## **Contents**

Title

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Characters

Boring Author Stuff

Acknowledgments
It's Better This Way

By Travis Hill

Copyright 2013

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Cover art by: Cheryl @ CCR Book Cover Design

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Dedication:

This story is dedicated to Jackie, Junior, Missy, The Dude, and Daisy. Yes, I have five cats. Yes, I'm an old cat woman. Except I'm not a woman. But I'm an old cat woman.

ISBN-13: 978-1491219812

ISBN-10: 1491219815

CHAPTER 1 - The Wreckage

I poked my head up over the rocks to get a look at the wreckage. No smoke, no signs of life. I looked over at Tony, a hundred yards away, to see what he wanted to do. Our scouts hadn't been in this particular valley for almost six months, but that wasn't unusual since there were no humans and there was nothing of interest to the bulls to bring them here. Except now one of the alien dropships or troop carriers or possibly even a mining vessel was splattered over a fifty yard area half a mile down the hill from us. Tony gave me the hand signal asking if I saw anything moving, and I signed him back a negative. He gave me the 'watch while I move down' signal and waited for me to acknowledge. I pointed to the AR-17 that was between my feet and gave him a questioning gesture. Tony shook his head vigorously before beginning his descent down the hillside to the wreck.

I lifted my head above the rock again, just enough to be able to see everything before me. In case a bull, or an army of bulls were hiding out in the rocks lower down the hill waiting for a rescue ship. We didn't know anything about them other than they had destroyed every single electrical grid on the planet, landed a bunch of ships, built a bunch of massive towers, and now were mining certain areas while another group of them took enormous machines into major cities like Portland and Salem to grind them up into dust, one city block at a time. The only two things we truly knew about them were that they looked weirdly like the minotaurs from Greek mythology, and they killed without warning any human carrying a gun. If you weren't carrying a firearm or some other piece of military hardware and weren't interfering with whatever a bull was doing, you got ignored as if you didn't exist.

The last time I'd ventured up to Portland, I had spent almost ten minutes walking behind a bull. I yelled at him (we assumed all are male since no one has ever reported one that looked like it might be a female), ran around in front of him making rude gestures, even threw a brick at him. The only time he paid even the slightest attention to me was when I acted like I was going to pick up an old computer tower lying in the middle of the street. As I reached down, I saw his attention shift to me in an instant, his lower right arm swinging what looked like a short-barreled gun toward me. I broke into a run, darting under his weapon, and kept going for the next five blocks or so, shrieking with hysterical laughter. Dane Bodeker told me he'd nearly pissed himself watching me mess with the bull, and that he did pee himself a little when the thing turned its weapon on me.

Tony made it down to the first scorch in the earth. He looked back at me and gave me the 'hold' signal while he did recon on the area. I was a bit spooked. The bulls had technology countless orders of magnitude greater than ours. They might ignore us unless we were armed or 'stealing' from them, but I didn't think they'd be too appreciative of us snooping around one of their wrecks. We'd always heard through the network that the bulls slagged anything that crashed or stopped working, down to the molecule, as if to give us a big fuck you for thinking we might be able to salvage some useful tech from it. For the first few years there was the hope of acquiring tech to burn them off the face of our world. Then it was just to acquire some kind of tech to add something to ease the drudgery of everyday life. Now it was rarely even a thought. We'd learned to do without and still survive.

Tony gave me the 'all clear' sign. I shouldered my rifle and started forward. A sharp whistle from him made me look up from watching for rocks at my feet, and he frantically waved the rifle off my shoulder. Right. I propped the weapon up behind the rock I'd hidden behind and restarted my journey down to the crash site. Just in case there were some live bulls around, or some that decided to show up while we were snooping around, I would be glad I didn't have my gun. Hopefully.

I came around a large metal compartment that might have been a cockpit if it'd had any windows. Two seats and what looked like two desks from the old days were inside, along with about ten gallons of what had to be alien blood. It was black and crusted like it had been exposed to the dry central Oregon air for a week or more. I reached down to touch it, but Tony tapped my shoulder and shook his head. We didn't know if it was toxic or psychedelic or just harmless like our blood. Maybe it had some killer virus that made human insides turn to bloody gelatin.

About ten yards ahead was the first body. The bull had to have been exposed to the elements for a week or more. The sun had desiccated a good amount of the flesh, but surprisingly the body hadn't been munched on by critters or insects. What caught our attention was the fact that this bull didn't have his armor activated. Very few words came down the network about what the aliens really looked like without their matte-gray armor. They had two squat but powerful legs, four arms, and a single head on a huge frame. Altogether, they stood eight to nine feet tall, giants that towered over humans. Apparently the rumor was true that they were all flesh and muscle and bone with armor that could only be a millimeter thick, if that. Humans had debated endlessly about whether or not the aliens were spindly little creatures with giant heads that required power armor to function on a world with gravity.

The dead bull's four sunken, sightless eyes stared at a sky that was growing more cloudy by the hour, most likely one of the spring storm systems that could survive its trip over the Cascades and into the central wastelands. The alien definitely bore some kind of odd resemblance to the minotaurs I'd read about in school when I was a kid. The protruding nose and strangely shaped head were the aspects of its face that made it look like a minotaur. The four eyes and four slits I assumed were for breathing were creepy as hell, but nowhere near as weird as the thing's mouth. The creature looked a lot more like a minotaur with its armor activated. Without the armor, it looked like an abstract painting of a four-eyed, four-jawed cow.

I pulled my knife from its sheath on my leg and knelt down to peel away one of its four cheeks. Tony looked like he was going to stop me, but he couldn't take his eyes off the bull anymore than I could. I flipped the knife over and put the dull edge under a mouth flap and gave a tug. It felt like I was trying to cut leather for a moment before the cheek flipped back along the side of the bull's face. A vertical jaw lined with a mix of sharp canine-like teeth and flat molar-like teeth greeted me. It was such a shock to see it that I jumped a little, causing the cheek flap to fall back into place along the jaw.

This time Tony did touch me on the arm, but I ignored him and reached back down to flip a few of the cheeks back all at once. Both of us took in a sharp breath when we saw two horizontal and two vertical jaws aligned perfectly with each other. I had a sudden thought of what it would feel like to have a hand or a leg caught in a mouth like that and shuddered. I'd started wiping the knife on my pants and getting up when a thought shot through me.

"Where is the other body?" I whispered to Tony.

"Damn," he mouthed silently and immediately started fanning out from the dead bull we had been kneeling by.

For a while we thought maybe there was only one bull. Half an hour later Tony found the body up in the rocks opposite of the way we'd come into the valley. This one had his armor activated except for around his head. A chunk of this one's face and left jaw had been ripped off by something, probably one of the many sheared metal sheets or rods littering the area around the cockpit. Bull number two didn't seem to have suffered the decomposition that number one had, but we didn't know if that was because of the armor or because number two had died a long time after number one. Neither of the corpses had the death stench about them. Neither had any smell at all according to my nose.

We walked back to the wreckage to scavenge as much as we could, if anything. Before too long both of us admitted we had the willies, that we couldn't shake the feeling that any moment another bull dropship would come over the rim of the valley or straight down out of the sky and find us sniffing around their wreck. They might think we were defiling their dead. Or they might just feel like snuffing us out. Or worse, they might take us prisoner and do all kinds of weird shit to us.

We found zero, nothing to take back to the Farm. Possibly humanity's first peek inside a crashed bull ship and it looked barren. Just the two seats and the two desks. We speculated that the desks were just holographic control boards. We speculated that the bulls simply flew the ships with their minds. We speculated all way out of the valley and across Lanyard Hill to the tree line so we could make camp. We had two more days of traveling to get home after detouring into the valley just to tell Mom and the council that we'd put eyes in there so they didn't have to for another six months. 
CHAPTER 2 - Running Back and Forth

The aliens had appeared above our skies twenty-three years ago, and before we could even send them a greeting, they detonated multiple EMP's over almost every square inch of Earth's atmosphere. The effect was so strong that it blew out every circuit, every microchip, every electrical connection all over the planet, even the military hardware that was supposed to be shielded specifically against it. Humanity almost collapsed just from that one blow. Within an hour, blue-white blobs of what looked like plasma fell from the skies, and military installations all over the world went offline permanently.

I had been fifteen and just home from being let out of school after the EMP attack. My father had come home from work, and we stood in the back yard, arms around each other, watching interstellar bombs drop from the high clouds and hit Mountain Home AFB. I remember my father's face when he suddenly realized that Gowen Field was less than ten miles from us and was home to a squadron of the new F-39's.

When the blob finally came down over Boise's airport, it was a spectacular sight. I watched it, not concerned that it might have a blinding flash like a nuclear weapon did until after the fire wave rolled out for at least a mile, consuming everything in its path. We lived up on a slight rise in the foothills to the east of the city, and the view was amazing for watching huge jets and smaller attack planes take off and land, especially at night. The view we had was too perfect to watch an entire mile of a city simply turn to dust within thirty seconds. We had to duck down and hug the back of the house when the backpressure wave came to replace the oxygen burned in the giant fireball.

Within a week we had to leave our home and travel through the mountains. The aliens hadn't shown any interest in us. They hadn't even landed any ships or towers near us (something I wouldn't even learn about until a year later). It was the humans that forced us out. With no electricity, no grocery stores, no cars, no use for gas other than burning things, Boise collapsed in less than five days. Being Idaho, it seemed almost everyone had a gun of one kind or another except my father, and by extension, me. Groups of men with guns started forming, some trying to be civilized and help restore order. The majority forcibly took whatever they wanted or needed, and they left bodies in their wake to let others know what was coming if you didn't comply. No doubt a lot of the bodies were from those that did comply in hopes of not being harmed.

