Chapter Fourteen
The Slow Death
"We need new names. Our old names are what our parents called us. And they don't know us anymore."
I remembered the rabbit that lived in Owl's blackberry bush, the one Owl had saved from Frisk. Mildred Sanger had said that the rabbit taught the Plains Indians magic and storytelling.
"I'm Rabbit from now on. The storyteller. That's me." I said.
Viper snickered. I ignored her.
"Well, if we're doing animal names, then I'm Wolf; because wolves are bad ass."
"Raven is always talking for the people, speaking to monsters to help people who can't and tricking them into doing right. So, if we're doing animals, then I'm Raven."
Viper pouted for a minute, and then said, "Well snakes are keepers of knowledge, but 'Snake' sounds stupid. So I guess I'm Viper, because then I have poison if you mock me."
"I guess, I'm last. I like Owl. Silent when hunting and like a sniper in the night, and wise too- the symbol of wisdom and strategy.”
“Do you know how silly it is, giving ourselves new names?”
“That's what children do when they become adults. They get new names.”
“Okay, fine.” Viper said, “But now what?”
"Bruce Lee always said, 'real living is living for others.' If we are just doing this ourselves, maybe that's why we're failing. Maybe we need to help other people who will listen." Raven said to Owl.
"Nobody is listening." Owl said quietly
"The adults aren't. But what about the other kids? How many of them could we convince? How much more could we do with five more people? With ten?" Viper added. Owl looked at her in surprise as Viper kept talking, "I think we should do like Victoria from Twilight and form an army of our own?"
"Wasn't she the bad guy?" I asked.
"And so are we, and you shouldn't think otherwise."
Raven shook her head, “Anyone doing something big is a villain from somebody else's point of view. Other people can call of villains. I still say we're heroes.”
"In brightest day it's easy to be heroes. But the Green Lanterns knew that you also had to be a hero in blackest night. This is blackest night bro. Every night ends, but you gotta fight the whole way through if you still want to be a hero when dawn hits. I'll run interference, you build us the Green Lantern Corps." Wolf smiled as he spoke.
And with that Wolf got up and ambled back over to the food line. As he was in line, we quickly began whispering to kids who would listen that a big secret meeting was about to take place- just for kids. And we told them to watch for the distraction and the follow us.
Wolf waited until he got back to the front of the line and was told that he had already got his meal for the evening.
“But I’m hungry!” Wolf said loudly, “What about him, he’s a skinny little runt. He doesn’t need that much food. I’ll take some of his.”
“Wolf reached for the soup bowl on the plate of the nearest boy. And adult reached out to restrain Wolf, and Wolf hammered a fist into the man’s gut.
“I want my food!” Wolf yelled, as he swung his fists in the midst of what was quickly becoming a melee around the food line.
“Well, that’s a distraction.” Viper said.
“Yup.” Owl said, “Let’s hurry.”
We quickly led the kids who had listened to us out of sight. And got everyone sitting on boxes facing Owl, who positioned himself at the front of the room.
"You guys know me. I'm the freak in the cowboy hat. I'm the guy whose mom got shot 'cause she talked too loud. You shouldn't even be listening to me. Old Lady Winter and her goons wouldn't like it. They will probably slash your rations for listening to me."
Owl let that sink in for a second. the kids shuffled, but nobody moved.
"But you and me, we know something. Old Lady Winter will slash the rations anyway, to punish us, to control us, to keep us helpless. Well, I don't want to be helpless. Do you? Do you like waking up in this place and begging for food from the school bully? Do you like watching your parent turn on you one by one? Is this how you want to die? 'Cause you're probably going to die if you stay here. You know I'm right. We've all seen death, we've learned that nice little lesson. Maybe you didn't get it as close up as I did, before this how many of us had seen a dead body? And how many now?"
Once everyone had raised their hand, Owl continued.
"So why are we still here? So we can starve and be miserable, die slow instead of fast?"
Hawk stood up.
"You talk tough, but what do we do?
"We leave, and we make it hard for them to follow."
"And then what? We starve."
"And then we live. You don't think we won't starve here?" Owl spread his hands and stared Hawk in the eye. "We leave, maybe we starve. We stay, you know we starve and we get kicked while it happens just to make it that much better."
The crowd began to murmur amongst themselves, and a bunch of kids got up and left. Viper looked around and tightened her lips into a line as sharp as a metal roof. She stalked up Owl and spoke to him, loud enough for the crowd to hear.
"Enough of this, they aren't up for it. You wanted warriors, and all we have here are cowards who want their moms to make everything better. Let them die sucking thumbs and praying for the adults to fix it. As if the adults didn't cause it in the first place."
The crowd had gone silent, listening to Viper's rant. Owl looked at me, and I winked. And Owl smiled for just an eye-blink and then shook his head and spoke to Viper.
"They aren't cowards. They're scared, there's a big difference. You're scared and so am I. You'd have to be nuts not to be scared. But they aren't cowards, that's why I picked them. Think about how many kids there are in town. I didn't call all of them did I?"
Viper shook her head, "So?"
"So, these are the ones who are smarter, sharper and braver than the others. These are kids who have seen what's going wrong. They know what's wrong, but we're asking them to do something big- huge really. So of course they aren't going to just jump into line."
"I don't think there are even five kids here with the guts to leave with us." Viper said and folded her arms.
The kids were squirming and murmuring again.
Hawk was still standing, and she spoke again, "Okay, I'll bite. How do we keep from starving? It's winter. We've got no stored food and no grocery store close by that's still open."
Owl grinned, "You know me. You know my Mom. What did my mom let me do?"
"Wear a cowboy hat and carry a pocket knife?" Hawk asked.
"And go hunting." Owl said, facing her with a broad grin.
Hawk considered for a second, and turned and looked back towards the main room.
"And what about our parents? How do we help them?"
"Will they let us?" Owl answered, "My mom knew the score right up to where They shot her. Look at Raven's parents, they knew. What happens to every adult who knew that the town is doomed? Mrs. Sanger's dead, my Mom is dead and all the rest are under house arrest. House arrest, think about what that means? I bet you've tried talking to your parents. Haven't you? And I bet they're like everyone else's parents here. If they aren't scared into line, then they're under house arrest like this is Nazi Germany. You tell me what to do about our parents."
Hawk's shoulders dropped, "I don't know."
Owl put a hand on her shoulder, "Then let me tell you. We let them choose. They're grown ups, they're allowed to stay here.”
“But that’s breaking the rules. That’s breaking the law. Like actual laws you go to jail for.”
"Do you think laws made of paper are going to keep us safe after this?" Owl said. “Right now, adults are useless. The adults don't know that the world they lived in, built and paid for, is already dead. Their world is gone now and they can't handle it. They're going to fight until they die or smarten up. That's their choice. Now its time to make yours. Do you think we can make it to spring living under Old Lady Winter and her goons?"
Hawk shook her head.
“Exactly. We aren't going to make it staying here. We need to run. We have to stay hidden, because the adults- our parents- will drag back to live on this corpse until we all freeze or starve or tear each other to pieces.”
“I guess.” Hawk said.
"Does anyone else think that we can make it to spring like this?" Owl said to the group, now dwindled to about twenty-five. Nobody spoke.
"Does anyone else think that our parents will save us this time?"
Nobody spoke.
"Who's hungry?"
Murmurs.
"Who's tired?"
Murmurs.
"Who's sick of being pushed around?"
"Who's sick of being scared of the adults that are supposed to protect us?"
"Well, I say let them deal with this mess. They made it. I say we leave. We can't do worse than they already are. So who wants to be free?"
And then, one by one, the kids still here stood up and then we knew.
We snuck back in small groups to the main room. When I got back, I saw Wolf sitting by himself with several choice bruises on his face. I sat down beside him.
“So?” I asked.
“Well let’s see. I was on one third rations for running away. And Now that’s been cut in half, so I guess I’m on one sixth rations,” Wolf grinned, “I think their going to need a teaspoon to serve my last few meals here bud. So how did it go?”
“We didn’t get a lot, maybe twenty five kids.” I said.
“Better twenty five that care than five hundred that don’t.”
As we talked we were joined by the rest of the group, and also Hawk and her crew. Sparrow in particular seemed pleased by the whole turn of events.
"This song goes out to everyone who's ever fought for freedom." Sparrow said.
"Why do you say that? You don't even sing." Hawk said, rolling her eyes.
"Dunno," Sparrow said, "Sounds good? Always wanted to be a DJ? It irritates you?"
"So, your plan is to walk away?" Hawk said, keeping stride with Owl.
"Yeah, I don't see any other option. This isn't working and now that all those spider webs that Professor Tuttle talked about seem to have snapped, I don't see us putting it back together any time soon. We can’t stay near town. Not at all near town. That’s what we learned the last time we ran away from here. The whole area around town is hunted out. So we need to walk away, completely." Owl said.
"Then what happens after we walk away? I mean seriously, where are we going? Out into the woods to hang on as long as we can before dying like everyone else?"
"My mom," Owl paused, "My mom married my dad, because she saw something in him and what he dreamed about that she thought was noble. It didn't last. At first I blamed my dad, I thought he was a lazy slob. He's no prize, I know, but he isn't lazy. He's broken. He saw something that he valued die, and it broke him. When he looked at this world that's dying now, he saw a monster that was devouring everything he loved."
"What's your point?" Hawk asked.
"My point is that you see nothing beyond this world of ours that's dying. My dad didn't see it that way. He saw a whole other world being devoured by this world of ours, which he saw as a monstrous cannibal nothingness."
"So, do you know what he saw? I don't know that you ever talk much with your dad? And if we don't have something, then this is still a dumb idea."
"I don't. Dad is broken, still too broken to teach probably. But I know what we need to look for, and what we need to find. It's a gamble, but staying here is worse."
"This means we're all stuck trusting you and your cowboy hat."
"No, it means we all need to trust each other. I'm not in charge of this. If I am, then we're screwed. People being in charge is part of the problem, I think. We need to be something different, a tribe maybe and not whatever this is."
"So it boils down to going native? Doesn't that seem a little silly."
"I am native- remember? They lived here for ten thousand years without everything we had, and they did okay. I don't think that's it exactly. But I think we need to find what they had. Because whatever it was, we don't have it now."
"I still think this is one big gamble."
"Nobody is forcing you to help us. Stay here and starve. We don't need people who don't want us."
"No, I'm with you. I just want to know how crazy you are."
"Mr. Wolf says that things will get better after the initial crisis has lowered the population to realistic levels, and then the real leaders will rebuild," Mouse said abruptly, causing both Hawk and Owl to jump.
Owl was quiet for a moment and then he said, "What are they going to rebuild with, Mouse? Before we lost TV, everything we saw said that everything was breaking. We're going to end up in the Middle Ages by this time next year at this rate."
"No we aren't. The real leaders are stockpiling essential technology." Mouse countered.
"Okay, so that will buy them time. But how do they repair things, and get new materials? Everything is made in super huge factories now. Parts are made miles and miles away- you remember what Professor Tuttle told us. How do we rebuild that?"
"The leaders will know," Mouse said.
Owl looked around, "Does this feel like rebuilding?"
"We have to wait for the population to drop to manageable levels."
"You mean we have to wait for people who oppose Mr. Wolf and Mrs. Winter to die off or disappear like Mayor Tailor did. You mean we have to wait for them to get rid of anyone who doesn't agree with their ideas. You mean that we have to wait until everyone is so weak from lack of food and scared from the men with masks and guns that nobody will say 'boo' to them anymore. Yeah, that sounds like the answer to me too."
"But what if it works?" Hawk asked, "What is they do manage to get people through this?"
"You tell me," Owl answered, "Do you want to live in a town where Mrs. Winter is Queen, Mr. Wolf is judge, the his goons are the secret police?"
"I like Mr. Wolf," Mouse said quietly, "He thinks I'm strong. A real man."
"He told me that too, once. And then I started to make my own decisions and he didn't think I was a man anymore. See if he still thinks you're a man when you ask him the questions Professor Tuttle taught us. And then decide if you still like him."
"Thank-you Mouse,” Raven added, “Now we know their endgame. Turn back the clock to when a few people controlled everything because they think that they know better than everyone else."
"But I don't think that is going to work. I don't think we have enough food and water and power to last the winter. Do you guys?"
"No. But what do we do?"
"We trust Owl," Viper said, "we should have listened to him in the first place."
"Then the least I can do is get you that white picket fence. Maybe not today, but someday."
"Take your time. I trust you."
“So we’re running, fine. How do we get out?” Hawk asked.
“I’m working on that. Last time we had a distraction. We’ll probably need more this time.” Owl said.
We sat in silence, all thinking then, all watching, looking for something useful.
I was watching the 'Hello Kitty' gunman, the one who murdered Owl's Mom. He was watching a group of people walk march through the food line. As I was watching, he brought his thumb up to his face again- like he had when he shot Owl's mom. Then he stepped forward and dragged Mrs. Lamb out of line for some apparent infraction. And I realized that he wasn't giving a thumbs up, as I had originally thought. He was reflexively trying to wipe his nose like Bruce Lee spoiling for a fight. And suddenly I realized that I had seen that before.
I turned to Owl, "Did you see that?"
Owl glared at the 'Hello Kitty' gunman.
"Yeah," He said, "I saw that, and I know what that means."
We kept sitting though and Owl just scanned the room like he was looking for something. Then his eyes settled on Skunk.
Skunk sat on a yellow plastic folding chair next to a pile of boxes containing bags of rice. He carefully unfolded his knife, making a show of it, so that the kids around him would see it- and presumably be afraid of him for it. Then Skunk set to work cutting open the boxes and removing the bags and then flattening the boxes once they were empty.
Once he had finished the boxes in front of him, Skunk stood up and walked out of the room to get more boxes. I returned to talking to Wolf.
Sparrow looked back at us and asked, “So, a tribe huh? What does that even mean?”
Raven answered, “It means we stick together. It means everyone is valuable. I hear the adults talking a lot about the needs of the many and the good of the group. My dad never talked about that stuff, even when he was band chief. He always looked at each person as being as important as the tribe, maybe each person was the tribe to him in some way.”
“Okay, so what do we do with that?”
Wolf grinned, “No kings, no presidents, no mayors, none of that stuff. Any time you got that, then you got somebody taking more than their share.”
“So how do we get stuff done and decided things?” Hawk asked.
“We talk it out. Leaders can be different,” Viper said, “They don’t have to have formal power. Owl ends up leader for us a lot lately, because he actually knows stuff about how to survive. But it’s not like we’re going to bow to him and call him King. And if he doesn’t teach us how to do what he does, then we’re going to either make him, or tell him to get lost. He’s leading right now, because he’s the right person to do the leading right now. But he’s only leading, because we let him.”
“Don’t most kingdoms or gangs or whatever start that way? I mean Mrs. Winter didn’t start in charge. Mr. Wolf didn’t start in charge. They acted like leaders and then suddenly they were in charge.”
“Definitely true,” Raven said, “And we have to guard against that. Mildred talked about needing three things to be warriors. You had to know how to think for yourself, how to provide for yourself and how to defend yourself. And Mrs. Winter has used people not having enough of the first two, and Mr. Wolf has used people not having enough of the last one, so that they stay in charge.”
“Mildred also said that you have to admit that there is no single right way.”
“Then why leave this place if there is no right way?” Mouse said.
“She didn’t say that there weren’t wrong ways. There are lots of wrong ways, but there isn’t just on right way. And so you can’t stop people from leaving or doing different. And anyone who does is dangerous.”
“Mildred also said no wars, don’t wage war. This whole thing feels an awful lot like war- even if I can’t figure out who my Dad and Mrs. Winter are at war against.”
Maize shook her head, “Maybe you can’t figure it out, but I can. They’re at war with people who disagree. They’re at war with their own people: us, our parents, the whole town.”
“Sounds about right,” I said, “The other thing Mildred talked about, was that we need to live for the future. You need to do things so that you aren’t damaging your ability to stay alive tomorrow, or next year, or twenty years from now. That’s the problem with what’s happening in town here. The town is eating up everything that would give food next year. If they run out of food, what do they plant if they survive the winter? They’ve over hunted the whole area, what’s going to be left to have baby’s to grow into new deer and grouse and ducks and rabbits to hunt around town next year.”
“Okay, but that isn’t good for us, either is it?” Hawk said, “How do we not do that?”
“That’s a question for Owl.” I said. As I said it, I realized Owl hadn’t said anything for the whole conversation. I looked around and saw Owl sitting just behind me.
“Don’t do that.” I said. “So how do we avoid over hunting?”
“Don’t hunt underage animals, don’t hunt females during the times when their probably pregnant or raising babies. Hunt the bigger older males over the younger males. Don’t take more than you need. It’s pretty simple. Mom and Dad drilled all that stuff into me pretty early on. I can teach you guys. I figure that I’ll be doing a lot of teaching for the first little while. I didn’t han out with the band much, but something one of the elders told me once. I kind of ignored it at the time, but it makes more sense now. He said that the reason Natives were called indigenous is because indigenous means that something belongs to a place. He said that city people always wanted things that belonged to them, but that the earth was too big to belong to anybody- you had to belong to it. I think, that’s what we need to relearn, in order to survive.”
“Okay good, but what do we do until then?”
"We could act like Malificent in 'Sleeping Beauty' and transform into something scary in order to fight them." Viper said.
"That didn't exactly work for her did it?"
"And again, she was the bad guy."
"And so are we. But in the books the bad guys lose. Bad guys win in real life all the time."
“I can feel it, you know.” Owl said to me, quietly.
“Feel what?” I asked.
“The transformation that Viper's talking about, that Mildred talked about. I can feel the stories, the mythology, that Mildred talked about. I feel it thick around us. And I can feel the outrage. The Witch Doctor, the one without a home. We don't have a home Rabbit. I don't think we've ever had a home. I don't think our parents did either, or their parents, all the way back- I don't know how long. This is what happens if you scratch the surface off everything our parents and their parents have built. This crap is what we've all been raised on. How many years back did that story Mildred tell us happen? I can feel the outrage, and I think its older than me.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, I'm officially freaked out.”
“Good, because none of this will be easy.
"Why? What you are doing?"
"Thinking."
"That's dangerous."
“Isn't that the truth. We think and we think and we think and we don't do anything. Thinking doesn't work on its own, because unless start breaking rules and shaking everything to the ground, thinking won't change anything.”
“We've already broken more than a few rules.”
“Fine. Now it's time to break the biggest rule of all. People rebel all the time in the history books, you know? The French Revolution, the American Revolution, The Russian Communist Revolution- all those people rebelling against other people doing horrible things, and nothing really changes except the people doing the horrible things. It's a game of musical chairs. And people are dying because now we're almost out of chairs to sit on.”
“And?”
“And now it's time to admit that this is a stupid game, and that it's time to leave. We need to break the biggest rule the adults ever taught us. Mildred's story was about people trying to keep growing forever to out run the prophecy that if they ever stopped everything would fall. Well, you can't keep growing forever can you? Eventually you run out of stuff or space or both. And things are falling apart. Mildred's story is warning about how our parent's have lived and everyone's parents all the way back to whoever started this. We need to admit that this whole thing: cities, the spiderwebs of factories and roads and supply lines, all the stuff the adults are trying to hang on to- none of works anymore and maybe it never really did. And then, we need to leave. I figure it will be pretty hard and scary, so be ready for that.“
“Alright, let’s not bunch up like we have some big secret conspiracy. I think I have the beginnings of a plan. I’ll let you know once I’m ready.”
We nodded and all kind of moved off as casual as possible. Wolf and I wandered off to practise sparring. Owl and Viper found and bench and sat down together and Viper snuggled into Owl. Raven wandered from kid to kid talking, probably reassuring people. Hawk and Lion found a spot and started arm wrestling. Maize and Sparrow pulled out a deck of cards and started playing. Mouse wandered off. And I hoped that he wasn’t going to listen to Mr. Wolf again, or worse yet to expose us. Mouse was a problem, he was loyal as a German Shepherd to Sparrow, but I was never sure how smart he really was.
"Hey!" Skunk yelled, and I turned to look at him.
"Who took my pocket knife?" Skunk demanded, looking back and forth at the people- mostly kids- sitting within easy distance of his chair.
His eyes settled on Sparrow and Maize, who were playing cards just a few feet away from where Skunk had been working. Neither was very big and that was probably part of Skunk's reasoning. Skunk stomped over to the two and glared down at them.
"Alright small fry, give it up, or I'll start enforcing rationing restrictions."
"How would taking your knife help anyone here?" Maize asked. She looked like she was trying to calm Skunk, but Skunk wasn't having it. He rounded on Sparrow and snatched Sparrow's glasses clean of the smaller boy's face.
"What about you four eyes? Are you going to lie to me, like your girlfriend here?"
Sparrow stood up, "Those glasses cost significantly more than your stupid knife. I don't care about your toy. I don't care about you power trip. And I don't care about your threats of rationing. If my glasses are not in my hand very shortly, you are going to regret mistaking me for a helpless nerd."
