica and Stephen was moaning in pain. The sound coming from Stephen sounded like the noise you’d make when mocking a pain, actually. Stephen was not really giving into it, or, not yet acknowledging it. In fact, it seemed that Stephen was indeed, mocking the pain. As if he could fight it back by mere force of will power.

“How’s he doing?” Clive asked Calvin.

“Veronica thinks he has tetanus,” Calvin said.

Clive winced. It was just a small movement, behind his eyes, but you could see it if you knew where to look.

It should be said here that most of the world has long operated under a misconception about tetanus. This misconception has, in many ways, been a purposeful deception, perpetrated by a few generations of salesmen who have grown very rich by convincing the world to have faith in vaccinations as an answer to every ancient bogeyman. As part of this deception, almost everyone in the world was propagandized into believing that the medical condition of tetanus comes from rusty metal. It does not. Tetanus comes from the production of a highly dangerous toxin produced by the introduction of the tetanus bacterium into the body.

The widespread belief that tetanus comes from rust was encouraged by people in the medical and pharmaceutical professions who wanted to sell tetanus vaccines to everyone in the world. The idea that tetanus is always resident on rusty nails and other rusty items is based loosely on the fact that most rusty items are found outside. Most tetanus cases, especially in earlier generations, happened on farms where animals defecated, and where the tetanus bacteria would often thrive in anaerobic environments (like the pits and deposits on a rusty nail) and in the dirt in areas frequented by animals. The rusty surface of a nail just happens to be a great place for the tetanus bacteria to hide, and when a puncture is made in the surface of the skin, the nail is a handy delivery device that can push the tetanus endospores deep into the wound. It should also be noted that the fatality rate of those who contract tetanus in a full-blown way, and who do not receive treatment, is about 50%. It’s a coin toss, if such a thing can be said without it seeming to be too callous.

Everyone doesn’t always have all of the information they need to properly treat a medical condition, especially in a situation where there has been a great—even worldwide—calamity, and when the only recourse is found in the colonized minds of technologically crippled people who have relied for too long on chemical drugs and high-tech treatments to maintain a semblance of health through brute force application of money and industry. In short, there are ways to treat someone being afflicted by the toxins produced by the tetanus bacteria. Keeping the wound extra clean; flushing it with clean and sterilized water or saline solution; soaking out the toxin with a drawing solution and with Epsom salts; flooding the body with natural substances that have anti-bacterial qualities; all of these treatments can help, and sometimes even cure, a patient afflicted with tetanus. Whether or not the people in a given radius have that knowledge is what makes the issue problematic.

Veronica stood at Stephen’s bed and looked down at him. A few hours ago (or was it yesterday?), he’d begun to complain of tightening in his jaw. Not long after that, the jaw had wrenched into uncontrolled spasms. That’s why they used to call it lockjaw. He almost bit his tongue off because the spasms were so violent and unexpected. Now the convulsions had begun in his feet and arms. She looked down and took his hands into her own. He’d been rubbing them frantically in his sleep. She thought of how, when he was just a boy, she’d held his hands in her own as she taught him to clean the paint from a paintbrush. Those hands were now writhing in grotesque shapes, held there as if frozen in ice, his back arching up and then out, waves of uncontrolled musculature rolling up into his shoulders.

Stephen’s face was frozen in pain. Veronica wanted to take the weight from him, but she could not. She felt the helplessness of a mother whose whole world is passing before her eyes. She felt her art slip away into the distance. She hung there over the precipice, over her child.

CHAPTER 42

Just south of Elizabethtown, Peter, Elsie, and Ace joined the few other travelers on the state highway heading southeast towards Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. Peter’s contact in the FMA had informed him that they would come upon a large militia checkpoint there, just below Mount Joy.

“They’re stopping most everybody from entering the heaviest Amish areas,” the man said. The way he said it made it sound as if that answered all that needed to be answered. “If you’re lucky, you’ll meet up with some other refugees heading into the same country; maybe get in with some party that has a legitimate claim to be allowed in.”

Peter liked the way the man didn’t stress the word legitimate. The tone of the statement suggested that there was social order enough there that one might find someone reasonable in charge to talk to. He didn’t know if luck had anything to do with it, but he was silently hoping that just such a scenario might avail itself.

The walk from Elizabethtown to Mount Joy passed uneventfully, and the three travelers spent most of the time in silence, as if they expected a mental onslaught to come upon them at any moment. Perhaps it was the weariness of the journey, or the expectation of still more walking that lay ahead that made them dull. Or, perhaps it was the fact that, as they walked, they were simultaneously scanning the horizon looking for armed bandits. Either way, all work and no play had done its work. The walk through the rural areas was drab and depressing.

By contrast, passing into Mount Joy on a major highway was a traumatic sensory experience when compared to their long practice of walking primarily through the countryside. The destruction of war was everywhere. Off the road to the north, as if they’d been dragged there to rot, piles of bodies laid decomposing in the sun. The decaying fleshy mess was covered with lime or sand, ostensibly to keep down the odor. The whitened bodies looked surreal, and therefore fake, as if they’d been crudely fabricated from picture books of someone else’s war.

The remains of fires from the night before, and the debris left behind by disorder and panic, were everywhere. Burned-out buildings lined the streets, and brick edifices were pockmarked with the telltale damage of bullets and bombs. In the streets, blackened cars with shattered windscreens and doors perforated by bullets lay helter-skelter. The shell casings of bullets were swept to the curb where they rested in tiny cylindrical ridges, remnants of stories that may never be told. The scene looked, well, imaginary. No one had collected the shell casings yet, but Peter knew that soon enough, someone would. The bodies could be left to rot, but the brass would be gathered because it had value.

There is a strange contradiction in the signatures of urban warfare that can be hard to describe. Since the area had actually been a city besieged in battle, it had the texture of a scene put together by moviemakers to resemble an urban battlefield. This made it harder to see the damage and blood and evidences of death as real. And it is precisely necessary to see these things rightly, because they are both real, and immediate. The revolution will not be televised, because the mechanical infrastructure of mass communication will lie in heaps on the ground when the revolution comes. So, when it happens, it is confusing and counter-intuitive. Most people will not have imagined it as it is. They haven’t had to, because some set designer has always done it for them. Camera angles and lighting choices have conspired to show them a part, and to present it as the whole. In reality, there was the stench of death coming from bodies covered by lime and sand. There was the weight of the guns in the backpack pulling heavily on exhausted shoulders. A million tiny and violent details assailed the senses. This was not a movie set. This was what Peter and Elsie and Ace were seeing and feeling.

Twice within just the first few blocks, our travelers saw men hanging by their necks from light poles. One hanged man, having reached the end of his rope, twisted slowly in the cool breeze, a look of surprise on his face. He never thought he’d end up like this. Pinned to his worn and soiled coat was a piece of cardboard with the wordLOOTER written on it.

Here and there, FMA soldiers stood in small groupings, smoking valuable cigarettes, huddled around trashcans burning with fires for warmth. Peter noticed that here, in contrast to the few other urban areas he’d seen during the journey, people looked him in the eye instead of at their own shoes. It seemed the Identify: Friend or Foe mechanism was at work among most of the survivors now. Indefinable factors and subtle indicators were tabulated quickly as eyes met in brief interludes that were unadorned with movie music or poetry.

When passing groups of men, Peter saw that the males usually looked first at Elsie. This had become a pattern, and he understood it completely. There was nothing nefarious or creepy in it, though he wondered what Elsie thought about the phenomenon. Peter understood it perfectly. He did the same thing whenever his group would pass men traveling with women. Peter would look at the women and children to see if they’d been abused or showed signs of duress. “It’s amazing what you can tell of a group’s story by seeing if the women are in bad condition,” he told Ace.

Ace thought of the fellow he had met once while on furlough. He thought of the blackened eye he saw on the guy’s girlfriend once and wondered if he would let that go today. “If women are traveling against their will,” Peter continued, “then there is something wrong.” He’d said the last word with finality, and then he’d looked at Elsie. She was healthy, bright-eyed, and strong. Peter and Ace were usually given a pass by the men who were sensitive to such things.

In Mount Joy, despite the frightening atmosphere and the collateral damage of war, a few businesses here and there were operating. Here, as elsewhere, organization was already beginning to bubble up in little corners as sharp-eyed opportunists, or strong men, or fast talkers, or, more likely, the best scroungers, were setting up shop. Passing by homes or storefronts, the travelers saw signs advertising goods or services to be had inside. Remarkable. Honest to goodness commerce. A city coming together.

Invariably, armed guards stood by doorways, and the suspicious eyes of entrepreneurs tried simultaneously to woo potential customers and threaten harm and death if they came too close too fast. One merchant had simply posted a sign out front that read Caveat Emptor.

There were other signs of business, hand-written on cardboard or pieces of wood, or spray-painted on blankets, or spelled out with charcoal upon the door. The signs advertised things as various as winter root vegetables (mostly turnips, carrots, and potatoes), home-brewed alcohol, AA batteries, and milled flour. Later, Peter would learn that Mount Joy was one of the areas on the periphery of Amish territory where businessmen were getting rich trading in produce, goods, and crafts made by the Amish, or salvaged from a world gone awry. But passing through Mount Joy, Peter didn’t know any of that. He’d just walked through the remnants of a nuclear war that made the stores in Mount Joy look like a walk along Park Avenue. He was from Warwick, after all, so he had to admit that what he was seeing right now was remarkable.

Winding their way through town, around abandoned busses and the charred remains of vehicles and men, Elsie noted that the very first signs of some kind of life were returning, like when the first blades of grass or crops poke through the melting snow in spring. They saw children playing in a yard fenced by wrought iron and reinforced by sandbags. A street peddler strolled by with a cart loaded with broccoli, chard, and cauliflower for sale. A guard with an MP-5 machine pistol strolling along behind the cart was the only clue that the peddler was concerned about bandits.

Peter stopped and pointed in amazement at a restaurant that seemed to be open and operating, and he looked at Ace and Elsie in turn to see what they thought of such a thing. The restaurant was in an enormous brick building at the end of a small side block. They could hear it before they could see it because it buzzed with activity. When they did see it, they noticed that it had the faintest remnants of hand-painted signs on the brick edifice indicating that the building had once housed a brewery. It was hard to say for certain, because the sign was flaking off. Little bullet pockmarks punctuated the side of the building, hinting at another story that might never be told.

Ace smiled and nodded his head. Elsie’s eyes brightened at the thought of a real meal seated at a real table using real utensils. Peter wept. It was only a brief tear that never crested or ran down his face. He covered it quickly by catching the thought in his throat and choking it down, but the thought had most certainly been there. It was something in the light that glowed along the edges of the building’s lines, or the sound of what seemed to be music and dining inside. Whatever the case, he felt the tear rise up in him. He used to take his lovely wife to a place just such as this, back in that old life in Warwick. This place reminded him so much of that. Then he thought of Vasily, his friend. How much he’d love to be walking here with Vasily!

The guards in front of the old brew house looked them up and down but did not search them or demand that they surrender their weapons or gear. That was a good thing, because the travelers were not going to patronize any business that wanted them to be disarmed in order to trade there. The guards waved them in and went back to looking up and down the street for trouble.

Inside the restaurant, a palpable sense of having passed into a fantastical dreamland state immediately overtook them. Except for the fact that everyone in the restaurant was heavily armed, and looked as if they hadn’t showered in months, the restaurant itself seemed to be completely unfazed by the drama that was going on in the rest of the world. Candles and lanterns lighted the place, and the delectable smells of Italian cuisine wafted outward from the kitchen. Waiters and waitresses, dressed in aprons, swirled in and through the crowds with trays of drinks (with ice!) and plates heaped with delicious dishes. Luscious green salads, lasagna, spaghetti with meatballs, chicken alfredo, and other sumptuous delicacies steamed past Ace, Peter, and Elsie as they stood and watched with their mouths open and watering.

A maître d’ of sorts met them after a moment and showed them to a table covered in a red tablecloth with white cloth napkins. He took their drink orders and smiled when they all ordered Cokes with ice. Before he could walk away, Peter stopped him and asked him what form of money the establishment accepted for the meals.

“Silver coins are preferred, sir,” the man replied. “We also take gold or anything else of value, but if it isn’t gold or silver coin, you’ll need to talk to the owner before you order. I’ll get your Cokes though. Should I send the owner over?”

“Yes, sir. Please do,” Peter said, nodding his head.

When the maître d’ walked away, Ace looked at Peter and smiled again. This was the sniper’s third smile in a single day, a new record. “If I’m dreaming, donot wake me up!” Ace said. He ran his hands through his hair and felt the rough callouses of his palm scratch the leathery shell of his face.

“I get your point, Ace, but you aren’t dreaming.”

Peter looked at Elsie; her eyes were bright as the waitress returned with their cokes and sat the small platter down on the table, methodically moving each coke from the platter to the table. The ice clinked in the glasses as the drinks settled, and the gas bubbles fizzled in response. Peter looked at the coke, and then at Ace, and continued, “… unless, that is, we’re all sharing the same dream.”

“Oh my goodness,” Elsie exclaimed. “Cokes, with ice? Parmesan chicken with wine sauce? Where in the world are we?”

“Apparently, the owner here has worked out some kind of deal with the two opposing armies, and I’ll wager he’s being supplied by the Amish somehow, probably via a whole system of underground traders. Commerce is the only creature that will outlive cockroaches and will still be thriving at the end of the world.”

“Apparently!” Elsie said.

A tall, dark man with slicked-back hair approached the table and nodded to everyone before speaking. “Paul tells me you might need to work out payment?”

“Yes, sir,” Peter replied, looking the man in the eye. “We have gold, and quite a bit of it, but it’s not in coin.”

“Almost never is,” the tall man replied. “What else have you got?”

“That we’re willing to part with? Not much else.”

“What else you gonna need?”

“Alcohol, if you got it. No dangerous, homemade white lightning or watered down swill, but Vodka or Scotch if it’s available. Still in the bottle. Preferably with the original seals intact.”

The man laughed. “You don’t ask for much, do you? You do know that the world ended, and no one is importing Stolichnaya or Glenfiddich anymore?”

“We could also use vitamins if you have any, a sharpening stone, gun oil, and a gun cleaning kit if you think you might give up any of those items.”

“Vitamins? You’re on your own on that one. The rest of that I can do.”

“Okay, so how does this work?” Peter asked.

“Let me see the gold.”

Peter pulled out a small nylon ammo bag and unsnapped the top, opening it so the restaurateur could look inside. Ace made a show of moving his right hand into his lap, showing the business owner that he had a pistol and that he was willing to use it. Ace still had the Glock strapped to his leg, but he’d picked up a .357 revolver that he really liked, and he especially liked the impact it had on anyone who might be considering something evil. The tall man saw the motion and just smiled. He wasn’t worried in the slightest.

