It's Better This Way Page 2

  Once in a while though, a cunning few somehow survived, usually by lasting long enough to find the closest occupied home and lying in wait until the perfect time to ambush, murder, and steal. Rape was almost always a given if the ambushed had been unlucky enough to be female. Most banished took the hint and relieved the dead of everything that would help them survive a long trip away from The Farm and even the central wastelands. The Farm had a fairly long arm of influence, and it had become an important hub in the network. The few who didn’t get the hint usually came back into our territory and tried to exact revenge. Sometimes they got some revenge, but in the end they always died. Once in a great while one of the banished would manage to get his hands on weapons, food, and enough followers to make things difficult for everyone around the region, including us.

  The council would ask Mom to give the okay for a kill squad to hunt down the self-proclaimed king, messiah, god, whatever he called himself. Once it had been a banished husband and wife, and their religious fervor had ignited a lot of deaths on both sides until Tremaine killed them both with a shotgun before being torn apart by the flock, as their faithful called themselves. That was a couple of years before I stumbled along and joined The Farm, but the lesson ran deep. Even if the madman wasn’t one of the banished, we still hunted him down and took his life. We simply couldn’t afford a strongman in the area making trouble. Usually the ‘trouble’ ended with too many humans dead.

  The Farm had spent the time from the day of the invasion building up inventories, weapon stocks, food, seed, non-electrical equipment, books, everything they thought they would need to survive in the middle of Oregon with no contact with anyone outside of how far they could ride a horse or a bike. It had started as a sort of pot farm and hippie commune before the invasion. After, it became a destination for anyone that could follow the rules and wanted to live. Life outside of The Farm was almost always much more brutal and harsh. Jenna White, Mom to everyone now, was the original owner of the 1940’s farmhouse and outbuildings that sat on one hundred sixty acres of rolling hills farmland.

  Because of Mom and her hippie clan from Portland, The Farm now housed almost four thousand humans on a couple thousand acres. There was no more BLM or county sheriff to come around and tell you where to put fences. The people with the guns decided where to put up fences. Mom had the final word on just about everything, though there was a council that varied from nine to more than fifty, depending on what was being decided, that got to decide what rules to make, what quotas to set, who got what work assignments. When crimes or issues affected everyone to the point the council decided it was best to have a full vote, all of us would congregate on the giant (and usually overgrown) lawn that was still kept on the south side of the main house. At four thousand citizens it could get a bit crowded, but even during the most debated issues that required a full vote, there had never been more than three thousand of us gathered.

  Everyone was assigned a job to do for a year. If you didn’t want to do the job, you had one chance to exchange it with someone that the assignment team agreed could handle the job you were refusing. If you refused a swap after you’d requested it, or refused to do your job for any reason other than a medical reason, you got banished. If you stole anything, you got banished. If you physically hurt someone against their will, you got banished. If you raped someone, you got castrated and cauterized, then banished. If you killed someone, you got banished to The Cage.

  The Cage was an iron cage, crafted by our blacksmith Dredge, placed at the intersection of the main road that ran in front of the main house and the road that led out to LR40 and on to Eugene. Murderers were stripped and had their hands and feet bound before being put inside the cage. Where they stayed until they died. It was disturbing to walk past The Cage every day and see the change from the previous day as the person inside died slowly of starvation, dehydration, and exposure. I’d only had to witness such an event twice in my nine years.

  The last time it was a teenage girl who cried for days when she wasn’t wailing in sorrow or screaming in fury or fear. It rained every day for a week then, and the poor girl stayed alive longer than anyone else ever had. Most only lasted five days. Some of the heartier ones were said to have lasted as long as seven days. Misha, the teenager, had finally clocked out after thirteen days. Thirteen agonizing, slow, painful days. I saw her in my dreams sometimes. But she’d murdered a teenage boy who had taken her virginity before spurning her.

