Free The Raid: an Eden short story by Keary Taylor

 
     
     
    I exhaled slowly, creating small, wispy
clouds as we moved silently through the still evening.  Dew collected under my
fingers, freezing my hands to my shotgun.  The cold of March crept down my
neck, wrapping around my body, and sinking into my skin. 
    I glanced at my companions when we
stopped at the tree line.  They were tired and cold after traveling the last
two days, one of which snow fell from the sky.  Despite the danger that lay
before them, they were determined, focused.  They looked back at me.  Bill,
Graye, and Tye – my brothers in arms. 
    We were the elite defenders of Eden. 
    And this was a raid.
    We waited as the last traces of light
disappeared from the horizon.  The stars fazed into the sky and the moon rose
over the city, washing it in pale gray light. 
    The darkness brought safety in an unsafe
world.
    “Let’s go,” Tye whispered as he stepped
from his hiding place toward the road.
    Our feet moved silently, our firearms
held at the ready.  The dark road stretched before us, illuminated by the
flashlights Tye and Graye pointed into the night.  The concrete was broken and
cracked.  Patches of green spread across its dark surface, nature reclaiming what
was rightfully its.
    There were abandoned cars everywhere. 
Some parked on the side of the road, some sitting in the middle of the street,
the doors hanging open and the keys still in the ignition.  The buildings
around us started to crumble.  And animals that at one time stuck to the
mountains out of fear of humans prowled the alleys and wild backyards.
    The four of us had been on dozens of
raids together before.  We moved as a well-trained team, aware of one another’s
movements, able to communicate without words.  These were my comrades, my
fellow soldiers.
    I may have only been a
seventeen-year-old girl, but they still respected me.  I was one of them.
    Tye walked at the forefront of us, his
rifle sweeping with his eyes.  Eyes that were deadly accurate.  Tye never
missed a target.
    “ You need to stay focused on the next shot,” he’d told me once when I was
thirteen.  He adjusted my hands on the rifle and scooted my feet into the right
position with his own boots.  “If you keep that bad shot in your head, your
focus won’t be where it needs to be and you’re probably going to miss the next
one too.”
    With his
teaching, as well as Bill’s, I almost never missed these days.
    We were in most dire need of
ammunition.  It was one of the only things we couldn’t create ourselves, and
one thing that was absolutely necessary for our survival.  You couldn’t forage
bullets in the mountains where the colony survived.  With one outdoors store in
the city, and one general-carries-everything-you-need store that had
ammunition, we headed for the outdoors store.
    We came around the back of the familiar building. 
Tye quickly passed the beam of light through the windows, and found the store
empty.  Pushing open the glass door we had broken years ago, Tye, Bill, and
myself stepped inside while Graye kept watch at the door.
    Since we walked into and out of the city
on foot, we were extremely limited in what we could take on each raid.  We
could only carry so much in our packs.  That was the reason we had to go on
raids nearly once a month.  Our minimal supplies could only last so long, and
so we had to go back into danger time and time again.
    “I’ll load you up first,” Tye said to me
as he started picking up shotgun shells from a shelf.  The stack was getting
smaller and smaller.  We’d go through the entire supply before fall came. 
    I nodded and turned.  My pack jerked as
he pulled the zipper open and then sagged toward the ground when he started
loading it.
    “Here,” I said, reaching for the packs
of socks on a rack right in front of me.  They were thick.  Hiking socks. 
Socks for the end of the world.  “Put these in too.”  I handed back six packs
to Tye.
    When my pack was loaded as heavy