The Dying Cinders

The Dying Cinders Chapter 5

5. THE REPUBLIC OF DENVER, Part 1

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I seen it vividly jogging my brain memory (life is) I seen it vividly jogging my brain memory Life is long as infinity, this was the final calling No birds chirping or flying, no dogs barking We all nervous and crying, moving in caution In disbeliefs our beliefs the reason for all this The tallest building plummet, cracking and crumbling The ground is shaking, swallowing young woman With a baby, daisies, and other flowers burning in destruction The smell is disgusting, the heat is unbearable Preachers touching on boys run for cover, they're paranoid Rapists and murderers hurdle alleys Valleys and high places turn into dust Famous screaming in agony...

-      Kendrick Lamar

**********

I used to read a lot of books back in Polk. Novels, mainly. There was precious little left that Pastor Evans didn't burn but I made do. The Shadow over Innsmouth was a favourite of mine (hopefully for the right reasons) but Blood Meridian was better. I read and re-read my dad's copy of The Earthsea Trilogy until it was dog-eared. `A good book is like a doorway into another world', my dad used to say, `and the best ones always make you want to stay'. He was right. I remember one hot summer's day he sat me down and taught me about structure and pace, setting, characterization, theme, motifs, suspension of disbelief – and all the conventions I ought to know to make an accurate assessment about how good a tale really was. I suppose biographies fulfil a similar purpose, if not structure – to draw you in, to share a life, to tempt you to stay. So, ask yourself, whoever you are... are you tempted to stay in my world? I hope the answer is no. If not, then you haven't really been listening, my friend.

So why am I doing this?

Everything that happened to me and Parker, why am I sharing it with you? What purpose does this little `autobiography' serve? I don't even think I know. I don't know what I know anymore. What I think becomes a blur the longer I think it. Every day becomes the next and on and on I go, but nothing gets better. How did I get here? When did it all turn? Was it when Parker first fed me his cock and made me obsessed with him? Was it when my Dad died? Or was it when Polk burned to the ground? Over these last few weeks I've come to believe that the turning point of my grand drama, the very climax of it, was that rotten fucking city.

Denver.

There, my devoted listener, is where it all changed.

**********

It was a long walk from Fort Lupton to Denver. Jay and Parker walked for hours as they followed the US 85 south beneath a baking hot sun. It was so hot the tarmac beneath their sneakers started to soften. Jay mopped up his brow with his bare wrist. His throat was so parched he would've sold his kidneys for a glass of water, but he kept moving, knowing that Parker would scold him if he started lagging. The sun was at its highest and brightest when they passed by a small town called Brighton – though all they saw of it were the upper walls of its many three-storey apartment buildings, their beige-tile roofing either collapsing inward or growing green with moss, and that was all they would see. Jay had suggested searching Brighton for supplies rather than Denver, but Parker scoffed at the idea – `It's too close to Fort Lupton,' he'd said, `I'm not taking any chances'.

He said `I'm', noted Jay, not `we're'.

Parker was a few paces ahead of Jay. His knapsack rocked from side to side upon his back with the AK-47 slung from his shoulder by its strap, and Hunter's .357 Smith and Wesson tucked into his belt. He was tired too, Jay could tell, his kinky black hair practically sparkled in the sunlight from all that sweat, but he didn't slow down or look back.

He and Jay hadn't spoken much since breaking camp at the Platte. They bundled what little things they had left into their pilfered knapsacks, filled their flask with boiled water, kicked dirt over their cookfire to hide the ash and hare bones, then hiked their way back to Route 85 and made their way south. The silence was deafening. No dirty jokes, no banter, no talk at all. Jay spent a lot of that morning working up the nerve to ask Parker why he hadn't mentioned shooting Pastor Evans sooner, but backed out every time he got close.

Is he ashamed? Jay wondered. No, not him. And certainly not for that. So then why...?

Parker stopped walking.

"What's wrong?" Asked Jay. "Why'd you stop?"

Instead of saying it he pointed a sweaty finger ahead of them. Jay looked on. No fewer than a hundred yards up was a cluster of concrete road blocks – dozens of them – blocking all three lanes of the highway. Their placement was slipshod, and many had cracked through (whether by erosion or force) but there was enough still standing to block anything wider than a motorbike from approaching the city. Parker growled beneath his breath. His plan was to sneak into the city, grab some fuel and supplies then steal a functional car and loop back onto the E-470 and follow it around the city until it re-joined the I-25 on the southern side. If all the other highways into Denver were blockaded (and there was no reason they wouldn't be) then his plan was fucked. That reality became clearer as they pressed on. They squeezed through the roadblocks and followed the 85 southbound past Elmwood Cemetery, its emerald fields long overtaken by weeds and thistle and shrubbery; and soon found that for every 200 yards they walked they found another cluster of roadblocks along the way. Many were strewn with bullet holes or broken in half by explosives, but most still stood and at once Jay saw the problem this posed. Even if they found a vehicle, getting it out of Denver meant driving on and off-road to dodge the checkpoints, risking their tyres and wasting time. But they were desperately low on food, fuel and meds and if they didn't re-supply soon, they wouldn't survive long enough to make it to Mexico.

The last major checkpoint was beneath the bridge of the E-470 as it crossed over Route 85. Within its shadow rested yard-high concrete blocks bulwarked at the gaps by barbed wire. Atop the bridge were two hexagonal pillboxes and aligned to both sides of the 85 were long rows of dragon's teeth stretching out as far northwest and southeast as Jay could see. They were half hidden in the high weeds of the surrounding fields, along with the marbled bodies of dozens of US Army soldiers; their helmets and weapons and fatigues still equipped to their bones.

"They must've fought a pretty bad battle here," said Jay, as he and Parker climbed over the roadblocks. "During the Occupation I mean."

Parker said nothing.

On the other side of the blockade was a huge column of abandoned vehicles. The entire highway was logjammed from edge to edge by thousands of empty cars, RVs and pick-up trucks, long since abandoned by their owners. Now Jay understood the purpose of the dragon's teeth hidden in the grass. It wasn't just there to keep 55ers out, but to keep the citizens in. If the rest of the city exits were fortified this way, there was no way in hell they were driving out of Denver.

Since the cars were all so closely huddled along the highway it was impossible to walk it, so Jay and Parker followed the 85 the rest of the way off-road. They passed through Henderson and a derelict auto unload facility until the route joined with the I-76. By the time they reached the beached trucks, pit stops and trailers of Adams City, the sun was setting. It would be dark before they reached downtown.

"We should rest up for a few hours," Parker said. They were his first words since they left the river. "We'll get the supplies when it's dark."

Finally**...** Jay bit his lip – and swallowed that part of himself that felt relieved. Instead he checked around for a spot to rest at. This deep into Adams City there was nothing but old factories and empty lots about, tin-roofed shacks and woodsheds and the like, but further along the street there was an old trailer park hemmed in by wire fencing. Jay drew his 9mm and led the way to the first one that looked reasonably habitable, kicked open its rusty door (plastered over with faded Buchanan '96 stickers) and led the way inside.

**********

Understand that Parker and I weren't ignorant of the danger.

For years rumours about Denver had bounced around Polk's walls. Dodge warned us away from the city. We weren't stupid. We never would've entered if Hunter Wuhrer's goons hadn't stolen all our gear. But he did, that bastard, and he changed everything; he altered the course of our fucking destinies.

The plan was simple.

Go into the city, scavenge for some food and supplies and fuel, hijack a running car and drive it out of town. If there were any more road blocks like those at the Route 85 intersection, we'd siphon the gas into cannisters and double back to a used car lot outside the city. It was nothing we hadn't done before, right? Just like the supply runs the Black Bandanas used to make on Fort Collins... right?

Dear listener, do you understand what monstrosity of thought is? It's the realization that if I could turn back time, I wouldn't have gone back to warn the Polk about the 55ers or save my father or stop Parker from going beyond the wall and kicking off this whole fucking mess. No, no. I wouldn't have done any of that. If I could turn back the clock, I would've done one thing and one thing only – I would've whispered in my own ear...

**********

`STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM DENVER'

That's what someone scrawled into the lacquered oak countertop that Jay now sat upon. He slowly traced his fingertips over its knife-carved indentations, mainly to distract himself from the laminated lunch menu next to his denimed thigh. Just looking at it made his stomach grumble – Grilled Bacon Chicken Cheese Deluxe, Texas Bacon Cheesesteak Melt, Bacon Angus Cheeseburger Deluxe, Texas Bacon Patty Melt, T-Bone Steak Dinner... each one sided with hash browns and a choice of iced tea or coke and each picture looked torturously juicer than the last. There were still a few abandoned plates left on the window-side tables, but nothing was left of them except long encrusted sauce smears and dust. The Waffle House was long since abandoned but judging by the thousands of rat shit kernels littering the tiled floor, there had to be a source of food somewhere nearby.

Jay willed himself not to think of food and called out to Parker. "Find anything yet?"

He yelled back "Not yet!" as he rifled through the cupboards in the back. He wasn't taking his time in there, but he was careful not to make much noise. A few minutes later he came back out with nothing to show for his trouble except an old butcher knife and a surprisingly clean towel. He wrapped the former in the latter and swapped it for the AK-47 he'd given Jay to hold as he stood look out. Now they had two knives apiece.

"There's fuck all in this shit town," said Parker. He shoved open the glass doors and stepped out into the parking lot where an early morning chill bit down upon them. Walking southwest from Adams City, they'd passed by nothing but empty townhouses and derelict grocery stores. Parker and Jay had searched a few of them but each one was methodically picked clean. All the kitchens were turned out with no canned food to speak of. Every medicine or gun cabinet the found were equally empty, nor were there any valuables left worth trading for. It was like that all the way to Elyria Swansea. But as they passed beneath the I-70 overpass into the heart of the city, the city quickly transformed into fractions of itself that could only be described as villages.

They came by the first one in Cole. It ran for about two blocks in either direction, four blocks in total, the area hemmed in by a three-yard high fence of razor wire, old lumber, broken furniture and cracked slabs of asphalt. Outside its walls the townhouses were as dilapidated as anything else they'd seen in their journey, but within them the homesteads were well tended. Sheets of tin-mental patched up cracks in the tiles roofs and whole gardens had been dug up into tiny farms of apple trees, potato patches and makeshift glass greenhouses filled with picked tomato vines and potted herbs. Newly whittled picket fences arrayed around both lawns and yards like paddocks and in them Jay and Parker spotted troughs full of pig slop as well as stacks of wire frame chicken coups and woodwork rabbit hutches. The villagers had spread out sheets of tarp from the rooftops to the telephone poles by the sidewalk, probably to shield their livestock from harder weather.

People have been living here, thought Jay. He would have said it out loud if he thought Parker would say something back. And recently too. And yet like the rest of the city they'd seen so far; Cole Village was abandoned. What was unusual about this place was that the abandonment looked recent. The street that Jay and Parker walked down was overflowing with junk – the kind of junk you dropped as you fled for your life from something – liquor bottles, blankets, spindles, tobacco pipes, jewellery, rope, pitchforks. And all the livestock was gone. Nothing was left of them save some old feathers and dung mounds.

"Whoever was living here cleared out in a hurry," said Parker.

But there's no signs of a fight, thought Jay. There were no corpses or bullet holes or bloodstains nearby. Whatever cause them to flee wasn't violent – but no doubt carried with it the threat of violence. "55ers, you think?"

