Our War Page 3

In Hannah’s imagination, the whole city was packing up and leaving her behind. Abandoning her just as her mother had.

  If something bad happens to me, do whatever it takes, Mom had said.

  “You left me alone,” Hannah cried.

  She knew she wasn’t being fair, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “You said everything was going to be okay, but it’s not.”

  Her brother’s voice intruded. You can’t always cry to get your way, brat.

  “Screw you too, fart-face.” Nobody was here to tell her to mind her language, so she added in a quieter voice, “Friggin’ ass.”

  Alex abandoning her was the greater sin, since it had been his choice.

  Her big brother had always known how to make her mad. He knows how to push your buttons, Mom had described it. Hannah had pictured having a real button on her forehead, which was where she always felt her anger start.

  Now, she was almost grateful for it. The anger felt good.

  Do whatever it takes.

  Maybe what Mom meant was surviving wasn’t a list of things to do. Maybe it was how you looked at things. How hard you tried.

  Mom was telling her she had to be strong and make her own decisions like a grown-up. Should she keep slogging forward, or go back and register at the orphanage?

  Hannah had wanted to get lost, only to revisit how horrible being lost felt. Every step just got her more lost. Turning around, however, meant going to a terrible place. Going forward offered a chance. What you’re looking for, the policewoman had said.

  Maybe there was food awaiting her. A hot bath and a soft bed.

  That settled it.

  Hannah set the water jug on the sidewalk and started walking again. Sorry, Mrs. Bevis. Her legs protested, but it felt good to be journeying toward something rather than escaping. That would come later, when she’d leave this nightmarish day with a long sleep.

  The road turned into an overpass over a highway, which the map said was I-70. Below her, the highway stretched south until it curved around a hill covered with the stumps of trees cut down for firewood. She couldn’t see the siege line from here, but she knew the rebels were out there, trying to get in and run things the way they had at Sterling.

  By the time Hannah crossed the overpass, her face ached from the cold, and she was dragging her numbed feet. She didn’t stop. She kept her head down and stared at her boots, taking one step after another until she’d banished all sense of time.

  Finally, she looked up to take in old brick buildings. A theater, a bookstore that was still in business, and several art galleries stood side by side. The windows of a closed clothing store were covered in propaganda posters, protest signs, and lurid graffiti declaring, NOT MY PRESIDENT, PRO-AMERICA/ANTI-MARSH, WELCOME TO THE RESISTANCE.

  Prospect Street. Her face was so cold now, she couldn’t even smile as she approached the address on the ticket.

  At the top of the stone steps, the sign read, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE COLLECTIVE.

  A security camera perched over the doors. She waved at it, but nothing happened. The city only had electricity a few hours every evening.

  This wasn’t what she’d expected.

  As she reached to knock, two women came out and almost walked into her. Both wore brown wool coats belted at the waist. The younger woman carried an automatic rifle slung over her shoulder.

  The older one sized up Hannah. “A cat left a bird on our doorstep.”

  “Can we help you?” the younger one said.

  Shivering from the cold, Hannah eyed the rifle. “I’m sorry to bother you. A policewoman said I should come to this place.”

  “Are you an orphan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should go to an orphanage.”

  “I don’t want charity,” Hannah said, repeating something Mom said often enough since they’d come to Indy. “I was trying to join the police.”

  “We aren’t the police. And you’re too young, anyway.”

  “Perhaps not all that young,” the older lady observed. “This is Sabrina. I’m Abigail.”

  “I’m freezing.”

  Abigail laughed, though Hannah hadn’t been trying to be funny. Her eyes turned hard. “Tell me your name, please.”

  “Hannah Miller.” She garbled the words, her face numb. Talking was like trying to speak while wearing a rubber mask.

  “Nice to meet you, Hannah. What happened to your folks?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Dead?”

  “A sniper shot my mom this morning.” She winced. Saying it out loud made it real again. “My dad died months ago. IED in the road.”