Skunk shoved Sparrow over, knocking the smaller boy to the ground, "You are helpless and you are a nerd. This is my house. And these are my rules. So, where is my knife?"
"You never had a knife." Owl said. He wasn’t shouting, but he spoke loud enough that Skunk turned.
"What was that, freak?" Skunk asked.
"You never had a knife. I had a knife, you had a toy. A little boy who's lost his toy and now is throwing a tantrum. I should be the one to complain. My knife was actually worth something. Yours is just silly and pitiful. Not only is your knife a little toy, but you're crying, because you lost it."
Skunk looked Owl up and down, as though considering the potential altercation. Finally his eyes lit up and he tossed Sparrow's glasses to the ground and jogged off.
Sparrow picked up his glasses and wiped them clean and put them back on.
"This song goes out to all the wimps who couldn't stand up for themselves," Sparrow said in frustration, "If Mouse were here, this would be different."
"Yeah, but Mouse likes listening to Mr. Wolf a little too much." Owl said.
"You did fine." Maize said and Sparrow sat down, "The timing wasn't right to escalate that."
Sparrow nodded.
Hawk tossed an MRE bag at Sparrow, "Don't be a Chotch Monkey!"
"What the heck is a Chotch Monkey?"
"Somebody who's way too full of themselves, generally male."
Sparrow spread his arms, "I'm too little to be full of anything. You are talking to the literal 98 pound weakling. The only I'm alive these days is because I don't eat much and people still think that Nerds are cool."
"And cute." Maize added with a wink.
Skunk strode back to his seat. He was carrying Owl's sheath knife.
"So somebody took my knife. But now look what I've got. Anyone who thinks my knife gives them clout, remember that my new knife is bigger."
With that, Skunk sat back down and continued opening boxes and removing rice.
Hawk shook her head, “Okay Sparrow, you are officially not a chotch monkey.”
Wolf and I looked at Skunk and then each other, and then stopped sparring and walked over to Owl.
"Hey bud. Why did you remind him that they had your knife?" Wolf said.
"Yeah," I added, "It seemed like you wanted him to take your knife."
Owl nodded, "That's better than him beating up Sparrow. I like Sparrow, he's smart and has fight in him. And anyway, now I know where my knife is. Don't I?"
"So that was on purpose?" Wolf asked.
Owl nodded, and Wolf suppressed a chuckle.
"Epic Win Bud."
"Thank you."
"He does have a bigger knife now."
"But he has no idea how to use it."
"True, but that might make him more dangerous, not less."
Conversation turned back to the guard with the Hello Kitty sticker, and how to get him alone.
“I figured that I'd just confront him and let him chase me to an empty room,” Owl confessed as we talked.
“That's dumb,” Viper said, “Everyone will see it and other guards will follow.”
“But we know his weakness,” Raven said, “We know what gets him angry and who he likes to hurt. Women. I bet if he overheard me talking about how dumb his sticker looks and what a wimp he looks like with that sticker on him, then he would follow after me to teach me a lesson. And I bet the other guards wouldn't think much of him going after a girl, compared to the number one troublemaker in the seventh grade. Men always underestimate us ladies.”
Wolf and I both objected at the same time, “You could get hurt!”
“We all could get hurt. Don't talk like Wolf's dad. We aren't any weaker than you boys,” Viper said.
Owl nodded, “I know. The only problem that I see with the plan is that you can't taunt him or just sit there talking to yourself. Both would be kind of obvious.”
Viper nodded, “You need another poor weak and defenceless girl to join the conversation, so that we can giggle at the stupid sticker. I can do that.”
“I didn't mean you.” Owl said abruptly.
“Why not?” Viper asked, “You just said you knew we girls weren't weaker than boys. So why not me?”
Owl breathed in and seemed to be trying to find words that were hiding from him somewhere in his ribcage. Eventually, his shoulders sagged a little and he shrugged.
“I just didn't want to put anyone on the spot. You can totally do this. Just, you know, just be careful and don't get hurt.”
Our new team of kids, minus Raven and Viper wandered off in groups to an used corner, hidden from view by stacks of boxes. Isolated and hidden from view, we waited.
“What are you going to do?” Lion asked.
“Yeah,” Hawk added, “You still haven’t told us the plan.”
“The guard with the ‘Hello Kitty’ sticker? That’s the one who murdered my Mom.”
“Oh.” Hawk stopped and seemed to be searching for words, but couldn’t find them.
“And now I also know who he is.”
Lion leaned in with interest, “And so, what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to do something colossally stupid. And then I’m going to use it to help us escape.”
I could see Hawk adding things up her head, “Is this a good idea? I mean I normally don’t run from a fight.”
“This is almost certainly not a good idea. But I need to do this. And I think I can use it to add a distraction to get us out of here.”
“I like it.” Lion said.
“I don’t.” Maize interjected.
“Okay, I understand that not everyone likes this.” Owl said, “But does anyone hate it enough to stop me?”
Nobody answered And then the girls darted around the corner and quickly stepped into the crowd of kids, with Owl standing just ahead of myself and Wolf.
Seconds later Mr. Pinchen came barrelling around the corner in his riot gear, with his helmet under his arm. He pulled to a stop when he saw the group of us and stared. Owl had his hands clasped behind his back like a general addressing disobedient troops as he faced Mr. Pinchen.
"So, Mr. Pinchen, that thing you do with your thumb is a bit of a give away, huh? I mean, I don't know any other adult who tries to imitate a Bruce Lee movie before being a jerk or a creep. So I know you wear the uniform with the 'Hello Kitty' sticker on the shoulder pad- which is really lame, by the way. But that means I know something else. I know what that means. That means, I know who killed my mother. Want to guess who did it?"
Mr. Pinchen looked around, I think to see who was watching. Once he realized it was just us, he grinned and did his thumb wipe again.
"I don't think you thought this through little boy. Nobody here can help you, and none of the bleeding hearts can see you to cry and moan about what I'm going to do to you."
Owl had a wild look in his eyes now, one I didn't like. He looked like he was swinging between supremely confident and absolutely terrified.
"So Mr. Pinchen, I know you like your victims unarmed. My mother, your wife and so on. " Owl said, "We kids aren't dumb Mr. Pinchen. We see things, we understand more than you might think. And once we realize that there is no Santa Claus, we know that adults lie to us, all the time. We aren't fooled. You aren't lying to protect us. You're lying to protect yourselves, and we're tired of it."
"Doesn't matter," Mr. Pinchen replied, raising up his fists into a boxing position, "You're still a thirteen year old boy who hasn't grown into his body, and I'm still a grown man who knows how to fight."
"You know how to beat unarmed opponents," Owl corrected, "I don't think you know how to fight. I know you think you've got this in the bag. After all, my sheath knife was confiscated and everyone knows Skunk has it now. So, I understand that you must feel pretty confident right now," And then Owl raised a eyebrow and glanced subtly over Mr. Pinchen's right shoulder, looking behind the man, "But I'm not the only kid who carries a knife around here."
Mr. Pinchen twisted reflexively to look where he had noticed Owl's gaze looking, and Owl swung his hands back into view, his right hand carrying Skunk's missing pocket knife. Owl thrust the pocket knife into Mr. Pinchen's mid section, just below the ribs in the soft bits- but pointing upwards at his lungs.
Mr. Pinchen gasped in pain. Then, before his opponent could cry out, Owl let go of the knife, cocked his right arm back and drove a palm strike into the knife- jamming the knife up into the older man's lung- burying the knife in Mr. Pinchen's mid section until it was almost entirely invisible.
The impact drove the air out of Mr. Pinchen's lungs, and he gasped for air, but the knife now lodged in the lower part of his right lung was causing him breathing problems. He gasped and wheezed and tried to make noises, but every sound he made was crushed to a laboured whisper.
"You killed my mother. You shot her from the safety of a crowd, hidden by a mask and large numbers and false authority. You guys aren't the good guys, and maybe you never were. But you got what you deserved today. For my mother's murder, for your wife's abuse, for your general cruelty while hiding behind that mask- plastic or otherwise. This is it. Today you get to answer for how you've lived your life."
"Sticker..." Mr. Pinchen managed to wheeze, "...from ...daughter ..."
Owl paused at this, mid stride. And then I noticed that he had begun crying, silently, like he had when his mother was murdered. Then his gaze hardened.
"You beat your wife Mr. Pinchen. I don't know if you beat your daughter, but you certainly weren't a father to her. It doesn't matter what you told yourself. Fathers don't abuse mothers. You aren't a father. you're a monster. And you know what? I didn't know this about myself before, but it turns out, I'm okay with killing monsters."
Owl was still crying. I didn't say anything. It was okay. He could handle it.
Mr. Pinchen did not die quickly. He faded off slowly crumpling to the ground. He pulled at the butt of the knife in his stomach, but couldn't get a grip- and probably didn't have the strength to remove it had he managed to get a proper grip on the handle.
Owl looked down at his right hand, now wet with Mr. Pinchen's blood. Reaching out he placed his hand on the stickered shoulder pad and pushed the bigger man over onto the ground, leaving a red hand print over the 'Hello Kitty' sticker.
"I guess our hands are always red from now on." Owl said quietly, “I can live with that. I thought this would break me. I really did. It didn't, and I can't imagine anything breaking me if this didn't. I'm something else now, something new. I guess we'll find out what, huh?”
And we just stood there watching him. I didn't know what to feel. There was a human being dying in front of me. I could feel something approaching horror crawling under my skin. At the same time, I could feel satisfaction in what Owl had done. I hated Mr. Pinchen, and everything he and the rest of Them stood for- and this felt like justice. It felt wrong too, but it felt like justice- and I couldn't pry those feelings apart.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Exodus Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
Helter Skelter
Okay boys and girls, and gentlemen and ladies, this is where any timid readers who've pushed on should stop now and go no further.
At this point you can pretend that the national guard stepped in. You can pretend that the outside world still had the resources to provide emergency relief and reinstate a normal world of rules and laws and safe living rooms where nobody else has to die in a food riot.
Anyone who isn't one of us should really put this book back, you know we're looking for you right now.
This is the point where we step past the point of no return. This is the point where any chance at a happy ending, as they show up in children's books and films, vanishes forever. This is where anyone from a happier world should stop and go no further.
Tell yourself whatever lies you want about what happened in Safehope Bluff. Pretend I'm lying to you. Pretend I don't know what I'm talking about. But whatever you do, don't keep reading if you can't handle a world where people don't ride in on white horses to save children from unhappy endings.
You think 'Old Yeller' is traumatizing to children? You think they should never have killed Optimus Prime in the animated 'Transformers' Movie? You think 'Bridge to Terabithia' went a little bit too far? Was it too much for you when Dumbledore bit the dust?
You haven't seen anything yet. Stop reading.
Only warriors should step beyond this point.
You have been warned.
* * *
Bart’s capture had shaken us. My mom hadn’t done anything, just stood by and watched while Mr. Wolf beat Bart like a dog. Everything felt unsafe. The death of Owl’s mom could have blamed on heat of the moment and losing control of the situation. But now I didn’t think so. The leadership obviously felt that this was okay. Mr. Wolf had brutalized Bart because he was the the focus of Mr. Wolf’s anger. This left us all feeling cold and unsafe. We knew they didn’t have enough food. We knew Mrs. Winter didn’t have a problem with letting people she didn’t like starve. We knew Mr. Wolf was happy to assault anybody he didn’t like. We knew that Raven’s parents hadn’t been seen since the protest. We knew that all the town council members who had objected were likewise gone, disappeared. Any business that disagreed had been used as a storage facility, the businesses own supplies confiscated. We had watched all of this happen, little by little. But seeing Bart bleeding in front of us seemed to bring it all into focus.
And so after Bart was captured we went back to our Obi-won in Mildred Sanger to ask for advice. It's funny, but Mildred was one of the last people assigned a bed. She came in after my own family. I still don't know how she managed that. But once she arrived we were able to rely up here and that lifted our spirits a little.
“Magic is creating through will alone. Taking thought and making it action.” Mildred said, as we spoke off from the main area on metal folding chairs.
“I showed you Tarot cards and I told you that magic is something that you understand that others do not. That is true, magic is a shapeshifting word. Magic is many things. In the sense that I currently am using it. Magic is created change through meaning.”
“Okay, but what does that mean?” Viper asked.
“Do you remember the story of Brave Young Man and Corn Lady.” She asked.
“It's pretty hard to forget. Especially looking at everything that's happened.” Viper answered.
“In other words, you see meaning and parallel between the story and your current situation? How did that happen? This was a fairy tale. This was a story that I told you outright had never happened. And yet it has helped transform your understanding of the situation compared to those of the other people in this building. How could a simple piece of fiction do that?”
“Well the story showed us another way to interpret what we were experiencing.” Raven said.
“Magic is creating change through meaning. You have a new story that you have made yours. That story is part of how you understand the world and your place in it, and it has made you different. I wrote many such stories, although I was not allowed to retrieve them when I was forced to vacate my house, so I do not have them here to share. But such stories are key to changing the game that you play.”
“My dad told me that tribes are a different game from the game everyone's playing right now.” Owl added.
“You father is quite correct. Tribes are a different game, or more correctly, they play different games and the tell different stories. And not just different stories, tribes tell different types of stories. And the stories that they tell are what make the games that they play different. Different fairy tales produce different adults, eventually. Magic. The thing about tribes is that they need to be free, that is why they do not survive captivity- their stories and games do not function and cannot be played in captivity, whether a community center gymnasium or a reservation.”
"Well.” Raven ventured, "Bruce Lee always said to be like water."
"You mean wet and miserable?" Viper asked.
"He meant that we should be patient when trapped and flow throw any available opening." Raven answered. “I'm we wait until we see an opening and then take advantage of it.
“And do what?” Viper asked, “I mean, seriously, at this point what can we do?”
“My dad says that we should run away. He's told me three times now. I'm starting to think he's right. Maybe we can play a new game if we can get away.”
Wolf shook his head, “That's a big freaking scary idea there bud. Seriously? Walk away and never come back? That's your idea?”
I though about my mother with her silence and Mr. Wolf with his bloody nightstick.
“I think I would prefer that to this.” I said.
“Okay,” Raven said carefully, “But we aren't a tribe, not really, not yet. Even if we all agreed that this was the best option, we don't know how to live like a tribe, we don't know how to turn ourselves into one. I mean where on earth would we start?”
“Well, didn't you just say that they story about the Brave Young Man and the Corn Lady is part ofbeing a tribe,” Owl said to Mildred, “What if we started with that? What would we do next?”
“I don't have an easy answer for you, I'm afraid.” Mildred Sanger said quietly, “This is the work of the Witch Doctor, the Lonely Hero who comes with storm and has no home.”
“When it comes time for somebody to do the thing that nobody else has the fortitude to do, you will find yourself possessed by an outrage so deep that something is reborn within you, something ancient and powerful, and you will find that a ghostly force guides your hand. But never try to master it, for there is no victory for the Master.”
Viper shook her head, “Mrs. Sanger, are you saying that ghosts are real? Are you saying that a ghost will actually possess one of us?”
“You decide if ghosts are real or not. I will not say yes or no for you. I am saying that you should listen to the moving of forces grander and older than either you, your parents, or the civilization now decaying around us. I am saying nothing more than this, listen to what was here first.”
"There are many things that are useful, without necessarily being true. A fairy tale can be useful to teach a lesson. A myth or fable can encapsulate the broad strokes of a historical event even if it uses metaphors and is largely a fabrication in itself. Explanations of how to perceive the world, spirits in the earth, souls and things- need not be true to be useful."
"So it doesn't matter if magic is real or not?" Viper asked.
"That's not the point. Magic means different things to different people. But each belief, whether in ghosts, or psychics or ancient stories, can be measured both by whether it is true and by whether it is useful. And certainly it does matter if something is true. But something can be untrue factually, while still being useful for other reasons. And then it does matter, you need to remember that no matter how useful a belief may be, that doesn't make it true."
Mildred never liked to talk where other people could intrude. And so we had been meeting out of the way and hidden behind a pile of boxes labelled as soap. As we were finishing our conversation, we heard a door open on the other side of the wall of the boxes. I don't think we would have taken much note, if it weren't for the fact that the footsteps that followed were accompanied by the sound of rubber dragging across tile, a quiet squeaking of two shoes being pulled.
We turned and moved over to peer over and around the boxes. On the other side we could see Mrs. Winter and two of Them, holding the semi-conscious form of Bart.
“You are an agent of the enemy.” Mrs. Winter said to Bart as her guards held his limp form, “Your disinformation has made my job more difficult at every turn. You have disrupted our ability to control the message. You have challenged our authority. And I will not tolerate it any longer. My associates believe that you can be used as an example to show people how we can bring anybody in line. But I suspect that this will merely allow you one last chance to oppose me by becoming a martyr. I'm not going to allow you to become a martyr. You are simply going to vanish. And, in time, you will be forgotten.”
“People. Will wonder. I'm too loud. Will be missed.” Bart wheezed out throw split lips.
“Oh I don't agree. This is quite a crisis and if a few people go missing in the crisis, that's just what we call casualties and missing persons. Come spring all people will remember is that they have made it through and that they owe that and their continued survival to the new council. We'll need to come up with a new name. Interim is so, temporary sounding. And if people do wonder about your fate, it won't matter. They will depend upon us for food and protection and thus their loyalty will be assured. You've lost. I've won.”
“You can't. Kill ideas.”
“Perhaps not directly,” Mrs. Winter said, “But ideas only survive in a very particular environment, the human mind. And although I may not be able to kill an idea; I can certainly kill a human.”
She held out her hand, and the guard on her right placed a large straight bladed military style knife in her hand. She grabbed Bart's hair and pulled his head back, exposing his neck.
“Now. We know. Who the villain. Is.” Bart managed, and then Mrs. Winter thrust the knife into Bart throat and then quickly turned it and drew the blade upward and under the chin line. Blood spurted across Mrs. Winter's shoulder, some spattering across her sky blue blazer.
We pulled ourselves back around the boxes in horror.
“She can't do that!” Raven whispered.
“She did.” Wolf said.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
“We run.” Viper said, “Like Owl's dad said we should. We get out of here. Anywhere is better than here.”
We were whispering. But we clearly weren't quiet enough.
“Do you hear that?” Mrs. Winter said from the other side of the boxes.
“No ma'am.”
“I heard something. Clean this up and get rid of it. You with me, we're making certain there are no loose ends.”
Mildred looked at us, and then looked around the room. She pointed to a set of boxes where we could see a space large enough to squeeze through and hide.
“Go. I can buy time for you to escape. Make a new way, find a new game, a new story. Make me proud.”
There wasn't time to argue. We could here the sound of Bart's body being dragged away. And then the sound of two sets of footprints moving slowly towards our position. As we turned to run, Mildred said to Raven.
"Remember, hope is like a fire. Don't let it go out. Even dying embers can become a fire again if they are fed."
Raven nodded. And then we ran. Behind us I could hear footsteps approaching and then Mrs. Winter's voice.
“What is this, Mildred?”
“Call it a protest. I know you don't like that word Helen, but I don't have another for you I'm afraid.”
“A protest against what Mildred? Us keeping this town alive for so long?”
“A protest against your methods. That's quite a stain you've got on your jacket.” Mildred said, “I certainly wouldn't call you a people person at this point.”
"People will let you down if you let them. Control is safety. Give people a free hand and they will hurt you and break the rules and make everything fall apart. And so I need control. When my father walked out, I learned a lesson in human nature. And so now I know what people are really like. Everything will end up looking right- like it did in the old days." Mrs. Winters continued talking as she turned away from Mildred and back towards our position.
"These days, everyone assumes that Summer is just to make the story work," Milderd Sanger said, "But of course it might actually be a nickname."
Mrs. Winter froze in her tracks and turned back to face Mrs. Sanger.
"Explain yourself Mildred." Mrs. Winter said.
"You know the joke Helen. Winter froze her husband into Summer's bed. Did you think that people made the joke just because summer is warm compared to winter's snow and ice? Didn't you think that maybe the word summer was in some way descriptive of your husband's lover?"
As we moved along silently, I could hear them talking although I could no longer see them.
"How would it describe his lover Mildred?"
"Who was the town hippie, Helen?"
"You were Mildred. I don't like where you are going with this."
"People so rarely like the truth. Lies are fair more convenient. Far more useful. So Helen, what did hippies take part in?"
"You're going to have to tell me Mildred."
"The summer of love maybe?"
"And of course, therefore my husband might have nicknamed his lover 'Summer', because she- you- were the only hippie in town."
"I loved Gerard. Deeply. I didn't think much of marriage as a convention then, and I was so much less respectful of other people as a young woman. That said, he was miserable with you and he was happy with me. And then he was gone. What did you do to him Helen? Mmmm."
"You did everything! I did nothing! You stole him and I took him back!"
I heard a sharp heavy sound and heard Mildred Sanger gasp. Then I heard the sound of something hitting the ground and Mildred Sanger groaned in pain.
