It's Better This Way Read Free Page B

farmers or others who traded with us, offering a bed and a meal and any news traveling along the network. They knew we would come running with guns raised if anything happened in their neck of the woods. The outliers didn’t have to live by our rules, and we didn’t preach our rules to outsiders, whether they were close enough to be considered locals or if they’d journeyed from far away places like Portland, Reno, or even the Bay Area.
    We simply told them our rules, and told them if they wanted to trade with us, wanted us to protect them against mobs or brigands, they had to abide the most basic ones of ‘don’t hurt people’ and ‘we are all in this together’ which sounded like some hippie shit from the 1960’s but Mom insisted on it. I think the fact that we actively hunted down anyone who had a taste for power or any other kind of evil made the survivors within a hundred miles appreciate what we did even more and helped keep the region stable. We were the only law where there was none.
    Tony made the fire while I worked on getting something to eat ready. It would be another round of MRE’s, but they were nutritious and some weren’t half bad. I liked Tony. We’d been scouting as a pair for seven months now. In five months when I got a new assignment, I’d miss him for sure. We typically said less than a hundred words to each other during our forays around the wasteland to keep an eye on things. I didn’t even know his last name.
    Last names were a funny thing these days honestly. A lot of the kids who were born after the bulls arrived opted for a single name now. Kortanna. Jennimyer. There was even a fifteen year old kid who called himself Megatron after some old cartoon I guess. Tremaine was the big inspiration for the single name trend. He’d died to cleanse the region of exactly the kind of thing that the Farm would sacrifice everything to be rid of.
    After a beef stew and applesauce meal from the foil pouches, I leaned against a rock and fired up the pipe. We were close enough to home that only the truly foolish would try to ambush us in the middle of the night. Not that there wasn’t a decent share of truly foolish, but ten miles was practically home base considering the reach that The Farm had. Tony puffed a bit with me, and we sat silently, watching the galaxy come to life above our heads. I wanted to ask him his last name, where he came from, why or how he ended up at the Farm. Instead, I wondered again about Sandra.

CHAPTER 4 - A Scavenger and His Sister
     
    After watching my father get riddled with bullets, I made it back to Boise. I was hungry, thirsty, dirty, and mostly insane. I waited until night to sneak back into our house. It had been sacked, but like most homes on the street from what I could tell, it hadn’t been completely trashed. I slept upstairs near the window of my father’s bedroom. If I heard anything I could go out the other window and down into the side yard, as well as watch the main street from up high. Running water was a fantasy, but there was a small stream that ran behind the house a few over from ours. I found an empty plastic gallon jug in the garage, along with a nice pile of human excrement on the hood of my father’s BMW.
    I drank the water, regretted it by nearly shitting myself to death for the next two days, then decided to go exploring through the neighborhood. I needed food, clothes, and most of all guns. I needed to acquire a bike or a horse or something to somehow make it to Corvallis to find my sister. I tried to keep at bay the images of her being raped and killed by the new powers controlling wherever she was. As I moved house to house, I found more dead bodies than food or guns. Most houses still had plenty of clothing left in them. I sampled a pile of brand new athletic socks and an unopened bag of boxer-briefs, tossing them all into my new backpack that had been overlooked at the Morgansens’ house. By the third night I found a nice pair of hiking