Peter Jaxon—Demetrius Jaxon

Peter Jaxon’s relationship with his father, Demetrius Jaxon, is reshaped by discoveries that turn the Long Rides from a seemingly simple search for survivors into a project of recovering the past. Through weapons Demetrius left behind, Theo’s account of family and political conflict, and Auntie’s memory of conversations about the stars, Peter begins to understand both what his father sought and how incompletely he had known him.

The hidden weapons and the Long Rides

Theo reveals that Demetrius found an underground bunker at the old Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms, about a two-day ride away. Much of the base had been buried by sand; the weapons were stored underground, boxed and dry. The cache included rifles, pistols, mortars, machine guns, and grenades, as well as vehicles and a couple of tanks. Demetrius and his brother Willem could not move the heavier weapons or use the vehicles, but they carried rifles back to the station by cart over three trips. Willem was killed before the work was finished.

The secrecy was partial rather than absolute. Demetrius told Peter and Theo’s mother and a few others, and Theo guesses that the Colonel and Old Chou knew. Zander must have known because he was hiding the weapons at the station. Peter, however, had not been told. Learning about the cache forces him to confront not just his father’s concealed activities but also the distance between Demetrius’s purposes and what his sons understood of them.

Family conflict and the end of the rides

Theo connects the end of the public Long Rides to conflict between Demetrius and Sanjay. Sanjay opposed the rides, especially after Raj, his brother, was killed while riding with Demetrius. Theo believes Sanjay resented Raj’s choice to accompany their father; after Raj’s death, the dispute worsened. Sanjay turned the Household against Demetrius, had him voted out as Head, and brought the rides to an end. Demetrius then stepped down and began riding alone.

This history gives Peter a new context for his father’s isolation and for the secret weapons. The rides were not simply an accepted communal undertaking: they had become entangled with bereavement, political opposition, and a family disagreement that left Demetrius outside the role he had once held. Peter is discouraged that Demetrius kept the secret from him, and that Theo had kept it too. His reaction registers the cost of inheritance: the brothers receive their father’s unfinished purpose only through delayed disclosures and disagreement.

What Demetrius believed he had seen

The brothers also dispute the meaning of Demetrius’s final search. Peter says their father believed something; Theo answers that this belief got him killed. From Theo’s perspective, the fact that the subject is rarely discussed does not alter the conclusion he draws while standing the Mercy: Demetrius did not go out merely to surrender or give up. He went because he could not bear to remain ignorant. Theo calls the decision both brave and foolish, and says that Demetrius got his answer.

Peter identifies the reported sighting as a Walker at Milagro. Theo allows that Demetrius may have seen one, but suggests he may instead have seen what he wanted to see; either way, Theo questions what a single Walker would change. The difference between the brothers is not settled by proof. Rather, the scene makes their competing accounts of Demetrius visible: to Theo, his father’s final act was an impulsive pursuit of an answer; to Peter, the belief behind it may connect to something larger than the immediate evidence.

Peter’s changed understanding of the past

In the days after the events of that night, Peter replays what happened, including Caleb’s account of the tower and Theo’s bitter remarks about the guns. He comes to recognize that the cache matters because it carries the material power of the Time Before into the present. Until then, he had treated the old world as something cut off by the catastrophe: a past with no bridge to the world of the Colony, where the Army was gone and the territory beyond the walls seemed only an open grave of forgotten history.

Holding one of Demetrius’s rifles, Peter senses that this division is not complete. The past and its capacities have flowed into his hands. He revises his assumption that Demetrius had been searching mainly for survivors: perhaps, Peter realizes, the Long Rides were an attempt to remember the world itself. The rifles are therefore more than a hidden stockpile. They make the past tangible, and give Peter a way to understand a search whose purpose he had taken for granted without truly considering it.

A father remembered through other people

Peter’s growing knowledge also depends on memories held by people beyond the immediate family. Auntie tells him that Demetrius used to visit her and speak about the stars. She recalls their conversations as a familiar exchange: he would tell her he had seen them, and she would ask how they were doing. Peter is surprised that his father shared these moments with her; he had not imagined Demetrius talking with Auntie about the Long Rides or the stars. She makes clear that they spoke about many things, including the stars.

This recollection unsettles Peter’s picture of Demetrius as much as the hidden weapons do. In just a few days, the world seems to have changed in a fundamental way, not because Peter learns that his father was a different person, but because he discovers how much of that person had existed outside his knowledge. Demetrius’s relationship with Peter is thus reconstructed through fragments: a brother’s explanation, a rifle recovered from the old world, and an older woman’s remembered conversations. Together they suggest that the Long Rides carried both a search into unknown territory and an effort to preserve a past that the Colony believed it had lost.