Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

Most of the time it isn’t. Tonight it isn’t. And tonight we watch two at a time.

“He doesn’t trust us. Why should he? We’ll have to watch all four of them for a while. They’re…odd.

They might be stupid enough to try to grab some of our packs and leave some night. Or it might just be a matter of little things starting to disappear. The children are more likely to get caught at it. Yet if the adults stay, it will be for the children’s sake. If we take it easy on the children and protect them, I think the adults will be loyal to us.”

“So we become the crew of a modern underground railroad,” I said. Slavery again— even worse than my father thought, or at least sooner. He thought it would take a while.

“None of this is new.” Bankole made himself comfortable against me. “In the early l990s while I was in college, I heard about cases of growers doing some of this— holding people against their wills and forcing them to work without pay. Latins in California, blacks and Latins in the south… . Now and then, someone would go to jail for it.”

“But Emery says there’s a new law— that forcing people or their children to work off debt that they can’t help running up is legal.”

“Maybe. It’s hard to know what to believe. I suppose the politicians may have passed a law that could be used to support debt slavery. But I’ve heard nothing about it. Anyone dirty enough to be a slaver is dirty enough to tell a pack of lies. You realize that that woman’s children were sold like cattle— and no doubt sold into prostitution.”

I nodded. “She knows too.”

“Yes. My God.”

“Things are breaking down more and more.” I paused. “I’ll tell you, though, if we can convince ex-slaves that they can have freedom with us, no one will fight harder to keep it. We need better guns, though. And we need to be so careful… . It keeps getting more dangerous out here. It will be especially dangerous with those little girls around.”

“Those two know how to be quiet,” Bankole said.

“They’re little rabbits, fast and silent. That’s why they’re still alive.”

24

Respect God:

Pray working.

Pray learning,

planning,

doing.

Pray creating,

teaching,

reaching.

Pray working.

Pray to focus your thoughts,

still your fears,

strengthen your prupose.

Respect God.

Shape God.

Pray working.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2027

We read some verses and talked about Earthseed for a while this morning. It was a calming thing to do— almost like church. We needed something calming and reassuring. Even the new people joined in, asking questions, thinking aloud, applying the verses to their experiences.

God is Change, and in the end, God does prevail.

But we have something to say about the whens and the whys of that end.

Yeah .

It’s been a horrible week.

We’ve taken both today and yesterday as rest days.

We might take tomorrow as well. I need it whether the others do or not. We’re all sore and sick, in mourning and exhausted— yet triumphant. Odd to be triumphant. I think it’s because most of us are still alive. We are a harvest of survivors. But then, that’s what we’ve always been.

This is what happened.

At our noon stop on Tuesday, Tori and Doe, the two little girls, went away from the group to urinate.

Emery went with them. She had kind of taken charge of Doe as well as her own daughter. The night before, she and Grayson Mora had slipped away from the group and stayed away for over an hour.

Harry and I were on watch, and we saw them go.

Now they were a couple— all over each other, but at arm’s length from everyone else. Strange people.

So Emery took the girls off to pee— not far away.

Just across the hill face and out of sight behind a patch of dead bushes and tall, dry grass. The rest of us sat eating, drinking, and sweating in what shade we could get from a copse of oak trees that looked only half dead. The trees had been robbed of a great number of branches, no doubt by people needing firewood. I was looking at their many jagged wounds when the screaming began.

First there were the high, needle thin, needle sharp shrieks of the little girls, then we heard Emery shouting for help. Then we heard a man’s voice, cursing.

I died with someone else. Someone laid hands on me and I came within a finger’s twitch of squeezing the trigger once more.

Bankole.

“You stupid asshole!” I whimpered. “I almost killed you.”

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

I was surprised. I tried to remember whether I’d been shot. Maybe I had just come down on a sharp piece of wood. I had no sense of my own body. I hurt, but I couldn’t have said where— or even whether the pain was mine or someone else’s. The pain was intense, yet diffuse somehow. I felt… disembodied.

“Is everyone else all right?” I asked.

“Be still,” he said.

“Is it over, Bankole?”

“Yes. The survivors have run away.”

“Take my gun, then, and give it to Natividad— in case they decide to come back.”

I think I felt him take the gun from my hand. I heard muffled talk that I didn’t quite understand. That was when I realized I was losing consciousness. All right then. At least I had held on long enough to do some good.

Jill Gilchrist is dead.

She was shot in the back as she ran toward the trees carrying Tori. Bankole didn’t tell me, didn’t want me to know before I had to because, as it turned out, I was wounded myself. I was lucky. My wound was minor. It hurt, but other than that, it didn’t matter much. Jill was unlucky. I found out about her death when I came to and heard Allie’s hoarse screaming grief.

Jill had gotten Tori back to the trees, put her down, then, without a sound, folded to the ground as though taking cover. Emery had grabbed Tori and huddled, crying with her in terror and relief.

Everyone else had been busy, first taking cover, then firing or directing fire. Travis was the first to see the blood pooling around Jill. He shouted for Bankole, then turned Jill onto her back and saw blood welling from what turned out to be an exit wound in her chest. Bankole says she died before he reached her, No last words, no last sight of her sister, not even the assurance that she had saved the little girl. She had. Tori was bruised, but fine.

Everyone was fine except Jill.

My own wound, to be honest, was a big scratch. A bullet had plowed a furrow straight through the flesh of my left side, leaving little damage, a lot of blood, a couple of holes in my shirt, and a lot of pain. The wound throbbed worse than a burn, but it wasn’t disabling.

“Cowboy wound,” Harry said when he and Zahra came to look me over. They looked dirty and miserable, but Harry tried to be upbeat for me. They had just helped to bury Jill. The group had, with hands, sticks, and our hatchet, dug a shallow grave for her while I was unconscious. They put her among the trees’ roots, covered her, and rolled big rocks atop her grave. The trees were to have her, but the dogs and the cannibals were not.

The group had decided to bed down for the night where we were, even though our oak copse should have been rejected as an overnight camp because it was too close to the highway.

“You’re a goddamn fool and too big to carry,” Zahra told me. “So just rest there and let Bankole take care of you. Not that anyone could stop him.”

“You’ve just got a cowboy wound,” Harry repeated.

“In that book I bought, people are always getting shot in the side or the arm or the shoulder, and it’s nothing— although Bankole says a good percentage of them would have died of tetanus or some other infection.”