“I know most of the passwords; Amos taught me,” Jacob was saying. “Plus we might get lucky and I might recognize the sentry.”
He assigned them each a place in formation. Taking the lead, he led them up the hill. Amy was, of course, at the back, “out of harm’s way.” Nervous about their first encounter with others, the men made their guns ready.
“Better if the sentry doesn’t recognize him,” Larry muttered to Horace as they started up the hill after Jacob. The comment made Amy wonder. She had heard the rumors that Jacob had left his first assignment after some incident. No one seemed to know exactly what had occurred, but to have resulted in his expulsion, it would have had to be pretty bad.
Just below the crest of the next hill, Jacob called Horace forward, and the two of them approached the crest together. There they halted, and Jacob used his binoculars for a long while. When the two of them turned and gestured the rest forward. The disappointment was apparent on their faces.
As Amy crested the hill, she could guess its cause. Liberty Farm was still a good half mile away, but even from here it was obviously deserted. A gaping hole in the roof of the main building stared blankly at them. Pigeons fluttered lazily out of broken windows. Several of the houses sagged as though on the verge of collapse. The place had been abandoned for a long time.
“They appear to have been compromised,” Jacob said. “Move in slow and careful, no telling what’s up there. It could be a trap.”
Amy caught Luke’s dead-serious look and quelled her snort. The place had been abandoned for years. They had no communication with Freedom Ranch, and no idea that they would ever come, let alone be coming now. Why would the enemy have left some people there for god knows how many years to ambush the next party to come along?
Then again
, she told herself,
isn’t that exactly what the ranch was about? Weren’t we set up in the mountains to wait for just such an occasion?
The approach was uneventful. Jacob waved them off in pairs to explore the farm and its buildings. “Report,” he called from his position behind the first building.
“This building’s clear,” Patrick sang out from inside the main building.
“All clear,” Luke yelled from a nearby building.
“All clear,” came another voice, Larry’s.
Excited shouts came from a half-collapsed barn behind the main building. There was a brief crack of gunfire.
“Talk to me! Talk to me!” Jacob shouted.
There was a rustling in some tall weeds nearby, and a deer broke cover. It dashed between two of the buildings and then passed not more than five feet from where Amy hid. It ran toward the river.
Mark and Shawn came barreling after. Shawn had his gun up and fired again, missing the deer. It galloped down the hill at full speed.
Shawn made to shoot again, but Mark pushed his gun aside. “Quit wasting ammo, dolt!” he shouted. “You couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn.”
A hundred yards away the deer paused and looked back. Amy saw Luke’s gun go up. There was a crack. The deer took a step, and its legs gave way. It dropped.
“Good shooting, Luke,” Larry whooped. Luke flushed and gave a sheepish smile.
The house-to-house search was forgotten. Luke, Daniel, and Larry went to collect the deer and field dress it. The rest of the men made a more leisurely inspection of the premises.
A second shout of excitement, this time from Horace, was so filled with glee that no one went into combat positions. Amy wandered over to see what he had found. Horace and Willie were standing in front of a large patch of corn. It was already almost as tall as Amy and had big round ears on it.
“Seems a bit early for corn,” she said, trying to count the days they had been gone. Had they really been gone that long?
“The stuff we grow, yes,” Horace told her. “This is a variety we haven’t had in years. It’s sweet corn.”
“Sweet corn?” Kurt asked as he came over.
“Damn, I forget how long it’s been. All you kids have ever had is parch corn,” Horace said. “I grew up in Iowa. I bore the fighting okay. I took the hard years okay. I gave up everything for the cause, gladly. But the year that the corn borer infestation destroyed our entire crop of sweet corn, I cried.”
Under Horace’s directions Kurt went to get a fire started while Amy and Willie helped him gather and husk as many ears as were ripe. Amy was surprised to find big yellow kernels inside.
“I have never seen corn that color,” Kurt said when she brought their harvest to him. He was boiling water in the biggest pot they had.
“I have,” Luke said as he came up bearing venison steaks.
“From a book,” Patrick finished.
Luke blushed but didn’t comment.
