Super Pulse (Book 4): Defect

by Conifer, Dave

  “I’m probably gonna’ stay here for the night,” Nick said. “I might even move in. If it’s easier, you can leave and take the bottle with you. I don’t know if you were serious about keeping me company. I won’t hold you to it.”

  “Dead serious,” she told him. “I already said I’m here for you.”

  “Well, I was hoping to get under the covers before I freeze to death,” Nick said.

  “Then I’ll join you,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she answered. “I don’t want to freeze to death either.”

  You know, Sarah, Nick said, “If you’re that worried about the wine, go ahead and pour it out. That way you don’t have to stay and babysit. I really do appreciate it even though I’m not showing it.”

  Sarah sat down and put her arm around him. “Babysitting isn’t what I have in mind.”

  ~~~

  A few minutes later they were in bed, fully clothed except for the shoes they’d both dropped onto the floor at the last minute before crawling under the blankets. Still reeling from Sarah’s suggestion, Nick was completely befuddled when she pushed his arm out of the way and wriggled up against his chest. But he didn’t fight it. Sarah was a good woman, and it had been a long time since he’d touched anybody. After she was settled, he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. It felt good, and there was nothing better for warming up.

  “Nick, I worry about you,” she said. “You take everything to heart. Nobody’s perfect. Even if this was your fault, nobody’s holding it against you. Everybody’s glad you’re here. I know that for a fact.”

  Nick took a deep breath, trying to keep his composure. He wanted to believe her words. But he didn’t. He just didn’t. “Okay, thanks,” he finally said, his voice hoarse and husky with emotion. “I don’t think you’re right. But either way, I don’t want to talk about it anymore, even if you’re not gonna’ let me finish that bottle.”

  She snuggled tighter, pulling the blanket up over her shoulder as she did it. “Our whole world is gone, Nick. Think back on all we had, six or seven months ago, even if we didn’t appreciate it. It’ll be a while before anybody gets used to it. Until then, nobody’s very happy. You’re not the only one. You just have to learn to handle it better, that’s all. Don’t let it all get to you like this.”

  “It’s different for you,” Nick protested. “All you have to—”

  “No, it’s not,” she countered. “You just think it is. Everybody’s got a reason to give up. It’s not just you.”

  “What’s your reason?” he asked after a pause.

  “Hush,” she said as she propped herself up on an elbow. “That’s enough talking for tonight.” She stifled his reply with a soft kiss on the lips. What came next was something that Nick wouldn’t have thought either of them had in them. As it turned out, both of them did.

  A half hour later they’d put some clothing back on and regained their breath. After straightening out the blankets, each enjoyed their best night’s sleep since the lights went out the previous summer.

  ~~~

  “Are you okay, Sarah?” Nick asked the next morning when he saw that like him, she was quietly awake. He wasn’t sure of the meaning of his own words. All he knew was that he was surprised about what had happened. He felt somehow guilty.

  “Of course,” she answered, smiling as she rolled towards him. “Why? Aren’t you?”

  “Well, yeah,” he stammered. “Of course. I guess I feel bad that you thought you had to, you know, do what you did.”

  “What I did?” she asked in mock anger. “You were here too, bud.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, I know. What I mean is, well, I guess I’m saying you didn’t have to do that. I’m okay. Even if I’d gotten drunk alone last night, I’d still be here right now.”

  “Oh, well thanks a lot,” she said. “You really know to charm a lady.”

  “No, what I’m saying is—"

  “I’m kidding,” she interrupted. “I know I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. I wasn’t even planning on anything like that when I tracked you down last night.” An impish grin crossed her face. “But I’ve thought about it a few times.”

  Nick sat up and cocked his head to get a better read on her face. “Really? Me?”

  “Yeah, you,” she said. “Is that so hard to believe?”

  He shrugged and fell back onto the bundled-up coat that had served as his pillow after he’d gotten up during the night and fetched it. “If we’re being completely honest here, yeah, it is. I’m not exactly a prize catch.”