“Okay,” the tall man said, after looking through the gold in the bag, “Here is the way this works. No one else is taking gold that isn’t coinage right now. At least no one that actually has anything that you might want to buy. I’ll take this bulk gold off your hands and replace it with gold or silver coin—your choice. I take a ten-percent handling fee off the top, and the exchange rate is posted above the bar. If you know gold and silver, you’ll be able to tell if the stuff I’m giving you is good or mixed with junk metals. I don’t debase the coinage. It’s not good for business. I’ll tell you plainly that I’d be dead and gone if I was scamming people. I surely wouldn’t let strangers,” he pointed at Ace, “like your friend here, hold guns on me while I conned them,if that is what I was doing.”

“So you just take the gold? How does this happen? I mean, logistically how does this happen?” It was Elsie who asked this obvious question. She looked at Peter, “He could just walk away with our gold, right?”

The tall man looked at Peter and then at Elsie as if to reassure her. He then motioned to Peter. “You come with me. Bring the gold. My son Charlie there will come and sit here with your silent, but deadly friend.” He motioned to a boy in the corner.

“How do we know he’s your kid?” This time it was Ace. Again, the question was obvious. The father looked again at Elsie as if the answer was, too.

She looked at the boy, how he sat with his arms crossed and how there was an unspoken argument about this little charade that the father and son had been having. She thought of raising her own son. Then the idea hit her.

“You use your son as collateral?” Elsie asked with shock evident on her face.

“I find it engenders trust. If I try to cheat you or run off with your gold, kill Charlie. He’s my only child, though, so be sure. Don’t make a mistake.” He let that thought settle and then continued. “I’m not trying to cheat anyone here. I’m doing business, and I’m getting rich. I’m getting rich precisely because I don’t cheat people. I provide a valuable service.”

Peter had heard enough. He pushed back his chair and lumbered to his feet. “Okay, let’s do this.”

“Easy there,” the tall man said, putting both hands up in front of him. Peter sat back down. “I’ll send the waiter over with Charlie. Order your food first. Then, after you’ve ordered, come up to the bar with your bag and we’ll finish our transaction. If all goes well, your meal is on me. I’m not getting rich on the food and drinks. They merely add atmosphere to this, shall we say, mutually beneficial transaction.”

Peter nodded his thanks to the tall man. He leaned his back into the backrest and felt the strain of the muscles relax into the luxurious comfort of something as simple as… a chair. A few minutes later, a waiter came over. He was followed by a curly-headed boy who was obviously, by all rules of narrative logic, named Charlie.

Charlie looked to be about ten years old, and now he didn’t seem to be bothered at all that he was being used to expedite a monetary transaction.

The waiter smiled at the three diners and held his pencil and note pad up in front of him. “My name is Paul, and I’m going to be your waiter today. May I take your orders?”

Charlie pulled up a chair next to Ace and plopped down in it demonstrably. “My name is Charlie, and I’m going to be your hostage today!”

“I see you’ve done this before,” Peter said to Charlie while shaking his head.

“Only about a billion times a day,” Charlie said and folded his feet up underneath him on the chair.

“So it usually turns out alright?” Peter asked Charlie.

“Usually. But don’t try any funny business, mister. My Dad has seen it all.”

“I’ll bet he has.”

“Your order?” the waiter repeated with an insistent smile.

Peter ordered the chicken fettuccine alfredo with mushrooms and a garden salad. Ace ordered spaghetti with meatballs and an extra order of garlic bread. Elsie ordered lasagna with a salad and a piece of apple pie. The waiter wrote it all down, nodded his head at everyone at the table, and then disappeared into the kitchen with the order.

Peter got up from the table and took the bag of gold up to the bar. The entire transaction took place out in the open, and there was no attempt to hide what was going on, nor was there any sense that the transaction was out of the ordinary. The tall man went painstakingly through the bag. He carefully examined and tested each item, weighing it before telling Peter what he thought of it, it’s eventual meltdown weight, and what he could give Peter for it as part of a wholesale transaction. When he’d gone through the whole bag of gold items, he turned to Peter and asked him how he would like his payment.

“How do you suggest?” Peter asked.

“The gold I can give you in coin, buttons, or bars of different sizes. You’ve quite a bit of value here, so I recommend that you get half of the value in silver coinage, though. Pre-1965 dimes and quarters. That’s what people want now. Then get the other half any way you want. Fact is, not many people out there are able to take or exchange large pieces of gold. You did well to find me. Everyone doing business takes silver, and most people around here take .22 shells or buttons of real copper. Some people take metal wire, spools of thread, or straight nails for small items.”

“I’ll take it like you recommend,” Peter said, nodding his head. “Half in silver coinage, and the other half in gold coins of a quarter ounce or less.”

“Okay, it’s a done deal then.” The tall man went through the process of counting out the silver coins, and then the gold. When Peter nodded his approval, the man put the coins into two separate small pouches made from some kind of leather or skins, and then handed them over to Peter.

“Wait right here,” the tall man said to Peter. “I’ll get your other items.”

When the man returned, he placed a small plastic bottle of gun oil, and a cheap gun cleaning kit on the bar. Then he reached under the bar and pulled out a ceramic coffee mug and two bottles of cheap vodka. “I already charged you for these, so they’re yours.”

“What’s with the coffee mug?” Peter asked.

“You said you wanted a sharpening stone.”

Lightning fast, the tall man flipped the mug over while simultaneously, with his right hand, reaching into a sheath hidden beneath a white cloth he wore around his waist like a sash or cummerbund. He’d just started to withdraw a hunting knife, when—out of nowhere—Ace was almost magically standing next to the restaurant owner with the revolver pointed to the man’s head.

How Ace had moved so quickly across the restaurant with no one noticing him, Peter could not say. Instantly, though, there were a dozen other guns from all around the restaurant pointing at Ace and Peter.

The restaurant owner, for his part, cut his eyes towards Ace and smiled.

“Everyone calm down!” he said, as he slowly pulled a hunting knife from the sheath.

Ace cocked the pistol, showing no emotion or fear on his face.

“I said, calm down,” the man said.

He moved slowly and dragged the knife blade at an angle across the rough bottom edge of the coffee mug several times, turning the blade to do the same on the other side, showing Peter, without words, that this was an adequate way to sharpen a blade. He nodded his head slowly at Peter, and then returned the knife to the sheath. Ace de-cocked, and then holstered his pistol. He turned and walked back over to the table as if nothing had happened. Slowly, the other guns in the room all returned to rest as well, and the noise in the place returned to its previous level. The restaurateur smiled and then put out his hands as if to ask “is there anything else I can do for you?”

Peter looked at the tall man and thanked him, but before the man could leave, Peter asked him another question.

“How do I know that you don’t have hired bandits out there who will rob us now that they know we’re carrying gold and silver?”

The tall man smiled again, but it wasn’t a chilling or malevolent smile. The brief standoff hadn’t shaken him a bit. It was a knowing smile, as if he’d heard it all before and now he was just going through the motions of his day like he always did.

“You don’t. However, I will tell you this, if you get down the road and you conclude that I’ve cheated you in any way, feel free to come here and kill us all.”

“You seem quite confident that no one is actually going to do that,” Peter said.

“I’m a realist,” the tall man said.

Peter picked up the things he’d bought, and with full hands, he nodded his thanks to the man.

“By the way,” the man said, “my name is Nick. I don’t have time or the inclination to worry any more. The bombs cured me of my idealism.”

“I was going to ask you that,” Peter said. “Why is this place so special? Why isn’t it bombed out or burned like most of the rest of the buildings in town? Why aren’tyou being robbed when it’s obvious there is so much evil going on around here and in the rest of the world?”

“Well, sir—” Nick said.

“Peter,” Peter said.

“Well, Peter, those are a lot of good questions. We aren’t robbed here because I pay a lot for security; and I have more security than the average person would be likely to detect without looking for it and knowing what to look for. We aren’t bombed out and burned because I’ve made agreements with both sides in this current conflict, and they studiously avoid damaging my business. In exchange, I handle moving a lot of their plunder—for a fee of course. Morally, it might seem questionable. Practically, I do a lot of good for everyone involved, and I don’t harm anyone. Currently this little town is in the hands of the FMA, and to be honest I prefer it that way, but if things turn around again, the town will change hands and we’ll be under the control of the MNG. Granted, things are worse under the MNG, and fewer travelers like you are willing to pass through town when the MNG is in charge, but either way, my business goes on. So, whether the MNG or the FMA are in power, I will simply attempt to be my own man until someone runs out of money. Like I said, I’m not getting rich by selling food.”

“It seems dangerous to count on the caprices of war,” Peter said.

“Damned foolish. But you’ve been out there. What else should I do? Count on its niceties? Go hole up in a bunker somewhere?”

“I understand,” Peter answered. And he really did.

CHAPTER 43

It had been dark for hours. Cole was standing in the back of the meal line waiting to get supper when his new work friend Robert walked up behind him and grabbed a tray from the pile.

Robert snorted. “These trays can hardly be called clean,” he said aloud.

Cole looked over at Robert, then at his tray, and scraped some dried material of indeterminate origin from it. He shrugged at Robert, then shuffled his feet as he waited. Supper would undoubtedly be some disgusting and watered-down stew comprised of grains and other floating unknowables. Still, if you didn’t eat, you didn’t live very long. Cole and Robert waited patiently, feeling the gnawing in their bellies and wondering what their evening’s allotment of calories would consist of.

Robert leaned over to Cole and whispered into his ear, “My friend, you told me to find out whatever I can about your sister Natasha, right?”

“Yes. Yes I did.”

“Well, I have some bad news for you, Cole. My brother told me something about that power hungry sleazebag named Mike Baker, the guy you verbally grappled with in the yard today, you know him… kind of personally, right?”

Mikail. Cole winced. “I know him very well. Why? What’s going on?”

“I thought it seemed like maybe you two had a past,” Robert said. “Anyway, the word is that Mike has been protecting your sister since she’s been in the camp. No one’s allowed to touch her or do her any harm.”

“Yes,” Cole said, biting his lip and nodding almost imperceptibly. “I figured as much. Mike’s a complete reprobate, but he does seem to have a kind of nostalgia for his home town people. Weird, I suppose.” Cole pulled off his glasses with one hand and blew on the lenses one at a time before returning them to his face. “It’s a mystery to me why he’s protecting her, because he’s forced her to work as a dragger. It seems like cutting off one’s nose—or simply waiting till it falls off on its own accord—just to spite one’s face. Everyone says that being a dragger is a death sentence, but, so far, thank God, her sentence seems to remain an open question.”

“I don’t know,” Robert said, wiping his face with his sleeve. “I can’t say what he’s doing or why.” He looked around and then spoke again in a whisper. “I just know that my brother heard that Mike was going to have your sister brought to his office tonight. Apparently, he plans on having her for himself.”

Cole turned and stared into Robert’s eyes. He did not blink, and his countenance did not change. He refused to allow his face to betray the anger and fear that flared up inside of him. His throat constricted, forcing him to swallow hard before pushing out his words.

“You heard this from your brother?”

“Yeah. Not half an hour ago.”

“And who is your brother?” Cole asked.

“He’s a picker. He’s gotten in with some of the guards. That’s how he found out. They were talking about how beautiful your sister is, and one of the guards wondered aloud why someone hadn’t already claimed her. Most of the women have been claimed by someone or another—by a guard, or by a prisoner with power in the camp. Another guard told my brother the scoop. The word is that she belongs to Mike, and no one better touch her but him.”

Cole shook his head. His heart pounded and he was enraged, but he kept his emotions in check. Time to think and act, not react. He flexed his shoulders, trying his best not to show too much emotion. His thoughts, though, were rampaging. What is this world where humans are traded like fish and treated like dogs? He could not abide such a world. He thought of the world of his youth. What would Volkhov say of this practice, this trading of people like animals? Cole already knew the answer. Volkhov had sounded the alarms. Old Lev knew what men, deprived of their artificial world of laws and social structures, would turn into, and here was the evidence.

“This is supposed to happen tonight?”

“Tonight.”

“What time?”

“What does time mean here, Cole? I don’t know. My brother just said tonight, and it’s already late.”

Cole quietly placed his tray back in the stack, nodded at Robert, and then walked out of the dining tent and into the cold and dark of the Carbondale evening. Anyone who had met him on the way and tried to stop him or impede his progress would have received a beating so severe that it would have made that person wish he were dead rather than in Carbondale on that night.

Sergei Dimitrivich Tupolev stood in the dark and waited for the soldier to arrive. He kicked a small clump of snow, and, as he did, he thought of the time he’d spent in the camp. He thought of the events that had brought him here, and the adjustments he’d made to just keep going. Steve. He hated that name. He spit it out with contempt under his breath. A man does some things during times of crisis or emergency, which he normally would not do. Things not altogether honorable. Sergei had been tallying up the column of his crimes—sins he’d committed under the name of Steve. Since escaping from Warwick, he’d rationalized that Steve would do things that Sergei never would. But now, even Steve had found his limits. He’d always been a follower. He’d always let Mikail push him around. He’d done wrong things for what he thought at the time were right reasons. But now he’d had a belly full of it.

No more.

A few seconds later, he handed a roll consisting of all of his pay chits to the man in uniform. The two were in the dark shadow of the infirmary, not far from the dining tent. Their transaction was relatively safe here. No one went to the infirmary, and if they did, they didn’t live very long. The smell of death and disease in the air suggested that it was a place to go to die rather than a place to heal and get better. This provided an advantage, as there was little likelihood of this illegal transaction being interrupted by curious persons from within the medical tent.

“It’s not enough,” the man in uniform said.

“That’s what I figured,” Steve said. He reached into his coat and withdrew a napkin. He handed the man the folded napkin, then put his hands back in his pockets. Wrapped up in the napkin were four wedding rings and two gold necklaces.

“You stole these from the bodies!” The soldier said, emphasizing his point while still trying not to be heard.

“What?” Steve replied. “Are we obeying the law now? I got these in another, similar transaction to this one, and just as illegal. Are you really surprised at how this black market system works?”

“No,” the soldier said with a sly grin, “but… I could take these from you and walk away and there’d be nothing you could do about it. You couldn’t report it now, could you?”

“Well, that would make things problematic for you. I’m sure your commanding officers would be upset if they found out that you were selling weapons and other hardware out of the armory. They might ask what I was trying to buy with these misappropriated items.”

“Nobody would believe you,” the guard said. The look on his face told Steve that the guard wasn’t sure if he believed that. Steve decided that he didn’t.

“Mike Baker and I come from the same town in New York. Warwick, New York. You ever heard of it? You want to check that out?” Steve laughed. “I bet he’d vouch for me against you!”

The soldier stared at Steve awhile before finally handing over the package that he’d held at his side throughout their conversation. Steve opened the package and looked at what he’d just purchased.

“These better be good, buddy. If not, I’ll be in really bad shape, but I’ll make sure that you are in even worse shape…if they’re not good.”

“They’re good,” the soldier said. “Took them out of the crate not ten minutes ago and brought them directly here to you.”

“Alright then,” Steve said with a nod. He looked in the bag and counted the items.

“If you plan on using those things, make sure you stay away from tent 43. That’s my tent. My shift is over and I’m going straight there now.”

“I’ll stay away from tent 43.”

“What’re you gonna do with those things, anyway?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. I’m just using them for leverage. Chances are you’ll never hear about them again.”