As he wondered about that Parker spooled up one of the ropes and folded it into his backpack. Maybe it would come in handy later. "Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we-"

He stopped talking the second he heard wheels and rumbling engines rear towards the village from the north. Jay and Parker quickly ran off the road, up the sidewalk and behind an outhouse nestled against the closest townhouse and watched as three pick-up trucks; 2 F-150s and a black-painted Dodge Ram, wheeled to a stop mid-way through the street. Each one flew the 55er flag from their roofs and carried four-strong squads of men in each rear wagon, all of them tooled up to their eyeballs with 12-gauge pump actions and fully jacketed M16s. Only one of them was (visibly) unarmed; a tall, nut-eyed man climbing out of the driver's side of the Dodge Ram, the gravel track crunching beneath his boots. Jay and Parker watched him closely. Going by his pale grey hair and unshaved beard he was in his mid-to-late fifties, maybe older, but oddly muscular beneath his khaki jacket. A fleshy scar ran down his face from the top of his widow's peak, along his forehead, over his left eye, down his cheek and ending at his jaw. There was a look in his eye as he surveyed the empty village around him – a kind of focused, over-alert stare that went from one house to the next scoping out vantage points or defensive formations and traps. He was ex-military for sure.

"Boys!" He yelled out to his men, "Search the area, they can't have gotten far!"

They're looking for someone, thought Jay. He crouched behind Parker, who quietly slung the AK-47 back over his shoulder as the 55ers climbed out of the rear cabins and spread out across the street. Some patrolled the streets whilst others kicked open the townhouse doors and searched them through as the silver-haired man walked up to the first F-150 XL and exchanged words with the driver -- which left the Dodge Ram at the back of the formation empty. Parker grinned.

"That's our ride," he said.

What the fuck's he thinking? The closest 55er was a skinny mope in cargo pants balancing his 12-guage off his shoulder. He was two doors down from them. In a couple minutes he'd pass by their alleyway and spot them. "We can't take their pickup!"

"Where else in this piece of shit city will we find a running car with a healthy tank of gas without taking it from someone? Look how far they've spread out, all we need to do is double around and grab that Ram," then he pointed towards the back of the house. "Hang back behind that wall and get your knife ready."

There was no point in arguing with him now. Jay sighed, then crept back slowly around the cracked rear wall of the house they were tucked up against. He shrugged off his backpack and unwrapped the Waffle House knife – seven sharp inches of stainless steel. Jay held his position at the corner as Parker grabbed a pebble from the ground and pressed up closer to the outhouse wall. When that skinny 55er passed by the alleyway to move to the next house, the Evans boy threw it at the opposing wall and the scuffed sound drew his attention.

"Someone there?" He said.

No reply.

Snarling, the 55er pumped the 12-guage. If he was smarter (or at least better trained) he would've yelled for someone to come and cover his back. Instead he moved in – just like Parker wanted him to. The skinny, string-haired militiaman stepped forward cautiously, one slow boot after the other, until he inched past the outhouse – and Parker leapt out from behind it. One of his arms snatched around his neck. The other clamped down around his mouth – too late for him to call for his friends. He was a scrawny fuck and Parker had nearly half-a-buck over him in weight, so when he struggled to buck free Parker span their bodies sideways and cracked his nose against the wall. The pulpy, crunchy sound made Jay's stomach curdle. The 55er screamed into Parker's hand (which was now soaked in the guy's blood), but it was nothing but muffled noise. His hands went limp and the 12-guage dropped to the grass.

"Jay!" Whispered Parker. "Jay, come out here!"

He emerged from the corner with the knife in his hands and saw the 55er wrestle weakly in the chokehold, blood streaming from his nose down Parker's hand and shoulder. "Gut him!" Said Parker. "Quick, before any of his buddies come!"

Jay froze.

For a moment, it was like someone asking him to throw himself off a cliff. He had the knife in his hand. He had the training. He knew to aim for aim for the chest or the throat for a clean kill. He didn't need a run up and there was no risk he might scream or alert his friends. The target was scum – rapist, murderer, slaver. There was no judgement from above nor any law in place to punish him for it. Stabbing that 55er should have been as simple as gutting a deer or butchering a pig – something he'd done a dozen times back in Polk.

And yet he froze.

"Jesus Christ, what are you waiting for?" Seethed Parker. "Do it!"

One upon a dream Jay had pictured himself stabbing Billy Locke to death. He recalled the frantic, savage look in his own eye as he repeatedly jutted cold steel into his gut and soaked his own bedroom carpet in the bastard's blood. It seemed so easy in his mind. And now? In the real world? The blade wobbled. Jay looked down and saw his knife hand trembling like a leaf. He clutched his wrist, but the shakes wouldn't stop. What's wrong with me? He thought. Why am I...?

Parker growled, annoyed, and threw the 55er down and pulled out the combat knife they took from Hunter Wuhrer's pickup truck three nights ago. Before he yelled for his pals the boy shoved his mouth into the soil, tucked the blade against his throat and sliced it open. Parker held him down like a hog, his wound glutting, until a few second later the man went limp.

"What the FUCK is wrong with you?" Barked Parker. "You wanna die out here? Jesus! Grab his fucking legs, help me get him into the outhouse!"

Jay was scared to even touch him now – but was scared worse of Parker being mad at him again. The boy shook off his shakes and followed suit as Parker grabbed the dead militiaman by his shoulders. Together, they bundled him into the outhouse and secured the door with a lost rake. The others wouldn't find him for now but the second their captain called for a pull out they'd realize they were missing a man. Keeping that in mind, Jay followed closely behind Parker as led him around the back of the houses. They slipped from shadow to shadow all the way to the end of the village until they were far enough away to cross the street and not be spotted. They dove into the shadows of those houses and followed the rear alleyway all the way back to the house closest to the three pickup trucks. The patrol had thinned a bit by then as the 55ers turned the townhouses upside down searching for supplies. Only two of them were on the streets -- their captain (still gabbing with the front-most driver) and the second driver who stood guard by a growing stockpile of food, clothes and tools at the foot of the sidewalk, about four doors down from the outhouse where his dead comrade was stashed.

Parker took the lead, inching down the cobblestone driveway towards the Dodge Ram. Once in its shadow, he ducked low and (with a still angry look on his face) waved for Jay to follow him. Nervous, Jay looked around. None of the other 55ers were in ear or eyeshot. The Mixon boy followed Parker's footsteps until he was safely tucked up beside him again.

"Get into the truck," said Parker. He swapped knives with Jay, combat for kitchen, and drew out his Luger with his free hand. "As soon as you hear a shot, start the engine alright? Don't fuck up this time."

Jay frowned. He wanted to defend himself by saying something clever (like Parker always did) but nothing came to mind. Instead of arguing he just nodded (reminding himself of a scolded kid) and carefully opened the car door to climb inside. The Dodge Ram was hot and musty with the stench of BO, but Jay kept his head no higher than the dashboard – which was just about high enough to watch Parker sneak over to the middle pickup ahead of the Ram and sink his knife into both of its rear tyres. The hiss of released air was too faint to overhear. Parker then snuck forward, low against the shadows, and then quickly punctured the rear and front tyres of the frontmost pickup – and that they did hear. Jay spotted the captain (who now realized that something was wrong) pull a Glock 19 from a holster beneath his jacket, but he ducked for cover when a gunshot ripped through the passenger side window and splattered the right side of driver's skull against the half-rolled window.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Jay clambered up onto the driver's seat and turned the keys in the ignition. As soon as the engine thrummed to life more gunshots peppered off in the distance. One crashed through the front window of the second pick up as Parker ducked behind it for cover and the captain, gun outstretched, yelled for his men to out of the townhouses. It gave Parker just enough time to run low from the F-150 XL and climb into the Dodge and as soon as he did Jay put his foot on the gas and peeled away in reverse. The second driver by the stockpile advanced past the captain and pumped his 12-gauge but he missed his shot by a yard and blew a hole through an abandoned mailbox. By the time he loaded another round and the 55ers came running out of the houses to see what the fuck was going on, Jay reversed the Ram into driveway, drove right, and peeled out of the village gates in the opposite direction.

**********

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

Should we have stolen a vehicle from the 55ers? Probably not. But what would've changed? Precious little to none, I'd bet. Maybe we would've passed her by, that fucking bitch, or maybe we'd have just stumbled on until the 55ers caught and killed us. Who the fuck knows? All I know now is that any hope we had of throwing him off the trail was gone the minute we stole one of his rides and incapacitated the other two. Whose `him', you ask? The `him' I'm speaking of was the captain of that road crew, a man I was soon to learn was one of the most powerful captains in the whole of the Fifty-Five Thousand Army, the man who ordered the attack on Polk after it defaulted on its tithes, the one whose son tried to rape me and sell me into slavery.

Wuhrer.

But more on him later.

Once we drove out of Cole Village the going was a hell of a lot less slow. The truth was that the Dodge Ram was (at the time) well worth stealing. The tank was three quarters full, the black finish made it easy to hide at night, and as we were soon to learn, the rear cab was packed with dozens of M16 rifles and three whole crates filled with hundreds upon hundreds of 20-round magazines. When Parker reasoned that it looked more like a shipment than a hoard, I wondered (out loud) if that meant they might come after us. He frowned at me for saying it but didn't argue with the logic.

"It doesn't fucking matter," I remember him saying, "I took out the tyres on their other pickups, they'll have to walk back to the nearest 55er town to get another ride and by then we'll be gone."

His plan was to find as much food, meds and clothes as possible, load up the Ram, then find the fastest way out of town. If the rest of the city exits were blockaded (like it was back on Route 85) they'd siphon some gas, walk until we found a working car, then drive it back and collect the supplies. It was just a matter of finding what we needed.

That afternoon we only stopped to swapped seats. Parker took the wheel (I didn't mind since I hadn't driven in a while and I was nervous about beaching or damaging it by mistake) and made sure not to stop until we got enough distance from Cole. We drove south past Martin Luther King Boulevard into Whitter, then turned right on 26th Avenue towards Five Points and from there we turned left onto Welton Street. From there you started to see the towers and skyscrapers downtown. That's where (and when) Denver started looking like the cities that I used to see in my father's old picture books – or at least their broken reflection.

Abandoned cars rusted away beneath the sun everywhere we looked. Broken telephone poles rested peacefully in their old crash points on the roofs of the local three-storey apartments. Moss and liana grew from the cracks in the clay-coloured bricks. The streets were just as broken. Not just potholes or cracks but whole craters blown into the gravel by god knows what... RPGs, IEDs perhaps? And sweet Jesus, the bodies. I'd never seen so many dead bodies in one place before. They were everywhere. Fucking everywhere. Old skeletons wrapped in withered clothes and strewn out over stoops, sidewalks, dumpsters, windows, ledges, deck chairs, doorways, park benches. Some of them still sat in their cars with their worn finger bones still locked to the wheel. I saw half-finished civic buildings rotting away in their old construction sites – metal girders and pipes poked out of the cement like rib bones. One of the cranes had somehow fallen into the ring fence of an empty ballpark. It was so desolate. I remember wondering to myself what that city must have looked like before everything went to shit, how busy it must have been, how loud and overpowering. But now? Now it was just a graveyard. Nothing living walked those streets anymore. That's what I thought at the beginning, anyway.

We weren't too far out from the central business district when we started seeing trails of thick black smoke rising into the sky. We got a little closer and then we started hearing rifle fire rattling off at unseen targets at an unknown distance – sustained bursts every few seconds. It got quiet for a few minutes then started up again, regular as clockwork.

There was a crater in the road up ahead. Parker turned right onto Park Avenue West and drove through an empty car park to re-join Welton Street, but we didn't reach another ten yards ahead before we found the first blockade.

"Oh shit." Parker hit the brake, shut off the engine, then opened the door and climbed out of the Ram. I did the same.

It wasn't military. The `blockade' was just a bunch of cars shoved into a single line across the street. What I didn't know at the time was that the people who did it (people we were soon to meet) had done that to every single westward road on North Broadway; from Brighton Boulevard off the I-70 all the way south to the Valley Highway over South Broadway and West Kentucky Avenue. We weren't going any further even if we wanted to... at least not by car.