  “Your marriage didn’t last,” she said. “Is that what this is about? Because a divorce doesn’t mean you’re some kind of monster.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said quickly, wishing hadn’t brought it up. “By the way, Val and I were still friends after it was all over. Part of that was pity, though.”

  “Lots of marriages don’t last, for a thousand different reasons,” Sarah said. “Sure, you probably made a few mistakes. I mean, since we’re being honest here, like you said,” she added. “You can’t take that all on your own shoulders.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said sarcastically. He gauged the light that seeped in under the door and concluded that it was a gap of nearly two inches. This cabin still needed to be properly sealed, but that wouldn’t happen until it was occupied. No wonder it was so cold. “It looks early out there.”

  “What do you have to do today?” Sarah asked.

  “Carly found me some good quality scrap metal,” he said. “Axles from old trucks. I’m going to fire up the forge start experimenting. I have to make some spades and shovels for the spring planting. How about you?”

  “I was supposed to go to the Armory and clean guns,” she said. “Hopefully there’s still some left to clean after what they told us last night.”

  “Thanks to me, if you ask Roethke,” he said.

  A few minutes passed before another word was spoken. “Sarah, what about your marriage?” he asked. “Did I just wreck it?”

  “In a way, I hope you did,” she answered. “That would mean Eli is still out there somewhere, and there’s still a marriage to be wrecked.” Her reply came so fast that he knew it was something she’d given plenty of thought to. Everybody had their demons.

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said.

  “But I forced myself to face reality after that day when I went back to my house with Dewey,” she continued. “I cried a lot for a while, but I don’t anymore. Even if he’s still alive, which I wouldn’t doubt at all, he’s in Boston. He may as well be on the Moon. And I’m okay with that, because it’s not up to me, anyway. I don’t have a say in it. I’ll never see him again. Neither will my daughters. And that’s that.”