The older men, however, had pretty much the same reaction as Horace. They gathered around and watched the food cooking. “Now, boys, this will be a real treat, mark my words,” Larry told them.
Only Jacob was missing. By the time the meat was nearly ready, he came out of one of the buildings and slumped down beside John.
“Nothing,” he sighed. “The place has been stripped. There is no sign of when, why, or how.”
“Do you think the terrorists got them?” Daniel asked.
“Probably,” Patrick muttered.
“I don’t see any sign of a struggle,” Luke objected.
Jacob gave Luke a look. “Luke’s right again. I’ve looked everywhere. No bullet holes that I can see. No bodies, no bones, nothing to indicate anyone died here. Everything of value is gone, but nothing looks to have been broken up. I’d have to say they went peacefully of their own accord,” he said.
“Why would they do that?” Kurt asked from by the fire.
Jacob shrugged.
“Maybe things got too hot,” Horace ventured. “Just because they didn’t fight here doesn’t mean they didn’t fight.”
“A distinct possibility,” Jacob said, mulling it over. “They could have taken too many casualties, or seen something big coming, like an army moving into this region. They could have fled to one of the camps deeper in the mountains. That would explain the rest of it too.”
“The rest of what?” Luke asked.
“I’ve been through Martin’s house,” Jacob explained. “He was our—their—leader. It has been completely gutted. No paper or anything to indicate what this farm once was or where the people went. If they fled, they would have taken all his papers and documents.”
“That explains it then,” Shawn said.
“Not necessarily,” Jacob countered. “Everything’s been gutted as far as I can tell. I even found a few old autos stripped of just about any usable part. Unless they added a bunch more members after I left, they wouldn’t have had the manpower to take that much stuff, not on short notice anyway.”
“Maybe they had enough notice?” Mark said.
“Maybe they left because they didn’t need to stay,” Kurt ventured as he turned a steak. “Maybe they went back . . . you know, to civilization, because, well, because it was over.”
Nobody replied. The more Amy considered it, the more likely it seemed. The thought disturbed her immensely. What if they had been up in the mountains for years needlessly?
Her train of thought was interrupted by Kurt’s next proclamation, which was that dinner was done. After weeks on MREs and dried foods, even the smell of venison and corn was enough to drive everything else out of her mind. Within a couple of bites, she had to admit the sweet corn lived up to the praise the older men had given it.
Everyone thought so and expressed the sentiment in their own way. “Damn, this is good,” Mark said.
“You ain’t fucking kidding,” Patrick agreed around a mouthful.
Kurt glared at the pair of them momentarily, and Amy could almost hear a lecture on cussing. Then Kurt shrugged and went back to eating.
They ate without conversation. The corn was gone in minutes. There was plenty of meat, however, and the men attacked that at a much more leisurely pace than they had the corn. Luke and Larry hoisted a huge spit lined with cuts of meats high above the fire to dry.
The men began to laugh and joke again. The mood was jovial, almost drunkenly so. Then Larry puked.
“Oh, gross,” Patrick said.
Before anyone could move to help Larry, John wordlessly joined him in sickness. Amy’s stomach lurched, in sympathy perhaps, or at the sight of the others. Jacob was sick next, followed by Horace.
It was soon clear that everyone was affected. It struck suddenly and unrelentingly. Amy had only a moment to wonder what could be happening before she fell sick as well.
Amy paused as she gagged again. It was only dry heaves. She had long since emptied her stomach. She was bent over like an old woman, in part due to the twelve canteens that hung over her neck and in part due to the pain in her gut.
The sun was setting low in the sky. She paused and tried to think. That made it how long? Twenty four hours of worrying, not for herself so much as for the others. She dragged herself upright and walked the last few steps back to the farm.
Shawn was sitting on the steps to the porch of one of the houses. He gave her a ragged smile and thumbs-up. The other ten men of the expedition lay on the porch. They all slept fitfully, if it could be called sleep. Unconscious was nearer the truth.
Why Shawn and she were spared, she didn’t know. They’d both been sick, all right, but not nearly as bad as the others. Amy’s medical knowledge was almost nonexistent. It would have probably been better if Luke had been the one to remain conscious.
