Zomblog 05: Snoe's War (6 page)

“That’s not true,” I insisted. “They had her in that cube.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Felicia said. “And like I said, I wouldn’t exactly take the word of somebody being tortured. People say a lot of things to try and get out from what is being done.”

I got up and started towards where this person was being interrogated. A couple of people must have tried to slow me down, but after I pushed through them, Felicia was at my side and telling people to back off.

There was a guy standing at the entrance to the tent. Quite honestly, he looked like he would rather be anyplace else at the moment. And from the sounds coming from inside, I guess I could understand. Once again I found myself praying that I never became immune to emotion or feeling to the point that I could so easily tune out another person’s suffering.

“I want to talk to him!” I blurted as I entered the tent.

I have heard about cameras. I have seen photos and understand what they are and how they work. We don’t have anything like that now. There are people who draw or paint, but that is really not the same. At that exact moment, I wished for one of those things so that each of the men standing around that table could see the looks on their faces. No matter how much bluster and denial they could muster, they would not be able to deny the fact that each of them knew deep in his heart that he was doing something wrong.

“Snoe…” Bob was the first to recover and came towards me with his hands out as if he meant to shield me from what was so easy to see just a few feet away.

“I want to talk to him,” I repeated. “Felicia says that he has admitted to seeing my mother hanged the other day. I want to talk to him right now.”

“Let her pass,” another man spoke up. This one was a little taller than Bob who was easily six and a half feet tall.

“I don’t think that is a good idea,” another man said.

This one was a short, pudgy, balding man who looked like he had been dunked in a trough of blood. His face was splattered and for some reason, my eyes fixated on a single drop that grew and grew on his chin until it simply could not defy gravity for another second.

Despite his appearance, he had the expression of a man who had been caught in some terrible act. He also looked like he did not care and that I had just interrupted him in the middle of something very important and he wanted me gone. Not because he—like the others—was embarrassed by his actions. Rather, I was keeping him from getting back to it and he
really
wanted to resume whatever he had been doing a moment ago.

“Do you know who that is?” Bob asked.

“I could care less,” the pudgy man remarked, setting down a long metal rolling pin that was slick with blood.

“She is Snoe Gainey,” Bob whispered like it meant way more than it should.

In a flash, the pudgy man was now studying me in a way that I was not at all comfortable with. And were it not for my mother and what I had heard regarding her death. I might have noticed…or paid attention to that look.

I pushed past and took a spot beside the table this man was strapped down to and I tried to keep my focus on his face…such as it was. He could only really look out of one eye, and that had to be rough considering that it was barely a razor-fine slit. I tried to imagine what this man might look like in a normal situation and really could not. He was a bloody mess, and he was so swollen and misshapen that it looked like a huge lump of clay that had been tossed on the floor for the children to do with as they wished.

“You say that a woman was hanged the other day,” I said. “What makes you think that it was my mother?”

“Because…” His voice was barely above a whisper.

I had to struggle and strain not only to be able to hear his words, but also to be able to decipher them. The man’s lips were probably twice their original size as well as being split in multiple spots. I could make out one particularly ugly hole where it was obvious that his lower teeth had come through the flesh. Also, I could tell that several of his teeth were broken and could not begin to imagine how this sort of damage was actually inflicted.

“The president made everybody come out to witness it. She announced it on a bullhorn and had a huge banner hanging above the gallows. She gave you an hour to turn yourself in…and you didn’t.” All of that took what felt an eternity to say as the man coughed, choked, and spat through every word.

“You are a liar,” I said, leaning down close to him. “My mother was in the cube enduring the same fate as the president of Sunset Fortress did…I heard with my own ears before that expedition I was sent on ever left.”

The man shook his head very slightly. He coughed again and blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. I was having a very hard time looking at this without feeling some sense of pity. After all, it was Dominique, not this man, who had killed my mother—one way or another.

“All I know is what was said. And the woman was able to speak before she was hung…although I don’t think she got to finish. She told you to run and never look back.”

Once again it was what felt like a lifetime until the man could get all of his words out, but I heard each and every single one very clearly. I asked him to describe the woman who was hung and he did…perfectly. It was certainly my mother he described. So then I asked him to describe the woman who was currently in the cube. I could feel something in my chest starting to squeeze. I had a feeling.

“…and her face has a nasty bite scar.”

Phaedra
.

I felt my knees go weak again. It seemed like I was spending a lot of time trying not to faint. My head swam with this revelation. If what he was saying was accurate, then I had, in fact, caused my mother’s execution.

I had not even considered that perhaps Mama Lindsay’s girlfriend, and also a good friend of mine, a woman named Phaedra Woods, might be what Dominique had been using as leverage against my mother until I had surrendered. And now, in my haste, I had made the choice to run.

My mind was reeling with all of the bits and pieces that I fixated on to make my choice to run. In my mind, every whispered conversation between the guards had been about me. And now, my mother was really and truly dead.

Bob had me by the hand and was escorting me out of the tent where I imagine that the torturing would resume and this man would eventually die. The pity I had felt a moment ago was gone. I suddenly did not care that he probably had nothing to do with Mama Lindsay’s death. I wanted him to pay.

I jerked away from Bob and went right back inside. I heard Felicia call my name, but I didn’t care. As I entered, the pudgy man had moved in beside the person whose name I would never know…nor would I ever care to know.

The pudgy man had the metal bar in the mouth of the man on the table and was punching him in the chin. Each punch was punctuated with a word.

“When. Are. The. Troops. Coming. This. Direction?”

The bar was pulled from the man’s mouth and I could hear what had to be teeth crumbling. A dark line of drool extended and broke with an audible and wet sound. Blood leaked from both corners of the man’s mouth.