"So, what the fuck do we do now?" I asked. It was cloudy that day, but I still remember shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand as I watched the smoke columns drift between the skyscrapers downtown.

"Lookit, the hard part's done, we've got us a ride, don't we?" Parker stuck his thumb at an indoor car park behind us. "Let's stash the pickup inside then search for supplies, boots first."

I wish we'd turned back and tried find another way around.

Better yet, I wish we never went into that fucking city at all.

Maybe then we never would've met... her.

**********

Jay couldn't say he knew much about the concept of a mall. He'd heard about them, of course (mostly from books) and as a kid his dad used to tell him stories about how he and Grandma Mixon used to go for shopping trips in Denver (when he was a kid) but ultimately he was what the old world would've called a small town boy and he couldn't really `see' the kind of place their stories were talking about – food courts and arcades and Chuck E. Cheese and what not. And then boom... there he was walking in one.

They found it not too far from where they left their pickup, just a few blocks away really. The whole mall front was reinforced glass backed by metal latticework. Jay imagined it looking amazing back in the day. Today? Today it was covered in moss and bird shit – but it wasn't cracked at all. He and Parker shoved open the revolving door into a huge semi-circular building, at least three floors high. They were surrounded on all but one side with stores. Clothes stores, games stores, phone stores, grocery stores, shoes stores, music stores... the forecourt was empty though, save for two battered old ice cream and candy floss stands (both of which were overturned). The floor was filthy with rat shit... and bird shit and dog shit and human shit... and broken tiles, cracked bulbs and loose girders fallen from the ceiling, but you could walk around it.

"Strap up," said Parker. He'd swapped the AK-47 for one of the M16s in the pickup and loaded a fresh mag as Jay fished out his 9mm. "We don't know what's waiting for us in the shade."

That's what your father used to say, thought Jay. He took out his torch then advanced into the darkness. He would've been scared to without Parker close by his side. They followed the light cone across the dirty forecourt toward a set of metal steps.

"What the fuck kind of stairs is that?" Said Parker.

"It's called an escalator," Jay shined a light over it. "It used to move. My dad said all you needed to do was stand on one of the steps and it'd carry you up to the top."

As Jay climbed its inert steps Parker fell in behind him. "Well that's stupid."

"Why's it stupid?"

"What's fucking stupider than moving stairs?" he said. "No wonder the old world went to shit if the people were so goddamn lazy that they couldn't walk up the fucking stairs on their own. Jesus."

Most of the stores were at the top and Jay and Parker had no choice but to go through them all one by one. Normally they'd be more careful, go a little slower, but the gunfire in the distance made them both anxious (especially Jay). Whoever was still holed up in this city was fighting tooth and nail to keep it and neither of them wanted to be on the wrong side of that fight. So, they split up. Jay took the left, Parker took the right. And neither of them found much. Jay's first store sold shoes (or used to) but most of the boxes were empty, snatched up by scavengers years ago... although he found a good pair of boots his size. He kicked off his beaten-up sneakers then fitted them on.

The next store over was a bakery. All its pretty glass cabinets were smashed up and what little food was left in them had rotted up into crusty balls of mould. The pantry was empty when he checked it and the next bunch of stores were the same – picked clean. Jay was another six stores down on his side when he heard Parker calling out to him;

"Jay!" He yelled. "Jay, get over here!"

He was in an old drug store at the time. Jay stuffed the only worthwhile things he found into his backpack (an expired bottle of aspirin and some surgical tape) and followed his voice across the way into an old video game store. It was probably the only store in the whole mall that hadn't been ransacked. Its stock still sat on its dusty shelves (only slightly worse for wear) SNES cartridges, Sega Genesis cartridges, Sega Saturn CDs and PlayStation disks – and posters still clung to the walls;

Electronic Entertainment Expo '97

Atlanta, Georgia

(GET YOUR TICKETS NOW!)

And...

The Battle Continues!

Tekken 3tm

...and so on. His father used to say that video games were bad for children (`they just rot your brains') and judging by how little was actually taken from the store over the years, Jay believed it. He found Parker across the way in an old video game store where he sat hunkered over the corpse of a dead Dobermann. It was shot through the head.

"You found this?" Asked Jay.

Parker nodded. He checked the dog's skull for an exit wound but didn't find one. "It's fresh... and it was killed at a distance. Someone must've dragged it here. C'mon. Keep that torch light up ahead of me."

Jay flashed the torchlight ahead of his feet by a yard and followed him as he led the way behind the counter to a spare room in the back. He opened it just lightly enough not to make any noise as the light cone fell over what was inside – a ruffled sleeping bag, empty cams of spam, apple cores, spare pistol clips, a piss bucket, and some oil-soiled rags.

"Someone's slept here?"

"No shit," said Parker. "Whoever shot that dog probably-"

The 9mm went off. The shot ricocheted off the stone floor and cracked the wall, startling Parker. Jay hadn't meant to fire it; his finger just slipped against the trigger the second that arm snatched tight around his throat and dragged him backwards into the video game store. Something cold and sharp jutted against his ribs but Jay was only faintly aware of it because he was struggling to breathe. And then a smooth voice whispered "drop your gun" into his ear. A girl's voice. He dropped his weapon (and the torch). Parker charged out of the rear room in shooting posture, the M16's stock set firmly against his shoulder, but he flinched when he spotted the knife up against Jay's abdomen.

"Who are you guys?" She spat. "You with the Foragers?"

Foragers? Thought Jay. But the blade felt so prickly against his ribs he lost his focus and winced.

"Put the fucking knife down," said Parker. "A blind man couldn't miss at this range."

The girl chuckled. "That's an M16, 700 rounds per minute cyclical, 30 rounds per mag. Shoot me at this range and you take your boy with you. You should've come out with that little Nazi pop gun instead."

The Luger rattled tauntingly in Parker's belt as she said it. And she was right. There wasn't a marksman alive or dead who could cut a clean shot of a target one-yard shy of their M16.

"Who are you?" He asked.

"I'm asking the questions here," she said. "Drop your rifle and slide it over to me. Slowly."

Parker's shoulders shook with anger, but he complied, and slowly lowered the weapon to the ground. He reluctantly tapped the rifle over to her. He was frowning – but there was a glint in his eye that Jay only ever saw at one specific time... when Parker burned things.

When the M16 hit her boots, the girl released Jay's throat just long enough to take it up, shove Jay over to Parker and lift the stock into her shoulder. This wasn't like Silver holding up a Glock three times his body weight in LaSalle – she knew how to use that weapon. And for the first time Jay saw her with his own eyes.

She was a girl, but you couldn't tell beneath her scruffy lemon-coloured hoodie and baggy black khakis. She was caked in two days' worth of blood, dirt and sweat from her dirty blonde hair down to her scuffed-up boots. A beaten backpack swung from her shoulders.

"You say you're not with the Foragers then who are you?" She asked. "Scavengers? Travellers? Runaway slaves?"

Jay caught his breath. He was bleeding from a slight cut where her knife had jabbed at him (but he didn't realize it at the time). "We're... travellers. Are you on the run for the 55ers too?"

Her eyes narrowed. She paused, calculating what she'd just heard, then calmly asked them if they were from `up north'. That's when Parker told her about Polk and the 55ers.

"...Polk, huh? We had a couple of survivors pass through a couple days ago... they told us about what happened. I'm sorry." And then her entire expression changed from mistrustfully to weary as she handed the M16 back to Parker, who looked genuinely confused by that (as did Jay). Inside that moment was an even smaller one where Jay honestly expected Parker to open fire on the girl, snatch the pack off her back, and keep moving; instead he did the exact opposite.

He smiled at her (sceptically). "You sure you wanna give this back to me?"

"Don't be stupid," She said. "You're not getting out of here alive without me, got it?" There was a hidden chest beneath the store counter. The girl thumbed some numbers into its lock and popped it open. It was full of meds – liquid paracetamol, diazepam, syringes, gauze, dressings, band aids, etc. She loaded all of it into her backpack. "Do you two have names?"

What? Are we friends now? Thought Jay. "Uh..."

"Parker," he said. "This is Jay."

"Well, Parker and Jay," She zipped up her pack and hauled it back onto her shoulders. "I'm McCullough. You can call me that if you like. And I don't know how you didn't get the lay of the land rolling this deep into the Republic on your own but here's the skinny – you're in hostile territory now and if you wanna live long enough to walk back out, you better stay on my ass, you got it?"

Republic? Jay thought. What does she mean `Republic'...?

"What the hell's going on around here?" Asked Parker.

McCullough pulled a M11 from her back pocket and racked the slide. "There's no time. I shot one of their hunting dogs on the way in, they'll circle back to the mall soon. Follow me."

She then leapt over the counter and left the store. Parker moved to follow her.

"Wait," said Jay. "We're just gonna go with her?"

"There's jack shit in here, Pee Wee. And didn't you hear what she said? `We had a couple of survivors pass through here?' She's got others with her, maybe those people from that village in Cole. We'll take the supplies we need off them and after that, we're done with this fucking place."

Jay hated it when Parker was right (because he was always so damn smug about it) but he was right about that. Wherever McCullough and her people were holed up they were more likely to get food and fuel off them than they would trawling through that decrepit mall. Parker shouldered the M16 for his Luger and followed McCullough out of the store. Jay sighed, cocked his 9mm, and followed Parker.

The three of them crept out into the second floor and picked their way through the broken glass and tile fragments to another dead escalator down the hall. They followed it up to a smaller third floor and looped around its balcony to a side door marked STAFF ONLY. McCullough booted it open. The door swung into the wall and revealed a long flight of stairs that they quickly scaled, all the way up to the mall's roof. The fresh air hit Jay like a rabbit punch (especially compared to the grimy stink of the mall) but it was soured with the scent of smoke. From there the black columns of ash were taller than ever and the rattle of gunfire ever more distinct.

"Keep low," said McCullough.

She crawled to the roof's edge and carefully pointed Jay and Parker to a column of trucks arrayed along the pavement opposite the mall's rear exit. Their engines were chugging, and their rear cabins were full to overflowing with fresh corpses, and they were guarded by a squad of twenty beefed out, yellow-toothed savages. Jay would've mistaken them for 55ers if not for their gear... military-grade. M16 rifles equipped with M203 grenade launchers, Mossberg 500 shotguns, M67 frag grenades and M84 stun grenades. They wore oddments of old US Army field equipment mixed in with their dirty t-shirts and slacks; a few in BDU fatigues and combat boots, others in flak jackets and combat helms, or even more in visors and desert camos. They weren't ex-military, but they were packing like a rebel army.

"They the `Foragers' you were talking about?" Whispered Parker.

McCullough nodded `yes', but Jay was more concerned with that cargo of theirs. Every few minutes two men emerged from the side streets and abandoned buildings carrying a dead body in their hands. They walked up to the trucks, slung the corpse on top of its pile, then ran off to get more. "What are they doing with those bodies?"

McCullough frowned. "...Food."

**********

She called them the Foragers.

They were (as I was soon to be told) an aggressive militia excommunicated from the Fifty-Five Thousand Army in 2010. They hit the road and went southwest into the Rockies where food was so scarce that survival meant capturing wanderers out of Larimer County. That's where they developed a taste for human flesh. They kept the women as their slaves but the men (those who wouldn't join up) were summarily executed and served up as hamburgers. But wanderers were so few that they would've eventually died up there, whether from disease or starvation. Yet they survived. How?