The women had it the worst down in the city. Seeing what had become of some of them made me glad for the first time in my life that my mother had been dead for three years. That sliver of joy was immediately crushed when I thought of my sister Sandra, trapped in Corvallis at the university dorms. She'd always told me to 'just wait until you get to college' whenever I'd complain about how horrible high school was, how I was never going to get a girlfriend. College kids were supposedly older, more mature, and I wanted to fool myself that her dorm mates would band together and protect each other. Boise State University sat down in the valley on the eastern end of the city, and from what I could tell, those college kids were doing exactly what the other armed gangs of locals were doing... which was a lot of shooting and making a lot of women scream.

This gang or that gang finally started roaming the foothills around the city, knowing that most of the houses were upscale and likely to have something valuable like guns, food, or women. We got out just in time and made our way up to Idaho City on foot with not much more than a pair of hiking boots, a coat, a few pairs of socks and underwear, and a couple of knives. Idaho City didn't want us or anyone else coming near them, and had set up a roadblock on Highway 21 about ten miles from the city limits. There were at least twenty rifles pointed at us as we approached. A loud voice called out for us to halt about two hundred yards from the jumble of worthless automobiles and pickup trucks they stood behind.

A group of five came around an old Chevy truck and walked towards us, guns leveled at us from their hips the entire time. When they were fifty feet away, the leader of the group told us to turn around and go back to Boise. My father begged with them to let us go on, at least go through their small mountain town so we could continue on to the next and see if they would offer us refuge. The leader wouldn't budge. My father started yelling at them, alternating between insults and pleading with them to at least take me in. Instead, the man in charge gave us thirty seconds to turn around and head back the way we had just come from.

At twenty seconds, the five rifles that had been pointed at us from the hip switched to their shoulders, five eyes sighting my father along the barrels. I turned and started walking back down the road, grabbing my father's coat sleeve to get him to follow. He shrugged me off and when I tried to grab his arm again, he turned on me and shoved me down, going on about how it just wasn't right that these people wouldn't take us in, we could work, we were useful. He rounded back on the five men and began walking towards them screaming like a madman. I sat with my ass on the asphalt, shocked to watch my father falling apart before a whole gang of men with guns and hard looks in their eyes that promised they'd make the hard choices without thinking twice.

The count reached zero and I watched five guns unload bullets into my father from twenty feet away. He danced a sickening little pirouette before falling over on his side. He was dead before his head cracked open on the pavement. Five rifles swung around towards me. I closed my eyes and felt hot urine flood my Levi's. Instead of the sound of gunfire, I heard the leader start counting down from thirty again. I ran at least ten miles, snot and tears congealing on my face. I finally had to stop when my thighs were on fire from the friction of cold urine and rough denim rubbing back and forth. 
CHAPTER 3 - Thoughts of Home

I woke from the nightmare that has plagued me since the day it happened. The fire had burned down past coals and was growing cold. Tony stirred for a few seconds then went back to as relaxed a sleep as one can get on cold, rocky ground. I flipped over onto my back to stare at the sky. Twenty three years after light pollution became a faded memory, the sky was still the most breathtaking thing I had ever witnessed. As a kid, my dad, Sandra, and I would go up into the Sawtooth Mountains and do some sky gazing on an old telescope that he'd had since he was a kid himself. We had to travel farther and farther each year to find true dark as Boise continued to expand.

It was funny in a way to think that in the span of about ten minutes, the skies once again became the same as when Plato, the Israelites, and even the first men had looked at them. The line of the Milky Way always made me think of the bulls, wondering where they had come from. If they could find us, could there be other alien beings within the bright cluster of stars I could see every night, looking for them? For a year or so after it happened, I fantasized that some benevolent race would come and help us fight off the invaders. After another year, I had made up my mind that since the bulls ignored us as if we were insects, they must be obeying some galactic law, which meant none of the other powers within the galaxy were going to do anything about it.

I could see the glow of dawn coming, so instead of trying to sleep anymore I got out of my bag and rummaged around for firewood. By the time the first fiery line of sunlight broke over the central wastes, I had water boiling and the last scoop of coffee brewing. Anytime one of our scavenger crews found the stuff, it got locked away in the main pantry of the big house. It was worth more than gold these days. The only people who were given a coffee ration were the scouts. A few of the citizens probably grumbled about how they deserved it, as well as a few of the crew members who had unearthed it by chance somewhere. Scouts needed to be the most alert and sometimes had to walk or run for hours. Bulls were easy to spot, but other humans bent on taking what you had were sneaky, clever animals. Besides, the penalty for filching goods, especially coffee, was banishment. The same as for stealing it from anyone else on the way back to The Farm or stealing it once it had been locked away in the pantry.

I cringed at the thought of banishment. I'd seen it more times in the nine years I'd been a citizen of The Farm than I liked to remember. I'd voted for it against others that had stood accused of some crime or other more times than I wanted to think of as well. The terror in their eyes as they were stripped completely naked and marched down the road for a mile before being told to get lost would give me nightmares for a week or two after. The escorts would never shoot the banished either, no matter if attacked. It was the severity of being forced out naked and not even being humanely killed that served as a warning to everyone else. Over the years scouts and crews and more than a few farmers and ranchers found the naked corpses of those that didn't have what it took to survive with absolutely nothing. Which was most of them, I'm sure.

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 powers 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.

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 older 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 just 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.

"What happened to her?" Ellie asked.

"Sandra? I don't know, Honey. I never found her," I said with sadness.

Ellie jumped off my bed and ran over to my chair, climbing up in my lap and putting her arms around my neck.

"I'm sorry, Evan," she said, and I could feel little tears soaking into my shirt. 
CHAPTER 7 - Truth and Consequences

When my week of rest was over, I packed my gear and headed to the main house to meet up with Tony and get our next assignment. Sometimes we would patrol the same route consecutively, sometimes we would get a different sector to range around in. The same sector a few times in a row would give us a keen eye for any changes since the last time we'd been through the area, and then we'd get a change-up to a different sector for a bit to make sure we stayed sharp. We'd talk to other scouts who were heading out if they were getting our sector or vice-versa to let them know of anything they should pay attention to.

I mounted the steps to the main house and Jerry Glavin met me at the door before I could knock. Mom must have had him on door-greeting duty. Either he'd done something right and his gig was a promotion or a gold star of recognition, or he'd screwed up and this was to humble him a bit. I'd never bothered to listen to gossip about what went on in council or the even juicier rumors of what eccentricities Mom had. Some were about purported sexual deviances like orgies or multiple lovers at once. Some were about how Mom had a working generator and a ton of media equipment in a hidden basement and the council was privy to it. One I had overheard had to do with the council and Mom breeding some weed that could make you go blind.

People would talk about anything, whether it was true or not. Worse, people would believe anything, true or not. Even after the bulls landed and almost wiped out our civilization, humans hadn't learned much of a lesson. I suppose those of us at the Farm were a rung higher on the evolutionary ladder in the fact that we'd somehow found others of like-mindedness and had, even more amazingly, kept it all together and running mostly smooth for twenty years.

But even within the borders of the illustrious Farm, humans were only one step ahead of those on the outside. The same petty arguments, gossip vines, and prejudices existed in here. We just had learned how to keep it in check to where it never interrupted the well-oiled machine of... whatever this was that we had. A democracy? A constitutional monarchy? A collective? I didn't know. I didn't really care. If someone couldn't keep it in check, they were shown the gate.

A group of nine scouts already waited in the dining room. I made ten, and was the last one to arrive. Mitch Duncan passed around sheets of paper to each scout. I was a little surprised at this, paper being a rare commodity these days with no paper mills and the fact that wood pulp products tended to have a short shelf life in this brave new world. I looked down at mine. It was blank. Confused, I looked over at Tony's paper. It was blank as well. I thought for a second that maybe we were supposed to write down whatever Mom or a councilor told us to, but I glanced over at Shanna's piece of paper. Her and her partner's scouting path was clearly drawn through the Diamond Peak area, with a checklist of things to put eyes on or be aware of.

The other scouts milled about, talking with Mom and the council members while Tony and I stood at the edge of the room still wondering what the blank sheets of paper meant. Finally the scouts herded themselves outside to begin their two-week journeys. Tony and I didn't move from our spots.

"Tony, Evan, come sit down," Deena said, waving us over to the chairs closest to Mom. "You probably are wondering about the blank sheets," she said after we sat down and the other council members pulled chairs in a semi-circle around us.

"Have we done something wrong?" I asked. I had a fleeting moment of fear that we were about to be banished for some infraction, or maybe even for exploring the dropship crash.

"Heavens no," Mom said with a laugh, and everyone else joined in. "Evan, how long have you been here?"

"I don't know. Nine years maybe?" I replied, unsure.

"What about you, Tony?" she asked my partner.

"Twelve years." He was as tight as ever with his words.

"And have either of you ever broken any of the rules here?" Mom asked us.

I looked at Tony, who just shrugged at me. "Yes," I answered. I expected gasps of surprise or shock, but I decided if I was about to stripped and put out on the road, I wouldn't go out a liar. No one gasped or even tittered. A couple of them smiled, while Ben Valera reached over and patted me on the back.

"I figured you two would be honest enough to pass that test," Mom said, shooting a look at Kim So. Apparently Kim hadn't been so sure either of us would answer the question honestly.

"And what rule or rules did you break, Mr. Galliardi?" Dana asked.

Here it comes, I thought. The trial and the confession. Except they didn't act like a pack of wolves about to tear us apart.

"I punched Jed Myers in the face five years back after too much drinking and him turning me down for sex. I ate extra calories when I was a gardener." Tony's confession came out wooden, stilted. But he didn't shy away from the truth.

"And you, Mr. Greggs?" Dana asked me.

"I beat the daylights out of Manny Rosa my first year as a gardener for getting too handsy with Cara Templeton," I said.

"That was you?" Tony asked me, surprising me.

