Free Gone to Ground by Cheryl Taylor Page A

the intensity being directed at him from the brown eyes. “Sir, the northwest annihilation team reports the areas of Preston, Lund and Hiko have been erased.”
    Rickards cringed inwardly at the matter of fact way that Knox reported the eradication of hundreds of homes and businesses. Most of the owners of these buildings were dead; some in the fire storms that had ravaged the Southwest for the past ten years, but many more from the disease that put the exclamation point to the end of an era. A few of these places, however, still had owners who where housed here in the Laughlin APZ, or in the Elko APZ to the north. Owners who came here expecting their properties to be waiting for them when they were allowed to return. In spite of his belief that what he and the other Enforcers had done was necessary for the community’s good, he still felt a wave a guilt over the wanton destruction, and over the lies that had been told to the people they were sworn to protect.
    The government gave a plausible excuse for the destruction. First they said there were so many buildings that had been damaged during the last few years of monster wild fires and violent weather, that they needed to be removed to prevent danger to the people when they returned.
    In addition, the government line was that many of these buildings were incubators for the disease. The authorities said that bedding and other belongings harbored the virus, and just as in the middle ages up through the 19 th century it was accepted practice to burn the belongings of plague victims, the government now had to make similar decisions to prevent any more deaths from the influenza..
    Maybe , thought Rickards. His wife had been a nurse, and while he’d learned from her that animals could frequently become reservoirs for disease for long periods of time, and in fact the common held belief was that birds had been the original purveyors of this virus that had so devastated the world’s population, he couldn’t remember her ever telling him about viruses that lived for longer than a few weeks or months on inanimate objects. Maybe the authorities meant that there was a possibility that animals would get into the buildings and become infected and thereby become reservoirs, but somehow he doubted it. The Enforcers weren’t the only ones twisting the truth to make it more appetizing.
    Finally, the government claimed that these abandoned buildings provided the perfect hiding place for ghosts, those people who had avoided concentration, refused the authority of the restructured government, and were now considered dead for all intents and purposes.
    Rickards felt a wave of nausea roil through his stomach at the thought of these cutesy little names that were being handed out right, left and center. This post apocalypse era seemed to be filled with new meanings for old terms: ghost, exorcism, concentration, APZ. Why the hell do we always have to try and pretty things up? Rickards thought. It’s not as if it makes the situation any more palatable. We’re still destroying buildings, lives and changing futures, even if it is for the people’s own good.
    As much as it disgusted him, though, he knew these acronyms and other forms of shortened terms had been around for probably as long as there had been governments and other bureaucratic agencies. He didn’t have to like it, though.
    The problem of ghosts plagued him every day. The government considered these malcontents to be nothing short of terrorists, committing treason by refusing the concentration order, avoiding the APZs, and stealing from the communities’ already short supplies in order to survive. The governmental stance on ghosts was simple. Concentrate those possible of being converted to the community way of mind, and exorcize, or eradicate, those groups too entrenched and violent to be converted.
    Fortunately for him, and for the other Enforcers, the majority of people were so demoralized by the devastation wrought by the