Sometime in the summer of 2012 their scouts discovered an abandoned US Army base hidden in the mountains and looted a treasure trove full of weapons from its guts – pistols, rifles, carbines, combat armour, grenades and grenade launchers, trucks, jeeps and Humvees (hell, they even found choppers, but no one knew how to fly them). It took around six months for them to eat up the base's larder of freeze-dried rations but by then they were already tired of hiding in the mountains. So, they took all their shiny new toys south and set their sights on Denver. They attacked the city less than two weeks ago and already they'd conquered half of it – everything west of Interstate 25 was their territory now.

That girl, McCullough, told us all of this as we snuck out of the inner city through Park Avenue West. When I asked Parker if it was smart to leave without the Dodge Ram, he said we didn't have a choice. "We'll go back for it when we need it," he said. The truth is it was too dangerous to go back because the whole of downtown was crawling with Foragers. With their military jeeps marooned behind the North Broadway car wall, the Foragers were forced to patrol the streets east of it on foot. We had to sneak past them, alley to alley, all the way from Five Points to East Colfax Avenue.

"There's a colony of survivors living here from the time before," she explained. At the time we'd hidden ourselves behind a dumpster somewhere between the bombed-out St. Joseph's Hospital and North Downing Street to avoid a Forager recon party, "Their leader was a colonel in the US Army. After the Occupation he helped them seal off the city exits and build villages out of the ruins. He got the people back on their feet."

I remember thinking how eerily familiar that sounded. And then Parker asked her what her story was. I remember wondering why the fuck he cared.

"I don't have a story," she said. "But no, I'm not from around here if that's what you mean. I was passing through Colorado with a... a friend. Ennis."

I asked her what happened to him and watched McCullough's eyes sour. "...He killed himself."

"I'm sorry."

"It doesn't matter," The Forager patrol went by without spotting us. She lowered her butcher knife and led us up to the alleyway entrance. "I came here looking for supplies when I got ambushed by a Forager scout. He broke my jaw, but I survived. He didn't. That's when the colonel found me. I hadn't planned on sticking around, but... he has a convincing kind of way about him."

We slipped back onto Park Avenue West once the Foragers were out of sight. We turned left onto 16th Avenue and followed it all the way east to City Park Esplanade where the battle scars of the conflict with the Foragers began to fade. There were no more road blocks or smoke trails, no more RPG-inflicted asphalt craters or forgotten corpses. We'd come to a part of the city that the Foragers hadn't attacked yet, where displaced bands of frightened men and women fled east. I realized then why we found Cole Village so empty – its people were fleeing from the Foragers.

At the end of the road was an old high school fortified into a base by barbed wire fencing and nine-foot high sniper roosts. Hundreds of wailing villagers gathered together at its front steps demanding shelter. I remember a small group of guards letting them in (two-by-two) at the doors – they had nothing but cudgels and crowbars for protection.

"This is where we part ways," said McCullough. "Go inside, pretend to be a townie, they'll give you as much food and water as you can carry – then make a break for it. Don't stick around. The Foragers will be here by nightfall and they'll kill or capture anyone they can get their hands on."

She wasn't lying. The car wall on North Broadway slowed them down but it was only a matter of time before they broke through – and when they did no fucking crowbar could protect the place from an M72 LAW. What bothered me was how little McCullough seemed to care. "Shouldn't we warn them?" I asked.

She shrugged. "That's up to you. Adios."

"Wait," Parker said. "Where are you headed?"

The girl's eyes sharpened. "...Why?"

...My thoughts exactly, I thought.

"This is a war, right?" He said. "Well we've got guns. Lots of `em. They're in our pick-up downtown. Take us with you, let us supply up, and they're yours."

Parker was telling the truth but there was no way McCullough could know that. Still, her eyes fell on the M16s strapped to Parker's back. A couple of teenager wanderers with an assault rifle – maybe that was evidence enough – and it was. The girl glared at him like he was crazy. I'll bet she thought, `why the fuck would they wanna wade even deeper into this fucking mess?' and she wouldn't have been wrong. It was a dumb bargain. It was an unnecessary one, too. All the food we needed (or at least enough to have lasted us for a few days) we could've gotten from that outpost. But it wasn't my plan. Parker didn't check with me before he made that stupid agreement with her. It was like he didn't even remember I was there.

McCullough looked confused at first, like she suddenly found herself staring into the face of an idiot, and then her frown transformed into a dirty little smile. Without another word she tightened the Velcro straps on her backpack and turned south towards Sullivan Gateway, gesturing for Parker and me to tag along. Parker followed her. I followed him.

I was such a fucking fool.

When we left that mall in downtown Denver, I was dumb enough to think that the biggest danger to us was the Foragers, but I was wrong. Jesus fucking Christ, I couldn't have been more wrong. No, no, no. But I know now. The biggest danger to Parker and me wasn't the Foragers or the 55ers – it was McCullough.

And, like always, I never saw it coming.

**********

They walked south from City Park onto East Colfax Avenue then headed east past the old National Jewish Health building which by then was little more than a half-collapsed mound of rubble (the complex was bombed by the 55ers in 2002 as a warning to the `Christ Killers'). The road ahead was pockmarked with potholes and weeded over at the cracks – making it difficult to navigate – but McCullough led Jay and Parker all the way east from Denver into Aurora and turned south on Peoria Street. There were road blocks every fifty yards and a pair of Winchester-totting gunmen behind each one. To Jay they looked haggard and sleep-deprived (judging by their baggy eyes and five o'clock shadows) but they were alert and they waved McCullough through without question. She took them all the way south into Del Mar Park.

It used to be a resort park (back before America collapsed upon itself). Car parks and drive-thrus and plazas clustered the upper half of the site and an open field occupied the lower. There were playgrounds, tennis courts, swimming pools, batting areas and Burger Kings – all since disused or repurposed as the survivors transformed the entire grounds into a refugee camp.

Like East High School, Del Mar Park was now surrounded by over a mile's worth of barbed wire fencing and all points of entry were either blockaded by cement-filled trucks and RVs or guarded by woodwork sniper towers. They'd erected hundreds of tents and triages around the roadsides and car parks, where the wounded and dying wailed on rusty pop-up beds and hammocks and lawn chairs as an overworked handful of medically-trained townsfolk administered first aid. Med supplies were low. As Jay passed by one tent, he saw a three-person silhouette casted against the sheets; a nurse pinning a wounded man upon a table as a second man took a hacksaw to his leg. There was no morphine to hand, judging by his screams. The boy cringed.

The streets were just as frantic. Armed patrols walked the grounds in groups of five or six. Pick-up trucks peeled by bringing in more wounded from the surrounding villages or driving back out to rescue more from the fighting with the Foragers. One of those pickups (almost empty on its way out) stopped nearby as McCullough, Parker and Jay headed for an old building with huge red lettering on it that said KEY BANK. A man jumped out of the rear cabin and landed in front of the three of them; a slender figure in his late forties, a man of middling height with hazelnut hair shaved down to a buzzcut and an old Winchester 9422 hanging from his shoulder.

"McCullough," he said. "Whatcha got there? Not like you to bring in stragglers."

The blonde girl shrugged at him. "The colonel will want to talk to them, Tom."

"Why? We got enough mouths to feed as it is."

"We ain't staying," quipped Parker.

Tom's tombstone teeth curled into a lopsided smile. "I don't believe I was talking to you, boy."

Parker balled a fist. But before he swung it at Tom's face, McCullough stepped in between them. "See those M16s on their backs? They've got a whole stash of them hidden away downtown. You know the Foragers picked our armouries clean whilst we weren't looking – he will want to talk to them."

Sudden talk of guns assuaged his mistrust. Some. Tom cast Parker a hard eye before he climbed back into the pickup truck and slapped the door. The driver revved up and peeled off down the road towards the North Peoria Street gate. Parker watched him go with a scowl. "What the FUCK is his deal?"

McCullough smiled to herself. "That's Tom Cherry, he's kind of the second-in-command around here. And yeah, he's a piece of shit... but he isn't dumb. He's smart enough not to trust out-of-towners."

"Aren't you an out-of-towner?"

"Exactly," she said. "Come on, let's go."

The Key Bank building was across the street. Parker and Jay followed McCullough over to its glass doors and into the lobby where all the old hallmarks of a banking institution had been stripped away. There were nail holes and gaps in the dust where old sofa chairs and desks had been yanked up and bundled away for building supplies or kindling. All the wall posters were ripped off and the flower pots thrown out and the carpeting cut off – the room had been completely stripped down and its furniture replaced with a column of aluminium tables locked together into a huge one decked over with maps of both the city and the state. The room was dark save for the burning wax candles and oil lamps. And at the far end of the tables sat a tall, broad-shouldered black man in faded military fatigues. He looked tired. His weary eyes followed the nib of his Sharpie as he drew a line along a map of the city. He didn't notice his guests until one of them greeted him.

"Colonel," McCullough said.

He didn't look up. "Lieutenant-Colonel, kid. As in oak leaf, not eagle. Not that it matters anymore, really. Come to think of it... I was on my 21st year of service right when all went to shit, wasn't I? Now there's a damning thought," He finally looked up from the map. "And who are you two boys?"

"I'm Jay," I said. "This is Parker."

"...Well. Pardon my manners, boys. I'm Ned Creighton," He paused for a moment to pull off his reading glasses. He glared at McCullough. "...More runaway slaves...?"

"No sir," Jay interjected before either of them could jump in. McCullough didn't really know their situation and he didn't trust Parker to explain it without offending this man. The older boy wasn't much for manners or formality. "We come from a town up north called Polk."

"Polk..."

"You've heard of it?"

"I have," Ned scratched the stubble under his chin, little black and grey coloured hairs balled up into tiny little peppercorns – he hadn't shaved in a long time. "My battalion was posted there... 11 years ago? Yes, 11 years. Damn."

Ned was with the 4th Infantry Division. Jay was too young to remember much about them, only what is father told him (that they were garrisoned in Polk High School throughout most of the Occupation) and what Parker told him (that some of their soldiers snuck down to town some nights and snort coke and whore around with Sister Johnson's mother).

"It was destroyed by the 55ers," explained Jay. "We escaped with one of our town guard's trucks and drove south looking for supplies when we stumbled into... all of this."

Out the corner of his eye, Jay saw Parker smile at the lie.

Ned frowned. "I see. Well boys, I'm sorry to hear that, but there's not much I can do for you. The Republic's made room for outsiders as McCullough here can tell you... but now's not the time to welcome new folk."

"We hadn't thought to stay," said Jay. "That truck we took – we were halfway here when we realized it was full of guns. M16s, I think. Plenty of ammo too. We didn't really have a use for it but then we saw that you guys might need them, so... we were thinking we could do a trade? Whatever supplies you can spare – food, clothes, meds – anything."

The Lieutenant-Colonel mulled on that a spell. He gestured for Jay, Parker and McCullough to join him by the table. Next to his closest map there was a plastic jug full of lemon water and a stack of Styrofoam cups. Ned poured four cups and passed three of them around. Jay gulped his whole. It was lukewarm but good. He asked for more.

"Help yourself," said Ned. "You know, I remember your town. Real sweet people too – good Christians, good Americans. It was the summer of '03 when my men and I got the call to deploy north. The 55ers had overrun Fort Collins and were bombing the hell out of Denver, they even choked off trade by raiding goods trucks on the interstate highways. Our job was simple – garrison off the I-25, retake Fort Collins to stop the flow of bombs to Boulder and Denver, then hold the Wyoming border and reopen trade in the northern half of Colorado. And we did it. By winter of '04 we'd driven those bastards back north and my battalion was sent here to help rebuild the city, and by summer of '05 there was even talk of going north and retaking Wyoming. And then in '06 we got the call out of Fort Carson."

"The call?"

"The call to withdraw," said Ned. "`All military personnel stationed within the Denver Metropolitan Area are to withdraw and regroup at Fort Carson with immediate effect'."