“Whatever you’re doing, just leave me out of it, okay? I’m just trying to get by—just like everyone else.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Steve said. With that, he walked away, leaving the guard standing alone in darkness.

Natasha stood facing Mike who sat in his chair with his feet kicked up on his desk. The light from three kerosene lamps basked Mike’s office tent in an orange-yellow glow, and a small kerosene heater clicked rhythmically as it pumped out heat that made the tent comfortable and warm.

“So you want me to be your girlfriend? Are you serious? Are you kidding me, Mike? I detest you! What is wrong with you?” Natasha then broke into a long rant in Russian. She emphasized important points in her speech by pointing her finger in Mike’s face at the appropriate moments.

Mike just stared at her, unmoved by her outburst. “Just a bit of advice,” he said coldly—and in English, “I’d cool it with the Russian-speak, unless you want to start a riot in this place.” He paused and let her consider the truth of that. “Nobody—and I mean not one single person in this place—is a big fan of the Russians right now. You’d do well to try to remember that.”

“You are an idiot if you think I’d ever throw in with you,” Natasha said, now speaking in English with a perfect American accent.

Mike clasped his hands in front of himself, and brought them thoughtfully up to his chin. “It would get you off dragger duty, and probably even save your life. Surely you don’t detest me so much that you’d die to make a point?”

“Don’t be so surprised.”

“Well,” Mike said as he reached over on the desk, picked up a pencil, and rolled it slowly between his hands, “things are about to change around here, Natasha. I mean radically change.” He pulled his feet down off the desk one boot at a time, and then leaned forward in his chair to speak conspiratorially, “I’m taking over this place in the next twenty-four hours, Natasha. Maybe sooner.” Mike fidgeted with a folded paper that was sitting on the edge of his desk. The paper had rows and columns of numbers on it, and looked official. After a moment of silence, he looked up at Natasha to see whether she believed him. He could tell that she believed just enough to keep listening. “Now that you know that little piece of information, Natasha, you will either agree to my proposal, or…,” he paused for effect, “…your body will be in that picker pile for your friend Steve to drag tomorrow.”

“Why are you even asking me? People like you—people who would threaten to kill a girl because she won’t be his girlfriend—they usually just take what they want.”

“I’m not a rapist, Natasha.”

“So, you’ll kill me if I don’t become your girlfriend, but you’re not a rapist?”

“No. I’ll kill you because you know a secret that could harm me and damage our plans. Natasha, I am not going away. We are headed for a worldwide socialist revolution. I am going to see to it that I am at the head of that revolution. This is my reason for existing, Natasha. I only trust you with this secret because I would like you to be by my side.”

Mike looked at Natasha and smiled, before continuing. “Listen… we come from the same place. We have things in common. That’s all this is. It really is as simple as that. Let’s not make this into something it isn’t.”

“You are a piece of work, Mikail.” Natasha spit the words out in anger.

“I’m just trying to help both of us make the best of a bad situation. And, do not address me by that name. One slip like that could get us both killed.”

Natasha ignored Mike’s answer and pointed a finger in his face. “And what makes you think you can take over this place? You failed with your coup at Warwick.” She looked at him and saw that her words cut him. He swallowed before answering.

“I’ve learned a lot since we left Warwick. I won’t make the same mistakes again.”

Natasha paused. “But why? Why take over? You have a powerful job right now.” She let that hang in the air, not understanding why for some men no amount of power is ever enough. “You could help people, Mike! You could do good. These people need help, not another tyrant, so why feel like you need to seize power?”

“I’ve been biding my time,” Mike said, as if he hadn’t even heard her speaking. “I had expected that our friends in the new Red Army would be here by now. An invasion was planned to follow the EMP and the nuke attacks.” He ran his fingers through his short hair and exhaled deeply. “This has been planned for a very long time, Natasha.”

He stood up and walked around the desk, and as he did, Natasha walked to the far end of the desk to increase the distance between them. “Apparently, the invasion has either failed, or it never came off.” Mike waved his hand as if it were all water under the bridge now, and of no importance to his plans. “Whatever the case, we’re on our own here, and we need to act.”

“We?” Natasha snarled. “We? I’m not with you, Mike. I’m not with the Red Army.”

Mike paused for a moment and stared at Natasha through narrowed eyes. “You are Russian, Natasha, just like me,” he whispered.

Natasha looked away. Her mind flashed back to what seemed like only hours ago, when she’d insisted to Steve that she was Russian.

“I’m not Russian,” she whispered.

“Yes, you are, Natasha. Yes, you are.”

She shook her head, as if she were shaking off the remnants of an old life and an old identity. Strength boiled up in her blood, and hardness returned to her gaze. She clenched her jaw in finality. Onlyshe would define who and what she was. She spun around and fixed Mike in her angry glare.

“So what’re you going to do, Mike? Operate a death camp? Is that how you want history to remember you? As a Gulag Commander? That is very Russian of you!”

“No!” Mike said. “I’m going to liberate this so-called ‘death camp.’ That is how history will remember me. The Americans built this camp, just like they built the Charm School. I didn’t destroy our homes and loved ones with a drone attack. The Americans did that. The Americans killed Lang, Natasha, not me! Don’t you blame any of this on Russia!” he hissed. “This prison is being criminally mismanaged for the financial benefit of the one American man who is in charge. Hardly a proper socialistic set-up like the one I will soon implement. The commander is also wasting all of his resources in this fruitless war against the FMA. I have almost 100% of the Missouri National Guard officers supporting my takeover. Any officer that does not support me, will be taken care of pretty quickly. They do not know that I am Russian and, of course, I’ve had to offer them the world in exchange for their allegiance, but we’ll see how that all turns out when the time comes. Promises can be adjusted once power is consolidated.”

“How are you going to end the war, Mike?”

“Easy. I just won’t fight it any more. Once I am in power, I will negotiate a cease fire, and then I’ll withdraw our forces and let the FMA have this useless real estate.”

“Oh? And then where will you go?” Natasha put her hands on her hips in frustration. “Your plan is to take over the camp, then abandon it?” Natasha looked at Mike as if her objection was obvious. “That sounds like a brilliant plan.”

“You haven’t even heard the plan.” Mike said calmly, looking at Natasha with no discernible expression on his face.

“So tell me then,” Natasha said. “Where will you go? Where will you take all of us prisoners?”

“Settlers.”

“Prisoners!”

“I’ll be the senior commanding officer of the Missouri National Guard. I will assume the name of the man who currently runs the MNG. I will take his identity. Once that is done, we will go somewhere else. Maybe we’ll all go to Missouri. I’ve heard it’s nice there.”

Just then, Cole stomped into Mike’s tent and the wooden door slammed closed behind him. A smile crept across the bulldog’s face and his shoulders drew back in amusement. “Oh look, a hero!” he said with a laugh.

“Cole!” Natasha shouted.

“Natasha,” Cole said. He glared at Mike. “Time to come with me, sister.”

“Glad to,” Natasha replied, sneering at Mike as she moved behind Cole and towards the door.

The smile on Mike’s face grew, and he raised his hands above his waist with his palms out, as if to show that he’d committed no crime and that he intended no harm. “It’s funny,” Mike said, “that you two have a way of treating me like some kind of cartoon villain, when I’ve done nothing but protect you ever since Warwick.”

“Oh,” Cole said, his eyes half drooping as if he were bored. “We are so thankful for all you have done for us, Mikail Mikailivitch.” Sarcasm dripped from Cole’s lips as he spit out the words in a hard Russian accent. “We’ll remember you in our prayers every night. May all of Russia place you in the pantheon of national heroes! May your name be remembered alongside those of Stalin and Lenin, comrade Mikail!”

Mike sighed and his head dropped to register the undeserved abuse. “I should tell you both—” he said, shrugging his shoulders as if he had no other alternative, “—that if you leave this tent without reaching an agreement with me, neither of you will live until morning.”

“Yes,” Cole said, smiling, “you don’t sound a bit like a cartoon villain.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“We don’t need your help,” Natasha said.

Just as she said these words, the door flew open once again, and a cold icy breeze followed Steve into the tent.

“Great!” Mike said, “A Warwick reunion.”

Despite the placid look on his face, Steve brought into the tent with him an atmosphere of steadfast determination. The air was electric with tension as Steve quickly moved Cole and Natasha towards the door with his left hand.

None of them saw that in Steve’s right hand was a tire iron, gripped tightly and hidden up close to his right pants leg. None of them noticed the two lumps, one in each pocket of the pants he’d worn ever since the day that he, Mikail, Vladimir, and Kolya had first escaped into the tunnel that had brought them out of Warwick.

Steve ignored Mike and spoke directly to Cole and Natasha. “You two go directly to the tool shed at the southeast corner of the camp. Don’t run, but walk quickly. Wait there in the shadows until you hear my signal.”

“What will the signal be?” Cole asked.

“You’ll know it when you hear it,” Steve replied. Mike was moving toward him now, and Steve looked away from Cole and Natasha and fixed his eyes on Mike, arresting Mike’s movements for a moment. Both men froze and stared at one another.

“At some point, if all goes well, there will be a breach in the fence. That’s when you two need to make a break for it,” Steve said flatly.

Mike half-stepped toward Steve again before stopping. “Steve, your Chechen blood is rising up in you.”

At that, Steve turned fully to square up with Mike. “Shut up, Mikail.”

“I always said you could never trust anyone whose people came from Chechnya,” Mike said with a sneer on his face. He stepped defiantly towards Steve and this time Steve met him half way and swung the tire iron with all of his might. The iron struck Mike just behind his left ear, and the short, muscular man instantly dropped to the ground. A tiny trail of blood began to pour out from just above his right ear. He was unconscious.

Steve turned back to Cole and Natasha as if nothing at all had just happened. “Listen for the signal, and watch for a breach in the fence. When it happens, you go! Don’t try to take anyone with you.” Steve now looked directly at Cole. “Kolya, you made that mistake once before. You went back to the tunnel for your glasses and you got caught. Don’t make that mistake again. Once the fence is down, RUN!”

CHAPTER 44

“People have always thought that disease would end the world—some bug or some transmuted virus—and it will, eventually. At least that’s what I think. Disease will end the world. However, it won’t be like everyone has imagined. We will have to deal with things like tetanus again, and the rampant and deadly diseases of the middle ages will all return.” Red Beard said.

“Rats,” Clive said. He spat the word out and turned to look down the small hallway of the bunker.

“Ok, I want to clear up something right now, since we have time, and we’re just talking here,” Clive said. “Most folks have it wrong about the middle ages. Ignorance and disease killed many people, no doubt about it. But when you hear some historian talking about how industrialism and progress extended the length of human lives in our era, you need to really examine the fallacies in many of their arguments.” Clive looked over at Red Beard and smiled. “I’m not arguing with you, Pat, I’m just making a point, since we’re all just talking here.” Red Beard just nodded, encouraging Clive to continue. Clive did.

“High death rates in the Middle Ages were the product of a combination of about three things. One, the masses of people in Europe had moved to the cities. The cities were teeming with people, most of them trying to escape armies that had been crisscrossing Europe for a couple of hundred years, stealing crops and food and kidnapping young men to force them into military service. So the cities were packed full of people.” Clive shook his head and muttered, “It was a recipe for disaster.” He looked over at Pat to see if his friend was still tracking with him. Red Beard was.

“Two, the people in those cities were ignorant. Good information was kept from them. They were superstitious and oblivious to even the most basic understandings of cleanliness and hygiene. They threw their bodily wastes out of their windows and into the streets for heaven’s sake, and then drank from the rivers that the waste ran into!” Clive acted out this part of his story, and then ended by shaking his head and waving his hand as if something stunk in the bunker.

“This was all in the cities, mind you. Three, there was little to no knowledge of the part played by vermin in the carrying of disease. City people killed all the animals that preyed on vermin, and then the rats and such-like animals, multiplied out of hand in the cities. Just like today. People will kill a harmless snake in their yard because they’ve been trained to be afraid of snakes, even though humans are about a million times more likely to be killed by a disease that is carried by the snake’s natural food! That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with!” Clive threw his hands up into the air. “Have you ever heard a modern urbanite say, ‘the only good snake is a dead snake’? Well, those are the people who will destroy the world via disease!”

Clive looked at Calvin and Red Beard and realized that he’d raised his voice, and now he was shaking his finger. He put his hand down and started to laugh.

“I don’t mean to preach,” Clive said, “but it gets me hopping mad that cities and industrialism cause a problem, then they get credit for solving the problems they cause, even if they didn’t really solve the problems at all. They just postponed them for a century or two. Listen, an individual, or a family, or an extended family group living on the land unmolested in the year 600 would have the same life expectancy as people do now. The trick is to live unmolested. It’s a simple thing to grasp, really.

“Walled cities were not places—originally—where people lived. They were once called ‘citadels,’ and they were places where people went to get away from occasional violence, and also to worship. The citadels stored up food and supplies from the countryside, and eventually people stayed there to trade and do business because it was safer, and of course there were more people there. A lot of those people ended up staying, because it didn’t make sense to keep traveling when you could just live in or around the citadel. Once the people got used to the cities though, most of them figured they liked it better than having to work in the fields or forests for their food, so they eventually raised armies to go and plunder other areas, and to defend their own city. The cities became occupied military bases and home to mercenary armies. Rampaging armies have a way of causing… you guessed it… citadels in other places, which is the root cause of more armies, which cause cities. It’s a loop. Diseases and a high mortality rate are the result of cities and, of course, ignorance and violence, which are the result of the wickedness in the hearts of men.”

Clive stopped again and twisted his mustache between his thumb and forefinger. “Anyway, too many people have these simplistic conceptions about the middle-ages, and they therefore have mistaken ideas about cause and effect.” He had his hands in his pockets now, like a professor, and he paced back and forth as if he were lecturing to his students.

“Many people will make it through these critical days only to be killed by tetanus or cancer or hunger, or whatever.” Clive looked up and then he froze. He followed Red Beard and Calvin’s glances, and looked over his shoulder. He saw that Veronica was glaring at him, and he immediately recognized the insensitivity of his words. The three men all apologized in unison. “Sorry, ma’am.”

Clive looked at her and smiled underneath his mustache. “He’s a strong boy, Veronica. He’ll be all right.”

Veronica weakly returned his smile.

They all knew that Clive was lying.

After a while, Veronica came down the hallway and sat with them. How long had she been standing over her Stephen? What is time when your son is dying? She leaned her head against the cold of the concrete wall and sighed. She sat listening to her own breathing for a moment. The others were content to let her have the silence. Then she spoke. Heartbreak filled her voice.

“Youth and innocence die first in war. Don’t let anyone tell you differently,” she said.

Red Beard spoke first. “You’re right, Veronica. You are surely right.”

Veronica woke from a deep sleep and the feeling (was it imagined?) of cold air rushing across her face braced her. Something left her unsettled. She sat up and looked to her right. There was her sweet child. He was breathing heavily, and the sweat glistened from his head in beaded droplets. She bent down to brush his forehead with her hand, and he rolled his neck forward. She kissed his cheek and held the face that had looked up at her so many times. Now, his eyes were ablaze with fire and intensity. He was alive, but barely so.

