Cannibalism in Carolina

An excerpt from Doomsday Reef: Ten years after the end of the world as we knew it

Chapter 19

Barry seemed in a good mood, and Will was in the pilothouse with the headphones on, so I thought I’d revisit our previous night’s discussion. I was trying to think of a way to bring it up when Barry surprised me and raised it first.

“Captain Kilmer, last night I didn’t want to ruin my first try at sailing by talking about what you called the C-word.”

“I remember. You said that some people wound up on the menu, but you didn’t explain what the menu meant.”

He closed his eyes, turning his face slowly side to side to feel the wind. “I’ve been trying not to think about it for a long time, but since last night, I’m thinking about it all the time. So I guess that means this is a good time to talk about it.”

Because of all the normal boat sounds, even under sail, the wind in the wires, random pieces of metal rigging hardware creaking and clicking, and the ocean gurgling along the hull and slapping under the transom, I couldn’t have heard him if he whispered. He had to speak in a normal voice.

“Do you want me to take the wheel?”

“No, it’ll be better if part of my mind is on holding the course. Are you sure you want to hear about it? It’s not pretty, and I’m not proud of some of it. A lot of it.”

“Oh, I can take it. I’ve been to war. I’ve seen ugly. Who knows? It might make you feel better.”

“Confession is good for the soul, is that it, captain?”

“I’m not your priest, far from it. Tell me if you want to.”

“Okay. I do want to, but don’t ask me about it again after tonight. One and done, all right? Deal?”

“Fair enough, shipmate. Deal. I agree to your terms.”

“Shipmate? Shipmate. . . Thanks, captain. Okay then. But I can only tell you what I saw with my own eyes. I can’t tell you what happened in the next county over. Anybody could have had a totally different experience than I did.”

“Like Will Padgett.”

“Right, just like Will. He was close enough to Beaufort to walk there, and he was lucky not to get thrown off the island by the militia, or to be put to work as a VIW on a real farm. That’s what they call the farm slaves on the island—VIWs. Voluntary Indentured Workers. But there’s nothing voluntary about it, no way. Not after you walk across that long bridge.”

(I noticed that Barry, like Mike, pronounced it views, and didn’t spell it out as V-I-Ws like the men who’d caught him.)

“Being a starveling, Will wouldn’t have made the selection for farm work anyway. Before I got to the island I starved, oh, I starved plenty, but I’m not a starveling because I was already a full-grown man when it all went down. And now I’m just a survivor, but I guess I’m not real happy about it.”

“Why not?”

Barry looked upward, leaning back with his hands on the wheel and sighed. “Because I’m not proud of how I survived.”

“Because of the C-word?”

He said nothing for at least a minute. “The C-word . . . That, sure, but not only that. That was a part of it, but that wasn’t even the worst part. There was worse. Much worse.”

“Look, Barry, if you don’t want to talk about it—”

“I don’t want to talk about it, captain, I really don’t, but I feel like I have to talk about it. I have to tell somebody.”

On unhurried night watches there were always pauses between replies. “Well, it’s just you and me out here on a big dark ocean.”

“If you hadn’t of tripped me, I wonder where I’d be now? Thrown off the island? Or back on the farm with two shackles, instead of one? You don’t get a third shackle. You get buried.”

Whew. “Now you have no shackle, and you’re steering.”

“Steering to Argentina. Sometimes in my hammock I think it’s a dream. Or in my dreams, I’m back on the farm. Then I feel my ankle, with no iron on it, and I know I’m not.”

Some more minutes passed. We were still surrounded by the same black ocean, but the narrow band of stars across the horizon behind us was widening.

Barry asked me, “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“If you want to tell me, then I’ll listen.”

“Yeah. Okay then. So last night I told you I lived in North Charleston, in a trailer park. I lived there for a few years after my mother died. She died even before the shit hit the fan.”

“What did you do for a living, I mean, to pay the bills?”