"They say why?" Asked Parker. He was engaged. He didn't really like long conversations, but he was always curious about the goings on of the outside world and the history of the Occupation.

Ned frowned at his water cup. "No. The rumour mill's always running, though – desertions, secessions, rebellions, nullification – but no one knows anymore. All I knew, all I cared about, was that if my battalion left this city then the thousands of citizens still living in it had no defence left against the 55ers. So? We defied our orders and we stayed. We came together, soldiers and citizens, and we fortified all the city exits, secured the water towers and power plants for as long as we could keep them going, built up villages around the best garden plots and started raising our own livestock again. We took hunting parties into the Rockies for deer meat, pooled all our fuel and preserved it with stabilizers, brewed our own beer, grew our own fruit and veg – we turned this whole city into a colony of little towns who shared what they had with each other like folks used to do back before... and we called it the Republic of Denver. We were going to be what America always was – a shining beacon – and once the government got back in control of things, we'd be right here waiting for them. That was the dream."

"And then came the Foragers," said McCullough. It was all an old story for her, so she wasn't as riveted by it as Jay and Parker were. She sat on the other side of the table picking dirt from her nails with her butcher's knife.

The Mixon boy thought back to that rotten old Winchester that Tom Cherry carried. After nearly 10 years of exercise he could only imagine how frail and prone to malfunction the battalion's weapons were. Ned clutched a fist on the table. His almond-coloured eyes were dark with anger and frustration, but also doubt. Jay saw it plain as day. "...We've got organization and numbers over them, but they've got all the firepower on their side."

"Which is why you're gonna need the guns," said Parker. Jay balked at him. He sounded sly when he was aiming for slick.

"If we keep fighting back," said McCullough. "We could always cut our loses."

Ned glared at her. "...We are NOT having that conversation again."

"Half the damn town is having it. The Johnsons and the O'Leary's took six other families with them and left for Colorado Springs a few days ago – that's half our best nurses. And more are gonna join them once the Foragers cross the I-25."

"They won't... not for now, anyway. I've sent platoons to Curtis Park, Lodo, Lincoln Park, Baker and Washington Park. That's good soldiers out there. They'll slow the bastards down. But right now, we need to think about-"

Ned stopped mid-sentence when a woman dressed in navy blue scrubs strode in through the cracked glass doors, wiping blood from her hands with a towel. She wasn't far off her fifties (judging by the crow's feet cornering her silvery eyes) but there was an ageless quality to her looks – her high cheekbones, cupid's bow lip and wavy blonde hair – that was built for a straight kind of man to fall for. But like Ned and Tom Cherry before her, she looked horribly tired. She strode up to the Lieutenant-Colonel's chair and frowned.

"I've sutured Sgt Oakstaff's wounds," she said. "He'll be back on his feet in a day as long as he keeps resting."

Ned nodded thankfully. "That's welcome news, honey. Let me introduce you to two new... guests. This here is Jay and Parker. Boys? This is my wife, Sarah."

The Polk boys said "hello" to her and in return she muttered an equally unenthused "hi boys" in their general direction. "Ned, I'm sorry, but I've been on my feet for the last seventeen hours and I need some sleep before Tom brings in the next lot of survivors. Just wake me up before nightfall, okay?"

There was a rear door just a few paces shy of the tables. The door was slightly ajar and revealed a cushioned spring mattress – the first clean mattress Jay had seen since they left Polk. Sighing, Sarah wiped the sweat from her brow and stalked off towards it.

Ned frowned. "...Honey."

Sarah stopped. She sighed once more (as if for the thousandth time that day) then reversed her steps back to her husband's side and planted a kiss on his forehead. After that she went straight into the side room and shut the door behind her.

The room fell silent.

"It's... been a trying time these last few weeks," Ned fingered his wedding band distractedly. "Sometimes I wonder how this town holds it all together..." Then he snapped back into focus. "Alright. In exchange for a week's worth of supplies we'll take those M16s and-"

"We need fuel too," said Parker. "That included in the deal?"

Ned's frown hardened. "I wasn't finished. We'll give you a week's worth of supplies in exchange for the M16s... and your help."

Parker's eyes darkened. "...Help with what?"

But by then McCullough was already onto the thrust of the conversation. She swung her dirty boots off the table and glowered beneath her lemon-and-black hood. "Colonel, I don't need their help to get it back, especially not now. Besides you know I work better on my own."

"It's not up to you, kid. You came back empty-handed and shot the last time, we can't afford to lose our best tracker... not now. We need that equipment."

Jay watched Parker's eyes smoulder – he was getting annoyed. He'd put the deal at risk if he opened his mouth and said something stupid to Ned. Anticipating the train wreck in his mind, the younger boy quickly jumped in quickly before it happened, "Could you tell us what you're talking about?"

Ned took the Sharpie he was using earlier and pointed to spot on the map with it. "After the Foragers' first attack I ordered a pull-out of all our people west of the I-25 and one of my boys ended up beaching a Humvee downtown – but it's no ordinary set of wheels. It's got the last working minigun left in the city. Better still, the Foragers don't know about it. I've sent McCullough out a couple of times to retrieve it, but-"

"I don't need help," she said bitterly.

Parker smirked at her.

"It's not a request," said Ned. "Take these two with you to collect the Humvee and the guns then circle back to Del Mar Park. That's the deal, boys. Take it or leave it."

**********

Ned Creighton reminded me of my father.

Danny Mixon never put his hands on a weapon, of course, and he sure as hell wasn't black. And he didn't consider himself much of a patriot. For my father, America was only ever halfway to achieving the ideals its founding fathers espoused. But he cared about people... he cared about people he had no business caring about and Ned was the same way. I saw it plain. And I knew how it would end.

But it wasn't until I looked through his maps that I started respecting him. Over the course of nine years he had secured most of the city, from Elyria Swansea (north) to Wellshire (south). He even opened the city's reach into Wheat Ridge and Lakewood (east) and incorporated parts of Aurora (west) including Del Mar Park and the Buckley Air Force Base. For those parts of the city he abandoned, mainly Hampden South and everything east of Stapleton, he used what little construction equipment was left running to demolish them and set up middens for their waste.

Black circles demarked the areas converted into villages and there were precisely 36 of them (each one sheltering about 100 people). And according to his notes those villages begat a veritable shit-ton of produce – tomatoes, apples, cabbages, carrots, berries; all of which their communities shared with each other. Collectively they reared thousands of chickens, pigs, cows and even horses. He drew asterisks at certain points to represent hidden larders and stockpiles (red for medicine, yellow for food, black for guns and ammo, etc) and blue ticks next to those asterisks confirming that they'd been successfully retrieved.

The larger hospitals such as UCH and Saint Joseph were abandoned but only because they didn't have enough generators to run them – instead Ned routed sick folks to smaller clinics across the city and had his battalion build local infirmaries, one for each village. And he wasn't content to protect them – he insisted that they protect themselves too. He had his soldiers set up gun ranges in City Park for mandatory firearms and hand-to-hand combat training for the townsfolk.

I was even more impressed by Ned's notes. He had hundreds of multi-coloured Post-It notes stapled to his maps and each one contained fun-sized nuggets of handwritten information -- everything from livestock and population counts to lists of criminal incidents. Local courts were maintained to settle petty disputes whilst more serious crimes (like rape and murder) were tried by civilian juries selected at random. Neither Ned Creighton nor Tom Cherry participated in adjudication because the law was independent of the battalion. And although they were the founders of the Republic Ned was only its symbolic leader. Ultimately, the Republic of Denver was run by a civilian council consisting of 36 elected officials (one from each village) and Ned was only ever called to intervene when they were deadlocked – which wasn't often.

Understand that there's a reason I'm telling you all of this – that it was remarkable.

The Republic of Denver was everything Pastor Evans tried to do in Polk but better, with none of the religious bullshit getting in the way. It wasn't just a makeshift shanty town cobbled together out of the decaying guts of a forgotten city, it was a whole new way of life. People were living off the land again, but the state no longer had any oversight on their lives. It was the utopian pretence those fucking 55ers used to aspire to before the allure of slaves and robbery and rape revealed them for what they really were. The Republic wasn't just a pipe dream. It was a man's life's work writ large and made whole, a desperate breath of civilization in a sea of decay. It was Ned Creighton's magnum opus – the greatest thing he would ever do with his life.

No wonder he wasn't prepared to give up on it.

Forager-held areas were circled off with a bright yellow highlighter – everything between State Highway 121 and Interstate 25. 16 villages had fallen and over 40 secret larders with them (and most of those stashes were black). He desperately needed our guns because he desperately believed in his Republic, his life's work and worth. And that desperation was so strong he couldn't see that the bigger threat standing right next to him – just like my father.

...Just like me.

**********

Jay barely knew anything about sex when he and Parker first started cornholing. He knew that people did it a lot in the old world and not just to make babies (at least before the GFC took hold) but he'd never really had that "birds and the bees" conversation with his father. Everything he learned was from Parker; like how to `squat out' (like he was doing a shit) and keep his back arched to ease the cock in. Taking the head was hard because it was the thickest part of Parker's dick – but once it pushed through the remaining seven inches slid in like grease – and there was no feeling in this world quite like it. Normally.

But Parker was really rough that night.

They had been shown to their room for the night; the master bedroom of one of the repurposed townhouses on the southside of Del Mar Park. Jay had no clue how tired he really was until he saw that freshly made bed and collapsed onto it – it was most comfortable thing he'd touched since they'd left Polk. He didn't even bother to get undressed.

Jay was out like a light for a couple hours at best, he was only vaguely aware of it when the mattress beneath his back depressed with a sudden extra weight and an eager pair of hands started unzipping his jeans and pulling off his shirt. Jay was slightly more aware of being rolled onto his belly, but he didn't wake up until that spit-lubed cockhead forced it way into his asshole.

His eyes shot open. "W-what the fuck?"

The air stank of pre-cum. Parker usually let Jay get into the mood by stroking himself for a little while but not that night. He was too horny, too impatient. All Jay could do was groan into the moonlit darkness as Parker whispered at him to "relax" and "open up" as his cock slowly slid in deep enough to bottom out at the hips. They both caught their breath for a second, and just a second, before the older boy started pounding the younger one's asshole.

Fuck...! Jay's knuckles went white as he clutched whole fistfuls of the bed sheets and held on for dear life as Parker's cock thrust into him like a piston. Pumpkinhead was never gentle in bed but he was never like this either. Oh God...! Oh God!

Jay couldn't say how long it went on for. It felt like hours. But it was the longest, hardest fuck of his life. Past a certain point his senses numbed to everything except that burning hot cock ploughing its way into his rectum – he couldn't even hear his own moans over the clap of Parker's sweaty thighs slapping down on his ass. Beyond that, all he heard was Parker's gruff Neanderthal growls vibrating against his ear.

Until he stopped.

Blood thumped in Jay's ears. He still had Parker's shaft buried deep in his guts. He dared not move. But then the older boy did it for him. Jay moaned like a girl as (inch by tantalizing inch) Parker's cock slowly slid out and the older boy flipped him limply onto his back. He landed on a wet stain where he'd already shot three days' worth of cum into the sheets – it felt cool and sticky against his hot skin. And then he looked up at Parker, shirtless and sweaty, his shoulders and neck bright red beneath the freckles, but he looked angry for some reason. Jay couldn't make sense of it until Parker guided his dick back towards Jay's (now) gaping asshole. That's when it hit him.

He didn't come yet. Jay thought. He didn't... "UGH!"

The cock was so slick and his hole so open it just glided in like a skewer. Jay's whole body spasmed from shoulder to toe. Parker took him by the hips and rode him hard again, punching thrust after punching thrust and Jay smothered his screams through gritted teeth as his own stiff cock slapped against his stomach.