  By the evening, we were only about ten miles short of The Farm. Since we were coming back from the northwest, it was desolate and there were no outlying houses or shelters. Coming back from the south was the best, with friendly farmers or others who traded with us, offering a bed and a meal and any news traveling along the network. They knew we would come running with guns raised if anything happened in their neck of the woods. The outliers didn’t have to live by our rules, and we didn’t preach our rules to outsiders, whether they were close enough to be considered locals or if they’d journeyed from far away places like Portland, Reno, or even the Bay Area.

  We simply told them our rules, and told them if they wanted to trade with us, wanted us to protect them against mobs or brigands, they had to abide the most basic ones of ‘don’t hurt people’ and ‘we are all in this together’ which sounded like some hippie shit from the 1960’s but Mom insisted on it. I think the fact that we actively hunted down anyone who had a taste for power or any other kind of evil made the survivors within a hundred miles appreciate what we did even more and helped keep the region stable. We were the only law where there was none.

  Tony made the fire while I worked on getting something to eat ready. It would be another round of MRE’s, but they were nutritious and some weren’t half bad. I liked Tony. We’d been scouting as a pair for seven months now. In five months when I got a new assignment, I’d miss him for sure. We typically said less than a hundred words to each other during our forays around the wasteland to keep an eye on things. I didn’t even know his last name.

  Last names were a funny thing these days honestly. A lot of the kids who were born after the bulls arrived opted for a single name now. Kortanna. Jennimyer. There was even a fifteen year old kid who called himself Megatron after some old cartoon I guess. Tremaine was the big inspiration for the single name trend. He’d died to cleanse the region of exactly the kind of thing that the Farm would sacrifice everything to be rid of.

  After a beef stew and applesauce meal from the foil pouches, I leaned against a rock and fired up the pipe. We were close enough to home that only the truly foolish would try to ambush us in the middle of the night. Not that there wasn’t a decent share of truly foolish, but ten miles was practically home base considering the reach that The Farm had. Tony puffed a bit with me, and we sat silently, watching the galaxy come to life above our heads. I wanted to ask him his last name, where he came from, why or how he ended up at the Farm. Instead, I wondered again about Sandra.

  CHAPTER 4 - A Scavenger and His Sister

  After watching my father get riddled with bullets, I made it back to Boise. I was hungry, thirsty, dirty, and mostly insane. I waited until night to sneak back into our house. It had been sacked, but like most homes on the street from what I could tell, it hadn’t been completely trashed. I slept upstairs near the window of my father’s bedroom. If I heard anything I could go out the other window and down into the side yard, as well as watch the main street from up high. Running water was a fantasy, but there was a small stream that ran behind the house a few over from ours. I found an empty plastic gallon jug in the garage, along with a nice pile of human excrement on the hood of my father’s BMW.

  I drank the water, regretted it by nearly shitting myself to death for the next two days, then decided to go exploring through the neighborhood. I needed food, clothes, and most of all guns. I needed to acquire a bike or a horse or something to somehow make it to Corvallis to find my sister. I tried to keep at bay the images of her being raped and killed by the new powe
rs controlling wherever she was. As I moved house to house, I found more dead bodies than food or guns. Most houses still had plenty of clothing left in them. I sampled a pile of brand new athletic socks and an unopened bag of boxer-briefs, tossing them all into my new backpack that had been overlooked at the Morgansens’ house. By the third night I found a nice pair of hiking boots for when my current pair went belly-up, as well as a Mormon cellar.

  Mormon cellars were wonders to behold. All you had to do was find a family that was of the Mormon faith and then go into their house. A basement was almost always a feature of their houses, and there would always be a very large room that was stocked floor to ceiling with all the essentials like water, cornmeal, canned goods, jars of vegetables, jerky… you name it, they had it if it could survive the apocalypse. I was glad that whoever had been looting the neighborhood either didn’t know about Mormons or didn’t have the capacity for sane thought to even grasp such a concept. Whoever had killed the husband, wife, and three young children upstairs couldn’t have been sane. But a Mormon cellar was a Mormon cellar, and this one was untouched.

