“Get up.”

“Can I have some soup?”

“Get. Up.”

“I’m a good worker.”

Carl pulled the man up by his armpits, and for a moment the man remained curled, his legs pulled to his chest, his whole body hovering over the dirt. Then he slowly let his legs down and they saw that he was very tall, stringy. Carl appraised him. He might be either very strong or very weak.

“Let’s go,” Carl said. He marched the man back out into the bushes.

When Carl pivoted to return to camp, the man in the madras shorts reached for him. It was a plaintive reach, one of desperation, sorrow even. They could all see that. But Carl took it as aggression, and he grabbed the man’s arm and lunged at his throat. Carl and the man slapped at each other’s faces. Their hands and fingers clawed, but their wrists broke form and rendered every move ineffective. They had never seen Carl fight before. It turned out he wasn’t very good at it.

The men spun in a circle, their feet shuffling, as though dancing, slapping at each other to avoid getting slapped. Finally Carl landed a punch in the center of the man’s face and he went down to one knee holding his nose. Carl kicked the man’s foot out from under him, and the man fell to the side, his hands at his face, his knees tucked again. He stayed down.

Carl returned to camp and the Community went about their day.

They cleaned up from breakfast. They did small tasks, tidied as though guests were expected. They turned the meat in the smoker, stretched skins. The Gatherers went out in small groups to gather. They did what they could to distract themselves from the presence of the man. But, nervous, they did their tasks poorly. They scraped a hole into one of the skins. Meat fell into the smoking fire. A batch of pine nuts was ruined.

During supper, the man crawled closer, his tongue hanging out, dirt crusted. Carl walked to him, grabbed him by the collar of his fleece pullover, and dragged his limp, long frame back past the edge of camp.

He sat between sage bushes, exactly where he’d fallen that morning. He broke off the leaves and slowly ate them. It was not sustenance and would eventually make him ill. As they fell asleep, they heard him crawl away. They heard the wet slap of diarrhea against the dirt and the man whimpering.

In the morning, Debra woke again to find the man tangled in her skins, and Carl pushed him to the boundary and fought him again. They did the same dance they had done, but for a much shorter amount of time. Carl landed a punch after only a few turns on their dusty dance floor, and the man crumbled.

This cycle repeated itself over the next two nights and mornings. Debra began to sleep in Juan’s bed. In the morning, the man would be found in Debra’s bed, luxuriating in the comfort and space. And Carl would drag him away from camp.

On the third night, around the fire, Debra said, “I brought him scraps yesterday.”

“That’s not allowed,” said Dr. Harold bitterly.

“I don’t care,” said Debra. “And I’m going to do it again tonight.”

“Debra, why?” Bea asked.

“Because I want my bed back,” she said. Juan scowled at her and she scowled back. “He kicks in his sleep.”

“She steals the covers,” he said. They each pawed at their own bleary eyes.

“He’s not going away,” Glen croaked. “Maybe we should discuss what to do?”

“Let me handle it,” said Carl. The conversation ended there.

As people retired to their beds, Carl walked to where the man crouched and kicked him. They saw the man trying to flatten against the ground as Carl lifted him with kicks to his abdomen.

“Stay down,” Carl demanded, though it was clear the man had no intention of fighting back. Carl kicked him over onto his back and straddled him. He pulled his head up by his hair, and he landed four punches to his face. When he let go of his hair, the man’s head fell back to the ground, as if returning to where it belonged. Carl leaned toward him, secret-telling distance, and stayed like that as everyone else held their breath. Then Carl walked back to camp and crawled into his bed, where Bea lay waiting.

In the morning, the man was building a fire poorly. His lips were full and purple. His cheeks distended like a harvesting chipmunk’s.

The breakfast crew took over and the man watched carefully, taking notes with no paper. When they all sat around the fire to eat, he sat too. And when they were given a bowl of blackened rice, he was given one too.

“This is Adam,” Carl said.

“Hi, Adam,” they all said.

Adam tried to smile, but no emotion escaped his swollen face.

“Tell us a little about yourself, Adam,” said Debra.

And that’s when they heard that there were other people in the Wilderness State. That they’d been here for some time. And that more were coming.

His chin quivering with anger, Carl declared them, whoever they were, to be Trespassers. But Adam said they already had a name. They called themselves the Mavericks.

? ? ?

Sister and Brother and Pinecone woke from nightmares in which they were blindfolded and dragged away in the purple night to the Mavericks’ dirty hovels. They said they pictured a kind of wild man the adults knew did not exist. A wild man covered in dirt, animal blood dripping from his mouth. The kind of wild man City dwellers had perhaps always imagined the Community to be. But probably these other people looked like Adam. Their City clothes were dirty and hanging on them, but were still City clothes. Their hair was too long but still evoked the last professional cut they’d received. The soles of their shoes were splitting, but they were rubber soles. They still had jeans. They still had unbroken eyeglasses. They would look ruined by the Wilderness, not at one with it. What they wondered was, while Adam seemed harmless enough, would the others be?

According to Adam, the City the Community had known was nothing compared to how it was now, and that is why people were fleeing, making such a risky trek to hide in the last place they could. The last wilderness. Whenever the Newcomers would try to nod their heads knowingly, being the previous most recent City dwellers, Adam would point at them and bark, “No, you don’t know. You don’t know.”

His storytelling went on for days. But then, one night, he went quiet. They thought it might be fun to have a new audience who hadn’t heard their own stories, the ones about the beginning, the Ballads they’d created from their history. So Juan told them, creep ing around the circle, his eyes beaming emotion, making faces, hands fluttering in pantomime. He’d done some amateur theatre in the City, he told them, which was new information.

Adam sat there politely the first night, then distractedly the second. On the third, he stuck his thumb out and thrust it down. “Boo,” he said as Juan recounted a treacherous hunt. Juan froze.

“Excuse me?” said Bea.

“I said, ‘Boo.’” Adam stuck his tongue out. “Your stories are a snooze. And while I’m at it, boo-hoo, poor you.” He rubbed his fists into his eyes and said, “Waah. Hardship? You had it so easy! You guys just walked right in. I bet they flew you over in a cargo plane.”

The Community said nothing since it was true.

“You walked up to the door of the Wilderness State and it was wide-open. Practically given a red carpet. Now you want to hear about hardship, I’ll tell you about hardship. We had to escape the City. We didn’t have a cargo plane take us. We had to walk to get here. We bribed truck drivers if we were lucky enough to see one. It took months and months. We evaded the authorities the whole way. The ones that made it anyway. And there are plenty who didn’t, okay. Okay?” He shouted and they startled, and some of them obediently nodded their heads. “But we’ve been here for years and you didn’t even suspect it. We all know who you are. We’ve seen your bare asses when you shit. And you’ve never even suspected we existed.”

The Community was dumbstruck.

Carl latched onto what he could. “Years?” he said. “Then why are your clothes still so new?”

“I didn’t say I had been here for years. We. Us. The Mavericks.”

“How did you manage to hook up with them if we’ve never seen them?”

“I guess I’m a better explorer than you.”

This angered Carl. “I think you’re an ex-Ranger who got fired and went nuts and didn’t want to leave.”

“No, I’m a Maverick. I’m on the team. We don’t follow their rules. We make our own rules.” Adam popped his arm and made a muscle. It quivered effortfully. He still looked dangerously undernourished. It was hard to know if he was telling them a story or the truth.

“We get in trouble when you don’t follow the rules,” Carl complained. “We get blamed.”

Again, Adam wrenched at his eyes. “Boo-fucking-hoo. Try being on the run 24/7.”

“We don’t have to run,” said Carl. “Because we’re allowed to be here.”