“Oh, I was trained in HVAC. I did the vocational-technical track in high school, ‘vo-tech,’ but my best job was installing satellite TV antennas. I installed the dishes and I got peoples’ connections set up, and I did troubleshooting when they didn’t work. We subcontracted for the satellite cable network. That lasted for about three years until the installation company went bankrupt. After that I did part time work: HVAC, electrical, hell, plumbing, anything to make a few bucks. They were all side jobs for cash. Everything was going downhill for a long time before that, but then it all came apart at once.

“When it happened it was almost like overnight. The credit cards, the ATMs, the gas pumps—nothing worked. It was cash only—only there was no cash! People who could get away, I guess they got away, but I don’t know where they got away to, or how far they got. Every food store was looted in the first week. It started in the black neighborhoods and it just spread out from there. The government put on curfews, and then they declared martial law, but that’s just a lot of empty words when all the police run away too. Who’s going to die to keep hungry people from taking food out of a supermarket when the credit cards and EBT cards don’t work? Nobody, that’s who.

“I lived in sight of I-26, and pretty soon that highway was gridlocked as far as the eye could see. Every truck was busted open and looted, so maybe you got some of that if you were right there and you were lucky, but what did that get you? A week? Some people set up black markets with what they stole, but that didn’t last long. Credit cards and debit cards didn’t work, and neither did the ATMs, so who could pay? How?”

“What about the banks?” I asked him.

“The banks were closed, and then they were burned. There was like one day of bank runs, you know, people in long lines down the street, and then all the banks were closed. It turned out there’s no money in banks, not really, at least, not enough. But one thing we all learned real fast is that people who are starving get pretty goddamn mad at anybody who’s sitting on a pile of food and trying to sell it back to hungry people. And not normal angry mad, I mean crazy mad, like homicidal mad! And there were a lot more guns and ammunition around than food after all the supermarkets were looted and burned.

“All of this happened at almost the same time. The money stopped and the food was gone, and then the shooting started. Shooting all the time. It was constant, like a war. But being in a poor white trash trailer park, I guess we weren’t exactly the first place that hungry people would go to look for food. It was more the other way around, with people going to the rich neighborhoods. It was actually kind of lucky I was in a trailer park. My neighbors were what you might call the hard-luck cases— but at least they were hard. They’d all been hungry before.

“You know—bikers and ex-cons and fired cops and mean drunks. Well, those kinds of guys can put a guard on the only way in and out of a trailer park like right off the bat. There was a big chain-link fence around the whole place and there was only one way in and out, off Rivers Avenue. Old soldiers and ex-cons and ex-cops—they know how to do security. And you never saw so many Confederate flags in your whole life as when all that was going on—it was like people were marking their territory. Just stay the fuck out, right? That’s why I liked Rebel Yell as soon as I saw the name. So, Rivers Avenue is the main drag out of Charleston other than I-26, the interstate.”

“I know, I’ve been there a few times. How did people get to the nice neighborhoods if it was all gridlock?”

“This was before the gridlock. I’m sort of jumping around the times in my mind. But people just walked, they met up in groups and they walked. With guns. Or they rode bikes. Bikes are great; they don’t get stuck when cars are jammed up. The bottom line is there’s no reason to stay where you’re at when you’ve got no food. So you might say the looting and robbing started the panic that started the permanent gridlock. Even if you just wanted to stay home and mind your own business, how can you, when you have no food? And the water stops?”

“What about the preppers, you know, the survivalists, the people who already stored up a lot of food?”

“In a white-trash trailer park? I didn’t know any. And after you eat every old rusty can of corn, and every MRE you find stashed somewhere that you forgot about, then what? You’ll dig up roots and boil them, but roots won’t stop your hunger. Do you think you’ve been hungry before, captain, really hungry? Starving? No, you haven’t. This is different. I heard somebody call it wolf hunger. You see anything warm that’s moving and you just see meat. You can smell it. You can taste it. They live and I die. They die—and I live. That’s wolf hunger. And after the electricity goes out and stays out, and then the water stops, how can you stay put? With no food? You can’t.”

“So what did you do?”