  Abigail nodded as if it were normal such things would happen to a ten-year-old. That it was normal a girl would know what an improvised explosive device was. “You look frozen to the bone. Where did you come from?”

  “The refugee center.”

  “You walked a very long way to get here.”

  “The policewoman said what I was looking for was here,” Hannah said.

  “And what would that be?”

  “I told her I was looking for my brother.”

  “I understand. You’re looking for family.”

  “Is Alex here?”

  “No.” Abigail said to her friend, “We’ve taken young ones before.”

  “They’re from the Square,” Sabrina said. The fighter had elven features accentuated by rectangular glasses and red hair that hung in long braids. “It’s sad what happened to this girl, but we can’t take care of everybody. She belongs in an orphanage. We should let her warm up and then send her on her way.”

  “Hannah, do you know what we do here?”

  Her eyes left Sabrina’s rifle to again read the sign next to the door, but what it said wasn’t true, not anymore. “You’re militia. You fight the rebels.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  Hannah thought about her mom toppling over from a sniper’s bullet. The IED blast ripping through the car. The strong and confident police officer barking at the crowd to sign up and resist the dictator who’d caused all this.

  “I think the policewoman was right,” she said. “This is the place.”

  Abigail turned to her friend. “You go on ahead. I’ll catch up.” After Sabrina left, she bent to look Hannah in the face. “Would you like some hot food?”

  Hannah grimaced. She was shaking now from the cold. “Yes, please.”

  “Then let’s get you inside before you freeze to death.”

  Hannah trudged after her into a reception area, where an old woman smiled from behind a desk. Then through a room with Ping-Pong and card tables, a dining hall, a spacious living room with a TV. Everything drab but comfortable as an old sofa. Two women walked past, guns holstered on their hips. Another stomped a pedal to stitch a uniform on an old sewing machine.

  Double doors swung open to reveal the kitchen. Abigail and Hannah went inside, where a team of women worked at preparing some kind of stew in a giant oven jury-rigged for wood fire.

  Abigail took off her coat and ladled a bowl. “Sit.”

  Hannah sat at a small card table. Her entire body ached as it began to thaw in the kitchen’s heat. Abigail placed the bowl in front of her and took a seat herself to watch her eat.

  Hannah spooned some broth and sipped it. Scalding but delicious. She blew on it a few times before slurping the rest.

  Abigail folded her hands on the table. “We are the Free Women Collective. I’m the commander, but everything you see here was built by a community.”

  Hannah began to shovel her stew as hunger overtook her.

  “If women ran the world, do you think we’d be having a war? Hannah?”

  She perked up at her name. “I don’t know. No, I guess.”

  “A year ago, we were a women’s shelter offering second-stage housing for victims of domestic violence. They lived in fourteen apartments over our heads. Eat a little slower.”

  Hannah paused and studied the woman’s face. Abigai
l was thin like everybody else, and younger than she’d thought at first. A strong woman, though worn down by hardship and care. Past Abigail’s shoulder, another woman gave a massage at a table. A rifle stood propped against the wall.

  “Women and their children would come here and live for as long as two years,” the commander went on. “We provided food, childcare, counseling, life skills. When the troubles started, the police couldn’t protect us.”

  She said they cowered inside during the big demonstrations, the bombings and barricades, the police engaging in house-to-house fighting against right-wing terrorists. When they peered out the windows, they saw men flashing victory signs as they drove past in trucks.

  A man came to collect his wife. He yelled, “This place is under Marsh-al law!” Marsh-al law, not martial law, a different kind of law, one that let him do whatever he wanted.

  He found his wife in her room, seized her by the hair, and told her he was taking her home. This time, he promised, she’d behave herself.

  “We grabbed any weapon we could find and helped her,” Abigail said.

  Hannah’s mouth fell open. “You hurt him?”

  “I’m not going to talk to you as a child. You earned it.”

  “Good.” Hannah hated when grown-ups lied to avoid a hard truth.