"Yep. Manny put his fingers where they weren't welcome while in the dorms, and I put my fists where they weren't welcome in his face." I saw some of the council looking curiously at me, so I added, "I don't think any person is obligated to give up something like that against their will under any circumstance." When they nodded or just kept staring at me, I finished up my confession. "I ate extra calories all three years I was a gardener. I had sex with another man's wife. Twice. Two different wives I mean. And I stole extra coffee rations on my third scout."

This one got a gasp from more than a few council members, followed by stern looks or whispers between each other. Coffee is the one thing they keep a close eye on, and even scouts are only allowed so much.

"Oh knock it off," Mom said to everyone. "Like none of you have done it." This got her some accusatory stares, as if any of the council would ever stoop so low as to steal coffee, or break any rule for that matter. "None of you would be councilors if you hadn't sat where those two are sitting, thinking, like you did, that they are about to be banished."

I looked at Tony with even more confusion, but he had the beginnings of a smile on his face. A few seconds later my brain finally put all the pieces together and I realized why we were given blank assignment sheets.

"Yes," Mom said to both of us. "I've had my eye on both of you for a few years now. Why do you think I paired you together as a scout team?" We stared at her, not knowing what to say. "The fact that you two found the crashed ship sort of made us speed up a decision that we've been discussing for the eight months that you've been on assignment. The fact that you sat here and told us the truths that could easily get you banished means you at least have the integrity to be honest when it counts. Then there are our visitors."

"Visitors?" I asked.

"Yes, they have necessitated that you two be pulled off scout assignment and made full council members before you were sent back into the field," Thad said from my left.

"I don't understand," I said.

"Understand this," Mom said, looking from Tony to me. "Repeat this silly little oath and join us as council members. We have a lot to talk about."

The oath was less than ten words long. I was almost disappointed that I didn't get some kind of special robe or headdress to wear, even though none of the other council members ever wore anything but their normal clothes.

"Yesterday a delegation from the United States Army showed up along the southern Willamette Highway, traveling north," Mom told us after we shook hands or hugged everyone in the room. "There's four of them, and all four are wearing real Army-issue combat gear. The word along the network is that one of them is David Hamida."

David had been a ten-year man at The Farm, and had just walked off one day after coming back from a scout down south. His partner Vincent Mueller had walked with him. Neither said a word to anyone, but sentries and residents sent word along the network telling us they'd kept traveling south.

"They should be here by tomorrow. They sent word ahead on the network to let us know they want us to call a full vote," Jerry said.

"Why would they want a full vote?" Tony asked, breaking his silence.

"We don't know," Heika said from my right. "We've been trying to figure that one out ourselves."

"The reason we pulled you two in is we need experienced eyes and solid minds fresh out of the field," Mom said, steering the conversation around to us again. "At least two of these gentlemen appear to be career military. One is David. The fourth one... we don't know who he is, but he carries a heavy black case with him."

"Like... a bomb?" I asked.

"It could be, but we don't think so," Jerry answered. "Though it gives us the same concern as you obviously just had, gathering three thousand or more bodies together and whatever might be in that case. But no, we think it might be tech. And while I'm sure all of us at The Farm would kill an innocent man just to listen to a song on the radio, to see even the worst movie ever made play out in front of us one more time, I can't help but think this is a bad omen."

"Omen," Mom snorted. "This is why you two were brought on board. A few of us are getting up there in years, and both of you have proven that you are solid, rule-abiding citizens—" there were a couple of snorts from others this time "—that are honest enough, skilled enough, and wise enough to help keep this shithole running for long after we are all gone by protecting it now and picking good replacements before your own times are up."

I didn't know what to say. The 'delegation' coming tomorrow was worrisome only in that we didn't know what they wanted, or even where they had come from. That these people were insane enough to believe a completely flawed human being like me was worthy of being given a position of importance where others would listen closely to me and make decisions based on what I said was the real worry. 
CHAPTER 8 - Army Greetings

The soldiers coming up from the south became the big news around The Farm. Talk was everywhere. No one was talking about me or Tony becoming council members, which was fine by me. We had been offered slightly larger quarters to live in, but both of us refused. If I had a place any larger, Branda would move in without saying anything. She'd just show up one day with Ellie and never leave.

Part of me was all right with this, as I'd get to have a hand in raising Ellie for more than just a week at a time. The other part of me knew that I'd be trapped with a woman I only somewhat liked, and definitely didn't love. I liked having a warm body around for sexual release, but either I wasn't ready to settle down with a woman yet, or just not with her. And they made me a councilor.

The council spent the entire day putting the word out that there would be a vote after sunset. Mom made it clear to us that we should make it clear to everyone at The Farm that this was important, more important than passing judgment on an offender for a banishment. By mid-afternoon the entire complex was buzzing about the vote, everyone discussing with each other what they thought the reason for it was. Most figured it had to do with the soldiers that were headed our way. I hadn't seen a real soldier in at least eighteen years.

The last ones I'd met were a platoon on I-5 keeping the peace around Medford. They no longer resembled the clean-shaven, fresh-faced boys that joined the military for a college education or because they had nothing else to do except look young and innocent. This group looked like a bunch of old, unshaven men with dirty surplus store uniforms. Most soldiers had either been wiped out by the orbital attack on their bases and ocean carriers, and those that weren't wiped out had more than likely silently deserted within a couple of months of seeing there was no fighting the bulls. That is, if they hadn't deserted right away to try to make their way home and help out their families after the EMP's and massive plasma bombardments.

Just after sunset the four delegates arrived inside the main gate. The entire council greeted them, unarmed, but we had triple the amount of armed guards on both sides of the gates. We also made Mom wait inside the main house, just in case. The leader stood out from the rest. He was right at six feet tall, and he had a hard face with a couple of ugly scars on his cheeks and forehead. Under his helmet was a crew cut of iron-gray hair that matched the iron-gray eyebrows and stubble on his cheeks.

I'd never been in the military, nor had much interest in military things, but I knew right away this man was a career officer. The way his eyes tried to take in everything without moving his head and the relaxed stance that would fool people into thinking there was no possibility of deadly violence that could erupt from him in less than a second told me all I needed to know. His eyes scanned each of us as he shook our hands and introduced himself and his contingent.

"I am Colonel Eric Hardaway, United States Army, First Army Division out of Crater Lake," he said at what I figured was parade rest. A couple of the older councilors gave him a hard look at the 'First Army Division' title. "The old United States military died the day of the invasion. We've regrouped and decided to start over since at least ninety percent of forces were killed on I-day." He looked back briefly at the three soldiers behind him. "This is Corporal Hackett," he said nodding to the soldier with the over-sized black plastic suitcase. "Sergeant Waters is my number two," he said, nodding to the other soldier who looked career military as well. He looked like a killer to me. He was only slightly less hard looking than the Colonel. "And you probably know Corporal David Hamida."

We all nodded towards the three, then Jerry spoke. "Colonel, we are glad you have chosen to visit us, but we'd like to ascertain what might be in that suitcase your colleague is carrying." When the Colonel gave him a frown, Jerry went on, "Seeing as how you've asked us to gather our numbers for a vote tonight, and we have no idea who you are or where you come from other than what you've just told us. No offense of course."

"None taken, Councilor," the Colonel said, indicating with his tone and his eyes that there damn sure had been offense taken. "However, I'd rather not go into it here, out in the open."

"Colonel," Deena Samuels said, stepping forward, "I assume whatever is in that case is what you've asked us to gather our numbers for?" When Hardaway nodded, she said, "Then you can understand that we have concern that it might be a bomb of some kind to wipe us out, can't you? If not, then let me explain that the citizens of this area are not stupid, and it will be easier to gather more of them if there is something of interest to talk about as they are walking the roads to join us tonight."

Colonel Hardaway scowled at her for a fraction of a second, then gave a hand signal to Corporal Hackett to open the case. Hackett placed the suitcase flat on the ground and dialed in the numbers on the roller locks. The lid popped open, and all of us leaned in to get a closer look.

"Bang!" David Hamida said loudly, making all eleven of us councilors jump back. When the Colonel glared at him, David threw up his hands in an 'aw shucks, it was too tempting' gesture.

"I apologize for Corporal Hamida's lack of maturity," Hardaway told us.

Jerry waved off the apology as we gathered around the suitcase again. Inside was what looked suspiciously like an old flex monitor and a notebook computer, along with a bunch of cables and what could only be a projector. Murmurs up and down the line of councilors followed as we realized that indeed these men had brought actual tech with them.

I hadn't seen an electrical device that functioned in almost two decades. We'd heard through the network that some places had been able to get their electrical grids back online after rewiring the generators and going inch by inch down the transmission lines replacing all of the hardware that had been blown out on I-day.

I thought about 'I-day'. Only the military would try to give it an abbreviated name that could be used in a patriotic story or song one day. D-Day. VE-Day. VJ-Day. MI-Day. The rest of us just called it 'the day' or 'the invasion'. I also thought about what we'd heard on the network about the places that had put their hydroelectric generators or coal-fired plants back online. The bulls would either send a plasma bolt down through the clouds and obliterate everything within a mile or two of the gens, or they'd send a dropship that would hover above the place and slag it into molten steel and concrete dust. No one knew what they'd done to the nuclear power plants all over the world, but since Geiger counters never spiked, it seemed likely that the bulls had contained their runaway reactors after everything shut down.

Tony and I showed the soldiers to temporary quarters to wait, eat, and freshen up before the gathering in a few hours. We figured that everyone would stop trickling in from the outlying areas by nine or so, which meant we could all find out just what the hell these four soldiers were here for by ten. 
CHAPTER 9 - Invasion Redux

"Thank you for gathering to hear us speak," Colonel Hardaway said in a loud, clear voice from the platform on the south lawn.

I estimated at least four thousand bodies in the crowd, but it was dark and hard to see. We'd built large fires all around the area to illuminate both the platform and the main house.

