by Lou Cadle
“Yes, or fled, though how a parent could flee without a child, I can’t explain. It was confusing, how the children were—whatever. Captured. When they were taken. There were conflicting stories, and I’m not sure we’ll ever know the truth.”
“Maybe the truth doesn’t matter,” Sierra said. “Maybe what matters is the future.” If only that were true.
They made it to the Kershaw house and found Rudy entertaining the children by reading to them. Everyone turned to look as the two women entered.
“Well?” Rudy said.
Kelly said, “We’re taking some of you home today and some tomorrow. Isn’t that good news?”
The children’s faces suggested it was not entirely good news. Only one jumped up and said, “Yay!” But when she saw the other children weren’t responding similarly, that one sat back down.
Sierra was able to quit worrying about herself and worry about someone else. These poor children were going to be screwed up forever, weren’t they? She saw Emily standing in the doorway to the bedroom, ready to bolt. Yes, another child ruined by all this.
It was too awful to think about. Her situation was too awful to think about. Everything was. She wanted to run home, throw her blanket over her head, and shut the whole world out.
But there was work to do. So she stood her ground.
Kelly took out the list and read the names. The excited girl was the fourth one, and she jumped up and nearly vibrated with excitement. One other boy raised his hand when his name was called.
“Sierra,” Rudy said, “please raise your hand.”
Obediently, she did.
“Okay, you two go with Sierra,” he said, naming the two responsive ones.
Sierra held out her hands, and the girl ran to her. The boy looked at the other children, then back at Sierra, hesitant.
Rudy said, “It’s okay. You’ll all be home by tomorrow and see each other again. You probably will all go to school again in the fall. Everything will be okay.”
The boy came to Sierra but refused to take her extended hand. “I’m too old for that,” he said.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s go to the car.”
In the dark, they walked together down the road, the little girl swinging their arms and chattering on. Okay, not every child was ruined by it. This one girl seemed pretty resilient. And so was Misha.
The boy said, “I can’t see.”
“I can,” Sierra said. “I’ve been outside longer. Take my hand. Not because you’re too young. But because I can see a little better.”
He did, and a couple minutes later they were in the splash of light from the headlights. The boy dropped her hand. She lifted the children over the log to Dev on the other side, and he got them situated in the back seat. He was very kind to them, gentle. For a moment she wished she could return his feelings. But she couldn’t. Didn’t.
Kelly appeared next with two children, and then a minute later Rudy arrived with the last two. Sierra and Dev worked together to get those four children situated in the car. It was not meant for more than four people, but they managed.
“My aunt and uncle?” Rudy said.
Kelly said, “Joan will be home later and talk to you about that.”
“That sounds bad,” Rudy said.
Kelly hesitated. “Your uncle is fine. And he wants to see you. Very much wants to see you.”
“My aunt?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head.
The car backed up and then drove away, taking the light it had provided with it.
After a long moment of silence in the dark, Rudy said, “Does my uncle know about Oliver?”
“He does. I told him.”
“I have to get back to the others,” Rudy said. “They’ll be scared.” And he turned and left for the Kershaw house, his footsteps crunching down the gravel road.
“Nice kid,” Kelly said.
“Not a great soldier,” Dev said, a few seconds later, when the footsteps had faded. “But yeah, a good-hearted person.”
“So are you,” his mother said to him. “Where’s your father?”
“Went home to make sure everything was secure, he said.”
“That man. He really does trust you, Devlin.”
Sierra could nearly hear the shrug that probably greeted that statement. She said, “Okay, I have to get back to Pilar and supper. See you guys tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll do fresh bread and jam at our place,” Kelly said. “Eight sharp.”
“Okay,” Sierra said, and she walked home. She had a midnight guard shift again, but that was fine. She wasn’t going to sleep that well anyway. May as well do something useful as lie in bed and think about what-might-have-beens.
Pilar was waiting for her to begin supper. He had sliced the bread, and the soup was on the stove, simmering. “You okay?”
“Sure.”
“Sierra, something is bothering you.”
She cast around for a good explanation. “The kids. I’m worried about how screwed up all this will make them. They’ve lost parents, some of them. They’ve been in a battle, been ripped from their homes. It’s hard.”
“It is. And you’re good to think of them, but that’s not what’s wrong.”
That lie hadn’t worked. She shrugged. “I’m a little down.”
“About what?”
She didn’t want to tell him. “I’m not sure.”
“Is it that we may be done with shooting for a while?”
“Are we done?” she said. “Did it go that well in Payson?”
“We think so. Time will tell, but yes, for now I don’t think we need to worry about the Payson people or the other neighborhood. Definitely not the other neighborhood. Francie’s.”
“Were any of them there?”
“Francie, Wes, and six others.”
“Did they mention Jackson?”
“Who?”
“A guy I fought with. He was shot in the back.”
“There was someone hurt they picked up in Payson and took home. Is that what you’ve been worried about?”
“Yes.” Much easier to lie, to have him think this, than to explain the truth.
“Good man?”
“The best,” she said. “How’s the soup?”
“Edible,” he said.
