The house seemed too dangerous and exposed to stay in, and Orry thought we had enough daylight left to reach the shelter. So we set all the pots we could fill with snow on the woodstove to thaw, and refilled our bottles; treated ourselves to sharing a real live toilet that still had one flush left in its tank; and armed ourselves with kitchen knives and shop knives. When we left, Mattie put the soup pot down on the floor, and opened the back bedroom door. The little yapper fled under the bed, but Mattie said, "He'll come out when we're gone, and at least the house will be warm and there's something for him to eat for a while, and if the weather turns nicer he can get out. Better than what happened to the poor guy outside."
We left the fire burning when we left, and for at least an hour afterward we could see the smoke streaking black against the deep blue sky, through the cold, still air.
THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 1998, 5:15 P.M.
ABOUT FOUR MILES SOUTH OF LYONS, COLORADO.
The dead woman was still wearing a good pair of jeans, but she'd been stripped to the waist; she still had one boot on, and the other had been flung down the hill.
"Must not have fit," Orry said. I laughed because that was funny, and he stared at me like I was weird.
I knelt to look. Blood matted the hair on the back of her head, and her skull felt squashy and cracked where I pushed with my finger. Up ahead, Mattie said, "Aw! Aw shit!"
He'd found a dead little boy, who couldn't have been more than four. His neck was at a funny angle; someone had broken it. He was in socks and underwear.
"That's the one whose clothes fit," I said. "Somebody wanted that kid's clothes for their own kid, so first they killed his mom, and then they chased him down-"
Mattie blubbered and hung on to my arm for the next couple of miles. Once all the footprints turned off toward Hygiene, I felt a lot safer, but Mattie was silent and moody for another hour.
MONDAY, 8 JUNE 2015, ABOUT NOON.
RAFTER XOX RANCH, WESTERN NEBRASKA.
"Ma'am, did you want lunch?"
"Thank you, Glory, if they send over some bean soup and a barbecue sandwich, that'll be fine."
"Right away!" She's gone before I can say "thank you" and "no hurry."
The crowd noise outside tells me that everyone is going by the infirmary to reassure themselves that Mister Matt is just fine, because for the Rafter XOX community that's somewhere between knowing that God is in his heaven and that the sun will come up in the morning. Not that I blame them.
I don't know what I'm going to say.
Mattie's such a reasonable person that the fact that it all worked out will be fine with him, and when I admit that I don't know, really, why I said Broken when I meant Straight, he'll probably just shrug and say he's glad to be here. He has never, never, never second-guessed me.
It's just . . . I feel so afraid, now that it's over. And I'm afraid to tell anyone, even him, especially him, what I'm afraid of.
Ages ago, Mattie looked up reactive attachment disorder and spectrum disorders and all the other weird-kid things in the old books, and figured out how in the new, post-Change world, they might be more advantages than drawbacks. He was the one who picked my brains about how to make people like myself comfortable enough to stay with us and give us their hearts and loyalty, and along the way taught me how valuable I was.
Of course there are some regular people at the Rafter XOX too, refugees who just wandered in and found it congenial, but basically we've got a population that could have filled a special-needs school or even an outpatient mental health clinic before the Change, and it was Mattie who understood how, nowadays, that made us stronger and better.
Mattie makes all our weird, not-good-with-people, but talented and capable, people feel valuable and needed, and they stay, and they're loyal as dogs or angels. Me, I couldn't win anyone's loyalty in a million years. After all, reactive attachment disorder means you don't ever really like people, or hardly any people, or care about them really. They can tell, and they hold that against you. At best, you're a useful jerk.
I run Rafter XOX and fight for it and protect it. I'm its decision-maker and its strong arm, but Mattie, he's the memory, and most of all the heart. If I had given the order to kill him, or if the rescue had failed, everyone here could have been left with mean, cold, practical old Miz Claire, who never knew when a touch on the shoulder or an extra plate of chili might save a soul.
Miz Claire who never cared about anyone except herself, and who is sitting here so scared I want to crap my pants, realizing that I came within inches and seconds of finally being able to taste love and trust, and then having it go away.
Through our early years in the refugee camps, and then scrounging work as cowboys, and grubstaking the Rafter XOX and building it up, it was Mattie who taught me to see the way I was as a gift. My RAD meant I could lose people and just say, well, they're not here anymore, they're not useful anymore, that's that. I could keep going, without hesitation, calmly and precisely, taking care of our people, no matter what the loss.
And today I almost lost him.
Today I found out I no longer have my gift. Not where he's concerned.
THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 1998, 6:20 P.M.
JUST SOUTH OF LYONS, COLORADO.
Daylight was fading and the sun was already down when we turned in at Twilight Drive, a cluster of houses around a short stretch of road just off 7. Orry led us to the north end of the road and undid the combination lock on one backyard gate. "Is there a dog?" Mattie asked nervously.
"Little Yorkie, probably inside if anyone's home," Orry said. He pulled the gate open. "Fuck."
"What's the matter?"
"Tracks-all those tracks from the house to the back gate. That's the way up to the shelter. Nothing else up there."
"Well, so-"
"So Dad offered to let them share if they'd let him use their property for free. But they didn't want that. Dad paid them three hundred a month to have the shelter on their property, and they took all that money, because they said they'd never need the shelter and-"
"Maybe they'll give you a refund," Mattie said.
Orry nearly exploded before I said, "Mattie."
"Guess that was stupid," he admitted. "Sorry, Orry."
"We're all tired," Orry said. "Okay, so there'll be Dave Buchanan and his wife, Angie. Her brother Kevin usually lives at their house too, and they have two real little kids. So at worst I guess it's three against three."
That last trudge up the snow-covered hillside was hard work. Near the top, we crouched and crawled up to the ridgeline, and looked over.