"My name is Colonel Eric Hardaway. My fellow soldiers and I have traveled from the new Division headquarters at the Crater Lake complex."

This got a grumble from the crowd. Everyone had heard of Crater Lake, but no one had suspected that it was where the remnants of the military branches had gathered to regroup.

"We've traveled to talk to you about a lot of things. For twenty three years, these aliens, these 'bulls' as we've come to call them, have been grinding up our major cities and digging massive holes in our earth. They've set up thousands of the giant towers and hundreds of massive factory complexes. They've used technology far beyond human understanding to wipe out our societies in one fell swoop, along with our ability to fight back. Before you hear why I've called for all of you to hear my words, I would first like to show you something."

He gestured to Hackett, who in turn gestured to me and a couple of other councilors to rig up the screen. The projector screen was something almost out of science fiction. It was a paper-thin sheet of transparent material that felt like cloth, sounded like sandpaper when you unfolded it, and stretched to over a hundred times its initial size. Sergeant Waters and Corporal Hackett had helped us set two twenty foot poles in the ground near the platform. The poles stood twenty feet apart, and we stretched the projector screen across the entire expanse, locking it in place around the poles with what looked like bungee cords.

Once Hackett saw that we'd made sure the screen was ready to go, he took the projector out of the case and walked into the crowd about fifteen deep. The people parted for him like he was Moses. He set up the projector on a tripod and pointed it between the two poles. The whole thing looked to be about as big as the old digital cameras from before the invasion. Not much more than an old pack of smokes. That made me think about the last Camel I'd smoked. Twelve years ago maybe. My pulse still quickened at the thought of puffing on a fresh cigarette.

The crowd's murmuring turned into a loud buzzing as Hackett set everything up. The instant he flipped the switch to the projector, there were a few seconds of oohs and aahs before everyone fell silent as Colonel Hardaway began to talk again.

"Twenty three years ago, the aliens destroyed all of our infrastructure, then all of our military assets," he said as a shaky video of an object large enough to blot out the moon slid into view on a black sky.

The view was from a satellite that was either orbiting the moon or thousands of miles above the planet. The object, what had to be the alien ship, covered almost a quarter of the Earth behind it. The scale made it hard to estimate just how large it was, but I decided it was entirely too damn big. The clip went black and immediately a new one played, the alien ship blotting out a quarter of the planet while white fireballs poured out from below it and plunged into the atmosphere. Within seconds there were bright flashes on the surface. I watched as North America swung into view and then was inundated with a swarm of plasma bolts. Idaho was hidden from view by the ship, but I knew exactly where two of those bombs hit.

"Within two days, the aliens began using dropships to bring down their tower components," the Colonel went on.

We watched enormous thrusters bring down objects that looked like metal fence posts, land them gently on the ground, and return to the ship. The satellite had a hard time zooming all the way down to a landing site, the alien ship blocking the view most of the time, and the haze of looking almost horizontally through the atmosphere to the ground below it made the video foggy. The clip went black and a new one started. Gasps from the crowd came when we watched a tower come together, three gargantuan posts that raised themselves onto their ends, the other ends touching the sky.

The clip switched to another tower, this one built near a city. The city could have been any Midwestern capital like Omaha or Minneapolis. It had been too long for most of us to remember what particular cities looked like unless we were looking at geography textbooks. The city in the video had high-rise buildings. I estimated them to be in the forty story range, though I was just guessing. When the alien tower assembled, it was at least five times taller than the largest skyscraper in the city, and at least three times as wide at the base.

"Two days after that, the aliens began using dropships to assemble massive complexes," Hardaway said as the video showed another wave of ships departing the alien mothership.

The video once again changed to a hazy ground view, and we watched four huge bricks come together then begin unfolding outward. There was no way to judge the size of the completely unfolded building until the video cycled to one that was near a tower. It was unthinkable that a building could be that large. It was a titanic complex that reached about one sixth of the way up the tower in height, and was at least ten times more massive around the base than a tower.

"As you might have guessed, you older types anyway, this footage is from SEES-31, a Navy spy satellite that sits almost fourteen thousand kilometers above the earth. SEES-31 and a few other sats survived the EMP attacks, but we had no way of contacting them, even knowing they were still up there, still functioning, until about eight years ago. The SEES spy sats were automated, and the minute the alien ship entered our orbit, we tasked them to track anything and everything, from orbit all the way down to the surface.

"First, I want to tell you about the towers," Hardaway continued as the video switched to a high-resolution shot of a tower, its top far above a jungle canopy. The alien ship must have moved out from below the satellite, or this was video from a different sat. "We weren't able to get close to them because the bulls keep a wide perimeter around them guarded by automated weapon systems. Ten miles is as close as you can get to them before an energy beam reaches out and kills you. Thanks to the satellite data though, we understand a lot more about them that we ever have.

"After tasking the two remaining research satellites still active in orbit, we've been able to determine that the towers are four kilometers in height, and four kilometers in circumference at their base. We also believe that the towers have two important properties. One is as a wireless power source for bull technology. Certain energy waves emanate from the towers," he said as the video changed to a thermal or some other filtered view, and waves of energy radiated outward from the tower's top. "The other task, and the most important one, is that the towers are removing methane from our atmosphere."

This caused a bit of a stir with the older ones in the crowd who could remember back when global warming had been a hot-button issue, and methane gas from all the cows and power plants as well as the natural decay of organic material (mostly cow shit) had raised the methane levels in the atmosphere to alarming levels.

"We believe," Hardaway said, "that methane is a super-toxic poison to the bulls. Notice if you will the activity around the towers and complexes. Most of the bulls don't have their head armor activated." Slow-moving bulls with their faces uncovered moved in varying patterns in the clips that played. The majority of residents had never seen an armored bull, let alone one with its alien face completely uncovered. "We believe this based on two pieces of evidence. The first is the atmospheric concentration of methane near these towers is non-existent to about a ten klick radius from each tower. The second is because of this."

The video changed to a daylight scene cut with sharp, dark shadows. The video was shaky for half a minute before it smoothed out. Two soldiers were in front and off to the right of the camera's view. It looked like it had been filmed in a large city, Los Angeles or San Diego if I had to guess. Two bulls patrolled the trash-filled streets six blocks behind one of their massive crushing machines that ate up human cities and spit out dusty chunks from the rear. One of the two soldiers pulled two items out of a backpack, handing one to his partner.

I watched, holding my breath, as the two soldiers walked up behind the two bulls. I knew from experience that the bulls would do nothing to them since neither soldier had a weapon visible, but I also knew something amazing or frightening was about to happen. The soldiers split, one walking to the left of a bull, the other to the right of the other bull. The one on the left had just turned its head slightly as if to acknowledge a human next to it when both of the soldiers stabbed at the bull next to them with what looked like a metal syringe.

Gasps and shouts from the crowd rang out as the syringes found their way through the alien armor. Before the bull guns could even swing around, both of them turned rigid, their armor turning off within a second, their skin no longer a steel gray but an inky black. More cries of surprise came from the citizens gathered on the south lawn.

"Those two bulls were injected with concentrated methane. The effect, as you have just seen, is instantaneous. The bulls don't even have time to react. The very second the methane enters their blood, an escalating system shutdown from toxicity is achieved."

His words were punctuated by the puffs of dust and debris as each of the aliens in the clip froze up and fell over.

"Thanks to scenes like this that have played out all over the major metro areas of California, we have perfected both the methane compound as well as the delivery system. The bulls know what human weapons of war look like, and as you know, they'll vaporize you on site if they see you with one.

"However, they have no idea what this weapon is. Since it isn't feasible to attack each bull individually and on foot, we've also created a hydraulic-magnetic launcher, better known to some of you older folks who like science fiction as a railgun, as well as a kind of shrapnel bomb that explodes with methane-filled and methane-coated projectiles. All it takes is a single microgram and you have a dead bull."

Colonel Hardaway gave the crowd a couple of minutes to discuss this revelation amongst themselves before going on.

"The complexes, as far as we've been able to determine, are some kind of molecular forge. The crushers from the cities unload whatever they've collected that they didn't spit out the rear end onto dropships, and the dropships unload the substance at the forges. Once per month an orbital freighter picks up the refined substance from all of the forges in the area and takes it back upstairs to the main alien vessel.

"Same goes for the giant mining vehicles and the massive pit mines. We believe their crushers eat up our cities to extract raw materials that get separated in the crushers and then further refined at the forges. We still don't know how accurate this theory is, but over the last seven years we've been watching closely, and we believe that we've got the right idea."

"What I've called you all together for is to tell you that the United States Army is recruiting able-bodied men and women to train at our Crater Lake complex and begin taking the fight to the bulls. They nearly wiped us off the planet twenty three years ago, and we've been unable to do a single thing about it until now. We have, as you can see, gained a sliver of their technology during our incursions to their areas to test our weapon delivery systems.

"We don't understand most of it, but we understand enough of it to build power packs like the one powering this projector. We also have full amenities at the Crater Lake facility. That means clean, hot, running water, electricity, hydroponic gardens, weapons manufacturing, climate controlled underground housing, computer and media systems including advanced instruction modules for learning both your Army job as well as a civilian skill, and a real network that doesn't rely on word of mouth, horses and bicycles.

"I know that you people have done the impossible with your setup here in the central wastes. I saw a lot of farmland on our way up here. I saw a lot of good sentry and scouting activity. You people have done everything right to survive in a world gone mad, and have done it without a baron or a lunatic leading you at the point of a rifle.

"I know you have strong trade ties with the Reds and the Kaisers. I'm here to let you know that it wasn't all for nothing. You've survived, had babies, kept the peace, and have done it by keeping your baser, more animal pleasures at bay. Instead of a region full of murderers, thieves, and rapists, you've transformed the wastes and surrounding areas into a safe haven for other civilized humans to migrate to.

