Which was why she had decided five years ago to take her chances with the Ghosts.
Before that, she had been living in the Safeco Field compound along with two thousand other people. When the Great Wars had escalated to a point where half the cities in the nation had been wiped out and the remainder were under siege from terrorist attacks and plagues and chemical poisonings of all sorts, much of the population began to occupy the compounds. Most were established within existing structures like Safeco, which had been a baseball park decades ago. Sports complexes offered several advantages. First, their walls were thick and strong, and provided good protection, once the entrances were properly fortified. Second, they could hold thousands of people and provide adequate storage space for supplies and equipment. Third, all contained a playing surface, which could be converted to gardens for growing food and raising livestock.
At first, the strategy worked well. The measure of protection the compounds offered was undeniable. There was safety in numbers. A form of government could be established and order restored within their walls. Food and water could be better foraged for and more equitably distributed. A larger number of people meant more diversity of skills. When one compound filled up, those turned away established another, usually in a second sports complex. If there was none available, a convention center or even an office tower was substituted, although none of these ever worked quite as well.
The biggest problem with the compounds began to manifest after the first decade, when the once-men started to appear. No one seemed certain of their origin, although there were rumors of “demons” creating them from the soulless shells of misguided humans who had been subverted. Urban legends, these stories could never be confirmed. Some claimed to have seen these demons, though no one Owl had ever met. But there was no denying the existence of the once-men. Formed up into vast armies, they roamed the countryside, attacking and destroying the compounds, laying siege until resistance was either overcome or the compound surrendered in the false hope that mercy would be shown. When word spread of the slave pens and the uses to which the once-men were putting the captured humans, resistance stiffened.
But the compounds were not fortresses in the sense that medieval castles had been. Once besieged, they turned into death traps from which the defenders could not escape. The once-men outnumbered the humans. They did not require clean water or good food. They did not fear plague or poisoning. Time and patience favored the attackers. One by one, the compounds fell.
This might have discouraged those hiding in the compounds if there had been anyplace else for them to go. But the mind-set of the compound occupants was such that the idea of surviving anywhere else was inconceivable.
Outside the walls you risked death from a thousand different enemies. There were the Freaks.
There were the feral humans living in the rubble of the old civilization. There were the armies of the once-men, prowling the countryside.
There were things no one could describe, crawled up out of Hell and the mire.
There was anarchy and wildness. The humans in the compounds could not imagine contending with these.
Even the risk of an attack and siege by the once-men was preferable to attempting life on the outside where an entire world had gone mad.
Owl was one of the people who believed like this. She had been born in the Safeco Field compound, and for the first eight years of her life it was all she knew. She never went outside its walls, not even once. In part, it was because she was crippled at birth, deprived of the use of her legs for reasons that probably had something to do with the poor quality of the air or food or water her mother ingested during pregnancy. After her parents died from a strain of plague that swept the compound when she was nine, she was left orphaned and alone. A quiet and reclusive child, in part because of her disability, in part because of her nature, she had never had many friends. She began living with a family who needed someone to care for their baby. But then the baby died, and she was dismissed and left without a family once more.
She began working in the kitchens of the compound and sleeping in a back room on a cot. It was a dreary, unrewarding existence, but her choices were limited. In the compounds, everyone over the age of ten worked if they wanted to remain. If you did not contribute, you were put out. So she worked.
But she was unhappy, and she began to question whether the life she was living was the best she could hope for. She began spending time on the walls, looking at the city, wondering what was out there.