“Why?” He asked, flabbergasted by the request.
Ashley gave him a withering look, annoyed that men could be so dumb. “So they can come in when it rains and run outside when it’s sunny.”
As soon as he gave in and built the corral they requested, they started in on him to make it bigger.
Plenty of hay bales sat in the barns and sheds that dotted the countryside, and every third day Coy or Danny made a run and brought back a truckload.
Becky wandered over to the corral one afternoon and watched the girls tend to their charges. She carried a paper bag by its scrunched-up top.
“What’s in the bag, Mrs. Crandall?” Meghan asked. No matter how many times she’d told them to call her Becky, they continued to address her and the other adults by their surname.
“It’s a surprise,” Becky replied.
Meghan hurried over with little Stebbin padding along at her heels as always. His long, pink tongue hung over his bottom jaw and bounced in crazy circles with each step he took.
The teen grabbed the bag from Becky’s outstretched hand and peeked inside, then searched Becky’s face with wide eyes. “Do you think they’ll eat them?”
“Let’s go see.”
The horses would indeed eat the dried apples. Tara had returned from a scavenging run with a five-pound bag of them that afternoon. The fruit was shriveled and slimy and smelled of dirty socks, but the horses crunched them as if they were spun sugar. If the girls let too much time elapse between bites they registered their complaints with gentle knickers. They pushed and prodded to get the treats from Meghan’s hand, even though her sister held them in her hand, too. She was shy and withdrawn around people, but the girl had a way with animals.
Becky watched Meghan give the last apple to the yearling, one the teens had named Cinnamon. “Girls- come talk with me a minute.”
She asked them about their day and their mood, and if there was anything they needed. Ashley bantered back and forth with her, but Meghan studied her with an intense gaze and stayed silent. It was clear the child knew she didn’t come by to make small talk, so she decided she should get to the point.
“You two are doing a fabulous job with these horses and I don’t want that to change.” Ashley smiled at the compliment but Meghan’s expression remained unchanged. She waited for the other shoe to drop.
“But you know they are tools, right? When the weather clears the guys will saddle-break the ones that aren’t broke already, and they’ll ride them and use them to help this place. And if there comes a time where they need to sacrifice one or all of them in order to save themselves, or if the creepers get a hold of them…” Becky searched their eyes, trying to ascertain if her words were sinking in. “Enjoy the horses, girls,” she took a hand from both of them in hers. “But always keep in mind that there’s a chance you’ll come here one day and find them gone.”
Ashley looked at Becky, her inky-black eyes somber. “Meghan and I know we can’t depend on things anymore. The day Coy brought them in he told us not to get too attached, because come summer the grown-ups would ride them most days.” Ashley took her sister’s hand and the three of them made a circle, as if to play a game of Ring Around the Rosie. A single fat, round tear dropped from her right eye and rolled slowly down her cheek. “But in our family, you rode from the time you were big enough to sit a horse without falling over, and these stables are the one place we can pretend we’re still back home.”
Becky didn’t say anything; instead, she pulled both girls to her and embraced them. After a long time, they pulled apart. Becky pointed to the corral. “You need to have Danny build you a squeeze chute. They make it easier to let out one horse without fighting off the others.”
“I know, right?” Meghan hooted. Her eyes sparkled with excitement and she dashed to the pen. She gave a fifteen-minute stream-of-consciousness lecture covering all the improvements to the horses’ living quarters she wanted made, if only Danny would get off his lazy butt long enough to help.
Becky caught Ashley’s gaze, and they both smiled. Arm in arm, they followed Meghan around the corral and listened to her prattle.
Jiri
* * *
Jiri glided across the quarry with the effortless grace seen only in athletes who’d performed at high levels and professional dancers. He headed for tunnel eight and thought about clothes.