"I'm here to let you know that the time has come to take the next step and join us to get these alien bastards off our planet and back to wherever they came from, preferably hell so they can't go home and tell the hive or their government or whoever they answer to that humans kicked their asses!"

If he expected a massive cheer to drown out his last words, his shout of triumph, he was disappointed. A hundred or so cheers went up, those doing the cheering obviously being part of the Colonel's target audience. The rest of us who were gathered on the south lawn began talking all at once to those nearby. The whole time, Hardaway stood on the platform at parade rest with his hands locked behind his back. Hackett packed up the projector and carried it back to the case. The swell of voices in the crowd rose until it sounded like one long continuous shouting match.

Jerry, then Dana, then most of the council got up on the platform and held their hands out asking the crowd to calm down, to be quiet so we could do what we did best at these gatherings, which was ask questions and make decisions. Their efforts were futile. The soldiers, the thought of a base with all the creature comforts that anyone that had been alive twenty three years ago had all but forgotten about, and the rallying cry that backed the video clips we'd all watched were too much distraction for the masses. I was just about to get on the platform to plead for calm and orderly discussion when Mom climbed up and walked out to stand next to Colonel Hardaway.

The crowd became silent within seconds. Everyone knew about Mom, and everyone had spoken to her at some point in their lives on The Farm, but she never took to the platform during the votes. She never made herself a voice of The Farm in public. That she was standing on the platform meant something very important was happening.
CHAPTER 10 - Unlikely Debate

"Thank you, Colonel Hardaway for showing us that," Mom said. "As a community, we have a certain protocol that we've developed. We will open this discussion to a debate in a moment."

"A debate?" Hardaway asked. His face looked confused, mistrusting. "What is there to debate? You people have a duty to your country. You can't tell any of these people here that they can't leave and do their duty."

"Oh no, Colonel," she said, "We aren't going to debate whether or not anyone can go with you. Everyone here is free to leave if they please. They know it, even if you don't. What we are going to debate is whether or not we agree with what you've just said. As a community."

"I don't understand," the Colonel said, looking more confused than ever. It looked like he thought there was some trick he hadn't factored into his plan. He'd thought he would come to The Farm and give his speech and we'd all pack up and run for their base. He hadn't factored in the part about how it had been twenty three years since there had been any real law and order, state or country boundaries, or any harassment from the bulls beyond dumb humans trying to attack them.

"Listen, people!" Mom shouted, and the crowd quieted back down again. "Who has a question for the Colonel about what he's said tonight?"

Hundreds shouted and waved their hands to be the first one to ask a question. Hardaway looked upset, Waters actually seemed nervous for once, Hackett didn't look at anything except the gear he'd been stowing away in the black suitcase, and David was downright scared. Surely he informed the good Colonel how The Farm goes about business? I thought.

After Mom pointed to him, the crowd around a man twenty feet from the platform moved back, letting him ask the first question. I didn't know his name, but I'd seen him around for a couple of years.

"Colonel, thank you for the video. I thought I would die before ever seeing something like that again. But my question is how do you know that killing a few, or even a lot of the bulls won't suddenly bring down retribution on you? On us? On all humans?" The crowd closed in around him again.

"They haven't exacted revenge for any of the ones we've killed so far," the Colonel answered matter-of-factly, like it answered everything.

"And how many have you killed, Colonel?" Mom asked, taking over the question from the man in the crowd.

I'd learned in my years that this is why Mom never lost control of The Farm. She was too smart, too wise, too able to see things objectively no matter how much emotion was involved.

"Uh... at last count I'd say somewhere around eight thousand of them." He began to look nervous as well, and the commotion that ran through the crowd at such a number made him rock on his heels a little.

"And has that body count resulted in any perceptible good on the humans in the areas where you've killed these bulls?" she asked.

"Well, there are no more bulls in some of the areas now, and the numbers in the major cities keep falling and keep being replaced after a couple of days of not showing back up to their base or wherever they go."

"Right," Mom countered, "but the bulls don't actually harm humans in the first place, correct?"

"Sure they do, lady," the Colonel said, realizing in an instant that he'd been the one to get emotional, the one to let his professionalism slip, and he quickly locked his hard-ass Colonel facade back into place. But the slip let Mom and the rest of us who are good at reading people know that he hadn't been prepared for such a question. He'd fooled himself into thinking he could wave the patriot's flag as he walked through The Farm and everyone would follow him as if he were the Pied Piper.

"They only attack humans with weapons, humans that show threatening tendencies to them, or for some reason humans that are stealing whatever it is they are after in the cities. And now we also know that they attack humans who get too close to their forges and their towers." She said it in a conversational tone, no sneering, no sarcasm, just a statement.

"Look, I understand that it has been over twenty years and people have learned how to live differently, but that doesn't excuse the fact that these are the beings responsible for the collapse of humanity," Colonel Hardaway said, matching Mom's emotionless tone.

Mom looked out into the crowd, and immediately hands shot up. She pointed to a woman about a hundred yards away. Nicole Bronson I think, but it was hard to tell at night and at that distance with a crowd between us.

"Isn't what the towers are doing actually good for us? Removing methane was kind of a goal back then, and after twenty three years of no factories, no pollution, don't you think that has been good for the planet?" Nicole shouted towards the platform.

The Colonel looked for just a second like he was going to come unglued. The nerve of Oregon hippies is what I imagined him thinking, except with a lot more cursing.

"That's all well and good," Hardaway replied in a loud voice, making sure the damn hippie heard him, no doubt. "But as long as these alien invaders occupy our planet, we can never rebuild what we had. They won't allow us to have electricity or tanks or planes or..." I thought he was going to say nuclear weapons. I was sure that he and his surviving army or whatever they had built up under Crater Lake were wishing they had the ability to launch nukes at that behemoth sitting in orbit above the planet. Instead he said, "...hospitals, medical equipment, pharmaceutical drugs."

Fifty feet to my left another man was alone as the crowd parted around him. "Why would we want to go back to the old days? It was those old days where the people in power, our governments, still had people like you around. Fighting wars that sent our young to die for some cause known only to those who sent them! Who wants to go back to greed, money, power, classes?"

More buzzing and the crowd parted around another woman, Sheila something or other, who shouted, "We've learned how to live without electricity and your tanks and planes and bombs. Even hospitals and pharmacies. But the aliens have never once come to this valley. They've never attacked any of us. They don't interfere with our farming, our trading, or reproducing."

"They have come to your valley!" the Colonel thundered, his emotions finally breaking back through. "We shot down one of their transports five weeks ago and it crashed just northwest of here! Or did your 'leaders' not tell you this?" The way he said leaders made it sound like dog asses or piles of shit.

This got the crowd riled up. I tried to find Tony with my eyes, but I only caught Mom's attention. She motioned for me to get on the platform. I climbed up and stood next to her. Mom stepped forward and put her arms out, and when the crowd quieted down again, she turned to me and smiled, and stepped back. I guessed I was up.

"We found this ship two weeks ago," I shouted a little too loud. I cleared my throat and started again. "My partner and I found the transport and two dead bulls. They crashed into the ground about thirty miles northwest of here. There was no sign of what caused the crash, and no available tech or useful items to scavenge. We reported it to the council on our return. Nothing was said for two reasons. One is that we've all heard through the network about crashes and other things like this involving dead bulls. The second is we don't want curious eyes making the trip to see it. Thirty miles is getting a bit beyond our protective coverage, and we don't even know what might happen if the bulls finally come along to collect their dead and their equipment while a human is there rooting through dead bodies and smashed ship parts."

This quieted the crowd. Colonel Hardaway looked like he wanted to slug me in the guts as hard as he could, mostly because he couldn't be happy that my sensible explanation had seemed perfectly normal to the gathered crowd. And that they accepted it without arguing or shouting. But I was worried. If the Colonel and his army had the ability to shoot down bull ships...

"Listen, people," he said in his loud voice. "I get it. You all love the commune. You get to grow your dope and smoke it while you eat your bountiful harvests of tomatoes and steaks and chickens and apples. You get to teach your children how you want. You've socked away enough supplies and weapons and good people that you can survive any warlord that tries to set up shop within fifty miles of here.

"But what about the rest of humanity? If you are so in touch with your humanity, why would you not step up and help the rest of your brothers and sisters who haven't been as lucky to be part of something like you've built here? There are millions of Americans, probably billions of your fellow humans, who haven't fared even one percent as well as you have. Don't you think you owe it to them?" Hardaway shouted, thinking to appeal to our touchy-feely hippie natures. Apparently David Hamida hadn't told him just how dark we could be.

"Colonel Hardaway," Mom said, and the crowd quieted down again from their jeering and shouting at the soldier, "We are in touch with humanity. We allow humans into this community that are willing to work hard, be responsible, be good, kind, caring citizens who will help their fellow brothers and sisters in humanity. We keep the riff-raff down in our region. We keep trade routes open and safe for non-citizens. We owe anyone who doesn't want to be part of this absolutely nothing. It's a choice people make. David Hamida made that choice once." I looked over at David, who still looked terrified. "We didn't begrudge him for leaving and joining up with you instead. We even let him take his rifle and survival gear that we issued to him." With that, David looked ashamed on top of terrified.

"These fucking aliens have invaded Earth, goddammit!" the Colonel screamed, more at the crowd than at Mom or me. "We need to shove their asses back off into space or into oblivion. We are Americans, goddammit!" His shouting was starting to make some in the crowd laugh, which only infuriated him more. "We have the ability to kill them, and all we need are bodies to man the stations and perform the tasks. They don't even fight back! We aren't asking for your food, any of your metal, your women, your weapons. You people ARE the weapons and we, America, humanity needs you!"

Tony climbed the platform and walked up behind Colonel Hardaway. I was close enough to hear him tell the Colonel, "I think you've lost them, sir."

