Page 25 of Bred Mate
“What the fuck happened to you?” She asks the question with no small amount of anger. I’m not sure if it is directed at me or not, but I am not going to tell her what happened. Can’t say I had my shit handed to me by a woman named Margaret who makes sugar cookies on the side.
“What do you mean?” I don’t know what she’s referring to right away.
“You’re drenched in blood,” she says. “Who cut your head open?”
“Oh, that was a secretary. They weren’t open to negotiation,” I say.
“So they smashed your head open?”
“There was a misunderstanding about appointment times.”
She looks at me with wide eyes.
“Did you fucking kill them? Is there a crime scene in that building? You know that we can’t just?—”
“Everyone’s alive,” I interrupt her. “They didn’t want to sell. But I got you this. Actually, on second thought, probably best not to eat it. It might be poisoned.” I Frisbee the cookie into a nearby trash can.
“Why have you come back with a poison cookie?” She looks at me, frowning. “What happened?”
“They don’t want to sell,” I repeat. “They have plans to develop the area. They already have permits. It’s like I said. There’s one way to deal with things like these, and it’s not through paperwork.”
Ellie scowls. “Why did your father sell the land?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you call him and ask?”
“What difference would it make? It’s been sold, and it’s going to be developed. It’s time your little pack moved. Nothing can be done.”
She nods slowly. “Nothing can be done,” she repeats in a tone I really don’t like.
“Nothing can be done in the way you want it done,” I clarify. “Plenty can be done my way.”
She pushes her sunglasses up into her hair. “We just murder everyone who gets close to the forest.”
“We don’t have to murder them. We can fight them off, destroy their machines, generally make life miserable for them,” I say. “We can disrupt, and we can do it until it costs them more than their development could ever make them. I tried it your way, little girl. Now, we try it mine.”
Two weeks later…
Karl
I have never had this much fun before. I thought I knew pretty much everything I needed to know about the world and how it worked, but I’m learning a lot out here in the forest. Like how to drive heavy machinery.
“No! Other lever. Yep. That’s the one. Okay! Push it forward, and then pull back, yep…”
I’m being instructed by a beaten man tied to a tree who doesn’t want me to keep hitting him. He tried coming in here by himself. I almost feel bad for him.
I put a bulldozer into gear and drive it into the river. They have kept sending people to try to cut the forest down and start construction, and we have done nothing but fight them, steal their machines and their lunches, and anything else not nailed down. Ellie’s brothers have taken to chaos quite nicely, happily setting fire to vehicles. I feel bad about the youngest one. I want to send him to New Orleans to go to a good school and have a decent life, but he won’t go and she won’t let him. I know if I get him snatched up and sent to school he’ll just run away.
I jump out of the dozer just as it hits the water, narrowly avoiding getting trapped and sucked down when it starts to tip and sink. This is not a safe job, but I don’t care much about safety. The river is starting to get dammed with all the machinery we’ve put in it. Can’t be good for the environment, but it’ll be worse for the environment to be cut to shit and built up on.
Once the driver is run off, we settle down to dinner, some of it foraged, some of it hunted, and some of it a kind of smorgasbord of stolen lunches from workers who got sent out here against all common sense.
“Do you want this?” Connor holds out a glistening baggie to me. I can see in his eyes the fact that he wants me to say no. He’s offering it out of misguided kindness.
“What is it?”
“It’s a sandwich without crusts in a plastic bag. It’s tasty.”
