[DRB]: Stay Alive
Dated: 8/19/1899 (2024)
The dead quiet of the night found Filly Maddison doing something she did often: writing telegrams. Tonight was different, though— not some mere response to a business order, or even a report back to her gang's leader. A briefing had already been sent, discussions had already been had, and she'd been set to task. Tonight her frantic hands penned the same message over and over, short and anything but sweet: A warning. One she hoped would reach everyone in time.
The pen shook in her hands, letters sprawling against the page haphazardly.
She'd heard some people drank to steady their nerves, but after the night prior even just the smell of alcohol made her sick to her stomach. It had been hard enough to keep her lunch down in the first place.
The scent of fire lingered on her clothes and hair. The smell of fire, and a touch of something more that she didn't want to even think about. They'd really done it now, and what did they have to show for it? It seemed like every few days she'd had that thought, and every time she thought the tension had reached its peak, something came along to draw the noose close, tighter.
Filly sifted quickly through her telegrams, struggling to find the next name she needed to address.
Her breath caught in her throat as she brushed across one that had taken the wind out of her lungs when she'd first read it. She couldn't help but linger on it, the bloody fingerprints so much bigger than her own and the page tainted by the scent of gunpowder. "Don't make it be me, Filly", he'd written. ”Don't make it be me.”
She couldn't bear to read it again. She set her jaw and steadied her resolve, forcing herself to set it aside and keep searching.
Another telegram caught her eye only a few down from that— Different penmanship, from someone who knew her far less, and yet his words had stuck with her the way a nightmare lingers on your shoulders after waking.
“I guess the moral of the story is that you're always on the King's land, whether you want it or not”, he’d written. “No one wants to be gutted like a fish. And you are directly on a path to poke at something you hardly can handle.”
They’d really done it now, she thought again. And what did they have to show for it?
With sinking shoulders, she thought of the story he’d told. The hunter and the bear, the king’s men and their spears. What were they all anymore but beasts — creatures without malice but equally without mercy, cornered on the very lands they called their home? Lands they had hunted, lived, fought, and bled on?
What could they do but run on borrowed time until it ran out? What else could they do but struggle and fight, fight the only way they knew how, for the only thing they had worth protecting— each other?
It had all happened so quickly— happened the way things always did. Everything changed in an instant, the way it had so many times before. One moment they were riding up on the others, the next they were riding for any semblance of seclusion. One moment she was thumbing through the assortment of herbs in her pouch, the next she was crouched on a cliffside, watching for threats while cries of pain rang out behind her. Busying her hands to hide the way they shook. Couldn’t the marshal have just talked? God, couldn’t she have just given them anything? Did it have to go the way it had?
…at the same time, could she blame her?
…would Filly be able to do the same for her own people? Could she withstand whatever lay ahead, when this all caught up to her? Cornered in a cell, at the mercy of the very hands they’d bitten?
It ended in blood. One way or another, it wouldn’t end without blood. And what would they have to show for it?
Each day, the pervasive, sinking feeling weighed heavier and heavier on her shoulders.
She had to believe they’d all make it. Piece by piece, bullet by bullet, kidnapping by burning by drowning, second by second borrowed and stolen— they would all make it through. They would all make it long enough that there’d be another way out. There had to be.
…didn’t there?
Filly finished the final telegram, trembling hands gathering them all into a pile to send. She murmured under her breath as she recounted them, ensuring she’d gotten everyone. One, two, three…
Flipping through them all one last time, she stared at the final lines written over and over therein:
Stay alert. Stay alive.
Stay free.