reached back with my right hand and let fly the knife from my hidden leg sheath.
I watched as the knife tumbled end over end in slow motion, flying toward its target. On my knees, off balance, wounded, hurting like hell, I was surprised I hit Han at all. So was he. The knife hit sideways and barely nicked him, but the distraction was enough for Megan to jab a finger in his eye. Han screamed and twisted away, allowing her to scramble to her feet.
He followed, latched on to the punch she swung at him, and spun her around with brute strength. My senses still in overdrive, I could hear the shouts and feet running from behind me as Billy, Mark, and dozens more rushed forward, but I knew they were too far away. I watched helplessly as Han snaked an arm around Megan’s neck and began to squeeze. I staggered to my feet, knowing I was closer than the rest of our people, but with the pressure Han was putting on Megan’s neck, her esophagus was going to collapse before any of us could get there. I watched impotently as she managed to turn her chin into the crook of his arm. I cried a string of hopeless profanities as I watched him choking the life out of my daughter.
Megan bit him. As Han squeezed her neck, she dug her chin down into his arm and bit as hard as she could. Han screamed as she ripped a piece of his arm out with her teeth and spit it out. As he loosened his grip, she twisted her body to her right, slipped her leg behind him, slapped her left palm into his groin, and squeezed. For a brief second, he went slack with the pain, and she whipped her right arm back under his, then up over his head to claw into his eyes as she suddenly knelt and yanked his head back. The big man fell backward and landed with his neck squarely on Megan’s bent knee.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
Senses finally dropping back to normal, I welcomed the darkness and fell.
Epilogue
It’s been more than two months since I first wrote those words.
Two long months of resting my cracked ribs, left arm stuck in this sling. I suppose I should be thankful. At least I can get up and walk into the field next door to watch as Megan teaches the morning self defense sessions. Still, it will be several more weeks before I’ll feel healed enough to join them.
Some days I walk down the road to Mark and Jenny’s house and watch as he hammers out his latest project on the forge. Sometimes it’s a knife, sometimes a set of horseshoes. And sometimes we share a wry grin as he pounds out nails from whatever scraps he can find.
Poor Ken with his injured leg can barely get around. He can walk some, with the aid of crutches, but he tires easily, and I can see the frustration in his eyes at the slowness of his progress. It will be a bit longer before he’s strong enough to make the walk to Mark’s.
The world is different now. We don’t have the pharmaceuticals that were once so readily available, and so we have to let Nature do her work unaided.
And we have to learn patience.
Jim comes by most days, and we all discuss the goings on of the town. We try to keep the topics light, but occasionally discussion turns to the uncertainties arising in our future.
For instance, we know now that our plan to store gasoline for the vehicles in town is likely to turn out to be a pipe dream. For while the gasoline may last another few years, we’re finding that little things like oil filters, tires, sparkplugs, and a hundred other irreplaceable parts are rapidly wearing out. In another year, it’s unlikely that there will be more than a handful of running vehicles left.
When the discussions take this turn, I tend to grow despondent. What will the future hold? What legacy will our children inherit?
But I’m generally an optimistic person by nature, and I write my spells of depression off to not having anything to do. Hence, this journal. It helps me keep busy and mostly out of Debra’s way. Mostly, but not completely.
She told me this morning that she’s pregnant. And in that mysterious way she’s always had, she says it’s a girl. I know better than to doubt her.
And I find now that I don’t know what I was worried about. We may lose some of our old ways, some of the things that we once took for granted. But so what if we lose our cars? We’ll ride horses for a while until we learn to repair the cars. And we’ll be closer to nature than we were before D-day. How is that a bad thing?
It will probably take years before we figure our new balance between the past and the present. Eventually, we’ll learn how to get the electricity running, how to manufacture the parts we need to get the cars running, and all the other things we used to know.
But for now, I have a way to hold the depression at bay, something to work for, to look forward to.
We’re going to call her Amber.