  I had no luck with finding guns though. Guns were worth more than food. I found a couple of shotgun shells and four bullets that said ‘9mm’ on the flat part, but nothing to load them into. Not that I would have been more dangerous than if I was unarmed. I would probably end up blowing my foot or head off, but I could at least scare someone. Unless they had a gun and knew how to use it, then I’d be holding my guts in while they rifled through my belongings. I found a couple nice knives and sheaths to strap onto my new canvas camo pants. Sunglasses, beanies, gloves, enough food to last… a couple of weeks? I had no idea, I wasn’t a survivalist. I’d been camping a total of three times. I thought about grabbing a fishing pole and some tackle, but gave that idea up. Boise might not have been a major city, but it was big enough to keep me active without ever engaging in things like camping, fishing, hunting, or riding horses more than a few times at best.

  Sandra was what burned in my mind for the week I spent prowling the old neighborhoods. When I’d gathered everything I could find, including a handy pocket map, I tried to mount the bike I had appropriated from our next door neighbor. Food and guns were still more important than bikes, but that would change at some point when there weren’t as many mouths to feed or humans left to shoot. I swung my leg over the seat and fell over backwards with a crash. I cursed through the entire hour it took me to sort everything, throwing out two-thirds of it as too heavy, too bulky, or unnecessary for survival. I even left behind the little plastic wind-up radio. It still worked somehow, but for six nights I spent a couple hours before going to sleep slowly rolling the dial through the AM, FM, and Emergency bands. There was nothing but white noise.

  It took me almost a year to get to Corvallis, but by the time I wheeled into the edge of town, there was nothing left of it. It looked like every single building had been burned down or demolished. As I rode into town, I noticed heavy track marks everywhere and almost no building left standing. More worrisome was the lack of rubble. I’d looked at tons of old World War II pictures, of what was left of European and Japanese cities after major bombing campaigns, and the amount of rubble always fascinated me. Corvallis was devoid of it. I looked at my little pocket map, but there was no inset of the city. Portland and Salem yes, but not Corvallis, nor even Eugene.

  I spent the next fifteen years traveling the coast looking for her. I didn’t even have a picture to show anyone friendly enough to talk to about her. There were lot of females named Sandra, but none of them turned out to be my sister. I spent too many nights curled into a ball, crying in fury and despair over not being able to find her, refusing to give up and admit she was most likely dead. I would play conversations over in my mind that we’d had, or even the times when I was a little shit and stole her tampons without understanding what they were, parading them around to all my friends at elementary school until a teacher saw what I was doing and freaked out.

  I would remember when she turned nineteen and I was just about to hit fifteen, how she came out to me. She was too ashamed to tell Dad, even though he wasn’t a raving homophobe lunatic. That was our mother. Sandra had tried to tell her when she was sixteen that she wasn’t going to the prom or any of the dances with boys because she liked girls instead. Our mother was so indoctrinated to believe that it was a sin that she refused to even entertain the idea that her own daughter was a lesbian. Our mother was the type that liked to put her fingers in her ears and repeat ‘la la la la’ instead of hearing something that was the polar opposite of what she had been raised to believe. It was a big reason why Mom and Dad were divorced and we’d stayed with Dad.

  Sandra bawled her eyes out when she told me all of it one night the week before she left for Oregon State University.

  “Relax, Sis,” I said to her. “So you’re a lesbian. You’re going to Lesbian State University aren’t you?” I asked smiling.

  “Shut up, Evan,” she said, trying to hit me, but also trying not to smile.

  “Imagine all the hot girls that go to school there,” I told her. “I see them every day on the internet.” My wink told her that the websites I had been looking at weren’t likely to be the type where the girls kept their clothes on.

  “God, you’re a little perv,” she said, before adding, “I hope there’s a lot of girls like me there.”

  “Sis, it’s college. There’s bound to be at least one fat, sweaty, pimply dyke for you to bang.”

