Babe! Babe!
Ain’t no use in looking sad, shambler’s bite ain’t all that bad,
Honey, oh baby mine!
When my eyes go shambler yellow,
Honey! Honey!
When my eyes go shambler yellow,
Babe! Babe!
When my eyes go shambler yellow, then it’s time to end your fellow,
Honey, oh baby mine!
Swing your scythe and take me down,
Honey! Honey!
Swing your scythe and take me down,
Babe! Babe!
Swing your scythe and take me down, before I turn the whole damn town,
Honey, oh baby mine!
By the time we get to the end of the song I ain’t enjoying it so much.
“Halt!”
We all stumble to a stop. There’s a cook wagon in the middle of the field, something I’ve only seen from drawings about Western life. A grizzled old colored man stirs a big pot of something over a fire, and a couple of small, dark-skinned boys run to and fro as the old man barks out orders.
“All right,” the sheriff calls, turning his horse around so he can look down on us. “You got ten minutes to eat. Now git.”
Everyone rushes to the cook fire, pushing and shoving to get next to the little boys, who hold wooden bowls that the old man ladles some kind of porridge into. I stand back, not bothering to shove my way into the throng. Once the melee has cleared I walk up to the front.
The old man looks at me with rheumy eyes. “Ain’t nothing left,” he says, scraping the pot. He manages to produce a bit of burned mush from the bottom and puts it in a bowl for the little boys to share. To me he hands an empty bowl.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Don’t you sass me, missy. I gave you the bowl because you’ll need it for lunch. Now clear on out.”
I blow out an angry breath and go to stand next to Ida, who is poking at her burned porridge piece in dismay.
The big girl, Cora, looks at me, shoveling her porridge into her mouth with her hand. “You’d better learn, Negro. Them fancy manners ain’t gonna keep you alive for long out here.”
I watch Cora eat, and feel a little ill. There are no utensils to eat the porridge, so the options are use your hands or starve. The rest of our group stampeded to the trough like hogs because they knew there wouldn’t be enough food for everyone. And this is all after we were herded out to the work site.
Ida sidles up to me, her expression worried. “Watch out for Cora. She’s one of his favorites,” she says, eyes hooded as she watches the big girl reach into a boy’s bowl and scoop out a mouthful of porridge. “You want a little?” she asks, and I shake my head.
“No, you eat it. I ain’t all that hungry, anyway.” It’s a lie. I’m starving, but Ida is tiny, and she looks like she needs the food more than I do.
“Let’s go!” the sheriff yells from his horse, cracking a whip over our heads. Everyone shoves the rest of their porridge into their mouths and forms back up into their lines, bowls clutched in their hands.
Once again, we start running, our destination unclear. This time when everyone starts singing, I don’t join in.
We stop a short while later, our second run of the morning much shorter than our first. The ground is flat, the sun is already hot, and the grass is high, but I barely notice any of it on account of my aching feet. My boots are laced tight, and each step is painful, blisters already forming. I don’t even want to imagine what my feet look like under the leather.
The sheriff turns around and gives us all a steely gaze. “Fence menders, get to your business.” About half the boys and girls run off and each pick up a spool of bobbed wire, slinging it over their shoulder before they head off to a fence line a few hundred feet in the distance, the waist-high grass parting as they move through it. Cora is one of the fence menders. So fence mending must be easier than patrolling, if what Ida said about her being one of the sheriff’s favorites is true.
Beyond the fence, much closer now, is the imposing exterior wall. I’m guessing that’s where I’m bound.
“Patrol, go get your weapons.” The sheriff points to a ramshackle-looking shed, and this time I run out ahead of the group, ignoring my throbbing feet. I am not going to fight shamblers with a bowl.
I’m one of the first to the shed, Ida right behind me. When the girl next to me, Iris I think her name is, opens the door, my heart falls.
These ain’t weapons. They’re garden implements. There are several sets of sickles and quite a few scythes, but none of them have been cared for. The blades are rusty, the edges dull, and the pair of sickles I pick up ain’t even weighted properly. No wonder the girls on patrol don’t last long.
I grab the sickles and march over to Sheriff Snyder. I’ve had enough of this. I spent three years at Miss Preston’s honing my combat skills, refining my manners, getting an education. I ain’t no flunky to be prancing around the countryside just waiting to get bit. If I’m going out against shamblers, I need to be properly equipped.
“Sheriff, might I trouble you for a moment?”
The man looks down his nose at me, and his horse snorts and paws at the ground. “Why aren’t you lining up with your people?”
“Sir, I do believe you should know that these weapons are highly inadequate for any kind of patrol.” I hold up one of the sickles and point to the curved blade. “These haven’t been sharpened in ages, they are rusted, and I doubt they could cut through grass, much less a shambler’s neck.”
“Jane McKeene, I realize that you are new here, so I’m going to let you go back and have one of the girls explain how things work