He had been a clothes horse before the outbreak. Life as a single man with a six-figure salary, plus the sizable inheritance his parents left him, provided significant discretionary income. He spent a healthy chunk of it every year at a pair of conferences in New York City. He always flew out and stayed at the Library Hotel, a beautiful building with over 6,000 books, where each of the ten floors represented a segment of the Dewey Decimal System. He kept a standing reservation for room 800-002; in the Dewey, 800 represented literature, and the hotel designed room 002 around a ‘classical fiction’ theme. The pictures on the walls were a rotation of authors such as Steinbeck, Dickens, Austen, and Hemingway. Among the classic books that filled the built-in shelves, he’d once found a rare volume by Victor Hugo in the original French. Early in the morning and late at night he roamed the hotel’s spacious and well-lit reading room, never failing to find and delight in an obscure text he had never seen before.
He attended the workshops and lectures, but the real reason he made the semi-annual trip was to shop. He haunted obscure boutiques with names like Topman, Cadet, and Gentry, as well as the better-known shops like Georgio Armani, Burberry, and Saint Laurent. His preference was for Italian suits by Kiton and Desmond Merrion, suits from Savile Row, ties by Salvatore Ferragamo and Versace, and shoes by Berluti and Barker Black. Jiri shopped in the morning, made his purchases, and arranged for their delivery back to Kansas. He’d take a cab back to the conference site and spend the afternoon attending lectures and workshops.
The group had suffered so many privations over the previous seven months that something as trivial as wearing the same grime-encrusted clothes day after day barely registered. Except for Jiri, who bore a disadvantage when it came to clothes- his size.
When they scavenged a home or after they cleared a house to set up camp for the night, they followed a familiar routine in the master bedroom. The guys formed a loose group around the bed or near the door and waited. Somebody, usually Coy, would pull a handful of shirts off the hanging rod and read the sizes off the labels. The men who wore that size smiled and exchanged high-fives and picked through the closet and the drawers for a change of clothes and extras to store in their packs. The women repeated the process with the clothes from the wife’s side of the closet. That way everybody in the group had a steady supply of clean clothes free from dirt, grime, blood, and gore.
Except for Jiri. Whatever tiny percentage of the population shared his six-foot-eight-inch frame didn’t live in the houses the group passed through. His clothes grew older and rattier and the blood and guts became harder to clean.
One night, in a stone farmhouse outside a tiny town south of Bolivar called Wishart, Jiri hit the mother lode.
He’d cleared the farmhouse’s cramped living room and found himself staring at photos of the former residents that hung on a wall above a wide-screen TV. He walked away from the pictures but something made him turn back and take another gander. That’s when he saw it. The family consisted of a mom, a dad, a teen son and two younger daughters. And in every picture dad was in, he towered over the rest of the brood. He looked six-foot-six, maybe taller.
Jiri waited for the all-clear call. Once it came, he dashed up a rickety staircase to the biggest bedroom on the second floor and threw open the closet doors. He shined a light inside and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. A row of men’s shirts hung neatly from the crossbar, and they looked big enough for his frame. And dad sure liked his flannel. Checkered flannel shirts stretched from one side of the closet to the other. Nothing but checkered flannel shirts. Red flannel, blue flannel, and green flannel, red and green squares tha
t screamed Christmas, the white and red flannel that gangbangers wore in the movies, the blue and darker blue that the gangbangers on the opposing side wore, and more.
Never a beggar when he could be a chooser, Jiri took off the shirt he was wearing and tossed it in the corner. He chose a red shirt with green and red checks and put it on over his tee-shirt. He pulled out three more, rolled them up, and stuffed them in his pack. Across the room, the dresser’s bottom drawer overflowed with denim. The homeowner’s waistline was close to his, so he put on a fresh pair of jeans and added a second to take with him. He pulled his boots back on, the ones they’d looted at the army base, and observed his reflection in a mirror above the dresser. Jiri chuckled and shook his head at the image looking back at him. At least the clothes are clean, he thought to himself. He inspected himself in the mirror one more time before heading back down the stairs, still chuckling, to find out what was next.
