After Grace

44. The Fire

The men threw me to the floor, the women jumped off their cots. The two men who had dragged me inside lifted their rifles, keeping everyone back. I raised myself up to my feet and faced them. "Get out," I warned. They remained in place, defiant.

The smaller of the two lowered the other man's gun and slowly they both left the room.

"You're hurt," a high voice called. I turned to find Seth's little sister standing behind me, her brow wrinkled with worry. I bent down to her.

"Can you go to the back and see if you can find me a sharp piece of wood, like the ones Vicki needed?" she nodded and ran off. The others remained, watching me.

"Vicki's dead," I said quietly so Rosemary wouldn't hear. Some of them cried, others only stared at the floor.

"We've tried it our way," I said. "Hiding. Hoping others would step up so we didn't have to. It didn't work."

"Their way didn't work either," Eleanor said. She was older than the others, or at least looked to be.

"Maybe it would have, if we had helped them," I told her.

"You can't know that."

"I don't know it. But what I do know is that they hung Vicki out there and left her body for everyone to see as a warning. As a message. I know they locked the best of us in a freezing cold shelter to die-- I know that the only way things are ever gonna change is if we change them. If we weren't prisoners, we could hunt, we could rebuild this place."

"We'll die," one of the younger girls said. She was about my age but seemed like a child to me.

"We are dying!" I told her. "We can die the way we have been, quietly starving to death in the night, or we can make some noise." I said. "The people in that shelter would have come for us. They've been taking care of us for months."

"How would we do it?" the young one asked. Rosemary hurried back through the crowd, handing me a long, sharp wooden stake she'd pulled from a crack in the wall. I took it tight in my hands.

"By force," I answered.

#

"Help!" Rosemary screamed as she ran through the road. "Please!" she shouted, her feet crunching on an undisturbed carpet of snow. I watched through the frosted window as she came from the left, crossing in front of the granary and continuing on. Two men came jogging behind her, trying to catch up. Before she was out of view completely, another man rushed out from the front and swung his arm out, wrapping them around her waist. The two finally caught up, all three men huddled around the young girl.

"You two idiots trying to have your way with this one? She's barely nine years old." They shook their heads at him.

"We were patrolling, saw her run, she just went nuts!"

"What happened girl?" the man asked. The girl wept.

"She's lost it," the other man said.

"It's time," I told them as I moved to the door. Whatever Vicki and the others hadn't stripped from the building, we took. The girl beside me slipped three nails between her fingers as she closed her hand into a fist, her palm was wrapped in cloth to keep it from getting injured. The others had similar weapons, it was the best we were ever gonna get. I squeezed the wooden stake. "I'll get the one on the left," I said, having recognized him through the window. I took the door's handle into my free hand and pulled it open. We darted out, moving fast and silent toward the small cluster of men at the other side of the road.

As we inched closer, Rosemary's eyes rolled back and she began flailing on the ground. The men held her down, frustrated. "What is it!" one of them shouted. "What's wrong? What do you want?"