There was no time to waste.

As promised, Abdul had left the farm before dawn, but not before pass­ing on a warn­ing: They knew where he was and they were com­ing. “They” of course were the adults. Yakov called in the three old­est kids, plus Pietra. When he’d told them what Abdul had said they just stared at him. Then Pietra began to cry. Yakov hugged her tightly.

Why are they doing this?” She asked between snif­fles.
“They’re just hun­gry.”
“But so are we.”
“I know. Lis­ten to me. I want to you round up every­body around your age. Take them to the barn and lock it from the inside. Bar the door with any­thing you can find.
“But what about you? You can’t even walk!”
“No argu­ments, Pietra. Go!”

It looked like she was going to cry again, but she ran out of the house before Yakov could be sure. He turned to look at the other three.
“Help me.”
“We’re not fight­ers, Yakov,” said Evan.
“I know that, but we can’t let them take this away from us. We can’t go back.”
“Then what?” This was Sally.
“We’re going to have to learn how to fight. This place is too valu­able to lose.”

When he thought about it, it had been too easy. The escape from Kilda, the unevent­ful trip through the bad­lands, and then find­ing the farm laid out wait­ing for them. He wasn’t sur­prised karma had come to collect.

Yakov had clam­bered onto the roof of the farm­house for a bet­ter look. With his leg the way it was this was the best he could do for their group. Down below he made out pairs of kids hid­ing and wait­ing. Sun­light glinted off the pots and pans a few of them had scav­enged from the kitchen. Then some­thing else caught his eye. A black mass had begun to form at the top of the ridge. A lump caught in Yakov’s throat. There were too many of them.
Get ready!” He shouted. He heard a few sobs in response. The mass was get­ting closer now and sep­a­rat­ing into indi­vid­ual fig­ures. At the front of the group he recog­nised his father.

One of the adults threw a rock through the win­dow and then it was on. The adults swarmed over the farm tram­pling the newly sown crops. A group of kids ran out and tack­led those clos­est to them. Once the other adults saw the pot dan­gling from Sean’s hand they pounced like wild ani­mals, scream­ing “We’re hun­gry. You have to feed us.”

Other kids ran out from their hid­ing places swing­ing in wide arcs in an attempt to ward off the rav­en­ous horde. Yakov saw the car­nage below and braced him­self on the win­dow sill.
“Stop it! Stop it all of you!” Hans pulled a woman off the still body of Sean and stared at Yakov through sad eyes.
“Oh no,” she cried, “What have I done.”
The kids quickly formed a wall between the adults and Sean.
“Get out of here. Just go.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Collabowrite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.