Cyrus
* * *
Jiri entered the Original’s tunnel and approached the first person he saw, a tall and chunky man with jug-ears named Timmy or Tommy. Timmy/Tommy was ugly, with a flat, Slavic forehead, a fleshy nose, and bushy eyebrows that arched in a way that made him look perpetually surprised.
Jiri aimed for a tone that was polite but brisk enough to make him seem hurried. The last thing he wanted was a conversation with Timmy/Tommy. “Would you please tell me where I might find Cyrus’ apartment?” He wondered if apartment was too grandiose a word for this motley collection of rooms made of cubicle partitions and particle board, but that was how The Originals referred to them and now wasn’t the time to quibble.
Timmy/Tommy’s directions led him to a flimsy-looking shanty three-quarters of a football field into the tunnel. He stood motionless and cocked an ear toward the apartment wall. From inside he could make out rustling noises and the unmistakable sound of a mouthful of potato chips being crunched to oblivion. He rapped three times on the particle board wall and was aghast when his knocking caused it to lean inward. Silence from inside; even the rustling noise and chewing sounds stopped.
He knocked again, more gently and on a two-by-four that held the particle boards together. “Cyrus?” he called out. “It’s Jiri, Will’s friend.”
Silence.
Jiri looked at the sheet of plywood that served as the apartment door. He laced his fingers in front of him at chest level and tapped his thumbs against each other. After a few moments, he smiled.
“Well, shit,” he mumbled in a loud voice. “Guess he’s not here.” He walked back toward the exit, making sure his boots clomped on the concrete floor as he went. When he’d walked fifty paces he stopped. He unlaced his boots and pulled them off, setting them by one of the support pillars. He turned and padded back to the apartment, silent in his stocking feet. Back outside the door, he squared up in front of it. His leg shot out and his heel connected with the door’s dead-center with all his strength. The plywood didn’t so much fall by the wayside as it exploded, breaking into several pieces that all flew around the living area in different directions.
He leaned his head inside and peered about. Cyrus was laying on a couch, staring at him bug-eyed and motionless. He wore a pair of boxer shorts that billowed around thighs as thick as Boars Head hams. A grease-stained tee-shirt was pulled up under his ample man-tits and his uncovered stomach ballooned out and glistened in the weak light like the underside of a catfish. He had just stuffed an entire Twinkie in his mouth; apparently, in his shock he forgot to chew and just sat there with the lump of yellow dough wedged into his open maw.
Jiri got right to the point. “If I got you all the plant matter you needed, do you reckon you could brew up a steady supply of biofuel?”
Cyrus stared at him, his expression unchanged, the Twinkie unmoved. For a moment Jiri thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he blinked his eyes twice and nodded his head slowly.
Jiri tapped his knuckles on the particle board twice. “Outstanding.” He waved goodbye, turned, and walked away. Several people left their nearby apartments to investigate the loud noise Jiri made when he kicked Cyrus’ door in. He nodded and smiled at them but kept walking, stopping only to put on his boots.
Jiri and Mark
* * *
Jiri had just left the tunnel when someone inside called his name. He turned to see Mark Renner step out of his home tunnel and hurrying in his direction. ”Friggin’ great,” he mumbled. Mark wore a spotless white Tommy Hilfiger button-down shirt that looked crisp enough to stand up by itself and a pair of blue jeans. He wore what Jiri derisively called a bro-hat; a baseball cap with a pair of wrap-around sunglasses perched on the bill.
He extended a hand to Jiri and put on his best used car salesman’s greasy smile. “How the hell are ya?”
Jiri shook his hand. “Good, Mark, I’m good.”
“Damned glad to hear it. What brings you down to where the J.V. team lives?”