“Some of us tried to go to the Air Force Base. My father was in the Air Force when I was a kid. That was before he ran off and left me with my mom, but I still knew my way around the base. For a while after he split she still had a dependent’s ID card, and sometimes we shopped there. So some of us from the trailer park thought they had to have some food on the base, for emergencies, because it was the government, right? They used to fly charity missions out of there in the C-17s, the Globemasters, so they had to have a lot of food there, right?

“But by the time we got there the Air Force security force was keeping people out with machine guns, and there were bodies just all over the place. All over the place! Piled up by the main gate, and along the walls and fences. So when we went up there looking for food, we got grabbed by Air Force security instead, and they told us if we worked on a sanitation detail they’d feed us. And it wasn’t a choice, it was an order. Working on the sanitation detail meant throwing dead bodies on the back of a flatbed trailer behind a pickup. Two men, one on each end, just throwing them up. One-two-three: heave-ho.

“So you’re taking bodies to be piled up to be burned way out in a field past the runways, and at the same time you’re starving to death, and something just clicks. You make a new equation in your head: A plus B equals C. And you’re not the first one. Some other people are already at it. You didn’t kill anybody—they were already dead, right? You didn’t know them, right? And those Air Force boys are nowhere to be seen, no sir. They want nothing to do with the sanitation detail out in the field with all the burning bodies. So what do you think happens next? Well, I can tell you what happens next. You’re not starving anymore. That’s what happens next.

“And you didn’t do it! You didn’t kill anybody, you didn’t carve anybody up, no, it was just there. Take it or leave it. Eat or keep starving. Well, Captain Kilmer, I didn’t see anybody say ‘no’ and leave it. Not when you’ve been starving more than two weeks. Not when people are dead all over the place, and you didn’t kill them either. But you can’t just pull something to eat out of a big funeral pyre, no, that won’t work. For one thing, the smell. Oh, you’ll never forget the smell! It’s not just muscle that’s burning, oh, no! It’s guts, it’s blood, it’s hair, it’s clothes, it’s shoes—everything’s burning, everything at once. No, you have to take an arm or a leg, and you have to take it somewhere else. And somebody else did it first, so you’re just sharing, at first. And then you’re not hungry. You’re a wolf.”

**

Barry went quiet. I let it hang there for a long minute, looking behind him at the band of stars on the western horizon.

“Did everybody do it?” I asked him.

“Everybody . . .who? Everybody, where? For me it started with the sanitation detail, but I’d say anybody who tells you they didn’t is a liar, at least where I was at. You eat or you die, and you can’t live on dandelions and fresh air. After every cat and dog and squirrel and rat is eaten, after you try to eat roots and weeds and the wheat off the top of tall grass, well, what do you think happens after that? What? When there’s already dead bodies everywhere? The Air Force just made it easier for us by putting us on the sanitation detail. We were early adopters.

“And away from the Air Force Base a lot of people killed their own selves anyway. You’ve got no food left at all, not a grain of rice, not a crumb, but you’ve got a bottle of pills and vodka? Well, a lot of people took the easy way out, and who can blame them? And after you run off from the base and you make it home and you find your next-door neighbor dead in his trailer, well, there’s thirty pounds of meat lying right there on the floor—and there’s still propane in the tank for his grill.

“Let me tell you, people go out of their mind when they’re starving and there’s dead bodies every place you turn. In cars, in stores, hell, up in trees! Anyplace. It’s just pure crazy town. Anything you think you know about human nature goes right out the window. I’ve seen a boy kill his brother with a hammer fighting over one red apple. I’ve seen a mother boil her own littlest baby in a pot to feed her other babies. And once people get past—you know—the cannibal thing—there’s no limits at all after that. People who will boil and butcher up a little baby will do anything at all after that. Anything. That’s the menu.

“And everybody is going crazy not just from starving, but from the bodies everywhere, the smell, the smoke, the gunfire, the fear. It’s worse than hell. Much worse. Half of Charleston burnt to the ground just from people setting fires for no damn reason at all. Even normal people go crazy out of their minds. So the people who were still alive past the first month, well, they’re operating on a whole new plane of reference.