"Squeeze down on it," ordered Parker. "Make it feel like a pussy."

(If it was possible) he was even less gentle the second time around, but somehow Jay heard the command. He tried to tighten his ass muscles against his cock but didn't work, it just made more friction, and Jay was so tired and wiped out that he couldn't think. He could only lay there, limply, as Parker fucked away at him for a release that he couldn't get even as he made Jay cum for the second time in forty minutes. The Mixon boy cringed as his cock shot a stream of jism into his own eye. It felt gross and goofy, the kind of thing Parker would've laughed at if he wasn't struggling to get off. Instead the older boy pulled out of Jay's ass again and climbed up his body, pinning down his arms with his shins until his heavy balls were swinging two inches shy of Jay's neck.

"Ouch...!" The added weight hurt his arms. "Dude, get off my-"

And then he shoved his cock into Jay's mouth.

The boy gagged, naturally. He hated ass-to-mouth, always had done, even though he always did his best to keep himself clean down there (for Parker's sake more than his own) the thought of it always made him sick. But Parker held Jay's head down with both hands and jabbed that long, throbbing cock down his throat and wouldn't let him up until he came. And he did come. Eventually. Jay felt the spasms through his open lips as Parker finally shot his load in gooey gouts, one after the other, each one of which he swallowed. The growls and moans of release were so loud he worried that his father might here – and they he remembered where he was and what had happened. It was a twitch, an old reflexive worry. Danny Mixon was dead... and this wasn't Polk.

A now satisfied Parker dragged his prick out of Jay's mouth. It was sticky with threads of cum and phlegm and it flopped onto his muscled stomach as he landed on the other side of the bed with a "Woof!" and a few minutes later (after catching his breath) he crashed out like nothing had even happened.

Suddenly Jay was desperate for a cigarette.

He climbed out of the bed on wobbly legs then fondled his way through the darkness to find his jeans. He found them hanging off a desk chair. He weakly threaded his feet through the leg holes and zipped up. There was a noticeable bulge where he'd tucked the American Spirits into his back pocket. Sighing, Jay opened the sliding glass door and went out onto the balcony.

The night air felt cool and calming against his bare chest. It was a nice feeling. It helped him ignore his aching jaw and asshole. He took out a cigarette, struck a match to it, and watched the ashes burn a bright orange glow at the tip.

Off in the west, very thin columns of smoke rose into the starry black skies and if you listened closely, you could hear the distant rattle of automatic fire. Jay would've noticed it himself if not for the whispers. They weren't loud – the cicadas were louder, really – but they were distinct. Jay's ears followed the sound past the driveway and across Del Mar Circle Street to the ring of oak trees bulwarking the asphalt from the weedy, long unshorn grass fields. He spotted two figured cuddling beneath the shadows of an oak tree – and he was just about close enough to make out who they were.

It was Sarah Creighton, Ned's wife, wrapped in the arms of his second-in-command, Tom Cherry. All her coldness was gone. She had her thin arms curled around the man's neck, his hands upon her hips, and they shared a secret kiss in the moonlight.

"Did you talk to him?" Asked Tom.

Sarah bit her lip remorsefully. "I can't even look him in the eye anymore. He still loves me, Tom."

"Goddamn it, Sarah, this ain't about us anymore. This town is doomed and he's the only one who can't see it, he's getting so desperate he's dragging kids into this mess to do our gun-running for us. It ain't right and you know it! But you're the only one who can convince him to leave – the others won't go without him."

Jay watched Sarah rest her head against Tom Cherry's barrelled chest. In reply he scooped up her back in his brawny arms, held her tight as a life preserver, and kissed a little bald spot at the crown of her flaxen wavy locks.

"I'll try," she said. "I'm so exhausted, Tom. I'm so fucking exhausted..."

**********

You know back then I just though Sarah was a piece of shit. It was a simple calculus, really. Ned reminded me of my father – the caring nature, the belief in people, his love of his work – and Sarah was like the retarded townspeople that condemned his son to death. Sheep are sheep and that's all they ever will be... no one pays them to think, they just act. That's what I thought of her... I thought: she was a selfish whore doing what selfish whores did since the dawn of time – getting hers on her back no matter who it fucking hurt. That's what I thought then at least. But now? Heh. Let's just say it took me a while before I realized that the real villain of that little piece of post-apocalyptic theatre wasn't really Sarah, it was Tom Cherry.

A sheep's a sheep and a whore's a whore.

Feed a sheep a carrot? He'll follow you. Feed a whore some dick? She'll follow you. But who's doing the feeding? That's the motherfucker you need to worry about. My only regret is how long it took me to realize that. Ten guesses as to who I'm talking about in my case? Nah. You're a bright listener, you'll figure it out...

**********

Jay woke up alone.

The sheets were still soggy with cum and sweat and spit. When he looked over at the other bed, he found it empty and unmade. Parker? His backpack and Luger were right where he'd left them – beside the door, but he was gone. Jay's stomach sank as he wondered (for a hot minute) if Parker had headed out without him... at least up until he heard the older boy chuckling from another room – so he slipped on his new (old) boots and followed the sound.

The (temporary) one-floor apartment that Ned gave them was barebones and hollowed out. Most of the old furniture and rugs were gone. When Jay walked into the lounge was almost empty save for a spotty sofa drawn up against a pinewood dinner table covered with a white sheet. There was a large Tupperware container full of cold boiled eggs and bread rolls on it (Parker had woofed down half already) and splayed out over the sofa was McCullough. She had her scuffed black boots propped up over one armrest and her hooded head propped up over the other. Her arms were folded. From where Jay was standing you couldn't even tell she was awake – not until she greeted him.

"Mornin', Pee Wee," she said smirking.

Jay frowned.

"I never said you get to call him that," Parker's cheeks were puffed up with cold eggs as he said it.

"Why not, you do?" McCullough's hood fell off as she sat up straight and Jay saw her face clearly for the first time. She'd trimmed that dirty blonde hair down to a brush cut overnight. Her nose was sharp, her sallow skin dotted with bright red acne, and her lips were the colour of turkey-flesh. She wasn't pretty at all. "Why do you let him talk to you like that? You two guys brothers or something?"

Not that it's any of your business, thought Jay. "We're friends."

"Okay," McCullough cast Jay a faint smile. He mistrusted it. "Well dig in before your friend eats it all."

Both the eggs and the bread were still warm which was surprising. Jay openly wondered about it as he sat down to eat (he was even hungrier than he realized) and McCullough explained that they had a wheat field just outside the city. "The Foragers destroyed it though," said the girl. "Eat up. We've got a long day ahead."

After breakfast Jay and Parker grabbed their gear from their bedroom. McCullough warned them against bringing the `noisy' M16s – she herself carried only her sheathed butcher knife and M11 – so Parker settled for his Luger and Jay his M9. Once they strapped up their backpacks all three of them left the apartment buildings and headed out to the upper half of Del Mar Park. Its occupancy had grown overnight from around 600 people to 1100 and it told everywhere they walked. Crying townsfolk sat on sidewalks and grass patches looking dead-eyed and shell-shocked. Most had nothing but clothes on their backs. Others had horses with bulging leather saddlebags or baggage carts hitched up to their mules with what whatever precious few belongings they had time enough to pack. The Republicans had set up three dozen more tents for their people in Aurora Plaza – but they were only temporary shelters.

"Ned wants to evacuate everyone into Buckley Air Force Base," said McCullough as they made their way through the cries and screams of the camp towards the Key Bank building. "It's kind of like a fall-back point. Once all the Republicans are safe and we've brought back the guns and the Humvee, he'll mobilize the whole battalion and strike back at the Foragers. Not that I-"

McCullough stopped mid-sentence as she noticed what Jay spotted a few second earlier; a crowd of hundreds gathered around the Key Bank building and murmuring to themselves. What the hell is going on? He wondered. Parker and McCullough pushed their way through to the front (with Jay following behind) as six lightly armed militiamen walked out from through the glass doors with AKs and 12-gauges. Then, just a few minutes after them came their grey-haired, scar-faced captain, the one Jay and Parker saw in Cole Village yesterday.

Oh god, Jay thought, oh god...

"MY NAME IS WUHRER!" He yelled to the crowd. "I'M THE CAPTAIN OF THE 13TH MILITIA OF THE FIFTY-FIVE THOUSAND ARMY! SOME OF Y'ALL MAY ALREADY KNOW ME! MOST OF YOU, PROBABLY NOT. NO DOUBT ALL OF Y'ALL THINK OF ME AS YOUR ENEMY! WELL TODAY... I'M NOT. THE FORAGERS WERE EXCOMMUNICATED FROM OUR ORGANIZATION BECAUSE OF THEIR UNGODLY TASTE FOR HUMAN FLESH... AND I WISH YOU ALL LUCK IN DEFEATING THEM. ME AND MY MEN... WE MIGHT EVEN BE ABLE TO HELP YOU IN THAT REGARD! BUT WE HAVE A PRICE! THERE ARE TWO BOYS ON THE RUN IN THIS CITY. ONE WITH DARK HAIR... BY THE NAME OF PARKER EVANS! THE OTHER WITH BROWN HAIR... BY NAME OF JAMES MIXON! IN THE PAST FOUR DAYS THOSE TWO BOYS HAVE STOLEN A TRUCK-FULL OF MY GUNS AND MURDERED FIVE OF MY MEN... INCLUDING MY SON! AND I HAVE REASON TO SUSPECT THEY MIGHT BE HIDING HERE IN DEL MAR PARK! SO, I SAY THIS TO ALL OF YOU! DO NOT TRUST THESE BOYS! THEY ARE ARMED... THEY ARE DANGEROUS... AND ANY INFORMATION YOU CAN GIVE ME ABOUT THEM OR THEIR WHEREABOUTS... WILL BE REWARDED!"

There was an empty pickup truck at the edge of the Key Bank building's pavement. The crowds moved aside as Wuhrer and his men marched over to it, jumped inside, then drove off up to Peoria Street gate where they left unimpeded. Jay kept his head down as the crowds around him chattered noisily about the two boys Wuhrer was talking about and instantly he was reminded of that day in the courthouse – the day his whole town condemned him to death and Brother Shaw gunned his father down like a deer. He looked to Parker, and even he was worried.

And then someone snatched Jay's wrist.

A strong arm yanked the boy clean out of the crowd and he fell hard into the dirt, yelling for the person to let him go – but he wouldn't. And it was Tom Cherry. Snarling, the Republic's de-facto second-in-command dragged him across the car park and through the glass doors into the Key Bank building where he physically hurled Jay onto the moulding carpeted floor. Through the corner of his eye he saw McCullough and an angry Parker charging in with his Luger in hand, but as soon as he stepped through two Republican guards raised their hunting rifles at him and he froze.

Tom Cherry yelled at Jay to "get up!" so he slowly crawled onto his feet as Ned Creighton approached him, frowning.

"You lied to me," said Ned.

A chill went down Jay's spine. "We... we didn't mean to."

"You didn't mean to? So, you fed me an accidental pack of lies? How does that work?"

McCullough stepped forward. "Colonel, you don't need to-"

"Girl, you stay your ass outta this!" Barked Tom Cherry. "Ned, I knew these boys were trouble. I don't know what the FUCK she was thinking bringing them here, but I knew they were trouble! The last thing we need right now is to piss off the motherfucking 55ers by housing these two sons-of-bitches! I say we toss their asses out RIGHT NOW!"

Ned folded his arms and looked at Jay, square and hard. "I need you to tell me the truth, kid."

Tom Cherry is fucking your wife, thought Jay. Somewhere in the background he heard Parker yell at him that they didn't need to explain themselves, but Tom Cherry warned him to keep his mouth shut before he got capped. This had gone so bad so suddenly.