  “We beat that man until he could barely walk and dumped him out on the street,” Abigail said. “You could say the Free Women started that very moment, in a collective act of self-defense.”

  “Oh.” It went against everything she’d been taught. “You couldn’t just talk to him?”

  “You ever have an imaginary friend, Hannah?”

  “When I was little.” When Alex wouldn’t play with her, she always had Bekka.

  “Well, the fascists out there, they grew up having imaginary enemies, boogeymen under the bed they never outgrew. Immigrants, Muslims, gays, you name it, even women. They’re scared of everything and want to control it by hurting us. If they win, we’ll lose everything. No, we couldn’t have just talked to him.”

  Hannah regarded her empty bowl and nodded. She didn’t want anybody to talk to the sniper who’d murdered her mom. She wanted him arrested and put in a jail forever, and too bad for him if that hurt his feelings.

  “This war has given us sadness and hardship we’d never imagined,” Abigail went on. “Just like you. But here, we’ve done better than survive. We built the Free Women. We fought back. We stopped the fascists at Pleasant Run. We’re holding our ground. And more, we built a community. A community based on equality, empowerment, and protection. For the first time in their lives, a lot of these women feel like they’re in control.”

  “It’s good here,” Hannah agreed. She felt safe in this warm, busy kitchen with Abigail, surrounded by the smells of food and the chatter of women.

  “I’m telling you all this because you need to know who we are and what this is,” Abigail said. “What we’re fighting for and why it’s important. If you didn’t like anything you heard me say, you can leave tomorrow with a full belly. If you did, you can pitch in. Fair enough?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a big decision. Best to sleep on it.”

  Hannah smiled at the idea of sleep. Her eyelids were already getting heavy.

  Abigail gazed around the room crowded with women working together to prepare the next communal meal. “You know, as horrible as it is to say, when this war is over, I think a lot of us are going to miss it.”

  SIX

  Alex Miller jerked awake in his tent. “What?”

  “Get your ass out here, that’s what,” Mitch said.

  “Coming, Sergeant.” The boy emerged groaning from his warm sleeping bag and pulled on his uniform and boots over his thermals. After watch duty last night, he was tuckered. But when Mitch said get your ass outside, you did it.

  He crawled out of the tent and stood blinking in morning light. “Reporting.”

  Mitch eyed him with his thumbs hooked in the load-bearing vest of his woodland camouflage uniform. The sergeant was a large man, broad-shouldered and muscular, his only concession to middle age a soft gut and some streaks of gray in his beard. He was a combat vet who’d served two tours in Afghanistan.

  The rest of the squad stood grinning behind him. They were either going to beat him up or give him a Christmas present. You never knew with these guys. Alex fidgeted from nerves and an urgent need to pee.

  “How old are you again, son?”

  “I’ll be sixteen in March.”

  “You’ve been with us awhile now. Through the whole show, almost.”

  Ten months ago, Alex asked the wrong men for a ride. The men were with the Liberty Tree militia. They’d handed him over to Mitch to break in. Since then, Alex had worked as a runner, cook, porter, and sentry for the patriots.

  “Yes, Sergeant,” he said.

  Booming gunfire to the north. The libs were making another push against the siege line at the Brickyard Crossing golf course.

  “The Liberty Tree got its name from the elm in Boston where the colonists made their first stand against the British king,” Mitch said. “Do you understand what we’re trying to do here?”

  “Sometimes, you have to break it to save it,” Alex recited.

  The patriots held an iron-clad, black-and-white view of the world. They exalted America, the Constitution, and the role of the average citizen in safeguarding the republic from tyranny. They weren’t destroying America. They were protecting it. To them, overthrowing the government wasn’t treason but the height of patriotism.

  “Good boy.” Mitch held out an AR-15 rifle. “This is for you.”

  He hesitated before taking it. “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  “You’re a fighter now. You ready for that?”

