It's Better This Way Page 3

  These days things were running smoothly, internal threats non-existent after twenty years of seeing what was beyond the central wastes. External threats were rooted out by scouts like me and my silent partner Tony. Old relics that had use or value streamed in via the scavenging crews. The council would get together with Mom and decide what could be traded on the outside for things of value that we needed and couldn’t produce or scavenge for ourselves. Whenever the scavs would come back with school textbooks, we would keep a stack of them and trade off the rest to the Reds up in Redding or the Kaisers and the Santanas over in Cottage Grove for things like pre-invasion tools, bailing wire, and medicines reclaimed from pharmacies and hospitals.

  The medicines were sketchy these days, with most everything having expired a decade or more ago. Syringes and latex gloves in sealed bubble packs along with sealed sterile bandages, scalpels and needles were always in need. We had a blacksmith and a forge, but creating medical-grade metals fine enough to do surgery with wasn’t really an option. Dredge spent most of his time forging new axles, bolts, nails, and bindings from the metals the scavs transported back to The Farm.

  The specialized stuff mostly came from the Santanas, and only because they were the only ones brave or crazy enough to venture into Eugene. Sometimes the Kaiser crews would go with them, but most of the time the two groups were in some kind of dispute. They were wise enough to keep the dispute away from legit traders like us and the Reds and a number of other small groups on the western side of the Cascades, but they would have big blowouts over ridiculous things, and within a few days both clans would be ten or twenty members fewer.

  “Welcome back, ladies,” Arn said as we passed through the inner gate. Arn was a pretty funny guy, but we were too intent on telling Mom and the council about the crashed dropship.

  “Stuff it, Queenie,” Tony said to him as we passed by, and I nearly stopped in my tracks. Arn smirked at him and winked at me.

  “Did you just call him Queenie?” I asked Tony in a whisper as I kept pace with him.

  “We dated for a while, but he wasn’t what I was looking for,” Tony replied without looking at me.

  “You two dated?” I asked, louder this time.

  “Yes, Evan. We dated. We fucked. We exchanged bodily fluids. Would you like to know anything else?” he said, loud enough for Arn and Kenny, the other interior guard, to hear us.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” I said, my face burning with shame as I noticed that Kelly and Danielle from the kitchen crew also heard him. “I just… I don’t know anything about you. I didn’t know you were… uh…”

  “Gay? Is that what you’d like to know?”

  “No, I kind of got that now,” I said, trying not to fumble more words like an idiot. “I just meant we’ve been partners for almost eight months, and we never really say a lot.”

  He stopped and looked at me. “Does that bother you?”

  “No, I just meant… No, that doesn’t bother me. I think we get along well, and we’re good at what we do.”

  “Good. I didn’t think you were the type to get upset from lack of conversation. Is that all you wanted to know?”

  “No,” I answered. “What I really have been wanting to ask you for months is if you have a last name and where did you come from.”

  Tony’s face grew dark, pained for a second before he answered, “Galliardi. And I’m from Philadelphia originally.” He looked at me for a moment to see if I was going to ask anything else, and when I didn’t, he started walking again to the main house.

  I caught up to him and tried again. “I’m sorry Tony. I imagine your story is probably shitty like everyone else that wasn’t born into The Farm. I was just curious.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, giving me a sideways smile. “I just don’t like remembering how I got here. So what’s your last name?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Greggs. And I’m from Boise. And now I’m here because my sister was at Oregon State when it happened, and I had to find her.”

  “Did you?” he asked softly.

  “No. I looked for her for more than a decade.”

  “Then I’m sorry for you,” he said. He laid a hand on my shoulder as we came to the steps of the main house. “So… you wanting to date Arn or what? Because I have to tell you, I think he’s a bit big for you. He’d split you in half, skinny.”

  I thought I might die before we got inside to tell everyone what we’d found on our two week trip. My face must have been almost purple with embarrassment because when Jerry Glavin came to the door to greet us, he couldn’t stop staring at it.

  CHAPTER 6 - Questions and Lessons

  “Any idea what kind of ship it was?” Deena Samuels asked Tony.

  “No idea,” he said. “I’ve never seen one of their ships up close before, and Evan said he’d never seen one like it either.”

  “And two dead bulls?” Deena’s wife Dana inquired.

  “Two. One looked like he got ejected straight forward during the crash,” I answered. “The other was able to crawl or walk a half-mile up the valley. We found him behind some rocks.”

  “But he had his armor activated?” Benny Valera asked us. “And the first one, the ejected one, he didn’t?”

  “Correct,” was all Tony said. He had to talk to the council, but he used as few words as possible even with them.

  “What did the armor-less one look like?” Mom asked, causing everyone’s head to turn in her direction. “What? I’ve never seen one either,” she said to everyone in the room. Mom still pretended to hate being the center of attention, but she especially didn’t want to be the center of attention during these kinds of debriefings.

  Tony looked at me, then gave me a slight hand signal that said I should answer the question.

