When had I begun thinking of him as a man rather than a boy? What the hell. We’re all men and women now, not kids anymore. Shit.
Bankole walked behind, looking even more formidable than Harry in spite of his graying hair and beard. He had a gun in his hand. I had gotten a look at it as I walked past him. Another automatic—perhaps a nine millimeter. I hoped he was good with it.
Natividad pushed his cart along just ahead of him with Dominic still in one of the bags. Travis walked beside her, guarding her and the baby.
I walked with the two women, fearful that one of them might fall or that some fool might grab one. The one called Allie was still bleeding, spitting blood and wiping her bloody nose with a bloody arm. And the one called Jill still looked dull and shaky. Allie and I kept Jill between us.
Before the attack began, I knew it would happen. Helping the two trapped women had made us targets. We might already have been attacked if the community down the road had not drawn off so many of the most violent, desperate people. The weak would be attacked today. The quake had set the mood. And one attack could trigger others.
We could only try to be ready.
Out of the blue, a man grabbed Zahra. She’s small, and must have looked weak as well as beautiful.
An instant later, someone grabbed me. I was spun around, and I tripped and started to fall. It was that stupid. Before anyone could hit me, I tripped and fell. But because my attacker had pulled me toward him, I fell against him. I dragged him down with me. Somehow, I managed to get my knife out. I flicked it open. I jabbed it upward into my attacker’s body.
The six inch blade went in to the hilt. Then, in empathic agony, I jerked it out again.
I can’t describe the pain.
The others told me later that I screamed as they’d never heard anyone scream. I’m not surprised. Nothing has ever hurt me that much before.
After a while, the agony in my chest ebbed and died. That is, the man on top of me bled and died. Not until then could I begin to be aware of something other than pain.
The first thing I heard was Dominic, crying.
I understood then that I had also heard shots fired—several shots. Where was everyone? Were they wounded?
Dead? Being held prisoner?
I kept my body still beneath the dead man. He was painfully heavy as deadweight, and his body odor was nauseating. He had bled all over my chest, and, if my nose was any judge, in death, he had urinated on me. Yet I didn’t dare move until I understood the situation.
I opened my eyes just a little.
Before I could understand what I was seeing, someone hauled the stinking dead man off me. I found myself looking into two worried faces: Harry and Bankole.
I coughed and tried to get up, but Bankole held me down.
“Are you hurt anywhere?” he demanded.
“No, I’m all right,” I said. I saw Harry staring at all the blood, and I added, “Don’t worry. The other guy did all the bleeding.”
They helped me up, and I discovered I was right. The dead man had urinated on me. I was almost frantic with the need to strip off my filthy clothes and wash. But that had to wait. No matter how disgusting I was, I wouldn’t undress in daylight where I could be seen. I’d had enough trouble for one day.
I looked around, saw Travis and Natividad comforting Dominic who was still screaming. Zahra was with the two new girls, standing guard beside them as they sat on the ground.
“Are those two okay?” I asked.
Harry nodded. “They’re scared and shaken up, but they’re all right. Everyone’s all right—except him and his friends.” He gestured toward the dead man. There were three more dead lying nearby.
“There were some wounded,” Harry said. “We let them go.”
I nodded. “We’d better strip these bodies and go, too. We’re too obvious here from the highway.”
We did a quick, thorough job, searching everything except body cavities. We weren’t needy enough to do that yet. Then, at Zahra’s insistence, I did go behind the ruined house for a quick change of clothing. She took the gun from Harry and stood watch for me.
“You’re bloody,” she said. “If people think you’re wounded, they might jump you. This ain’t a good day to look like you got something wrong with you.”
I suspected that she was right. Anyway, it was a pleasure to have her talk me into something I already wanted so much to do.
I put my filthy, wet clothes into a plastic bag, sealed it, and stuffed it into my pack. If any of the dead had owned clothing that would fit me, and that was still in wearable condition, I would have thrown mine away. As it was, I would keep them and wash them the next time we came to a water station or a store that permitted washing. We had collected money from the corpses, but it would be best to use that for necessities.
We had taken about twenty-five hundred dollars in all from the four corpses—along with two knives that we could sell or pass on to the two girls, and one gun pulled by a man Harry had shot. The gun turned out to be an empty, dirty Beretta nine millimeter. Its owner had had no ammunition, but we can buy that—maybe from Bankole. For that we will spend money. I had found a few pieces of jewelry in the pocket of the man who attacked me—two gold rings, a necklace of polished blue stones that I thought were lapis lazuli, and a single earring which turned out to be a radio. The radio we would keep. It could give us information about the world beyond the highway. It would be good not to be cut off any longer. I wondered who my attacker had robbed to get it.
All four of the corpses had little plastic pill boxes hidden somewhere on them. Two boxes contained a couple of pills each. The other two were empty. So these people who carried neither food nor water nor adequate weapons did carry pills when they could steal them or steal enough to buy them. Junkies. What was their drug of choice, I wondered. Pyro? For the first time in days, I found myself thinking of my brother Keith. Had he dealt in the round purple pills we kept finding on people who attacked us? Was that why he died?