  For nearly a year, he’d been helping them because he’d had nowhere else to go. Now they wanted him to fight at their side.

  He thought about pointing out he was only fifteen, but Mitch already knew that. The militia had other teenagers fighting with them. Boys became men early these days.

  He gave the only answer he was allowed. “I sure am.”

  “That’s good, because I have a job for you.” The sergeant put one thick arm around Alex’s neck and pointed with the other. “Walk that way about two hundred meters until you spot the enemy’s forward posts. Then hustle back and report what you saw.”

  A solo recon patrol in urban ruins infested with snipers, armed with a rifle loaded with a single thirty-round magazine. It was a simple test. To join the Liberty Tree militia, a man had to follow orders. Then he had to prove his courage.

  The pressure in Alex’s bladder became unbearable as he imagined it. “You can count on me, Sergeant.”

  “Then get to it. Holler at me when you get back. And don’t get shot.”

  He wondered if it was okay if he hit the latrine first, but he was too scared to ask. Best if he just took off and made a show of it.

  The front line lay a block away. During the siege, the Liberty Tree had dwindled to company strength, about a hundred fighters. These men held a mile of trenches and fortified houses running down the west side of North Tibbs Avenue. Concrete barriers and sandbags straddled the cross streets.

  “Hey, fag,” Sergeant Shook called to him. Wearing ballistic armor, the giant left his campfire. “Look at you. My little boy is a man now.”

  Alex grimaced. His bladder was about to burst. “Mitch gave me recon duty.”

  “Not until you give me ten. Ten push-ups or ten free punches.”

  He did the push-ups. Shook was a psycho. Before the war, he’d drive to protests wearing homemade armor and wade into antifa with a club. In his simple ideology, you were either a patriot or a pussy. He called himself an intellectual and the “last man.” Fierce, though he struck Alex as more jackal than wolf.

  Stroking his goatee, Shook walked off bored before Alex finished. He got off the ground and started running, ready to explode. He raced past the trenches on the front line.


  “Get some,” somebody yelled after him.

  Shrapnel and vehicle wreckage littered the street. He bolted across and into the backyard of the nearest house. There, he tucked the rifle in his armpit, unzipped his fly, and blasted the wall with a satisfied moan. His shoulders sagged.

  “Thank God,” he gasped. It felt like victory.

  Snow covered the ruins and muted the distant crackle of gunfire. Pretty in a way. Christmas soon, and a white Christmas from the looks of it, the first in years. Alex had grown old enough to find the holiday boring, but now he missed it. He’d been part of a family once.

  Now he was in the patriot army.

  Zipping up, he checked out his surroundings. Alex was alone at the edge of No Man’s Land. So quiet, though he knew the enemy was out there. Across the alley, a house stood with the corner of its roof blown off and covered in tarpaulin that rustled in the breeze. He imagined a sniper nested up there, drawing a bead on him. He shrank back out of sight.

  Alex was a fighter now, a big deal in the militia, but he was no soldier. He was a teenager who liked skateboarding and online games. The war had turned him into a LARPer playing with real bullets.

  Two hundred meters, Mitch said. Alex had no idea how far that was. He was more afraid of going back than forward. The militia had kept him alive this long, but now it dawned on him he might not survive this war. There were people on both sides all too happy to get him killed. He made up his mind to give himself up the first chance he got.

  He spotted a Venus symbol spray-painted on the wall near his head. The militias tagged houses Mars, which meant friendly, or Venus, which meant liberal. The Liberty Tree guys were always going on about how feminine liberals were. Alex remembered seeing that symbol painted on his own house back in Sterling. That night, Dad loaded up the SUV, and they made a run to Indy.

  He wondered what his dad felt while loading up his bewildered family to flee his own home. Alex had been too absorbed with his own troubles to notice. He wished he’d paid more attention. That night was the last time they’d seen each other.

  No doubt, Dad had been very scared, even more than Alex was now.

  Similarly, he’d soldier on and hope for the best. He too had no choice.