The Few Part 7: The Old Bakery

John stared after the Courtesan as she slid a pistol into her pocket and turned a corner out of sight. He stood there for a moment, not sure what to make of it. He looked back at the nervous crowd and tried to think of something to say. He wanted to say "This is what happens when you kill people," but thought better of it. He knew they wanted him to say "Let's kill them," but he couldn't. They would have no way of doing it even if he had said that, now that all the guns were gone.
After a minute of staring silently back at the crowd, he bowed his head and stepped down from the steps. "It's over," he said, "let's go home."
The crowd looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to say something else. When he didn't, somebody in the crowd shouted "Yeah, everybody go home and get your kitchen knives!" The crowd grew excited and erupted into a noise that John couldn't identify as a shout or a cheer, and made their way back towards the edge of town.
As the crowd walked off, Wendy walked briskly towards John, who now sat seated on the steps. She held the twins firmly by the shoulder as they tried to pull away and follow the crowd. "We'd better go too," she said almost emotionlessly. John nodded as he stood up, and they began to meander back to the houses.

As they neared the neighborhood, panicked crowd members were running back toward the town. John tried to stop and talk to a few of them, but none of them would stop, and their frantic explanations were no more coherent than the dull roar of the growing torrent of people leaving. The Echsons slowly worked their way through the crowd until it thinned, and then began the familiar walk up Pacific Circle to the house. As they walked up the pathway to the door, an unkempt man stepped out of the house and blocked their way. If he had any years on John, he didn't have many, but his skin was tanned and calloused, and his hair worn thin and ragged from Sidewood's unforgiving climate, giving him the aura of a man much older.
The man held a clenched fist to John's chest and growled, "This is my house now." The man was a good bit larger than John, and despite John's efforts, he could not get to the house. After a few minutes of blocking, the man retreated to the porch and grabbed a rifle. It still bore the gold property tag of the Hunting Society. He shot it into the setting sun, the bullet whizzing over John's shoulder before flying off into the unknown. Defeated, John glanced back at his family and they retreated down the street back to town.

They found the group back at the disheveled hunting club building, where a man in his 30's had taken Sam's place on the steps, screaming curses at the lowlife scum that dared to challenge them and drawing cheers of conjoined anger and excitement from the crowd. The people were boiling into a fervor that surpassed even that of the runs, but the new leader dared not turn that fervor to action because at the root of the anger and excitement was the plain truth that they were powerless to do anything.
As the the man on the steps grew tired and began to run short of breath, the cheers of the crowd died down. Murmurs drifted among the crowd as they discussed the new leader's speech, which they found strangely devoid of substance. "He's right," said one man to his wife, "Everything he said was right -- but what are we going to do?"

Succumbing to the requests of the confused crowd, the new leader walked back to the steps. He did not stand on them this time -- he stayed at the base of the steps and said with a false certainty, "We'll set up shop somewhere else. We're going to move to the old bakery building."
Satisfied with this, the crowd proceeded down Main Street to the old bakery building. The building had not been occupied for years, and was only a slight improvement over the destroyed building they were vacating. The decaying wood face of the building had long since lost most of the white paint that had covered it in years past, and here and there boards had fallen off of the outside walls, exposing cracked, weathered beams and fraying, water-soaked insulation. The doorway had been boarded over with plywood that had through years of weathering cracked, warped, and come loose, allowing the persistent an easy entrance. The large opening where the storefront window had been was blocked by ceiling beams that had fallen down in front of it.
Once inside, the softened wood floorboards bent and creaked under their feet. The old shop counter had fallen on one end and sat in a gentle slope to the floor, and the shelves that had once displayed baked goods had broken and fallen from the walls, leaving only a pile of wood and metal brackets on the floor. The partition that had once separated the main room from the kitchen had mostly fallen, leaving only the beams from which it had hung. The kitchen equipment was rusted and in some cases nearly disintegrated, and even the old stone wood burning stove was cracked, with a few stones laying on the floor and the cracked mortar leaving more stones ready to fall at the slightest disturbance.

The people crowded into the building, the floors groaning at the weight, and looked around, expecting the new leader to speak to them, but he wasn't there. The crowd grew restless and upset, and to allay the disaster that would occur if there were to be a panic in this crowded building, John gravitated to one end of the building and started speaking.
"We'll need to stay here," he announced. "Now that are homes are taken, we don't have a choice."
He realized he was not helping to prevent a panic, and searched for something encouraging in the situation. When nothing came to mind, he made something up.
"We'll stay here tonight, and tomorrow, we'll get our homes back!" The crowd relaxed, and John glanced over at his family. They too were smiling at the prospect of his outlook, and as he glanced at the faces of optimism he had incited, he wished it were true.

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