  What about you and me, Nick wanted to ask. But he wasn’t even sure how he’d answer that himself, so he didn’t think it was fair to ask her. It was too soon. Maybe what had happened meant nothing, either to him or her. If she wasn’t asking that question, he wouldn’t either. Instead they climbed out of bed into the frigid air, adjusted their clothes so as not to give out any easy clues, and headed off for another day in Tabernacle.

  ~~~

  That afternoon Nick dropped by the new one-room building he’d erected all by himself over by the Crop Fields a few weeks earlier. Now known as the “Solar Shack,” it was the home of the team currently researching solar energy and electrification the camp. The team consisted of two members, Ant Palozzi and his girlfriend Vi Rodriguez, with an occasional assist from Dwayne Griffin when heavy-duty electrical work was required. The Solar Shack had been approved quickly after Ant requested it, mostly because of the well-received update on the team’s progress that had preceded the request. Working in the corner of the Food Distribution Center wasn’t good enough, he’d argued, because it was always in the shade. He hadn’t even had to explain to The Committee why that was counter-productive for the solar power project.

  “Wil
l it bother you if I’m up on the roof for a few minutes pounding nails?” Nick asked after poking his head inside. “I found enough shingles to finish the job for you.”

  “Cool by us,” Vi answered with a smile. Ant, hunched over his work bench, neither looked up nor spoke. Knowing he could catch up on things with Ant after the roof was done, Nick nodded and went back outside. An hour later he was back down the ladder and inside the shack.

  ‘You’re good to go,” he told them. “If it hasn’t leaked yet, it isn’t going to now.”

  “Thanks, man,” Vi said. Nick nodded politely, hoping Ant would look up from his work bench. She nodded back just as politely. Nick always had the feeling that Vi, who looked to him like a flower-power refugee from a Vietnam War protest, thought of him as a square and disliked him. It wasn’t high on his list of concerns, but it sometimes made for awkward moments.

  “So when do the lights go on?” he asked.

  “Ha ha,” Ant answered. This time he looked up. “Seriously, though, we’re moving along, especially since we moved into this place.”

  Nick walked over to the wall and rubbed at what looked like green ash. “What happened here?”

  “You sure you want to know?” Ant asked.

  “We blew up a battery,” Vi explained. “We’re still learning as we go, you know?”

  “Yikes,” Nick said. “Anybody hurt?”

  “No, Thank God,” Vi answered. “The suits woulda’ shut us down. But nobody was here. Turns out you can’t just keep pouring electrical current into a battery without limits. After it happened I was back in the library until I figured out what went wrong.”

  “So you’re actually generating power?” Nick asked. “That’s amazing.”

  “It really helps being over here in the sun,” Ant said. “We were spending all our time stringing out cables and rolling them up every night. Thanks for throwing this place up so fast.”

  “It was a lot of trial and error, right Ant?” Vi said. “Basically we kept rebuilding inverters and trying different panels. The odds weren’t bad. Eventually we hooked up a working inverter and a working panel at the same time. And then we knew what to look for.”

  “That’s amazing.” Nick said again. “I wish I’d saved all my Stones records now.”

  “You and me both, baby,” Vi said.

  “Don’t you wish we could build the technology we need instead of scavenging the trash heaps for parts?” Nick asked. “I feel like it’ll take us centuries to get back to where we were.”

  “That’s heavy, man,” Vi said. “But it doesn’t bother me. Our job is to make power with whatever we have. I don’t care where the pieces come from. We’re just here to put them together.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Nick said. “That’s all we can do, anyway.” He hiked up his tool belt. “I better get over the Bath House before it gets dark,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but Del told me to get over there before the end of the day. So off I go.”

  Seven

  “So Squidly man,” Plankton said one night as he huddled around the campfire with Squid and Lou. “How come you never tell us where we’re going? You never have any doubt which direction to head, but you’ve never told us why.”

  Squid angled the long stick he held in his hand until the tip was over a bank of hot coals. The hunk of rabbit meat speared on the end would cook faster that way. He tried not to smile when his camp mates followed his lead and moved their own soon-to-be entrees to the same spot. It always happened that way. “I see it a little differently, Plankton. It’s like my daughters used to say. I’m not the boss of you,” he answered. “You’re welcome to tag along with me. Or not. But I’ve never told you what to do or where to go.”

  “True that,” Lou said.

  “I don’t even know what this is,” Plankton said, holding up his stick. “I could just do this by phone. Nobody listens to me, anyway.”

  Both Squid and Lou ignored Plankton’s remark. Both were well familiar by now with Plankton’s tendency to blurt out nonsensical comments at any time, always with a dreamy smile on his face. Nothing he said in this state ever mattered, especially to Plankton himself. Squid had concluded weeks earlier that, while Plankton was still competent, he’d somehow burned out part of his brain and couldn’t control these impulses. He may not even be aware of them. It could have been drugs, or pot, or untreated mental illness, or any number of things. They never hurt anything, and it usually gave him and Lou a chuckle. They were just glad their friend was still among the living.

  How Plankton had survived the point-blank shotgun attack on the day they met was still a puzzling mystery that Squid spent far too much time thinking about. When they found him a few hours later, sitting contentedly at the foot of a conifer, he was completely unscathed and hardly seemed to know how lucky he’d been. Squid had heard of people who were somehow blessed with what could only be called, for lack of a better term, ridiculously good fortune, but this was the first time he’d ever seen one of them up close. How anybody could have missed that shot from so close was beyond Squid, but he was thankful for it.

  “We’d never survive without you,” Lou said. “Especially now that we followed you out here into the middle of nowhere.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Squid said. “You’re military, aren’t you? I know you are. You know what to do to stay above ground.”

  She waved her hand across the makeshift campsite. “Not like this, Squid. I don’t know anything about trapping and skinning animals for food, or building shelters out of nothing. Or finding clean water to drink and making stuff to wear so we don’t freeze to death. Or knowing where I’m going without a map or a compass.”

  “Or eating bugs,” Plankton said. “Or birds. Or mushrooms.”

  Squid wondered why Plankton talked about eating bugs so often. Never once had they resorted to that. But it’s not like it’s the first time he didn’t make any sense, Squid reminded himself as he brought the smoking meat close to his face to inspect it by the light of the fire. Satisfied with the cook, he gnawed off a piece and began chewing. Soon the others did the same. “Well now you do know how to survive,” he said. “If you’ve been paying attention. So maybe you needed me before, but you don’t now.”

  “You trying to get rid of us?” Plankton asked, struggling to smile through a mouthful of dinner.

  “Nope,” Squid said, without further explanation.

  “So how’d you know?” Lou asked. “That I was military before all this?”

  Squid shrugged. “Nothing specific. You can tell. You just know. The way you approach things, I guess.”

  She nodded slowly. “Kind of like ‘It takes one to know one?’” she asked. “You’ve got some kind of military background too, don’t you? You don’t learn to live off the land like this by taking weekend camping trips with the wife and kids.”

  Squid stabbed the handle end of his stick into the soft dirt, suspending his meal in mid-air, and stood up. “Nature’s calling,” he told them as he draped a rag from his pocket over his dinner before disappearing into the woods. They were used to his vanishing acts. It was what he always did when the conversation went where he didn’t want it to go. They knew he wouldn’t be answering Lou’s question anytime soon, and they knew he wouldn’t be back for a while. It had come up several times during the months they’d been together, and the result had always been the same. By now they’d learned not to worry, and even more, not to push him to tell them what he didn’t want to tell.

  He didn’t return for several hours, waiting until he knew Lou and Plankton would be wrapped in their ragged bed rolls under the shelter he’d built from branches and insulated with materials he scrounged up from the forest floor. After finishing his cold dinner, which he found still skewered on the stake right where he’d left it, he joined them in the lean-to and rolled himself into his own bedding for the night.

