Politics.
Also, after the weather started changing, with the rains and the suckers, the main hall of the station stayed dry, elevated as it was, and it was big enough for all the fireteams to have sleeping space, and room for the other stuff we did.
Four of the fireteams were organized around women, girls really, because not one of us was past twenty years old, except for Preacher. The fifth team, their captain was taken a week earlier by the Hunters. Unlucky guys in that crew. No sex. Well, not with any girl, at least. So now there were four females left, maybe in the entire world. It didn’t matter anyway. Whenever one of the captains got pregnant, she’d just bleed out.
Nothing took hold in Marbury, except for the Hunters and the bugs.
And the captains, Preacher was mostly responsible, were fooling themselves if they thought we’d be able to last much longer. Every day, more and more of us were taken, eaten, or got sick from the bugs.
That’s why all the Rangers were getting ready to leave, give up this region and drop back to somewhere we’d only heard rumors of. But they were nice stories, I guess.
I’ll get to that.
* * *
Anamore Fent didn’t say anything to me until we reached the steps at the front of the station. There was another team coming in at the same time. With the rain how it was, the place looked almost like pictures of Venice, the way the water came right up to the landing.
Maybe Venice during the plague.
I think she noticed how I watched her while we were getting dressed. I didn’t care. I wasn’t embarrassed, and here was this half-naked young girl standing just inches away from me. But when she did have all her clothes on, she looked almost like a boy because her hair was cut so short.
Except I remembered she was pregnant, and her belly did show that.
Nobody expected that to go much longer.
A lot of the females died that way. The rest got taken by Hunters.
She told me to get one of the privates from the other team—that was the one that was only men—to take our horses around to the platform. She told me to get this little kid named Strange to do it, and I thought that was the same name Ben and Griffin had on the shirts they wore when I first met them in Marbury, so I was hoping it was one of the guys. But it turned out he wasn’t. I didn’t know the kid. He had a twin brother, though, and they looked like they were maybe fourteen years old, a bit young, even for Rangers.
So while we got dressed on the landing, I actually looked at what I was wearing. There were three stripes on each of my sleeves, and my last name, KIRK, was stenciled on my left chest.
And when I buckled up my pants, that’s when I could tell that I was holding half the broken lens in my right front pocket. The Marbury lens, from the kids’ garage in Glenbrook. Crazy shit.
I wasn’t about to take it out and screw around with it in front of this crew.
Who knew what kind of shit might happen?
That’s when everything started to sink in, too, and I started to get more than just a little scared, wondering where everyone else ended up.
Because I figured that something big had changed. It never rained and thundered like this in Marbury before, So maybe, I thought, this wasn’t Marbury at all. And maybe my friends had all ended up somewhere else, too.
So part of me wanted to bust that lens out of my pocket and see if I could find anything in it, but I was also afraid of all these other people, and just how bad we might have fucked everything up beyond our ever getting back.
“Okay, I’ll take care of the horses,” I said.
“Then eyes out for Preacher and Pittman inside. They’re getting the food tonight,” Fent said.
“Okay.”
I turned to leave and she grabbed my arm and pulled me around.
“Is something wrong with you?”
“Uh. No,” I said.
Anamore Fent studied my eyes, like she could see something inside there. It scared me a little.
She said, “You don’t look right.”
“Nothing’s wrong, sweets.”
I could never get away with calling her that if any of the team was around. She’d have kicked me in the balls so hard, I’d sprout a nutsack from my throat. And she was a lot of things, but definitely not sweet, even if she did have an occasional preference for me over her other options. What can I say?
This wasn’t Glenbrook, Jack.
She let go of my arm, and that was that.
* * *
Duties rotated among the groups for guard posting, but the fireteams remained segregated during meals and sleeping.
Some of us were much better off than others; and that’s just how it was. Social classes are always going to exist, as long as you have at least two people on the same fucked-up planet.
Competition.
Afterwards, Rangers would mix in the big churchlike main hall of the station, playing games, gambling, sometimes for food or equipment, guns, they’d even play for sex.
It’s just how things were, and unless I was really drunk and brave, or stupid, I kept my distance from the game players. We, none of us, had had any alcohol for … how long? It doesn’t matter, anyway. Some guys knew ways to get high by snorting a kind of black salt they could find after the rains. It wasn’t actually salt, though, and I’d never put shit like that up my nose. It was actually a kind of mold, I think. I’d see guys fry their brains on that shit.
That first night was difficult, because all these memories started filling in like scrambled pictures and random snippets of sound.
I didn’t say anything, I just hovered around the team, keeping a slight distance, and when the hall finally started to quiet down a little, and most of the game debts were being paid, we took our boots and shirts off and stretched out with our guns on the pew benches we’d walled into our own small areas—like five states—so we could listen to Preacher play his little accordion.
Sometimes, I thought I’d catch a glimpse of her and some of the others whispering about me. She knew I was different, but how could she tell? What could she possibly know about us? That she’s just a fragment of something that might not even be real, that happens to be stuck on a wire we impaled ourselves on, like fish on a gill string?
That is, unless I am totally alone.
But I didn’t even want to think about that.
eleven
CONNER’S STORY [2]
Preacher played. It sounded sweet.
The old man was high. He snorted that shit all the time, and it made him tell the craziest stories. I don’t know if the crew believed him or not, but they usually did shut up and listen to the fucker.
Brian Fields was out somewhere in the darkness of the hall settling a debt, and Fent put Charlie on watch. Even when it wasn’t our turn on duty, she usually kept one of us guarding. We all preferred it that way. In the past, especially after the breakup of the army, Rangers suffered more attacks from our own than from the monsters.
Now that there were fewer than forty Rangers left, disputes over ownership weren’t so likely to flare up, but with just four females to all these guys, we all watched one another with suspicion.
Jay Pittman lay on a pew across from me, and Fent took the one bridging our gap. I tried to keep my eyes away from hers and pretend I was falling asleep to Preacher’s music, but she was too smart to be fooled. That’s why she was still alive.
When he’d stop playing, he told his stories, ones he’d either memorized from his Bible or just made up on the spot. Nobody knew how to read. I’d maybe only seen a few books, trash, in my entire memory with the team.
Preacher coughed. He was just trying to see if we were still awake. When he unhooked the accordion from his hands, it made a dying sigh on its own as it folded down onto the floor.
He said, “God breathed demons out from his own mouth. He did this to entertain himself while the Jumping Man was up in the sky.”
Pittman carried his chain of bug pricks around everywhere he went, like it was a kind of warning to the other Rangers, or some type of statement about his own masculinity, even though he was the only one of our team besides Preacher who’d never had sex even one time with the captain, at least as far as any of us knew.