The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2) Read online

  Maybe that’s why Walter let her do half-shifts and stay home with the kids after they got out of school. Either that, or the militia still considered her somewhat of a child and gave her light duty. Still, everyone in the militia remained obligated to respond to emergencies so it didn’t really matter where she happened to be in town if a major event occurred. Her siblings—both biological and adopted—needed her, so she didn’t mind the easy patrol schedule.

  Also, Tegan mentioned that having one of Madison’s friends—Becca—show up in town alive and safe with her parents both in good health had offered a desperately needed scrap of normalcy that helped pull her out of the defensive shell she’d constructed. For now, Harper loved that she could go home with the kids as soon as they got out of school.

  Madison would implode if Harper stayed away from her for any length of time. Jonathan, strangely enough, had taken the deaths of his parents, surviving the war, and forming a new family all in stride. At times, she worried about him for behaving too normal. She’d never seen him cry over losing his mom and dad, both killed by rioting survivors who blamed anyone who looked remotely Korean for the war. Though, he had been with Cliff for at least a month before she met them, so maybe he’d gotten all his tears done with already.

  And Lorelei… that little girl simply loved everyone. Perhaps her overabundant cheerfulness would also help Madison.

  It might even help Harper.

  She reached the road that led to the school, but with at least two hours left until the kids got out, she sighed and continued walking down the road, keeping an eye on the neighborhood.

  2

  Not the Worst Place

  Competition shooting had been Harper’s version of soccer, gymnastics, or dance class since age nine.

  Late that afternoon, after walking the kids back from school, she stood in the yard behind the house on Hilltop Drive they’d been assigned, holding a bow with a camouflage paint scheme. Laughter and cheering filled the air from the front yard where the children—her siblings plus Becca—tossed a Frisbee around.

  Despite her familiarity with shooting, she’d never touched a compound bow until recently. The militia had recovered quite a number of them from the Walmart at her suggestion, figuring that with the collapse of the nation’s infrastructure, bullets would eventually all run out. A bunch of the guys had presses to reload cartridges, but that didn’t mean powder, primers, or slugs fell from the sky. Eventually, they’d have only bows, knives, and swords left to protect the town. Though she still had a healthy stock of 12-gauge shells, 246 at last count thanks to a few successful scavenging trips the militia conducted, she felt no rush to use them up.

  For the past few weeks, she’d been throwing an hour or so at a time every couple days at familiarizing herself with firing a compound bow. Using one felt wonky compared to the shotgun. The much slower-moving arrows fell in a sharper arc that sometimes required she aim at a spot well above her target so the arrow would fall onto it at range. She didn’t think the bows would be terribly good choices for anyone to carry around Evergreen while trying to be cops. Picturing pre-war police running around with bows proved too ridiculous a thought. She’d have laughed if not for the worry that if she ever wound up carrying that bow on patrol, a bad guy could jump on top of her before she could fire a single arrow.

  A stack of boxes and a sheet of scrap plywood up against the base of a tree forty feet away served as a target. Some of the arrows they’d taken from the store had points that resembled pencils more than traditional arrows, ‘target heads’ as Cliff called them. While they could be used as weapons, they weren’t intended to shoot anything other than targets. Hunting arrows had bladed points. Those, she didn’t fire for practice. Besides, the target heads withstood repeated strikes better than the razor tips would. She also didn’t have any of those, as they remained in the militia storage area to be issued as needed when the bullets ran out.

  Harper loaded an arrow, drew the cord back, sighted, and let go. Her shot hit the target, but high left… not where she’d been aiming. In Cliff’s opinion, that she had been able to consistently hit the target board—even if it didn’t bulls-eye—after only four or five hours of attempting meant she ‘was a natural.’ Dad once said the same thing about her and shotguns, though the firearm had never felt as awkward as the bow.

  Going shooting had been a bit more than a simple hobby, but nothing she ever intended to make any sort of career out of. Madison adored her dance classes far more than Harper had ever been into going to the range with Dad. He hadn’t been a ‘prepper,’ merely thought his daughters should learn how to protect themselves.

  Little did either of them know how much she would need those skills.

  She tried not to think about having killed people, especially the close-range ones that sometimes haunted her dreams. She tried even harder not to think about how she could shoot dangerous people without much hesitation anymore. How had she gone from wanting nothing more than to sit in her room and read to being the only thing standing between Madison and horribleness?

  It seemed as though she’d gone in an instant from stressing about scoring high enough on the SATs so she could get into a good college to stressing about starving to death. The two months she’d huddled in the basement with her parents didn’t feel like something that had really happened.

  Harper sighed at the memory, glancing down at the bow in her hand. These things might work to defend the town or something, but not for crap like Tommy beating his wife.

  That thought made her think about the gang who killed her parents. Would they keep expanding, claiming territory, eventually reaching Evergreen? Could they be an aberration? How many gangs like them had popped up in the country as a whole?

  She loaded another arrow, pulled the cord back, and tried to picture the way the last arrow flew. After a second’s concentration to aim, she let her two fingers snap forward. The arrow plunged into the plywood about a fist’s width from center.