"We're from Polk... that's not a lie. Wuhrer and his men... they destroyed our town... that's not a lie either. He... wanted to sell me as a slave and when we escaped... his son... followed us into an old high school and he... he tried to... to rape me."

The coldness in Ned's eyes wavered.

"It was self-defence..." Tears sprouted in Jay's eyes as he recalled those awful moments in the principal's office. "After that... we came into Denver... we found that truck... and we did take it... but we needed it. We didn't know it had all those guns... we just needed it to get away. I'm so sorry that I lied, but... we thought you wouldn't trust us."

Tom Cherry balked. "This doesn't change a goddamned thing!"

"Enough," said Ned. "McCullough, did you know about all this?"

"I swear to god, I didn't..." She said. "They just said they got the guns from their hometown. You know me, Colonel. I wouldn't risk bringing the 55ers into this."

Ned mulled on all that had been said with a furrowed brow. His decision didn't take long. "...My Pa used to say America was two things... the country and the country's ideals... one might change, but the other stays the same," He sighed. "Get moving. I want those guns and that Humvee here by nightfall, understood?"

"Jesus Christ, Ned! Seriously?" Tom Cherry was incredulous. "How can you trust these little bastards after what you just heard?"

Ned turned his hard glare towards his deputy. "I don't trust anyone I don't know, Tom. You should know that by now. But I trust the 55ers even less... or have you forgotten that those slave-trading cretins are half the reason this country's been torn to shreds? I did what you asked, I heard Wuhrer out... and I'm not playing ball with a man like him. I want that equipment," Ned turned back to Jay. "You hear me? Nothing's changed. Bring me that Humvee and the guns or our deal is moot and be damned what follows."

**********

I never read Moby Dick. It was one of those old American greats my father always pushed me to read but I never got around to... sorry, Pop. Wish I did now. But at the end of the day everybody knows the plot – a bitter old sea captain's quest for vengeance on the white whale that ate half his leg. Damn. It took me a while until I realized that that was what Parker and I had become for Wuhrer – his white whale. Funny that. I couldn't see it at first. Parker maybe, but me? What does it say about me that I couldn't see myself as the white whale of anyone's story? Yeah, funny that. But that's what were – Wuhrer's white whale. I like to imagine how it must've been for him sometimes.

Wuhrer, making Pastor Evans ply him with meds in exchange for a blind eye. Wuhrer, being short changed on those meds and demanding retribution. Wuhrer, being offered a slave (Jay Mixon) and deciding that wasn't good enough. Wuhrer, using that as an excuse to attack Polk, rob its supplies and enslave its women. Wuhrer, who sent his son to capture that slave boy who escaped. Wuhrer, who stumbled upon his son's charred remains and swore vengeance. Wuhrer, who followed us into Denver and demanded our heads.

I'll bet anything that Captain Ahab was an asshole. But assholes don't care about the fucked-up shit they do. Eat their leg or kill their son and they'll come for you with all the wrath and righteousness of God. But everyone's the protagonist of their own story, right? Everyone's got to have their white whale.

So, who's mine...?

**********

It was a sweltering day. Jay popped his shirt collar and swept the sweat from his brow. It was so hot that the air began to distort; the distant streets of leafy suburbia and white-painted fences rippling slowly before his eyes. Jay was a few paces shy of Parker and McCullough, who together looked like shadows beneath the sun. He held a hand over his eyes to block out its rays and spotted them fingering an old Denver Metropolitan Area map. It was a three hour walk between Del Mar Park and downtown Denver.

They left around an hour after Wuhrer's meeting with Ned and Tom Cherry and headed due west by the E 6th Avenue where they walked the craggy asphalt, which was bumpy from internal weed growth and erosion, and blockaded every 100 yards by Republican checkpoints. Each one was manned by fireteams of four, but they were poorly equipped. A handful of men had some Winchester rifles. A few more had a six-shooter each. The rest carried crowbars, baseball bats and meat cleavers – one even had a rake. They were a civilian guard (not the soldiers of Ned's battalion) and as Jay passed them by, he knew that if the Foragers every got this far that these men stood no chance against them.

The three of them were waved through each checkpoint (without fuss) and so walked up to the dividing line between Sunnyvale and Highland Park, Havana Street, which they turned right onto. It was a straight shot through a long line of abandoned homesteads. Old Harleys and Hatchbacks rusted away in their driveways and half-opened garages beneath the shade of their broken, moss-covered roofs. It reminded Jay of what he used to think of as home.

McCullough stopped.

"What is it?" Asked Parker.

"Don't you smell that?" There was an overturned ice cream truck nearby. McCullough climbed up onto its side (which was now its top), sweeping away the window's broken glass with her boot, then took out some binoculars from her backpack and spied due west towards downtown. Jay asked her what she saw. "Smoke. And its only a few miles off, maybe an hour's walk from here. The Foragers are close."

The girl climbed back down, took the map out of her back pocket, then spread it out over the hot granite and waved for Jay and Parker to come to her. The three of them hunkered down to the haunches around the map like a campfire. "We're gonna be crossing over into their territory sooner than we thought so we better get ourselves straight on the plan," she pointed one of her dirty fingernails at a car lot halfway between Lodo and Five Points, just off Larimer Street. "This is where the Humvee is. And the guns?"

Parker took out his combat knife and poked a tiny hole into the map at the spot where they'd left the Dodge Ram – the indoor car park between Welton and 22nd Streets. "They're in a pick-up on the first floor. It's well hidden, they ain't gonna find it."

"So, what's the plan?" Asked Jay.

"Isn't it obvious?" McCullough moved her finger between the two points. "We go for the Humvee first since it's deeper into Forager territory, then we double back for the pick-up."

Wait a minute... "If it's a three hour walk from here to Larimer Street then we should be done by midday, right? Do we drive back straight away, or do we wait for nightfall?"

Parker picked up on Jay's train of thought. "We'll be harder to spot at night, but... I don't wanna wait around in Forager territory for eight hours."

"At the rate they're going they'll probably hit Del Mar in a day anyway," said McCullough. "Let's not fuck around, let's just get the equipment and go. Once we go past Forager lines no shooting unless it's necessary, okay? Stick to my ass and we'll be fine."

Parker scoffed at her with a broad grin that Jay wasn't sure he liked. "Fuck outta here, we know what we're doing. Right, Pee Wee?"

Why do you have to call me that in front of her? Thought Jay. "...Right."

After that (and after Parker took a leak behind the overturned ice cream truck) they kept moving. There was smoke in the air just like McCullough said and as they proceeded up Havana Street and turned left onto East 11th Avenue, Jay tasted it on his tongue. Along the way they passed by a huge campus that once belonged to the Community College of Aurora. Now it was one of the 36 villages of the Republic of Denver. Like the others, the grounds were fenced with a makeshift wall made up of wooden planks, barbed wire, old cars, cement, and slag piles. There were no sniper roosts but the highest roofs around the campus were repurposed into vantage points for lookouts. Further along, they witnessed a massive crush of Republicans streaming in from the east – not just screaming townswomen but soldiers from Ned's battalion, many of them wounded and barely hobbling along. They huddled together at one of the main gates clawing for entry (and safety) as one of the civilian guards yelled into a battery-powered bullhorn; "PLEASE ENTER IN AN ORDERLY FASHION! EVERYONE WILL BE PROVIDED WITH ACCOMODATION!"

Further up the street beyond the campus the smoke trails were now visible by the naked eye – and the rattle of semi-automatic fire was distant but palpable. Jay, Parker and McCullough watched all the desperate townsfolk (numbering in the hundreds) of pour into the village as they kept moving along.

Parker smirked at them. "They're all fucked, and they don't even know it."

Then McCullough smirked at him. "You're an optimistic boy, aren't you?"

"And you're a dumb girl if you think I'm wrong," he pointed at the walls around the campus. "What is that shit? It's paper. Light that shit on fire, lob some RPGs in there, and then those guys are gonna be screaming to get out, not in."

Parker was right. He was a dick about it (of course) but he was right. The walls, the grass, the trees – a fire would spread through them like a disease. The walls couldn't be climbed (from within or without) which meant that the only exit points were the entry points – the gates – and so all the Foragers had to do was use them as chokepoints to gun down the Republicans as they tried to escape. And the more Jay thought about it the more he realized that the same could be said for any spot in the city. It was too big to defend and had too many places to hide in.

Tom Cherry was right, thought Jay. Denver is doomed.

"I'm not dumb, Parker," said McCullough. "I get it. I see it. This place isn't gonna last more than a few days... some M16s and an extra minigun isn't gonna change it. Deep down I bet the Colonel knows it too."

Parker frowned at her. "Then why even bother with this shit?"

"Because Ned took me in," she said. "Tom Cherry wanted to kick me out, but he looked out for me when he didn't have to. I owe him. And even if I did leave... where would I go? There's nothing out there except ruins and crazy people."

Jay watched Parker's eyes narrow as he spoke. "...You ever hear of Octavia Wilkes?"

Her reply was cut off by a dull clap, followed by the `whoosh' of propellant cutting through the air. The girl screamed "GET DOWN!" and as they dove for the hot gravel Jay spotted a small black rocket hurtle into the crowd full of Republicans and explode. Jay felt the rumble in his cheek through the ground. The blast tore through the crowd's heart and sent up a plume of dust, shrapnel and shorn limbs into the air as the survival townsfolk screamed and fled in all directions. Perched upon one of the campus' old staff buildings was a Republican sniper, who quickly engaged his PSG-1 by the stock and cut down a Forager from a townhouse rooftop across the street who toppled backwards into an alleyway with his spent RPG-7 still in his hands and a bullet in his brain.

Over by the gate there was now a shallow crater with two limbless, headless torsos nestled in its smoking centre and a throng of townspeople (those who could) scattered away from it. Jay, Parker and McCullough, a few dozen yards clear of the epicentre, kept low.

"Shit!" Parker scratched the dust out of his hair. "The Foragers are here already?"

McCullough pulled her yellow hood back up. "Doubt it. Probably just a scout with a warning shot. I'll bet they're trying to drive the survivors out of the villages and into the streets... easier to pick them off."

We're running out of time, thought Jay. "Let's keep moving."

**********

Denver really was a warzone.

We tailed McCullough off East 11th Avenue and into the back streets and residentials, first north into Boston Street then westward by East 13th Avenue past Yosemite, Syracuse and Oneida Streets to the North Monaco Parkway, the halfway point between Denver and Aurora. We were in the heart of Montclair, in a residential area thick with gnarled oak trees and weeded-over lawns, which provided plenty of cover for us as we picked our way north to East Colfax Avenue – the same highway we'd walked to get to Del Mar Park the day before – but now it was in the hands of the Foragers.

We hid behind a dumpster as we watched them.

They were a road crew of around thirty men; their jeeps and Humvees parked up together in a laager blocking all four exits (north towards Park Hill, east towards East Colfax, south to Montclair and of course west into downtown Denver) as they camped inside the centre with their spoils – six bound and gagged women and seven male corpses piled up into a mound. One of the Foragers checked the women for weapons whilst the others either stood guard or plotted the course ahead with their street maps. A few were raiding the local houses and a nearby gas station but emerged with nothing except spare tools and materials (rope, tarp, etc). It was high morning and there were no cookfires inside the camp, before long they would load up their trucks with meat and captives before riding out.

Me, Parker and McCullough slowly backed away.

