Steve stared at the tracks before him. They shouldn’t exist, and yet they did. They shouldn’t have gone into the woods south of town, and yet they did. They shouldn’t have continued, or veered off, or led into what looked to be a militia compound with guard towers and men in trucker caps, and yet, well. To be fair he was still a little too far away to judge gender, and short hair was often more practical. The schnauzer growled and he grabbed its muzzle, looking it in the eye and willing it with all the evolved understanding between their species to keep its big yap shut. In a very literal sense.
It tried to shake him off. That seemed fair to Steve, who held on anyway and looked it in the eyes.
“Shh.” he said. “This is important.”
The schnauzer stopped, blinked, shifted its eyes away and back, and then relaxed its jaw. Steve let go. It shook its head and nodded once before lying down in the dirt and leaves: every muscle tense, snarl on its bearded lips, and silent as a set of graves where no hooligans or homeless had taken up temporary residence. Steve looked back at the camp.
They’d been putting wood to good use, he had to admit. Whether it was the wood he’d earmarked or, more likely, wood from any number of other places, they’d built themselves a fairly solid fence out here in the middle of nowhere. The advantages of labor, Steve thought, rue dominating his palate. And they certainly seemed to have a well of that particular resource. He couldn’t see in, but at a guess he would have estimated they had twenty or thirty people in there, based on the things he could see and the various interactions that seemed to take place off-screen. Seems stupid to be out here, he thought. Especially now.
A twig cracked. Steve jerked his head to the left. The schnauzer leapt to its feet, silent snarl withering in its intensity. Everything went dark.
We think the idea of militias are sort of silly. What’s the thought process there? You’re worried about mobs, so you form one? You’re worried about big governments so you form a small one? You’re concerned about, what, military oppression so you grab the tools to effect it your own self on a microscopic scale? The things we’ve seen come out of groups like that doesn’t encourage us as to their efficacy in fighting what are admittedly some problematic aspects of society. It just makes us think even harder that maybe humanity doesn’t quite deserve the things it’s killed and maimed and decimated to acquire. Which is probably a fair and broad thought.
But consider the militia member, whose disagreement with us on that should be obvious. To them these concepts are normal. This says a lot about the human brain as a lattice, more than anything else. There are no ideas except the ideas it has in it. That means each individual person defines their own reality, whether they realize it or not, and that’s kind of a scary thought to us. We have no science fiction method for collectivization. Humanity is reliant on empathy, a thing not everyone has, and reason, a thing most people don’t have, to drag it along into the concrete world and out of the primordial, soupy mess of constant existential conflict. And when a brain has missed that particular bus and doesn’t know or think to look up a schedule for the next one, suddenly joining an adult playgang with guns and hate would seem to make a lot more sense.
So what would we have people do? Not a lot. This isn’t some kind of diatribe for or against anything. It’s merely acknowledging a truth we hold to be self-evident but seems to be patently ignored in a fair few places: everybody’s crazy, nobody knows it, and it’s all the most normal thing in the world.
Steve’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. Sunset was quick this time of year, and the badger that had broken the stick blinked slowly as it shifted its own perspective, presumably taking in Steve and the schnauzer. It turned and waddled off, flat body low to the ground sort of like huge, furry cockroach. Steve exhaled and prepared to futilely grab the collar of the dog next to him, roughly three quarters of his weight but with two extra points of leverage and a being filled with muscle and potential determination, but it didn’t chase the badger. Instead it turned its giant, bearded head back toward the camp and resumed its silent snarl.
Something was different. The guards, still at their posts, seemed more aware than they had been seconds before. Not necessarily in Steve’s direction, which was comforting, but not away from it either. He tried to sink lower and swung his head side to side to see if he could find the source of consternation. Suddenly, from the undergrowth of forest, a deer launched itself out into the relative open near Steve’s position. It stopped, massive antlers quivering in the sudden stop like a cartoon pole-vaulter, turned all five eyes to look at him, and then pushed away to his right before being replaced by three more deer. The schnauzer attempted a half-hearted snap at the unexpected intruder, but missed wildly. The second wave of deer didn’t stop, instead following what seemed to be their leader on through the undergrowth in what turned out to be a conveyor belt of herbivore, confusing Steve and the schnauzer both with the embarrassment of confident protein riches.
The militia was not confused- or rather, at least one member, with both a rifle and a position on the wall was not confused, and before too many waves had passed the crack of a rifle echoed through the darkening glade. A deer, which had been passing between Steve and the camp, dropped and began to twitch. Steve, who felt vulnerable now that he was on the other side of the table of steaks from a group of wood thieves with trucker caps and guns they were willing to fire, began to back slowly away, doing his best to simulate dragging the schnauzer in such a way that it would understand it needed to help him accomplish the act.
Feeling his way backwards with a sixth sense he’d never had before and didn’t consider himself to have now, Steve watched the camp’s gate. Most of the guards that he could see had ducked down behind the walls, and the ones he could see were looking in other directions- mostly down at what must have been a gathering of gatherers ready to come collect the evening’s meal. Rifles cracked again, gradually more to his right, as the group attempted to bring down further provision. Laughter bubbled up from within the den, frothing across the forest and into Steve’s ears where it sounded vaguely threatening. He wondered why, thought about who was laughing, and realized he didn’t particularly need to wonder for much longer.
The schnauzer obeyed, clearly displeased about the situation but putting an absolutely furious face on things, and together they wended towards what Steve hoped was the truck. This was without much justification, it must be said, but certainly he was moving away from the camp and that was an operational success. He saw the main gate open and several people skip out, heading in the direction of the deer and also himself, in a confluence of events he wished he’d done more to prevent. He didn’t know what he could have done, but he knew that their skipping was faster than his backwards, dog-pulling meander, and everything in the world seemed to be a little bit darker because of it.
Skipping, he thought. Actually skipping. Like children, in some kind of happy park scenario. He looked closer, through the dim, woodsy twilight. Because they were children. A fascinating turn of events if ever there was such a thing. Sending the kids out to go get the dead beasts didn’t seem like a particularly expected thing to do, and if it hadn’t been for the adults with guns he might have stopped to examine the situation a little further, but as mentioned there were, and he continued backwards. Then the schnauzer growled, snapped its head around, and Steve yelped in pain as his wrist turned in on itself like a twist-tie shutting the plastic bag around a loaf of bread. Something ripped into his shoulder and he dropped in a heap to the ground.