"I tracked him down and I took him home. He'll never leave me now."
"So," Mildred said slowly, "The ice boils at last Helen."
Once we were out of that room, nobody was watching and we crept along in the other direction. Before too long we were out of the building and running through the parking lot towards the shelter of the alleyways and their shadows.
“I hope Mildred is okay.” Raven said.
“They're going to put her under house arrest like they did your parents. They might even kill her, like they did Bart. She's out for the count. This was her last move on our behalf.” Owl said.
“I hope my parents are okay too.” Raven said quietly.
“We all do,” Viper said, “I think Owl just means that we count count on them for support. We're on our own now. He's just a dork about how he says it.”
Owl didn't look up as he spoke, “I need some supplies from my house."
"Nothing is going to be there. They've cleaned out all the houses after they send us to the relocation center."
"They did, but they didn't look really hard. I think they felt guilty about one of Them shooting my mom. And I know Mr. Wolf kind of feels some kind of loyalty or gratitude or something to my dad for that deer he brought over way back when. So there's a bunch of hidden things in my house that I want to grab."
We headed to Owl's house. The first thing I noticed when we arrived was that the windows were boarded up and so was the front door. The old pickup truck was missing from the drive way. I guess that They had decided they needed another truck.
"They took all the stuff that Mom and I hadn't hidden, and pretty much all the big hidden stuff as well. So there won't be much left, but we can use what is left.
As we walked up, Owl reflexively checked the birdhouse. And as he did, a note fell out, and landed in the snow. Owl stared at it, as though it were an unexploded grenade.
We all looked at the paper, and finally Raven snatched it up. "It's going to get damp in the snow." She admonished.
Raven handed Owl the note, and Owl stared at it for a long time before opening it.
"Well what does it say?" Viper asked.
"It's from the day she was shot." Owl said, trembling, "It looks like she wrote it right before she went out."
"Well? What does it say?"
"Hey kid, things are getting crazy and we need to make sure certain people understand that they aren't kings and queens to rule over the rest of us." Owl stumbled a little here.
"Doesn't that sound like Mildred?" Viepr asked.
Owl gathered himself and continued, "I don't want you to be scared. Remember that I love you, always. Remember that I'm proud of you."
Owl's voice drained away as he tried to keep reading, and Viper leaned in and put her arm around him.
"I'll see you in time for dinner. Love Mom." He finished haltingly.
The woods were really eerie as we walked through them. Owl was in the lead and the big difference was how quiet things were. We'd never had problems seeing animals in the woods before this, even in the winter. BUt there was nothing. The woods were silent as a graveyard.
We wandered for several hours, finally hitting a fence that marked one of the cattle fields for a farm on Sumter's Ridge. Owl climbed over it, and the rest of us followed. I think Owl was planning to kill a cow for meat. Wolf went over last and got caught on the barbed wire. He wrenched himself free and the old wooden posts of the fence shook with the force of it, The post knocked against a red cedar tree next to is and a huge dump of snow landed on Wolf. He laughed and shook himself clean, brushing off what stuck.
As we entered the field, we discovered that we weren't the first people to think that. The field was almost empty. Most of the snow had been stamped down to brown mush. Around the field were sporadic red spattered stains on the earth. Big red patches amidst the white and brown. And in one corner, was a cow carcass. The cow had been partially skinned and dressed, but not completely. Animals had got to carcass now, and had eaten the meat off the bones and the organs out of the exposed torso of the animal.
"Why didn't whoever killed it, finish skinning it and cutting it up?" Wolf asked, confusion apparent in his voice.
We moved closer, but everyone was on edge, so we moved slowly. As we got close enough to see around the carcass we saw the body of a man lifeless in a bank of crimson snow, with a pick axe rammed through his midsection. He was dressed in red flannel, which helped hide the gore, but it wasn't pretty to look at either way. The animals had been eating his corpse as well. There wasn't much in the way of skin or meat on the body and more than one creature had made an attempt at tearing open the heavy corduroy pants the corpse was wearing to get at the meat on the legs. The corpse looked as those it had been nibbled apart by thousands of sets of tiny jaws with tiny teeth. Kind of how I imagined that piranhas would eat.
I turned away. Wolf put a hand on my shoulder, "Bud, don't look away. Not looking is what got us all into this mess."
"there's not much left to hunt, I guess." Raven said, "It makes sense. If I was an animal, I'd stay away from here too."
"Maybe they've mostly just over hunted this area. Maybe there isn't anything left to stay away."
"That's not good for anyone if it's true."
"When has anything that we've learned in the last few months been good for anyone?"
We stalked around the woods for several hours, but didn't see anything larger than a chickadee. Owl was looking more and more defeated the longer we hunted and saw nothing. When we finally gave up and headed for town, Owl looked like a helium balloon a week after the party- crumbled and deflated.
As we swung around towards our hide out, we got close to the town dump. As we passed by the dump, Raven noticed a stray dog- some sort of poodle breed- nosing around in the piles of garage for food. We stopped for a moment to watch. The dog was thin, not starving, but hanging on.
"Should we help it?" Raven asked cautiously.
"I don't know if we can. I think it's doing better than we are." Owl said.
We watched the poodle for several minutes as it scrounged litte bits and peices of things it was willing to eat out of the piles of garbage and wolfed them down hungrilly. Then we heard the sound of something big moving through the garbage, the weird sound of styrofoam on aluminum as large legs pushed through piles of waste. A skinny faced woman in a heavy ill fitting man's winter coat pushed over the pile of garbage and looked around. I recognised her as coming from Sumter's ridge, but didn't know her name. She spotted the poodle, and called to it. The dog looked up warilly and cautiously wagged its tail. The woman reached into her coat and pulled out a small revolver pistol. She brought the gun up, held it with both hands and fired, and then fired again.
Raven gasped and covered her mouth.
Both shots hit the poodle in the face and the dog twisted horribly before falling to the ground in a heap. The woman waded through the garbage to the dog. She pulled out a skinning knife and began to dress and clean the dog right where it fell.
I could see Raven was crying.
"Let's go," Wolf said sourly, "It's kind of obvious that nobody is doing better than anybody else right now."
Once we were well away from the dump, Raven spoke.
"I can't do this on my own. Even with you guys, you're great, but we need sombody else to help or we're going to end up like that poor poodle, or that poor cow, or that guy with the pick axe in his tummy. We need somebody. We lost Mildred. Who else can we turn to?"
I noticed that Wolf was shivering. I looked a little closer, he was breathing really quickly too. He looked really pale too, now that I was looking him carefully.
"Wolf are you okay?" I asked.
"I don't know. Are you okay? Wait. If I don't no, then does that mean yes?" Wolf shook his head.
Owl looked over at Wolf, "You sound drunk." he said slowly.
"I don't, dad would murder me more than usual. I'm just tired. Maybe a little spaced out." He shook his head again, as though trying to clear it.
Owl looked closer, and then he turned to Raven and Viper, "You guys have first-aid training. Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
Raven nodded.
Viper added, "Hypothermia, your mom called it with him not wearing a coat."
"It looks pretty mild, even though he's loopy. Everything else says he's still in the first stages." Raven said
"That makes it sound like I'm losing a video game." Wolf said.
"Since its mild, we should just use his own body heat." Raven said.
"So let's get him out of his wet shirt, and get him into something warm and dry." Viper said.
"Can we get him to the cabin?" Raven asked.
"We're closer to town, let's find an empty home and raid it for clothes." Owl suggested.
"Now we're stealing." Viper said flatly.
"This is Wolf. Yes, we're stealing. friends trump stuff." I said.
We ended up using Mrs. Giller's house. She had left a window open on the second floor, propped open with a copy of 'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire'. I boosted Owl up to her balconey and from there he squirmed in through the window. From there he was able to unlock the back door and let us in.
Wolf was a little spacey, but he wasn't delirious or antyhing. His shirt was the only thing that was wet, probably from the snow that fell on him earlier. We dug out a t-shirt that wasn't pink for him to wear, which took a while. In the end Wolf had to settle for a powder blue shirt with a pile of cartoon kittens on the front. From their we stuffed him in a knitted sweater with a floral design that was mostly brown. And we followed that up by wrapping him in Mrs. Giller's housecoat because none of her jackets would fit him.
The house was as cold as the outside, but there wasn't any wind and we were dry. So we rested here for a bit while Wolf warmed back up. The whole thing had been a draining experience at the end of a draining ordeal and we were pretty much run dry.
"That was weird." Wolf said at last. "It felt like part of me was dying."
"Hey." I said, "That's kind of the point, isn't it? This is not about who we were. We aren't those people anymore, they died. The town we knew is gone- it died, our parents are strangers to us. We aren't who we were. We're something new."
“We don't know enough yet. Owl, you know a lot about this stuff, but what do we do when everything's broken?”
“I don’t know.”
"Of course we don't. Batman trained his whole life to be Batman. We're a little behind in our homework here." Wolf said.
“We haven't become adults yet. We aren't warriors. We need adults to help us, to teach us. We need somebody that we can trust.”
“we don’t need adults. We need elders.”
“I don’t trust anybody trying to do the same old thing anymore.” Viper said quietly.
“We don't have elders anymore, do we?”
“We have Mildred.”
“She’s gone.”
"Gone Obi-won Kenobi style. And you know, what I think. I think that if Mildred Sanger is going to go all Obi-Won Kenobi, then we kind of owe it to her to go all Rebel Alliance on Them." I added.
“Okay, but how do we do that? We don’t exactly have much to work with here. We can’t even get by on our own.”
"You need to be like Batman here, not Superman. You don't have the super powers to be the good guy. Only people way stronger than the villains can afford to play fair when the bad guys don't." Wolf said to Owl.
“Maybe we can find somebody on our side. Most people are trying to get along as best they can. But I bet a lot of people disagree with what’s happening. Professor Tuttle tried to warn us about all of this stuff in his lessons. Maybe he can help us. Be our Yoda, now that Mildred is gone.”
“It’s worth a try. I don’t know who else to turn to at this point.”
Viper shook her head, “I don’t think we should turn to anybody. That was whole point. Adults are useless.”
“Yeah, but so are we until we can manage on our own.”
“Okay, fine. But I have a bad feeling about this. And so if we're going to see an adult, we should hide our equipment first."
"There's a lack of trust."
"I don't lack trust, I just trust him to act like all the other adults we've seen."
We trudged through slush and gravel towards Professor Tuttle's house. The Professor lived in a big old house that had belonged to the Professor's father. Professor Tuttle had inherited it a few years back when his father passed away after struggling with throat cancer for years. Before that, Professor Tuttle lived in basement suite of the house and paid his father rent. Now the whole house was the Professor's.
We approached cautiously and tried to ring the doorbell. A lot of places had no electricity these days. But the bell rang, clearly Professor Tuttle's power was till on.
Professor Tuttle answered the door, and looked at us in confusion for a moment before regaining his composure.
"I'm sorry. I didnt't expect to see any of my students on their own recognizance these days. How can I help you?"
"We need advice." Raven said.
"We need guidance." Owl added.
"We need a clue." Wolf finished.
"I suspect you also need a decent meal. Come in, I'll get you something and we can eat while you explain what you need from me."
He ushered us in. I noticed how warm Tuttle's house was compared to the relocation center. He sat us down in his living room, in chairs that were really old grandfather type chairs, and went into the other room. We waited nervously while he clattered around in the other room. He seemed to take a long time, but it was hard to tell. the professor's comment about food had reminded me how hungry I was. And hearing him rattle around making food was making my stomache ache with hunger.
He finally came back with bowls of chicken vegetable soup. It was clearly instant soup from a can, but it smelled amazing, and all of us devoured it.
Professor Tuttle waited while we ate, with a sad patient smile on his face. When we finished, he cleared away the bowls and sat back down.
"All right. Now, since you aren't in the relocation center, and since I know that you were assigned to the center; I assume that you are AWOL and attempting to manage on your own. Is this correct?"
Owl nodded.
"Everything's broken and we need another way. We were hoping you could help."
Professor Tuttle furrowed his brow.
"What do you mean?" He asked.
"All your spider web lines have broken down. Haven't they? The crisis that Mr. Wolf was warning us about has broken everything, because people panicked and did the wrong things and the wrong times. Right?" I said.
After a moment's pause, he nodded.
Viper continued, "And without your spiderwebs connecting everyone who makes stuff with the people who buy it and the people get the material used to make stuff, everything breaks down. No more life the way we know it. No more white picket fences and two car garages."
The Professor was silent, but nodded again.
"My dad and Mrs. Winter have stockpiled a bunch of food and supplies and stuff, but they didn't get enough before things fell apart, and they're running out early I think." Wolf said.
The Professor was still silent.
Raven continued, "And people don't know how to live together without that, so everyone is fighting, and trying to control things and nobody seems to know what to do. And we don't see how any of this is going to work, or how it will do anything except let everyone die really slowly."
"And?" Professor Tuttle quietly.
"And Mrs. Winter seems to be planning to use Mr. Wolf's army to make sure that the people who starve first are the ones that she doesn't like. And I guess she wants to build her own little country to rule with the people who are left over. Only I'm not sure that she can pull it off." Viper said.
"And so we need another way. We've tried doing this on our own, but we don't know enough yet. The animals are all gone or been hunted by other people," I added, "So we need advice on how to get through, because we aren't sure what to do. All of options seem like bad ones."
Professor Tuttle was quiet for a long time, and finally, when he spoke, he asked, "How do you know that the method being used by your parents and teachers and the other adults won't work?"
"Because my mother is dead. Raven's parents are locked up. Rabbit's mom feels blackmailed into what she's doing. Everyone on the Town Council who disagreed was either locked up, or disappeared in an avalanche." Owl said.
"This is like something out a 'The Empire Strikes back'," I said.
Professor Tuttle nodded.
"And where's the value in looking for another way? So what, in other words?"
Viper took a deep breath.
"The old way isn't working. So we need a new way."
"You are, of course, correct." Professor Tuttle said, "What you are missing, and it's only one thing- so don't take it too hard- is that this is the new way. It isn't pleasant, of course, but it is a reality."
"So you think we should just go back to the relocation center then?" Raven's voice had raised a little.
There was a heavy knock at the door. And then a voice said, "Council Authority, we're coming in. Do not attempt to run."
Professor Tuttle nodded again.
"Yes, that's exactly what I think."
"You sold us out." Viper said in disbelief.
Heavy men in ballistic armor and face plates marched into the room.
"Well done sir, excellent job keeping them here until we could arrive. We'll take them back to the center now. They shouldn't be any trouble in the future."
"Professor, what's the point in teaching us to think, to set our minds free, if you're going to help put the rest of us in cages?" Viper said, her voice cracking in outrage.
"The Castle walls do not hold, if the stones are removed from their places." Professor Tuttle said, but he wouldn't look at us when he spoke.
"Hey Professor. How do you know that they won't lock you up once you aren't useful to them anymore? It's not like Mr. Wolf trusts people who think too much."
They marched us back to the Community Center, where Mrs. Winter stood waiting for us. Mrs. Winter looked at us three, mostly at Owl, who appeared to be trying to staring her down.
“What you are doing is criminal. If we are going to preserve human life, we must maintain structure and order.”
Owl shook her head, “Structure and order are code words for dying slowly. I do okay in math and I can see that there are only so many containers of rice in the warehouse. And I can see that no more food is coming in. And I can see that every day, the people that stay here get less and less to eat. Your structure and your order are just there so we can can starve all neat and tidy. Screw you and your goon brigade Mrs. Winter. Adults are worthless if this is the best they can come up with, I'd rather go wild than die tame.”
Mrs. Winter shook her head and one of Them reached out a long arm to grasp Owl by his collar, “Order will be maintained whether you like it or not. Disciplinary action will be a reduction of rations to one third general levels for a period of three weeks.”
Mrs. Winter paused and then continued.
"I know you snuck out during the disturbance created by the late Mildred Sanger. I suspect that may have even been planned to do so. As a result, I think it's only just that you have a look at the human cost of the disturbance that you hid behind."
Mrs. Winter had four of Them lead us into a large unheated annex build behind the ice rink. The inside was unheated, and bitter cold, and lined up on mismatched tables that looked stolen from people's living rooms were about twenty corpses. Raven coughed and then doubled over and retched. We helped her up. They seemed oblivious to Raven's pain, they just waited until she straightened and then ushered us through the room to a table at the back. We passed the corpses of several people I recognized, including Viper's grandmother. Viper saw it and cried out. She buried herself in Owl's chest and began crying. Owl held her and again They waited without a word. When Viper managed to pull herself together, They pushed us forward again. On the table in the back of the room was Mildred Sanger's Corpse.
In September, I had never seen a dead body, and now I had seen dozens. The first was Owl's Mom and I didn't like how close together these two occurrences sat in the story of my life so far. I had the sudden sense that I would be getting far more practice staring at dead bodies than I ever expected to get.
The first thing I noticed is that everything became hyper real and unreal at the same time. I was staring at Mildred's face and it stood out in microscopic detail while everything around me warped and defocused.
Mildred's eyes were closed. I had, for some reason, expected them to be open. I think I had seen a lot of movies where the hero had to close the victim's eyelids. I noticed that her grey hair was wet, as though it had been washed, and was laid strangely- as though the hair were being positioned to hide something. The strangest thing was her skin color. Her skin was grey, she looked like a black and white photo that somebody had been trying to colorize, but hadn't quite finished. The color was devastating. The grey said, more than anything else- this is not a person anymore. The color told me that this is a body, decaying on a table. And from the color of her skin alone I knew, there was nothing left of the person I had known and depended upon for answers.
Mildred wasn't just dead. She was gone.
We marched like zombies back to the main seating area, and sat down.
"I'm used up." Owl said. Viper nodded, and I found myself nodding along with them.
"We tried everything. And people have died for us, and none of it helped. And none of it mattered. We can't recognise the town now. Would anyone call this place Safehope anymore. What's left?"
Viper said, "Everyone who ever helped us is either missing, broken, or dead- or has already betrayed us. We're alone. We're kids. We've got nothing left to try."
I added, "I don't know who my mom is anymore. We don't know where Raven's parents are. Viper's parents are even weirder than they were, and we can't trust them. Owl's dad is still broken, and his Mom...And Wolf's dad, well what do we do when the world is like this?"
We were silent for a minute or so, soaking in our grief and misery as though it were a swimming pool. And then Raven stood up.
"I'm used up too." She said, "I don't know what's happened to my mom and my dad. They were good people and they were trying to save us from the adults, and they were even trying to save the adults. But they lost. And Mildred was trying to save us too. And she's, she's gone. She's dead. And we still ended up back here. And Owl's mom is dead, trying to get food for us kids. And so I don't care if I think I'm used up. Mildred got used up. Owl's mom got used up. That's what used up really is. We only think we're used up."
"This is pretty harsh buds." Wolf said from sidelines.
"It's only harsh if we stop." Raven said, her voice actually sounded angry- which was new for Raven, "Right now I don't know who else is fighting their fight. My parents, Owl's mom, Mildred, they fought for us and our future, and if we stop fighting then everything they did was pointless. I don't care if we think we're used up, we owe it to them to try as hard as they did. I'm not done until I'm talking to Mildred Sanger again. I'm not done until they stop me."
“How many people have died because of us? Russell? My mom? Mildred? I don’t feel like I’m worth that many people dying?”
“No,” Raven said firmly, standing up as she continued to speak, “This does not end here. We have lost too much, had too many sacrifices and too much pain to stop here. Every person who’s died, whether for you or me or us or just for the idea that people could still be good to each other, is our responsibility.”
“What are you talking about? That’s not fair?”
“I never said it was fair. But if we stop, if we decide that this is all too much, then Mildred died for no reason. Then Frisk died protecting nobody. Then your Mom died fighting for nobody. Then we lost Russell and his family for no reason. The Bart got beaten up, and my parents disappeared all for no reason.”
“Oh come on!” Owl said.
“No! You will listen right now! Because, I! Am! talking!” Raven, and Owl’s eye’s widened and he sat down, “I don’t know where my parents are. And the reason I don’t know is because they tried to make this right. I don’t know if they are alive or dead, if they are okay or starving worse than the people here!”
“But that’s my point it's too much.” Owl said weakly.
“Then if it's too much, we can fail. We can die or get dragged away like Bart and my parents. But we do not quit. That’s what we owe everyone else who has either died or been punished up till now. We don’t stop, we don’t fall apart. We stand together and if we fall- then we fall fighting. I will not give up, when my parents never did. I will not give up after what Mildred did for us.”
“But it didn’t work. We failed.”
“We lost a battle. One battle. We are not done until we can’t get back up. And I am not going to let any member of the only family I have left decide not to get back up and fight when I know they could. So I don’t care how much it hurts. You still have your dad, I may not have either- so you will drag your butt up and stand with us and get back in the fight. You know how to do the stuff we need. More than anyone else amongst us, you know what we need- so get up and man up and let’s get going.”
