The kid was different. I didn’t see it right away, but Mather did, thank heavens. That sixth sense of his is what’s kept us alive so long.
The kid arrived as the sun was going down. Since the sky blew off, every sunset has been spectacular, nothing any artist or photographer could ever hope to capture. This one was no exception. Pinks layered over blues and oranges and yellows, some soft strokes, some bold ones splashed up there with a powerful hand. Back when I was in parochial school, I remember thinking the walls of heaven must look that beautiful.
I was pulling guard duty and I spotted him when he was a half mile down the hill that leads up to the compound. He was all bundled up in canvas, canvas that was ripped and tattered like a sail that’d spent a week in a hurricane. It didn’t occur to me then, but somebody must have told him that canvas was about the best protection you could have when you were outside. Somebody older, wiser.
“He’s reason to be alarmed,” Mather announced after watching him through binoculars he’d customized with a pair of Polaroid sunglasses we’d looted from a Manhattan drugstore back in the beginning.
“We’ll dispose of him,” I answered. It was an automatic response by then, as natural and routine as guard duty or sleeping during the day.
“Naturally. But I’m not confident that will be the end of it.”
“I don’t get it.”
Mather’s face tightened, the way it always does when one of us is acting thick. “Look at him,” he ordered.
I took his binoculars and got a good fix on the kid. He was on his ass, resting, looking our way and trying to figure if it was worth the effort to make the climb. Maybe trying to decide if he was going to get shot at.
“I’m looking.”
“Zero in on his face.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me how old he is.”
“Seven, eight,” I said. “Somewhere in there. You never know with roamers.”
“No, but one can determine outside limits. Will you accept twelve as his?”
“Certainly.”
“Very good. Now when was the last time we saw a twelve-year-old kid? A twelve-year-old kid alone, to be precise.”
I thought for a moment. I honestly couldn’t remember.
“You can’t remember, can you?”
“No, can’t say as I do.”
“Of course not. To my recollection, there never has been a twelve-year-old kid scouting our camp. Not alone. There have been twelve-year-old kids. Always in the company of grownups. And grownups—”
“—are something we can’t take chances on.”
“Precisely. Whoever he’s with, they can’t be far away.”
“You want a disposal operation.”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
“You don’t think they’ll come looking for him?”
“Precisely what I’d like to prevent. We don’t need another typhus scare.”
“Or the rot.”
“Or the rot.”
“Or anything that’s going to jeopardize these pregnancies.”
“Jesus, no.”
My eyes were still trained on the kid. He was on his feet again, stumbling our way. Apparently, he’d decided to take the risk coming up the hill. Maybe he was hungry. Or sick. Or sent to spy.
With roamers, you never knew.
“He’s in pretty tough shape,” I said as I watched him stumble, fall, and get on his feet again, like a drunk at closing hour at one of those midtown Manhattan bars we used to frequent in the old days. Except booze wasn’t this kid’s problem. It was the sun — one hundred thirty scorching, cloudless, breezeless degrees of it.
“I suggest,” Mather said, “that we dispose of him tonight. Tomorrow night, you and Pete will take care of his family.”
“Precisely,” I said. Mather grinned. He always got a big kick out of it, any time one of us used one of his words like that.
At noon the day we buried the kid, we saw smoke, a single pencil-thin curl that rose into the sky like jet exhaust, except there weren’t any jets any more. It was coming from the rubble that used to be Bradford Village, one of the suburbs of Burlington.
Mather called a huddle.
“They’re cooking,” he said. “Lord knows what.”
“Maybe they caught some fish,” said Tony. Since Robbie and Sloane got ambushed — it happened when we were escaping the Great Fire — Tony, Pete, Charles, Mather, and I were the only males in our camp.
“Assuming there are any left,” Mather said. “And except for our hatchery, I doubt there are.”
“How big do you figure their camp is?” Pete asked.
“Could be three or three hundred,” Mather said. “Smoke’s no clue.”
“Better be closer to three,” I said, and I meant it.
“I have every confidence in you,” Mather replied, “whatever it is.”
“We’ll go well armed,” I said.
Pete suddenly had that mongrel look on his face, a strange cross between outrage and guilt, but he didn’t say anything. Pete was our resident tech whiz — he’d designed the hatchery, come up with the ventilation scheme that kept the temps down inside, even managed to hook up running water and plumbing. A smart guy, but soft around the edges. He’d told me more than once that killing still turned his stomach, no matter how many times he saw it or did it. It was a peculiar attitude to have after all the crap we’d been through.
“Remember, we can’t afford any unnecessary expenditure of ammunition,” Mather reminded us.
“We’ll be careful,” I said.
“Single shots if we can.”
“We can.”
“Now I think you boys ought to get some sleep,” Mather said. “You’ve got a busy night ahead of you.”
We left at dusk, Pete and I.
Those gorgeous pinks and yellows were draining from the sky, leaving behind a cold, inky night loaded with stars. Night was always the best time to be on the move, whether it was a disposal operation or a raid on one of the few warehouses or stores that had anything left worth raiding. At night, you didn’t have to worry about whether the ultraviolet was going to burn the skin off your back or make you go blind or cook your brains or fry your sperm. Didn’t have to take your chances bundled in a hundred layers of clothes and sunscreen coating your body like axle grease.
I was packing a .357 Magnum and a pocket full of hollow-nosed bullets. There was a funny story behind that gun. Found it beneath a crucifix on the altar of a burned-out Catholic church in Manchester, New Hampshire, when we were making our way north from Boston. What it was doing there, who had left it, we never did figure out. Perhaps the good father gave his final sermon, then put it to his head and squeezed off a round. We didn’t find a body, but maybe one of his parishioners had dragged it away for burial when that Mass was over.
Pete was carrying a shotgun, one of the pumper-action Ted Williams models we’d scavenged out of a Sears Roebuck store somewhere along the line.
We had only about a hundred shells of buckshot left, but Mather had insisted we take every last one of them. He’d been trying to soft-pedal his gut feelings, but you could see he was deeply concerned. The fact that he ordered us to take those shells was proof enough of that. Truth was, his feelings were telling him that these roamers were going to be unusual. That disposing of them might be a greater logistical problem than we’d had to deal with in a long, long time, maybe ever.
That night, Tony and Mather stayed behind with the women and Eric, eleven months old, our only offspring. We had five women at the time, and three of them were with child. Mather was very stubborn when it came to the women, what they could do and not do. We’d had half a dozen pregnancies already, and all but one had ended in miscarriage. Mather said we couldn’t afford to take any more chances. We had to have more children if his grand scheme was ever to be realized. That was this year’s motto, More Children. He was ready to do anything it took to make sure he got them.