by Penn Gates
Nix jumps. “Crap! Don't sneak up on me like that!”
Cash stands on the stairs, resting one hand on the large boulders that make up the foundation of the house. “Sorry,” he says. “I wasn't all that quiet. You must have been deep in thought.”
Nix lays down her gun. “What do you want? I'm in the middle of something here.”
“I can see that,” he says and descends into the cellar without an invitation.
“You're not from around here,” Nix says, applying an oily rag to the barrel of her gun. “Where are you from?”
“Other side of the Ohio River—West Virginia." He slouches against the stone wall at the bottom of the stairs, apparently deciding to respect her space.
“That's quite a hike,” she comments. “Why travel so far north?”
“Wanted to see what the hell is happenin’,” he answers. “Only way you can find out anything these days is to go see for yourself.”
“So, what did you see?”
“Cities on fire. Lotta crazy people runnin’ around the edges of 'em. After awhile decided to keep clear of towns. Just as soon not have to shoot anybody 'less I have to.”
“I came down from Cleveland,” she says, surprising herself by volunteering the information. “Pretty much the same deal. Hardly seen anybody else since I've been out here, and frankly, I just don't get it. Did the damn fools all think the Feds were going to save them? I heard the military had opened refugee centers, but I thought they'd be temporary.”
“We're all pretty much fucked no matter where we are,” Hatfield comments and then colors. “Meant no offense, ma'am.”
“None taken,” she says. “I'm not averse to a little salty language myself – or at least I didn't used to be. Now I'm surrounded by small children and religious types.”
“You've got a big job here, no doubt about it. Lots of folks dependin' on you.”
“I don't need any more kids, that's for sure." She's not sure if she's talking about him or not, but he seems to think so.
“I'm no kid,” he growls. “I'm 24—and I can take care of myself just fine.”
“You're still a kid in my book,” Nix says firmly.
“See, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. I have skills to offer,” he continues stubbornly.
“We already have a hunter.”
“Wasn't talkin' about that, but yeah, I'm a good shot. And I know something about strategy in a fight—but none of that matters if you don't have enough to eat. You got a lot of kids to feed, and you already know you ain't gonna keep this circus goin' for long without farm equipment.”
“You can turn water into gasoline? You really are the son of—“
“C'mon, will ya—just for a minute—listen to what I have to say? Don't cost a thing to hear me out.”
“Go ahead—but make it short.”
“I can fix anything mechanical,” Cash says. “Can get it runnin’ and keep it goin’. I can weld. I can shoe a horse. Hell, I can even build a still.”
“That's a worthwhile skill. Still building, I mean." She can't see his expression, but she senses the tension in his body. “Tell me why you want to stay on here,” she says harshly. “Maybe you just like teenage girls?”
“Christ, you're a bitch,” he says, making it sound more like a statement of fact than an insult.
“Not exactly the way to get on my good side,” Nix answers and returns to cleaning her gun.
“I don't know if you have one, to be honest." He pushes off the wall and walks into the light by the workbench. “But to answer your question—just because I can make it alone don't mean I wouldn't rather be part of a group.”
“You all are gonna think this is corny, but I'd like to pay you back for not leavin’ me in a snow bank." He grins and the corners of his green eyes crinkle. “After all, turns out I was poachin’ your land.”
Nix is silent. This guy is an unknown quantity. It's hard to trust anybody these days. In fact, it's always been hard to trust. But she knows the situation hasn't gotten near as bad as it might in the future. They're still eating food grown last year. Unfortunately, Hatfield is right about one thing. She does need help—someone who's a pragmatist and doesn't let either religion or a sense of entitlement get in the way. And he's making her really uncomfortable with his steady gaze as he waits for her answer.
“I'll tell you what,” she says finally. “I've got something that needs fixing. If you can get it started in 48 hours, you can stay for awhile. See how it works out.”
“Show me,” he says.
“After supper. I can't leave my weapons half-cleaned. And by the way, that's one of the cardinal rules around here. Weapons are unloaded and out of reach in the house. Too many curious little kids.”