A few miles later along the highway, we saw some cops in cars, heading south toward what must now be a burned out hulk of a community with a lot of corpses. Perhaps the cops would arrest a few late-arriving scavengers. Perhaps they would scavenge a little themselves. Or perhaps they would just have a look and drive away. What had cops done for my community when it was burning? Nothing.
The two women we’d dug out of the rubble want to stay with us. Allison and Jillian Gilchrist are their names. They are sisters, 24 and 25 years old, poor, running away from a life of prostitution. Their pimp was their father. The house that had fallen on them was empty when they took shelter in it the night before. It looked long abandoned.
“Abandoned buildings are traps,” Zahra told them as we walked. “Out here in the middle of nowhere, they’re targets for all kinds of people.”
“Nobody bothered us,” Jill said. “But then the house fell on us, and nobody helped us either, until you guys came along.”
“You’re very fortunate,” Bankole told her. He was still with us, and walking next to me. “People don’t help each other much out here.”
“We know,” Jill admitted. “We’re grateful. Who are you guys, anyway?”
Harry gave her an odd little smile. “Earthseed,” he said, and glanced at me. You have to watch out for Harry when he smiles that way.
“What’s Earthseed?” Jill asked, right on cue. She had let Harry direct her gaze to me.
“We share some ideas,” I said. “We intend to settle up north, and found a community.”
“Where up north?” Allie demanded. Her mouth was still hurting, and I felt it more when I paid attention to her. At least her bleeding had almost stopped.
“We’re looking for jobs that pay salaries and we’re watching water prices,” I said. “We want to settle where water isn’t such a big problem.”
“Water’s a problem everywhere,” she proclaimed. Then, “What are you? Some kind of cult or something?”
“We believe in
some of the same things,” I said.
She turned to stare at me with what looked like hostility. “I think religion is dog shit,” she announced. “It’s either phony or crazy.”
I shrugged. “You can travel with us or you can walk away.”
“But what the hell do you stand for?” she demanded. “What do you pray to?”
“Ourselves,” I said. “What else is there?”
She turned away in disgust, then turned back. “Do we have to join your cult if we travel with you?”
“No.”
“All right then!” She turned her back and walked ahead of me as though she’d won something.
I raised my voice just enough to startle and projected it at the back of her head. I said, “We risked ourselves for you today.”
She jumped, but refused to look back.
I continued. “You don’t owe us anything for that. It isn’t something you could buy from us. But if you travel with us, and there’s trouble, you stand by us, stand with us. Now will you do that or not?”
Allie swung around, stiff with anger. She stopped right in front of me and stood there.
I didn’t stop or turn. It wasn’t a time for giving way. I needed to know what her pride and anger might drive her to. How much of that apparent hostility of hers was real, and how much might be due to her pain? Was she going to be more trouble than she was worth?
When she realized that I meant to walk over her if I had to, that I would do it, she slid around me to walk beside me as though she had intended to do that all along.
“If you hadn’t been the ones to dig us out,” she said, “we wouldn’t bother with you at all.” She drew a deep, ragged breath. “We know how to pull our own weight. We can help our friends and fight our enemies. We’ve been doing that since we were kids.”
I looked at her, thinking of the little that she and her sister had told us about their lives: prostitution, pimp father… Hell of a story if it were true. No doubt the details would be even more interesting. How had they gotten away from their father, anyway? They would bear watching, but they might turn out to be worth something.
“Welcome,” I said.
She stared at me, nodded, then walked ahead of me in long quick strides. Her sister, who had dropped to walk near us while we were talking, now walked faster to join her. And Zahra, who had dropped back to keep an eye on the sister, grinned at me and shook her head. She went up to join Harry who was leading the group.
Bankole came up beside me again, and I realized he had gotten out of the way as soon as he saw trouble between Allie and me.
“One fight a day is enough for me,” he said when he saw me looking at him.
I smiled. “Thank you for standing by us back there.”
He shrugged. “I was surprised to see that anyone else cared what happened to a couple of strangers.”
“You cared.”
“Yes. That kind of thing will get me killed someday. If you don’t mind, I’d like to travel with your group, too.”
“You have been. You’re welcome.”
“Thank you,” he said, and smiled back at me. He had clear eyes with deep brown irises—attractive eyes. I like him too much already. I’ll have to be careful.
Late today we reached Salinas, a small city that seemed little touched by the quake and its aftershocks. The ground has been shuddering off and on all day. Also, Salinas seemed untouched by the hordes of overeager scavengers that we had been seeing since that first burning community this morning. That was a surprise. Almost all of the smaller communities we’d passed had been burning and swarming with scavengers. It was as though the quake had given yesterday’s quiet, plodding paupers permission to go animal and prey on anyone who still lives in a house.
I suspected that the bulk of the predatory scavengers were still behind us, still killing and dying and fighting over the spoils. I’ve never worked as hard at not seeing what was going on around me as I did today. The smoke and the noise helped veil things from me. I had enough to do dealing with Allie’s throbbing face and mouth and the ambient misery of the highway.