  “Hey, not bad,” said Cliff from the back door.

  Harper lowered the bow, frustrated and feeling like a failure. She hadn’t consistently missed bulls-eye on a range since she’d been ten. “These things are impractical.”

  “No tool is impractical if it’s the only one you have.” He walked over to stand beside her. “It’s impractical to drive a nail with a frying pan when you have a hammer. But if you don’t have a hammer, and that nail’s gotta go in…”

  “Yeah, I get it. I’m just not used to this. But”—she held it up—“are we going to wind up carrying these around town on patrol?”

  He scratched at his beard, which he’d been trimming with a combat knife. “Ehh… probably not. When we run out of bullets, it’ll be a hand-to-hand game.”

  She cringed.

  “Don’t worry too much. We’re working on that.” He patted her shoulder. “Besides, cops cheat.”

  “Cheat? How? We don’t have Tasers either.”

  “I mean cheating as in there’s usually like nine cops jumping on one guy.” He grinned. “’Course, that would kinda necessitate changing up how we do things. No more individual patrols. At least two-person teams.”

  She picked up a third arrow and nocked it. “It’s been pretty quiet since Tommy. Do you think it’ll stay that way?”

  “Way I figure, most people are still a bit shell shocked at the war. Rearranged a lot of priorities. Folks tend to come together and help each other when facing a serious outside threat. We’re still in that survivor mode here, everyone clinging together for support. If we have any real issues, it’s gonna be from new arrivals.”

  Harper raised the bow, drawing the cord back. She stared down the length of the arrow at the little colored posts on the spar above her left hand. They corresponded to range, needing to use lower posts for a more distant target. As best she’d been able to tell, the orange one worked out to be the most accurate for the present distance to her target. She lined it up with the bulls-eye and let go of the arrow. The
shot went about four inches south of center and a little left. “Grr. Damn.”

  “Heh.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Bit of that competitive streak coming out.”

  She smirked, mostly for his being right. Part of her bristled at not hitting the center every time like she could do with a gun. But she also secretly hoped that if she could train herself into a master archer, the town would make her some kind of ‘defender’ like the snipers at the bus wall. That sounded less dangerous than working as a ‘cop’ inside town. She no longer thought of it as ‘pretending’ to be a cop. Somewhere over the past three months—when she didn’t wake up and find this reality all part of a strange, horrible dream—she’d come to accept the militia as real and her implied authority as at least somewhat genuine.

  “Yeah, a bit.” Half grinning, she picked up another arrow and aimed, letting all the air out of her lungs before loosing the shot. That time, she landed the arrow within three inches of the dot at the middle of the plywood.

  “You’re getting the hang of it. This time next year, you’ll be able to slice a mole off a black bear’s ass at fifty yards.”

  She shook her head. “I wouldn’t shoot a bear. For one thing, it’s an animal. For another, an arrow would probably only make it angry.”

  He laughed.

  “Umm, Cliff?”

  “Hmm?”

  She faced him. “I was thinking that bows would work better like to defend the town… but that also got me worrying that we might have to defend Evergreen.”

  “Mm-hmm…” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Those creeps who attacked us in Lakewood… do you think they’re like just a weird one-off type thing or are thugs like that going to be all over the place? Will bandit armies or whatever come after us?”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies.” He winked. “If shit like that’s going to happen, it won’t be until after we’re old or gone. Still too much of society left in people.”

  Harper rolled her eyes. “Tell that to the blue gang. If they went crazy, others will, too. Denver isn’t—uhh wasn’t that bad a place. Like New York is way worse for crime. Was.”

  “Well, you know that old thing about what happens when a plane is crashing.”

  She tilted her head.

  “I guess not.” He held up his hands as if gripping a melon. “See, there’s this thing where a bunch of people are on a plane and the pilot says they’re gonna crash and everyone’s gonna die. So, with the last like five minutes they all have left to live, they go bonkers. Drinking all the booze, screwing in the aisles, all inhibitions straight out the window.”

  “Eww.” She cringed. “Wild sex and drinking sure sounds like the blue gang.”

  “The shock of civilization being reshaped so severely overnight broke some people. Maybe those idiots figured they were going to die soon, so they stopped caring about decency. Others have been bad all along. And, you put an average person in a ridiculous situation… they do what they have to do in order to survive. Bet some of them ‘went with the flow’ out of self-preservation when they got forcibly recruited. You know that whole Milgram experiment?”

  “Umm, no.”

  Cliff pinched the bridge of his nose. “What did they teach you kids in school?”

  “Umm, chemistry, physics, math, English, social studies, Spanish…”

  He sighed. “Maybe if they hadn’t dropped civics, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “Huh? The milligram thing was civics?”

  “Mil-gram.” He laughed. “And no, not really civics. Okay, you do know about World War II right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. After it ended, a lot of people wondered how ordinary people could do ghastly, unforgivable things. Many of the Nazis were just like anyone else before the war, neighbors, family, friends… There’s even some photos of concentration camp workers smiling and hanging out on breaks like they’re ordinary office staff. So, this guy Milgram sets up an experiment to test people’s capacity to blindly obey a person in a position of authority. He gets a volunteer and sticks them in a chair, then brings in a test subject and orders them to push a fake button next to a dial. The volunteer pretends to suffer shocks at increasingly high voltages while begging the test subject not to hit the button again. The scientist tells the test subject it’s okay, just hit the button, and turns up the voltage. Most test subjects obeyed the person they thought of as an authority figure, even when they believed they were causing great pain to the actor pretending to be electrocuted.”

