The Priest

Formerly known as Bob (part 54)

The Battle of Willits

This battle will not be recorded in any history, mostly because there is no more history. People will not come here to lament the dead and praise the noble combatants. No one will come to view the site of a great battle because it’s not going to be a great battle, it’s going to be two ragtag groups of apocalypse survivors fighting to stay alive. Our deaths or the deaths of our enemies will mean nothing. The collapse reduced us all to a state that no one was ready for. For me I, for some unknown reason, just wanted to see another sunrise. I’m not even sure why. I think it’s another hold over from the old world, where another day above ground had some value.

Every other creature on the planet was concerned about the present but was also thinking ahead. According to some, although I didn’t believe it, the non-humans had no sense of the future. They could never adequately explain why, if they didn’t think about the future, squirrels buried food, or birds built nests, or bears filled up on food before hibernating, or even why predators hunted. To hunt implies an expectation of an outcome, to bury nuts implies a need to secure a food supply, to build a nest implies a need to have a place to raise a family, to fill up on food implies surviving an extended period of time without food, and all of these imply recognizing something in the future.

So, for us, it was the same thing. It’s unclear if non-humans want to see another sunrise, but they might. We never knew and never took the time to find out.

The day of the battle started like any other day, grubbing around for food, and getting ready for what would be another boring day in the end times or the end of all our lives.

There was no way to plan for this fight. We had no idea how many of them there were, no idea if they had firearms, no idea from which direction they would come, we had no information and that made planning difficult at best.

Dolly suggested posting lookouts at a few high points, who would hopefully be able to give some warning when the Colonels men were coming. It seemed like as good an idea as any, and since Stuffy and Tiki had not shown any indication that they could or would fight, they were selected as watchers. The rest of us hid ourselves so that we could see Stuffy and Tiki’s position, and we gave them pieces of a broken mirror to flash if anyone came into view.

Our arsenal consisted of my stick, Dolly and Por had knives and that was it. We did some searching and came up with a few baseball bats, some barbed wire, and our secret weapon which was found in the garage of one of the houses, a bow and seven arrows. Dolly took the bow and arrows because he was the only one of us that had ever used one.

Then we sat down to wait.

I found myself thinking of an old quote that I read somewhere, “There on the sands of time bleach the bones of countless millions who, at the dawn of victory sat down to wait, and in waiting, died.”

Waiting for someone to come and kill you is kind of fucked up. Not at all like other kinds of waiting. It was like being on death row and your date is coming up, only in our situation there was the small chance that we would cheat death, and that gets us right back to the beginning, who the fuck cares is we cheat death, I knew Dolly didn’t, he’d been ready to die for years, Por was young still, and maybe she thought there was something to live for, Tiki just wanted to be where no one would try to eat him, and I had no idea if Stuffy had a reason to live because he never talked very much about our predicament.

We waited for what seemed like a long time but when you’re just waiting everything seems like a long time and I guess when you’re waiting you ruminate, I thought of a woman comedian who once said, “Quitting smoking won’t make you live longer, it’ll just seem a lot longer.” I always thought that was funny. Maybe we could rewrite it for the apocalypse, the collapse of western civilization has only two outcomes, you die, or it seems to go on for fucking ever.

I caught a flash out of the corner of my eye that came from Tiki’s end of town. Dolly and Por joined me, and we made our way up the street, keeping to the backyards and alleys.

We heard them before we saw them and there sounded like a lot of them, either that, or they were just loud.

Dolly raised his hand in that closed fist thing he did that meant we should stop, and we ducked into a house and looked out the broken windows at the street.

They marched around the corner and came into view. There were about fifteen of them, not as many as we had expected after seeing all the people who were in Vegas. Several of them had rifles and pistols, colonel Kurtz was dressed up like a pirate with machetes, crossed cartridge belts across his chest and two big .45s in his hands.

Dolly turned and said, “We seem to be outgunned.” Por looked at him and shook her head, “No shit. So now what, fearless leader.”

“We kill as many of them as we can, and then we either die when they overwhelm us or we get away.”

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