When Hardaway turned around, a shotgun was staring him in the face. Sergeant Waters got one step in his direction before three more shotguns had them surrounded. Arn and Dredge were holding two of them. Kenny had his shotgun pointed at Hackett's head. No one bothered to point anything at David Hamida since he'd gone to his knees, crying almost the whole time.
CHAPTER 11 - Two Kinds of Votes

As a community, we held our vote. It didn't go well for the Colonel and his crew. In a way, I felt bad for Hackett more than any of them. He seemed like he was along for the ride, a guy that had found a place he fit in, had a job to do. He was good with the projector and staying out of the way. I hoped to get a chance to talk to him, and to Mom and the council about him. Sergeant Waters was a dangerous man. Maybe as dangerous as the Colonel himself. Waters was just a younger, stronger version of Hardaway.

David Hamida was worse than a mewling baby. I took him down to the basement of the main house. I'd never been down there before, and was surprised to find two holding cells made of concrete and iron. I put him in the same cell that held Corporal Hackett, locked the door, and went back upstairs.

The twelve of us sat in a circle in the dining room. We had pushed the table to the side and into a corner to give us room.

"I don't think we can let either the Sergeant or the Colonel be banished," Walter was saying as I sat down.

"Why not?" Dana asked him.

"Because both of them are too dangerous," Tony answered for Walter. "Hardaway and Waters are hardcore military. They are trained for survival. I'd bet Hardaway was Special Forces or SEAL or something before the invasion, and has trained Waters with everything he knows."

I nodded my head when a few of them looked at me. I'm not sure why they thought my opinion of military things was important. I had been fifteen when the bulls came calling.

"So you are saying," Deena asked, mostly to defend her wife, "that stripping those two and running them down the road isn't going to kill them? I find that hard to believe, especially as we are into the fall and the temperatures are dropping."

"Those two are the two that are guaranteed to live. The only way to kill them by banishment would be to march them into the mountains about twenty miles and then let them go. Except that they'd probably beat our guys back, and take their clothes and weapons. Worse, they'd escape back to Crater Lake and tell everyone that we intended to kill them," Tony explained.

"Worse than that," I chimed in, "they'd tell the ones back at Crater Lake that we are a bunch of traitors."

"What do you mean?" Heika asked me.

"We are traitors to the human race. Think about it," I said, nervous that I had the floor and was about to lay some words out for them. "They are still old-America. Old-Earth. Old-humanity. They've been fuming for twenty three years about being helpless, powerless to defend their country. Everything they'd grown up for, had fought for, was destroyed in a burst of electromagnetic energy, or in a big ball of plasma. Most of them lost their families either to the bombing or to starvation or riots or gangs or rape after our modern way of living was completely disrupted.

"Twenty three years these guys have wandered and recruited and plotted and dug a big hole down at Crater Lake to rebuild their armies to kick the bulls off the planet. To them, the old ways are the only ways of society, civilization, evolution. Farming and barnyard medicine and councils and voting are all ancient and worthless to them unless there's someone at the top ordering people to do those things or making laws allowing them to do it.

"Now they've got some kind of generator going that the bulls haven't blown up. They've figured out how to wire up a dish to talk to the surviving satellites, and spent years learning all they could. They have a plan. They want to exact revenge on the bulls. They want to kill bulls, and anyone who stands in their way will be traitors. Because by not backing their cause, we are helping the enemy remain on our world. And I don't want to sound like more of a traitorous human than I already do, but was I the only one that heard that the towers were removing methane from the atmosphere and kind of cheered a little inside?" Almost everyone in the circle nodded at this.

"And they've forced us to change how we live. Instead of buying the newest music, clothing, cars, and gadgets while watching mindless entertainment that kept us from doing anything about all the wars, the suffering going on in the world, we now have to actually work together as a cohesive unit to survive." More nods.

"When that projector kicked on, I felt fifteen again. My first thought was 'I want to watch Forrest Gump again' before I caught myself. How easy would it be to slip back into that old world where we waited for a gasoline-burning truck to deliver empty-calorie food sprayed with vitamins and minerals to our door while playing video games and arguing on the internet over ridiculous nonsense?"

I sat down, realizing my face had turned red. I couldn't remember the last time I'd said that much in the span of a couple of minutes. Not since I lived up in Winlock eleven years ago and had the closest thing I've ever had to a wife.

"I agree," Mom said, looking at me strangely. I thought it was respect, but it felt like something more. Or maybe I was imagining things. "The important question is what do we do about them? The vote went against them, but as you say, we can't banish them. Hamida and the mousy little guy would probably last about two days, if that, but I believe that the other two are a serious problem. I'm more worried about them getting back to their little base first instead of coming back for revenge right away. They'll get their whole crew together to come and hurt us. And if they can shoot dropships out of the sky and kill bulls indiscriminately, I'm going to guess they'll be able to put The Farm to the torch pretty easily. I wouldn't put it past them to kill four thousand of us as a lesson to everyone else who won't go along, either."

It was the most serious I'd heard Mom speak all night. I knew the woman had some steel in her, but she impressed me constantly with her ability to take and keep control of challenging situations. Everyone else was quiet for a bit.

"So what are we going to do about them?" Kim So asked.

"How do we really know that they are telling the truth? Or even that they wouldn't just decide that we weren't worth the trouble and would recruit others who weren't part of large, strong communities like ours?" Benny Valera asked. At thirty, he was one of the youngest councilors and didn't remember much about before the bulls arrived.

"I think it is pretty obvious," I said. "But we can always question David. He's pretty soft, softer than I remember him for sure, which is weird considering he joined a hardcore military outfit. But I say we get him alone and find out what he's told them, and what they've told him." I realized that this was my chance to talk about Hackett as well since everyone seemed interested in what I had to say. "Corporal Hackett, on the other hand... I don't know what the protocol is for council votes or if we can overturn vote decisions, but I'd like to defend Corporal Hackett. I don't believe we should turn him out in a banishment."

"Why not?" Jerry asked me. "He came with them. He's part of their group."

Mom watched me closely. I had that sensation again that she was trying to look inside me, or through me, and it made me uncomfortable, but not in a bad way.

"He's not like them, though. He's kind of bookish. I'm sure he's probably killed men, we all have, those of us that spent hard years living before coming to The Farm. But I don't think he's a steely-eyed killer like Waters or Hardaway."

"What makes you so sure?" Mom asked me.

"I don't know. Gut maybe? Hunch? I'm not saying we turn him loose so he can run back home to his army buddies. I'm saying we should hold on to him where he's at for now, let some time pass. See if he's able to hack it if we let him go. Maybe treat him like a human being so when we let him go he'll be inclined to stay here instead of possibly getting vaporized by the bulls when some operation they pull goes wrong, or maybe when the mothership torches them from orbit because they have power and a military base."

There was some grumbling, but Tony gave me a smile, as did Deena and Dana. The two were a cute couple, and though sometimes they seemed naive, it was because they wanted to see the good in everything. They were happy with the status quo. No one at The Farm looked at them funny, said anything nasty behind their backs or in front of them, or if something ugly was said, it had nothing to do with their sexuality and everything to do with being bad councilors.

Same for Thad and Walter. Both were in their forties, both sporting mostly gray mustaches, lean builds, and the lifetime tan of working in the fields. They weren't nearly as naive, but they were good people as well. Jerry was a bit of a sourpuss, but that came with being at least sixty I think. Mitch was quiet, slightly plump, which was an oddity at The Farm. I didn't know much about him, but he gave me a wink to let me know that I was on the right side of things.

Kim So always looked like she was ready to rip out someone's throat. We didn't know how old she was. She looked twenty-five, but she talked a lot about the pre-invasion days, so we figured she had fantastic Asian genes and was fifty. How she kept the gray out of her hair though was a mystery that only a few of the women knew how to do now, and was one of the most closely guarded, jealousy-inducing secrets at The Farm.

Benny was a darker-skinned young guy, probably thirty, but he was good people, and he had a soft spot for Heika. A really soft spot if I believed the rumors. Good on Benny for giving love to an old lady, and good on Heika for still going for it. She had to be at least seventy, but all of us men looked at her and knew she had to have been a knockout when she was younger. Ben usually deferred to Heika on most things, and while Heika was quiet, she was usually adamant about her point of view. She reached over and squeezed my hand.

And then there was Mom. She gave me another look that I couldn't tell the meaning of. "How about it?" she asked finally, breaking eye contact with me. "Is Evan's plan solid? Interrogate Hamida and see if we can integrate Corporal Hackett into the fold?"

Everyone gave a yes or nod of their head.

"Right. Evan, you and Tony get to do the dirty work with David. Not that you are being punished for being new, but because out of all of us, I think you two are the hardest inside. You've both voted your share of banishments, even though some of those people had to have been a friend or even a lover at one time. Being new and fresh from the outside where you were doing real work like scouting, I think you understand the position that we are in better than anyone as well. Don't kill the man, but get whatever you can out of him and we'll come back tomorrow at lunch and talk about it." 
CHAPTER 12 - Interrogations

"I'm sorry. I swear, I wouldn't have come back if I knew it would be this way," David said.

"What way did you think it would be, David?" Tony asked him. We had David tied to a chair, a rope around his neck.

"I didn't think you would lock us up and kill us!" David shouted. He was quickly going insane with fear.

"No one has killed you yet, David," I said to him, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder. He flinched at the touch. "What we want to know is what you told Colonel Hardaway or any of his superiors at this Crater Lake place.

David looked at me, then at Tony. "I... I..." he stuttered.

"Don't make it harder on yourself, David," Tony said to him.

I nodded when he looked at me. "If you are honest with us, we'll tell Mom that you helped us, and you will probably still be banished, but you should be able to at least leave with the clothes on your back, probably the gear you brought in minus the assault rifles."