Veronica didn’t see or hear anyone else. There was a light from down the hall, and she heard the whirring of someone cranking the lamp, and she called but no one answered. The noise of the dynamo stopped, and after what seemed to her to be only a few moments, she got up to look around, and there was no one to be found. She and Stephen were alone in the bunker. She grew frightened. Anxiety formed in the pit of her stomach and poured out from her towards some unknown point in the future, some obstacle she’d not yet encountered. She thought of the fact that the two of them were locked inside the earth, alone, following a nuclear attack.

She felt, for the first time in her life, like she was in prison. A lifetime ago she and Stephen had locked themselves in the nuclear bunker under the Brooklyn Bridge, but that had been an adventure. This was not an adventure. This was a long nightmare. One from which she could not wake.

Stephen’s body jerked violently and Veronica wrapped her arms around him and held on tight. His muscles bulged out of his neck, showing the tendons all the way to the shoulder blades and sockets. In an instant, he became all skeleton and sinew. His pelvis arched up and outward. His feet bent back until the bones seemed ready to snap. His fingers looked as if they would pop out of their sockets. Veronica held her son in her arms and whispered in his ear. She rocked him as she had done on those nights when he was just a baby, and as she’d done after they’d learned about his father’s death. She held him, swaying with him until the tension relaxed and his muscles released. This scene went on for a while, repeating its own little history as if it were an endless loop.

After a while, Veronica heard a bustling at the door of the bunker, and before she could get up to see what it was, Red Beard came hustling down the stairs. He was wearing a fallout suit. “Are you awake, Veronica?” He leaned his head into the doorway and got his answer. “Good. Sorry for not waking you earlier. We decided you needed some sleep. Come with me for a moment.” He motioned with his hand toward the door.

Veronica got up and began moving in that direction. She hesitated, looking back at her boy. What if? Then she followed. She didn’t even think to ask why.

“We decided that there were things that needed to be done—things that can’t wait any longer.” He didn’t explain what he meant, and she didn’t ask. He indicated with his hand to a fallout suit hanging on a hook by the door, and Veronica began putting the suit on without question. Red Beard continued talking while she did so.

“Clive mentioned that he knew someone, a man on the next farm over—the Amish farm.”

“Mr. Stolzfus?” Veronica asked. “Clive has talked to us about him before.”

Red Beard nodded. “Okay. Stolzfus’s old man used to serve as doctor to the whole community. The son, Henry, runs it now, and he learned a thing or two from his daddy, I’m sure. We have to take our doctoring where we can get it now.” He finished zipping up his own yellow suit. “Anyway, you don’t run a farm or build a barn or raise a roof or clear a field without a cut here and break there. You learn some field medicine by necessity when you’re a farmer. The man won’t be able to do much, Veronica, but perhaps he can ease the boy’s pain.” He motioned down the hallway toward Stephen. “We didn’t want to see him go on like this any longer.”

Pat half-way smiled at Veronica, and she was overcome with emotion. She looked at him standing there in his bright yellow suit, with his head of red hair exploding out over the top, his facial hair spilling onto his chest, and she wanted to hug him. At long last, she smiled. Red Beard smiled back. He wondered whether anyone alive had ever seen such a beautiful smile as hers.

“We’re saddling up some horses,” Red Beard said to Veronica. “Clive is going to ride over there with the boy in a little bit.”

Veronica looked back at him. “I’ll come, too.”

He frowned. “Oh ma’am, you can’t. It’s far too dangerous.”

Veronica waved him off. “Nonsense. I can and I will.”

Red Beard could see that it wouldn’t have made a difference to argue with her, so he didn’t. He turned on his heel and made a motion toward the door. “Okay, then. I’ll have Calvin saddle up another horse.” They walked out to the front steps of the house together and waited.

Clive’s RV was in the yard. The farm below them was spread out in beautiful rows, all white now and covered in snow that had fallen overnight. This is the way of Pennsylvania in winter. Snow lies on the ground for months, enriching the earth for spring. An imaginative watcher might imagine the scene in spring, rows of corn spread out in the field, lofty stalks pressing up into the lazy blue sky, with the white farmhouse and red barn in the foreground, and the rusty wheelbarrow, and the white and yellow chickens scratching about in the yard. The sun also rises over Amish country, and falls along the trees on the banks of the river rolling just on the western edge of the property. The creative mind could imagine the scene in its entire rural splendor—even now. Even with the smoke.

However, it was not spring. It was winter, and the fields were white, and the sky in the distance was heavy with smoke. Beauty enveloped in ugliness. On top of the strange looking RV blinked the only light that Veronica could see on the immediate horizon, save for the light of the sun and the sky, and the reflections off the water rolling by in the riverbanks. She stopped in her tracks.

On top of the odd-shaped RV was a small transmitter antenna, turning in a slow, robotic fashion to the north. From the lazy and unsteady movement, it was unclear whether the dish was turning by a motor, or whether it gained its motion by a manual, cranking action. The dish stopped for a moment, and the engine revved in the RV.

Clive Darling was on a phone call.

They placed the boy’s body, racked with pain, onto a stretcher and tied him down firmly with plastic wrap. They could not afford to have the boy jerk in a spasm and fall off either the stretcher or the horse. They would have to move quickly along the roads, though they didn’t have far to go. There was no telling what they would find once they got off Clive’s farm and headed down the river road. Veronica and Clive fixed the stretcher to a horse that was to going to be led along like a pack mule. As they tightened the straps and secured the litter, Veronica noticed that there were other packages tied underneath the stretcher. She noticed them but did not feel the need to ask what they were. She bent forward and awkwardly kissed her son and asked the horse that was carrying him to be careful with her “precious boy.”

Clive laughed, but in an affectionate way. His breath rose up in front of his face like a spirit when he did. “You think that animal understands you?”

Veronica stroked the end of the horse’s nose and dropped her head to look into its eye. “More than you know, Clive,” she said.

The two mounted the horses and pulled off across the snow. At the bottom of the hill, there was a little step-down onto the road. The road was covered by a patch of ice and one of the horses slipped for a moment, its hooves skidding outward, causing the saddle and its rider to slide backward and hang there precipitously for a moment. The horse caught itself, and, steady now, they continued on their way.

The traveling was uneventful. They saw no one on the road, and no dangers presented themselves. Still, the sound of this new world was eerie. There was the clop of the horses’ steel shoes on the slush of the pavement, the sound of plastic rubbing, and horses tossing their reins as Stephen tried to yell out, his jaw clenched in agony. These sounds echoed across the snow and rolled into the banks of the river. The riders were lost in the strangeness of it all, noticing the muted noises of the livestock and the sounds of an unexplained and undefined distant explosion. Everything seemed muffled, somehow.

As they rode, Veronica couldn’t help feeling as if someone were watching them—as if there were eyes peering at them from along the tree line by the river, or from the river itself, or from the ditch. It was as if the hills themselves had eyes. She rode in quiet awareness, watching to her right and northward along the river road. She reached to feel her pistol against her belt and a lightning bolt of understanding shot through her head. In all the excitement to get Stephen prepared, she’d forgotten to pack her pistol.

As they entered the road that led to the Stolzfus farm, they stopped. Clive made a little wave, and then the door to the farmhouse opened up, and Henry walked out into his yard. He made a little wave back, and the three then proceeded on horseback up into the barn, where the doors closed behind them. There was nothing particularly odd about it in the grand scheme of things. This was a friendly little neighborly exchange in Amish country, perhaps a visitation on a Sunday afternoon.

No, there was nothing extraordinary about the event taking place in front of Henry’s barn, except for the fact that everyone—the two riders on the horses, the boy strapped in the plastic on the other horse, and the man standing in the yard doing the waving, directing traffic—they were all wearing nuclear fallout gear.

CHAPTER 45

The explosion rocked the restaurant in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, just as Ace was wiping up the last of the delectable meat sauce with a piece of buttery garlic bread. Mortars began landing around the area of the restaurant, and Ace could see by a quick-snap look at the owner Nick’s face that this attack was not normal. It was something in his eyes. Nick held his smile for the rest of the crowd, but Ace saw the truth in his eyes. He wondered if the others had also.

In seconds, most of the diners had bolted out of the front door and gunfire rattled here and there in the streets outside. Peter jumped up and took Elsie by the arm, pulling her gently but firmly towards the bar, where Nick already stood taking an accounting of the potential danger. Bullets began popping through the front glass of the restaurant, and the three travelers had just crawled along the floor to where Nick stood, when an explosion destroyed a third of the restaurant’s seating area. The table where they’d just been sitting was not the dead center of the explosion, but it was close. They watched as the roof collapsed in upon itself, pouring dust and debris on the very plates off of which they’d been eating only seconds before. They looked up at Nick for some reaction, but he only flinched for an instant, and then he went back to assessing the room.

Ace could see bodies falling over as patrons tried to make it through the bottleneck at the front entrance to the restaurant. He tapped Peter on the leg and motioned that they should stay behind the bar along the railing. Bullets began pouring in through the restaurants opening. Someone is shooting into the crowd. The plate glass windows that stood on either side of the front door shattered and began to disappear.

Peter saw the small boy crouched behind the bar, and Elsie saw him too and went over to the boy. Peter settled in beside them and saw that Ace was straining to pull Nick down behind the edge of the bar, forcing him to take cover for his own life. Nick struggled against him, but eventually he, too, crouched down. He pursed his lips in anger as he considered what was becoming of his thriving business.

“Those MNG bastards!” he said, barely above a whisper.

“Where’s the back way out of this place?” Peter asked Nick.

“You don’t want to go outside right now. If they’ve decided to hit this place, then they’ll be coming from all sides.”

“What, then?” Peter asked.

“Down.” Nick started low crawling along the bar towards the door that led to the kitchen.

“Down?” Peter asked, following Nick and motioning for Elsie and Ace and the boy to stay close.

“Down to the catacombs,” Nick said without explanation.

Natasha and Cole walked quickly out of Mike’s tent heading towards the tool shed. Prisoners wandered here and there, but few people took any notice of the siblings as they moved purposefully towards their goal. A slushy brown-gray mist splashed upwards from their boots as they hustled, and when they arrived at the shed, they ducked into the shadows. They both leaned with their backs against the structure, their chests heaving from the exertion. The air was cold and brisk, and the darkness was almost complete. Here and there, the light coming from inside nearby tents cast long arrows of yellow-gold light onto the slush outside. The breeze howled through the fence in the distance and gave music to their deep and rhythmic, icy inhalations. Neither one of them thought about the possibility of there being cancerous dust or particles in the cold air that they greedily sucked into their lungs. In those moments when there are more immediate and tangible foes in the dark night, the more long-term enemies tend to disappear from the list of frights.

The immediate threat to Natasha and Cole was the guard tower on the southeast corner of the camp. Cole had just begun to wonder why Steve would have picked such a highly dangerous and heavily guarded area for their escape, when a tremendous, earth-shaking blast destroyed most of the upright supports that held up the tower. The structure collapsed in on itself as it fell, and then tumbled outward. A large section of the fence fell flat with a thud.

“Hand grenade,” Cole said, barely pushing out the words in his stunned surprise. Both he and Natasha were staring, dumbfounded at the destruction before them. Their ears rang slightly, but through the ringing, they could hear Steve’s voice from behind one of the nearest tents. It sounded muffled at first but then they could make it out.

“RUN!!”

There was gunfire in the distance, and Natasha pulled on his hand as she began sprinting towards the area where the fence had been destroyed by the falling tower. He felt his legs catch up, and before long, he was running with Natasha, hoping beyond hope that there were no guards with machine guns waiting for them at the fence line.

The two siblings had to slow down to climb through the wreckage of the tower, making certain not to drag a nail or sharp shard of metal across their legs from the broken fence, which had collapsed under the weight of the fallen tower. Cole arrived first, and he pulled Natasha over a particularly tricky section of debris. As she gained her footing, he looked up to assess the situation. He saw Steve standing between the two escaping Warwickians and a large unit of MNG troops, responding to the commotion, were gathering together not far from the collapsed tower. The soldiers, shocked and surprised by the sudden attack, were just beginning to check their weapons, and now they stood and gaped in foggy disbelief. Someone in charge started shouting orders, and the soldiers were in that moment—the milliseconds it takes to make a decision as to whether they should chase, or fire at the escapees.

It was the soldier on the far left who saw him first. A prisoner was standing defiantly between them and the destroyed tower with a hand grenade held up in his clenched fist. The pin had already been yanked away, and dangled pointedly from his lips.

One of the soldiers shouted, “Halt!”

Just as he did, Steve spit out the pin and ground it into the ground with the heel of his boot. He turned, locked eyes with Cole, and smiled. He made a motion with the hand that was not holding the grenade. “Run, Kolya! Run!”

Kolya Bazhanov stood and watched his high school friend grinning back at him. He watched as one soldier lost his cool and began firing, the bullets ripping into Sergei’s body. “Run!” Sergei yelled as the first shots hit him.

Cole ran.

Cole felt Natasha grabbing him by his elbow and pulling him, and he started to run again, but even as he ran, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the drama taking place behind him.

Steve, mortally wounded, dropped to his knees, and the group of Missouri National Guardsmen had started to move forward when the young man used the last of his dying strength to toss the hand grenade into the midst of them. The explosion that followed was terrifying in its intensity.

Now, Cole and Natasha were sprinting without hesitation, and they each unconsciously flinched as the deafening explosion echoed behind them. Their freedom had been bought with a price, and they did not intend to squander the benefit.

“Oh, my…” Natasha said as she ran.

Cole, for maybe the first time in his life, was speechless.

The sounds of battle intensified as Peter, Ace, and Elsie, along with the restaurant owner named Nick, and his son Charlie, low crawled deeper into the service areas of the besieged establishment.

“Follow me!” Nick shouted as he crawled. “Stay low and stick together!”

“Where exactly are we going?” Peter shouted back as bits of plaster and brick and other debris filled the air and dropped down on their heads. “The catacombs, you said?”

Nick reached a back wall and pulled himself up to his knees. The sounds of battle seemed closer now. The building shook with every impact, and the ground rumbled as Nick began struggling with a long, stainless steel shelving unit. The shelf was seven feet high and ten feet long. It was heavy, and made heavier because it was laden with canned goods and other barter-able materials. Nick, without assistance, was only barely able to move it, so he waved for Peter and Ace to come help him, and they crawled forward and began tugging on the shelf until it moved.

“This place used to be a brewery!” Nick shouted over the din of warfare and brutality going on around them.

“I know!” Peter yelled, trying to make himself heard over the constant shelling.

Nick and Peter gave the shelf one last shove, and then Nick pushed his way behind it. Reaching behind a wooden wall panel, he released a lever. The panel slid out of the way, and Peter saw that behind it was an antique door. Nick pulled the door open until there were maybe eight to ten inches of clearance, and then he jammed his ample frame through the gap, waving for Peter and the others to follow.

As everyone pushed in through the crack in the door, Nick squeezed back past them, and pulled the wooden door closed, leaving the group in darkness.