“Well, hell.” Wolf said, “After that, I’m not backing out. Let’s go die like heroes.”
“I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. I watched my mom compromise until there wasn’t anything left of what she wasn’t trying to protect. So yeah, to the death if we have to.”
"You can't see the whole until you break it up, and then its gone. You only know it when you've lost it."
Owl was standing in the darkest part of the room and the shadows seemed to swallow him whole and make him a part of them.
"The master loves the good slave. But what makes us good? The master wants us to obey and behave, and the master says that this is good. Well, I aim to misbehave. Because a good slave is a poor human being."
"You aren't making a lot of sense Owl."
"Mrs. Sanger died standing up and being free. My mom died trying to stay free. But more than that, I think they both died trying to keep us kids free. And I think that we owe them our best efforts on subject. I'm tired of being a little boy and I'm tired of being helpless. The only people that helps is the people who want to be in charge. I think it's time to be free."
Sparrow had walked up beside us. He tapped Owl on the shoulder, "So, what are you in for?"
"Thinking like a hero." Owl answered.
"Oo, good answer."
“No, not good enough!” Hawk said, striding towards Owl.
“You know,” Owl said, “I'm starting to associate your voice with immanent doom.”
“You'd better! Our town is dead, your mother is dead and your dog is dead. And we're all probably next. And there is no hope and nothing left to fight for or believe in!" Hawk had grabbed Owl by his shirt and was shaking him.
I could see Wolf tense up- his hands closing into fists- about to intervene, when a low growl intervened first.
Hawk froze mid shake. Owl's mouth dropped open in startled recognition and he looked around wildly.
Finally his gaze settled on a folding table with a plastic table cloth. Crouched ono his belly with his fangs barred, Frisk was glaring out from under the table at Hawk.
There was a moment like a note held in the middle of a song, where time seemed to stop. Owl eye's shone like he was about to cry, although he didn't. I couldn't tell if anyone was speaking, but everything seemed really quiet. Time hung there, floating slowly around Owl. And then he grabbed Hawk's hands, pulled free of her grip and ran over to the table and knelt in front of his dog.
The fangs vanished and Frisk's tongue hung out in joy, and his butt wiggled in excitement and Owl scratched behind the terrier's ears. Frisk vibrated with obvious joy at Owl's presence and squirmed and wiggled in delight as Owl rubbed his belly and scratched his ears and back. But to Frisk's credit, he didn't sit up or leave the safety of the table and its concealing table cloth.
Nobody said anything. For all I knew, Frisk was the only non-guard dog left alive in town. That he was still alive, somehow alive, seemed like a miracle, a gift from a universe that I would have previously called mean and nasty. Nobody spoke. Nobody wanted to jinx things, nobody wanted to get the miracle dog caught and killed.
In the midst of so much awful stuff, we had found a delicate fragile miracle, and we had to protect it.
Owl stood up.
"My mother is dead. My teacher is dead. My town may even be dead. But my dog is alive. And I am alive and you are alive and we are all alive. My mother died fighting. My teacher died fighting. If I'm going to die, I want to die fighting. If I'm going to live, I want to live the same way.”
Nobody spoke. Frisk's survival seemed to have granted Owl the right to speak uninterrupted.
“You can do what you like. I've got a fight to pick."
Helter Skelter
Okay boys and girls, and gentlemen and ladies, this is where any timid readers who've pushed on should stop now and go no further.
At this point you can pretend that the national guard stepped in. You can pretend that the outside world still had the resources to provide emergency relief and reinstate a normal world of rules and laws and safe living rooms where nobody else has to die in a food riot.
Anyone who isn't one of us should really put this book back, you know we're looking for you right now.
This is the point where we step past the point of no return. This is the point where any chance at a happy ending, as they show up in children's books and films, vanishes forever. This is where anyone from a happier world should stop and go no further.
Tell yourself whatever lies you want about what happened in Safehope Bluff. Pretend I'm lying to you. Pretend I don't know what I'm talking about. But whatever you do, don't keep reading if you can't handle a world where people don't ride in on white horses to save children from unhappy endings.
You think 'Old Yeller' is traumatizing to children? You think they should never have killed Optimus Prime in the animated 'Transformers' Movie? You think 'Bridge to Terabithia' went a little bit too far? Was it too much for you when Dumbledore bit the dust?
You haven't seen anything yet. Stop reading.
Only warriors should step beyond this point.
You have been warned.
* * *
Bart’s capture had shaken us. My mom hadn’t done anything, just stood by and watched while Mr. Wolf beat Bart like a dog. Everything felt unsafe. The death of Owl’s mom could have blamed on heat of the moment and losing control of the situation. But now I didn’t think so. The leadership obviously felt that this was okay. Mr. Wolf had brutalized Bart because he was the the focus of Mr. Wolf’s anger. This left us all feeling cold and unsafe. We knew they didn’t have enough food. We knew Mrs. Winter didn’t have a problem with letting people she didn’t like starve. We knew Mr. Wolf was happy to assault anybody he didn’t like. We knew that Raven’s parents hadn’t been seen since the protest. We knew that all the town council members who had objected were likewise gone, disappeared. Any business that disagreed had been used as a storage facility, the businesses own supplies confiscated. We had watched all of this happen, little by little. But seeing Bart bleeding in front of us seemed to bring it all into focus.
And so after Bart was captured we went back to our Obi-won in Mildred Sanger to ask for advice. It's funny, but Mildred was one of the last people assigned a bed. She came in after my own family. I still don't know how she managed that. But once she arrived we were able to rely up here and that lifted our spirits a little.
“Magic is creating through will alone. Taking thought and making it action.” Mildred said, as we spoke off from the main area on metal folding chairs.
“I showed you Tarot cards and I told you that magic is something that you understand that others do not. That is true, magic is a shapeshifting word. Magic is many things. In the sense that I currently am using it. Magic is created change through meaning.”
“Okay, but what does that mean?” Viper asked.
“Do you remember the story of Brave Young Man and Corn Lady.” She asked.
“It's pretty hard to forget. Especially looking at everything that's happened.” Viper answered.
“In other words, you see meaning and parallel between the story and your current situation? How did that happen? This was a fairy tale. This was a story that I told you outright had never happened. And yet it has helped transform your understanding of the situation compared to those of the other people in this building. How could a simple piece of fiction do that?”
“Well the story showed us another way to interpret what we were experiencing.” Raven said.
“Magic is creating change through meaning. You have a new story that you have made yours. That story is part of how you understand the world and your place in it, and it has made you different. I wrote many such stories, although I was not allowed to retrieve them when I was forced to vacate my house, so I do not have them here to share. But such stories are key to changing the game that you play.”
“My dad told me that tribes are a different game from the game everyone's playing right now.” Owl added.
“You father is quite correct. Tribes are a different game, or more correctly, they play different games and the tell different stories. And not just different stories, tribes tell different types of stories. And the stories that they tell are what make the games that they play different. Different fairy tales produce different adults, eventually. Magic. The thing about tribes is that they need to be free, that is why they do not survive captivity- their stories and games do not function and cannot be played in captivity, whether a community center gymnasium or a reservation.”
"Well.” Raven ventured, "Bruce Lee always said to be like water."
"You mean wet and miserable?" Viper asked.
"He meant that we should be patient when trapped and flow throw any available opening." Raven answered. “I'm we wait until we see an opening and then take advantage of it.
“And do what?” Viper asked, “I mean, seriously, at this point what can we do?”
“My dad says that we should run away. He's told me three times now. I'm starting to think he's right. Maybe we can play a new game if we can get away.”
Wolf shook his head, “That's a big freaking scary idea there bud. Seriously? Walk away and never come back? That's your idea?”
I though about my mother with her silence and Mr. Wolf with his bloody nightstick.
“I think I would prefer that to this.” I said.
“Okay,” Raven said carefully, “But we aren't a tribe, not really, not yet. Even if we all agreed that this was the best option, we don't know how to live like a tribe, we don't know how to turn ourselves into one. I mean where on earth would we start?”
“Well, didn't you just say that they story about the Brave Young Man and the Corn Lady is part ofbeing a tribe,” Owl said to Mildred, “What if we started with that? What would we do next?”
“I don't have an easy answer for you, I'm afraid.” Mildred Sanger said quietly, “This is the work of the Witch Doctor, the Lonely Hero who comes with storm and has no home.”
“When it comes time for somebody to do the thing that nobody else has the fortitude to do, you will find yourself possessed by an outrage so deep that something is reborn within you, something ancient and powerful, and you will find that a ghostly force guides your hand. But never try to master it, for there is no victory for the Master.”
Viper shook her head, “Mrs. Sanger, are you saying that ghosts are real? Are you saying that a ghost will actually possess one of us?”
“You decide if ghosts are real or not. I will not say yes or no for you. I am saying that you should listen to the moving of forces grander and older than either you, your parents, or the civilization now decaying around us. I am saying nothing more than this, listen to what was here first.”
"There are many things that are useful, without necessarily being true. A fairy tale can be useful to teach a lesson. A myth or fable can encapsulate the broad strokes of a historical event even if it uses metaphors and is largely a fabrication in itself. Explanations of how to perceive the world, spirits in the earth, souls and things- need not be true to be useful."
"So it doesn't matter if magic is real or not?" Viper asked.
"That's not the point. Magic means different things to different people. But each belief, whether in ghosts, or psychics or ancient stories, can be measured both by whether it is true and by whether it is useful. And certainly it does matter if something is true. But something can be untrue factually, while still being useful for other reasons. And then it does matter, you need to remember that no matter how useful a belief may be, that doesn't make it true."
Mildred never liked to talk where other people could intrude. And so we had been meeting out of the way and hidden behind a pile of boxes labelled as soap. As we were finishing our conversation, we heard a door open on the other side of the wall of the boxes. I don't think we would have taken much note, if it weren't for the fact that the footsteps that followed were accompanied by the sound of rubber dragging across tile, a quiet squeaking of two shoes being pulled.
We turned and moved over to peer over and around the boxes. On the other side we could see Mrs. Winter and two of Them, holding the semi-conscious form of Bart.
“You are an agent of the enemy.” Mrs. Winter said to Bart as her guards held his limp form, “Your disinformation has made my job more difficult at every turn. You have disrupted our ability to control the message. You have challenged our authority. And I will not tolerate it any longer. My associates believe that you can be used as an example to show people how we can bring anybody in line. But I suspect that this will merely allow you one last chance to oppose me by becoming a martyr. I'm not going to allow you to become a martyr. You are simply going to vanish. And, in time, you will be forgotten.”
“People. Will wonder. I'm too loud. Will be missed.” Bart wheezed out throw split lips.
“Oh I don't agree. This is quite a crisis and if a few people go missing in the crisis, that's just what we call casualties and missing persons. Come spring all people will remember is that they have made it through and that they owe that and their continued survival to the new council. We'll need to come up with a new name. Interim is so, temporary sounding. And if people do wonder about your fate, it won't matter. They will depend upon us for food and protection and thus their loyalty will be assured. You've lost. I've won.”
“You can't. Kill ideas.”
“Perhaps not directly,” Mrs. Winter said, “But ideas only survive in a very particular environment, the human mind. And although I may not be able to kill an idea; I can certainly kill a human.”
She held out her hand, and the guard on her right placed a large straight bladed military style knife in her hand. She grabbed Bart's hair and pulled his head back, exposing his neck.
“Now. We know. Who the villain. Is.” Bart managed, and then Mrs. Winter thrust the knife into Bart throat and then quickly turned it and drew the blade upward and under the chin line. Blood spurted across Mrs. Winter's shoulder, some spattering across her sky blue blazer.
We pulled ourselves back around the boxes in horror.
“She can't do that!” Raven whispered.
“She did.” Wolf said.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
“We run.” Viper said, “Like Owl's dad said we should. We get out of here. Anywhere is better than here.”
We were whispering. But we clearly weren't quiet enough.
“Do you hear that?” Mrs. Winter said from the other side of the boxes.
“No ma'am.”
“I heard something. Clean this up and get rid of it. You with me, we're making certain there are no loose ends.”
Mildred looked at us, and then looked around the room. She pointed to a set of boxes where we could see a space large enough to squeeze through and hide.
“Go. I can buy time for you to escape. Make a new way, find a new game, a new story. Make me proud.”
There wasn't time to argue. We could here the sound of Bart's body being dragged away. And then the sound of two sets of footprints moving slowly towards our position. As we turned to run, Mildred said to Raven.
"Remember, hope is like a fire. Don't let it go out. Even dying embers can become a fire again if they are fed."
Raven nodded. And then we ran. Behind us I could hear footsteps approaching and then Mrs. Winter's voice.
“What is this, Mildred?”
“Call it a protest. I know you don't like that word Helen, but I don't have another for you I'm afraid.”
“A protest against what Mildred? Us keeping this town alive for so long?”
“A protest against your methods. That's quite a stain you've got on your jacket.” Mildred said, “I certainly wouldn't call you a people person at this point.”
"People will let you down if you let them. Control is safety. Give people a free hand and they will hurt you and break the rules and make everything fall apart. And so I need control. When my father walked out, I learned a lesson in human nature. And so now I know what people are really like. Everything will end up looking right- like it did in the old days." Mrs. Winters continued talking as she turned away from Mildred and back towards our position.
"These days, everyone assumes that Summer is just to make the story work," Milderd Sanger said, "But of course it might actually be a nickname."
Mrs. Winter froze in her tracks and turned back to face Mrs. Sanger.
"Explain yourself Mildred." Mrs. Winter said.
"You know the joke Helen. Winter froze her husband into Summer's bed. Did you think that people made the joke just because summer is warm compared to winter's snow and ice? Didn't you think that maybe the word summer was in some way descriptive of your husband's lover?"
As we moved along silently, I could hear them talking although I could no longer see them.
"How would it describe his lover Mildred?"
"Who was the town hippie, Helen?"
"You were Mildred. I don't like where you are going with this."
"People so rarely like the truth. Lies are fair more convenient. Far more useful. So Helen, what did hippies take part in?"
"You're going to have to tell me Mildred."
"The summer of love maybe?"
"And of course, therefore my husband might have nicknamed his lover 'Summer', because she- you- were the only hippie in town."
"I loved Gerard. Deeply. I didn't think much of marriage as a convention then, and I was so much less respectful of other people as a young woman. That said, he was miserable with you and he was happy with me. And then he was gone. What did you do to him Helen? Mmmm."
"You did everything! I did nothing! You stole him and I took him back!"
I heard a sharp heavy sound and heard Mildred Sanger gasp. Then I heard the sound of something hitting the ground and Mildred Sanger groaned in pain.
"I tracked him down and I took him home. He'll never leave me now."
"So," Mildred said slowly, "The ice boils at last Helen."
Once we were out of that room, nobody was watching and we crept along in the other direction. Before too long we were out of the building and running through the parking lot towards the shelter of the alleyways and their shadows.
“I hope Mildred is okay.” Raven said.
“They're going to put her under house arrest like they did your parents. They might even kill her, like they did Bart. She's out for the count. This was her last move on our behalf.” Owl said.
“I hope my parents are okay too.” Raven said quietly.
“We all do,” Viper said, “I think Owl just means that we count count on them for support. We're on our own now. He's just a dork about how he says it.”
Owl didn't look up as he spoke, “I need some supplies from my house."
"Nothing is going to be there. They've cleaned out all the houses after they send us to the relocation center."
"They did, but they didn't look really hard. I think they felt guilty about one of Them shooting my mom. And I know Mr. Wolf kind of feels some kind of loyalty or gratitude or something to my dad for that deer he brought over way back when. So there's a bunch of hidden things in my house that I want to grab."
We headed to Owl's house. The first thing I noticed when we arrived was that the windows were boarded up and so was the front door. The old pickup truck was missing from the drive way. I guess that They had decided they needed another truck.
"They took all the stuff that Mom and I hadn't hidden, and pretty much all the big hidden stuff as well. So there won't be much left, but we can use what is left.
As we walked up, Owl reflexively checked the birdhouse. And as he did, a note fell out, and landed in the snow. Owl stared at it, as though it were an unexploded grenade.
We all looked at the paper, and finally Raven snatched it up. "It's going to get damp in the snow." She admonished.
Raven handed Owl the note, and Owl stared at it for a long time before opening it.
"Well what does it say?" Viper asked.
"It's from the day she was shot." Owl said, trembling, "It looks like she wrote it right before she went out."
"Well? What does it say?"
"Hey kid, things are getting crazy and we need to make sure certain people understand that they aren't kings and queens to rule over the rest of us." Owl stumbled a little here.
"Doesn't that sound like Mildred?" Viepr asked.
Owl gathered himself and continued, "I don't want you to be scared. Remember that I love you, always. Remember that I'm proud of you."
Owl's voice drained away as he tried to keep reading, and Viper leaned in and put her arm around him.
"I'll see you in time for dinner. Love Mom." He finished haltingly.
The woods were really eerie as we walked through them. Owl was in the lead and the big difference was how quiet things were. We'd never had problems seeing animals in the woods before this, even in the winter. BUt there was nothing. The woods were silent as a graveyard.
We wandered for several hours, finally hitting a fence that marked one of the cattle fields for a farm on Sumter's Ridge. Owl climbed over it, and the rest of us followed. I think Owl was planning to kill a cow for meat. Wolf went over last and got caught on the barbed wire. He wrenched himself free and the old wooden posts of the fence shook with the force of it, The post knocked against a red cedar tree next to is and a huge dump of snow landed on Wolf. He laughed and shook himself clean, brushing off what stuck.
As we entered the field, we discovered that we weren't the first people to think that. The field was almost empty. Most of the snow had been stamped down to brown mush. Around the field were sporadic red spattered stains on the earth. Big red patches amidst the white and brown. And in one corner, was a cow carcass. The cow had been partially skinned and dressed, but not completely. Animals had got to carcass now, and had eaten the meat off the bones and the organs out of the exposed torso of the animal.
"Why didn't whoever killed it, finish skinning it and cutting it up?" Wolf asked, confusion apparent in his voice.
We moved closer, but everyone was on edge, so we moved slowly. As we got close enough to see around the carcass we saw the body of a man lifeless in a bank of crimson snow, with a pick axe rammed through his midsection. He was dressed in red flannel, which helped hide the gore, but it wasn't pretty to look at either way. The animals had been eating his corpse as well. There wasn't much in the way of skin or meat on the body and more than one creature had made an attempt at tearing open the heavy corduroy pants the corpse was wearing to get at the meat on the legs. The corpse looked as those it had been nibbled apart by thousands of sets of tiny jaws with tiny teeth. Kind of how I imagined that piranhas would eat.
I turned away. Wolf put a hand on my shoulder, "Bud, don't look away. Not looking is what got us all into this mess."
"there's not much left to hunt, I guess." Raven said, "It makes sense. If I was an animal, I'd stay away from here too."
"Maybe they've mostly just over hunted this area. Maybe there isn't anything left to stay away."
"That's not good for anyone if it's true."
"When has anything that we've learned in the last few months been good for anyone?"
We stalked around the woods for several hours, but didn't see anything larger than a chickadee. Owl was looking more and more defeated the longer we hunted and saw nothing. When we finally gave up and headed for town, Owl looked like a helium balloon a week after the party- crumbled and deflated.
As we swung around towards our hide out, we got close to the town dump. As we passed by the dump, Raven noticed a stray dog- some sort of poodle breed- nosing around in the piles of garage for food. We stopped for a moment to watch. The dog was thin, not starving, but hanging on.
"Should we help it?" Raven asked cautiously.
"I don't know if we can. I think it's doing better than we are." Owl said.
We watched the poodle for several minutes as it scrounged litte bits and peices of things it was willing to eat out of the piles of garbage and wolfed them down hungrilly. Then we heard the sound of something big moving through the garbage, the weird sound of styrofoam on aluminum as large legs pushed through piles of waste. A skinny faced woman in a heavy ill fitting man's winter coat pushed over the pile of garbage and looked around. I recognised her as coming from Sumter's ridge, but didn't know her name. She spotted the poodle, and called to it. The dog looked up warilly and cautiously wagged its tail. The woman reached into her coat and pulled out a small revolver pistol. She brought the gun up, held it with both hands and fired, and then fired again.
Raven gasped and covered her mouth.
Both shots hit the poodle in the face and the dog twisted horribly before falling to the ground in a heap. The woman waded through the garbage to the dog. She pulled out a skinning knife and began to dress and clean the dog right where it fell.
I could see Raven was crying.
"Let's go," Wolf said sourly, "It's kind of obvious that nobody is doing better than anybody else right now."
Once we were well away from the dump, Raven spoke.
"I can't do this on my own. Even with you guys, you're great, but we need sombody else to help or we're going to end up like that poor poodle, or that poor cow, or that guy with the pick axe in his tummy. We need somebody. We lost Mildred. Who else can we turn to?"
I noticed that Wolf was shivering. I looked a little closer, he was breathing really quickly too. He looked really pale too, now that I was looking him carefully.