“Understood." He leaves without another word.
◆◆◆
Nix doesn't sleep much any more. She just kind of catnaps. The sound of the back door downstairs closing softly dances around the edge of her consciousness for a second and then kicks her awake.
She yanks the curtain aside and tries to focus her eyes on the ground below. A dark outline moves away from the house and towards the machine shed. She studies the shape. A bit shorter than tall, gangly George, and bigger in the shoulders. Too comfortable with the darkness to be Jason.
“Ha!” she says aloud. “I knew you were too good to be true. You're going to try for the God-damn truck!”
Nix pulls on an old pair of farmers' overalls and cinches a wide leather belt around her waist. She sticks her gun in it as she flies down the stairs in her bare feet. She barely pauses to grab a coat and pull on boots before she's out the door. She catches a glimpse of movement to her left. He's gone into the machine shed where the truck is parked. She wants badly to catch him redhanded when he starts the engine, and if she has to shoot out a tire to stop him, so be it.
She stands in the cold, acutely aware of how little insulation rubber muck boots provide. Minutes go by and still no sound, no garage door opening. What the hell is he doing? Maybe he's not the mechanical genius he made himself out to be and he can't manage to hot wire the truck. Hell, she'd figured that out when she was 14.
She's not just cold, she's frozen. A few minutes more and her fingers will be too stiff to pull a trigger. And she's plain tired of waiting for something to happen. She creeps silently to the side entrance of the shed. There's a faint sliver of light showing from beneath the door. She blows on her hand, grips her gun, and yanks the door open.
Cash is hunched over the old rototiller she'd shown him after supper. Her grandfather had loved the thing, said it was a collector's item. Cash's reaction had been equally enthusiastic.
“Christ Almighty! This here is an old Clinton Mule!” he'd said. “Lot of folks say this was the best small engine ever made.”
“That might be, but I've never known it to start,” she'd responded. “And my grandfather spent more than a little of his spare time tinkering with it." She'd made a sweeping gesture. “Show me you're the mechanic you say you are.”
Now, Cash glances briefly in her direction and goes back to whatever he's doing. If he sees the gun aimed at him, he doesn't respond to the threat of it. “C'mere,” he says impatiently. “Hold the lantern. I got to have some light right over this spot.”
Nix slowly lowers her weapon. “Are you fucking crazy? It's the middle of the night!”
The lantern light accentuates the harshness of his features, but he grins and that transforming thing happens again. “C'mon, hold the light for a second. I can start it. I just need to tighten this down." He leans closer to the engine.
“You're full of it,” Nix says. “Jesus Christ himself couldn't bring that thing back to life.”
“Wanna bet?”
“We already have a bet, dude.”
“Well all right then—here goes!" Cash fiddles with the throttle, jiggles some other things, and then lets her rip. It starts on the first pull.
“God damn!” Nix says. “I guess this mule's name i
s Lazarus!”
Cash turns off the engine. “Don't want to waste gas,” he says. “And speakin' of gas, I saw one of them farm fuel tanks a few miles the other side of the woods. Maybe tomorrow we should go get it. We could bring the whole damn thing back. Gotta have some place to store gas besides cans.”
“You ever been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder?” Nix asks. “It's freakin' two in the morning. Cut your throttle and get some rest.”
“Funny. That's funny.”
She stands waiting.
“Oh—you weren't kiddin." He throws tools into Gramps' old wooden box and wipes his hands on a rag. “Still don't trust me not to run off with the truck, huh?”
“I never apologize for being suspicious,” Nix says. “It pays off more often than not.”
“Hope for the best, expect the worst,” he says like he's reciting a nursery rhyme. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Shut the fuck up and go to bed.”
“I noticed there's a room behind the machine shed. How long before you trust me enough to let me fix it up for myself? I've had a bellyful of sleepin’ in barracks.”
I knew it, she thinks. Military training. She makes a mental note to find out more, but right now, she wants to hit the bed and get another two or three hours of sleep.
“I'll trust you, when I trust you. You'll be able to tell easy enough when I make up my mind.”
