“It’s hard to know how it all got started. People were standing around outside the main grocery in my neighborhood bumming cigarettes and sharing news, when these trucks just rolled into town. From a distance, we thought it was the power company. Hell, everybody cheered! But no one is cheering anymore.”
One of his mates kicked a rock and looked off in the distance, over the ridge, toward the city. “Ain’t that the truth,” he muttered, under his breath, to no one in particular.
“There was a group of homesteaders… whaddya call’em? Survivalists? They lived in this little community back in the woods a bit. The Guard just wiped that place out. We saw that with our own eyes as we were hiking out this way. They came in and commandeered all the supplies, fuel, goods… even the people. In the first few days, they interrogated people, treating them like prisoners. They asked and prodded and even tortured people until they found out where these end of the world types were, you know, the people who had stored up food and supplies. Then the guardsman sent out the word that people who did that were ‘hoarders.’ That’s what they called them. Then they outlawed hoarding and announced the death penalty as a punishment. I’m telling you,” the man shook his head, “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself.”
Peter took in what they said and didn’t ask questions. He was calculating how to adjust the trajectory of their hike in relation to this news. One of the men, the first one who’d spoken, now chimed in again, pointing to Peter’s weapon and the one Lang had slung over his good shoulder.
“Those guns. You better be careful with those. The Guard has been shooting on site anyone caught with guns and ammo. They don’t even ask questions. They simply fire and then relieve you of your burden. And they have snipers posted at outposts all around the town.” He nodded at Peter as he said this, as if to promise him that what he was saying was true. “They shoot first and ask questions later, buddy. And they rob and steal at will, and they are deadly efficient at it.”
“Lord, have mercy on us!” Elsie said, almost involuntarily. Her gloved hand covered her mouth and her eyes betrayed her fear.
“Well, you better hope that the Lord does, because the people running Carbondale will not.”
Lang scratched his chin. He, too, was considering this new information. He’d learned from Volkhov to dig deeper, and so he did. “And they all went along with it? The whole National Guard unit?”
“Oh, no,” the second man replied. “That’s just it. There was… thereis… a battle going on over that very thing. That’s one of the problems right now. It’s hard to tell who’s who. There was a large portion of the Missouri Guard unit that wouldn’t go along with the plan, and they’ve kind of formed themselves into, I don’t know… what would you call it?” He looked at his friends and they shrugged. “…A resistance unit?” His friends shrugged again. “They call themselves the FMA, the Free Missouri Army. Man,” he said, shaking his head, “you can’t make this stuff up. Only a few weeks ago I was buying milk on the way home for my wife, and now we have armies battling in our streets. A lot of former cops and ex-military — those are the ones that don’t seem to be going along with the Guard’s tyranny.” He looked at one of his friends. “Well, dang it, it is tyranny,” he said, obviously continuing some argument the two had been having. “You can call it temporary measures if you want, but it ain’t temporary for those folks lying in the ground.”
Turning his back to his friend, he continued. “Anyway… so, there is a group that has set themselves up as an alternative, and they do seem to be more reasonable. If nothing else, they have local folks involved. And this FMA is the only hope that a lot of rural people have around here of not being forced into the camps. So right now, we’re all in the middle of a little ‘civil war’, and it really just comes down to who you run into.”
Peter sighed deeply and looked at Lang. The two men raised their eyebrows at each other, and each waited for the other to speak.
Peter spoke first, and he spoke to his group.
“I suppose we should head straight west. We’ll have to find some way to cross Interstate 81, and that might be worse than Highway 17 was, but if we make it we can turn south. It’ll be a longer walk that way, but we’ll avoid a lot more trouble, and it seems to me like the farther we get away from Carbondale, the better.”
Lang nodded his head, and then turned back to the three men.
“You said we can see Carbondale from the top of that hill? Is it safe to take a look?”
“Probably,” one of the men said. “As I said, there are snipers here and there, or at least we have heard that there are. Hell, most of what we’ve just told you is hearsay, except for what we’ve seen with our own eyes, but what we did see was bad enough. So you prolly want to lie down and keep low and don’t stay on the ridge very long.”
“I’d like to check it out, if that’s alright with you, Peter?”
“Yes. I think I’d like to see it too, but, you go ahead. I’ll stay here with the ladies.” He looked at the three men and smiled, before adding, “No offense of course.”
“None taken.”
Lang walked up the hill, and as he walked, he noticed that the pain in his shoulder had increased. Perhaps it was the standing around. The constant walking gave him focus and took his mind off the pain, but the time spent standing and talking caused him to feel every movement of the wound. He could feel the ache throb through him like a knife. It pulsed with his heartbeat, and the pain spiked if he breathed too deeply.
As he reached the top of the hill, he dropped down on all fours in the snow and crawled the last bit until he crested the plateau. Looking down on the city, he inhaled sharply at the sight and felt the pain shoot through him, even down into his lower back.
Spread out before him was a landscape only seen, in our age, in the movies. There was an encampment consisting of thousands of large tents pooled in the middle of a low-slung valley. Sitting up on the hill was the highway that wound around a mountain and ran through the heart of what used to be Carbondale. The camp was bordered on all sides by trenches dug into the earth — scratched in, really — with razor-sharp wire strung along the borders and watchtowers being constructed at the four-corners by people being herded through their labors by men with guns. Along the outside of the fence, men and women were digging the trench deeper, and the occasional guardsman placed around the perimeter shouted orders to hasten the work.
The town was a direct likeness of a World War II era Nazi prison camp. There were tents stretching almost as far as the eye could see, and prisoners, most of them in clothes better meant for the city, were trudging through the gates and wandering aimlessly along the inner areas of the fence, as if they were plotting an escape, or hoping that the fences would hold fast against whatever terrors had attended their way to the camp.
Off to the east, placed, it seemed, so that the newly arriving refugees had to trudge through it on their way to the camp, was a fresh cemetery, a burial ground for the thousands of dead. Diggers worked feverishly in the snow.