"Wolf are you okay?" I asked.
"I don't know. Are you okay? Wait. If I don't no, then does that mean yes?" Wolf shook his head.
Owl looked over at Wolf, "You sound drunk." he said slowly.
"I don't, dad would murder me more than usual. I'm just tired. Maybe a little spaced out." He shook his head again, as though trying to clear it.
Owl looked closer, and then he turned to Raven and Viper, "You guys have first-aid training. Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
Raven nodded.
Viper added, "Hypothermia, your mom called it with him not wearing a coat."
"It looks pretty mild, even though he's loopy. Everything else says he's still in the first stages." Raven said
"That makes it sound like I'm losing a video game." Wolf said.
"Since its mild, we should just use his own body heat." Raven said.
"So let's get him out of his wet shirt, and get him into something warm and dry." Viper said.
"Can we get him to the cabin?" Raven asked.
"We're closer to town, let's find an empty home and raid it for clothes." Owl suggested.
"Now we're stealing." Viper said flatly.
"This is Wolf. Yes, we're stealing. friends trump stuff." I said.
We ended up using Mrs. Giller's house. She had left a window open on the second floor, propped open with a copy of 'The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire'. I boosted Owl up to her balconey and from there he squirmed in through the window. From there he was able to unlock the back door and let us in.
Wolf was a little spacey, but he wasn't delirious or antyhing. His shirt was the only thing that was wet, probably from the snow that fell on him earlier. We dug out a t-shirt that wasn't pink for him to wear, which took a while. In the end Wolf had to settle for a powder blue shirt with a pile of cartoon kittens on the front. From their we stuffed him in a knitted sweater with a floral design that was mostly brown. And we followed that up by wrapping him in Mrs. Giller's housecoat because none of her jackets would fit him.
The house was as cold as the outside, but there wasn't any wind and we were dry. So we rested here for a bit while Wolf warmed back up. The whole thing had been a draining experience at the end of a draining ordeal and we were pretty much run dry.
"That was weird." Wolf said at last. "It felt like part of me was dying."
"Hey." I said, "That's kind of the point, isn't it? This is not about who we were. We aren't those people anymore, they died. The town we knew is gone- it died, our parents are strangers to us. We aren't who we were. We're something new."
“We don't know enough yet. Owl, you know a lot about this stuff, but what do we do when everything's broken?”
“I don’t know.”
"Of course we don't. Batman trained his whole life to be Batman. We're a little behind in our homework here." Wolf said.
“We haven't become adults yet. We aren't warriors. We need adults to help us, to teach us. We need somebody that we can trust.”
“we don’t need adults. We need elders.”
“I don’t trust anybody trying to do the same old thing anymore.” Viper said quietly.
“We don't have elders anymore, do we?”
“We have Mildred.”
“She’s gone.”
"Gone Obi-won Kenobi style. And you know, what I think. I think that if Mildred Sanger is going to go all Obi-Won Kenobi, then we kind of owe it to her to go all Rebel Alliance on Them." I added.
“Okay, but how do we do that? We don’t exactly have much to work with here. We can’t even get by on our own.”
"You need to be like Batman here, not Superman. You don't have the super powers to be the good guy. Only people way stronger than the villains can afford to play fair when the bad guys don't." Wolf said to Owl.
“Maybe we can find somebody on our side. Most people are trying to get along as best they can. But I bet a lot of people disagree with what’s happening. Professor Tuttle tried to warn us about all of this stuff in his lessons. Maybe he can help us. Be our Yoda, now that Mildred is gone.”
“It’s worth a try. I don’t know who else to turn to at this point.”
Viper shook her head, “I don’t think we should turn to anybody. That was whole point. Adults are useless.”
“Yeah, but so are we until we can manage on our own.”
“Okay, fine. But I have a bad feeling about this. And so if we're going to see an adult, we should hide our equipment first."
"There's a lack of trust."
"I don't lack trust, I just trust him to act like all the other adults we've seen."
We trudged through slush and gravel towards Professor Tuttle's house. The Professor lived in a big old house that had belonged to the Professor's father. Professor Tuttle had inherited it a few years back when his father passed away after struggling with throat cancer for years. Before that, Professor Tuttle lived in basement suite of the house and paid his father rent. Now the whole house was the Professor's.
We approached cautiously and tried to ring the doorbell. A lot of places had no electricity these days. But the bell rang, clearly Professor Tuttle's power was till on.
Professor Tuttle answered the door, and looked at us in confusion for a moment before regaining his composure.
"I'm sorry. I didnt't expect to see any of my students on their own recognizance these days. How can I help you?"
"We need advice." Raven said.
"We need guidance." Owl added.
"We need a clue." Wolf finished.
"I suspect you also need a decent meal. Come in, I'll get you something and we can eat while you explain what you need from me."
He ushered us in. I noticed how warm Tuttle's house was compared to the relocation center. He sat us down in his living room, in chairs that were really old grandfather type chairs, and went into the other room. We waited nervously while he clattered around in the other room. He seemed to take a long time, but it was hard to tell. the professor's comment about food had reminded me how hungry I was. And hearing him rattle around making food was making my stomache ache with hunger.
He finally came back with bowls of chicken vegetable soup. It was clearly instant soup from a can, but it smelled amazing, and all of us devoured it.
Professor Tuttle waited while we ate, with a sad patient smile on his face. When we finished, he cleared away the bowls and sat back down.
"All right. Now, since you aren't in the relocation center, and since I know that you were assigned to the center; I assume that you are AWOL and attempting to manage on your own. Is this correct?"
Owl nodded.
"Everything's broken and we need another way. We were hoping you could help."
Professor Tuttle furrowed his brow.
"What do you mean?" He asked.
"All your spider web lines have broken down. Haven't they? The crisis that Mr. Wolf was warning us about has broken everything, because people panicked and did the wrong things and the wrong times. Right?" I said.
After a moment's pause, he nodded.
Viper continued, "And without your spiderwebs connecting everyone who makes stuff with the people who buy it and the people get the material used to make stuff, everything breaks down. No more life the way we know it. No more white picket fences and two car garages."
The Professor was silent, but nodded again.
"My dad and Mrs. Winter have stockpiled a bunch of food and supplies and stuff, but they didn't get enough before things fell apart, and they're running out early I think." Wolf said.
The Professor was still silent.
Raven continued, "And people don't know how to live together without that, so everyone is fighting, and trying to control things and nobody seems to know what to do. And we don't see how any of this is going to work, or how it will do anything except let everyone die really slowly."
"And?" Professor Tuttle quietly.
"And Mrs. Winter seems to be planning to use Mr. Wolf's army to make sure that the people who starve first are the ones that she doesn't like. And I guess she wants to build her own little country to rule with the people who are left over. Only I'm not sure that she can pull it off." Viper said.
"And so we need another way. We've tried doing this on our own, but we don't know enough yet. The animals are all gone or been hunted by other people," I added, "So we need advice on how to get through, because we aren't sure what to do. All of options seem like bad ones."
Professor Tuttle was quiet for a long time, and finally, when he spoke, he asked, "How do you know that the method being used by your parents and teachers and the other adults won't work?"
"Because my mother is dead. Raven's parents are locked up. Rabbit's mom feels blackmailed into what she's doing. Everyone on the Town Council who disagreed was either locked up, or disappeared in an avalanche." Owl said.
"This is like something out a 'The Empire Strikes back'," I said.
Professor Tuttle nodded.
"And where's the value in looking for another way? So what, in other words?"
Viper took a deep breath.
"The old way isn't working. So we need a new way."
"You are, of course, correct." Professor Tuttle said, "What you are missing, and it's only one thing- so don't take it too hard- is that this is the new way. It isn't pleasant, of course, but it is a reality."
"So you think we should just go back to the relocation center then?" Raven's voice had raised a little.
There was a heavy knock at the door. And then a voice said, "Council Authority, we're coming in. Do not attempt to run."
Professor Tuttle nodded again.
"Yes, that's exactly what I think."
"You sold us out." Viper said in disbelief.
Heavy men in ballistic armor and face plates marched into the room.
"Well done sir, excellent job keeping them here until we could arrive. We'll take them back to the center now. They shouldn't be any trouble in the future."
"Professor, what's the point in teaching us to think, to set our minds free, if you're going to help put the rest of us in cages?" Viper said, her voice cracking in outrage.
"The Castle walls do not hold, if the stones are removed from their places." Professor Tuttle said, but he wouldn't look at us when he spoke.
"Hey Professor. How do you know that they won't lock you up once you aren't useful to them anymore? It's not like Mr. Wolf trusts people who think too much."
They marched us back to the Community Center, where Mrs. Winter stood waiting for us. Mrs. Winter looked at us three, mostly at Owl, who appeared to be trying to staring her down.
“What you are doing is criminal. If we are going to preserve human life, we must maintain structure and order.”
Owl shook her head, “Structure and order are code words for dying slowly. I do okay in math and I can see that there are only so many containers of rice in the warehouse. And I can see that no more food is coming in. And I can see that every day, the people that stay here get less and less to eat. Your structure and your order are just there so we can can starve all neat and tidy. Screw you and your goon brigade Mrs. Winter. Adults are worthless if this is the best they can come up with, I'd rather go wild than die tame.”
Mrs. Winter shook her head and one of Them reached out a long arm to grasp Owl by his collar, “Order will be maintained whether you like it or not. Disciplinary action will be a reduction of rations to one third general levels for a period of three weeks.”
Mrs. Winter paused and then continued.
"I know you snuck out during the disturbance created by the late Mildred Sanger. I suspect that may have even been planned to do so. As a result, I think it's only just that you have a look at the human cost of the disturbance that you hid behind."
Mrs. Winter had four of Them lead us into a large unheated annex build behind the ice rink. The inside was unheated, and bitter cold, and lined up on mismatched tables that looked stolen from people's living rooms were about twenty corpses. Raven coughed and then doubled over and retched. We helped her up. They seemed oblivious to Raven's pain, they just waited until she straightened and then ushered us through the room to a table at the back. We passed the corpses of several people I recognized, including Viper's grandmother. Viper saw it and cried out. She buried herself in Owl's chest and began crying. Owl held her and again They waited without a word. When Viper managed to pull herself together, They pushed us forward again. On the table in the back of the room was Mildred Sanger's Corpse.
In September, I had never seen a dead body, and now I had seen dozens. The first was Owl's Mom and I didn't like how close together these two occurrences sat in the story of my life so far. I had the sudden sense that I would be getting far more practice staring at dead bodies than I ever expected to get.
The first thing I noticed is that everything became hyper real and unreal at the same time. I was staring at Mildred's face and it stood out in microscopic detail while everything around me warped and defocused.
Mildred's eyes were closed. I had, for some reason, expected them to be open. I think I had seen a lot of movies where the hero had to close the victim's eyelids. I noticed that her grey hair was wet, as though it had been washed, and was laid strangely- as though the hair were being positioned to hide something. The strangest thing was her skin color. Her skin was grey, she looked like a black and white photo that somebody had been trying to colorize, but hadn't quite finished. The color was devastating. The grey said, more than anything else- this is not a person anymore. The color told me that this is a body, decaying on a table. And from the color of her skin alone I knew, there was nothing left of the person I had known and depended upon for answers.
Mildred wasn't just dead. She was gone.
We marched like zombies back to the main seating area, and sat down.
"I'm used up." Owl said. Viper nodded, and I found myself nodding along with them.
"We tried everything. And people have died for us, and none of it helped. And none of it mattered. We can't recognise the town now. Would anyone call this place Safehope anymore. What's left?"
Viper said, "Everyone who ever helped us is either missing, broken, or dead- or has already betrayed us. We're alone. We're kids. We've got nothing left to try."
I added, "I don't know who my mom is anymore. We don't know where Raven's parents are. Viper's parents are even weirder than they were, and we can't trust them. Owl's dad is still broken, and his Mom...And Wolf's dad, well what do we do when the world is like this?"
We were silent for a minute or so, soaking in our grief and misery as though it were a swimming pool. And then Raven stood up.
"I'm used up too." She said, "I don't know what's happened to my mom and my dad. They were good people and they were trying to save us from the adults, and they were even trying to save the adults. But they lost. And Mildred was trying to save us too. And she's, she's gone. She's dead. And we still ended up back here. And Owl's mom is dead, trying to get food for us kids. And so I don't care if I think I'm used up. Mildred got used up. Owl's mom got used up. That's what used up really is. We only think we're used up."
"This is pretty harsh buds." Wolf said from sidelines.
"It's only harsh if we stop." Raven said, her voice actually sounded angry- which was new for Raven, "Right now I don't know who else is fighting their fight. My parents, Owl's mom, Mildred, they fought for us and our future, and if we stop fighting then everything they did was pointless. I don't care if we think we're used up, we owe it to them to try as hard as they did. I'm not done until I'm talking to Mildred Sanger again. I'm not done until they stop me."
“How many people have died because of us? Russell? My mom? Mildred? I don’t feel like I’m worth that many people dying?”
“No,” Raven said firmly, standing up as she continued to speak, “This does not end here. We have lost too much, had too many sacrifices and too much pain to stop here. Every person who’s died, whether for you or me or us or just for the idea that people could still be good to each other, is our responsibility.”
“What are you talking about? That’s not fair?”
“I never said it was fair. But if we stop, if we decide that this is all too much, then Mildred died for no reason. Then Frisk died protecting nobody. Then your Mom died fighting for nobody. Then we lost Russell and his family for no reason. The Bart got beaten up, and my parents disappeared all for no reason.”
“Oh come on!” Owl said.
“No! You will listen right now! Because, I! Am! talking!” Raven, and Owl’s eye’s widened and he sat down, “I don’t know where my parents are. And the reason I don’t know is because they tried to make this right. I don’t know if they are alive or dead, if they are okay or starving worse than the people here!”
“But that’s my point it's too much.” Owl said weakly.
“Then if it's too much, we can fail. We can die or get dragged away like Bart and my parents. But we do not quit. That’s what we owe everyone else who has either died or been punished up till now. We don’t stop, we don’t fall apart. We stand together and if we fall- then we fall fighting. I will not give up, when my parents never did. I will not give up after what Mildred did for us.”
“But it didn’t work. We failed.”
“We lost a battle. One battle. We are not done until we can’t get back up. And I am not going to let any member of the only family I have left decide not to get back up and fight when I know they could. So I don’t care how much it hurts. You still have your dad, I may not have either- so you will drag your butt up and stand with us and get back in the fight. You know how to do the stuff we need. More than anyone else amongst us, you know what we need- so get up and man up and let’s get going.”
“Well, hell.” Wolf said, “After that, I’m not backing out. Let’s go die like heroes.”
“I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. I watched my mom compromise until there wasn’t anything left of what she wasn’t trying to protect. So yeah, to the death if we have to.”
"You can't see the whole until you break it up, and then its gone. You only know it when you've lost it."
Owl was standing in the darkest part of the room and the shadows seemed to swallow him whole and make him a part of them.
"The master loves the good slave. But what makes us good? The master wants us to obey and behave, and the master says that this is good. Well, I aim to misbehave. Because a good slave is a poor human being."
"You aren't making a lot of sense Owl."
"Mrs. Sanger died standing up and being free. My mom died trying to stay free. But more than that, I think they both died trying to keep us kids free. And I think that we owe them our best efforts on subject. I'm tired of being a little boy and I'm tired of being helpless. The only people that helps is the people who want to be in charge. I think it's time to be free."
Sparrow had walked up beside us. He tapped Owl on the shoulder, "So, what are you in for?"
"Thinking like a hero." Owl answered.
"Oo, good answer."
“No, not good enough!” Hawk said, striding towards Owl.
“You know,” Owl said, “I'm starting to associate your voice with immanent doom.”
“You'd better! Our town is dead, your mother is dead and your dog is dead. And we're all probably next. And there is no hope and nothing left to fight for or believe in!" Hawk had grabbed Owl by his shirt and was shaking him.
I could see Wolf tense up- his hands closing into fists- about to intervene, when a low growl intervened first.
Hawk froze mid shake. Owl's mouth dropped open in startled recognition and he looked around wildly.
Finally his gaze settled on a folding table with a plastic table cloth. Crouched ono his belly with his fangs barred, Frisk was glaring out from under the table at Hawk.
There was a moment like a note held in the middle of a song, where time seemed to stop. Owl eye's shone like he was about to cry, although he didn't. I couldn't tell if anyone was speaking, but everything seemed really quiet. Time hung there, floating slowly around Owl. And then he grabbed Hawk's hands, pulled free of her grip and ran over to the table and knelt in front of his dog.
The fangs vanished and Frisk's tongue hung out in joy, and his butt wiggled in excitement and Owl scratched behind the terrier's ears. Frisk vibrated with obvious joy at Owl's presence and squirmed and wiggled in delight as Owl rubbed his belly and scratched his ears and back. But to Frisk's credit, he didn't sit up or leave the safety of the table and its concealing table cloth.
Nobody said anything. For all I knew, Frisk was the only non-guard dog left alive in town. That he was still alive, somehow alive, seemed like a miracle, a gift from a universe that I would have previously called mean and nasty. Nobody spoke. Nobody wanted to jinx things, nobody wanted to get the miracle dog caught and killed.
In the midst of so much awful stuff, we had found a delicate fragile miracle, and we had to protect it.
Owl stood up.
"My mother is dead. My teacher is dead. My town may even be dead. But my dog is alive. And I am alive and you are alive and we are all alive. My mother died fighting. My teacher died fighting. If I'm going to die, I want to die fighting. If I'm going to live, I want to live the same way.”
Nobody spoke. Frisk's survival seemed to have granted Owl the right to speak uninterrupted.
“You can do what you like. I've got a fight to pick."
Friday, February 12, 2016
Exodus Chapter Twelve
Chapter Twelve
The Wild Hunts
The snow that had begun when Owl's mom died had not stopped. The whole world had disappeared beneath a layer of winter. All sound and movement was muffled or curtailed by the huge drifts of snow. A heavy white net was draped across the whole town and everyone was affected by it.
The only constant sound with the crunch crunch crunch of booted feet pushing through the snow. This was the dead of winter now, and everything was crushed beneath the weight of the season.
I've never lost a parent. I know Wolf lost his mom years ago. But I've never felt it myself and watching Owl go through it was odd, like looking through a window.
Owl had to stay with his dad at the trailer park. Owl didn't want to, but when you're thirteen adults make you do what they want.
They cleaned out Owl's house. Owl got to collect a bunch of stuff and then watch as everything else was loaded into trucks and confiscated by the Provisional Council. They took his mom's hunting rifles and bows and the food they had stored. They took her camping gear and the big containers of stored water. They dug up the root vegetables that she had kept in the ground to help keep them fresh longer and put them with the other stored food supplies.
I helped Owl move his stuff over. His Dad looked really apologetic the whole time.
"I know that this ain't ideal boy. But this is how it is. We should have run. I told you, but I should have done it myself. I didn't, and we didn't and now we've lost her. And so its just us. We got to pull together to get through this."
"Are you going to stay sober?"
"I'm going try for while, and then I ain't gonna have a choice. I don't see anyone making new booze for a while at this point. And with any luck, by the time that hits I'll be dry and can tell the booze I don't need it anymore."
"It's been so long since I've seen you sober, I don't even know if I know what you're like sober."
"I was a lot like you."
"that scares me Dad."
"Scared me too. You can't imagine looking at your son, and seeing him be so much like you, and knowing that you just aren't built to live in the world you got to live in. It's like reading some old time fairy tale where you know everyone is gonna die."
"I do know what it's like dad. Because I watched my dad fall apart, and had to sit there wondering every day if that was what would happen to me."
"Well, now that ain't gonna happen. We have a different problem. We lost your mom, because we weren't able to get a handle on things. We don't have to lose anything else."
“Well,” I ventured quietly. “It isn’t just you guys. Its us too.”
Owl’s Dad looked up, surprised. Like I said, people forget that I’m around, “I forgot you were here. That was rude. What were you saying?”
“I was saying it isn’t just the two of you. Before things got bad, a friend of ours, well more of a, well, somebody we listen to, said that we were a warrior tribe. The six of us, I mean. And now Russell is gone, and your mom is gone and nothing is like it was before. But we’re still here, and you know. If we ever needed to be a warrior tribe, we kind of need to be a warrior tribe now.”
Owl's father shook his head, “Big city folks don't take too kindly to tribes. They run different, you know. They're like a different game altogether.”
Both Owl and I looked up surprise.
“What do you mean dad?” Owl asked, “How are they a different game?”
“Everything they do is different. Tribes use a different rule book and play a different game. They operate on a smaller scale you know? A human scale, one hundred to two hundred people. Even a little town like Safehope Bluff is too big to be a tribe, its full of lots of little groups about the same size a tribe would be. And because they're all human sized they got a tribal loyalty- like the union boys do. But size is only part of being a tribe.”