“But by then you’re not starving anymore, so at least that part is over. Then your whole life splits into two parts: the part before, and the part after, and your life before is gone, gone like a nice dream you woke up from, but this time you woke up in hell, and there’s no place else to go because everywhere is hell. And if you want to get out of hell, you don’t have any good choices left. No good choices. You can kill yourself—or let yourself get killed—and then you’re on the menu. Okay, so you learn there are new rules in hell, and rule number one is eat or be eaten. Either you write the menu—or you’re on it.

“But after a while all the bodies from the early days are gone. Or they’re too rotten and putrefied to—you know. And nobody is doing any more sanitation details, no sir, nobody is collecting those bodies. There’s no more Air Force security, and there’s no more police and there’s no national guard, and where there’s no food and there’s no water but there’s bloated rotting bodies everywhere, well . . . you just can’t stay there. You have to move on. You have no other choice. And do you know something really weird? Every dead body is black after a week. Everybody is equally black in death.”

**

My mind drifted back to Morocco, to the holiday feast we’d shared in the walled compound before the rescue mission to Fort Zerhoun. All of the food had been grown within the range of a small truck or even a wagon pulled by a donkey. I’d seen some of the terraced farms from atop the rock pinnacle where Tala had taken me to see both the blue Atlantic and the Atlas Mountains from the same perch. There were no distant supply chains to break down and cause immediate mass starvation.

After a few minutes, Barry went on with his story.

“So, I fell in with a little pack of survivors from the trailer park and the sanitation detail. They were bikers and veterans, and we moved up the interstate on foot to get clear of the city. A car couldn’t get two blocks the way the streets were then.”

“Wait, you said that bikes could get through. Bicycles.”

“Bicycles? Yeah, I guess I meant maybe in the first week or two. After that, anywhere you went, you had to move in a super sneaky stealth mode. In the city, I mean. By the time we left, you’d get picked off if you were riding a bike. Ambushed. Somebody puts a rope or a chain between some cars, or a car and a tree, and you’ve got to get off the bike to take care of it, right? Bang! You’re on the menu. So we had to walk, always keeping cover on each other. I had a 12 gauge pump and a bag full of shells. Everybody in our squad had some kind of a long gun, mostly AR-15s and AK-47s. There were seven of us when we left our trailer park.

“Sometimes we walked on the interstate, right up the line of cars, and sometimes we walked in the tree line off to the side. Almost everything in that gridlock was already picked clean, picked clean of food, I mean, but you could still find things to use. Like, say, a crowbar is real useful, that gets you into car trunks. We were moving real slow and careful, like soldiers. The boss of our squad was an Army Ranger. He was in Somalia and Panama and some places like that. He was old but he was hard, and he taught us about squad tactics. That’s what he called us, a squad. You don’t all move at the same time like in movies. You get behind cover, and you take turns moving. You plan it out and you cover each other. The old Ranger had a pair of binoculars. The binoculars helped him to plan things out so we wouldn’t get ambushed.”

“So there were seven of you in your squad. What about women and children? Were there any other survivors?”

Barry paused before answering. “There were no women and children. The squad was seven men. I was the youngest.”

I almost asked him what happened to the women and the children in the trailer park, but I was afraid of the answer I’d get. A mother putting her own infant in a pot to feed her other children was still in my head. And after that, what came next?

“Sometimes we stayed in houses that were already picked over. Only places we could check out for a long time, to make sure nobody was around. The Ranger was real careful about that. But we never stayed for long, usually just a day or two. Or maybe we’d lay up for a few days when it was raining real hard, but we always kept moving west.”

I asked him, “Why west?”

“Partly it was because of the sun. We’d always move out before dawn. The old Ranger said that moving west, the sun would be behind us in the early morning, and that gave us an edge if we ran into anybody. We’d be able to see into where they were hiding, and they’d be looking at the sun and we’d be in the shadows. This was before that Iceland volcano fucked everything up even worse so it’s raining almost all the time. Well, anyway, we’d make good time in the first light, just a couple hours, maybe make a few miles, then we’d slow down and move real careful, or we’d lay up during most of the day. The old Ranger had a South Carolina highway map, and one of the men in the squad said he had friends out west around Jacksonboro. But one way was as good as another to me. The squad was going west, so I was going west.

