Breakfast was slightly overripe grapefruit with slightly stale buns, home-churned butter and a tall glass of fresh cold milk each. Lara, Amo, Talia and Vie sat around the breakfast bar as the air just got hotter, licking their fingers and chattering about the tasks of the day ahead.
"Will it be hotter in Sacramento, mom?" Vie asked.
Vie was becoming very inquisitive these days, something his older sister Talia thought was hilarious. Whenever he had a question about dinosaurs or Matchbox cars or how much sand there really was on the beach, Talia would tease him mercilessly with false answers, until he was left running to Lara or Amo asking, 'Is it really true that there's Stegosauruses in Canada, mom?' or 'When will all the little sand eggs actually hatch and turn into jellyfish?' or some other nonsense.
Amo would always just make a surprised face and play along, 'I don't know what Talia's talking about, Vie. Everyone knows the sand-eggs hatch in July.'
He encouraged them both, leaving Lara always to reassure Vie what was real and what was false. This time though she forestalled any funny business.
"Cooler," she said quickly. "Away from all this concrete. We'll have running water too, which we can use for air conditioning in the pipes. There's going to be a lot of new great advances."
Amo nodded wisely while chewing on his dry bun.
"And spiders," Talia said, "as big as your hand."
Vie looked scared as she brought her hand close to his face, fingers wriggling.
Amo laughed. Lara sighed. This was her lot in life; constantly playing referee to a bunch of trickster children. In this at least, Amo had never lost his touch. The faraway look, that used to so-often come into his eyes when they were alone together, had never touched his life with the kids. That had always been reassuring, but still, it got annoying.
Sometimes she played along, of course, which only served to delight Amo and Talia more. Poor Vie even tried sometimes, with offerings that didn't make any sense but would have them all giggling, like the time he'd said there were ghosts of potatoes living in his bookcase. Amo had gone along with it, venturing into the bedroom to hunt them down with the utmost seriousness. It was a ridiculous kind of household to live in, nothing like the solid, dependable, perhaps boring home she'd know as a child, but didn't it offer up some of the best memories of her life?
She swallowed the last of her milk and got to her feet. Amo was doing something with the hood of a little Matchbox Porsche for Vie, while Talia was tapping on her iPad. "We should be first out, to lead the convoy to the park. Come on."
Action followed groans, as her crew got to their feet, swallowed their last bits of breakfast, and started off. It wasn't the life Lara had ever imagined, growing up in New Jersey with a career in the law ahead of her, but despite the post-apocalypse, and the limited range of fresh food, and her half-broken, half-healed devil of a husband, there was still a pleasing, routine mundanity to this. They could almost be any family from before the fall, having breakfast and getting ready for the school run.
She squeezed Amo's arm and he smiled back, then everybody was getting dressed and filing out the door.
They strolled over to the Chinese Theater forecourt on foot, where already a few folks were gathered; Crow in his uniform of threadbare stonewash jeans and light flannel shirt, Greg from Idaho in shorts and a long-sleeved white T with the Old Navy logo across the chest, Miranda in sensible light sportswear, good for flexibility while picking in the fields, Feargal standing by his vehicle already, Keeshom not wearing his pink sweater, and a handful of the others.
Lara smiled and waved as they pulled up. Already it was baking hot, and the events of the night before seemed very far away. She held up her master clipboard as they drew near.
"Everyone got their duties straight?"
Just like at the breakfast table, there were a few exaggerated groans. Crow smiled, which always brightened any day.
Amo stopped to chit-chat, and Greg picked Vie up onto his shoulder and spun him around, while Lara walked around the set of vehicles they had lined up, leaning in to make her double checks and marking them off on her clipboard. It wasn't so different from running her coffee shop, really; being in charge of logistics for New LA. It was just a lot of organizing, making sure the right things were in the right places at the right time.
Canned food, bottled water, medicine and medical gear had been easy for years, though were running thin now everywhere. Most of the cans had gone off years ago, and there wasn't a single bottle of water left within perhaps thirty blocks, scooped up in a decade's worth of scavenging.