  ~~~

  They’d been camped there for several days. Squid didn’t like standing still that w
ay, but his leg was hurting and he was tired, and he sensed that the others were as well. Traveling on foot in the dead cold of winter was wearing them down. There was a reason that life expectancies for human beings had been so much lower until technological advances of the twentieth century made life easier, he told himself every day. And by the looks of things, he thought grimly, that metric was about to take a nosedive back toward where it had come from before the time of electric blenders, a car in every driveway and endless supplies of food at the local supermarket.

  Aside from an occasional question or remark like he’d heard that evening around the fire, he didn’t usually have any difficulty batting down their questions about how far they’d traveled or where Squid was leading them to. His responses were always vague, but the truth was that he was carefully keeping track of time and distance as best he could. He had a good idea of where they were at any given time, and definitely had a plan for where he was going. Getting there as quickly as he could was something that mattered to him. He preferred not to be on his own, and there was safety in numbers, but his destination was more important than their company. That wouldn’t change regardless of whether they stayed or left.

  He wasn’t sure why he was so evasive about his travel plans. Playing his cards close to the vest was something he’d learned along life’s journey. He trusted Plankton and Lou by now. But secrecy and compartmentalization of information was his way, and that was all there was to it. That was who he was.

  Having a plan wasn’t making the journey any easier, however. Maybe they needed to do more to fix that. “So let me ask you this,” he said the next morning, after Plankton had demonstrated his improving outdoors survival skills by reviving the fire from the scant embers left over from the night before. “That Oldsmobile we had. Why did it run when most cars don’t? How did that man fix it?”

  As he spoke, Squid noticed that Plankton was once again cleanly shaven. He’d realized long ago that the filthy bag Plankton carried around contained a razor and a never-ending supply of blades. He must have found a stream nearby and taken a few minutes to scrape his whiskers away. Hopefully he filled their water jugs at the same time.