“And then we got ambushed crossing a fallow field. It was just dirt and mud. It was a rifle ambush. There was no cover, but it was right at dawn, first light, and the Ranger said it was safe enough and we had to chance it. There were no houses or anything like that in sight. No sign of anybody. We mostly stayed in woods and tree lines, but sometimes you just had to cross a field because there was no other way around. I never even saw who was shooting at us. I think maybe I was the only one of us who wasn’t shot, but I don’t know. I ran like hell and I made it to a ravine and then into some woods, and that was the end of the old Ranger’s squad from the trailer park. After that I was going solo. I kept moving west, I guess because I was used to it. I had no map or compass, and no binoculars. I was just traveling by the sun. I’d fill a water bottle from streams. At least there was plenty of water.

“Sometimes I had to use a road, or walk just off to the side of the road because there was no other way to go, so I walked mostly at night. Everything changed all the time—the terrain, I mean. Roads, rivers, farms, towns—it always changed. Sometimes it was wide open, and you could see for miles ahead, and sometimes it was pinched in tight. Sometimes there were woods and tree lines, and sometimes nothing but open fields. You had to study each new situation and figure out the best way to go. The old Ranger used to say, ‘terrain and situation dictates.’ So sometimes the best way was to follow behind another group of travelers. Let them walk across a danger zone first.”

“So there were other groups moving too?”

“Not many, but some.”

“Did you ever try to join one of these groups, for safety in numbers? Like with your squad from the trailer park?”

“No, never. We talked about it, before the ambush, about joining another group, but one of the guys told us about this gang in India called the Thugees. The Thugees are like killer gypsies, and they have their own secret culture. Their main trick is to make friends with travelers on the road and gain their trust, you know, just like you said: for the safety in numbers. So the Thugees would act real friendly, real helpful, and when everybody was asleep at night they’d strangle the people they joined up with. So when I was moving solo I never tried to join another group. After what I’d seen, I figured that gangs of killer gypsies like the Thugees would be next for sure. So I’d just trail along behind them, like when they’d cross a danger area like a little town that looked all abandoned.

“Or they’d come to a road block, or maybe a bridge across a river, or maybe some cars and trucks were pushed together across the road to make a wall. Sometimes the locals would put up a roadblock after a turn so you couldn’t see it from far off. And the easiest scam in the world is to put up a sign that says there’s food at some U.N. refugee camp just up the road. I think a lot of people fell for that one, but not me. No way. I’d always circle back around and try a whole different route.”

Chapter 20

I remembered something I’d seen when Barry had revealed himself to us as a stowaway. “So, how did you get the burn scars?” There was no denying he had been through many trials and tribulations. The scars on his ankle and his arms were permanent. The scrapes on his bruised face would fade with time.

“Oh, yeah, the burns . . . I’m getting to that. So I’d try to hang back behind a group of travelers, right? But one time I wasn’t back quite far enough. A group I was trailing walked into a trap, and I walked into it too because I was too close to them. It was just some little farms, and then a little town but it all looked like it was deserted. Well, the whole setup was like a fish trap, but for people. Do you know how they work, fish traps? They’re like V-shaped funnels put in a stream. They’re made out of sticks and nets, one after the other, like funnels, but getting smaller and tighter. That’s what they walked into. It all seems natural and normal, just a regular fence here and there, or a hedgerow, or maybe a stone wall, and nobody is around, there’s no sign of life—and then you’re in the trap. When I figured this out, it was too late. When they sprung the ambush I was in one of those funnels, and you can’t run back out of the funnel when there’s men behind you with guns.

