The Aftermath

Grant watched as several people of the group went out and begun searching the bodies. Mr Maxwell, the old Vietnam vet who had lived in the house two doors down for as long as Grant could remember was one of the first ones out there. The people looking through the bodies were systematic and following the old warrior’s lead. First removing any nearby weapons, then checking for concealed weapons or documents. Anything found was taken away and put to the side out of reach of the injured or deceased person. Not enough to take attention away from the person being searched, but enough to make sure that they couldn’t be just grabbed and used against the person searching.

It was a bit of a gruesome sight in and of itself, and something that Grant was glad he wasn’t having to do. Not just for the mental aspect of searching a dead body, but the fact that those people had died in a violent conflict. He wasn’t gong to get queasy let alone faint at the sight of blood, but he was glad he wasn’t having to worry about getting their blood all over him either.

As Grant watched, he saw that there was one of the men towards the back who wasn’t dead. Fortunately he wasn’t trying to pretend to be dead either. Sarah was watching as one of the neighbors applied pressure to a wound in his leg. From what it looked like, it seemed that the man was likely to survive, or he doubted they’d have been spending the resources to make sure the bleeding stopped. A world that was harder-hearted than the one it had been only a month ago. But you can’t waste medical supplies on those who were doomed, so the fact that the man was getting aid was a point in his favor. The fact he was alive was likely due to the fact that he’d been wielding a machete, the weapon being several feet from him now. Being a lower priority target had given him enough time to start to surrender, and it had saved his life.

“Do we have a medical professional?” Grant wondered aloud. “I mean, I get he’s probably not going to just die, but I don’t think we have anyone that is a trained medical professional do we?”

“Not on our team, but Mrs Maxwell was an army nurse. Look, there she goes now.” Brittany said back, her voice muffled from the brief but loud fight.

Grant nodded, distracted by the ringing in his ears that was starting to grow louder, and that was either a good sign or a terrible one. Either his hearing was recovering from the systematic miniature explosions that had gone off near him. He’d always heard battles were noisy, but now he was kind of impressed that he was able to hearing anything at all. “The difference between theoretical and practical knowledge, I suppose.” He murmured to himself as he watched the members of this small enclave of safety move through the wounded. He then switched to watching the houses away from the carnage and then further out than that. He let his eyes slowly move as he scanned for movement or anything that seemed like it didn’t belong. Not focusing on any singular thing, but rather the area itself. It was a trick his dad had taught him when hunting, and while he hadn’t done much hunting, he’d always remembered how to do the focus trick.

After checking to make sure that Mr Maxwell hadn’t lost his mind, Grant shrugged and left them to it. Instead, he took two of his girls and began taking the bodies up to the crossroads that led to their housing division, and began dumping the bodies there. Nothing glamorous, nothing overly gruesome, just a pile of bodies. Once they had all been dropped into a more or less stable pile, Grant took out a piece of chalk and wrote a simple message on the road on each side of them.

“Don’t go looting, and don’t worry about ending up like these idiots.”

It was simple, it was clear, and it was an absolutely crazy thing. Piles of bodies in a suburban area wasn’t something that happened in a civilized world and in a civilized country. But, that wasn’t what they had anymore, was it? Not until it could be remade and rebuilt into something that would work around the concept that men could capture and claim women. When new rules for how you acted could be codified and understood by everyone.