Eliot Strange and the Prince of the Resistance

12) Despair

For the next three days, the people in our camp are suffocated by a grief and sorrow so great that we can't seem to get enough oxygen in our lungs to carry on with the most mundane tasks. Most of the people in our camp didn't know the kids on the bus, but they all knew children like them.

It is like we are all grieving what once was, but will never be again.

Sadness these days is contagious, and we all have it.

I've been so sad, I have barely even looked for Torin, but he hasn't looked for me either. It is like we are all grieving everything we have lost since this shit storm began. We are all so sad that we don't want to talk about it.

Cindy Lou, tries to make everyone feel better by telling stories about her friends. Soon, even strangers, are missing all the Leos and the other children. The bus wreck becomes like all catastrophes. News that no one knew before the three strangers and a baby arrived, becomes people who were there and people who heard about it or saw it or smelled the bodies burning. The new stories about the wreck are only fueled by camp favorite, Cindy Lou, who goes from grieving, heartbroken friend to official story teller about what really happened to "our babies".

What makes it all worse is that we have not heard much about what is happening back in Mount Airy either. What little we have heard only makes us want to believe that maybe, for once, things are going our way. We don't know why, but the One Nation Army seems to have retreated back out of town. Rumor hints that a sniper trapped them downtown. Are the monsters turning around? Beaten? Waiting for reinforcements? What is the truth?

We hopefully believe that a lone sniper might have turned the tide until we hear later that they blew him out of the sky with mortars. If he is dead now too, why did the enemy back out of town?

Maybe, we are safe now? We want to believe it. We want to go back to normal. We need to do something. Make a move. We need to get ready or something, but we are frozen in place.

The lack of bad news behind us makes us complacent and lethargic and able to wallow in our grief, and we do. We still have sentry guards, but pretty much anyone who wants in, is let in. It is day three, and we are almost out of food. My dad is right on this point - only Jesus can feed the hungry with five loaves of bread and two fish.

On day three, growling stomachs move people to action. People start to leave and to follow the rumors of more food north of us. Even Bob and the men and women with him, who are from Dobson, desert our sinking ship. Before he leaves, Bob says he is sorry, but that an army's gotta be fed, and he can see where this is all headed. He says he's seen it before.

He's right. We have all seen this before. Hungry mouths to feed don't make good soldiers, even if they are fighting for what is right. History has shown us that if an army has no supplies, the battle is already over.

On the afternoon of day three, Leia and Adam and Sarah decide that we need to go see for ourselves. Find the bus wreck and make sure the children and Ronnie and Mary are buried, or at least all burned up so no animals are tearing them apart. This morbid thought won't leave our heads - that our own are lying dead in a ravine, and no one took the time to respect them. To cover them up. To pray over them. No one who loved them and knew them made sure that, even in death, they knew they were loved.

We talk about it into the night, what we will do the next day. Who will go. I seek out the two men and the woman, whose names I never learned, to find out more details, but they are gone. They left Christopher behind and, according to Cindy Lou, gave him to her.

"We traded," she says. "It was fair and fair. I gave them vegetables in the can. Ones I don't like, green beans and squash, and they gave me a baby. Even Stevens."