“No, then it’s too late. You just drop your gun and you put up your hands, or you die right there and that means you’re on the menu. So then I was put on a pickup truck with the rest of the group I was following, out to like a ranch, and I figured I was going to be on the menu for sure. The gang that trapped us was called the Templars of Christ, and their leader was a real trip, man oh man, he was something! Simon Templar was his name. I know it was just made up, but that’s what they all called him, Simon Templar, or Simon Peter, and he was the boss. He was a big man, real big, six-six easy, with long hair and a beard. He’d lay his head back and howl, and all the other Templars would join in like a pack of wolves. That was really something to hear, let me tell you.”

“They were Christians, and they howled like wolves?”

“They weren’t like normal Christians. I saw some crosses but I never saw a Bible. They said they were still in stage one, and stage one was just survival, and after stage one they’d find the pureblood women and rebuild the true church. They had their own customs, like the wolf howling. One of them would start, and then they’d all go off howling.”

“So, what did they have to do with your burn scars?”

“Well, the Templars didn’t tolerate tattoos, no sir. Some of it’s kind of mixed up in my mind, the Templars of Christ and the howling wolves, and some things might not be in the right order, but man, I’ll never forget their leader, Simon Peter, and how they’d howl like a wolf pack. I guess I was already pretty goddamn crazy by then, but even so, it’d make the hair stand up on your neck hearing thirty or forty of them all howling.”

“But what did that have to do with your scars?”

“Oh, right. The Templars didn’t tolerate tattoos, no sir. So when they trapped me and the group I was following they said just strip on down and let’s see what kind of new meat we got. This was at the first selection, after they unloaded us at their ranch. That’s what they called us when they caught us in their trap: new meat. There’s rifles aimed at you, so you just do what you’re told, or you die right there.

“The Templars hold that tattoos are a desecration of the temple of Christ, and so they must be removed. They said it was my choice, but I knew what it meant if I said no. It meant I’d be on the menu. So that’s where I got the scars, and I’m lucky I only had a few tats they could cover with an open hand. That was their rule, the one-hand rule, and none of my tats offended the Templars much. Some tattoos would get your throat slit like a hog right on the spot even if they passed the one-hand rule. This happened to a man right in front of me in the line. We were all bare-ass buck naked, arms straight out.”

“What was his tattoo that offended them so much?”

“I never saw it. I think that it was on his chest, and I didn’t look, but it sure riled up the Templars. Later I found out that anything with Satan or devils would set them off, and some other things. Hex signs, things like that. So after they cut his throat right in front of me, I figured I’m on the menu too, but when they looked at my tats they weren’t bothered by them, and they passed the one-hand rule, so they gave me the choice. They did it with an iron pipe that was red hot from a fire. They tied my arms around a tree real tight, and they rolled that hot glowing pipe over my tats real slow, back and forth. Then they left me tied there onto that tree for three days with no water. Bare-ass buck naked. They called it the tree of life.

“I was still alive after three days, and as you can imagine I was mighty goddamn thirsty. I was already pretty far out of my head but there was some kind of a psychedelic potion in that tea or whatever it was they gave me. They called it the cup of life. I think the cup was made from a human skull but that might be a hallucination I had. From what they said later I think the tea was made from magic mushrooms and toad skin, and I had visions. I flew around outside my body, and after all the visions I was numb for a week and I could barely move, but they fed me, and they howled over me, and after that I was a howling wolf Templar. I was the only one they kept alive out of that group who walked into their human fish trap. Like I said, captain, it was pure crazy town, but it turned out they liked people with blonde hair and blue eyes. And I’d survived the tree of life and the cup of life, so I was in, and they told me their secrets. At least, I think they did, most of them.”

Barry rubbed his bristly head and whiskers. I tried to picture him with long hair. No wonder he muttered in his sleep. He would require close watching, that was for sure.

He said, “The howling wolf Templars went out on raiding parties, only they called them rescue missions. They said they were rescuing the purebloods from the mud people. And they did, they did rescue people. This was a few years ago, and they still had one of those quad-rotor camera drones, so they could see what was out the next couple miles past their pickup trucks when they went out on missions. They were picking up territory and looking for purebloods to rescue, and looking for new meat. You have to understand, this wasn’t normal times. And by then you weren’t starving anymore, because by then you were a hunter—only I’m not talking about hunting deer.