They had plenty of medicine and plenty of places left to raid to get more, but a lot of it had gone off too, though that wasn't so bad as people didn't really get sick anymore. Things like drip bags, blood bags for emergency transfusions, and even alternative herbal remedies they had figured out how to make themselves. Keeshom and Macy had even put together a blood donation system, to keep their supplies fresh.
Machinery, gasoline stored in airtight containers, and equipment that could be mined at a Yangtze fulfillment center, all that was fine. The real challenge was fresh water and food, and those were the reasons they were moving. LA had no river, not really, not one that flowed clean and predictable. The concrete-lined causeway once called the LA River was a dried up skate-park most of the year, fit only for shooting movies in, and a bubbling swampy mess full of pollutants run-off from the decaying city the rest.
In Sacramento there was fresh water. Irrigating crops would be easy. Creating a sustainable settlement for the future, for any number of people, was a real possibility. It was a good move, perhaps long overdue.
She caught herself leaning against the cool metal of the JCB; Amo's original, still a hardy bright yellow despite all the miles it had done over the years, ferrying things back and forth. Now it was pulling a trailer with all their tofu-squeezing presses aboard, and a wagon behind that to stack up their crops.
The metal was cool on her forehead. It was good to move out of LA, that was true. All the arguments added up. But that didn't make it easy.
"You communing with the JCB?"
She turned and saw Crow standing there. From someone else such a comment would be blatantly sarcastic, from Jake or certainly Anna, but with Crow she never knew. His emotionless, deeply lined face gave nothing away. A good face for poker, she thought idly. It didn't help that he was First Nations, and didn't mind playing on the awkward tangle of emotions that raised in other Americans, if only for a joke.
She smiled. "It doesn't have much to say."
He came over and patted the machine's clean yellow flank, like he was weighing up a horse. "I believe it has some tall tales to tell, though perhaps it's not in the mood to share right now. Lara."
"Crow," she said, slightly inquisitive now.
"I'm feeling something different about you today. I don't know what it is. Do you?"
She raised one eyebrow, while underneath the surface her struggles of the night before flashed back. Could Crow somehow sense that? "Something like what?"
He smiled now, and shrugged. He was a big man, with broad muscular shoulders, and the gesture made him look like a friendly giant. "Who can say? Maybe it's the weather. On the other hand, perhaps it's like the feeling of the demons in Pittsburgh. But not the same. Just a feeling." He pressed a fist to his stomach. "In here."
Lara frowned. "Do the others feel the same?" 'The others', to mean the other survivors from Julio's pit.
"I haven't asked." He looked off dreamily, into the middle distance. "I just catch hints of it, like lemongrass on the wind. Do you know?" He looked back to her.
Crow was a close friend with Amo. He'd helped Amo through his tough times, she knew that, but she and him hadn't often spoken, certainly not one-to-one. Anything she told him would surely go straight back to Amo, and she'd already made the decision not to bother him with this.
"I like lemongrass. As a barista I'm interested in flavors. So maybe keep an eye on this, whatever it
is. A nose on it."
He eyed her carefully, then his smile broadened. He knew something was off, now. It felt that way. But he let it go, and patted the flank of the JCB again.
"A good machine," he said, "many tales," then wandered enigmatically away, leaving Lara with more questions than she had before, and a growing doubt that perhaps she should have already told Amo about last night.
She walked back round and looked at him, telling some story to Keeshom and Greg about Vie. They laughed. He spotted her and waved. That was Amo at his best, an inspiration to all around him still. Finally he was regaining not only his own confidence, but theirs too.
She couldn't endanger that. Not for something that she could handle fully herself. Not when she'd already kept so many of her waking visions secret, as a trusted member of the Council. She just wouldn't go swimming at night again, and that was that. There was no immediate danger to anyone.