“Tribes have a really interesting rule- I don't know that its official anywhere, but the guys who study tribes and write about them call it something fancy; radical equality, no that ain't right. I think it's radical egalitarianism. Either way, summed up real simple, it means nobody starves unless everybody starves. ”
“So, tribes have rules against hoarding as well?” owl asked.
“More like they understand how things work. If everyone hunts and only one person gets anything, the not sharing means that the others aren't going to share on the days when you have a bag hunt or a poor harvest or whatever.”
“Okay, but how is that different that this?”
“The difference between what's going on now and this is that no one person or group is enforcing it, and nobody gets to decide that some people are worth more. And in most cases people have their own hunts and often their own gardens. They share as needed, you know? They don't do it, 'cause its nice or because somebody with a gun is making them. They do it because a tribe is all about human scale- everyone in the tribe is invested, committed like, to everyone else's success. So if you aren't getting enough food to work or hunt effectively, then they're going to help you. And you know that if you don't help them on their bad days, then it hurts you in both the short run and the long run. No guns- just understanding of how things work. But it doesn't work if it's not on a human scale. Bigger than two hundred people and you start to lose it. That's why this town is all factions, its too big.”
“So it wouldn't work for the whole town?” I asked.
“Not all together. You look at the great tribes of the plains, like the Sioux. Those big groups were collections of tribes connected by alliance and stuff. A tribe is kind of like a town, only a different scale and purpose, and you know, that bigger grouping is more like a nation. If it was going to work like a tribe for the town, it would need to be a bunch of tribes. What's happening right now is one group- is controlling the others and keeping them weak so that they can hold the best resources.”
“So how to make a tribe?”
“I've no idea on that one. Generally you're born into it. It's not so easy to join a tribe, and I think it'd be even harder to make one.”
We were thinking about this, when Raven and Viper came running up to us. They stopped and Viper put her hands on her knees and bet over catching her breath. Raven looked at Owl and then pointed at Frisk as the dog lay on the steps to the trailer.
“Mr. Wolf is doing a sweep for animals that haven't been put down. He's noticed that you never applied to have Frisk listed as a working dog. He mentioned it to Viper and Me when we were helping with food rations. He said he owed to you to deal with it personally after what happened to your mom.”
Owl's dad looked at his son, “You got any ideas boy?”
“I do,” Owl said with a nodd. “Everyone else, get in the tool shed with Frisk and keep him quiet. Dad and me will handle this. Dad I need a hammer, nails, some small boards and a shovel.”
I ran over and picked Frisk up. Terriers are big, but Airdale Terriers are the biggest of the terriers. And Frisk thought this was a game and he wiggled something fierce as he waggedhis tail and tried to lick me. I managed to carry him to the tool shed and the three of us scrambled in. I looked back and saw Owl's dad digging in the garden while Owl hammered something together on the lawn.
We hunkered down and waited. After several minutes of shushing and calming Frisk I saw Mr. Wolf walking up the road with a hunting rifle over his shoulder. Owl and his dad had finished just before Mr. Wolf came around the corner. And as he got close, the three of them began to talk. Inside the tool shed, we huddled with Frisk, watching and listening to the conversation. Frisk was wiggling. I don't know if he knew what was going on, but he could definitely sense the energy and the tension in the air, and it was making him antsy as well.
“We should have left him at the cabin.” I whispered.
“His mom is dead, it was comforting for him to have Frisk around.” Viper whispered back.
“Let's hope that comfort doesn't cost Owl another family member.” I whispered.
I just kept hoping that he wouldn't bark or make any noise would give us away.
"I know this isn't pleasant,” Mr. Wolf said. “But you're a man now and I know that you can handle it. Your dog, it isn't a working dog- it can't pull its weight. We're going to have put it down."
Owl didn't say anything. He looked at the ground and clenched his fists white.
"I can do it. Where is the dog?" Mr. Wolf said.
Owl didn't look up, he just pointed over to his father's garden. Mr. Wolf looked where Owl pointed, taking in a ragged wooden cross pushed into a pile of freshly turned earth that stood out against the snow that lay everywhere else.
Mr. Wolf looked back at Owl after a long minute.
"You handled it yourself."
"Yes, sir." Owl said and nodded. "My dog, I should do it."
Mr. Wolf nodded.
"Well said, and well done."
He paused and then continued, “Things are going to get tougher. It's clear from... recent events, that simple appeals to common good and even common sense won't work to keep the social fabric together. The Council will be declaring Martial Law for the duration of the crisis. Things will became difficult, choices will become difficult. This is a good sign. You're able to make difficult decisions, good job.”
Owl nodded, and Mr. Wolf nodded to them both and headed out. I noticed that he hadn't even said 'hello' to Owl's dad.
Just like Mr. Wolf warned us, the next day the council declared Martial Law. It was a meaningless statement looking back. We had been under martial law since the Raven's parents led the protest, maybe earlier. But with food running out, and people getting sick, I think they wanted to make their authority official to prevent further riots. That much worked, their weren't any more riots, but rumors began to run rampant. I heard rumors of people from Sumter’s Ridge who have killed and eaten people. I heard rumors of the Ogre Lady come out to hunt, which was a really weird thought after the incident in the woods. And of course the rumor that food rations were our dead pets being fed back to us was the rumor that refused to go away. The Dissenting Voice told us that national governments everywhere had become powerless, governments in name only. Bart's articles talked about corporations acting like governments in places where they had corporate headquarters. Big services were apparently getting spotty. Bart's articles wondered aloud how much longer we would have electricity at all.
The Council designated the Community Center as a 'Relocation Center', and anyone who wasn't able to manage on their own under the new restrictions was assigned a folding metal bed or cot there. Large numbers of elderly people were moved into a relocation center to help conserve electricity, heating, and distribute food more easily. But I couldn't help but notice that it also helped to more easily control people.
Owl hunted pretty much every day now, so did his dad. They didn't generally hunt together, the idea was to maximize their range and their chances of finding something. Normally we went with Owl. And normally he used his rifle if he was hunting big game, and the throwing sticks if we were after rabbits. This time he had the rabbit sticks out as we began our sweep of the mountain woods.
"We're hunting rabbits?" Viper asked.
"We're hunting pretty much any small game."
As we were talking, Frisk's ears went back and he wuffed softly then charged a nearby rock outcropping. Owl turned immediately to look at Frisk's target, and as Frisk closed with the rocky area a bird looking a lot like a white chicken speckled in brown exploded out of brush in a rush of beating wings.
Owl was already moving, hurling the the stick with a side arm throw kind of like a frisbee. The bird was going up surprisingly fast; but Owl must have known that, because the rabbit stick whirled up and caught the bird hard across the back of its wings. The bird crumpled in the air and dropped back to the rocks. Frisk immediately grabbed the bird by its neck and trotted back to Owl as though it had been his kill.
"Wow! Did you guys see that?" Owl grabbed my shoulder, "I knocked that Ptarmigan right out of the the sky. That was awesome!"
"Ptarmigan?" Viper asked.
"It's a grouse. They're related to chickens and turkeys and pheasants." Wolf said, "My dad hunts them, but normally with a rifle."
"And that's hard to do with a throwing stick?"
"It's really hard to do!" Owl said excitedly, as he knelt by Frisk and quickly began to dress the bird. He grabbed the back of the bird and then pushed two fingers into the a soft spot in the neck area and held the front of the bird from there. I noticed Viper make a face, but she didn't look away. Raven looked sad, but not creeped out. Wolf on the other hand, looked a little creeped out.
Owl braced himself and pulled, and I watched as the ptarmigan tore into two surprisingly neat pieces. Owl immediately pulled out the innards and organs from the bird and put them into a separate bag. Viper gave him a weird look.
"Are we eating those?" She asked.
"Frisk is, once I get rid of any bones that could hurt him"
Owl continued working. He pulled the legs from the back of the bird and removed the feathers. The feathers came off a lot easier than I was expecting. Owl pulled his knife out to cut of the feet, which went into Frisk's bag. Owl peeled feather off the breast meat. he put the leg meat and breast meat into a separate bag, and the feathers and remaining corpse into a third bag.
"Nothing wasted." He said to Wolf's puzzled look as he stowed the last remains.
"So now what?" I asked.
"We see what else we can get"
What we got turned out to be two eastern cottontail rabbits, one squirrel, and two pigeons on the road leading back to town.
As we headed back along the road, a series of snapping twigs startled us. We crouched down low and listened.
Everything was silent.
“Should we go investigate?” Wolf asked.
“I don’t know where it came from, too many echoes.” Raven said.
"No, we are not going to split up and investigate noises in the dark. That is asking for the villain or the monster to pick us off one by one." I said in a whisper as we listened to the sounds in the forest.
A second set of snapping sounds erupted in our ears. And we waited. After five more minutes, and with no more sounds, we straightened back to our feet. Owl scanned around, looking through the trees. Finally we continued on through the cold air with Owl’s kills.
Owl suddenly went very still. His breathing slowed. Frisk tensed and dropped low to the ground. The rest of us kind of stumbled to a halt as gracefully as we could. I looked in the direction Owl was looking.
For a moment I couldn't tell what Owl was looking at, and then I saw the deer. I didn't really know about deer, even after the hunt with Owl’s Dad, but it looked big. It was maybe fifty feet away, standing as still as owl, almost hidden in a pile of dry dead brush. It's antler swept back from its head with two point on each antler.
As we all stood deadly still, I realized that Owl had drawn his hunting rifle slowly up to his shoulder.
The gun shot sounded like somebody had taken the sky and broken it over their knee. The deer hit the ground and kicked once and then was still.
"I did it," Owl breathed softly.
"You've shot deer before." Viper said.
"Yeah, but I put that shot right between the tear ducts, like pros do. That was the best shot that I've ever made."
"No way." Wolf said, impressed.
"Yeah way." Owl said. “ And right after that throw for the Ptarmigan, it’s like today is my day.”
"Let's go see." I added.
Raven looked unhappy, "I hate having to watch something go from a living animal into meat. I'm okay with it being meat. and I'm okay with it being an animal. But, I feel like a monster if I'm watching or helping with the middle part."
"Wouldn't it be worse if we wasted it?" Owl asked.
"I didn't say it made sense. I just don't like it."
"So did you want to stay back here?"
"No, I'm coming."
As we approached the deer, we heard the snapping of branches in the bushes again, and three men pushed through the trees. All three were big men. They were dressed in dirty overalls and plaid, practically wearing a uniform to designate them from Sumter's Ridge. The man in from had a huge drooped moustache, a shaved head and a large beer belly. Despite the extra fat, he looked strong with arms that had seen a lot of hard work. The second man was tall and thin, but had a look like a hungry coyote that made me think he was stronger than this thin arms suggested. His hair was long in back and greasy and his eyes watered. He looked like he was ready to infect us all with something unpleasant. The last guy was short, about a head shorter than the other two men, but broad across the shoulders and with big frightening hands. He had short blonde hair and uneven stubble and an unpleasant grin.
Frisk was on high alert, with teeth barred and I could tell from body language that everyone else was tense as well.
The man in front addressed Owl, "Good shot kid, right between the eyes."
"Thanks," Owl said slowly, his eyes darting back and forth between the fallen deer and the men in front of us.
"You did a good job bringing him down, so I think we can take it from here.
"That's okay," Owl said with a very deliberate dead pan voice, "I don't need any help."
"Well you're going to get it either way. And you're going to like it." The skinny man said.
"Earnest, show the kid the way home." The Man with the moustache said.
The short broad shouldered man nodded and stepped forward. Owl dropped his gun into the snow, I assumed, not wanting to shoot a human being. He reached behind his back, but the man got there first and punched him hard in the stomach. Owl doubled over, and then dropped to his knees. He made a choking noise and then leaned forward and threw up.
Wolf was moving before the rest of us could react. He shouldered into the smaller man and the two of them went tumbling into the snow. The skinny man stepped forward while the rest of us were frozen and kicked Owl in face, knocking him backwards. Owl landed on his back with blood on his face.
Frisk snarled and launched himself at the skinny man. The airdale terrier covered the distance in less time than it took the skinny man to realize Frisk was moving. Frisk didn't bite the leg, or even the arm like a police dog. Owl had trained Frisk, and Frisk sank his teeth into the skinny man's groin and bit down hard. The skinnny man sank to his knees screaming in pain.
I watched the scene like it was happening somewhere else, maybe on television on the new channel. The man with the moustache looked at the skinny man screaming on his knees, and then looked over to see Wolf on top of the smaller man raining punches on the man's face, and then back to frisk and the skinny man.
Owl struggled to his stomach, a crimson star painted across his face. He pulled his arms and legs under him and wobbled to his feet. The big man with the moustache shook his head, and stormed over to Frisk and the skinny man. The big man grabbed Frisk by the skin at the back of the dog's neck and pulled him into the air, forcing Frisk to let go of the skinny man's groin.
"Stupid vermin dog," He said, and then twisted his body and flung Frisk under hand over the edge of the nearby embankment. I could hear Frisk's yelps of pain, and then they stopped and could only hear the sound of Wolf battering the smaller man.
Owl was staring over the embankment in disbelief when the big man picked up Owl's Rifle. He pointed it into the air and fired a shot.
Wolf stopped and rolled off the smaller man, who didn't move.
"We're taking the deer, and we're taking your rifle. Because we're gentleman, that's all we're doing. Be really really grateful we're gentlemen. Earl, get your brother and carry him. I've got the deer."
"But what about my balls, Ed?" the skinny man, Earl, asked as he clutched his groin.
"You weren't using them anyways, now get your brother."
As soon as they were out of sight Owl threw his backpack to the ground and charged over to the edge of the embankment and began to pick his way down. The snow collapsed underneath his feet and his legs flipped up and he careened down about ten feet until his leg caught on a fallen tree branch, which gave Owl enough time to grasp and hold onto a pair fallen logs.
Viper grabbed a length of rope from Owl's backpack and looped it around a tree and then lowered one end to Owl so we could pull him up. It wasn't too hard with Wolf helping. Owl shook his leg and rubbed the spot where he had hung as he stared over the embankment.
"We have to go down there." He said.
"Bud, that is too steep and the snow is hiding all kinds of nasty. There is no way we make it to the bottom in one piece."
"But Frisk..."
"Don't think about it. If Frisk is alive, he'll find us."
"And if he's hurt?"
“We can’t help him. Because we’ll end up hurt going down after him. Look at that slop, look at the rocks.”
“But he’s my dog.”
“And he fought for you bud, and he fought hard. But we can’t help him.”
Owl's dad had got several fish by ice fishing at the lake that day. So the loss of Owl's deer didn't mean they had both come up empty. But the loss of Frisk drove the wind out of both of them. Out of all of us really. But we kept pushing on.
I wondered about the relocation center, and how they were deciding who needed to go there. Everyday new people were sent there. Nobody was given reasons beyond being told that the council had assigned them a bed. It was impossible not to see it coming. One by one every person who lived alone was assigned a bed at the relocation center. Elderly first. But eventually I didn't know any people who still lived alone- they all bunked at the relocation center. Then single parent families were assigned the beds. And by the time my mother told us that we were being assigned beds at the relocation center, I almost wanted to ask what took so long. But of course I knew what took so long. People loyal to the Council were the last people to be sent.
When we arrived at the center with our one backpack of possessions each we found a huge crowd of people. It looked like most of the remaining people in the town were all being assigned beds at the same time. I saw the others and we formed up with our families. The whole thing felt like something out of the wrong sort of history book, and familiar faces helped.
As we entered the parking lot, Owl tried to look around the mod of people to get a look at what was happening up near the front. The guard with the Hello Kitty sticker saw Owl craning his neck around and stepping back and forth trying to see. The guard stepped up and pushed Owl back into the mass of people without a word. Owl stumbled and his foot fell into a huge pot hole near the entrance to the parking lot and he almost fell. His dad grabbed him at last minute, stopping his fall.
"Thanks dad," Owl muttered.
"I ain't going to let you fall, not anymore, not if I can help it." his dad answered.
Mrs. Winter was standing on a small podium and once we had quieted down, she made a brief speech.
"They thought that they could bring the world down a manageable number by way of this crisis. But I think the conspirators have failed. I suspect that in the chaos, many small pockets of truth have appeared, and many strong leaders have seized the moment, just as we have. This will, I think mark the end of the New World Order." Mrs. Winter said as we began to form a line.
"Her crazy is showing." I whispered.
"The scary part is that people are starting to believe her crazy," Owl said.
"Hungry people are a lot easier to convince." Raven added.
As we filed one by one into the Community Center I realized that people were being handed a strip of cloth with a clip on it. The people were attaching the clip to a loop of their belt. As I got closer I noticed a number written in heavy black felt marker on the cloth.
When it was my turn I was informed that the number was my identification number, to be used for rations and finding my designated sleeping area.
I was told that my number entitled me to rations, which were available twice a day, in military 'MRE' Meals ready to eat bags or from the cafeteria cooks. I was told that only adults were allowed outside the relocation center without special permission. Children, I was informed, were to be restricted to the 'public areas' of the relocation center for their own protection.
The whole thing was mechanical and automatic feeling. I felt like an android on an assembly line. The whole process was lulling me into a stupor, when an incident involving Skunk caught my attention several rows ahead.
Skunk was right at the entrance to the main sports hall in the community center, which seemed to be where everyone was being ushered.
I hadn't really been paying much attention to anyone outside the group, but I heard the order clearly.
"Please surrender any weapons on your person before proceeding."
I watched as Skunk's pocket knife was confiscated. And then, I watched as Skunk looked around and spotting us, pointed Owl out to the guard who had confiscated the knife. The guard walked immediately over to Owl.
"I have been informed that you have a concealed weapon on your person. Surrender it immediately."
Owl grimaced, and then rolled his eyes, "It's not concealed. It's in a belt sheath."
"You will surrender the weapon immediately."
"I am, I have to unhook it from my belt."
Owl was wrestling with the clasps that attached the sheath to his belt. The guard however, clearly wasn't interested in waiting. He grabbed Owl by the shoulders and twisted him around so Owl's back was towards the guard.
"Ow! Come on! I'm doing what you said!"
The guard slapped Owl's hands away from the sheath. He grasped the sheath and pulled it sharply loose, and I could see that he had damaged the clasped by pulling as he had.
"Thank you for you cooperation. A note will appear on your file." The guard said, and turned and marched off
Owl picked up a bit of the broken clasp from the ground and put in into his pocket.
"Clearly, they don't want us able to defend ourselves." He said.
The first time I woke up in the relocation center, I gagged on the smell of sweaty people and baby diapers, and winced at the sound of people and people and people talking crying arguing and screaming. I didn't want to open my eyes, but I didn't feel comfortable in the relocation center if couldn't see. I didn't feel comfortable here when I could see, it was unbearable when I couldn't. Too many thing could go wrong around me when I was here.
I could hear the flies circling the snoring adults and the whining of the dogs that had been allowed to stay at the relocation center.
I opened my eyes. The whole center looked beige and ugly and broken hearted. People were milling around aimlessly. Some people walked around as though they needed to feel like they had somehwere to go. Other people were leaning on table or stacks of folding chairs and talking as though they were sitting on a porch watching the sunset- like they were tring to force things to be normal. Other people hugged themselves as though attempting to alternately comfort themselves or shield themselves from the reality around them. The room buzzed with crowd sound, like the people were flies over a dog skunk on the highway.
I sat up and stretched. The metal folding bed was not comfortable to sleep on and the blanket was not warm in the large laregly unheated room.
The Relocation Center was in the gymnasium at the Community center and spilled into the iceless hockey rink. Tables were set up with letters of the alphabet on them and little folding metal beds on wheels were everywhere. People slept or sat on the beds and cried quietly for the most part, while other people in reflective orange vests handed out rations and other people in black armored vests watched like everyone were criminals.
The high ceilings made everything echo and meant that people were only able to sleep once exhaustion was stronger than the constant sound of people crying echoing off the ceiling. Staying in the Relocation Center felt like waiting to die.
One of the first things I noticed, once I got used to the movement of people in the Relocation Center, was Skunk. He was wearing a reflective vest that indicated he was working. And as I watched, I realized that he was responsible for handing out food cards necessary to get your daily rations.
And as I watched further, I realized that he wasn't giving everybody food cards. Kids who came up alone were being denied cards. Skunk had found a new way to be mean, he was the gatekeeper of the food now.
Mrs. Winter had a desk set up in the front on the podium with a set of cabinets and big white boards on rollers with maps and notes. It looked like a stage or movie set: something fake that existed only to look convincing. I noticed that there was a little stone paperweight on Mrs. Winter's desk. It was of a wall with ancient drawings of people and snake headed things. It looked kind of like Ancient Egyptian stuff, but not quite.
"The annunaki, the source of the divine right of kings, our secret rulers, and my ancient enemy." Mrs. Winter said, noticing my gaze.
I didn't say anything. What did you say to that? It weirded me out, that she wasn't hiding this stuff anymore. I gues she felt that she was in control now and didn't have to hide. It weirded me out more that it seemed like she was right.