  “Oh my God, Evan, grow up!”

  “But I bet there’s some really hot blonde—”

  “Brunette,” she interrupted, already forgetting that I was a sex-starved teenager fantasizing about the same girls she would likely be attracted to.

  “—brunette that has a nice rack, likes lacy thongs, and has a tongue like a jackhammer.”

  “Just when I think I’m going to miss you, you cure me of it,” she said, punching me in the leg as hard as she could. It was an old game that we’d played since I was old enough to walk.

  A week later she was off to school and I was beginning tenth grade. We sent each other emails almost every day. She posted pictures of the girl she was dating soon after starting classes, followed a few days later by a new picture of a new girl she was dating. Followed again a few weeks later by yet another girlfriend. I called her a rug-munching slut and she called me a shamelessly furious masturbator. Then the bulls arrived and I never heard from her again. I never got to tell her how much I loved her.

  CHAPTER 5 - Arrival

  We passed the first set of sentries just before noon. We came off the scrub and onto Bander Road after we rounded Waldo Lake below Upper Rigdon Lake. It used to be called something like ‘NF-5898’ but now we just called it ‘Bander Road’. I had no idea why it was given that name. I just knew that it led us down to The Farm. In an hour we’d be at the official gates, the ones that had been built back when the turmoil was still igniting power struggles and cities were slaughterhouses. La Pine was the nearest real city, about ten miles off to the east, but there wasn’t much left of it except a lot of ashes and rusted metal.

  The wall around The Farm was ten feet high and about five feet thick. The interior and exterior walls were stacked pine trunks, and the middle had been filled with gravel and dirt. The walls extended for more than a mile in total around The Farm, though the lands for about three miles on each side were part of the complex. The residents didn’t like it when you called it a city. It didn’t have an official name. Everyone just called it ‘The Farm’. I didn’t really understand this, but I didn’t antagonize them by calling it anything other than ‘The Farm’ or ‘the complex’. I wasn’t one to make waves in a place that could vote to strip you naked and send you on your way.

  The main gate wasn’t really a gate, just a large opening that had armed guards on the outside and on the inside. There really wasn’t much to guard. Our enemies were either in the ground or long gone. But once you had been assigned a job, you did
the job. Guarding the inner perimeters of The Farm was only hazardous if you were allergic to boredom. I’d been lucky in my nine years by never having drawn that assignment. I’d been a gardener for the first three years, and I’d enjoyed it. It was hard work, but you got extra calories as a gardener, and you damn sure got in shape. Plus it was a probationary period to see if you could hack it. Most people that couldn’t hack it walked off The Farm in the first year.

  That was the thing. You could leave at any time if you didn’t like it. You could even take your weapon and whatever you could carry on your back, as long as you didn’t steal it from anyone else. If you left, you could even come back if you’d been a good citizen in good standing. That was one of those things that got a full vote by the entire membership. There had only been a few that had walked off and then came back later during my time here. Sometimes farming or teaching or ranching or whatever you got assigned with just wasn’t working out and you thought you could strike out and do better. I could never figure out how anyone would think it was better outside of the The Farm’s range of influence. Then again, most of us had arrived here with nowhere else to go, but with the will to live and be productive members of any society that wasn’t full of religious nuts or ruthless dictators.

  There had been power struggles in the history of The Farm. Two years after the invasion, three of the co-founding men tried to imprison Mom and about ten others. The Farm was only a year and a half old then, with barely fifty residents, but to a person they swamped the three and killed them. Seventeen humans died that day by the hands of fellow humans, but everyone that was still breathing became even more committed to keeping that kind of horror from ever happening again. The walls hadn’t come until about eight years later. Two years after that, two of the council members had let in a band of twenty seven bandits that they’d been dealing with in secret, and the entire complex had nearly been destroyed. Twenty seven dead bad guys and sixty dead good guys taught everyone at The Farm another important lesson.