I’d learn Spanish if it would keep Maddie alive and let the world go back to normal. Does that make me a traitor? Can anyone be a traitor if their country is gone?
Still, 222 shells sounded like a lot, but she’d burn them quick if a hostile force attacked Evergreen. Hell, she used to go through 400 or so merely from one day practicing for an upcoming competition. Given their relatively short range, shotgun shells would last longer than rifle ammo for the simple reason she wouldn’t have any targets until a hostile person made it close enough. Still, in the chaos of an actual fight, people could easily close distance. She could tear through fifty or a hundred shells in a serious engagement—assuming she didn’t die. Harper also feared the ammo would eventually rot to unreliable—or dangerous—junk, so she didn’t have an obsessive need to hold onto them at all costs beyond her distaste for killing people. She’d try everything she could to avoid having to fire on someone, but ‘conserving ammo’ would not be a point of hesitation.
If it can save my life or protect someone, better to use them than let them rot.
A random, bizarre thought of Mom checking ‘best by’ dates on plastic-wrapped packages of shotgun ammo at the grocery store—as if buying them there like any other necessary item seemed normal—made her glance down at the Mossberg and sigh. “Someday, you’re going to become a decorative wall-hanging that reminds me of Dad.”
A flicker of memory haunted her. Thinking of her father brought a wave of guilt for his death. A member of the Lawless gang had kicked in their front door, locked stares with Harper, and had one disgusting thing on his mind—until he saw the shotgun. Her hesitation forced Dad to protect her, leading to him being shot from behind when he took his attention off the patio door in the kitchen.
For the longest time, Harper blamed herself for his death. She’d finally decided to talk with Dr. Tegan Hale about it after the woman witnessed her rage-kill the Lawless who shot Dad. The gang attacked them months ago when they’d run into the city for medicine, before gasoline ran out. By random chance, that guy jumped on the back of their van and tried to get inside. As soon as Harper recognized him, she lost control.
Though a medical doctor, the woman had experience with mental health counseling. The day Harper grabbed Madison and fled the house after her parents’ deaths, a large pack of Lawless chased them for blocks. She still didn’t quite know how they managed to get away. Even if she had been able to shoot the guy who came in the front door, they might have still been overrun.
It had taken her eleven months, but Harper finally put ninety percent of the blame for her father’s death on the Lawless instead of herself.
Overcome with grief, she stopped walking, bowed her head, and shivered from the weight of emotion. Most of the time, she held it together, but every so often, a moment of desperately trying to wish it had all been a dream brought her to the edge of tears. She sometimes hoped if she closed her eyes hard enough and wanted it bad enough, she’d wake up to find herself back home.
No one’s stupid enough to actually launch a full-scale nuclear war on purpose, right?
Harper bowed her head.
Nope. I’m still here. She opened her eyes. Guess people really are that stupid.
She wiped a few stray tears from her face, then resumed walking, almost laughing at herself for being maudlin out of the blue. Had to be the drizzly weather affecting her mood.
“I’m probably never going to be able to think about Mom and Dad without feeling sad and guilty… but I guess that’s normal. It would be way scarier if I had no feelings at all. Dad knew I’d have trouble shooting someone or he wouldn’t have been watching me. Okay. I’m fine, really.”
One deep breath led to another—and the odor of acrid smoke.
“Crap!”
Something burned, and not a fireplace. This stank too much to be a simple wood fire. All thoughts of the past disappeared. She faced into the breeze, looking around for the source. A trail of dark grey-black smoke leaked from a house on Brookline Road.
Harper sounded one long blart from her air horn can, a 911 tone, then ran toward the house.
2
The Natural Way
Smoke poured from a ground-floor window of an otherwise nice two-story home.
The house sat below the level of Brookline Road, its roof only a little higher than the street surface. Harper disregarded the long driveway off to her right, scrambling down the steep tree-studded embankment to the asphalt-paved area in front of the house. A double-ended driveway connected to Brookline on her right and out to South Hiwan Drive on her left.