The center had a big projection screen television set up in one corner. I immediately wondered why they were spending electricity on something like that. I watched the TV, and saw that it was playing news footage.
The footage looked as though it bits of news from the last several months, and it was creepy. I saw riots in Eastern Europe over oil and food shortages. I saw footage talking about a bunch of countries whose governments had been kicked out or overthrown, or simply disappeared, as the army or rebels or rioters took over of just kicked everything down. I saw footage of war, with lots of burned dead bodies in lots of different deserts. I saw food lines, again and again. I saw articles about nobody being able to afford to drive. I saw and I saw and I saw.
Nobody was coming to help us from the outside world. We were alone. The spiderwebs Professor Tuttle talked about had broken, and everyone was trapped in their own little world, in their own little war, in their own little hell.
Time passed horribly slowly in the center. There was nothing to do except get your food rations and occasionally get assigned to some sort of labor detail to strip something useful out of this house or that shop. I discovered, weirdest of all, that the union had restarted the Pulp and Paper Mill's gas generator. That was where they had got the electricity to continue running the parts of town that were still running. There was no electricity coming in anymore. The mill's generator had been hastily converted to run on a broader range of fuel- pretty much anything that could burn. It was apparently very inefficient, but it kept the lights on. They were apparently feeding the wood from whole houses into the factory to keep things going. It was like making sacrifices to some horrible monster.
I don't know what everyone else did to pass the time. Mr. Wolf kept taking us kids with us, mostly Wolf, Owl and myself, to show us how he was managing things. The girls stayed quiet, and I think were trying to keep under the radar. Parents were a lot more unsettled by everything I noticed. a lot of the little kids cried pretty bad the first first nights, but then they adapted.
I remember coming back from a run to the mill with Mr. Wolf and Owl to find Owl's Dad standing out back of the ice rink. Owl looked at his father cautiously. The man was crying gently with a bottle in his left hand and can of beer in the right.
"How did you get alcohol dad? They ration that stuff worse than food."
"I hid it crazy good. This is mine, and I needed it what with everything that's been happening. This stuff helps me deal with this stupid broken place."
“You promised you’d stay sober dad.”
“I promised, I’d try until there wasn’t any left to get me drunk with. I couldn’t manage. I wasn’t a very good husband all things considered, but I should have smartened up and got her out. But I didn’t and sometimes that’s a little hard to handle sober.”
"Does it really help with the pain dad?" Owl sounded scornful, but also a little curious. And that worried me.
"No, you don't boy. You don't get to imitate your old man on this thing. I fit too many stereotypes boy, you know that. I'm why you don't show any pride in your heritage. I know that. But this is the last of what cities have to offer me. I'm all dry after this. I wish you had listened closer to me about your mother, but I'm your father and I should have been there myself. And I wasn't. And it breaks me open that I wasn't. And I wish so bad I could keep hiding in a bottle, but I'm almost dry now and I'm going to have to do things alone. But no, the alcohol doesn't make the pain go away, just hides it for a while and let's it gather strength while yours falls away. Hiding only works for so long, and then you have to act."
“So what am I supposed to do, Dad?” Owl asked, “I’ve lost mom and I’ve lost Frisk. And I’m stuck here. What am I supposed to do?”
Owl’s dad pulled himself up and looked his son in the eyes, “You run. I told you this before, and I’ll tell you again. You see this? They’ve done this before and they’ll do it again. We didn’t see much of the Residential Schools up here, because we were so isolated. But I got relatives, you got relatives in other areas who got sent away and starved and beaten. They actually said that they wanted to kill the Indian in us, but what they really mean- and I don’t think they knew it- is that they needed to kill the wild part of us.”
“What you mean dad?”
“Why do you think when people in charge say good, they mean people don’t ask questions? Why do you think being good means being obedient. And why do you think the people in charge now, like you principal and your friend’s dad, why do you think they want control of the resources? Because if people were all asking questions and all had their own stuff, the people in control wouldn’t be in control. If you want to control people, you got to make them helpless, take away their ability to ignore you, to defy you. They did that to us, tribe by tribe, pushing their way west until their feet touched water. But I think, you know, that it was done to them too.”
“What was done to them? Dad you aren’t making much sense.”
“Them early civilizations, always empires, always conquering across the land. I think I know why. Way back then, people knew how to live- by themselves in little groups, they didn’t need no big city or no marketplace to get their food. And so the only way the cities could spread was by marching around conquering. And so all them early civilizations were conquerors. And now there aren’t many of people left who know how to live without a supermarket, and that’s how the people in charge like it. But this is what it leads to, because everything runs out eventually and then you have to face the hard cold sober reality you’ve been hiding from.”
“Are you talking about governments or yourself Dad?”
“It’s the same problem either way. We both are running out of something that we used even though we knew it would run out one day, and neither of us have a back up plan. It’s the same thing.”
“So, I should run?”
“You should grab anyone who will listen and run. Get away, get out. Go.”
“What about you?”
“I’m still a drunk boy. I’d just be a hindrance.”
“You’re also still my dad.”
“Not yet I'm not. Hang in there boy. With any luck, you’ll see your dad again soon.”
Back inside the center, we hooked up with the girls and Wolf and did the only thing left besides watching television, talk about what was happening.
"Have you noticed that a lot of people don't leave their cots anymore?" Viper asked.
Raven and I nodded.
"Mostly older folks." Owl said, "I notice that most of the grandparents aren't getting full rations either."
"I heard a few kids who think that their grandparents have died. The guards take them into 'private care' and nobody is allowed to see them ever again. It's been weeks for some of them."
"They don't want people to see other people starving."
"We're all starving, even the people getting better rationing that they other. They can't hide that."
"I think they're trying to keep from looking too bad"
"I can't find my grandmother." Viper said quietly. "They didn't put her in that private care thing, at least not as I can tell. Nobody seems to know where she's gone."
"Have you asked your parents?"
"They told me that she's out for a walk. Which is stupid, Grandma never left the rocking chair for anything besides bed time and meal time."
"So you don't think she went for a walk?"
"Not unless somebody took her for one. And she wouldn't want to go."
"Have you noticed how few old people we see around these days?"
I nodded. Nobody talked about it. But it was true. Every day there were fewer old folks who weren't in 'private care'. The elderly had slowly become invisible. And nobody wanted to talk about it, in case our worst fears were true.
They aren't adults,” Owl said, shaking his head, “An adult is somebody who can stand alone, stand up for himself, and know what he believes.”
Almost on cue, I heard several shouts of alarm and several more whoops of victory coming from a side entrance. We glanced at each other.
“That is either very good or very bad.” I said.
Owl shook his head, “When was that time something very good happened?”
“Well let's go see what fate is kicking us with this time.” Viper said.
We headed towards the noise, and discovered that They had managed to capture Safehope Bluff's Public Enemy number one: David Bartholemew.
Two of Them held Bart like Federal Agents holding a terrorist. Bart was thin as a stalk of corn, and pale as bleached flour. I don't know how he had the strength to stay standing, let alone grin the cocky contemptuous grin that he had plastered on his face as he looked at Mr. Wolf.
"So, do you have some fall guy to beat me up in the back room?" Bart asked.
"Oh, I can manage my own discipline," Mr. Wolf said, and then in one smooth motion drew the nightstick from his utility belt and brought it across Bart's jaw with a sharp cracking sound. I think Bart would have fallen over there, but They kept him upright. And that meant that Bart couldn't even avoid the hits by falling.
Mr. Wolf delivered blow after devastating blow. Bart's face was a mass of bruises right from the first hit. By the third hit, the nightstick had broken the skin on Bart's face and blood was spattering across the visors of the two of Them holding him in place. Somewhere around the fifth hit, Bart’s feet went slack and he stopped holding his head up.
Mr. Wolf continued to rain down blows.
Finally Raven screamed, "You're going to kill him!"
Mr. Wolf paused, nightstick hanging in the air like a horrifying promise. He turned and looked back at the people watching him.
"It'd be an improvement." He said, "But you'd like that wouldn't you?"
He looked back at the slack unconscious figure in front of him. And I was struck by how much it reminded me of the mule deer, skinned and gutted, hanging from the tree. I shuddered and shook my head to clear the image.
"Put him in confinement."
Owl leaned in, "We didn't give up Bart, so who did?"
We moved away from the scene where none of Them would hear us. Viper was the first to speak. She looked angry.
"Well. Everything is falling apart. Just like you wanted. Doesn't it feel great? No white picket fences for anyone anymore. Even if we last the winter, nothing will ever be the same. The world we know is gone. Isn't this what you wanted?"
"I didn't want everything to break. I didn't want this. I just didn't want to be part of their world."
"Well. Now nobody will. Probably ever again."
"Dad was right. He saw what coming. Not just the fact that things would fall. He saw what the fall would do to us. I wish I had listened to him."
"Bruce Lee always said that if you spend too much time thinking about something you won't get it done. I don't think we can afford not to get this done. So maybe we should just stop thinking and do it." Raven said.
The Wild Hunts
The snow that had begun when Owl's mom died had not stopped. The whole world had disappeared beneath a layer of winter. All sound and movement was muffled or curtailed by the huge drifts of snow. A heavy white net was draped across the whole town and everyone was affected by it.
The only constant sound with the crunch crunch crunch of booted feet pushing through the snow. This was the dead of winter now, and everything was crushed beneath the weight of the season.
I've never lost a parent. I know Wolf lost his mom years ago. But I've never felt it myself and watching Owl go through it was odd, like looking through a window.
Owl had to stay with his dad at the trailer park. Owl didn't want to, but when you're thirteen adults make you do what they want.
They cleaned out Owl's house. Owl got to collect a bunch of stuff and then watch as everything else was loaded into trucks and confiscated by the Provisional Council. They took his mom's hunting rifles and bows and the food they had stored. They took her camping gear and the big containers of stored water. They dug up the root vegetables that she had kept in the ground to help keep them fresh longer and put them with the other stored food supplies.
I helped Owl move his stuff over. His Dad looked really apologetic the whole time.
"I know that this ain't ideal boy. But this is how it is. We should have run. I told you, but I should have done it myself. I didn't, and we didn't and now we've lost her. And so its just us. We got to pull together to get through this."
"Are you going to stay sober?"
"I'm going try for while, and then I ain't gonna have a choice. I don't see anyone making new booze for a while at this point. And with any luck, by the time that hits I'll be dry and can tell the booze I don't need it anymore."
"It's been so long since I've seen you sober, I don't even know if I know what you're like sober."
"I was a lot like you."
"that scares me Dad."
"Scared me too. You can't imagine looking at your son, and seeing him be so much like you, and knowing that you just aren't built to live in the world you got to live in. It's like reading some old time fairy tale where you know everyone is gonna die."
"I do know what it's like dad. Because I watched my dad fall apart, and had to sit there wondering every day if that was what would happen to me."
"Well, now that ain't gonna happen. We have a different problem. We lost your mom, because we weren't able to get a handle on things. We don't have to lose anything else."
“Well,” I ventured quietly. “It isn’t just you guys. Its us too.”
Owl’s Dad looked up, surprised. Like I said, people forget that I’m around, “I forgot you were here. That was rude. What were you saying?”
“I was saying it isn’t just the two of you. Before things got bad, a friend of ours, well more of a, well, somebody we listen to, said that we were a warrior tribe. The six of us, I mean. And now Russell is gone, and your mom is gone and nothing is like it was before. But we’re still here, and you know. If we ever needed to be a warrior tribe, we kind of need to be a warrior tribe now.”
Owl's father shook his head, “Big city folks don't take too kindly to tribes. They run different, you know. They're like a different game altogether.”
Both Owl and I looked up surprise.
“What do you mean dad?” Owl asked, “How are they a different game?”
“Everything they do is different. Tribes use a different rule book and play a different game. They operate on a smaller scale you know? A human scale, one hundred to two hundred people. Even a little town like Safehope Bluff is too big to be a tribe, its full of lots of little groups about the same size a tribe would be. And because they're all human sized they got a tribal loyalty- like the union boys do. But size is only part of being a tribe.”
“Tribes have a really interesting rule- I don't know that its official anywhere, but the guys who study tribes and write about them call it something fancy; radical equality, no that ain't right. I think it's radical egalitarianism. Either way, summed up real simple, it means nobody starves unless everybody starves. ”
“So, tribes have rules against hoarding as well?” owl asked.
“More like they understand how things work. If everyone hunts and only one person gets anything, the not sharing means that the others aren't going to share on the days when you have a bag hunt or a poor harvest or whatever.”
“Okay, but how is that different that this?”
“The difference between what's going on now and this is that no one person or group is enforcing it, and nobody gets to decide that some people are worth more. And in most cases people have their own hunts and often their own gardens. They share as needed, you know? They don't do it, 'cause its nice or because somebody with a gun is making them. They do it because a tribe is all about human scale- everyone in the tribe is invested, committed like, to everyone else's success. So if you aren't getting enough food to work or hunt effectively, then they're going to help you. And you know that if you don't help them on their bad days, then it hurts you in both the short run and the long run. No guns- just understanding of how things work. But it doesn't work if it's not on a human scale. Bigger than two hundred people and you start to lose it. That's why this town is all factions, its too big.”
“So it wouldn't work for the whole town?” I asked.
“Not all together. You look at the great tribes of the plains, like the Sioux. Those big groups were collections of tribes connected by alliance and stuff. A tribe is kind of like a town, only a different scale and purpose, and you know, that bigger grouping is more like a nation. If it was going to work like a tribe for the town, it would need to be a bunch of tribes. What's happening right now is one group- is controlling the others and keeping them weak so that they can hold the best resources.”
“So how to make a tribe?”
“I've no idea on that one. Generally you're born into it. It's not so easy to join a tribe, and I think it'd be even harder to make one.”
We were thinking about this, when Raven and Viper came running up to us. They stopped and Viper put her hands on her knees and bet over catching her breath. Raven looked at Owl and then pointed at Frisk as the dog lay on the steps to the trailer.
“Mr. Wolf is doing a sweep for animals that haven't been put down. He's noticed that you never applied to have Frisk listed as a working dog. He mentioned it to Viper and Me when we were helping with food rations. He said he owed to you to deal with it personally after what happened to your mom.”
Owl's dad looked at his son, “You got any ideas boy?”
“I do,” Owl said with a nodd. “Everyone else, get in the tool shed with Frisk and keep him quiet. Dad and me will handle this. Dad I need a hammer, nails, some small boards and a shovel.”
I ran over and picked Frisk up. Terriers are big, but Airdale Terriers are the biggest of the terriers. And Frisk thought this was a game and he wiggled something fierce as he waggedhis tail and tried to lick me. I managed to carry him to the tool shed and the three of us scrambled in. I looked back and saw Owl's dad digging in the garden while Owl hammered something together on the lawn.
We hunkered down and waited. After several minutes of shushing and calming Frisk I saw Mr. Wolf walking up the road with a hunting rifle over his shoulder. Owl and his dad had finished just before Mr. Wolf came around the corner. And as he got close, the three of them began to talk. Inside the tool shed, we huddled with Frisk, watching and listening to the conversation. Frisk was wiggling. I don't know if he knew what was going on, but he could definitely sense the energy and the tension in the air, and it was making him antsy as well.
“We should have left him at the cabin.” I whispered.
“His mom is dead, it was comforting for him to have Frisk around.” Viper whispered back.
“Let's hope that comfort doesn't cost Owl another family member.” I whispered.
I just kept hoping that he wouldn't bark or make any noise would give us away.
"I know this isn't pleasant,” Mr. Wolf said. “But you're a man now and I know that you can handle it. Your dog, it isn't a working dog- it can't pull its weight. We're going to have put it down."
Owl didn't say anything. He looked at the ground and clenched his fists white.
"I can do it. Where is the dog?" Mr. Wolf said.
Owl didn't look up, he just pointed over to his father's garden. Mr. Wolf looked where Owl pointed, taking in a ragged wooden cross pushed into a pile of freshly turned earth that stood out against the snow that lay everywhere else.
Mr. Wolf looked back at Owl after a long minute.
"You handled it yourself."
"Yes, sir." Owl said and nodded. "My dog, I should do it."
Mr. Wolf nodded.
"Well said, and well done."
He paused and then continued, “Things are going to get tougher. It's clear from... recent events, that simple appeals to common good and even common sense won't work to keep the social fabric together. The Council will be declaring Martial Law for the duration of the crisis. Things will became difficult, choices will become difficult. This is a good sign. You're able to make difficult decisions, good job.”
Owl nodded, and Mr. Wolf nodded to them both and headed out. I noticed that he hadn't even said 'hello' to Owl's dad.
Just like Mr. Wolf warned us, the next day the council declared Martial Law. It was a meaningless statement looking back. We had been under martial law since the Raven's parents led the protest, maybe earlier. But with food running out, and people getting sick, I think they wanted to make their authority official to prevent further riots. That much worked, their weren't any more riots, but rumors began to run rampant. I heard rumors of people from Sumter’s Ridge who have killed and eaten people. I heard rumors of the Ogre Lady come out to hunt, which was a really weird thought after the incident in the woods. And of course the rumor that food rations were our dead pets being fed back to us was the rumor that refused to go away. The Dissenting Voice told us that national governments everywhere had become powerless, governments in name only. Bart's articles talked about corporations acting like governments in places where they had corporate headquarters. Big services were apparently getting spotty. Bart's articles wondered aloud how much longer we would have electricity at all.
The Council designated the Community Center as a 'Relocation Center', and anyone who wasn't able to manage on their own under the new restrictions was assigned a folding metal bed or cot there. Large numbers of elderly people were moved into a relocation center to help conserve electricity, heating, and distribute food more easily. But I couldn't help but notice that it also helped to more easily control people.
Owl hunted pretty much every day now, so did his dad. They didn't generally hunt together, the idea was to maximize their range and their chances of finding something. Normally we went with Owl. And normally he used his rifle if he was hunting big game, and the throwing sticks if we were after rabbits. This time he had the rabbit sticks out as we began our sweep of the mountain woods.
"We're hunting rabbits?" Viper asked.
"We're hunting pretty much any small game."
As we were talking, Frisk's ears went back and he wuffed softly then charged a nearby rock outcropping. Owl turned immediately to look at Frisk's target, and as Frisk closed with the rocky area a bird looking a lot like a white chicken speckled in brown exploded out of brush in a rush of beating wings.
Owl was already moving, hurling the the stick with a side arm throw kind of like a frisbee. The bird was going up surprisingly fast; but Owl must have known that, because the rabbit stick whirled up and caught the bird hard across the back of its wings. The bird crumpled in the air and dropped back to the rocks. Frisk immediately grabbed the bird by its neck and trotted back to Owl as though it had been his kill.
"Wow! Did you guys see that?" Owl grabbed my shoulder, "I knocked that Ptarmigan right out of the the sky. That was awesome!"
"Ptarmigan?" Viper asked.
"It's a grouse. They're related to chickens and turkeys and pheasants." Wolf said, "My dad hunts them, but normally with a rifle."
"And that's hard to do with a throwing stick?"
"It's really hard to do!" Owl said excitedly, as he knelt by Frisk and quickly began to dress the bird. He grabbed the back of the bird and then pushed two fingers into the a soft spot in the neck area and held the front of the bird from there. I noticed Viper make a face, but she didn't look away. Raven looked sad, but not creeped out. Wolf on the other hand, looked a little creeped out.
Owl braced himself and pulled, and I watched as the ptarmigan tore into two surprisingly neat pieces. Owl immediately pulled out the innards and organs from the bird and put them into a separate bag. Viper gave him a weird look.
"Are we eating those?" She asked.
"Frisk is, once I get rid of any bones that could hurt him"
Owl continued working. He pulled the legs from the back of the bird and removed the feathers. The feathers came off a lot easier than I was expecting. Owl pulled his knife out to cut of the feet, which went into Frisk's bag. Owl peeled feather off the breast meat. he put the leg meat and breast meat into a separate bag, and the feathers and remaining corpse into a third bag.
"Nothing wasted." He said to Wolf's puzzled look as he stowed the last remains.
"So now what?" I asked.
"We see what else we can get"
What we got turned out to be two eastern cottontail rabbits, one squirrel, and two pigeons on the road leading back to town.
As we headed back along the road, a series of snapping twigs startled us. We crouched down low and listened.
Everything was silent.
“Should we go investigate?” Wolf asked.
“I don’t know where it came from, too many echoes.” Raven said.
"No, we are not going to split up and investigate noises in the dark. That is asking for the villain or the monster to pick us off one by one." I said in a whisper as we listened to the sounds in the forest.
A second set of snapping sounds erupted in our ears. And we waited. After five more minutes, and with no more sounds, we straightened back to our feet. Owl scanned around, looking through the trees. Finally we continued on through the cold air with Owl’s kills.
Owl suddenly went very still. His breathing slowed. Frisk tensed and dropped low to the ground. The rest of us kind of stumbled to a halt as gracefully as we could. I looked in the direction Owl was looking.
