“My friend tried to keep me from going, but I knew I was right. Whatever else was going on, I was going to die if I didn’t get warm. I stood. I shivered, and there was this pain here—” she traced the scar. “My friend cursed me back to the settlement, convinced we were going to get shot. But she came. Safety in numbers.
“Safety in numbers is a powerful idea. By the time we straggled to the smoking ruins, nearly everyone was there. The walkaways were in bad shape, hurting and coughing and cold. Staring at us from the other end of the houses were the vigilantes, hostile and unsure of themselves. They’d had a group madness that let them burn their neighbors’ homes. They’d been a mob, with diffused responsibility, the whole thing an emergent property of social mass, and now it had dissipated.
“My group set up an infirmary, right in front of them, treating our wounded with whatever we had. There were some people who’d hurt themselves jumping, some who’d gotten hurt in the scramble through the woods. It wasn’t until dawn broke and we did a head count and a network sweep that we discovered four people were missing. Two of them straggled in later. Two were found in one of the houses, charred to bone, missed in that scramble. One of the dead was fifteen years old, and no one knew how to get in touch with his parents, somewhere out there in default.
“Word got out about the fire. There was a lot of U.A.V. traffic, not just copters and gliders, but bumbling zepps with medical relief and food. Soon there were people, more walkaways, and the straights freaked out and started to arm up, build a rampart to defend themselves from reprisals.
“There was no revenge. The straights had stolen our earthmoving gear for their defensive rampart, but there were new diggers within a couple of days. Don’t know who brought it. I was laid up with bad fever, infection. When I came to my senses, they told me they hadn’t expected me to make it. I was too poorly to help for weeks. It was only once we had some wet printers running that I had pharma for the infection—some silver-doped antibiotics that knocked it out.”
They listened raptly. Then the girl shook her head like there was a bee in her ear. “Am I getting this right? You got burned out by insane vigilantes who killed your friends and nearly killed you, personally, and you hung around?”
“We didn’t hang around.” She smiled at the memory. “We rebuilt. The normals watched from their ramparts, like a militia, but we didn’t fight. First thing, we built a kitchen, then we baked, because rammed-earth construction is hungry work. Every time cookies or granola bars came out, we brought a tray over to them under a white flag and left it. The trays piled up, untouched, until one day they were gone. Don’t know if they ate them or not.
“It was very Gandhi-ey, though I had an itchy neck from the thought of all those scopes trained on me. They’d dial their laser-sights up to visible and make the dots dance on our foreheads, or over our hearts. But when we put out videos—including a red dot over the breast of a very pregnant woman who’d come to help—there was such a flood of net-rage for the vigilantes they quit it.
“We dozed the old houses when the new ones were done. We’d lived in hexayurts and tents, because our old places were uninhabitable. Having them there, the mummies of our dead, kept us working and shamed the vigilantes. Once the old places were down, we planted wildflowers and grasses that would have been beautiful when they grew out.
“The new settlement was three times as big. A lot of our volunteers wanted to stick around, and then there were new walkaways, so disgusted with the vigilantes they left the gate-guarded town. Some were double agents, but that was okay, since we didn’t have any secrets. Secrets were just overhead.
“As we got nearer to move-in, the atmosphere got festive. There were movie nights on the sides of the buildings, which we’d painted white. We always tried to paint our stuff white, just to do our bit for the planet’s albedo. We turned our excavation site into a swimming hole with water from the creek. The earthworks machines turned into rope swings and dive platforms.
“I was in the pool when the vigilantes moved in again. They HERFed our drones and used pain-rays and sonic flashlights to herd us all into the square between the four rows of houses. Then a guy with a semi-military private security badge used a loudtalker to warn us that he was deputized by the county to clear the land and we had ten minutes to vacate. There was a EULA after that, about how they could just blow us away under the Anti-Terror Act of such-and-such if we engaged in conduct likely to represent a threat to life or property. As soon as he was done, he cranked up that fucking pain-ray. No one even thought about going back for their stuff. It was like your face was melting. There were kids in our group, under ten, and they screamed like they were being sawn to pieces. You hear stories about parents lifting a car off their kids, but that’s nothing—I saw parents walk straight into the pain-ray to get their kids. One of them fell down seizing, and her partner lifted her in a fireman’s carry with a kid under the other arm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more impressive physical feat.
“We couldn’t hide in the woods. They had their U.A.V.s flying overlapping coverage, following us in flocks until we were twenty klicks away. I limped all day and all night, and every time I slowed down, babycopters would drop out of the sky and ram me, nudging me along like cattle. I stuck with a couple who were carrying their kid. They stopped and tried to camp because their little boy couldn’t take another step and none of us had it in us to carry him anymore, and I stood guard over them, batting the copters with a leafy branch. More and more of the little bastards descended on us and eventually we moved on. They begged bicycles from a noncombatant couple on the road, and then I was slowing them down. I moved off on my own.
“I eventually dropped, and I must have been out of the copters’ enforcement range, because they hovered off on the horizon, making that cricket-noise, but I drifted off even so and when I awoke they’d gone. Must have needed a recharge and the vigilantes didn’t think I warranted a relief squadron.”
“What happened next?” the girl said. Of the three, she was most horrified. Limpopo guessed that this was because she was the richest of them, the one for whom this was the most inconceivable.
Limpopo shrugged, felt a tightness in her shoulders, realized she’d harshed her mellow by reliving the experience. It was three years before, and she still got some PTSDish moments, but not for a while. This telling made it come strong. These three reminded her of whom she’d been, a fresh walkaway and, yes, a bit of a shlepper. The fire and the forced march had burned shlepper instinct out, made her realize the uselessness of getting attached to stuff.