"Fuck," Orry said. A bright campfire was burning in front of what looked like an open bank vault door in the hillside. From the open doorway, brilliant light poured into the gathering darkness. "They tore off most of the camouflage, broke the door open, they built a fire outside; shit, shit, shit, who knows how many other people have seen that by now? I can understand stealing it but they ruined-"
A man came out. "Dave Buchanan," Orry said. Buchanan set up lawn chairs around the fire. "What the fuck, are they going to hold a fucking sing-along?"
A woman and two little kids in snowsuits came out to hold long sticks over the fire.
"Oh, Jesus God, they're holding a weenie roast," Orry groaned. "Okay, now-"
"What are you kids doing?" a voice said behind us.
I rolled over. There was a man there with a shotgun.
"Kevin, you're wearing one of the spare coats from the shelter," Orry said to him. "That belongs to me. The whole shelter belongs to me. You assholes need to get your shitty asshole looter selves out of my shelter."
"Oh, shut up, boy-"
I stood up. Kevin swung the gun to point it at me, and I walked straight toward him. "You're a pussy," I told him, "and you don't have the guts to pull the trigger, so put the gun down and-"
"I'll shoot. You put your hands up."
I walked toward him. "Pussy, pussy, pussy. Pussy won't use his gun. Pussy's too much of a pussy."
He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and I was looking down the barrels.
"The safety is still on, dumbshit," I said.
He looked down. With both hands, I grabbed and yanked the barrel toward me, then wrenched it around like a big steering wheel. He let go with a cry of pain-his finger had been trapped in the guard. I swung the gun out and back to bring the butt into his crotch.
He gasped and bent over. I brought the gun back around, then over my head, then swung it down like John Fucking Henry being a Steel Drivin' Man on Dad's old CDs. The stock smashed into the back of his head hard enough to face-plant him. Then I just pounded up and down like a crazy bitch churning butter with a shotgun, whamming the stock on his head till he stopped moving. I kicked his shoulder to turn him on his back; blood had gushed from his nose and mouth.
I knelt and pulled out the big chef's knife from my coat pocket, felt for a pulse in the man's neck, and didn't find one. "Where are the carotids?" I asked Mattie.
"Uh, they run straight down from the ear, there's one on each side and um-"
Mattie gabbled about blood veins till Orry said, "Shut up. They might hear you down there."
Since I'd already heard what I needed, I ignored them. I grabbed Kevin's bloody chin by his stupid neck beard, swung his head to one side, and cut as deep as I could along his jaw and into his neck; I felt bone scrape. Then I flipped his head the other way and did it again.
Blood just oozed out, though there was a lot of it.
"No spurting," Mattie said. "So he's dead."
"That was the idea," I said. "Did the happy-happy family down there hear us?"
They were still all gathered around the fire; it sounded like one of the kids was crying and Angie was trying to soothe it.
"I guess he didn't realize guns don't work anymore," Orry said.
"He should have tried one out," Mattie said. "If it had been working, at least he'd have known whether the safety was on."
Orry giggled. "That shotgun doesn't have one. Did you know that, Claire?"
"Nope, but I guessed he wouldn't know."
"If I could guess what people know," Mattie said, "the world would make more sense."
"No shit," Orry said. "Let's follow Kevin's tracks in the snow toward the shelter. If we go that way maybe we'll meet them coming the other way, and we can ambush them."
Kevin's tracks led us down around the ridge to a big backpack. Orry opened it and said, "Yeah, canned goods and frozen food. Couple jugs of milk. We should remember to pick this stuff up after we settle with Buchanan; we don't need it right now."
"What was he doing with it?" Mattie asked.
Orry shrugged. "Probably he was coming back from looting the neighbors, saw us on the ridge, and just walked right up. We're not exactly woods scouts, are we?"
The weird thing was, those were his last words, ever. Like one minute later, as we followed the tracks toward the shelter, Buchanan stepped out of the shadow of a pine tree and jabbed a bat under Orry's chin, full force, then brought it up and back down savagely across Orry's forehead.
I pulled the linoleum knife from my pocket and lunged forward, raking Buchanan's face from cheek to cheek across the eyes. Buchanan dropped the bat and screamed.
I jabbed forward with the steak knife in my other hand, but it just bent on his leather coat. Meanwhile I backhanded with the linoleum knife across the hands covering his face, slashing through flesh and tendons. By then Mattie was behind him, swinging with a hard sidearm to jam a wood-drill bit deep into the man's back.
Buchanan fell to his hands and knees. I stepped over him, jerked his head back by his mullet, and cut my second throat of the day. This one spurted, so I guess his heart was still going, but not for long.
We turned Orry over; he was breathing but unconscious. "We need to get him into the shelter," Mattie said.
"Turn him on his side so he won't choke," I said. "We need to get those assholes out of our way."
At the fire, the wife was huddled with the two kids, trying to quiet them with, "Daddy will be right back."
"Your husband and your brother are both dead," I said. "This is our shelter now. Get out. Run and keep running."
She screamed.
I remembered Orry lying back there in the snow, and how bad we needed to get him in, and the mess these redneck dipshits had made of the shelter, and just snapped. I grabbed the end of a stick in the fire and threw it at the bitch's head. She jumped back, still shrieking.
Mattie threw another one that hit her on the chest, maybe singed her coat, and she burned her hands keeping it from landing on the kids. She grabbed her little brats by the hands and started running up the hill, slipping and stumbling on the snowy slope. Mattie and I threw some more burning sticks after her. I yelled, "Don't come back, bitch!"
"Should we tell her she's heading straight for her dead brother?" Mattie asked.
"Does it matter?" I shrugged. "Think she's gone for good?"