David looked at both of us again, trying to decide if we were telling him the truth. He decided we were and told us everything. He'd given a detailed inventory of what The Farm had stockpiled, where we stored it, how many weapons we had, how the council and Mom functioned, everything. He'd spilled every secret that he knew about at The Farm to Colonel Hardaway.

No matter how much we threatened him, even after Tony punched him in the nose hard enough to make it bleed for an hour, nothing would get him to admit he'd told anyone but Hardaway. That he'd told Hardaway while they were still at Crater Lake was a bad sign. A good commander makes sure that kind of information finds its way to the proper channels. We had to assume there was a list somewhere down at Crater Lake with all of our details on it.

The interesting parts were what Hardaway had told him. Which was almost nothing except that the Crater Lake base was still running on a skeleton crew while they sent recruiters out to the safest areas first to entice survivors to enjoy the comforts of the old modern life while defeating the great enemy. We mapped out the eight underground floors that he'd been on and could remember. He didn't know all of the operational details of the base, but he had a good idea of sentries, schedules, and the technology they possessed.

He confirmed the complex had clean, heated, running water, a working sewer, electricity, and some computer equipment. He said that the Colonel had exaggerated on their ability to feed themselves with hydroponics, and that what he'd seen of the methane projectile bomb hadn't been that promising. He did say the methane coated knives, syringes, and even projectiles were definitely real and definitely working as intended.

*****

We relayed all of this to Mom and the council at lunch the next day.

"He didn't say anything about a contingency plan to wipe us out if we didn't go along with his little speech?" Walter asked.

"No," Tony answered, "but Hamida is a little fish, low rank stuff. Hardaway is a smart guy. He's pumped David for all the information he can get out of him and would likely give very little in return to him.

"Couldn't we just uh... interrogate the Colonel or his sidekick?" Heika asked, and all of us were surprised. She never advocated for violence openly, though she'd voted her share of banishments.

"We could," I said, "but he's not going to break. He'd just laugh at us until he was screaming in pain, then he'd probably just will himself to die."

"Every man has his limit," Thad said.

"Maybe," Tony told him, "but a guy like Hardaway knows we are going to kill him anyway, so he'll spout lies, nonsense, whatever he can make up until the pain is too much, and then we'll get babblings and ramblings."

"We should at least try!" Thad said angrily, and Walter put a hand on his shoulder.

"Okay then, Sport," I said, getting angry myself, "is it going to be you that does the deed, hurts him until he starts talking?"

"You two seemed to do a pretty good job of it last night," Thad fired back. He was almost shouting, and only Walter's hand kept him glued to the chair.

But I was on my feet and leaning over him. "Yeah, we did. And we didn't have to hit him but one time. Hamida's a baby. He broke at the first sign of implied violence. So as glamorous as it might have seemed that we extracted the secrets from Agent 007 down in our basement, why don't you take a minute to think about the shit you'll have to do to even make Hardaway flinch in pain? Do you want to watch while I smash his balls with a brick? Do you want to stand there and hold his eyelids open while I insert a hot fucking needle into one of his eyes?" I yelled, fists clenched at my side.

"ENOUGH!" Mom said. It wasn't a shout, but it was a command that made us all stop, sit down, and cool off a bit.

Thad looked a bit pale after I made him visualize crushed testicles. Whenever a description like that is heard, the first thing we men think of is how awful it would feel if it happened to us. The thought of a red hot needle piercing through the eye is absolutely terrifying. Thad apparently didn't like the self-reflection of being blinded in that manner.

Heika reached out and grabbed my hand. She always sat next to me, and she always smelled like lavender. Her hands were soft, not at all like the rough, wrinkled alligator skin that I imagined they'd feel like. I thought I knew why Benny was into her. I almost tried to imagine what her hands would feel like running down my back. Instead, I wondered what Mom's hands would feel like.

"I think we'll at least attempt to talk to the Colonel and his Sergeant," Mom said, interrupting my curiosity about her touch and my skin. "We have to be prepared to take care of both of them, though." There was no question as to what she meant. 
CHAPTER 13 - Into the Present

"You fucking people," Colonel Hardaway snarled at us. "Peace-loving traitorous cowards. You've let the bulls win! This compound alone has the manpower and the firepower to take over anything you could want, and instead you sit here farming between lakes, trading with scavs across the range and up in Redding."

"Are you done, Colonel?" Mom asked him. He spit in her direction, missing her face but getting some of it on her pants. "Very well. You must know that we are going to have to dispose of you and your young friend. How you exit this life will be determined by whether or not you help us."

"You expect me tell you what?" he growled.

"Tell us about your base down at Crater Lake. Tell us about what kind of weapons you have been building. Defenses. Tell us how many soldiers are there."

"You've got to be fucking kidding me." Hardaway laughed. "You think you are going to march down there and assault our base? First of all, good luck with that. We've got about ten thousand troops, and enough firepower to level this little shitspot to the ground in seconds. Second of all, you are really, really sick. Traitorous fucking sickos that you'd even think about helping your bull friends by trying to destroy us."

I didn't even think about it, I just slugged him in the gut as hard as I could. Since he was handcuffed to a metal chair, he could do nothing except exhale loudly, painfully, cough and gag a bit, then give me a look that promised a slow, painful death if he ever got out of the handcuffs. Mom clucked at me, though I could see approval in her eyes. She was an even harder woman on the inside than I'd realized.

"It's funny that you should mention your troop and weapon strength, Colonel. Two of your men have told us that you have less than five hundred in the complex at any given time, and right now less than half of that as you've sent out recruiters."

Mom got a dose of hateful stare from him.

"They've also told us that while you posses a good amount of weaponry, almost all of it revolves around ways to kill bulls, not humans. I'm sure you know that stabbing or injecting a human with methane will probably be quite painful, and might even be fatal in some circumstances, but for the most part, knives and darts aren't really much of a match against four thousand humans armed with assault rifles, shotguns, and hunting rifles. Especially since to live here, you have to be trained to use them. From what we understand about your little base, you park your recruits in front of a computer monitor and show them videos of how to stab bulls in the legs between the gaps in their armor."

"Fucking Hamida," the Colonel cursed. "I knew he was weak."

"Actually," Tony said to him, "your pal Waters told us all of that. You trained him well, but the red-hot needle piercing his left eye pretty much breaks anyone."

Hardaway spat at Tony, catching him in the face with a good one. Tony simply wiped it away with a sleeve. We stood around looking at him handcuffed to the chair. It dawned on him that we were serious in our questions.

"You bastards," he breathed. "Traitorous bastards. You'll doom the whole human race."

"I don't think so, Colonel Hardaway," Mom said, caressing his stubbled cheek. "The bulls don't bother us. We don't bother them. We don't let crazies set roots down anywhere near us just to ensure that the bulls don't come looking for gun-toting crazies and mistake us for them. Your kind of human... almost went extinct on the day of the invasion. Like roaches though, you men hang on, hoping for power, glory, to rid the world of the evil invaders, who, as far as all of us have been able to tell, have actually helped humanity more than they've harmed it.

"Sure, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions have died over the last twenty-odd years, but we are partial to the belief that there were far too many of us anyway. And you... your kind wasn't doing enough to kill them off fast enough because no one would let you use nukes and ruin the planet for the rest of us. And these evil aliens, they didn't use nukes either. They even did something to all of the nuclear power plants across the globe instead of letting them all go into meltdown when no humans were around to run them safely. They've cleaned the methane out of our air, and by destroying our industrial capacity, they've eliminated air, water, and soil pollution.

"They've done their best to help rid humanity of the last of your kind, the kind that runs around with their gun in one hand, their prick in the other, looking for someone else to order around, to send to their death while you reap the benefits, the glory. Hell, they are even eating up our cities with their machines. Wiping out every trace of us having an advanced civilization. Except we know what we had. We saved books that tell us what we are missing. We saved people who lived before and tell us what we are missing. What have you done to help your fellow human lately, Colonel Hardaway?"

She walked over to the shelf and pulled something down from a hook. Hardaway was about to answer, probably a vulgar-laden, scathing response to her 'hippie bullshit', but the words died in his throat. Mom was holding two pieces of wood that resembled two thick but short broom handles. Tied to the top of each was what looked like string. As she approached the Colonel, he saw, the same as the rest of us, that it was actually some kind of metal wire. It looked like bailing wire to me, but I couldn't be sure.

"What's the matter, Colonel? I thought you had a reply for me. Maybe some more accusations of being a traitor?" Mom said as she caressed the wooden handles, slowly walking around the Colonel's chair, reaching out with one hand to lightly touch his neck.

"You don't have the guts," he growled as he tightened all of his muscles at once. He must have thought he could break out of his cuffs and somehow overpower us. He thought wrong. No one took a breath for almost a minute as Mom wrapped the wire around his neck and pulled on the handles hard enough to eventually cut into the skin of his throat.

*****

Sergeant Waters we simply poisoned with cyanide. He took it like a man, and died within twelve seconds. He asked what had happened to his commanding officer. Deena described it to him without emotion. Waters got a frightened look in his eyes. I told him he didn't have to go out that way. He could go out with a bullet, or with some cyanide, or however he wanted. He chose the quick, painless way. I was left feeling a bit mixed about Waters. He didn't beg, cry, threaten, or insult. He was a true soldier, the kind that knew defeat and accepted it without any drama.

David Hamida paid the ultimate price for betraying the confidence of The Farm. I held Ellie in my arms, Branda hanging back, hurt because I'd told her it was over between us, as we watched Tony announce David's sentence in front of the thousand or so that had gathered. David shivered, naked, hands tied in front of him, while Tony read off the judgment. Most of the thousand of us that had come out to witness it followed the guards as they escorted David a mile down the road.

We'd already sent word up and down the network for twenty miles or more around The Farm that a banishment would be performed. Everyone knew that a naked man or woman was to not be harmed, but especially not be helped. Anyone caught helping a banished was treated like a murderer and put in The Cage.