We were tired when we reached Salinas, but we had decided to walk on after resupplying and washing. We didn’t want to be in town when the worst of the scavengers arrived. They might be calm, tired after their day of burning and stealing, but I doubted it. I thought they would be drunk with power and hungry for more. As Bankole said, “Once people get the idea that it’s all right to take what you want and destroy the rest, who knows when they’ll stop.”
But Salinas looked well-armed. Cops had parked all along the shoulders of the highway, staring at us, some holding their shotguns or automatic rifles as though they’d love an excuse to use them. Maybe they knew what was coming.
We needed to resupply, but we didn’t know whether we would be allowed to. Salinas had the look of a “stay on the road” type town—the kind that wanted you gone by sundown unless you lived there. This week and last, we had run across a few little towns like that.
But no one stopped us when we headed off the road to a store. There were only a few people on the road now, and the cops were able to watch all of us. I saw them watching us in particular, but they didn’t stop us. We were quiet. We were women and a baby as well as men, and three of us were white. I don’t think any of that harmed us in their eyes.
The security guards in the stores were as well-armed as the cops—shot-guns and automatic rifles, a couple of machine guns on tripods in cubicles above us. Bankole said he could remember a time when security guards had revolvers or nothing but clubs. My father used to talk like that.
Some of the guards either weren’t very well trained—or they were almost as power-drunk as the scavengers. They pointed their guns at us. It was crazy. Two or three of us walked into a store and two or three guns were trained on us. We didn’t know what was going on at first. We froze, staring, waiting to see what was going to happen.
The guys behind the guns laughed. One of them said, “Buy something or get the fuck out!”
We got out. These were little stores. There were plenty of them to choose from. Some of them turned out to have sane guards. I couldn’t help wondering how many accidents the crazy guards have with those guns. I suppose that after the fact, every accident was an armed robber with obvious homicidal inclinations.
The guards at the water station seemed calm and professional. They kept their guns down and confined themselves to cursing people to speed them along. We felt safe enough not only to buy water and give our clothes a quick wash and dry, but to rent a couple of cubicles—men’s and women’s—and sponge ourselves off from a basin of water each. That settled the question of my sex for any of the new people who hadn’t already figured it out.
At last, somewhat cleaner, resupplied with food, water, ammunition for all three guns, and, by the way, condoms for my own future, we headed out of town. On our way, we passed through a small street market at the edge of town. It was just a few people with their merchandise—mostly junk—scattered on tables or on filthy rags spread on the bare asphalt. Bankole spotted the rifle on one of the tables.
It was an antique—a bolt action Winchester, empty of course, with a five-round capacity. It would be, as Bankole admitted, slow. But he liked it. He inspected it with eyes and fingers and bargained with the well-armed old man and woman who were offering it for sale. They had one of the cleaner tables with merchandise laid out in a neat pattern—a small, manual typewriter; a stack of books; a few hand tools, worn, but clean; two knives in worn leather sheaths; a couple of pots, and the rifle with sling and scope.
While Bankole haggled with the man over the rifle, I bought the pots from the woman. I would get Bankole to carry them in his cart. They were large enough to contain soup or stew or hot cereal for all of us at once. We were nine now, and bigger pots made sense. Then I joined Harry at the stack of books.
There was no nonfiction. I bought a fat anthology of poetry and Harry bought a western novel. The others, either from l
ack of money or from lack of interest ignored the books. I would have bought more if I could have carried them. My pack was already about as heavy as I thought I could stand, and still walk all day.
Our bargaining finished, we stood away from the table to wait for Bankole. And Bankole surprised us.
He got the old man down to a price he seemed to think was fair, then he called us over. “Any of you know how to handle a relic like this?” he asked.
Well, Harry and I did, and he had us look the rifle over. In the end, everyone had a look at it, some with obvious awkwardness and some with familiarity. Back in the neighborhood, Harry and I had practiced with the guns of other households—rifles and shotguns as well as handguns. Whatever was legal back home was shared, at least in practice sessions. My father had wanted us to be familiar with whatever weapons might be available. Harry and I were both good, competent shots, but we’d never bought a used gun. I liked the rifle, I liked the look and feel of it, but that didn’t mean much. Harry seemed to like it, too. Same problem.
“Come over here,” Bankole said. He herded us out of earshot of the old couple. “You should buy that gun,” he told us. “You took enough money off those four junkies to pay the price I got that guy to agree to. You need at least one accurate, long-range weapon, and this is a good one.”
“That money would buy a lot of food,” Travis said.
Bankole nodded. “Yes, but only living people need food. You buy this, and it will pay for itself the first time you need it. Anyone who doesn’t know how to use it, I’ll teach. My father and I used to hunt deer with guns just like this.”
“It’s an antique,” Harry said. “If it were automatic…”
“If it were automatic, you couldn’t afford it.” Bankole shrugged. “This thing is cheap because it’s old and it’s legal.”
“And it’s slow,” Zahra said. “And if you think that old guy’s price is cheap, you’re crazy.”
“I know I’m new here,” Allie said, “but I agree with Bankole. You guys are good with your handguns, but sooner or later, you’re going to meet someone who sits out of handgun range and picks you off. Picks us off.”