She did the best she could. Without Patrick to boss him around, Shawn followed Amy’s directions like a lost puppy. Together they escorted or dragged the men onto the porch. It was not much shelter, but Amy didn’t know what else to do. The two of them did not have the strength to set camp by themselves.
Several of the men had turned delirious. Shawn herded them as best he could, stopping frequently to puke himself.
Meanwhile, Amy tended to those on the porch. She rolled them on their sides when they were puking and cleaned them the best she could when they finished.
She was in constant fear that either she or Shawn would succumb next, but neither of them did. She knew she had a fever and her mind felt cloudy, like she was thinking through molasses, but she had remained conscious so far.
She knew the men needed water or they would dehydrate. So she had managed to take all of their canteens to the river twice so far. Most of them couldn’t even hold water down, but she tried. She dabbed their foreheads and made them suck on wet rags when she could get them to wake up long enough.
She slumped down on the porch and held a quick conference with Shawn. While she was gone, Jacob, the last of the delirious ones, had passed out. It was a blessing of sorts. At least they no longer had to worry about someone wandering off. They dragged sleeping bags and blankets out of the packs and got everyone covered for another long night.
Amy awoke in the pre-dawn light. A dove cooed somewhere nearby. She couldn’t remember falling asleep. She had slept fitfully, waking periodically in the night to check on the men. Now she crawled over to where Luke lay. The rag on his forehead was still damp, and he moaned slightly when she touched it. Had she been awake recently or had Shawn been up checking on the men as well?
She gathered the canteens and walked slowly and stiffly down to the river. There, she washed her face and drank a little. To her relief, it stayed down.
As she returned, she found Shawn up and moving amongst the men. A quick worried gesture brought her over to where he knelt. Her blood froze as she saw Larry’s familiar face. There was something unnatural in the way he lay that told her everything. Still, she bent and felt for the pulse she knew she wouldn’t find.
Shawn looked at her, his eyes bright with fear. Would they all die out here?
She shrugged off the unspoken question. “We need to bury him,” she decided.
It took what little strength they had, but they somehow managed it. They got him picked up and carried him to the edge of the settlement. They dug a shallow grave under the shade of an old elm tree.
Amy thought of Larry; of all the people who would miss him: his wife, his son. All of the things he had done for her dad, for her. There was so much to say about such a man, but in the end neither of them knew what to say. They were so out of breath, so exhausted by their labors, they merely pushed his body in and covered it.
To Amy’s great relief, no one died while they were away. Some of the younger men even seemed to be doing better. Luke, her main fear, was less feverish and resting quietly. She got him to suck on a wet rag, and then even drink a little. She lay wearily at his side and slept.
The world spun as Luke pried his eyes open. He tried to recall where he was. He was sure he was supposed to be doing something important. What was it?
Then it hit him: the mission. He had to get going, or he would be late. He struggled to rise and a searing pain went through his head. He fell back and closed his eyes.
He took a few deep breathes and tried to concentrate. This was not right. They had already left, hadn’t they? Then it started to come back, the trip down the mountain, the storm, the farm, and then . . .
He opened his eyes again. Light clawed at them. He squinted. Amy’s face swam into view.
“You don’t look so good,” he told her.
She smiled. “You’re hardly one to talk,” she replied, the relief apparent in her voice. Her face was streaked with dirt and grime, and she had bags under her eyes.
Luke tried to rise again and felt a wave of nausea wash over him.
“Not so fast,” she told him. “Drink this.”
She held a cup to his lips. It was water, fresh and cool. Suddenly thirsty, he drank deeply. He promptly threw it up. He sat up, his head spinning. He was a frightful mess.
“I threw it up,” he said.
“At least you didn’t pass out, like last time,” she replied.
How long have I been unconscious?
He tried to think.
“Two days, more or less,” Amy said, guessing his thoughts. “Try again, slower.”
He sipped carefully this time. His stomach rebelled, but he did not throw up. It took all of his willpower not to gulp at the water, his body was so thirsty for it, but he managed another swallow.