Winston closed the apartment’s door behind him and stepped precariously toward the window that faced the woods, not entirely positive that the barn was empty. To his surprise, the barn had been cleared and swept of all debris, though the garden tools still hung where he had left them. The barn hadn’t been this clean since it had been built. The PLA kept the house floodlights on and the second generator running all night, which was more than adequate to both illuminate his surroundings and provide an audible cover of his movements. When he crossed the slightly ajar barn door, he was met with a blank gaze staring at him. He stopped frozen in his tracks, and turned his head slowly and deliberately to face his opponent, only to realize that it was Med’s death gaze, his face now skeletal and nearly absent of flesh. Winston promised that before this conflict was over, he would bury Med’s head, giving it the respect it deserved.
He carefully lifted the window and slowly poked his head outside. It was clear. He locked the stepstool into its open position and lowered it out the window. He leaned out and lightly dropped the gun and empty milk jugs on the ground. Next, he had to get his lanky body out the window. He lifted his legs through the window’s opening, letting them dangle outside, and followed with his torso. The entire process felt like an hour had passed since he had first closed the door to the apartment, but in reality it was only a couple of minutes. As he contorted through the window, he lost his balance and fell hard to the ground. Luckily, he was able to shift his falling weight, landing on his ass and not on the gun or empty milk jugs. The pain in his tailbone bit considerably. He held back a yelp, picked up his things, and looked up at the six-foot high razor-wire fence now surrounding the property. The trick wasn’t so much getting past the razor-edged fence, but it was being able to get back inside the property unnoticed. Winston pushed the gun through the hungry razors — careful not to inadvertently slice open a finger — tossed the jugs over the fence, and set the four-foot tall stepstool at the fence’s edge. From there, he latched onto a thick branch that hung low over the razor wire and pulled himself up, giving thanks that he still had the upper body strength to haul himself over the deadly fence (as a teen in Jamaica, he used to earn money by shimmying up the tall coconut palms and retrieving the sweet fruit for generous tourists). He reached down, collected the stepstool, and shimmied across the top of the branch to the opposite side of the fence. As he let the stepstool down, the sleeve of his hoodie caught a smaller branch, causing him to lose his grip, and Winston fell hard to the ground, again. He immediately stood, knowing that he must have made some sort of noise as he fell, pulled the rifle through the fence, collected the milk jugs, and bounded into the woods.
There, under the safety of the evergreens and red oaks, as he walked off the pain from falling, a Russian guard heard the commotion and rushed to the spot where Winston had crossed the fence and shined a bright flashlight into the woods. Winston stood motionless behind a red oak as the beam crossed back and forth until the guard gave up and went back to smoking a cigarette near the port-a-potties. After several moments, Winston stashed the stepstool behind a tree and stepped away silently through the woods toward the highway overpass, along a path of matted pine needles. He knew these woods well, even when lit only by the moon’s soft glow. He walked a hundred paces before turning south toward Robin Lake. As he made his way to the water, Winston’s nose was assaulted by a rank stench he had never smelled before. It was sickly sweet, rancid, and it made his stomach turn. His eyes searched for the source of the odor, but he couldn’t find it, and he continued to the lake.
At the water’s edge, he dipped one jug after the other into the water, filling them to the top. He snapped the covers on, and looped and tied the rope around his belt — the weight of the three jugs nearly stripped the jeans from around his waist. From where he stood, the Sparrow house was one hundred fifty feet to his left. The night was quiet, save for the muted, foreign conversations coming from inside the tents on his property. There was no longer gunfire, helicopters, or soldiers marching by — there was only peace and the tranquil reflections of earth’s benign orbiter observing from high above. A beaver swam by, just out of view, causing a swath of ripples in the lake. Winston breathed in the night air, its sovereignty quenching and invigorating. He wanted to spend the rest of the night in that spot, and yearned for the freedom that generations of Americans had fought so hard to preserve. It was going on three weeks being cooped up in that barn with no end in sight. As soon as another few weeks, he’d have to leave the safety of the apartment to search for food, a worrisome prospect, given the unknown condition of Johnsonville.
Suddenly, he felt the need to get back inside the barn. He hadn’t left a note for May and he grew concerned that she might leave the safety of the apartment to look for him. As he turned and headed back, he was greeted by a familiar sound — Amadeus softly droning in the night. The cat’s green eyes glowed in the moonlight — he sat ten feet behind Winston, patiently awaiting his master’s response. Winston smiled widely. May had expressed deep concern for Amadeus for the first two weeks of their stay, but she abruptly stopped mentioning him, the cat food that was going uneaten, and his welfare. It was as if May had decided that he was dead, yet here was the cat sitting right here before Winston’s eyes. He set the rifle down and picked Amadeus up. The cat felt the same weight to him, and appeared to be the same healthy animal he had known for twelve years. And the damned thing seemed genuinely relaxed in Winston’s arms, his purring loud and content. Perhaps a diet of chipmunks and salamanders had been satiating. He put the cat down, picked the rifle up, and headed back to the barn. Amadeus followed closely behind.
Again, the stench of human decay made Winston feel sick to his stomach. He knew what the odor was — it was Med’s headless torso, Julie’s naked body, the body of the soldier who had raped Julie, and God only knew how many dead PLA soldiers. Looking for the spot where the corpses had been unceremoniously dumped, he walked to the path that led back to safety, and then turned toward the highway overpass, stepping softly over the brush beneath his feet. Another fifty paces and there they were — the stink unlike anything else, their forms slightly obscured by the growing mound of garbage the soldiers dumped on them. This was their landfill. Winston could make out the blued, decomposed flesh of Julie’s body to the side, along with Med’s torso. The other bodies were under the opened cans and food wrappers and fouled toilet paper and all the other waste. He stood within eyeshot of the I-75 overpass; the road was just as quiet and still — as was the entirety of Johnsonville. A chilly breeze caught him and he shivered as he turned and headed back to the barn, Amadeus on his heels. Winston had a plan.
Only twenty feet and a razor-wire fence separated Winston from the barn. Still aching from his first crossing, Winston hopped the fence once again, though this time in reverse, and now laden with thirty-five extra pounds of weight (the water and stepstool). He pulled himself up the tree trunk and climbed onto the limb that hung over the razor wire, scooted across the limb, and let his body down easy, the drop only three feet to the ground. He landed on his feet, and stepped briskly to the window. He waited a moment, his back pressed to the barn. Feeling confident that he hadn’t been found out, he set the stepstool at the window and peered inside. The barn was still clear. He pushed the window open, and just as he pulled himself into the barn, May’s voice rang out like a church bell on Sunday morn, startling him. In a second, she was at the window.