  “Well, hard to tell. They could have been dead and exposed to the dry air for a week. Or a month. Or a day. Their blood looked black, but it was dry. The exposed bull, his skin looked like badly tanned leather. Hard to tell if their skin is the same gray as their armor,” I said. “Two short legs that look like they could crush the life out of a real cow. Four arms, all that, same as you’ve seen in the armor. No claws.”

  “That’s surprising,” Walter Danvers said.

  “Why is that?” Heika Ramsel asked him.

  “I don’t know, I just always thought under the armor they would be scaly, clawed, fang-filled monsters. I guess I read too much science fiction when I was a kid,” he replied.

  “You were a kid back in the eighties weren’t you?” his husband Thad asked, getting a laugh from everyone.

  “They have four eyes,” I continued, “and four slits that I figure are nostrils, but the weird thing is they also have four jaws covered by four flaps of skin. Like cheeks. Except the flaps can fold all the way back and expose all four jaws at once.” I looked at Walter and said, “And they are monsters if you look at them just from their heads. All four jaws were filled with teeth, from flat ones to a lot of long fangs.”

  Walter shuddered, as did a few others.

  “You found no artifacts? No weapons, no technology?” Mom asked, again getting a turn of heads towards her.

  “No, Ma’am,” Tony answered. “Evan and I spent the two day trip back speculating as to how they flew the thing.” Our two days of speculation had actually been about fifteen minutes of total conversation during the two days we mulled it over in our minds.

  “And no sign of a rescue attempt?” Mitch Duncan asked.

  “Not that we could see,” I said. “I kind of felt my butthole crawling in on itself the whole time though. Not like we were being watched, but like at any moment a bull ship would land and see us dicking around with their busted ship, their dead bull buddies, and vaporize us on the spot.”

  “They would have if they had noticed your weapons,” Kim So said. She was the last full-time council member to speak, and she sounded grim. She was grim. Kim So was a mysteriously young-looking little Asian lady that had to be olde
r than me.

  “They might have just for us being nearby their wrecked ship,” I countered.

  “And they might have followed you back and wiped us all off the face of the earth,” Jerry rumbled. “But they didn’t. And now we know about it. Question is, what do we do about it? Anything?”

  Everyone looked to Mom to see what she would suggest. She looked at Tony and asked him, “What do you think, Tony?”

  “I think there’s nothing of value there, and that eventually one of their sats or flyovers will reveal it and they’ll stop and take a look. I’d rather not have any humans or signs of humans around the thing. But that’s just my opinion,” he said.

  “What about you, Evan?” Mom asked me. The way she looked at me made me feel self-conscious, like she was looking into my soul to see if I would lie to her.

  “I think I’m with Tony on this, Ma’am,” I said, my eyes on the floor. I’m not sure why at thirty-eight years old the woman could still make me feel like I was six and answering for the broken cookie jar on the kitchen floor.

  “Then I guess that’s that. Nothing else besides the crash on your rounds?” Mom asked us. We shook our heads, then shook everyone’s hands or hugged them before leaving the main house and finding our way to our housing units.

  *****

  Branda was waiting for me when I stepped into the ‘barracks’. Over the years the members had been forced to build housing units to shelter the growing population. Instead of building a few hundred individual houses, they’d built twenty large units that could each house a couple hundred residents at once. There wasn’t anything spectacular about any of them. There was no television, no radio, no lights, no computers. Not even paintings or paint for that matter in most of the ‘apartments’ within the barracks. To be fair, everyone except Mom lived in the barracks. Even the council members. It was a point of pride that council members could and did live by the same standards as everyone else.

  Mom hated the special treatment, always complaining about how the main house was too big, too lonely. A decade back she started a tradition where she’d invite up to ten residents to come live with her for a week or two at a time. She liked the company, and they liked being near her, and of course they liked enjoying the slight upgrade in luxury that came with the main house.

  My apartment was about four hundred square feet of space with a bed, a wash bucket, and a toilet hole. Since we didn’t have running water, going to the bathroom inside presented a bit of a problem. But when they’d started building the barracks, The Farm had been in possession of a couple of engineers along with a few ex-contractors. With a lot of trading over in Cottage Hill and up in Redding, they’d hauled in a mass of PVC pipe and concrete and formed a foundation with a steep, sloping drop for all waste water to go down. Half a mile away, on a dead piece of rocky ground, they had dug out a massive drain field with layers of strainer rock. From there the solids were sterilized and turned into compost. The liquids were funneled off down an embankment into another drain field, this one made to evaporate excess water in the sun.

  It wasn’t a perfect solution all the time. If someone’s pipe got clogged, it was a nasty job of dumping hot water and using a sewer snake to remedy the situation. On hot summer days the drain fields gave off a rank odor that was just sweet enough to make you gag. Taking a shower was a chancy affair unless you had a partner who could keep the water heated and pouring down through the manual shower heads that had been modified to work without water pressure.