“You're a hard woman—and that's a fact.”
“Move it. I can't feel my feet any more.”
“So about tomorrow—”
She sighs. “You realize that's Christmas Eve, don't you?”
“Is it?” Cash asks. “I lost track a while back." He grins. “But wouldn't gallons of gas be the best Christmas present you could imagine?”
“Oh, all right,” she says, giving up. “We'll take Jason. He's strong as an ox and half as smart.”
“That the boy with the surfer hair?”
“Now that you mention it, he does look like he needs a Beach Boys track playing in the background.”
“He don't look happy,” Cash says as they go up the back steps. “What's his problem?”
“Work,” Nix says briefly. “But he does what he's told because he's afraid I'll kick him out if he doesn't carry his weight.”
“Would you?”
“I hope I don't ever have to find out.”
“Careful, St Nix, or I won't believe you the next time you threaten me.”
“The only reason I'd feel bad about kicking Jason out is that he's helpless as a puppy dog. You, on the other hand, seem entirely able to take care of yourself.”
“See, that's why you should trust me. I'm here because I wanna be, not because I have to be.”
◆◆◆
Just before dawn on Christmas morning, Nix lies in bed staring up at the ceiling. She knows the kids are going to be thundering downstairs shortly, and she supposes she should be there to witness the fun, but it's the last thing she feels like doing. Her mind is still full of the events of yesterday when they'd made the quick trip to load up a fuel tank. Or at least it was supposed to be quick.
The place looked deserted, but they'd gone up to the house to make sure. Salvaging was one thing, but presently the world had more than its quota of looters, and she wasn't about to add to their number. Repeated knocking brought no response, and the door was unlocked, so they'd gone inside.
“Someone got here first,” Cash had commented. “Looks like wild dogs tore through here.”
There were items scattered everywhere, but something was off. Nix's gut didn't agree with her eyes.
“I don't know,” she said. “Look over there in the corner. A jar of change. Must be a couple hundred dollars in there. Why didn't they take that?”
“Maybe they were smart enough to know that money can't buy you happiness these days,” Cash countered. “Maybe they were lookin’ for food. Or guns.”
Nix scanned the room. There were photo albums laying open on the coffee table, but the photos had been removed and they were scattered haphazardly.
She moved to the dining room. An antique cuckoo clock lay in pieces on the table, but it wasn’t random violence that had pulled it apart. There was an order to it, as if someone had begun to rebuild it. In fact, next to it lay a kit of fine tools such as a jeweler might use. Nix stared into the kitchen. A table dusted with flour was littered with crusted bowls. It looked like the aftermath of some sort of crazy bake-off.
Nix stood motionless, adding it up. “Shit! It's Geezer, for sure. This was the manic phase. They were running around, doing three things at once, never stopping, and then—”
“—the fever gets them,” Jason choked out, “And burns them up and dries them out. And then they die.”
“Got bodies in the bedroom,” Cash said as he joined them in the kitchen. “A real old couple. At least I think so. They've been here for awhile—not pretty.”
They’d spent a couple of hours digging graves and giving the old folks a decent burial. Jason had been useless for getting the bodies downstairs. He kept puking until Nix was afraid he wouldn't have the strength to help with the fuel tank.
It had been hard—real hard—to come back to the land of the living and admire the kids' decorations as they took turns hanging them on the boughs of the Christmas tree. The Shirk kids had made crosses from the gold foil wrapping paper that Nix found buried in an old box. She'd regretfully set aside the strings of colored lights. What was the point without electricity?
Martin had cut Santa figures from thirty year old Christmas cards and strung ribbon through them. It was clear that George disapproved, but one glance from Nix insured he kept his mouth shut. She had insisted that the large silver star go on top of the tree.
“It's the Star of Bethlehem,” she'd told George. “It's in the Bible.”