“There are huge, arched cellars under this place,” Nick said, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a Zippo lighter. He lit the lighter and held it up in front of his face. “We’d planned on making them into a restaurant called The Catacombs, but that was before the bombs dropped. They’ve been unused, except for storage, since the 60’s!”

He pushed his way back past the group again so that he could lead the way into the catacombs. “Follow me, and hold on close to the person in front of you! We’ve got about twenty steps, then a landing that doubles back, and then about twenty more steps to the door.”

Nick moved slowly towards the first step, hunched over with the Zippo in front of him so he could see. He found the stairs, and began to descend, with the rest of the group close behind him.

“So… what about the rest of your staff?” Peter asked.

“Most of ‘em took off when the shooting started,” Nick shrugged. “They were loyal, but only to a point.”

Nick reached the landing and turned to the left, searching with his foot for the next step down. “A few of ‘em got it when that mortar took out the area where you people were sitting. I didn’t see any more around, and none of ‘em know about this place… only me.”

His son cleared his throat. “Me and Charlie,” Nick corrected himself.

When the whole group had arrived at the bottom of the stairs, they could see by the illumination from Nick’s Zippo that there was a heavy iron door, rusted but very solid, leading into the catacombs. To Peter, the door looked like a movie prop, or the gateway into an ancient dungeon.

Nick produced a heavy, iron skeleton key on a leather strap, and opened the door with a solid push.

“Built in the middle 1800’s, the catacombs served as everything from wine cellar and beer-aging vault, to a hospital during the Civil War, to a speakeasy and casino during Prohibition.” Nick talked like a tour guide, chatty to take their minds off the rage of bullets that seemed to be pouring into the building over their heads. Once everyone was in the cellar, Nick pushed the solid door closed, and lowered a steel piece of I-Beam into a cradle that received the heavy bar and locked it into place. The barricade served as ‘insurance,’ Nick said, in case anyone ever managed to find a way to unlock the door.

The subterranean room they were in was cold and dusty, and there were antique wooden shelves laden with goods stretching from floor to ceiling. The shelves curved along their tops, matching the arched ceiling, and the whole of it gave Peter the mental image of a wine cellar in France, maybe back during the Hundred Years War.

The feeling of stepping back in time was shattered, though, when Nick walked over and pulled a tarp off what turned out to be a stainless steel box. Nick flicked a switch, and the box hummed to life with a mechanical whirr, which increased in speed and intensity, until the room filled with the sound.

“What are you doing?” Elsie asked.

Nick ignored her question. He only held up a finger and smiled. He continued his movements, and from under another shelf, he pulled out a device that looked like a World War 2 era battlefield phone. He plugged a cord into the humming stainless steel box, and then he cranked a lever on the phone.

Charlie, for his part, walked around the cellar and lit lanterns. Elsie turned and watched him as he did so. Ace helped the boy reach one lantern that was a little bit out of his reach. The orange-yellow glow lit up the room and gave it a warmth that matched its antiquity.

Ace, Peter, and Elsie watched Nick go through the strange series of motions, and then they glared at one another with a look of intense curiosity. Young Charlie watched the three visitors with unrestrained amusement and just smiled a knowing smile.

A minute or two passed, and the only sound was the whirr of the stainless steel box, and the breathing of the five inhabitants of the basement. Before long, though, Nick spoke into the phone.

“Clive? This is Nick over in Mount Joy. We’ve had a breech. The MNG have surrounded the place! Heck, they’ve probably taken the whole town. If you’re coming to save the day, now would be a really good time!”

As Cole and Natasha sprinted through the snow, the frozen ground and the darkness made their running treacherous.

Still, they ran, darting through the forest and through clearings without any real thought as to what direction they ought to run. Their goal was just to get away. Away meant ‘away from the Carbondale camp.’ Away was an idea to them, just as escaping from any imprisonment is always an idea. Their escape was no different from that of a man, not long ago, who’d left his Brooklyn apartment to seek freedom from the stranglehold of the city. Or, that of a woman and her son who’d trekked out of the city just to get away from the mayhem.

They ran to save their lives.

Natasha breathed deeply as she ran, and for a moment, she even forgot that Cole was with her. His own strenuous gasping, coming from behind her and to her right, faded for a moment as memories flooded over her. In her mind, she was back with Lang—who was really Vasily—and he was also the man she’d loved, and she was sprinting across the open clearing of Highway 17; sprinting for her life and to escape a world of lies. Tears welled up in her eyes now, and her thoughts tumbled together, and she thought of the other family members and friends that she’d lost. She thought of Sergei, giving his life for her. She thought of Peter and Elsie, and she hoped that maybe they were still alive. Where could they be? Somewhere out there in the darkness. She looked out into the rolling hills in front of her and the tree line to the right and ran toward that nothingness.

She ran as if she were running from her bitterest recollections, and running towards all the things she’d loved and lost. That thought brought her mind back around to Cole, the only family she had left. She turned to look at her brother, and that was when both of them stumbled through a particularly deep drift, tripping over something buried under it. Together, they tumbled headlong into the snow, crumbling like Olympic decathletes who’d failed only steps from the finish line.

Lying on their backs and looking up into the darkness, their chests heaved in unison as their eyes flashed around the night sky in a jumbled mishmash of terror, sadness, elation, and hope. They each greedily, and wordlessly, took in the cold, night air—the air of life—and neither of them was prepared when a dozen armed men were suddenly all around them with guns pointed into their surprised faces.

CHAPTER 46

Jay Watkins, former Sergeant in the Missouri National Guard, and now a Staff Sergeant in the Free Missouri Army, squatted down next to a large tree, leaning his back against it as he inhaled deeply from his cigarette. In the distance, there was sporadic gunfire coming from the direction of Carbondale.

“You two may have made it out of there just in time,” Watkins said.

“Time?” Cole mumbled, shuffling his boots in the snow. The rest of his sentence was a mumble.

“What was that?”

“Time is the father of truth,” Cole replied. He glanced up at the soldier, pulled off his glasses, and cleaned them on the filthy sleeve of his coat. He placed the glasses back on his face and snorted in disgust.

“That was Rabelais,” Cole said, matter-of-factly.

“Well, ain’t that a load of crap!” Watkins said. “And that was Jay Watkins, Staff Sergeant!”

“Time will tell,” Cole replied. “That’s all I can come up with right now. I suppose I could snort again if you’d like.” He straightened his back and looked at Jay Watkins.

Watkins laughed. The laugh was slow at first, but it grew in an increasing way, until the only way to describe the sound would be guffaws. Jay Watkins had large heaps of laughter pouring out him, coming from deep in his gut, and his whole body shook.

Cole laughed too, until he looked over at Natasha, and her face—frozen in anger, or maybe it was pain—put an end to the mirth.

Watkins took the last draw from his cigarette and threw the butt down into the snow. “As I was saying, it looks like you two made it out just in time. A dozen more made it out after you, but they got cut down by automatic fire in the clearing. You two beat the rush by a minute or two.”

“How do you know all this?” Natasha asked. Her hands were shaking, and her jaw was fixed and set.

“Our guys have been watching the prison for a week. We were in the final planning stages of an assault on the camp when you two blew the fence.”

“It wasn’t us,” Natasha said, looking down at her feet, before looking back up at Watkins. “It was a friend of ours.”

“He was a hero then.”

“He was.”

Watkins looked at the young lady and saw in her eyes that she really meant it. He was touched by such an old-fashioned notion. He could see these two were not ordinary.

“Where are you two from?” Watkins asked.

“I don’t suppose it matters anymore,” Natasha said, “it only matters where we’re going, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“We need to catch up with some friends who are headed to Amish country.”

Watkins lit another cigarette, took a long drag from it, then blew the smoke upwards into the chilly night air. “Well, our attack is, at the very least, delayed now because of your escape.” He jerked his head in the direction of Carbondale. “They know we’re here. We might be stuck out here for another week.”

Cole reached his hand out to Watkins who just stared at him blankly, not knowing what Cole wanted.

“Gimme a smoke, Joe.”

“It’s Jay, friend.”

“It was a joke, Jay, geez! I’m Cole, and grumpy here is Natasha, so enough of the meet-n-greet and give me a smoke.”

Watkins laughed again and popped a cigarette out of the pack, reaching it over to Cole. “Help yourself, Cole. I like you,” he said, laughing heartily.

“Do you like Shakespeare?”

“He’s alright, I suppose.”

“Then I suppose we might get along.”

“What if I had said ‘no’?”

“I’d have left you here talking to her,” Cole said, cutting his eyes towards Natasha.

Jay Watkins caught his breath. She was beautiful, he thought. He was about to say something corny like, “Well, that wouldn’t be so bad,” but he didn’t get the chance. A quick glance at Natasha showed him the impatience of a sister who’d been listening to her brother charm others with kooky bravado, along with her amazement that, even here, in the midst of catastrophe, he was still doing it.

“No,” she said. “We’re not getting along here, because we’re not staying, Cole. We’ve got to try to catch Peter and Elsie.” She looked out into the darkness. “If they’re still alive.”

They heard a quick blast of staccato gunfire from automatic weapons in the distance, probably coming from the prison camp. Natasha wondered if people were being executed because of the prison break, but there was no way for her to know. Maybe Mikail was taking over the camp. She did not speak the words, however. She didn’t say a word about the camp.

In retrospect, long after this cold, dark night, sometime in the distant future, she would regret not telling someone about Mike’s plan to take over the camp. She’d regret that she was never properly debriefed by the FMA. Those were sketchy times, and a lot of things were not as they should have been.

She tugged at Cole’s sleeve.

“Whatever you say, Sis,” Cole said. He lit his cigarette and puffed on it happily; the low, red glow of the cherry illuminating his now much slimmer face in the darkness. The glow of the cigarette caught in his glasses and flickered, and he turned to stare out into the darkness, and took the smoke into his lungs.

Cole turned back to look at the people around him, and he saw that his sister was still shaky from the escape—anxious to hit the road. He wasn’t so anxious. He felt that it was good to be alive.

A soldier walked up to Watkins and nodded a greeting to Cole and Natasha, who nodded back at him in return. The two soldiers stepped a few paces into the forest to talk, and when they finished, the underling soldier hustled back off into the darkness.

“It looks like you two may be in luck,” Watkins said.

“How’s that?” Natasha asked.

“We’ve been called off of this duty for the moment. It seems there’s a full-fledged assault going on in the Mount Joy area. We’ve got wagons and horses, but it’ll still take us a day and a half to get there. The MNG is trying to push us out of our territory.”

“Or draw you away from here,” Cole said. Natasha looked at him, as if to see if he knew anything. He didn’t.

Watkins pulled the last cigarette out of the pack, balled up the empty wrapper, and stuck it into his pocket. He pulled a new pack out of his coat, opened it with practiced precision, and then offered another cigarette to Cole.

Cole turned down the cigarette with a wave of his hand.

“I don’t smoke.”

“But…”

“That one was to keep me from soiling my pants,” Cole said, smiling. “I’m okay now.”

Watkins laughed and shook his head. “You are a piece of work, Cole.”

“That’s what they say.” Cole smiled when he said it and Natasha watched him smile, and then she looked at Jay Watkins. He motioned toward the darkness.

“Well, we better push off. We have a long trip ahead of us. You two will be safe with us until we get to Mount Joy. I can’t tell you what things will be like when we get there, but you’ll be a step closer to Amish country.”

They walked through the snow and darkness until they reached a road where the FMA unit was already packing up for the long haul south. Carts, buggies, wagons, and single mounts lined the road. A hundred soldiers on foot stood stamping in the cold, trying to defy hypothermia, anxious to get moving.

Natasha and Cole followed Watkins and climbed up into the back of an Amish buckboard wagon. When they’d each found their seats, Watkins pulled out a bottle of what looked to be Kentucky Bourbon, and passed it around to everyone in turn. When the bottle got to Cole, the young man grinned from ear to ear.

“Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.”

He took a long swig and then wiped his mouth on his coat before handing the bottle to Natasha, who passed it on without drinking.

Cole smiled to Watkins and winked, and then looked over at Natasha, who was glaring at him.

“That’s from The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Cole said with a straight face.

“I don’t care, Cole,” Natasha replied with her brows furled in mock anger. She stared at Cole for a moment before her own face broke into a smile. She leaned conspiratorially towards the others in the wagon and said, “My brother can get a little obnoxious with the Shakespeare.”

“Okay, then,” Cole said, “if I have your permission.” Then he reached over and slapped his sister playfully on her knee. “Let us every one go home, and laugh this sport o’er by a country fire.”

“Indeed,” said Jay Watkins, and with that, he turned his horses toward the south and gave a solemn nod towards the moon in the eastern sky.

Six hours after Nick had placed his emergency call to Clive Darling, the five people in the catacombs under the restaurant in Mount Joy heard a commotion the likes of which they’d never heard before. They’d been sitting around and talking about the war, and the things they’d seen since the crash had started when what sounded like World War 3 erupted above their heads, and some of the concussions caused bits of mortar and stone to fall down into the cellar.

Nick stared at the ceiling in awe. “It would seem that the battle is joined.”

“Ain’t no party like an MNG party,” Ace said.

“What are the chances this cellar collapses on us?” Elsie asked. There was worry in her voice, and she didn’t try to hide it.

“This cellar has been here since before the Civil War,” Nick said. “It’ll shake, rattle, and roll, but I’m certain we’ll be alright.”

“I’m fine down here!” The roar of mortars increased, and little Charlie had to yell to make his point.

“We’d definitely rather be down here than up there,” Peter said, pointing upwards. The sounds from upside responded to Peter’s statement as if to emphasize his point. The violence being unleashed on Nick’s restaurant was frightening, and awe-inspiring. “I’m not sure a housefly could live through what’s going on up there!” Peter shouted over the noise.

The assault was relentless, and Peter began to worry that—even if the cellar didn’t collapse—the damage and debris might take months to clear away, even if someone did know that the party was down in the cellar… which they did not. How are we going to get out of here? he thought.

What followed, for another twenty-four hours, was a nerve-rending mind siege. The war raged fervently in Mount Joy, and the people in the cellar thought that at any minute, the ceiling was going to come tumbling down on top of them.

The ceiling held, and after a particularly frightening barrage of mortar fire—at a moment in time that became crystalline in their consciousness—everything went eerily silent.

The silence reigned for about twenty minutes, and no one in the cellar spoke a word. Each person just sat stoically, eyes rolled upwards, staring at the ceiling, waiting for another shell to drop, or mortar to shake the earth.

Then there was a sound.

There was a rattling over near the door, and Nick jumped up and darted in that direction. He started pulling some baskets of clothing and cardboard boxes out of the way, and after he did, Elsie, Ace, and Peter could see that a copper pipe, about four inches in diameter, extended down through the ceiling. At about two feet above the ground, the pipe flared open at its bottom.

Nick looked over his shoulder and winked at the travelers. “If I were a careful man, this contraption would be the mechanism I’d use to stash the gold and silver and precious stones, you know, just in case we ever got robbed! The gold you paid me is down in this basket here. I would always drop the goods down the pipe after every transaction.”