  Branda was my part-time partner. Her eight year old daughter Ellie was my best friend, and the biggest reason why I still gave in to Branda and agreed to get naked with her. Not that I had a lot of women knocking down my door to burn off some pleasure, so maybe loneliness had a lot to do with it as well. Branda was a great looking woman of twenty-eight, but she wasn’t what I wanted for a lifetime of commitment. With me nearing forty, it wasn’t like I had a lot of choices left. Dane Bodeker thought I was mad to not want her around all the time. He also thought I was mad for not keeping Tiffany Kesler around all the time as well. He didn’t understand that I thought both women were fantastic, but neither sparked that fire in me that made me think of them all day long, daydreaming of being together until we died of old age.

  “Welcome home, Baby,” Branda said as I plopped down on my bed. She sat in the one chair I owned.

  “Where’s Ellie?” I asked without greeting her back.

  “She’s at school. ‘Good to see you, Branda’,” she said with sarcasm after answering.

  “Good to see you, Branda,” I said.

  “You don’t have to be an ass,” she pouted. “I missed you. You’ve been gone for two weeks.”

  “I missed you too,” I said, not sure if I was telling the truth.

  She left the chair and lay on the bed next to me. I could feel her fingernails tracing lines across my back, under my shirt. It had been two weeks. Tony wasn’t my type. And Ellie would be gone for at least another hour or two. Why not?

  *****

  I spent my rest week doing a lot of nothing. I hung out with Ellie almost every hour she was available. We’d go for walks along the planting field perimeters, the canal, or she’d hang out with me in the chair and her on my bed asking me questions that I never asked at eight years of age.

  “Did the aliens kill your mom and dad?” she asked me one night.

  “Ellie!” Branda scolded her.

  “It’s okay,” I said, and Branda’s hand dropped to move a stray lock of hair out of her daughter’s eyes. For a second I thought Branda might slap her. Instead, she hugged Ellie tight and settled back on my bed with her. “My mom died three years before the bulls came. My dad died about a week after.”

  “Did the bulls get him?” the little girl asked. When her mother’s eyes went wide again, I gently shook my head to let her know it was all right. I’d held most of it in for twenty years or more.

  “No, a group of humans shot him because he argued with some men who wouldn’t let us into their city. They wouldn’t even take me and send my father on his way. Five men with guns killed him right in front of me,” I told Ellie, looking her in the eye to let her know this was serious stuff. Lesson stuff.

  “Evan…” Branda said, and I knew what she was about to say.

  “Branda, Ellie is growing up. The world out there is different than what we grew up in. It’s still the same in that men with guns want to control everything, especially other men. But she’s been to a vote. She saw what happened to Misha in the cage. She watched Steve stripped and banished. You can’t hide the real world from her when it is as close as the main wall.”

  I was getting angry. Part of it was my frustration with Branda. She loved me, but I didn’t love her. She knew it, but wouldn’t accept it. She knew I loved Ellie as if she were my own, and she used it against me whenever she could get away with it. Which was most of the time.

  “You don’t have to be so brutal about it. She’ll have nightmares!”

  “Ellie,” I asked, “Did you have nightmares about Misha?”

  “Yes,” the little girl replied, looking down at the blanket.

  “Did you have nightmares about Steve?”

  “I don’t remember,” she answered, still not looking at me.

  I wanted to rant on, to tell Branda that there was nothing she could do to make me love her, not even move in with me every time I was back from a scouting assignment. She had been doing that for the last few times I’d been home for a week. She’d pack a bag of clothes for her and Ellie and we’d be a family for a week. Then she’d go back to her unit for two weeks while I was away, since it was larger. She got extra space because of Ellie. She never once complained about how I never went to their place when I was home, and as long as she brought Ellie with her, I didn’t care if my place was too cramped for two adults and a child.

  Instead, I looked at Ellie and apologized. There was no reason to take out my frustrations about her mother on her. “I’m sorry El, it’s jus
t bad memories for me. I get mad that men decided to kill each other instead of trying to kill the bulls or understanding that the world changed and everyone needed to stick together and be good to each other.”

  She smiled at me. “Do you miss him?”

  “My dad? Yeah. He was a good person. A bit naive at the end, but he did what he could to help me and my sister get ahead in life.”

  “You have a sister?” Branda asked me. I’d never told her any of this before.

  “Sandra,” I said under my breath, upset all over again.

  “Sandra and Branda,” Ellie chanted a few times.

  Her mother laughed, and I felt the sting of how easy it was for others to laugh when I’d spent fifteen years traveling the west coast looking for my sister. How I’d killed men, a few women, and one time a child of about seven or eight. I wasn’t prolific at it, and I didn’t enjoy it at all, which made it all the worse when I felt like I had been forced to do it to preserve my own life. How easily she could laugh about how they’d be such great friends when Sandra probably hadn’t had anything to find humor in. I’d seen with my own eyes what happened to college-aged women after the invasion. There wasn’t anything to laugh about.

  Branda must have caught my mood shift. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. Most likely dead,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry, Evan,” she cooed and started to get up from the bed, no doubt to come and comfort me. I waved her off. Everything about her suddenly seemed so fake. I hated her at this very moment. I hated myself as well because I knew as soon as Ellie fell asleep, Branda would want more than I wanted to give, and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.