Now she's got to put her game face on and watch Martin open his gift. It's an old metal tractor that she used to push around in the mud while her grandfather plowed his fields in the spring. She feels bad that she can't give the Shirk kids some of the other toys she found, but George is adamant about that. Their plastic ‘wash bowls’ are set out on the kitchen table and each contains small useful items, like hair pins for the girls, screw drivers or tape measures for the boys—and candy for everybody. That, at least, she could contribute. There was plenty at Forrest's grocery store. It had made her happy, beyond all reason, to put a jawbreaker in each bowl.
There's no ham for dinner, but Margaret and Mary have outdone themselves with a roast of venison, surrounded by potatoes and onions and carrots. The Shirks bow their heads in silence, as they always do, to give thanks.
Nix waits until they all open their eyes before she says, “Maybe we should thank the guy who almost broke his neck to put this roast on the table.” She lifts her coffee cup in a mocking toast.
Jason responds with a thumbs up in Cash's direction. Nix notices Brittany is a little over enthusiastic, bless her horny little heart. Another reminder that the girl needs watching.
Dessert is an apple cobbler, and Margaret sets down a double serving in front of Cash. To Nix it tastes like ambrosia, especially with coffee. Squad room coffee had been so strong it made her ears buzz, but kept her going through long hours of overtime. Now the allowance is one cup a day at breakfast, and the work hours are even longer. Apparently Cash misses it, too, but after his third cup he pushes back from the table and grabs his jacket off the hook.
“Where are you going?” Nix asks immediately.
“I'm gonna poke around in some of the outbuildin’s,” he answers. “Seems to be an amazin’ amount of stuff piled up. Some of it's gotta be useful." He grins. “You're welcome to come along. Make sure I don't run off with the junk.”
She surprises herself by deciding not to question him further. At some point yesterday, she'd begun to get the sense of what kind of guy he is. Maybe it was when he noticed the medals laying half-hidden by the drifts of photos and said quietly, “This guy got two Purple
Hearts."
He'd carried them up to the bedroom and pinned them on the old guy's chest before he'd wrapped the bodies for their last journey—which is more than Nix could have done with the best intentions in the world. Apologizing, she'd taken an embroidered dresser scarf and wrapped it around the lower half of her face just to manage carrying the well-wrapped corpses down stairs and out to the waiting graves.
“I've seen worse,” had been Cash's only comment.
As soon as Nix can, she sneaks off to the attic. Sitting around doing nothing drives her crazy, too. It's so cold she rummages around until she finds an old fur coat that might even be made of buffalo hide. She happily explores, finding things she'd ignored in her previous searches—labor saving devices that don’t require electricity. She still hopes the lights will blink on one day, but she's beginning to think that's not going to happen for a long time. She drags an old crank wringer for clothes out of a pile of other, unidentifiable objects and then locates a depression-era butter churn.
She’s pleased with herself. These are useful things that will save hours for Margaret and Mary, and whoever else is assigned household chores. Nix sometimes feels a little guilty that she doesn't help out in the kitchen—but not much. She's never been a cook. She's capable of burning stuff in a microwave. On the other hand, she has other talents.
Everybody has something to offer. It's just hard to see what it is yet in the case of the suburban brats. They've managed to make it to the threshold of adulthood with no discernible skills. They'll learn soon enough, she thinks, that unless they show an aptitude in a particular area that's needed, they're doomed to a life of unskilled manual labor—such as mucking out stalls or scrubbing floors.
When the attic grows so dark she can no longer see to continue her exploration, she goes downstairs humming. It might just be the image of Brittany scrubbing clothes on a washboard that has her in such a good mood.
Chapter 11
Nix lays back on the new spring grass and inhales the smell of it. As a kid, she and Gramps' dog, Toby, would roll around on the lawn, mock fighting and growling at each other until they'd tired themselves out. Then the two of them would lie together companionably in the hot summer sun and doze. Sometimes, floating in that paradoxically heavy state between sleep and wakefulness, she would be overcome by an awareness, more of muscle and bone than mind, that the earth beneath her was soaked with the blood, sweat and tears of all the St Clairs who'd come before her. It’s the closest thing to a religious experience Nix has ever had. She supposes it’s a form of ancestor worship.