“That bad?”
“No, it’s fine. A little heavy on the parsley.”
“I followed the recipe,” she said. “But I take responsibility for it being bad.”
“Often, you can halve the spices and herbs in a recipe. Probably should only use a pinch from now on, so they last longer.”
“We grow parsley.”
“You’re right, but we don’t grow everything. I’m going to miss vanilla and cinnamon when they’re gone.”
“Can’t we grow them?”
“We have no plants. Cinnamon is a tree, tropical, so I doubt it can take the freezing we get. Vanilla comes from an orchid, probably a damned fussy plant.” He ripped a new piece of bread into quarters. “And we don’t have one anyway, and I’d be shocked if anyone in Payson has one.”
“We’ll live without.”
“We will. Which reminds me, tomorrow morning, before the meeting, we need to set several hens to brooding. All of tomorrow’s eggs and the day after that. We have plenty on hand right now for us to eat.”
“You want chicks for Payson?”
“Yes. We made a trade. We went through the hardware store and Walmart and found some useful stuff left. So hens and end-of-season seeds are the deal we made for it.”
She tried to work herself around to curiosity. She didn’t succeed, but she knew how to fake it. “What are we trading for?”
“Fencing and grain seed and terra cotta pots. Kelly decided to turn that other place—the burned-out neighborhood—into a grain farm. We’ll do it with Francie’s group, share the expense—the supplies, I mean—and the work and the grain that results.”
“What kind of grain?”
&n
bsp; “Oats and amaranth. The oats were there at the hardware store as feed, but Kelly thinks they aren’t treated and should still sprout. The amaranth was in with bird seed and passed over when people were looking for food. And that’s great for us.”
“Have I ever eaten amaranth?”
“I don’t think I’ve served it. Maybe in some mixed cereal. But what it’s good for is drought. Our world is only going to get drier and hotter, for longer than you’ll be alive. And amaranth can take dry conditions. It will live through the worst summers we can imagine.”
“And you can make bread of it?”
“I’m sure Kelly can make a hell of a good bread from it. I’ll do my usual workmanlike loaf, no doubt. Oats we can eat as breakfast or in bread. It will stretch what flour we have to grow additional grains. But also, both grains are to supplement the hens’ diet. The hens can get a lot from foraging, but they’ll give us more eggs if we can get them supplemental grain. We have some field corn going, and we’ll expand that here in our yard. But the grain farm will really help keep the egg production up.”
“And the pots? That’s for growing what? Herbs or flowers?”
“No. That’s a thing someone from Francie’s neighborhood knew about. There’s this ancient system call ollas.”
“Mexican? Indian?” she said, her curiosity sparked a little.
“The other India,” he said. “Or China—she wasn’t sure. You bury these pots and run tubing, like regular irrigation tubing, or traditionally reeds, from your water source to the pots, which you bury among the garden plants. It’s like drip irrigation but only uses a fraction of the water. We could even tap the stream for that, as long as we have a year-long stream. If that dries up, we’ll get better at collecting rain water. Arch had his eyes on some other irrigation equipment down there, and we talked about that. None of it will look that attractive to people in Payson yet, with their water still coming out of the taps, but if we can trade for it, fair and square right now, it may do us great good in the future.”
“What’s to stop them from coming up in force and attacking us to get it back in five years?”
“Nothing. Nothing except that there won’t be any gas to drive up here. The other neighborhood will have to worry more. Not only are they closer to Payson, they have more people, more homes, and more resources. We’re safer. Plus, Arch says he has some ideas on making us even more so.”
“I’m sure he does.” What spark of curiosity she’d had was gone, and she was back to feeling the heavy mood descend on her again. She ate quickly before her appetite abandoned her. She knew she needed fuel, and so she took it in, a duty rather than a pleasure. “I’ll do dishes, if you want to get started on the hens. I need to get to sleep early because I have a watch at midnight.”
“Don’t work too hard.”
“I’m not,” she said. She needed to work harder, if anything, but the weight of her guilt was making it hard to do anything at all. Even cutting up meat and vegetables for the soup had been a draining physical chore.
Roy’s face haunted her, his voice, and her worry about who he’d left behind and how they felt. Heaviest of all was her not knowing what to do about any of it.
Chapter 21
Rudy had gone back to Payson with the last of the children and Joan at dawn. He had stopped at their place to thank them, waking them with an apology. He said he would be living with his uncle. “And I want to keep working with the kids. They like me. They trust me. We have something in common. If their parents will let me, I’d like to try and set up some kind of program down there.”
“I’d back you,” Pilar said. “You’ve done wonders with those children. And who knows how many teachers have survived. They’ll welcome your help, I’m sure.”
Joan hadn’t yet returned when they met at eight at the Quinn place. As usual, Kelly had outdone herself with the food. As it was daylight, no one was standing guard.
After they’d eaten some cinnamon bread with fresh apple butter, they began to talk.
Arch started. “The good news is, mostly we’ll leave Payson alone and they’ll leave us alone. That’s how I want it.”
“But we’ll help them,” Pilar said.
“We’ve already helped,” Arch said. “We freed them.”