4. HARVEST
Their convoy of nine rumbling, heavy vehicles parked in the Chino Hills State Park Discovery Center lot for a final check. The Center was marked by a solid granite monolith on the grass siding, engraved with the California bear. That granite slab would still be there long after they were all gone, Lara thought every time she came this way, pointing out the park of a State that hadn't existed for millennia.
She shook herself and throttled down the big JCB, looking out over the Discovery Center. It had served as their farming headquarters for twelve years, ever since Cynthia first surveyed the nearest potential farmland to the Chinese Theater and settled on Chino Hills.
It was a modern-looking complex of two cedar-clad buildings, connected by a walkway with open pine rafters. Flanking the sides were low grassy hills, a natural windbreak, with shoots of spruce rising between them. In front there was already the last of their blue and white Isuzu 15,000 liter irrigation trucks. It was strange to think now that every day for years a small crew from New LA had taken that truck and two others up to the LA Aqueduct outlet at Upper Van Norman Reservoir, loaded up with fresh water, then driven back to fill up the irrigation channels spread throughout the crops. Lara had done it plenty of times herself.
It had been a gradual expansion to three trucks, of course. They'd started small, supplementing their seemingly endless stock of canned and dried food with fresh vegetables and fruits, adding a field at a time, adding the trucks, digging irrigation furrows, adding new crops and more sophisticated planting and harvesting machinery. Now they were heavily dependent on it, every year drying and canning any excess to be kept in cold storage, for lean years.
They'd added staple foods a few years before their supplies of dried wheat and rice went bad. Both wheat and rice could grow in the hot, dry California climate as long as you kept them watered. Now they had rice fields, wheat and sorghum, alongside orchards full of oranges and peaches, fields of strawberries and long ranks of tomato and grape vines side by side. There was a field of alfalfa for the small menagerie they'd managed to breed up to sustainable levels of cows, pigs and sheep. They had cucumbers, plenty of lettuce, squash, peppers and more. Potatoes had grown well for one season then been struck by a rotting blight, so they'd given up on those, a fact Amo often lamented.
"Roast cheese potato skins," he used to mumble at times, before Maine took away most of his humor, lying in the hammock in their little dry brown garden. "Curly garlic French Fries."
The kids would join in with him, as they always did, though they'd never had any of the foods he kept listing. They just liked to make things up.
Now Lara climbed out of the cab and looked around. The sun was baking and heat bounced up off the lot's dusty blacktop, making it hard to breathe. Already she was soaked with sweat and they hadn't even begun.
People began to file out of the long yellow school bus; fruit pickers, each equipped with a picking basket on their back. Most of the wheat and rice was already in and processed. Now it was the last of the fruit, corn, vegetables and of course soy. They'd process it, can it, then head north to Sacramento, where they'd never need to worry about making water runs, and fuelling huge irrigation trucks, again.
"We're heading out, got our gear."
Greg was standing before her, handsome and calm as ever despite the heat, like he'd been born into upper-ninety's temperatures, which he probably had. He tossed his short-cropped auburn hair and flashed her a grin. "You OK?"
Lara smiled back, then looked over his troop gathered around. Nine in the fruit-picking brigade, that was right. "You're all clear," she said, "and I'm fine, just getting nostalgic."
"For fruit-picking?"
"Sure, for fruit-picking. You know how many times I've been out here, running a harvest?"
"Uh, eleven?" he guessed. "Eleven summers, eleven years, right?"
Lara chuckled. "Try seventy-six. There's fruit but there's everything else, all different dates through the year, and I'm always here to run it. Like a tradition."
Greg made a face like she'd blown his mind. "Whoa. I only ever do the fruit."
"And you're great at it too. That's why you're the lead picker. Now on you go."
"Yes ma'am," he said, and went along. He always reminded her of Bill and Ted. Was it Bill or Ted, the blonde one? A total spacehead, worse even than Ravi.
Next up were the soy troop, with their picker and mobile squeezing factory led by Delia, once a chef. Next were the vegetable pickers, with more baskets and carts to tow them in. Last came Josh and his huge corn combine, with a squad to work it.
