Together they built another fire in the building, and again Peter filled the two holes with hot coals. This time he boiled water in both pans and then he went through the process of checking and re-dressing Lang’s wound. When he pulled the gauze out of the wound, Lang yelled out, and Peter calmed him and told him that the pain was a good sign. He gave Lang a small piece of leather, the sheath of the knife that Clay had once gotten from Veronica, to bite down on.
“That means the wound is healing and the gauze has dried into the wound,” Peter said. “Even though it hurts, ripping the wound open is actually good for it.”
Lang bit down and looked at Peter through bleary eyes. The older man spread his hands as if to indicate that he could not quite explain exactly how it was good, but Lang would just have to trust him. Lang leaned his head back against the now cold stone and blinked that he did.
After Peter was finished caring for the bullet wound, they boiled enough water to fill all of their water bottles, and Peter said that this was the best they could do in the moment as far as water purification.
“Does boiling the water guarantee that the water will be pure and free from any dangerous bacteria?” Natasha had asked.
“Nothing ever guarantees anything,” was all Peter had said to that.
After packing up their gear, by around 8 a.m., they were ready to continue their walk. Checking the map and the compass, Peter plotted a course for them, and they set out through the snow, feeling the weight and mileage in their legs from the previous day’s trek.
They continued their southwesterly advance, and they were surprised and pleased to discover that, for most of the day, they moved through empty forestland and not suburban tracts or areas thick with farms and their fences. They made good time, and kept up their cautious movement, advancing steadily until the day began to morph into evening.
As the darkness began to fall, they saw from a low hill a space in the distance where the forest seemed to end, and they noticed the long black shadows of some type of structures that rose above the trees. They couldn’t quite make them out at first, but in a moment they could see them, distinct in their regularly placed intervals and structurally different from the chaotic mass of limbs and branches reaching like tentacles into the nighttime sky. In the gloaming they looked like dinosaurs against the darkening heavens, sitting up on a ridge where their skeletons towered over the valley.
As they grew closer, the structures disappeared into the mishmash of branches and darkness immediately over their heads, and they began to hear the now familiar sounds of people and gunfire, first in the distance, and eventually in the foreground. They slowed their approach and wove through the trees, staying hidden among the trunks and the brush until they eventually stepped to the edge of a clearing and saw spread out before them what looked, for everything in the world, like a battlefield.
The clearing was now deserted. However, this desertion had only happened recently, because the fires of a large encampment—one that would have served a large group of families—were spread here and there throughout the long, clear-cut strip, and the fires still burned.
As they surveyed the damage and looked around for any signs of movement they heard a crackling overhead and one of the wooden dinosaur looking structures, burning at its base from a fire set near a group of tents around the foundation, came suddenly to groan and creak and then to give way. It crashed to the ground in a huge, roaring din, its tail, connecting it to the other structures, tightening from the weight of the fallen beast before the tension was too much. The fall of the dinosaur and the tension in its tail caused it to snap and whip back upwards, sending a high-pitched ricochet through the valley that made the hikers flinch and step back as the noise whistled down the valley.
The trees and forest ended abruptly in a straight, ruled line and there was a long clearing, and when the three travelers examined the scene they noted that the strip was actually a long beltway that ran from northwest to southeast. Down this long, cleared strip ran power lines, held aloft by enormous wooden towers. The streak of land cut through the forest like a landing strip, and the scene looked, if they hadn’t known better, as if planes had merely skimmed in low to the ground and strafed the dozens of encampments along the strip with gunfire. Obviously, the refugees had been using the stretch of clearing as a highway to move from wherever they were to wherever they were going, and, not unlike Highway 17, which was still clear in their minds, this well-traveled route of escape had become a death trap for those who had thought to take the easy way out. In fact, if anything, this strip was the worse for having had one day more for the crowds to indulge in their mayhem.
Peter made sure the trio stayed low, and they moved quickly and with purpose, and they kept their eyes peeled to their surroundings as they surveyed the remains of the battle that had taken place, seemingly just moments before, in the field.
From the destruction, debris, and corpses lying around in the snow, Peter determined that this had been a makeshift refugee camp. He deduced that maybe thirty families had been staying in the clearing until only moments ago. The battle was not long in the past—perhaps an hour or so—but not longer.
The older man knelt down, and his eyes took in the gruesome scene. He looked out into the woods to the south, and he pointed so that Lang and Natasha could follow what he was about to say.
“It looks like they came from that way, through the woods. Some kind of looter raiding party. A gang of thugs, or… maybe they were middle-class teachers, grocers, and lawyers? Who’s to know? I’d say it was ten or twelve of them. The attackers came out from the woods. It was not long ago, this very evening, because the fires were burning. We heard that noise earlier. It’s likely that the refugees had no night vision from staring into the fire. Some of the tents and supplies spilled over into the fires in the confusion. The raiding party probably staked out the place from those trees.” He pointed back to the south, along a thicket of brush.
“They waited until they felt it was the right time, and then they hit hard and fast. It looks like about two-thirds of the people in this camp didn’t even stand a chance, cut down before they could stand up and figure out what was going on. No chance at all to get to any kind of cover.” Peter turned and swiveled on his heels as if he were watching the attack in real-time as it played out before him.
“The looters took what they wanted, then they went that way.” He pointed to the northwest, following with his finger up the greenbelt.
Peter didn’t want to spend too much time in the refugee camp, but he felt it prudent to do a quick and cursory search for supplies and weapons, anything the looters had missed. They moved quickly. Wrapped up inside a fallen tent, they found a .22 Marlin squirrel rifle and about ten boxes of ammunition. Lang was the first to find it, and he silently held it up for Peter to appreciate.
Natasha protested at first, when Peter and Lang took the rifle and packed away the ammunition in Lang’s backpack, but Peter explained to her that the people who owned this stuff… they were all gone. And the gun, if left here, would be taken by someone else coming by, either by good people with benevolent intentions, or by wicked people with evil intentions. “The only way that we can ensure that it falls into the right hands,” he spread his own hands, as if the answer were obvious, “is to take it ourselves. Use it for right purposes.”