Kelly said, “And we’ll remind them of that. And not all of our help will come at once. Our commitment to give them some seed stock for next spring’s plantings—that one we won’t fulfill until March, six months from now. And we’ve never mentioned the rabbits, and that’s something we can trade with in the future. A few breeding pairs of rabbits would go a long way down there.”
Arch said, “I’m worried they’ll just eat the chicks we give them.”
Pilar said, “I doubt very much they’ll do that.”
Kelly said, “If they do, that’s their choice. It’s a one-time offer, in trade for supplies. We’ve made that clear. If they mess it up, that’s on them.”
“Though it’d be easy enough to do it again next year,” Pilar said.
Kelly answered, “Only if there’s something we really want from them. And we all looked hard in the hardware store. I think we identified everything there.”
“Might still be some stuff at the junk yard,” Arch said.
“Considering what happened this summer, I think you should stay away from the junk yard,” Kelly said to him.
“Hmph,” Arch said, and then took a slurp of coffee.
Dev said, “Would you go through it point by point, Mom? So me and Sierra and Curt can catch up?”
Kelly said, “Good idea. Okay, here’s how it went, for those of you who weren’t there.” And she settled in to telling the story of the meeting. The Paysonites were mixed in their attitude. Some were grateful, some were angry and jealous, and some were just plain scared of anyone they didn’t know well. “For which I can’t blame them,” Kelly said.
Pilar nodded.
Kelly told about the ollas and her plans for the grain farm, about the fencing and all that. She told Curt she’d bargained for his wire, which Sierra was surprised to hear that he’d asked for. He caught her confused look and gave her a half smile. “For more traps. We’ll be needing them, for us and for trade.”
There were twenty or thirty details Kelly went through, and she finished with, “So what we have to start with is, we visit Payson once a month on the first for the next three months, until the last of the chicks are delivered. We come back here each time with supplies in trade. We have a message system with the other neighborhood, and we’re going to meet with them much more often.”
Arch said, “They’re going to repair the Morrow turbine. That’s job number one. But we’re going to interact more with them. Makes sense. They’re our closest neighbors, so we should keep that relationship friendly if at all possible.”
Pilar said, “Plus, they understand our perspective. They’re most like us.”
“True,” Curt said. “What’s our deal with them?”
“For now, we’ll meet every Monday at noon at the burned-out neighborhood. We’ll build the grain garden, clearing land where the burned-out houses’ yards were.”
“Wait,” Dev said. “Weren’t you going to find someone to live there?”
“Not necessary,” Arch said. “There are plenty of empty places in Payson.”
They all were silent for a moment, thinking of why that was.
“Anyway, we meet once a week, trade, get to know each other better, work on the garden so it’s ready to plant next spring, and make plans,” Kelly said. “In the winter, we might also do some trading of people before it snows.”
“What do you mean?” Curt said.
“Temporary trading. Like Sierra and Dev might go down and two of their young people come up for a week, everybody learning all the tricks and survival strategies of the others. We all agree on that one thing—that we probably know things we don’t even realize the others don’t.”
“I don’t like it,” Arch said. “It means they’
ll learn about our defenses.”
“Which is why I’ll push for the young people,” Kelly said. “Theirs won’t have the military experience of Sierra and Dev, and so we’ll come out ahead there. Also, we can hide things from them we don’t want them to know about.”
“Or lie,” Arch said.
“Sure, honey,” Kelly said. “But anyway, that’s the future, that kind of thing. First, we need to do more limited trading of work and knowledge and build up that relationship. We need to clean up the burned-out neighborhood and prepare the soil. Then, when we get the supplies from Payson, starting with the fencing, we build the grain farm.”
Dev said, “Do the Payson people know about the grain farm?”
“No,” Arch said. “Just that we want the grain for our hens.”
“Will they be mad if they find out eventually?”
Kelly said, “Not if we return some starter seed to them, I imagine. Then they can do the same thing. If they follow our advice, and take good care of the hens, in two years, they’ll have no food worries.”
“And they won’t die before then,” Arch said. “Not if they get the gardening right and shoot some deer.”
Sierra spoke up for the first time. “There was some canned food I was shown that the invaders had hoarded. Maybe not a can per household, but it was something.”
“Joan may be dealing with that today. I’m not sure,” Kelly said, frowning. “Or maybe she’ll wait until she moves back.”
Joan finally came in a moment later, a child in tow. It was a seven- or eight-year-old boy. “Hi. This is Rod. He’s going to be staying with me and the girls.”
“Hey, Rod,” Kelly said. “I bet Dev can find some of his old toys for you.”
“Where are they?” Dev asked her.
“In the shop. There’s a box on a high shelf over by the air compressor, labeled clearly.” She explained to Dev where to find it. “I was saving some things for the grandkids.”
“What grandkids?” Arch said, sounding irritated.
“The ones I hope to have one day, Arch,” Kelly explained with exaggerated patience.
“Can I go with him?” Rod asked Joan.
“Sure. Just don’t touch anything dangerous. There’s probably some sharp tools out there.”