I stood there as the session continued. I saw things that my mind went to work on right away to erase so that they would only visit and haunt my nightmares. I refused to move until the event reached the conclusion that I knew was inevitable.

Through it all, I don’t think I heard any of the questions being asked or the answers that may or may not have come in response. I simply stayed there until the man’s body shuddered and arched up one final time.

***

“If this president is amassing an army, there has to be a reason,” Felicia insisted.

I was at the table with Bob, Felicia, and a really sweet couple that were visiting members of another tribe. What I had discovered after the torture session was that a half a dozen tribes had sent people to this place for some sort of meeting. The word had started to spread that soldiers were coming and they were targeting individual tribes.

“We heard something outside of the Salt Lake Unified Zone that the Vegas Empire has sent ambassadors to the Native Confederacy,” Greg Carrick said. I noticed that he had whispered to his wife (or whatever she was supposed to be) before offering that bit of information.

“How long ago were you down that way?” Bob asked.

“Three months or so,” Ginger, his wife, said. (I noticed that she did
not
look at her husband before speaking.)

“So she is forcing people to join her?” I asked. The beauty of being alone was that I didn’t have to look at—
or
not look at—anybody before I spoke. “How loyal does she think this army that she is building could possibly be?”

“Considering the fact that she is holding family and loved ones hostage, I believe that she has little concern about that issue,” Felicia said.

I felt my face flush. My eyes met Felicia’s and I saw what she had just said—and in whose company—dawn on her. Everybody at the table had grown instantly silent.

“Oh, sweetie, I am so sorry,” Felicia said and grabbed my hand.

“It’s okay,” I lied.

It wasn’t okay. It would never be okay. I had gotten my mother killed. However, I could already feel something burning inside me. I guess I had never actually experienced hatred before. I was certain that I was experiencing it now.

However, there was something else in my mind that I was having trouble with. All my life, I had a certain image of my mother—Meredith, not Mama Lindsay. I had been able to see how some people disliked my mother. I also saw that she was a very strong woman who did what she did without apology. She was strong. Many called her selfish.

One of the things that I had always warred with was the idea that I did not want people to see me as her. I wanted Mama Lindsay’s and Mama Janie’s influence to shine through. I spent much of my youth worrying about whether what I did or did not do would be seen a certain way.

One of the things that I had always had a problem with in regards to Meredith Gainey was the fact that, despite how much you read her book, you still never got to know her as a woman. Right now, I needed somebody to help me with what was going on in my mind. I wanted revenge. The problem with that was the fact that I was still very much aware of how my trip east had ended up: I had come to the conclusion that I was just one person. There was really nothing that I could do realistically against Dominique and her NAA. To be more specific, there was nothing that I could do by myself.

“If she is building an army, then maybe we should be doing the same thing,” I said.

The four people sitting around the table with me looked at me as if I had suddenly become one of the zombies. Greg’s wife, Ginger, actually made a face like she saw or smelt something offensive. I just stared back at them all with as little expression as I could manage.

What did these people think was going to happen? Did they believe that Dominique would simply go away? Or, was this a case of ‘it hasn’t happened to me yet, so I will just ignore it’? I think that might be part of why the zombies had been so successful. People were not willing or ready to do anything until it had a direct impact on them, and by then it was too late.

I thought of some of the things that I had learned from Mama Lindsay, and even from Jenifer long before she became president. Corridor 26 did not just spring up. It took a lot of work. There are stories about how the people who settled that area had to deal with zombies and raiders. The zombies are just the easiest to talk about and label as bad because they are an absolute. You know that none of the zombies will ever try to be your friend. With people, especially once there were so few, you wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. The problem with that was that there were a lot of really bad people walking around. I think more so in the early days than now. It was that initial surge of people reacting to having nobody telling them what they could and could not do.

From what I read in both my mother’s and my father’s journals, it was clear that there were some very bad people out there. However, there were plenty of the good sort. And I think the bad sort of helped take out the bad in many cases because, while you could find a group of basically good folks to work with and strive to create something with, the bad was probably always seeking to be in control. “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians” is what Mama Janie used to say when it appeared that everybody wanted to be in charge at the same time. I think too many bad people in one place was probably the best thing to happen. Each of them would get greedy or want to be the boss and that would lead to fights which would lead to dying. At least that is how I see it.

That is also how I believe that places like The Corridor have been so successful. That is why the Confederated Tribes have managed to take an entire state and secure it from invaders—dead or otherwise. These are what I believe to be the examples of people at their best. This is in a big contrast to what I saw when I made my journey up the Columbia Gorge. There are areas that are apparently known to be sort of like a ‘No-Man’s Land’ that people avoid if possible.

I never thought of Corridor 26 as some sort of bastion of goodness. It is just where I grew up…where I lived. My little journey opened my eyes a bit. However, this new development with Dominique (I refuse to call her president of anything) has me re-thinking my basic beliefs.

I grew up around people who had a ‘live and let live’ ideology. From what I read in history class, I guess we could almost be considered pacifists. But that is not entirely accurate because we had small clashes with tribes that might wander into our area and try to test our defenses for whatever reason. Also, we made regular excursions out to the wilderness. There were times when human-versus-human conflicts took place. It had become rare over the past several years, but it still happened.

However, there is a chapter from the early days that I think too many people might have forgotten. The Genesis Brotherhood was an extremist group that used religion as something twisted and evil. (I should clarify that I have no problem with religion, however, I believe that anything taken TO THE EXTREME is problematic.) My birth mother, Meredith Gainey, along with a few others went in and took those people out. Yes, there were casualties, but I believe that, if she were alive today, she would be one of the first people signing up to take down Dominique and her version of New America.