Now, the travelers watched as a single, folded piece of paper tumbled down the pipe and into Nick’s hands. He opened the note and read it, and when he was done he squealed and shouted with delight.

“Woohoo!” Nick yelled. He hugged Charlie, who had a huge smile on his face. “Let me read it to you!” He held the letter near one of the lanterns and read aloud, with obvious glee:

CHAPTER 47

Mike stood in the open field next to the burn pit in the Carbondale Resettlement Camp. The corpses of the former camp commander and his closest officers lay in a tight line, face down in the snow. Mike stared at the bodies, and then slowly turned to look at the soldiers who were awaiting his next command.

His head hurt, and there was a terrible lump behind his ear. He scratched the back of his head and thought of the blow that Sergei had given him, but he did not wince. He steadfastly refused to show any weakness in front of the men.

He looked up and down the assembled line of soldiers, and he nodded his head. He could see on their faces that they fully accepted him as their leader and commander. Good, he thought.

“I want the man brought to me who was in charge of the armory! Bring him to me right now!” Mike commanded. He stood with his shoulders hunched and his jaw clenched. It was slight, but if you knew the man intimately, you would know it. Fortunately, none of the assembled crowd knew him intimately. At least, not yet.

Three soldiers dragged another soldier forward until the man was standing in front of Mike. Mike looked the man up and down with disgust.

“Did you give that prisoner two of my hand-grenades?”

The soldier looked down at his feet. In his mind, he went through a quick analysis of whether or not it would be good to lie to the new commander. He didn’t want to be given permanent kitchen duty, or get sent to the brig, but he also didn’t want to start out his time with the new commanding officer as a known liar. The soldier straightened his back. He’d made up his mind. He decided to tell the truth. He could deal with a couple of weeks of kitchen duty, or even substantial time in the brig, but he wanted the rest of the men to know him as a man who owned up to his mistakes. He looked Mike in the eye and nodded his head.

“I did.”

“You sold two of my hand-grenades to a prisoner, who then used them to kill my men and destroy my property?”

“I did, sir.” It sounded worse to him, the way Mike said it.

Mike pursed his lips, but nodded his head. He began to walk slowly around the soldier, and everyone waited—wondering what punishment the new commander would mete out on the wrongdoer.

“I appreciate you being honest,” Mike said.

He pulled out his side arm and shot the soldier through the head.

The body slumped to the ground and Mike waved for some of the men to drag the body onto the pile with the others.

He turned to the crowd gathered nearby and told them that honesty was a good policy—that it was like a good deed done to your neighbor.

The soldiers busied themselves around his feet, clearing the body and taking the time to rake the ground so that even any traces of the soldier’s blood were removed. The blood served as a reminder to the crowd that good deeds like that would not go unpunished.

Stephen was dead. Her little boy. From the time he was old enough to toddle, she’d called him “Little Man.” At the end, Veronica looked down into his face, and he looked up into hers. She was reminded that the act of looking into one another’s faces, was something that had happened every single day of his life at some point. For Veronica, there had always been a spark in the Little Man’s face unlike that in any other face she’d ever seen.

Now, as she looked into that face, she did not see any spark of life left. His body, carefully and lovingly strapped to the bed with long strips torn from Amish sheets, was finally motionless and at peace. The only remnants of the struggle that Stephen had faced in passing on were recorded in the sheets; in the wrinkled ridges where his body had convulsed involuntarily.

There was a creak in the floorboards as someone shifted their feet. The thick ancient planks in the floor rubbed in place.

Henry Stolzfus and his family stood behind Veronica, as she looked down on her boy. For a time, everyone was motionless. The Stolzfus family waited patiently for the next stage in the process. Henry flicked his fingers against the edge of his pants. It was a casual motion, but studiously so, as though he was trying to scratch an itch but didn’t want to disturb the scene with so obvious a display. He and his family knew this process well, and none of it was new to them. They would allow time for the mother to grieve and say her goodbyes, and then the Amish women would take the body into the great room to wash and prepare it. They knew the process so well because most of them had performed it many times in their lives. For the Amish, death is a part of life. While it is always sad, it is not seen as extraordinary. Death applies universally, and it must be handled in a way that reinforces this concept to everyone—especially the children. As in life, there is an order to death, and for now, they just stood quietly and waited.

At the end of the bed, looking down at Stephen, Veronica was surprised that, along with her grief, she felt such an overwhelming feeling of relief. Strange, because she’d just watched the life drain out of her greatest love. She stood there and experienced it. Truly experienced it. As she did, she also experienced the unexpected, unspeakable, and contradictory gift of release. It was a brief moment, but it was unmistakable. She stood in the room, which was objectively beautiful in its simplicity, and she noticed the palette was blue and brown and white and tan. She noticed the cloth; from the imprinted sheets, to the layers of cloth hanging from the shoulders of these beautiful girls—these strong women. They waited and watched patiently.

Veronica stood there; her long black braids hung in a tied up knot of a rope that draped beautifully over her shoulder, and her dark skin stood in sharp contradistinction to the palette of the room… shockingly so.

To everyone else in the room, her face looked thoughtful, and beautiful, and restful, all at once. It had an angular simplicity. The face echoed in the face of the body on the bed— and both stood in sharp contrast against the paler, whiter faces of the Stolzfus family, and it was all part of the contrast that was impressed upon her mind.

In that moment, Veronica D’Arcy found peace.

A part of her left with Stephen. That’s the only way to say it. His body was lying on the bed in front of her, and she stood over him and let go of something. It was as if her art, her view of the world, her argument that simply by breathing in and out and viewing the world through the eyes of artful love that things must go well—all of that, simplywent. Her belief that looking at everything as merely art, and that this mindset would allow her to live satisfactorily in the world, flew away with her son.

That antiquated view had helped her when John died. Then, she still had Stephen to hold onto, to help her hold that focus. And of course back then, the world was still intact. Whenever she looked into her son’s face, she would see John, experiencing her husband anew in Stephen, seeing his habits coming alive in her son, his pleasures. But now, her art failed her. Or… it failed to be sufficient to sustain her. She looked down at Stephen and felt that part of her slip away. That view of life could work—it had worked—if and when an artificial system of life-support could be maintained for most of the world’s population. Absent that life-support system, life as only art, was insanity. It was dementia.

What she found instead, in its place, was reality. She experienced it with acceptance, and strength, and she found peace in it.

For Stephen’s sake, Veronica was glad that he’d gone on from this world.

Now, she looked down on her son, and in looking at him she did not analyze his color palette. She didn’t remark to herself about the intersecting lines of the sheets with the bed, or note how strange it was to see his musculature in harmony with the Amish severity of the place. Her normal artist’s eye was at rest. She looked at Stephen and she saw his father, and the life she’d once lived, and even though she was filled with love for her dead husband and son, she didn’t focus on any of that.

Instead, from somewhere (who knows where these things came from?), Veronica had a realization. It was as if she came to understand that a page had turned and that it was time to move on. She saw the whole of the page, and she recognized that Stephen’s death was a representation of what was going on everywhere in the world. She was not in a position at that moment to exhaustively understand the thought, and she could not give voice to everything that Stephen was in that moment, lying there dead in an Amish bed. Nevertheless, an outline of the understanding was there. Maybe Stephen represented naiveté. Maybe he stood for innocence. Maybe he was a symbol of Western, Industrial decadence. Whatever the case, his death represented a particular kind of ignorance; one that comes to be in a world that exists within a framework of artificial ease.

He was her boy, but he was the offspring of a life lived inauthentically. She’d tried to teach him to survive, but she’d started too late, and she’d never questioned the fundamental presuppositions of life and living. She’d tried to keep him by her own strength, only to find out that no one living has that power. No one can see all the filthy nails sticking out of all the hidden boards out there in the world.

She breathed in the air and felt relief, and peace, and the realness of the moment. She believed that it would lead to the next moment, and for now, that was enough.

She took a soft step backwards, and the Amish women took that motion as a signal. It was exactly that, a signal. The women moved past her and began their work, untying the boy from the bed. Veronica turned to Henry Stolzfus and nodded her head. The tears were flowing now, but not in an angry or violent way. She was not mad. The tears were marking her place, and she knew that when she stepped out of the room, she was going to be stepping fully into an entirely new world, a world where the veil of superficiality had been rent for her… for good.

Henry Stolzfus put an arm around Veronica and led her out of the bedroom.

She didn’t look back.

The Battle of Mount Joy had turned into a pivotal battle in the civil war that was now raging across Pennsylvania. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. For one thing, the detail itself seems positively necessary for the narrative arc of the story. All of the characters must meet up somewhere and events must occur someplace, and Mount Joy seems as good a place as any. It works from a topographical sense as well a historical one. It also works as a literary one. This will become clear as we go along but, for now, simply note that Mount Joy was special.

In this Civil War, the battle had become a high-water mark of sorts. It demarcated a particular line along a larger battlefield map. Some General, looking at a map of the area, might have searched with his finger, and put that finger on the map at a particular place where he could focus his resources in such a way that it would inflict maximum damage. That point was Mount Joy. It was central to the conflict.

It had a narrative arc all its own.

The collision of forces at Mount Joy was initiated by an intensive MNG offensive that was designed to push the FMA southward, across the Susquehanna River to York, and then, eventually, to push them out of Pennsylvania and into Maryland, and from there, into the South. That is a mind-bending amount of detail to take in.

The battle at hand was representative of a world gone mad with force, and unfolding events, in many ways, would mark the end of that world, at least for a time. During the peak of the battle, there was an uncountable torrent of bullets, and shells, and mayhem raining down on Mount Joy. Someone thought that this piece of real estate was important enough to destroy it utterly, but there was more to it. Much more. Even in the heat of battle, the observer must sometimes stop to smell the roses.

Anyone who has been paying attention, or anyone who knows anything of history or of literature, can appreciate the fact that there is a symbolic war going on between forces centered along the imaginary lines of a map demarcated by the invisible boundaries separating York and Lancaster Counties. One mustn’t be a Civil War buff to know that by taking out a pen and marking a trajectory that followed along the path of the extended conflict, the line would eventually pass into Gettysburg, and then dip into the topmost corner of Maryland. It was as if a wall was being constructed by the conflict, forming imaginary boundaries into real ones. As people chose sides, it seemed that they divided out about as they did in the last such conflict. Historically, this imagined line of conflict brings to the mind another high-water mark, in another great conflict that once raged across the land, echoing its ancient voice, seeking our attention.

But that is not all.

One would also not have to be a lover of Shakespeare to notice that the houses of York and Lancaster were at it again. One wouldn’t have to be a historian of the Middle Ages and know about the War of the Roses to appreciate the rich irony, and to stop here and smell the roses.

One might want to note that in that conflict, it did not come down to a question of whether human beings could be bought and sold. Rather, it came down to a question of whether one should wear a white rose or a red rose on one’s lapel. That conflict, the War of the Roses, was ancient even when the last Civil War pierced Pennsylvania. Sometimes, the root and fruit of conflict isn’t visible from ground level.

Clive Darling, using contacts and means known only to himself, called in substantial ‘neutral’ forces to fight on behalf of the FMA in their battle to keep the MNG from moving south. He didn’t want to do that. He liked to remain aloof—above the conflict—but that was not possible in this situation.

Clive had a vested interest in keeping the MNG away from the front door of Amish country, so he brought all of his power and resources to bear on the problem. It should be noted that he had substantial power and resources. It was also notable that he had a very close friend and business associate in Mount Joy. Saving his friend was the motivation that added further impetus for Clive to insert himself into the raging civil war.

One can imagine a world in which Clive wouldn’t have cared at all about what happened in Mount Joy and therefore wouldn’t have taken an interest in its outcome—but that was not this world. In this world, he did care, and he was interested. The reason Clive was interested was that he was fighting a fight that was older than the War of the Roses. He was fighting to save a friend. In his mind, there was something even biblical about it all. This explains why the battle was so brutal and violent. The MNG didn’t know that Clive’s forces were coming, so they attacked what they thought was an inferior force, with the thought of rooting them out of the town.

What the MNG did know, was as shocking as what they did not know, and contributed further to the ferocity of the battle.

They absolutely did know that there was going to be an… overturning… of their own leadership. They did know that the man who was going to be their new commander wanted the way cleared so that the MNG could march south, and then west. For these reasons, the field leadership of the MNG used everything they had—every tool that they could muster—to try to dig the FMA out of Mount Joy. They would have accomplished the task, too, if thousands of well-armed militia, commanded, pre-positioned, and equipped by Clive Darling, hadn’t shown up to save the FMA.

A young officer crouched down behind a burned out vehicle and wondered whether one of the bullets zippingbyhis head would end upinhis head in the next instant. Still, he had to work out the details of why he was here, and what he should do next. His new commander, the little bulldog of a man, had gotten right up in his face and made himself, and his demands, known. The new boss wanted the FMA pushed back. That wasn’t exactly how he’d said it. What he’d said—exactly—was,“I want this way cleared!”

Cleared. The bulldog that now controlled the MNG had made a motion with his hand over the map to indicate that no obstacles were to stop the progress of his army. Then he showed how he would march his army—his “settlers” he called them—south along the line he’d drawn through the territory. In order for this to happen, he needed to control the area.

Because the new commander had been so demonstrative in the way he’d swept his hand across the map, the field officers of the MNG used everything they had, every tool that they could muster. Nobody wanted to be the one who failed. The result was a battle of the ages, both symbolically and literally. The MNG was trying to dig the FMA out of Mount Joy, but the FMA, somehow, was holding their ground. The young officer heard the bullets zing by, and he experienced that singular thought that is so common to soldiers in war. The thought crystallized, and it terrified him more than the bullets did. He now doubted if the objective could be met. He wavered. The resistance, which was stronger than he’d anticipated, was starting to seem impregnable.

The man who was the new commander seemed to have an echo about him. It was as though he’d studied the old commander and was now imitating him. He had a way of studying men and exploiting their weaknesses, and now he saw a seam on a map that he could exploit in order to obtain safe passage for his settlement. His plan was visionary. He would simply leave the camp at Carbondale to his enemies, and march his contingent south, protected en route by his friends.

He sat on horseback upon the ridge, watched his army clearing the line in the distance, and enjoyed how beautiful his plan was. His enemy, hiding in the darkness, planning their assault, would come running into the Carbondale camp only to find it deserted, like Moscow left to Napoleon, or the Russian countryside left to the Nazis.

He would have successfully accomplished the task, too, if thousands of well-armed militia, commanded, pre-positioned, and equipped by Clive Darling, hadn’t shown up to save the FMA.

Clive Darling and Pat Maloney stood with Calvin Rhodes along another ridge, under a cover of trees, and bit into slices of apple. Clive cut the slices with his pocketknife and handed them to Calvin and Red Beard as they stood in the cold morning air. Not long before, Calvin had been walking along with the two men, asking questions about the operations that he could now see unfolding in front of him. Looking through Clive’s field glasses, Calvin could see that Clive’s army was moving methodically, street by street, commandeering the entire area with the use of a massive amount of force.

“I think it’s just about over,” Calvin said.

“Then we should head down there,” Clive replied.