For a moment I couldn't tell what Owl was looking at, and then I saw the deer. I didn't really know about deer, even after the hunt with Owl’s Dad, but it looked big. It was maybe fifty feet away, standing as still as owl, almost hidden in a pile of dry dead brush. It's antler swept back from its head with two point on each antler.
As we all stood deadly still, I realized that Owl had drawn his hunting rifle slowly up to his shoulder.
The gun shot sounded like somebody had taken the sky and broken it over their knee. The deer hit the ground and kicked once and then was still.
"I did it," Owl breathed softly.
"You've shot deer before." Viper said.
"Yeah, but I put that shot right between the tear ducts, like pros do. That was the best shot that I've ever made."
"No way." Wolf said, impressed.
"Yeah way." Owl said. “ And right after that throw for the Ptarmigan, it’s like today is my day.”
"Let's go see." I added.
Raven looked unhappy, "I hate having to watch something go from a living animal into meat. I'm okay with it being meat. and I'm okay with it being an animal. But, I feel like a monster if I'm watching or helping with the middle part."
"Wouldn't it be worse if we wasted it?" Owl asked.
"I didn't say it made sense. I just don't like it."
"So did you want to stay back here?"
"No, I'm coming."
As we approached the deer, we heard the snapping of branches in the bushes again, and three men pushed through the trees. All three were big men. They were dressed in dirty overalls and plaid, practically wearing a uniform to designate them from Sumter's Ridge. The man in from had a huge drooped moustache, a shaved head and a large beer belly. Despite the extra fat, he looked strong with arms that had seen a lot of hard work. The second man was tall and thin, but had a look like a hungry coyote that made me think he was stronger than this thin arms suggested. His hair was long in back and greasy and his eyes watered. He looked like he was ready to infect us all with something unpleasant. The last guy was short, about a head shorter than the other two men, but broad across the shoulders and with big frightening hands. He had short blonde hair and uneven stubble and an unpleasant grin.
Frisk was on high alert, with teeth barred and I could tell from body language that everyone else was tense as well.
The man in front addressed Owl, "Good shot kid, right between the eyes."
"Thanks," Owl said slowly, his eyes darting back and forth between the fallen deer and the men in front of us.
"You did a good job bringing him down, so I think we can take it from here.
"That's okay," Owl said with a very deliberate dead pan voice, "I don't need any help."
"Well you're going to get it either way. And you're going to like it." The skinny man said.
"Earnest, show the kid the way home." The Man with the moustache said.
The short broad shouldered man nodded and stepped forward. Owl dropped his gun into the snow, I assumed, not wanting to shoot a human being. He reached behind his back, but the man got there first and punched him hard in the stomach. Owl doubled over, and then dropped to his knees. He made a choking noise and then leaned forward and threw up.
Wolf was moving before the rest of us could react. He shouldered into the smaller man and the two of them went tumbling into the snow. The skinny man stepped forward while the rest of us were frozen and kicked Owl in face, knocking him backwards. Owl landed on his back with blood on his face.
Frisk snarled and launched himself at the skinny man. The airdale terrier covered the distance in less time than it took the skinny man to realize Frisk was moving. Frisk didn't bite the leg, or even the arm like a police dog. Owl had trained Frisk, and Frisk sank his teeth into the skinny man's groin and bit down hard. The skinnny man sank to his knees screaming in pain.
I watched the scene like it was happening somewhere else, maybe on television on the new channel. The man with the moustache looked at the skinny man screaming on his knees, and then looked over to see Wolf on top of the smaller man raining punches on the man's face, and then back to frisk and the skinny man.
Owl struggled to his stomach, a crimson star painted across his face. He pulled his arms and legs under him and wobbled to his feet. The big man with the moustache shook his head, and stormed over to Frisk and the skinny man. The big man grabbed Frisk by the skin at the back of the dog's neck and pulled him into the air, forcing Frisk to let go of the skinny man's groin.
"Stupid vermin dog," He said, and then twisted his body and flung Frisk under hand over the edge of the nearby embankment. I could hear Frisk's yelps of pain, and then they stopped and could only hear the sound of Wolf battering the smaller man.
Owl was staring over the embankment in disbelief when the big man picked up Owl's Rifle. He pointed it into the air and fired a shot.
Wolf stopped and rolled off the smaller man, who didn't move.
"We're taking the deer, and we're taking your rifle. Because we're gentleman, that's all we're doing. Be really really grateful we're gentlemen. Earl, get your brother and carry him. I've got the deer."
"But what about my balls, Ed?" the skinny man, Earl, asked as he clutched his groin.
"You weren't using them anyways, now get your brother."
As soon as they were out of sight Owl threw his backpack to the ground and charged over to the edge of the embankment and began to pick his way down. The snow collapsed underneath his feet and his legs flipped up and he careened down about ten feet until his leg caught on a fallen tree branch, which gave Owl enough time to grasp and hold onto a pair fallen logs.
Viper grabbed a length of rope from Owl's backpack and looped it around a tree and then lowered one end to Owl so we could pull him up. It wasn't too hard with Wolf helping. Owl shook his leg and rubbed the spot where he had hung as he stared over the embankment.
"We have to go down there." He said.
"Bud, that is too steep and the snow is hiding all kinds of nasty. There is no way we make it to the bottom in one piece."
"But Frisk..."
"Don't think about it. If Frisk is alive, he'll find us."
"And if he's hurt?"
“We can’t help him. Because we’ll end up hurt going down after him. Look at that slop, look at the rocks.”
“But he’s my dog.”
“And he fought for you bud, and he fought hard. But we can’t help him.”
Owl's dad had got several fish by ice fishing at the lake that day. So the loss of Owl's deer didn't mean they had both come up empty. But the loss of Frisk drove the wind out of both of them. Out of all of us really. But we kept pushing on.
I wondered about the relocation center, and how they were deciding who needed to go there. Everyday new people were sent there. Nobody was given reasons beyond being told that the council had assigned them a bed. It was impossible not to see it coming. One by one every person who lived alone was assigned a bed at the relocation center. Elderly first. But eventually I didn't know any people who still lived alone- they all bunked at the relocation center. Then single parent families were assigned the beds. And by the time my mother told us that we were being assigned beds at the relocation center, I almost wanted to ask what took so long. But of course I knew what took so long. People loyal to the Council were the last people to be sent.
When we arrived at the center with our one backpack of possessions each we found a huge crowd of people. It looked like most of the remaining people in the town were all being assigned beds at the same time. I saw the others and we formed up with our families. The whole thing felt like something out of the wrong sort of history book, and familiar faces helped.
As we entered the parking lot, Owl tried to look around the mod of people to get a look at what was happening up near the front. The guard with the Hello Kitty sticker saw Owl craning his neck around and stepping back and forth trying to see. The guard stepped up and pushed Owl back into the mass of people without a word. Owl stumbled and his foot fell into a huge pot hole near the entrance to the parking lot and he almost fell. His dad grabbed him at last minute, stopping his fall.
"Thanks dad," Owl muttered.
"I ain't going to let you fall, not anymore, not if I can help it." his dad answered.
Mrs. Winter was standing on a small podium and once we had quieted down, she made a brief speech.
"They thought that they could bring the world down a manageable number by way of this crisis. But I think the conspirators have failed. I suspect that in the chaos, many small pockets of truth have appeared, and many strong leaders have seized the moment, just as we have. This will, I think mark the end of the New World Order." Mrs. Winter said as we began to form a line.
"Her crazy is showing." I whispered.
"The scary part is that people are starting to believe her crazy," Owl said.
"Hungry people are a lot easier to convince." Raven added.
As we filed one by one into the Community Center I realized that people were being handed a strip of cloth with a clip on it. The people were attaching the clip to a loop of their belt. As I got closer I noticed a number written in heavy black felt marker on the cloth.
When it was my turn I was informed that the number was my identification number, to be used for rations and finding my designated sleeping area.
I was told that my number entitled me to rations, which were available twice a day, in military 'MRE' Meals ready to eat bags or from the cafeteria cooks. I was told that only adults were allowed outside the relocation center without special permission. Children, I was informed, were to be restricted to the 'public areas' of the relocation center for their own protection.
The whole thing was mechanical and automatic feeling. I felt like an android on an assembly line. The whole process was lulling me into a stupor, when an incident involving Skunk caught my attention several rows ahead.
Skunk was right at the entrance to the main sports hall in the community center, which seemed to be where everyone was being ushered.
I hadn't really been paying much attention to anyone outside the group, but I heard the order clearly.
"Please surrender any weapons on your person before proceeding."
I watched as Skunk's pocket knife was confiscated. And then, I watched as Skunk looked around and spotting us, pointed Owl out to the guard who had confiscated the knife. The guard walked immediately over to Owl.
"I have been informed that you have a concealed weapon on your person. Surrender it immediately."
Owl grimaced, and then rolled his eyes, "It's not concealed. It's in a belt sheath."
"You will surrender the weapon immediately."
"I am, I have to unhook it from my belt."
Owl was wrestling with the clasps that attached the sheath to his belt. The guard however, clearly wasn't interested in waiting. He grabbed Owl by the shoulders and twisted him around so Owl's back was towards the guard.
"Ow! Come on! I'm doing what you said!"
The guard slapped Owl's hands away from the sheath. He grasped the sheath and pulled it sharply loose, and I could see that he had damaged the clasped by pulling as he had.
"Thank you for you cooperation. A note will appear on your file." The guard said, and turned and marched off
Owl picked up a bit of the broken clasp from the ground and put in into his pocket.
"Clearly, they don't want us able to defend ourselves." He said.
The first time I woke up in the relocation center, I gagged on the smell of sweaty people and baby diapers, and winced at the sound of people and people and people talking crying arguing and screaming. I didn't want to open my eyes, but I didn't feel comfortable in the relocation center if couldn't see. I didn't feel comfortable here when I could see, it was unbearable when I couldn't. Too many thing could go wrong around me when I was here.
I could hear the flies circling the snoring adults and the whining of the dogs that had been allowed to stay at the relocation center.
I opened my eyes. The whole center looked beige and ugly and broken hearted. People were milling around aimlessly. Some people walked around as though they needed to feel like they had somehwere to go. Other people were leaning on table or stacks of folding chairs and talking as though they were sitting on a porch watching the sunset- like they were tring to force things to be normal. Other people hugged themselves as though attempting to alternately comfort themselves or shield themselves from the reality around them. The room buzzed with crowd sound, like the people were flies over a dog skunk on the highway.
I sat up and stretched. The metal folding bed was not comfortable to sleep on and the blanket was not warm in the large laregly unheated room.
The Relocation Center was in the gymnasium at the Community center and spilled into the iceless hockey rink. Tables were set up with letters of the alphabet on them and little folding metal beds on wheels were everywhere. People slept or sat on the beds and cried quietly for the most part, while other people in reflective orange vests handed out rations and other people in black armored vests watched like everyone were criminals.
The high ceilings made everything echo and meant that people were only able to sleep once exhaustion was stronger than the constant sound of people crying echoing off the ceiling. Staying in the Relocation Center felt like waiting to die.
One of the first things I noticed, once I got used to the movement of people in the Relocation Center, was Skunk. He was wearing a reflective vest that indicated he was working. And as I watched, I realized that he was responsible for handing out food cards necessary to get your daily rations.
And as I watched further, I realized that he wasn't giving everybody food cards. Kids who came up alone were being denied cards. Skunk had found a new way to be mean, he was the gatekeeper of the food now.
Mrs. Winter had a desk set up in the front on the podium with a set of cabinets and big white boards on rollers with maps and notes. It looked like a stage or movie set: something fake that existed only to look convincing. I noticed that there was a little stone paperweight on Mrs. Winter's desk. It was of a wall with ancient drawings of people and snake headed things. It looked kind of like Ancient Egyptian stuff, but not quite.
"The annunaki, the source of the divine right of kings, our secret rulers, and my ancient enemy." Mrs. Winter said, noticing my gaze.
I didn't say anything. What did you say to that? It weirded me out, that she wasn't hiding this stuff anymore. I gues she felt that she was in control now and didn't have to hide. It weirded me out more that it seemed like she was right.
The center had a big projection screen television set up in one corner. I immediately wondered why they were spending electricity on something like that. I watched the TV, and saw that it was playing news footage.
The footage looked as though it bits of news from the last several months, and it was creepy. I saw riots in Eastern Europe over oil and food shortages. I saw footage talking about a bunch of countries whose governments had been kicked out or overthrown, or simply disappeared, as the army or rebels or rioters took over of just kicked everything down. I saw footage of war, with lots of burned dead bodies in lots of different deserts. I saw food lines, again and again. I saw articles about nobody being able to afford to drive. I saw and I saw and I saw.
Nobody was coming to help us from the outside world. We were alone. The spiderwebs Professor Tuttle talked about had broken, and everyone was trapped in their own little world, in their own little war, in their own little hell.
Time passed horribly slowly in the center. There was nothing to do except get your food rations and occasionally get assigned to some sort of labor detail to strip something useful out of this house or that shop. I discovered, weirdest of all, that the union had restarted the Pulp and Paper Mill's gas generator. That was where they had got the electricity to continue running the parts of town that were still running. There was no electricity coming in anymore. The mill's generator had been hastily converted to run on a broader range of fuel- pretty much anything that could burn. It was apparently very inefficient, but it kept the lights on. They were apparently feeding the wood from whole houses into the factory to keep things going. It was like making sacrifices to some horrible monster.
I don't know what everyone else did to pass the time. Mr. Wolf kept taking us kids with us, mostly Wolf, Owl and myself, to show us how he was managing things. The girls stayed quiet, and I think were trying to keep under the radar. Parents were a lot more unsettled by everything I noticed. a lot of the little kids cried pretty bad the first first nights, but then they adapted.
I remember coming back from a run to the mill with Mr. Wolf and Owl to find Owl's Dad standing out back of the ice rink. Owl looked at his father cautiously. The man was crying gently with a bottle in his left hand and can of beer in the right.
"How did you get alcohol dad? They ration that stuff worse than food."
"I hid it crazy good. This is mine, and I needed it what with everything that's been happening. This stuff helps me deal with this stupid broken place."
“You promised you’d stay sober dad.”
“I promised, I’d try until there wasn’t any left to get me drunk with. I couldn’t manage. I wasn’t a very good husband all things considered, but I should have smartened up and got her out. But I didn’t and sometimes that’s a little hard to handle sober.”
"Does it really help with the pain dad?" Owl sounded scornful, but also a little curious. And that worried me.
"No, you don't boy. You don't get to imitate your old man on this thing. I fit too many stereotypes boy, you know that. I'm why you don't show any pride in your heritage. I know that. But this is the last of what cities have to offer me. I'm all dry after this. I wish you had listened closer to me about your mother, but I'm your father and I should have been there myself. And I wasn't. And it breaks me open that I wasn't. And I wish so bad I could keep hiding in a bottle, but I'm almost dry now and I'm going to have to do things alone. But no, the alcohol doesn't make the pain go away, just hides it for a while and let's it gather strength while yours falls away. Hiding only works for so long, and then you have to act."
“So what am I supposed to do, Dad?” Owl asked, “I’ve lost mom and I’ve lost Frisk. And I’m stuck here. What am I supposed to do?”
Owl’s dad pulled himself up and looked his son in the eyes, “You run. I told you this before, and I’ll tell you again. You see this? They’ve done this before and they’ll do it again. We didn’t see much of the Residential Schools up here, because we were so isolated. But I got relatives, you got relatives in other areas who got sent away and starved and beaten. They actually said that they wanted to kill the Indian in us, but what they really mean- and I don’t think they knew it- is that they needed to kill the wild part of us.”
“What you mean dad?”
“Why do you think when people in charge say good, they mean people don’t ask questions? Why do you think being good means being obedient. And why do you think the people in charge now, like you principal and your friend’s dad, why do you think they want control of the resources? Because if people were all asking questions and all had their own stuff, the people in control wouldn’t be in control. If you want to control people, you got to make them helpless, take away their ability to ignore you, to defy you. They did that to us, tribe by tribe, pushing their way west until their feet touched water. But I think, you know, that it was done to them too.”
“What was done to them? Dad you aren’t making much sense.”
“Them early civilizations, always empires, always conquering across the land. I think I know why. Way back then, people knew how to live- by themselves in little groups, they didn’t need no big city or no marketplace to get their food. And so the only way the cities could spread was by marching around conquering. And so all them early civilizations were conquerors. And now there aren’t many of people left who know how to live without a supermarket, and that’s how the people in charge like it. But this is what it leads to, because everything runs out eventually and then you have to face the hard cold sober reality you’ve been hiding from.”
“Are you talking about governments or yourself Dad?”
“It’s the same problem either way. We both are running out of something that we used even though we knew it would run out one day, and neither of us have a back up plan. It’s the same thing.”
“So, I should run?”
“You should grab anyone who will listen and run. Get away, get out. Go.”
“What about you?”
“I’m still a drunk boy. I’d just be a hindrance.”
“You’re also still my dad.”
“Not yet I'm not. Hang in there boy. With any luck, you’ll see your dad again soon.”
Back inside the center, we hooked up with the girls and Wolf and did the only thing left besides watching television, talk about what was happening.
"Have you noticed that a lot of people don't leave their cots anymore?" Viper asked.
Raven and I nodded.
"Mostly older folks." Owl said, "I notice that most of the grandparents aren't getting full rations either."
"I heard a few kids who think that their grandparents have died. The guards take them into 'private care' and nobody is allowed to see them ever again. It's been weeks for some of them."
"They don't want people to see other people starving."
"We're all starving, even the people getting better rationing that they other. They can't hide that."
"I think they're trying to keep from looking too bad"
"I can't find my grandmother." Viper said quietly. "They didn't put her in that private care thing, at least not as I can tell. Nobody seems to know where she's gone."
"Have you asked your parents?"
"They told me that she's out for a walk. Which is stupid, Grandma never left the rocking chair for anything besides bed time and meal time."
"So you don't think she went for a walk?"
"Not unless somebody took her for one. And she wouldn't want to go."
"Have you noticed how few old people we see around these days?"
I nodded. Nobody talked about it. But it was true. Every day there were fewer old folks who weren't in 'private care'. The elderly had slowly become invisible. And nobody wanted to talk about it, in case our worst fears were true.
They aren't adults,” Owl said, shaking his head, “An adult is somebody who can stand alone, stand up for himself, and know what he believes.”
Almost on cue, I heard several shouts of alarm and several more whoops of victory coming from a side entrance. We glanced at each other.
“That is either very good or very bad.” I said.
Owl shook his head, “When was that time something very good happened?”
“Well let's go see what fate is kicking us with this time.” Viper said.
We headed towards the noise, and discovered that They had managed to capture Safehope Bluff's Public Enemy number one: David Bartholemew.
Two of Them held Bart like Federal Agents holding a terrorist. Bart was thin as a stalk of corn, and pale as bleached flour. I don't know how he had the strength to stay standing, let alone grin the cocky contemptuous grin that he had plastered on his face as he looked at Mr. Wolf.
"So, do you have some fall guy to beat me up in the back room?" Bart asked.
"Oh, I can manage my own discipline," Mr. Wolf said, and then in one smooth motion drew the nightstick from his utility belt and brought it across Bart's jaw with a sharp cracking sound. I think Bart would have fallen over there, but They kept him upright. And that meant that Bart couldn't even avoid the hits by falling.
Mr. Wolf delivered blow after devastating blow. Bart's face was a mass of bruises right from the first hit. By the third hit, the nightstick had broken the skin on Bart's face and blood was spattering across the visors of the two of Them holding him in place. Somewhere around the fifth hit, Bart’s feet went slack and he stopped holding his head up.
Mr. Wolf continued to rain down blows.
Finally Raven screamed, "You're going to kill him!"
Mr. Wolf paused, nightstick hanging in the air like a horrifying promise. He turned and looked back at the people watching him.
"It'd be an improvement." He said, "But you'd like that wouldn't you?"
He looked back at the slack unconscious figure in front of him. And I was struck by how much it reminded me of the mule deer, skinned and gutted, hanging from the tree. I shuddered and shook my head to clear the image.
"Put him in confinement."
Owl leaned in, "We didn't give up Bart, so who did?"
We moved away from the scene where none of Them would hear us. Viper was the first to speak. She looked angry.
"Well. Everything is falling apart. Just like you wanted. Doesn't it feel great? No white picket fences for anyone anymore. Even if we last the winter, nothing will ever be the same. The world we know is gone. Isn't this what you wanted?"
"I didn't want everything to break. I didn't want this. I just didn't want to be part of their world."
"Well. Now nobody will. Probably ever again."
"Dad was right. He saw what coming. Not just the fact that things would fall. He saw what the fall would do to us. I wish I had listened to him."
"Bruce Lee always said that if you spend too much time thinking about something you won't get it done. I don't think we can afford not to get this done. So maybe we should just stop thinking and do it." Raven said.
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