  “Wow, really?”

  “Yeah. So, you get some random guy captured by those blue idiots, they threaten to kill him if he doesn’t do what they say, and he just falls in line. Does atrocious things because he’s been ordered to. At first, they’re afraid of being shot for disobedience. Then, maybe they get a taste for violence and are caught up in the fray.”

  She looked down. “Does that mean we killed innocent people?”

  “Nope.” He grasped her shoulders until she made eye contact. “When someone runs at you, Maddie, Jon, or Lori with a weapon and intention to hurt, they give up being considered innocent. If they surrender and you still shoot them, that you should feel bad about.”

  Harper exhaled in relief. “Okay. So, do you think there are more gangs like that? Will bandit armies attack us?”

  “I suppose it’s an outside possibility, but I don’t see it happening. Most people just want to live and be left alone. I don’t believe we’re in any real danger of roving bands of warring tribes or anything. Shit like that might happen eventually, but not for several generations until there’s no one left alive who remembers the modern world. Like, if humanity fails and society reverts to like feudalism.”

  She nodded, ran to the target to retrieve her arrows, and fired them again one after the next. Her grouping improved a little, but hitting a giant piece of plywood that stood still didn’t mean she’d be any use in a real fight with a bow yet. Although her competitive streak reared up and made her want to practice more, barring an unlikely event like a large-scale skirmish where a small army attacked Evergreen, she wouldn’t run out of shotgun ammo any time soon.

  Though, such an attack wasn’t impossible.

  “Grr.” She hurried to the target to retrieve the arrows again.

  “Don’t stress out over it.” Cliff smiled, watching as she nocked an arrow and took aim again. “You’ll get the hang of it. Like anything else, it’s just a matter of repetition. No need to drive yourself nuts over it. No trophies to win.”

  Harper zeroed in on the target, concentrating on a spot about the size of a quarter. She loosed… and came within an inch of where she wanted to put it. Four arrows later, her grouping improved—slightly.

  Ugh. This is going to take forever. Guns are so much easier.

  “Bullets, chocolate, and coffee,” said Harper, staring at the bulls-eye.

  “What?”

  She turned her head toward him; wind draped her hair over her face. “Stuff that will all be gone soon. Arrows, we can probably keep making.”

  Cliff groaned. “The day we run out of coffee is going to be a true tragedy for humanity.”

  “I don’t think humanity, in general, will run out of coffee.” She walked to the target again to collect arrows. “Just the humanity in this country. The places where it grows will still have it.”

  “It would almost be worth the walk down to Colombia.” He smiled.

  “Hah. Speak for yourself. I’m staying right here.” She fired all five arrows again, taking her time and managing approximately the same grouping. “Ugh. Still not plating them all.”

  “Plating?”

  “Getting them all in a circle the size of a plate.”

  “Oh. Could be a bum arrow.”

  She shook her head. “Nah. I’m just not that good with this thing yet and it’s frustrating me. A poor craftsman blames their tools… something my dad used to say.”

  “Wise man.” He collected the arrows for he
r. “So, staying here… that mean you like this place?”

  “Evergreen’s okay. Maybe there’s nicer places out there, but there’s definitely worse.” She nocked and fired an arrow while barely thinking about it—and nailed the edge of the black dot at the middle of the board. “Dammit.”

  “Dammit? You hit the bulls-eye.”

  “Yeah, but I just kinda shot. Didn’t even think about much. Just let it go. Ugh. Maybe that means I’m missing because I’m overthinking.”

  “Well…” He gestured at the target. “Keep doing whatever you didn’t do.”

  She tried another reflex shot, but it went high, already ruining the ‘plate.’ Grumbling, she slowed down for the last three arrows of the set and got them within five inches of the first one.

  Cliff nodded. “Lot better than last week. You’ll get it. Anyway, you’re starting to look ready to snap that thing over your knee. Want to work on the jiu-jitsu some more and burn off some of that energy?”

  “Okay.” She set the bow on the tiny back porch and returned to stand near him.

  For the past few months, he’d been teaching her a number of self-defense techniques, mostly arm-lock takedowns, pain compliance holds, and a few leg sweeps. Today, he grabbed a nine-inch stick to approximate a knife, and used it to go over various disarming techniques in the event someone tried to stab her.

  After an hour or so of that, they practiced leg sweep takedowns. She lunged in, grabbed his shoulders, and tried to hook his right leg with hers while pushing backward on his upper body. He held his ground.

  “You’re going too light, like we’re demonstrating.”

  She locked stares with him. “We are demonstrating.”

  “No, we’re practicing. Demonstrating is just showing you the mechanics of the motion. Don’t break my ankle, but put a little more into it. If you need to do this for real, you shouldn’t hold back at all.”