Free Exodia by Debra Chapoton Page B

were decorated with far too
much mud. They’d worked on this project for hours. There never
seemed to be a lack of rusted car parts to be re-purposed into
things–things that would have been more simply made if the world
hadn’t begun to destroy itself after the Suppression. But Kassandra
and her sisters didn’t know any different. A fence was a fence,
whatever it was made of.
    “ There. Try it now.” Katie
jammed the shovel into the mud and helped her older sister wrestle
the awkward door into the hole. She retrieved the shovel and tapped
globs of mud into the open spaces until the suction took hold. Like
the other doors they had grappled with, this one stayed
upright.
    “ Do you think he’ll like it?
I bet he won’t.” Katie’s face fell to her customary
frown.
    “ If he can’t find any lumber
to buy I think he’ll love it.”
    Their father had left after the
earthquake to see what he could find. It was pretty obvious that
they would need materials not just for a new and pathetically
smaller windmill, but also for a fence. Deandra had come up with
the idea of using car doors almost as soon as he left. Their mother
thought it would be a good solution since already a few of the
sheep had discovered their freedom. All of them set right to work
on it. But one by one they found easier chores to do until only the
oldest sisters worked on finishing the job. Now the other five
girls had the flock back on the south slope while their mother had
walked to town.
    “ Yeah, he’ll love it. I just
hope it holds up when it rains.” Katie looked up, checking for her
own personal black cloud. She had a natural lean toward the
pessimistic.
    Kassandra gasped. “I hadn’t thought of
that. Wait. What about that stuff, that hardening stuff, that Mr.
Andrews sells? We could use that.”
    “ I suppose. What’ll we use
for trade?”
    “ Good question. Maybe a
certain younger sister?”
    Kassandra didn’t even smile at Katie’s
joke; she wasn’t entirely sure it was a joke. She could see the
flock coming down the hill in the distance. The cute little lambs
tried to keep up with their mothers. Her sisters spread around the
sides. She watched them with pride.
    “ Here they come. Prepare for
a muddy mess,” Katie said.
    The pond was reduced to half its size.
The herd would have to muck through yards of mud to get a drink. It
would be difficult to get them all watered, rounded back up and
corralled into the enclosure. How much longer they’d be able to
drink here was anybody’s guess.
    It was a long walk to the monument, but
there was a well and pump there with an old pool where, if they had
to, they could water the flock. It was the only idea Kassandra had.
She couldn’t let her sheep die of thirst. But there were certain
dangers in traveling so far. Alone. Just girls. If only her father
wasn’t a priest. They were probably the only family without
weapons.
    She felt pretty safe most of the time,
but there was no lack of stories about the Blues. A single Blue
man, trained as they were in warfare, could be a huge threat to a
young girl. What if they went to the monument and ran into one of
them? Or two?
    What if they were kidnappers? Or
rapists?
    Or murderers?

 
     
    Chapter 7 Lions and Lambs
     
    From the third page of the
Ledger:
    He was saved from the snare
and the pestilence. He walked the land of the wild beast and
trampled snakes along the way.
     
    BEING TALLER THAN those around me,
being trained in N.A. combat, being guarded by soldiers, being the
grandson of the Executive President, all that, has blinded me to
how absolutely useless, naive, and stupid I am. I’ve kept the sun
to my left side as much as possible for the last four or five
hours, but I wonder if I’m going in circles.
    I left the woodsy paths a while back
and started following an old interstate highway, one of the
magnetized ones with a buried network of high tech mags that kept
the cars of the fifties and sixties floating safely a couple of
feet