“I went on a rescue mission where we found about twenty children kept in a chain-link pen like they were sheep. None of those kids were bigger than Rita. It was men from the Middle East somewhere running that camp. God knows how they got into America. . . No, I guess we let them in, and then they built their own camp. Anyway, we killed all of them we could find, those Arabs or whatever they were. Most of them never even saw us before we dropped them. The Templars were real big on their rifle shooting. They’d pick out their targets and count down together, three-two-one, and then they’d open fire at the same time. Gino said you were a Marine Corps sniper?”

“When I was a young man, even younger than you.”

“Well, that was the first time I saw a rifle ambush from the other side. The other time was when my squad got ambushed. Anyway, after we took that place we killed every one of those Arabs, or whoever they were, that was still alive. They’d rape those poor little kids, and then they’d cut them up and cook them and eat them. Bones and leftovers down to little babies. Little baby hands and feet and little baby heads. Their butcher table was next to the pen. It was crazy town, right? Captain Dan, what happened made everybody crazy, even the normal people. So if some people were already crazy even before all this happened, well, then you just can’t imagine how crazy the crazy people got when they were starving to death.”

“So what happened to the little kids in the sheep pens?”

Barry sighed, and let out his air slowly. “The children we found, we couldn’t do anything for them. They were like paralyzed mutes. They just shook. You couldn’t get them to move. You couldn’t get them to look up at you. You couldn’t even get them to stand up with their cage door wide open.”

“So what happened to them?”

Barry looked down and shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t up to me. I was just the fucking new guy. The Templars said they were beyond salvation, and that it wasn’t decent Christian mercy to leave them there like that. Even killing can be a mercy, a mercy, that’s what they said. And after you’ve seen little kids kept in pens, right next to the rape bed and the butcher table and the cooking fire with the iron grill on top . . . any last shred of humanity just goes right out of you.

“So on top of everything else it becomes a race war. The Templars were shooting every black or brown face they could see, and from as far away as they could see them. It was the cleansing fire, they said. No, that went back to Charleston. Before we left, half the city was on fire and it just got crazier than hell. Smoke on the water, and fire in the sky. And not just normal smoke, not just wood smoke. That’s when I had the shotgun. But you go from eating those who were already killed, to killing people to eat. It takes some time, but you get there. And everybody had a reason to do it. Boomers? They already lived too long in those nice big houses. Bang! Then just people with gray hair. Bang! You don’t speak English? Bang! Wrong color? Bang! Don’t like your face? Bang! And a lot of people blamed the Chinese for taking down the power grid, so you didn’t see many Asians once the dust settled. Or blacks or Mexicans for that matter. At least, not where I was.

“Remember, captain, this is all happening after you wake up in hell, and your old life is already over. And when your face is your uniform, it’s a lot easier when you can see their faces from five hundred yards away—and eight hundred yards is even better. That was the Templar way. I think I was with them for a couple of months, wolf-howling right along with them. My hair was long then, and they were into the blue eyes and blonde hair thing. So that gave me pureblood status with them, and that’s why they kept me around after the tree of life. Simon Templar said that after the survival stage was over they were going to find pureblood women and start the true church all over, but without the mud people to drag us down again.

“Then on a rescue mission—but it was really just a hunting party—the squad I was with got ambushed. Simon had stayed back at the ranch; he wasn’t with us that time. They had a video drone, but it happened in a place that they thought was safe. There were about a dozen of us in two trucks, and we got ambushed where the road went through some woods.

“Whoever ambushed us had fully automatic weapons and grenades. I bailed out of the truck in back and I hid in a culvert pipe under the road. It had bushes growing out of each end and I crawled way inside. I barely fit, it was tight. It was pure luck I made it in there, because in a few minutes the ambushers went around and they scalped all the Templars, dead or alive. Scalped them like Comanches. I heard it all from not thirty feet away. Scalped them and took their limbs and left the rest for the buzzards. They took one of the trucks, too, the one that would still run after the ambush. I saw it all when I crawled out of the culvert. One night you’re wolf-howling with the Templars, and the next night they’ve got no arms or legs, and they’re all scalped, and it’s all under the same full moon.

