“I’ll agree to that,” Lewis said. “Hopefully the town learned its lesson there.”
“Definitely.” Matt brightened, eager to change the subject, and even more eager about what he was changing it to. “And something big happened personally for me this winter.” He held up his hand to show the wedding band on his ring finger, one of his dad’s old ones given as a wedding present.
The two men stared at it in shock. “No way,” Trev said, finally finding his voice at the same time he found his grin. “Sam?” Matt nodded, grinning back, and his friend pulled him into another crushing hug. “Congratulations!”
“Congratulations!” Lewis echoed, slapping him on the back almost hard enough to knock Matt and Trev over.
Trev backed away so he could also clap Matt on the back. “Tell us about it.”
Matt was only too happy to, describing his proposal and the wedding. The entire time Trev kept grinning like an idiot, and even Lewis was smiling broadly. Once he finished Trev shook his head.
“I’ll have to think of a wedding present for you.”
“Are you kidding? Your cache was the present of a lifetime.” Matt hastily turned to Lewis. “And the shelter! We’ll never be able to thank you enough.”
The mention of those things seemed to remind the cousins about the events last fall, and some of their good humor faded. “What about Mandy?” Trev asked quietly.
In spite of the happy reunion Matt scowled at the memory of the poisonous woman. “We caught her trying to steal food from my parents’ pantry the night Ferris left, after Razor attacked the town. Caught her red-handed, but she—”
“Whoa whoa, wait,” Lewis interrupted. “Razor attacked the town?”
Matt nodded and quickly went over the events of that day last fall, months in the past now but still vividly etched in his memory. He finished off by finally getting around to answering Trev’s question about Mandy. “So anyway when we caught her she tried to lie to us, not that any of us believed her. She was one of the first criminals Catherine exiled, and once she was gone it was a lot easier to stamp down the false claims she’d made about you. People figured that if she’d lie and steal she wasn’t too trustworthy about other things either.”
Trev smiled, but Matt thought he still looked a touch bitter. “That’s great. All it took to trust the person who grew up next door over a complete stranger was finding out that stranger was a liar.”
A somewhat uncomfortable silence fell. “Catherine was on your side the whole time, and so were a lot of other people. And I’m sure those that weren’t feel bad about it now.” Matt squared his shoulders. “Anyway conditions in the town were much better with Ferris and Razor both gone. I forgot to mention that Catherine also invited the refugees to come live in the town that day. Since we had no food there wasn’t any reason to keep them out anymore, and anyway the Mayor figured if she made the refugees citizens of Aspen Hill that would stop the growing hatred between them and us “townies”. And it did, for the most part. We put aside our differences and turned our focus to surviving the winter.”
“How bad was it?” Lewis asked. From his tone he wasn’t expecting good news.
Matt shook his head grimly. “Bad. With Ferris confiscating and “redistributing” what little food we had among the refugees, no one had enough. Our estimate is that over a third, closer to half, of Aspen Hill’s population, refugees included, died during the winter. Of starvation, cold, or illness. And to survive even as well as we did we had to slaughter almost all our livestock, including horses, as well as most of the pets.”
Lewis sucked in a breath. “That’s a lot of vital future usefulness wasted. Historically one of the most common signs of prosperity was the size of a community’s herd.”
Matt nodded. “The horses are the real tragedy. Not just because they’re majestic, faithful, hardworking creatures but because now in a world without fuel we’re back to horsepower, and we had to eat ours just to live. But either way we’re limping along, barely surviving, and we need all the help we can get.”
The cousins exchanged a look and Trev cleared his throat. “So we see. No offense, Matt, but you look like you’re almost too weak to stand. We’ve got some boiled wheat and strips of rabbit for you and your friends down below.”
“They didn’t come all this way for a meal,” Lewis stated, looking a bit annoyed. “What help did you think we could give, Matt?”
Matt sighed. He’d sort of been hoping to stretch the reunion out a bit longer. “Well it’s like this. I know you, Lewis, and you’ve got caches on top of caches on top of caches. You had a lot of food in your underground shelter in Aspen Hill, and when you found out about FETF you dragged some of it away to put in a new hiding place so it wouldn’t all be stolen.”
Lewis stiffened and turned to glare at Trev. “You told him?”
“I swear I didn’t!” Trev replied, waving his hands frantically.
“He didn’t,” Matt hurriedly cut in before Lewis could really start to rage. “I just saw Trev looking all dirty and sweaty and even more exhausted than when I’d left him, earlier that day when we got back from our trip to get April’s family. And then even though you guys had just lost everything he gave my family all the food from the cache up by his car. I figured you guys had started caching stuff the moment you heard about FETF and managed to squirrel a lot of your supplies away before Ferris got to you.”
“Good to know our friends are thinking that much about our private business,” Lewis grumbled.
Matt did his best to squash his annoyance, as well as the guilt that came along with it. “We spent this winter starving… food was the number one thing on our minds.” He waved at their waistlines, even though they were all bundled up. “On the other hand you seem to have weathered the winter well by the looks of it, meaning you managed to haul some supplies up here. But we were sort of wondering if you didn’t manage to cache more food than you two could carry up into the mountains, so maybe there’s a stash still down there that could save lives.”
“We could be planning to go down and get it ourselves,” Lewis said flatly. “Our food. Our lives.” He paused. “Assuming we had any extra.”
“You do though, right?” Matt demanded. “We’ve got children down there, women, men who can’t lift a shovel to plant a field or a gun to defend the town. Whatever you have could mean the difference between life and death for dozens, maybe hundreds of people.”
Lewis waved at the mountains around them. “See where we are? It’s a bit hard to be sympathetic when almost everything we owned was stolen from us, to the point where we decided we’d rather spend the winter freezing in ten foot drifts than stay in Aspen Hill.”
Matt sighed. He hadn’t expected this to be easy, and he’d had a feeling the cousins would feel this way. “We know you guys got the short end of the stick, but you can’t really blame the town for that. Ferris is the one who took all your stuff.”
“You went along with it,” Lewis shot back.
Matt took personal offense to that, until he realized his friend meant the town in general. Still… “He took our weapons!”
“You went along with that, too. Actually most of you willingly gave them up for some food and the threat of being put on a naughty boy list. Besides, Ferris didn’t loot our shelter all by himself.
“Nobody in my family helped with that,” Matt protested, although it irked him that he was being put on trial. He supposed he should’ve expected it while representing the town. “Plenty of other families didn’t help either, like the Watsons and Tillmans and a dozen others I could name. Besides, Anderson’s the one who organized that and he’s not in charge anymore.”
Trev shook his head, looking more tired than anything. “We were watching the people with Anderson empty the place out, you know. They weren’t really too quiet about celebrating as they robbed their neighbors blind.”