Jiri’s felt his blood pressure rise. Mark had a peculiar way of asking a question in a manner that implied the person he was talking to had insulted him when they hadn’t. Like calling his group the J.V. team- what he meant was, ‘I know you guys think you’re better than us’. It was another thing about the man that rubbed Jiri the wrong way. “I needed to get with Cyrus for a minute,” he answered.
Mark did a double take and raised his eyebrows. “What did you want with that double-sized tub of shit?”
“Nothing really, just some ideas I’ve been kicking around.”
Mark nodded with mock confidence. “Oh, I get it. Whatever you talked about, it’s too important for us peons to know.”
Jiri grew angrier with the tone of the conversation. He took a deep breath and forced a smile. “No, Mark, that’s not the case. I had an idea he might be able to help with. That’s all, an idea. No sense in talking about it until it’s more than that. Now, I’ve got to be getting back.” Jiri started to turn away.
“Hold up, hold up. I had a reason for hollering at you.”
Jiri turned back toward him. “What’s that?”
“How’s the food situation?
“Precarious. It would be better if Cyrus wasn’t spayed out on his couch eating junk food all day.”
“I bet. What are you gonna do, though? The Judge taught him early on that none of the rules around here apply to him.”
“Yeah? I bet Will teaches him different.” Jiri jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Look, I’ve really got to get back.”
Mark continued like he hadn’t heard him. “The reason I asked about food is the Judge knows where there may be some. A lot. He wants to sit down with you and Will to talk about it.”
Jiri was intrigued despite himself. “How much is a lot?”
“Barrels and boxes full. Tons, maybe.”
“Down here? In the tunnels?”
“No, it’s off-site.”
Jiri considered the idea and couldn’t come up with a reason not to hear them out. “Okay. Are you coming up or do you want us to come down?”
“Why don’t you guys come down? Meet us in the conference room we used when you first got here, at dusk.”
“Okay. Thanks, Mark.”
Mark let loose a throaty laugh. “Don’t thank me until you’ve heard the idea.”
The Meeting
* * *
Will pulled open the door to the conference room just as the sun dropped below the western horizon. Danny and Jiri trailed behind him; the Judge, Mark, and Misty waited for them. Will examined the room as greetings and handshakes went on around him. It sat in the corner of an immense opening off the main tunnel. As they walked in, the tunnel split into a Y. The path to the right kept you in the main passageway; the left led you to a medium-sized factory. They walked under a sign that said ‘Marigold Dairy Products’. Inside the plant, their path took them past a small manufacturing room. The machine’s silent and hulking shadows flickered in the lantern light. Conveyor belts crisscrossed the room.
Past the manufacturing room and off in t
he far corner a metal staircase led to a platform that overlooked the production floor; the conference room sat in the middle of the platform. It was a small square about thirty feet per side, with Plexiglas walls on all four sides. The better to keep an eye on the workers at all times, Will thought with a bitter smile.
A large mahogany table that sat seven on each side dominated the room. The three Originals were already seated on the far side; Will chose a chair opposite them. He had to admit that The Judge knew how to throw a meeting. Three crystal carafes sat in a row at the head of the table. One was filled with water and one a dark liquid Will figured to be tea. The third sat on a battery-powered warmer and a pair of hot pads rested nearby- that had to be the vile instant brew that The Originals called coffee. Will sampled it once and thought it tasted like mule piss strained through a pair of dirty athletic socks. A cluster of pricey looking glasses and coffee mugs sparkled and shone next to the carafes. A two-tiered porcelain tea-tray dominated the table’s center. The trays had a flower pattern and delicate looking etchings around the side and held an assortment of Pop-Tarts and Hostess snack cakes.
Each table setting was home to a little collection of office products. Will surveyed his. A legal pad, two ink pens, a pencil sharpened to a fine point, a stack of post-its, and a scratch pad. On the opposite side sat Misty, her pen poised over her legal pad like a freshman over-achiever on her first day of class. She reached out and pushed a button on an old black tape recorder to her left.
The Haven Series (Book 2): Haven Page 13