“And after that I was all finished with the Templars. My burns were as healed as they’d get, and I wasn’t starving, and I had a rifle they gave me. They didn’t entirely trust me, so they only gave me a 22 rifle with a scope and a box of fifty bullets for that mission. This was just to see how I’d do with it, but it turned out that was lucky because that 22 rifle was real quiet.

“I’d already learned how to be sneaky. How to move in the woods by day or night, and how to cross fields and roads the safest way. How to find water, and how to hide. Finally I came across a group that didn’t do the cannibal thing. They were all living on a farm that was in its own little valley, real hidden. I crept around and I watched them for two days before I approached them when they were working in a field. They were growing their own food, and they had some goats and pigs. I walked up to them real slow with my hands straight out. I didn’t think they were like the Thugee killer gypsies because they weren’t travelers; they had their own place already. It was men and women and some kids too. That pulled me to them, their women and kids. They seemed normal, like before. I hid my rifle where I could fetch it later if it didn’t work out.

“They didn’t let me in their house, but they let me stay in a shed with another man who was retarded. We had to stay in the shed from dusk till dawn—that was our deal. We’d get fed if we worked. That’s where I heard about Beaufort Island, and how it was there. They said they heard that on Beaufort Island if you worked on a farm you could live free just like anybody else. Well, I was working on a farm and I had to live in a shed, so Beaufort sounded better. I guess they were okay as people on their little hidden farm, but I think they had too many men and only a couple women and it was a pretty bad scene.

“The men were always fighting over the women, and I was one man too many. I know they were Christians, I could hear them pray together, and I suppose they tolerated me, but I still had to sleep in the shed with a retarded guy. They never let me inside their house to sit down and eat with them, not even once. I could tell the men didn’t want me there. The men were always watching the women to see who they were talking too. It was always very tense. I think the fact that I had found their hidden farm freaked them out. Right after I got there, the men started carrying guns all the time.

“So I left the farm and I got the stuff I’d hidden and I just kept walking, shooting game like woodchucks until my bullets all ran out, and then I was back to eating frogs and turtles. But after I left the farm I was heading south because of what they said about Beaufort Island.”

“How did you start fires for cooking?”

“Fires? I didn’t make any fires. Cold camp all the way. That old Ranger taught us that. Fires would give you away for sure. Hungry people can smell meat cooking from miles away. I could start a fire with a flint and steel, but I knew it was too risky. By then I could eat just about anything, cooked or not. Even so, pretty soon I was starving again, but I wasn’t going to kill anybody just to eat. I wasn’t going back to that way.

“My last selection was on the long bridge over to Beaufort Island. That’s where I ran into the militia and I ‘volunteered’ to be an indentured farm slave. Now you know the rest of my story, at least what I can remember of it. I know some of the time I was out of my head, I know that now, and I’m not sure what happened when, or even where, but it all happened, all of it. I didn’t dream it.” Barry pulled his right sleeve up, showing me the burn scars on his arm. They were as real as the scars around his ankle where we’d removed his shackle.

I said, “Something I’ve been wondering about: I didn’t see any blacks at all on the island. Some up in Charleston, but not on the island. Were there any blacks working as farm hands?”

“Blacks? I wondered about it too. A foreman I trusted said no blacks were allowed on the island, not even as VIWs. And I didn’t see many blacks on the mainland either, not after a few months. Captain, it was real ugly—and blacks were easy to spot at rifle distance. I only had a shotgun, but I saw it. After the C-word, all the rules are different. After you’ve seen what people can do to people . . . there’s no rules after that.”

I’d been looking at Barry while he was steering and telling his story, or I’d been gazing behind us at the widening band of stars marking the clear western horizon. After he was finished speaking I turned to check inside the pilothouse. Will was still in the pedestal seat, but it was facing toward the cockpit and he was staring at us.

There were no radio headphones covering his ears.