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deaths on both sides until Tremaine killed them both with a shotgun before being torn apart by the flock , as their faithful called themselves. That was a couple of years before I stumbled along and joined The Farm, but the lesson ran deep. Even if the madman wasn’t one of the banished, we still hunted him down and took his life. We simply couldn’t afford a strongman in the area making trouble. Usually the ‘trouble’ ended with too many humans dead.
    The Farm had spent the time from the day of the invasion building up inventories, weapon stocks, food, seed, non-electrical equipment, books, everything they thought they would need to survive in the middle of Oregon with no contact with anyone outside of how far they could ride a horse or a bike. It had started as a sort of pot farm and hippie commune before the invasion. After, it became a destination for anyone that could follow the rules and wanted to live. Life outside of The Farm was almost always much more brutal and harsh. Jenna White, Mom to everyone now, was the original owner of the 1940’s farmhouse and outbuildings that sat on one hundred sixty acres of rolling hills farmland.
    Because of Mom and her hippie clan from Portland, The Farm now housed almost four thousand humans on a couple thousand acres. There was no more BLM or county sheriff to come around and tell you where to put fences. The people with the guns decided where to put up fences. Mom had the final word on just about everything, though there was a council that varied from nine to more than fifty, depending on what was being decided, that got to decide what rules to make, what quotas to set, who got what work assignments. When crimes or issues affected everyone to the point the council decided it was best to have a full vote, all of us would congregate on the giant (and usually overgrown) lawn that was still kept on the south side of the main house. At four thousand citizens it could get a bit crowded, but even during the most debated issues that required a full vote, there had never been more than three thousand of us gathered.
    Everyone was assigned a job to do for a year. If you didn’t want to do the job, you had one chance to exchange it with someone that the assignment team agreed could handle the job you were refusing. If you refused a swap after you’d requested it, or refused to do your job for any reason other than a medical reason, you got banished. If you stole anything, you got banished. If you physically hurt someone against their will, you got banished. If you raped someone, you got castrated and cauterized, then banished. If you killed someone, you got banished to The Cage.
    The Cage was an iron cage, crafted by our blacksmith Dredge, placed at the intersection of the main road that ran in front of the main house and the road that led out to LR40 and on to Eugene. Murderers were stripped and had their hands and feet bound before being put inside the cage. Where they stayed until they died. It was disturbing to walk past The Cage every day and see the change from the previous day as the person inside died slowly of starvation, dehydration, and exposure. I’d only had to witness such an event twice in my nine years.
    The last time it was a teenage girl who cried for days when she wasn’t wailing in sorrow or screaming in fury or fear. It rained every day for a week then, and the poor girl stayed alive longer than anyone else ever had. Most only lasted five days. Some of the heartier ones were said to have lasted as long as seven days. Misha, the teenager, had finally clocked out after thirteen days. Thirteen agonizing, slow, painful days. I saw her in my dreams sometimes. But she’d murdered a teenage boy who had taken her virginity before spurning her.
    By the evening, we were only about ten miles short of The Farm. Since we were coming back from the northwest, it was desolate and there were no outlying houses or shelters. Coming back from the south was the best, with friendly