"Be careful out there," Lara said. "You know it jams sometimes."
"I been fixing her," said Josh, in his wheedling Alabama accent. "She ain't so tempr'mental now."
"Treat her right, then," Lara said, and checked him off on her list.
"Mom," came Talia finally, advancing shyly, which meant she had some kind of request. "Dad says we can do a hayride on the tractor, if we get all the fruit picked today."
Lara made a show of considering. This, oddly, was one of the joys of parenthood that she'd never expected; a kind of Ping-Pong game between her and Amo, with the kids as the balls. She caught Amo's eye and he smiled. Of course he knew a tractor hayride was already scheduled, but why not work a lesson into it, and use that as a reward? Lars Mecklarin himself would be proud of the way they used carrot and stick to control behavior.
He set them up, she knocked them down.
"If we get it all done," she said, sounding dubious. "And if I get only the most glowing reports, and you do your bit as well as anyone, and you drink a lot of water. Then maybe."
Talia's face lit up and she dashed back to share the good news with Vie. A few moments later Veronica and Tate came over with the other kids and gathered them up.
"Peach orchard," Tate confirmed as he went by.
"We'll join you shortly," Lara said.
Vie gave her a big thumbs up as she went by, then his fruit-team was on the trail and winding away, past the tall rows of corn just peeping over the nearby hill.
Amo came over and stood by her, so they were alone in the now-quiet lot.
"Last check?" he asked.
She nodded.
They walked in companionable silence over the lot to the Discovery Center. Entering the shade of its peaked roof cut the heat by twenty degrees. Amo unlocked the padlock holding the doors together and opened it, letting a breath of cool, cedar-y air exhale out. He held the door and she entered first.
Inside there were still signs of the Visitor Center it had once been, with colorful maps and the ranger's office to the side, a reception desk and racks where once pamphlets on other local attractions had been stacked. Amo led them through.
"You're quiet," Lara said, as he unlocked a door in back that led into their seed vault.
He smiled and opened the door. The room beyond was dark and even cooler than the main area. They'd insulated the roof and walls for just that purpose.
"I suppose," he said. "It's this move, but something else too."
"What?"
"I've been thinking about last night. About us."
Lara took a step into the darkness toward him. She didn't know where this was going. He was acting shy, like Vie with a question he felt was embarrassing. "Me too."
"I'm just," he said, then paused, searching for the words, which was not like him. "I'm just glad. I know it's been hard, living with me. I know I haven't been able to support you in all the ways I would've wanted to. But last night, I'm just…" He trailed off. She touched his shoulder and he smiled. "I'm just glad. You're still you. I'm still me, at least I'm getting to be. It means a lot."
She felt the prickle in her eyes again. "We're both glad, then."
He patted her hand on his shoulder, and turned back into the seed vault. But she didn't let go. "There's something else. Something I want to say."
He turned. "Hmm?"
It came on her suddenly, but once it was on her she realized it had been there for a long time, waiting for the chance to blink into the light.
"New LA's got seven kids now. Seven from fifty-eight people."
He raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. We talked about that in the Council. There's the incentive system now."
The incentive system had been Anna's idea, to encourage people to have children. Since they were moving to Sacramento, future-proofing themselves against future growth, it made sense they should grow. People weren't going to come from the cairns anymore, so they'd all agreed that getting pregnant afforded certain temporary privileges; like all your community duties were cut. Pregnant couples were feted and celebrated. They'd already run the new system once, when Greg and Merryn had their daughter Coralee.
Now Lara took a step closer, taking his hand in her own, making it up as she went along.
"I want that for us too. You and me."
His face was frozen in perplexity. She felt much the same. Until the words were out she hadn't realized how true the sentiment was. She hadn't allowed herself to think it, but now it was there and rising like a bubbling spring. She smiled. "I want us to have another baby, Amo." She laid her palms on his chest. "Maybe more than one. Maybe many. This move, Sacramento, it changes things. There's all of America out there waiting for us to fill it."
The Last Mayor Box Set 2 Page 58