“It’s strange,” Calvin said, lowering the binoculars. “I always thought of a war as a meeting of two belligerent opponents. However, here, if you don’t mind me saying so, Clive, your forces were more like a kind of a third party. Almost a disinterested party. You imposed an end to the battle between two combatants using overwhelming force.”

Clive and Red Beard and Calvin walked across the field toward Mount Joy, passing the time, eating apples.

“I don’t know, Clive.” It was Red Beard. “I’m just uncomfortable with the sheer amount of force, especially when it isn’t in self-defense. I mean, nature has forces that could blow up the world and end time. Stuff in space can crash into earth, and put an end to it all in an instant. Then there is all this,” he waved his hand in the air, “but there should be a balance in there somewhere.” Red Beard was showing his discomfort by shaking his head, and grimacing as they walked.

“Who gets to decide, Clive? Should money be able to impose its will, merely because it can afford to buy power? Isn’t that what all of the political parties were doing before the collapse? I mean, you can do this because you have money and you believe yourself to be good, right? Well, it seems to me that all power structures want to limit the power of others, and gather to themselves limitless power—and they think it is okay because they believe themselves to be benevolent. They think that they are good, and everyone else is evil. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greenies, whoever it is! They believe that their cause is right, so they should make rules for the rest of us. So, Clive, how are you different, if you think that money should be able to impose itself by purchasing force?”

Calvin had been only half following the conversation. He’d been looking at the sky, mostly. He suddenly snapped to, though, when he heard Clive lean into the conversation with an edge in his voice. It was a harsher tone than he’d heard the two men use with each other before. Clive laughed, a bit derisively. “You see that RV, Pat? Do you see Bernice there? That beast cost me twenty million dollars! But that isn’t the crazy part. You want to know what is the crazy part? I’ll tell you, pardner. I have one hundred of these around the country, and all around the world. I can turn off the power anywhere in the world, any time I want. So don’t tell me that money can’t buy power. It comes down to what you DO with that power.”

“I didn’t say that money couldn’t buy power. It can. That much is obvious. I asked if it should be able to,” Red Beard snapped back.

“I just used that power to stop a battle that would have raged for days or weeks and would have cost many more lives, Pat,” Clive said. “Personally, I don’t mind if these people fight. Really, I don’t. But I’m not going to let any of them, as they thrash out at one another, crush the only source of food and productive knowledge that any of us will have in the near future. I’m not imposing my will on people, except insofar as they are heedlessly endangering everyone else. Think of me as a referee.”

“I just said I don’t feel comfortable with arbitrary power. That’s all,” Red Beard said.

Clive didn’t respond.

Calvin bit into his apple and looked out across the field. He saw the RV roll forward down the street. Clive’s army was now moving efficiently toward what had once been the brewery at the end of the block, picking off any remaining opposition with impressive efficiency. It really was a thing of beauty, Calvin thought. He considered Clive and Red Beard’s argument for a moment, and decided that it was the willingness to use force that made it priceless… and morally questionable.

To Calvin, Clive and Red Beard’s whirlwind of activity over the last few weeks, started to make sense. For the first time he had an inkling as to what the cowboy and the leprechaun had been up to all this time. Even if now, with the fruit of their work made evident, they seemed to be disagreeing about the morality of it all.

The group that had weathered the battle down in the cellar emerged from the rubble of Nick’s restaurant with smiles on their faces. Clive’s men immediately went to work helping Nick and Ace haul the valuables. They removed bags of gold and silver, crates of barter-able goods—a veritable treasury—from the catacomb shelter that had saved five lives.

After the bounty from the basement was loaded into wagons, the group of five joined Clive, Red Beard, and Calvin as they exited the town of Mount Joy, walking the mile to the place where Clive’s heavily guarded RV was stationed.

The unified group talked as they moved across the fields, trudging through the snow towards Clive’s motorcade, and, as they talked, they caught up on the stories of their lives like old friends or new acquaintances would, like survivors would, with war stories and harrowing tales of terror and survival.

Peter and Red Beard talked as they walked. Calvin and Charlie paired off, with Elsie hovering just over their shoulders, having taken a motherly instinct toward both of the boys. Clive and Nick, old friends, carried on a conversation known only to themselves.

It was only Ace, along with the ever-present armed contingent that served to protect Clive, who was still watching for trouble. That is a critical fact to note.

No one among the group was ever in real danger. That should be noted too. Clive’s men were on the job, but they were just a tad slow in spotting two people who broke free from the tree lined rise just ahead, and began dashing towards the group.

The two were running, screaming, and waving their arms. They were two-hundred yards away when they emerged from the trees and began their mad dash, and it seemed that they might be running at a man who had just brought an entire town of opposing armies to its knees as easily as if he gone out for milk.

Ace moved automatically, and with no hesitation. In one smooth motion, he dropped his pack and the sniper rifle almost magically swung with his body, rising up into his ready hands. With clock-like precision, he popped up the scope covers, and brought the weapon up to the ready position. He dropped to one knee, and by this time, the whole militia contingent had seen the two strangers sprinting towards the group. They too began moving into position, raising their rifles and pistols towards the onrushing pair.

Ace looked through the scope and raised it until a face filled the lens. His eyes narrowed and he made a few slight adjustments in order to bring the face into clearer focus. That was when he saw her….

Natasha.

He moved the scope over a hair and spotted the other runner. That must be Natasha’s brother. The likeness was uncanny.

Cole.

What were they yelling? He could just make out their lips.

“Peter! Peter!”

“Hold fire! Hold fire!” Ace shouted.

The militia unit all reacted immediately, lowering their weapons and repeating the order to hold fire.

Peter and Elsie looked quizzically over at Ace, the unspoken question plain on their faces.

The sniper pointed at the two runners in the distance and smiled.

“Some friends of yours, I believe.”

CHAPTER 48

He was no longer Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov. He was no longer even Mike Baker. He’d now become someone else altogether different. He was being remade, reborn, yet again. He was now on the verge of becoming what he was meant to be. Like, for instance, in the Bible, when men of renown were placed into high office, and God Himself would give such men a new name. Mikail demanded that everyone else treat the affair with that kind of dignity, at the utmost level of seriousness. He had, in the past, been known by several names, but now, with his new office, he was adopting the name and rank that would be his for the rest of his life. He was seizing his birthright.

“Gentlemen! Welcome to the new world. That which has passed, is now behind us, and we are moving into the future together. I’ve spoken to each one of you, and you know what I have promised you. This force is about to rise up and we’re going to bring order to this chaos.”

He paused for a moment, choosing his words wisely, watching to see how each man responded to the words he chose.

“We have a lot of challenges ahead of us. We’re going to have hardships. But, this army is no longer going to be operating for the private benefit of one man!” He paused and looked at the crowd, “From now on, all of us are going to benefit! Everyone will share in everything!”

Mike walked slowly down the line of soldiers, looking each one of them individually in the eye before moving on. He stared into their souls and made contact with the part of them that actually hungered for order, and for recognition, and for improvement.

“A lot of things are going to change, gentlemen. We’re all going to change. In the midst of that change, though, there needs to be a continuation of sorts—a continuity with the authority that formed us and gave us being. Change. Continuity. Order.” He paused again for effect.

“To signify this concept, I am taking upon myself the name, rank, and authority of my predecessor.” He motioned toward a solider nearby, indicating the soldier should step forward. The soldier did, nervously.

“Soldier, do you know my name?”

The soldier nervously nodded that he did, unsure if that was what he was expected to do.

“I appreciate your honesty, soldier.”

He looked at the soldier and the soldier looked at him. He pulled his pistol out of his holster and asked, “What is my name, then?”

“General Amos Duplantis, sir!”

“Yes,” he said. He looked at the crowd of soldiers and they looked at him.

“My name is General Amos Duplantis. I will be known by no other name. To you, that is who I am.”

He gave the group one more scan, and then began walking back towards the command tent. After about four steps, he stopped, and turned back to the men.

“Does anyone have a problem with that?”

Maybe, down deep inside, some of them did have a problem with it. But the world had indeed changed. Power was now more fluid. Old habits would have to die hard. Maybe they didn’t like a twenty-something year old man taking authority, a name, and an office that didn’t rightly belong to him. But they also recognized that the old world may have been something of a meritocracy, however corrupt, but this new world? Not so much. If they wanted peace and an end to the war with the FMA and a portion of the spoils going forward, they were going to have to deal with the new situation as it was—not as they might have wished it to be.

The men all looked at the usual pile of bodies waiting near the burn pit. No one indicated in any discernible way that they had a problem with the name change.

“Dismissed!”

Back in the command tent, an officer named Rankin approached General Duplantis and saluted. Duplantis returned the salute, and the officer began his report.

“Okay, General, the team you wanted dispatched south from Mount Joy is on their way. I’m tasked with keeping you informed as information arrives about the mission. Their orders were to travel to the farm of one Clive Darling, a man who we are informed is giving aid and comfort, as well as material assistance, to the FMA. He was the one whose militia troops saved the day for the FMA at the Battle of Mount Joy. The team was ordered to dispatch Mr. Darling, gather intelligence, and then return to their unit which is currently just north of Mount Joy, regrouping after the… setback there.”

“How well can we keep informed of the progress of the mission?” Duplantis asked. He opened a cigar box on his desk, and pulled a cigar from it. He rolled the cigar between his thumb and forefinger, and then held it up under his nose. He inhaled deeply, taking the scent of tobacco and cedar into his nostrils.

“Our communications are fine between here and Mount Joy, but once the team is on the mission, they’ll be behind FMA lines, and it’ll be sketchy at best. We may not hear word until the team returns to their unit,” Rankin said.

Duplantis struck a wooden match on the desk and then held the flame up to the end of the cigar. He puffed several times, holding the match still, twisting the cigar in his hand so that the entire circumference was burning properly. He held the match until it burned out upon touching his fingers.

“If they return to their unit.”

“Yes, sir. If they return to their unit.”

“It will greatly aid in our extrication from Pennsylvania, if we can push the FMA out of Mount Joy, and eliminate the de-facto head of the independent militias in one fell swoop. If this Clive Darling is dead, we’ll sweep through Mount Joy next time like a knife through butter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep me apprised.”

“Yes, General!”

“Wow!” Natasha said, as she and the others piled into Clive’s RV. “What in the world is this thing?”

“Yes,” Cole said. “Quite impressive. I see that someone has been able to avoid the world’s current… difficulties… in style.”

Clive climbed over the console and into the driver’s seat. He turned to Cole and nodded his head. “We’ve managed to do alright, difficulties aside.”

“I applaud you for your foresight, sir.”

Clive laughed. “Napoleon said, ‘Forethought, we might have, undoubtedly, but not foresight.’”

A gleam twinkled in Cole’s eye. “Oh, so we’re quoting Napoleon are we? Well, sir, that’s just my game.”

It was shaping up to be that kind of ride. Natasha punched her brother in the arm. “Would you please shut up? Could the grownups talk for just a minute without you and your word gymnastics?” Cole turned away, trying to look offended. “Why, I am hurt, sister! Hurt, I say!” and they continued like this in their usual way, poking at one another. It was how they knew they were still alright.

The others, too, settled in. Elsie and Peter slid into the plush, leather seats and buckled the safety belts around themselves. Elsie pulled little Charlie down onto her lap, and pretended to tickle him. Due to all of the equipment in the RV, Ace, Nick, and Calvin had to stand up and hold on to cabinets as the RV rocked and rolled along the rural roads of southern Pennsylvania. Bernice was moving at a high speed so no one was doing much talking now.

Red Beard was in his customary co-pilot’s seat, and he stared blankly through the windshield as if his mind were calculating the ends of the universe. He’d greeted all of the newcomers warmly enough, but he didn’t say much as they traveled back to the farm. Clive could see that there was something still on Pat’s mind.

Two well-armed, black APCs escorted the RV from the front, and there were two more coming up behind. A large portion of Clive’s local force was still cleaning up at Mount Joy—handing things back to the FMA—and would join the folks in the RV back at the farm. They hoped (they told Clive) to only be an hour behind, but with the snow and the mess at Mount Joy, Clive was hoping that they wouldn’t be too delayed. He hated moving Bernice without overwhelming force protecting her. He’d made a pact with himself that he would never let the RV, or any of his proprietary equipment, fall into the hands of any enemy force. He had a fallback, if such a thing were ever to happen, but now was not the time to think of that. Clive felt sure that there was no active aggressor—at least no force that he knew about—capable of taking the RV in transit. However, once they returned to the farm, and the vehicle was stationary… well… he worried.

An hour later, when they pulled into the drive at Clive’s farm, the light was just beginning to fade to end the day. Driving up near the barn, Clive and Red Beard could see Veronica standing on the porch, looking out across the snowy fields of the farm. Her arms crossed over her chest, and she clutched herself in a way that communicated everything, and nothing.

Red Beard looked at Clive, and the cowboy pursed his lips and lowered his head.

“Stephen,” Red Beard said. He clenched his jaw. “Dang it! We should have been here, Clive.”

“We can’t be everywhere, Pat.”

“Well now, isn’t that convenient?” was all that Red Beard had to say to that.

It was just a moment, just an exchange at the end of a long day. Everyone else had already cleared out from the RV and they were gathering in the yard in front of the farmhouse to talk, and Clive and Red Beard lingered back for a moment, as if something must be said to clear the air.

“Now you listen to me.” Clive Darling shook his finger in the air. He had made his fist into a kind of ball and he was pointing out into the growing night. Pat Maloney was listening to him.

“I didn’t make the world,” Clive said, “but I am damned determined not to lose control of my own. I know you have your limits, Pat, and I have mine. I do.” He looked at Pat to see if he believed him, and with the look, there was an overlong pause.

The other man smiled, but shook his head a moment. He let Clive know by the way that he shook his head and smiled that that he did believe him, but that the limits they were speaking of were way beyond any he could contemplate for himself.

“You know, Clive,” Red Beard said, “I think maybe you had to live down there, down in that prison,” he paused, “like I did.” He paused again, as if to say perhaps you needed all those years of research, to know what that really means.

Red Beard took in a breath, and looked as if he were about to speak out of anger, but then he caught himself and exhaled. A face came to mind—the face of one particular young man he’d met in the city. No one knows why such memories occur in such moments, but they do, and this one did. Red Beard thought of the young man he’d met on the bridge. Clay was his name. He thought of the nice talk they’d had together. It had been such a pleasant time of conversation, but the look in that young man’s eyes… Red Beard shook his head. He recalled that Clay looked odd. So hurt, so defeated. He thought of the pain in the young man’s eyes, and he thought of the authorities and the expression of brute power that had put that hurt there, and he felt a tear rise up in his own eye.

“Clive, I’m not ready to use that kind of power.”

Clive was going to argue with him, but he looked at his friend at that moment, and thought that he looked like Tolstoy, or Rasputin, or both. He was just a mad monk—a good friend, but not one built to make decisions.

The two pals had just reached an uneasy peace, when the shots rang out.

