Nathan Jones - First Winter

Once inside the maze of poorly organized tents he drifted around to various groups of residents, sharing news of the outside world or even strips of venison jerky from his pack, as long as it got people talking about events closer to home.

A lot of what he picked up he already knew, from what Chauncey had relayed over the radio as well as what Dr. Langstrom, Robert, Hailey, and the other recruits had told him of their situation in camp. Resources were tight, freedom was restricted, and people were getting restless. Crime was running rampant and increasing in severity, there were frequent protests, all of which were ignored or suppressed, and there’d even been a few minor riots.

Nobody seemed to think Rogers was doing a good job, there was a great deal of resentment towards his soldiers, and more than a few people had already left in search of better camps, or even to strike out on their own. Basically anyone who’d already had the possessions and supplies were bailing, leaving only the most desperate and downtrodden behind.

The camp was quickly becoming a slum of the worst kind.

It took Lewis a while to hear anything about the thousand refugees Rogers had sent to Aspen Hill, and when he finally did it was indirectly. A snippet from an elderly woman gnawing on a piece of his jerky, information she tossed out while giving other news, about how Rogers rounding up the camp’s malcontents didn’t seem to have stopped the rising crime rates.

He politely interrupted the woman before she could move on to the state of the camp’s cooking. “He rounded up malcontents? Like protestors?”

She sniffed. “Protestors, petty thieves, rioters, and the sort of scum guilty of more serious crimes like attempting or even carrying out assault with deadly weapons, rape, and murder. Sent them all packing off east somewhere yesterday morning. None too soon, if you ask me, after he ignored what they were doing for so long even when we begged him to intervene. Not that it seems to be helping, since my friend’s daughter had her coat stolen this morning. The thug took it right off her back, said all sorts of terrible things about her to his friends while he did it, too. Poor girl’s lucky they didn’t do worse.”

“Terrible,” Lewis agreed sincerely, although inwardly he was steaming. He hadn’t expected Rogers to send pillars of the community Aspen Hill’s way, but that’s who he’d sent? Trying to kill two birds with one stone by reducing crime and unrest in his camp, and at the same time paying back the town full of people who’d challenged his authority by sending criminals their way?

Granted, most of the refugees were probably just desperate or frustrated, but if the major had really sent dangerous men along with the others, giving them a new place to prey upon victims, it went beyond unconscionable to outright evil.

Well whatever the camp coordinator had intended to happen, his plan had failed. Before too long all those refugees would be returning here and they’d be Rogers’s problem once again. Lewis sincerely felt for this woman, her family, and all the other innocents in camp who would once again be dealing with this. But he’d feel even worse if those problems had moved to Aspen Hill.

They’d faced enough trouble of that sort since the Gulf burned.

Over the next few hours he picked up plenty of useful information about the state of the camp, the disposition of Rogers and his soldiers, and even news about other camps and the world at large. He didn’t dare talk to any soldiers to see what they knew, and he wasn’t stupid enough to poke around in their barracks or headquarters tent in search of damning paperwork. There were no real trade opportunities here, even if he thought he could’ve snuck any deals past guards hostile to Aspen Hill, so all that was left to do was wait for the refugee men to arrive and see how they reported what had happened and how Rogers handled their return.

Lewis started drifting towards the eastern edge of camp, looking for signs of the large group of ragged men on the horizon. If nothing else it let him take his eyes off the squalor and suffering around him, which was a depressing sight. If the camp coordinator was mismanaging things this badly now, he shuddered to think how they’d fare when winter blew in.

The outcast refugees took even longer than he’d expected, likely due to exhaustion and depravation. The first thing Lewis noticed when they appeared along the road was that there were far fewer of them than there had been when he’d passed them this morning. Less than five hundred, at a quick count. He knew a hundred or so had split off to go their own way before the others had even left to return to the camp, and during the trip back it looked like more had made the same decision.

A lot more. He couldn’t see how that many people dispersed throughout the area wouldn’t be a huge problem for Aspen Hill and everyone else living within ten miles, including Rogers and his refugee camp. Travelers might be attacked, as well as foragers and hunters from the nearby towns and camps, and even isolated homes and smaller settlements might find themselves in danger.

And all for what? Because some town that hadn’t done anything to him refused to let him steal their food or dump more mouths to feed on them? For all the evil he’d done Ferris had simply been greedy, certain of his superiority, and completely lacking a conscience. On the other hand Rogers was looking more and more insane by the day, and to make it worse he wielded far more power than the FETF administrator ever had.

Either that or Rogers was getting desperate watching his camp fall apart, and in his flailing around grasped at solutions that only made things worse. Whatever the camp coordinator’s problem was, he needed to be relieved of command for what he was doing. Better yet court-martialed.

The second thing Lewis noticed was, if anything, even more alarming. Soldiers were mobilizing from the camp to drive out and meet the refugees, and it didn’t look like a welcoming party.

Sure enough, Rogers’s men stopped their trucks across the road in an obvious roadblock, taking cover behind them with weapons held ready to bring to bear on the approaching men, who stopped and stared in dismay and growing despair.

Lewis was too far away to hear what the soldiers told the refugees, but the end result had many of the men slumping in defeated exhaustion right there on the road, ignoring the shouts and threats trying to chivvy them back away from the camp while those refugees who still had some energy turned and shuffled back eastward.

It was hard not to feel profound sympathy for those men, even knowing that many of them were criminals and malcontents. He doubted more than a few had done enough to deserve such a fate, and none had been afforded due process or other consideration.

Incredibly, once the soldiers had turned the refugees away they piled into their trucks and drove back into camp. As if they seriously expected a bunch of starving, desperate men to turn around and walk off without causing any trouble, just because they asked them to. Either that or they didn’t care either way.

Rogers sure ran a tight ship.

Of course the ragged men did turn around and leave, even the ones slumped down on the road finally pulling themselves to their feet and shuffling off. But over the next half hour Lewis watched dozens of them sneak into camp. Lewis somehow doubted they planned to just go back to being docile residents after the way they’d been treated, either; Rogers had likely just turned most if not all of those returning into violent troublemakers, where before only a handful had been.

What was even more worrisome was the fact that it was only dozens, instead of the hundreds who’d been turned away. That meant there were now even more people out there unaccounted for, disenfranchised and starving, and each one was potentially a danger to Aspen Hill. To his friends and family.