David fell to his knees after being pushed away by Kenny and Arn. He wailed, cried, and cursed all of us. I guess to him it seemed as if we were having a party, celebrating his inevitable death. A strong scout might have made it somewhere safe, killed or robbed for some clothes and food, maybe even a weapon, and made it safely out of the central wastes where The Farm had no influence. David Hamida was not a strong scout anymore. The crowd milled about until David finally wandered off down the road. I hugged Ellie tight as we turned and headed the mile back to the main gate. It was getting colder outside, the sun going down sooner as the season crept its way into winter.

I stopped in to the gardener's dorm after dropping Ellie off at my unit. She wanted to come with me, but I made her promise to go to her mother. When I entered the dorm, more than a few heads turned my way. Everyone knew I was a councilor now, and some rumors even suggested I was shagging Mom on the side. I wouldn't deny that one bit unless Branda was around, and maybe even not then. I found the one I was looking for sitting on his bunk, reading a book. I sat on the bunk opposite him and leaned my head down a little to see the title of the book in his hands. It was "Great Expectations". Good man.

"How's life today, Charlie?" I asked the former Corporal Hackett.

"My knees are killing me, and I ripped a fingernail off," he said, putting the book down.

"Sounds like a normal day in the gardens," I laughed.

"It's better than being strangled to death," he said, causing me to look at him sharply. He shrugged and said, "Well, it is."

"What's wrong, Charlie?" I asked him.

"My name is Charles," he replied. "And I just told you. My knees hurt and my fingernail is torn off."

I smiled at him and stood up. "Just another day in the gardens, Charles," I said, giving his shoulder a squeeze and finding my way through the dorm maze and back outside. He'd be okay in another month or so.

*****

"Are you sure this is still the best plan?" Mom asks me as I strap on the survival pack.

"It's really the only plan. They'll send someone looking for Hardaway and his crew soon enough when he doesn't come back. Better that we show up pretending to be a big group of recruits and gut the place from the inside than test whether or not everything we were told was true about their defenses," I reassure her.

"How come you have to go?" she asks, adjusting the straps on my pack.

"Because it's my plan? I don't know. I just do."

"You still think you'll find her, don't you?" she asks in a low voice.

"Look, Mom—"

"My God, Evan, please stop calling me that if you're going to share my bed. It's just creepy."

"Look, Jenna," I say, emphasizing that I know her birth name just fine.

I decide to not attempt again to explain to her that calling her 'Mom' is just a habit that probably won't go away. Besides, she's almost twenty years older than me.

"I have to know. Or at least find out. I don't even remember what she looks like anymore, and I can't imagine what she would look like twenty-three years later if she was alive. The last pictures of her were in my email."

"I'm sorry, Evan," she says, putting a hand up to cup my cheek. "I know it's important to you, but you are important to me. I don't want to see you hurt. To be honest, I don't want to be hurt again."

I knew what she meant. She'd stopped taking long-term lovers over ten years ago when Tremaine had been killed. As far as she was concerned, I was heading into the same territory as Tremaine, with my rushing off to destroy the evil-doers. She'd kept a steady string of lovers all that time, but that was her right. No one questioned her sexual appetite any more than they questioned anyone else's, even though the rumors might suggest otherwise. She wanted me to be safe, at her side, in her arms. I wanted the same thing, but I had one last search to make, along with an even more important task to perform.

"It's okay," I say, leaning in and giving her lips a quick brush with mine. "I'll be okay. Everything will be okay." I give her a smile, and she returns it, but a tear falls down one cheek. "I have to go, the troops are waiting for me," I say, brushing away the tear.

She hugs me tightly, almost making us fall down because of the weird balance of my pack and her hanging from me at the same time. "Be careful, and come home safely. Bring everyone home safely."

I walk out of the main house and see the volunteers who are going with me. Over seven hundred of our four thousand members are going. Even against five hundred we'd be an unstoppable force, but against half that number, and with them thinking we are all recruits that Colonel Hardaway has given the rallying speech to, it seems almost too easy. Ellie runs up and gives my legs and midsection a hug. Branda hangs back, giving me a small wave. She knows about Mom. Jenna, I mean. It isn't pleasant to see how hurt she is about it. I can't think about that now, though. We have a long march through the cold and the snow ahead of us.

"Ready?" I ask my crew with a shout.

I'm answered with a few hundred clicks of heels being brought together and another couple of hundred slaps of hands on rifles. I smile.

"Forward march!"

It's Harder This Way - available Q3 2014

Character Page

MAIN CHARACTERS  
Evan Greggs - main char (38)  
Tony Galliardi - Evan's scout partner (40-ish?)

Mom (Jenna White) - owner of the Farm (56)

Jerry Glavin - council (61)  
Deena Samuels - council (wife of Dana) (37)  
Dana Samuels - council (wife of Deena) (33)  
Mitch Duncan - council (51)  
Ben Valera (Benny) - council (30)  
Kim So - council (?? Looks 25, probably 50+)  
Thad Danvers - council (husband of Walter) (47)  
Walter Danvers - council (husband of Thad) (43)  
Heika Ramsel - council (70)

Branda Hager - Evan's sometimes-girlfriend (28)  
Ellie Hager - Branda's 8 year old daughter (8)

Colonel Eric Hardaway (50) - US Army   
Sergeant Waters (34) - US Army  
Corporal Charles Hackett (26) - US Army - bookish/nerdy  
Corporal David Hamida (31) - US Army - Former citizen of the Farm

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS  
Arn - interior gate guard (40) - dated Tony Galliardi previously  
Kenny - interior gate guard (37)

Dane Bodeker - Evan's friend (36)  
Dredge - blacksmith (?? No one knows, looks anywhere from late 20's to early 40's)
BORING AUTHOR STUFF GOES HERE

I do feel guilty that I didn't write any more. That I haven't written more since. This was intentionally written as a stand-alone story, and I immediately moved on to other books, not really expecting anyone to read, let alone like this little story. Though readers have clamored for more of this universe since the beginning, it wasn't until I received a review that claimed this story is up there with Hugh Howey's "Wool," that I decided it was time to get going on a sequel.

(I know, I know. Before you scoff, and trust me I scoffed A LOT when I read it... okay I actually squealed like a forty year old girl because Hugh Howey is to me and a ton of other self-published authors, kind of like Justin Beiber is to tweenage girls. I do not in any way, shape, or form, believe I am on the same level as Hugh Howey. I have many more mountains made out of vanquished author skulls to climb before I can even see him on the horizon.)

I'm about to write both a prequel and a sequel to "It's Better This Way." They'll be just as dark and morally vague as this book is, but that's what happens in a post-apocalyptic world. One story will be the first year after Evan escapes from Boise, to right around the time he arrives in Corvallis to try and find his sister. The other is the story of Tremaine, and how all that nasty business with the crazy, religious husband and wife team came about. And was settled.

One last thing I'd like to mention, if it wasn't obvious, is that I'm a huge supporter of the LGBTQ community. My stories always seem to end up having someone or multiple someones that are LGBTQ. I'm not trying to preach, I just write what I know, which is rule #1 according to every author ever, and what I know is that LGBTQ persons are part of my everyday life. I'm related to a few, I'm friends with a lot more, and as far as I'm concerned, the sooner we get beyond arguing whether it is a choice or not (hint: it isn't), the sooner we can focus on things like building spaceships that will take us to new star systems. I'm a firm believer that we cannot achieve a feat that requires the resources of an entire planet, an entire species, to be able to travel the stars, until we learn to live together and stop being assholes to each other (me included).

If you disagree, well, come tell me about it at www.angrygames.com. Or email me:

angrygames@gmail.com / angrywriting@gmail.com

I reply to every email, even if the email contains enough hate and venom to make my head explode as if vaporized by a bull weapon.

If you liked this story and want to see what other stories I have that you might like (go ahead, get the samples, I'm all for getting samples before I spend money), then have a visit here:

www.amazon.com/author/travishill (I'm also available at Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, you get the idea)

If you are one of those twitter persons I keep hearing about, I am:

@Angry_Games.

If you are on Facebook... well, I actually don't like Facebook all that much. But... I suppose I have to have some Facebook in my life:

http://www.facebook.com/angryauthor

Thank you!  
Travis Hill   
May 17, 2013 November 13, 2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

The main reason I am able to have this page at the back of a book I have written is because of my wife Carly. She has supported and encouraged me the entire way. She's my true BFF. And she wants to call most of the stories I write "REVENGE FIST" (probably in all-caps as well). I politely inform her each time that while the title is supremely awesome, and that I love her very much, it probably doesn't fit <insert whatever story she wants to call REVENGE FIST here>. One day... I might write a kung-fu story or something...

Cherise Kelley, my first professional editor... thank you. And if any readers find errors, I'm sending them to do donuts on your lawn with their cars while shouting at you with a bullhorn.

Janifer Anderson, Brandi Hedden, Kendall Nellis, Kathy Estridge, and the entire Tonight Show Band. These people actually read this story and gave me feedback (or just didn't tell me it was awful), and Jan gave me great editing help. We are now BFF's forever.

Jeremy Irons, Brenda Larsen, and Priscilla Bingham, three of my professors at the College of Southern Idaho, for kind of forcing me to write for a living. You three knew I would be terrible at everything else, and you were right!

My brother for not smashing a brick into the back of my head late at night when I'm writing while I have my noise-canceling earbuds in and I'm almost too tempting of a target. I know he thinks about it sometimes. He's my brother. That's what brothers do.

Jeff Johnson for listening to me babble like an idiot about 'how awesome this new story I'm writing is!' almost every night.

Killswitch Engage and DevilDriver. I rarely listen to anything else when writing. PLEASE come to Boise, Idaho one day. I might be the only one that shows up to the concert, but I'll pay for at least four tickets if that will help. 