What we didn't know (but soon realized as we headed deeper west) was that, overnight, the Foragers had expanded their `occupied' territory from the I-25 all the way east to Colorado Boulevard – State Highway 2, and that its two dozen scout teams combed everything between Colorado Boulevard and North Monaco Parkway. From Martin Luther King Boulevard in the north to State Highway 83 – they blocked off each street, went from house to house looting what precious little supplies they could find, killed any resistance they met, captured any women worth taking, then torched everything they could see that wasn't strategically useful. By the time we made it to Capitol Hill everything from Park Hill to Hilltop was in flames, and that hot day became a boiling one. The horizon behind us filled up with a dark orange glow and thick viscous clouds of smoke almost blotted out the sun. In a different day and time, it would've been Parker's wet dream.

Forager-held territory fared little better, I recall.

The captured Republican villages became temporary concentration camps for those too weak or wounded to escape. The Foragers set up their own road blocks on main streets like North Downing and East 6th to stop the battalion from pushing back on them whilst their shock troopers regularly patrolled the side streets in jeeps. We avoided them by keeping to the back alleys, looping around the blocks that were too heavily guarded or waiting out the patrol jeeps and sneaking across the driveways. McCullough knew what she was doing, I'll give her credit for that much. Her navigational skills were the best I'd ever seen aside from Pastor Evans. She had a knack for staying out of lines of sight, for predicting where people would look, diverting their attention with a well-timed stone throw or following the patterns of a patrol route... but it made slow going of the journey, and what should've been a three-hour walk became a nerve-racking an eight-hour slog through enemy territory.

By the time we reached Lawrence Street, the site of the beached Humvee, the sound of gunfire had ebbed away behind us and Foragers were all over the streets. Some guarded buildings of unknown significance whilst others patrolled the blocks with gnashing dobermans and bulldogs. The downtown blockades and car walls had all been dismantled. From every lamppost and traffic light they'd taken the disembowelled corpse of a battalion soldier and strung it up by its ankles. Every few minutes pickup trucks full of bound, weeping Republican women rolled by heading towards the Foragers' base camp (according to Ned it was likely somewhere between the Mile-High Stadium and Sun Valley, on the western side of the Platte River).

We snuck into an apartment building overlooking the car park and crept down to its 2nd floor balcony, turfed with fake grass (I'll never forget the stink of it) and decorated with rotted lawn furniture – ancient wicker chairs and grimy plastic tables covered over by white parasols matted with moss and bird shit. The three of us knelt by the guard rail and glanced across the street was the car park. Just beyond its wire fence and a cortege of abandoned vehicles was the Humvee itself, perched upon the edge of a crater by its rear – like someone had shot at the ground with an RPG or missile and someone else tried to drive over the gap and couldn't make it. The Humvee itself was unguarded (you couldn't even see it from street level) but a squad of Foragers had set up a cookfire in front of the wire fence, boiling up what looked to be a stew. A Pitbull slept near the fire and each man had a M203-equipped M16 on him.

McCullough (who clearly had been here before) went over the plan. "There's a rear exit on the other side of the car park – it's thin as paper you can just drive through it once you get it out of the crater."

"And what are you doing?"

"There's a Forager camp around the block," She patted her backpack. "I got a little surprise for `em. As soon as you hear the explosion, those guys at the front will run and check it out. That's your chance. Once you get the Humvee, double back to the car park off Welton Street. I'll meet you there, just wait for me."

I watched Parker's eyes narrow with what looked like concern. "What's the fuck's the point of that, we can just pick you up on the other side of the car park."

"The blast won't hold their attention for long," McCullough pulled the 9mm from her back pocket and racked the slide. "But a little covering fire should. Don't worry about me, I know these streets. Just wait for me in Walton Street-"

And then we heard a scream.

We ducked lower and saw a family running down the street; a bespectacled Hispanic man bleeding from the nose and mouth, a middle-aged redheaded woman with the torn scraps of a sunflower dress barely clinging to her shoulders and hips, and a tow-haired teenage boy following close behind. They stopped in their tracks once they saw the Foragers by the wire fence. The three of them stood up from the cookfire exchanging grins and readying their weapons. "What's we got here?" one of them said. The father yelled "turn back!" only to freeze again when a roaring Harley Davidson tore around the corner and skidded to a stop before them. A hulking man with a grin-full of golden teeth dropped the kickstand and leapt off the chopper with a 12-gauge in hand.

"Ya know what I hates most?" The gold-toothed man pumped that shotgun and tore off half the bespectacled husband's face. "...When folk make me chase `em."

His wife shrieked as the blood spray splattered her sunflower dress from breast to thigh. One of the other Foragers snuck up behind her, slugged her, then hurled her over his shoulder as she passed out. The gold-toothed man aimed the shotgun barrel at the teenage boy's head, but he barely even noticed – he was too stunned by the sight of his near-headless father leaking blood and brain matter over the street.

"How'd these two get loose, Duggan?"

The gold-toothed man (Duggan, as he was called) strapped his shotgun and slung the unconscious mother over the chopper's rear seat, then threw the boy over his shoulder like a deer. "Caught `em hiding in one of the apartment buildings over there yonder – probably waiting on us to pass. Don't get caught out, ya hear? The Boss wants every woman we can find ready for sale in Cheyenne."

"They ain't gon' take us back," said the thug. "Why's he so set on that?"

Duggan shrugged. "Doesn't matter. We got our orders, we follow `em. Tell ya what, ya sour bastard. We'll have some fun with `em before we head back to base. Get ya belly full and ya cock up. Ya hear?"

Clearly Duggan oversaw this squad. His subordinate went back to his fellows around the cookfire and told his buddies about all the fun they were going to have later than night – they practically salivated over it. And as I watched Duggan peel away, I realized that that was what failure meant in that moment – death for me and Parker, rape and slavery for McCullough. I was scared, I admit it. I was terrified. I was shaking. But I didn't want either of them to see me looking weak, especially not Parker.

I had to be strong.

**********

McCullough let off two grenades. The first was a distant pop, barely audible, that kindled the attention of the three Forager guards camped out in front of the wire fence. They (and their collared pitbull) stood up and glared westward where a plume of dust rose above the car lot fencing and shouts of panic rang out, but it was the second blast, louder and larger than the first, that drew them away from the lot. McCullough (as Jay found out later) rolled her second grenade beneath one of the Foragers' jeeps. The resulting blast tore a hole through its chassis and threw it belly up before it crash-landed into the distant encampment.

"Shit!" Said one of the three, grabbing his M16. "We're under attack, let's move!"

The three Foragers (led by their hound) quickly fled their camp to support the rest of Duggan's squad. That was the window. Jay and Parker, whom had hidden themselves behind an abandoned SUV, bounded across the street and scaled the padlocked wire fencing, slinging themselves over the top and landing in the dirt tracks. They ran through a honeycomb of discarded vehicles until they reached the beached Humvee perched on the edge of the crater. A few dozen yards away they heard an exchange of gunfire – sustained bursts of rifle fire against the odd pepper shot of a pistol. There wasn't much time.

"Come on, Jay!"

The rear wheels dangled over the rim but hadn't sunk in yet. Parker and Jay quickly slid into the crater, put their backs against its rear, and on the count of three they strained and struggled and slowly pushed it back onto even ground; its heavy-duty tyres crunching into the gravel. The Polk boys then ran around either side and climbed in. Everything was grimy bolted steel and padded leather, the dashboard and instrumental panel looked like scientists' work desk. When Parker twisted the key in the ignition, its gauges (temp, press, level and volts) and rev counter lit up in bright green neon. The engine thrummed to life.

"You sure you know how to drive this thing?" Asked Jay.

Parker pulled an ignorant grin. "Well if I can't, we're fucked, Pee Wee!"

He depressed the clutch, shifted into first gear, hit the bite point, threw down the handbrake and accelerated out of the car lot. Like McCullough said the rear fence was nothing but plywood boards and wire fencing and the Humvee tore straight through it. As the wheel scrunched against the asphalt of Larimer Street they had a clear view of the Forager camp that McCullough attacked. Three of its men were face down and bloodied. The tents were on fire. Their two jeeps and three choppers were out of action. The six remaining men (led by the gold-toothed man, Duggan) fired upon the windows of a nearby deli and only ceased when the Humvee drove straight through their lines. Parker cackled like a madman as Duggan and his men dove out of the way and he drove off around the corner. A few of the Foragers shot at the vehicle but rifle fire couldn't penetrate its armour and it was long gone before they could load their M203s.

*********

Circling back to Walton Street was far easier than it should've been.

The Foragers obstructed the streets with blockades much like the Republicans, but they didn't have the manpower to secure much of downtown. I opened the map and gave Parker directions as he drove us up a series of empty back streets that took us to an unobstructed strip of North Broadway, which we crossed, and made out way back to Walton Street. We only came across two checkpoints. Both times Parker kept at a low speed and the Forager squads standing guard just waved us through. It was late in the afternoon when we rolled up at the indoor car park on Walton Street. Parker drove us through the broken barrier and up the spiralling ramps onto the first floor where the black Dodge Ram, hidden away safely amongst dozens of old abandoned cars, waited for us. Parker shut off the engine and threw his skull back into the head rest, sighing.

"Now all we have to do is wait," he said.

When I let myself relax, I felt a weight slide off my shoulders. Seeing Parker at ease made me feel at ease. I felt safe for the first time all day. It didn't last long, though. My head rolled to the left where through the car park's glassless windows I saw all of midtown in flames. It looked like a blood orange glow at the foot of the horizon. Looming clouds of black smoke joined the darkening skies above. It occurred to me then that the Foragers had just cut the town in half with that firewall, and yet somehow, we had to drive through it.

"Do we have a plan here?" I asked. "We're just handing over this truck and those guns to the Republicans?"

Parker shrugged. "If we fuck them over then we've got them and Wuhrer on our backs. We can't risk it. Besides, why not? We got weapons and a ride; all we need now is food and meds. Once we get what we need we're outta here. Let them all kill each other."

"Even McCullough?"

I didn't like her. I disliked her enough that I didn't care if she liked me or not (which was rare for me) but it wasn't until that moment when Parker's lips (those beautiful peach-coloured lips that had never kissed mine) pulled a sly smile at her name... that was when I genuinely started to think I had something to worry about. Ever since he admitted to killing Pastor Evans, Parker had been acting weird. He hadn't burned one thing since setting foot in Denver. He was snippy with me. Something felt... different between us and I knew McCullough was making it worse. And then Parker looked at me squarely for what felt like the first time in two days. "I think we should take her with us."

What? I thought. "What?"

"She ain't like those dumb sisters back in Polk," Parker eyed himself in the rear view. "She's like me, she's used to the outside, she knows what its like. And she's smart enough to see that this whole fucking city is a goner."

"You were the one who said we can't trust anyone out here, remember? You said we need to be smart. That's what you said. That's why we didn't throw in with Dodge and Silver, right? What makes her any different?"

Parker frowned. "You mean those two faggots who stole our fuel? They're the only reason we're here in the first fucking place, Jay! It ain't the same – and I can't watch both our backs on my own."

It really got my goat when he said that. It was like he'd suddenly forgotten that he was the heart and centre of my world. "...What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you keep PUSSYING out every five fucking seconds!" He snapped. "You nearly got us both killed in Cole and it was your DUMB idea to hide the Escort in a high school! How did that turn out?"

We stopped arguing when we heard a crash of broken glass behind us. I froze. Parker froze. He glared out of the rear view, I went for my 9mm. The two of us climbed out of the Humvee with our pistols in hand and advanced only to stop when a girl in a bright yellow, black striped hoodie entered in through a broken fire exit door. It was McCullough. She was bleeding from her hand (where she'd smashed the glass) and a wound on her right forearm, but she was alive. Parker lowered his Luger, smiling to himself.

I really didn't like that smile.

**********

·      Thanks for reading! Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome, feel free to e-mail me at stephenwormwood@yahoo.com.

·      Please see my other stories on Nifty, Wulf's Blut and the Harrowing of Chelsea Rice (gay/sf-fantasy).