The APCs opened fire into the tree line that ran along the river’s edge. The single rifle shot that had felled Nick, seemed to have come from that direction. Elsie instinctively grasped hold of Charlie, who was pulling and fighting against her, trying to get to his father’s body. Peter shouldered his AR-15 and popped off two rounds for effect, hoping to keep any sniper’s head down as he pulled Elsie and Charlie towards the farmhouse.

Ace had started running as soon as he heard the first shot. He bolted towards the RV, deciding to use it as cover so that he could make his way behind the house. From there, he hoped to find some high ground so that he could use his rifle and bring some aggression to bear against the unseen enemy.

Running toward the RV, he spotted Clive and Red Beard, and he shouted for them to get down. When he reached the two older men, their only response to the gunfire had been to lean in to one another in a frightened bear hug. They were crouching down in surprise and fear, but they were certainly not under cover. Seeing this, Ace put the full weight of his body to use as he crushed into the two men, collapsing them to the ground.

Red Beard fell into the snowy gravel and he let out a howl—not out of pain—but out of sheer surprise.

“Wow!” he said. “Who is that firing at us?”

No one answered his question. Clive was now sliding backwards across the ground until his back rested against the RV.

“Thanks for the hit, Ace. We owe you one. I… I just froze."

“It happens,” Ace said.

“Why would anyone shoot Nick?” he asked. “It must have been a missed shot, or something.”

Ace checked his weapon and cycled a round into the chamber. He looked around the RV and fired a round in the direction of the tree line. By this time, there was fire coming in from at least three directions: from the tree line that ran along the river, from a cluster of trees and a high ridge just across the road to the west, and from the north—from an unseen sniper near the woodpile where Stephen had stepped on the nail.

“They didn’t miss,” Ace said.

“How do you know, son?” Clive said, spitting out the words.

“Because, I do this for a living. They don’t miss their first shot. That’s the shot they had all the time in the world to make.”

“Then why would they shoot Nick?” Clive shouted.

“From the age, size, build—I’m guessing that they thought he was you,” Ace said. He pulled his pistol and fired two more rounds into the thick trees along the ridge to the west.

Clive looked over at Red Beard, who was now pressing his body tightly against the black metal of the RV’s slick sides. Red Beard’s eyes were rolled up towards the sky, as if he were praying.

“You two get inside the RV and stay low,” Ace said. “If they came here to kill you, Clive, then it’s best that they think they got you.”

Clive reached up and pulled open the door to the RV. Rising to his feet, he pulled Red Beard up and hustled the man into the vehicle. The RV was armored, and the glass was bulletproof. Then Clive cursed, because if he’d been thinking, he could have gotten everyone into the vehicle. Too late now, he thought. They’ve all scattered.

Ace fired another shot towards the ridge, and then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He knew what a good sniper could do—even in a low-light situation like this one. Then he ran, sprinting as fast as he could towards the back of the farmhouse. Shots plunked into the snow and earth around him, but they were un-aimed shots, and desperate. The fire coming from the Armored Personnel Carriers was successful at keeping the attacking force busy.

Cole and Natasha made their way to the barn. Cole didn’t know if the barn was safe or not, but he figured it had to be safer than standing out in the open. When they got inside the barn, Natasha noticed several tractors, some with front loading buckets attached to them. She got Cole’s attention and pointed to them, and both of them dove behind the large buckets for safety.

Peter was able to get Elsie and Charlie up to the porch of the house, and Veronica held the door as Peter rushed them all inside.

“Come with me!” Veronica said, as she bolted into the drawing room. She rolled up the carpet, pulled up the flooring panel, and then yanked up the door that led down to the fallout bunker.

“Ah, man!” Elsie said, with disappointment. “I’m sick and tired of being underground!” Her protest was interrupted as bullets pierced the walls and windows, and Peter—not willing to discuss it—hustled them all down into the cellar. Veronica told Peter how to pull the floor back in place, and, when everyone was clear, Peter handed down his backpack to Elsie who took it from him, and then looked up to see that he was closing the door on the cellar.

Elsie looked at Peter and at last it occurred to her that Peter was not coming down into the bunker. “Peter!” she shouted, “you get down here!” It was more a plea than a command.

“I can’t, Elsie,” Peter replied. Veronica was standing at her shoulder. Peter continued closing the door, only slower now. “My friends are fighting out there. You know I have to go.”

Veronica put her hand on Elsie’s arm, as if to indicate that it would be foolish to argue with Peter, and also to remind her that there was a hailstorm of bullets pouring in through the windows upstairs. With that, Elsie smiled at Peter in a way that told him to be safe, and he closed the door. He pulled the flooring back over the bunker door and then rolled the carpet back to its place. He made sure it obscured the entire entry to the cellar.

Then he exited the drawing room and ran out the back door of the farmhouse, a bear of a man, facing a conflict he had only just begun to understand.

The standoff lasted most of the hour. There was one, brief attempt by the attackers to advance on the farm. It happened just after the APCs had stopped their fire in order to let the gun barrels cool. The opposing force took that opportunity to break cover and move towards the farmhouse.

The gloaming of early dusk was falling, and that made target acquisition harder, but Ace was able to pick off two of the attackers in short order from his perch near the roof at the back of the house. He was glad that there were no enemies to the east of the farm. Of course, they might try a flanking action, and if they did, he’d probably be taken out. Nevertheless, he needed to keep the enemy from advancing. He put their numbers at less than ten men. Now, even if the APCs and other offensive fire hadn’t hit any of the attackers so far, they should be down to eight or less.

Just then, the APCs opened up again, taking out three more members of the advancing force. One of the APCs began moving across the farm’s yard, heading towards the sniper who was somewhere out in the field towards Henry Stolzfus’s place. When the APC got in range, they lit up the woodpile, and the fire coming from that direction ceased forever.

The incoming fire slowed to a near stop after the failed advance, but it picked up again about ten minutes later. Ace was expecting another attack, and was readying himself and his weapon, when he saw to the north a column of military vehicles approaching.

“I sure hope that’s Clive’s men,” he said to himself under his breath.

Down in the bunker, Veronica tried to make her guests comfortable, but Charlie was beside himself in fear and anger, and it took everything the two women could do to calm the young boy down. Elsie was finally able to get the boy to lie down, and before long, he curled up on a blanket, sobbing into his arms. Elsie decided to give him some time, so she kissed the top of his head, and went to join Veronica.

Veronica sat at the same desk where the inhabitants of the farm had spent many a day and night, holding long vigils after the bombs dropped. She’d sat at this desk, standing her watch over the Geiger counter readout, making tick marks into Clive’s notebook, and sometimes crying—much like Charlie was crying—over the condition of her own son. Now, she was leaned back in the chair. Peter’s backpack was sitting on the desk, and she was touching it softly, her mind in another place, when Elsie walked in.

“I think he might eventually fall asleep,” Elsie said. “Crying takes a lot out of you. I lost my husband in an attack not unlike this one. What was it? Weeks ago?”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Elsie,” Veronica said. “My boy died only a few hours ago. Right next door.”

“Oh, my—,” Elsie said, and put her hand over her mouth.

“They’ll keep his body over there — the Amish will — in a cold room, until spring comes and we can bury him.”

Elsie’s face was frozen in shock.

Veronica raised her hand in gesture of peace. “It looks like all three of us down here have lost our families.”

With that, there was silence for the span of a few minutes. Neither of the two women knew what to say, but they both knew that everything that had happened—all of it—was unspeakable.

After a few more moments, Veronica looked at Elsie and smiled.

“I know this backpack,” she said.

Elsie blinked. “Really? Do you know Peter?”

“I don’t know Peter, but I know this pack.”

“That sounds… impossible,” Elsie said, shaking her head.

Veronica pushed the pack over to Elsie. She was still smiling.

“Oh, I’m not accusing Peter, or anyone else, of stealing it. A lot has happened since all of this began, and I don’t pretend to know what occurrences have led us all here. I’m just speaking factually. I know that pack.” She pushed a stray strand of hair out of her face.

“Do me a favor, Elsie, and unzip it. Unless something has changed, or someone repacked it, or… I don’t know… maybe I’m altogether wrong; anyway, there should be a blue box in there. Take it out and open it up.”

Elsie was sitting in stunned disbelief. She didn’t know what to think. She unzipped the bag and, sure enough, there was a small blue box inside the pack.

“What’s in it?” Elsie asked.

Veronica smiled. “When I gave it to Clay, the kind and wonderful man who originally owned that pack, it was just a meaningful gift—a symbol of what I thought he was looking for. Now—,” she stopped. She took a deep breath before continuing. “Now, I’m guessing that Clay is dead, and what’s in that box could very well save this new world of ours.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. You see, it’s a special variety of gourd corn. It’s a non-hybrid seed corn that grows well in almost any environment. It is disease resistant, and it resists crossing with hybridized and manufactured corn varieties. We’re going to need this, Elsie, to save the world.”

Elsie carefully opened the blue box, and in it, was a hefty packet of corn seeds. There was a note too.

“That’s you!” Elsie said.

“That’s me,” Veronica replied.

She smiled. She had found her Archimedean point.

“I wonder what happened to Clay?” Elsie asked.

“God knows.”

Elsie sat for a moment, looking at the corn. She glanced over, and through the door, she could see that Charlie, indeed, had fallen asleep.

Veronica noticed too, and she nodded at Elsie. “It sounds like it has either slowed, or stopped up there. I’m going to go up and check things out.”

“Do you think you should?” Elsie asked.

“I don’t know, Elsie, but I’m going to. Do you mind if I take Peter’s pack? If I find him, I’d just like to ask him if he knows what happened to my friend.”

Elsie didn’t mind. She’d lost friends, too.

Inside the RV, Clive and Red Beard were talking. The gunfire outside had slowed for a moment, and they were trying to decide if they should do something other than huddle inside the vehicle.

“We should go check on Veronica,” Red Beard said.

“You’re probably right. She just lost her boy, and now we’re in a gunfight. Wouldn’t hurt to go check on her.”

“Let’s go.”

The two men slowly opened the RV door. There was sporadic gunfire here and there, as the two friends crouched low next to the RV.

In the distance, they could see the lights of the militia contingent. Clive let out a happy yelp, and he slapped Red Beard on the back. “We’re saved!” he said.

“Well, let’s get to Veronica,” Pat said. “There’s Peter, coming around the house, and it looks like Ace is with him. Maybe it’s all clear.”

It wasn’t. More gunfire erupted. Clive watched as the militia vehicles screeched to a stop, and the militiamen started pouring out in every direction. A firefight erupted, just as Clive and Red Beard reached the area where the drive split, with part of it heading towards the barn. Looking to his right, Red Beard saw Cole and Natasha coming from the barn, and he waved for them to stay put.

Ace and Peter were still moving forward towards the RV with their weapons readied, and that was when Red Beard heard Ace shout.

The militia flushed an enemy gunman from the ridge opposite the house, and as he ran from his cover, a militia bullet hit him in the back. He skidded to the ground and rolled and, despite his wound, in one complete motion, he popped up and raised his rifle to fire.

Red Beard saw the gun pointed towards them, and immediately reached for Clive. He seized the older man by the upper arm and, with almost super-human strength, spun him around, tossing him roughly to the ground and out of harm’s way. Three bullets thudded into Red Beard’s chest and neck, and the leprechaun fell to the ground without drama or pretense. Militia guns finished off the wounded attacker with a short burst, but it was too late.

Clive was already up and running towards his fallen friend. He screamed, “No!” at the top of his voice, but it was a useless and fruitless scream.

The shout echoed around the farmyard, bouncing off the buildings and the vehicles before disappearing into the coming night.

The light of the sunset had disappeared into the darkness, and the light of life was fading from Pat Maloney’s eyes. Looking up, he saw his friends, new and old ones, bending over him. Clive was clutching him and had pulled him up into his lap, so that his head now rested against the older man’s chest.

The world was fading into the fogginess of the surreal dream, and Pat was looking from face to face, and trying to speak, though he could not.

His eyes caught a glimpse of the backpack hanging on Veronica’s shoulder, and he reached towards it with his hand, as if there might be in it some savior, some elixir, or some potion that might pull him up from his condition.

He felt himself slipping, as if he were falling into a dungeon, or a prison, and the hand that was reaching towards the backpack was now reaching for anything—anything at all; any strand or rope onto which he might hold that might arrest his fall.

A face appeared to him as he fell, and it was the face of a friend that he’d only met once, and his hand now turned, and opened, and seemed to relax and cease its pointing.

For the others—for Red Beard’s friends gathered around him—the scene was tragic and shocking. Clive rocked his friend in his lap, and let out a sob of pain and loss that was surprising coming from a man with such limitless power. Perhaps it is impossible for a man truly to be god-like. Red Beard’s right hand reached up, and pointed, and he seemed to strain to say something, so they all leaned in at that moment.

“Clay,” was all he said.

Only a few of the team gathered around the dying man heard it, or, if they heard it, knew then what the name meant.

Then there was a release, as if the reason that all of this had happened, going back to the Hurricane that had struck New York City, was only to bring them all to this one moment—for them to be surrounding a man who had minded his own business, who had never hurt anyone, and who only wanted to pass the time with his friends.

The faces around Red Beard looked down at him with sadness. Some of the faces Pat had known for a while, and some of them had been new to him, but now he couldn’t see them, because dead men do not see.

Each person had their own thoughts at that instant, as the severity of the moment applied itself to each one of them in turn.

The end of the world is never pretty.

It was Veronica, later, who rallied the group, when it seemed that despair and hopelessness might overwhelm them all. She got them moving again, and eventually they could laugh, plan, joke, and argue.

We have work to do, she told them all, and reality never waits for us, or asks how we feel about the repercussions of our own folly.

Clive found a truck for Calvin, and the men spent some of their days fixing it up so that Calvin could eventually go home to Texas.

After many discussions, Natasha and Cole decided that, in a few more weeks, when the weather should be better, they would go to Texas with their new, young friend.

Peter and Elsie were going to be sad to see Natasha and Cole go, but they were determined to stay. This was a very tough decision. For Peter, the two young friends were the last connection he had with Warwick, and with his old life there. Peter asked his friends to keep their eyes and ears open down in Texas for news about his wife and child, and to try to get word to him one way or another.

Peter and Elsie adopted Charlie. Not officially, because there was no mechanism for that, but they took him in as if he was their own son, and hoped to help the boy grow into a good man in this new and different world.

Veronica and Ace decided to stay at the farm with Peter and Elsie, to help Clive run things, and maybe to serve as a conscience for the man who seemed to hold so much dangerous power.

The breakup of the team, however, wouldn’t be for a few more weeks. For now, they all worked, planned for the future, and lived.

At night, Veronica would read to Natasha, Cole, and Elsie from The Poems of C.L. Richter, and they’d talk about the things the poems brought to mind. Ace would listen, but he rarely talked. He liked to look off into the night, and stabilize the world with his silence.

Cole said that he didn’t know Clay, but he knew a few men who were very much like him. An old teacher named Lev Volkhov, and another friend named Vasily, reminded him very much of the man that Veronica remembered.

“A great man named Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world,’” Cole said, “so maybe we’ve all known Clay in one way or another.”

Perhaps Cole is right.