“Mr. Vitelli?” yelled Harper, still feeling a bit too young to call an almost-forty-year-old by his first name, Joe.
No response came from inside, so she barged in, slinging the Mossberg over her shoulder on its strap. A thin layer of dark smoke clung to the ceiling in the hall, seeping out from an archway on the left up ahead. The place looked otherwise normal, the fire seemingly confined—at the moment—to one room. She pulled her T-shirt up over her face as a mask, then hurried through the arch into the living room. Joe Vitelli lay face-down on the rug next to a glass-top coffee table. A fairly small patch of flames chewed on the rug not far from a fireplace. Harper hauled ass to the kitchen, grabbed a stock pot from a shelf, and ran to the bathroom to fill it in the tub.
An air horn pip went off not too far away, which meant other militia people responding to her request couldn’t tell where to go. They must be too far to see smoke past the trees.
While the pot filled, Harper stuck her air horn out the bathroom window and sounded another long tone.
“Where you at?” yelled Darnell in the distance.
“Here!” shouted Harper. “Fire! Joe Vitelli’s house. Brookline Road.”
She cut the water and lugged the pot to the living room, dumping the water on the burning spot, already larger than it had been a minute ago. In the midst of her pouring, people tromped in the front door out in the hall. Water splashed over the rug, smothering the patch of fire into a few tiny areas of burn.
“Harper?” called Leigh.
“In here.” She stomped on the squishy, ashed carpet, tamping out the last of the flames.
Darnell and Leigh appeared in the archway. Joe Vitelli abruptly pushed himself up onto his knees and began speaking as if having a conversation with someone about selling a house.
“Mr. Vitelli?” asked Harper.
He ignored her, continuing to reassure a non-existent person the house passed all inspections.
“Oh, damn.” Darnell coughed, walking over to the burn mark. “Looks like you got here just in time.”
Leigh waved her hand in front of the man’s face. “Joe? Are you feeling all right?”
He looked up at her, seemingly bewildered. “I told them purple was off the table. Why did they insist on painting it purple?”
“Uhh…” Harper blinked. “Is he on something?”
Darnell kicked at the burned spot. “Looks like an ember went flying out of the fireplace. This could’a been way bad.”
“Joe?” asked Leigh, louder. “Earth to Joe.”
He glanced down at a big plastic cup on the floor, which he’d likely dropped earlier when he blacked out. Still seeming confused, he picked the cup up, examined it for a second as if he’d never seen such an object before—and crushed it.
“Something is really wrong with him,” said Harper.
Darnell closed the screen in front of the fireplace. “We should get him to the medical center. This fire’s pretty much died down, but we can’t leave it going in an empty house. Harper, you mind getting another bucket?”
“Yeah, sure…” She hurried to the bathroom.
Darnell and Leigh continued trying to get Joe to respond to conversation while Harper filled the stock pot. The man replied babbling, or spouting mixed-up sentences unrelated to their questions, such as exclaiming ‘frogs can’t fly’ when they asked him if he knew where he was.
Harper lugged the pot of wa
ter to the living room.
Joe picked up a TV remote from the coffee table and put it on the floor in front of him. He picked it back up and put it on the table… then repeated the back and forth three times.
“What the actual eff is he doing?” asked Harper while dumping the water into the fireplace.
Darnell shrugged. “Don’t look at me. Leigh’s the one who used to be an EMT.”
“I’m thinking either he’s got a brain tumor or he’s having a sugar crash.” Leigh took Joe’s arm. “We need to get him to the medical center.”
Harper’s stomach knotted up at the words ‘sugar crash.’ It meant diabetes, which meant he would likely die fairly soon in a world where insulin no longer existed.
“Joe, man, can you walk?” Darnell took his other arm and helped Leigh lift the man to his feet.
“The house is listed fair,” said Joe—six times in a row. He gave a wild laugh while rocking back and forth.
“C’mon, Joe.” Leigh tugged on his arm.
They walked him out to the driveway.
Harper accompanied them, mostly out of worry and curiosity than any true need to provide an escort. Joe ambled along, babbling random phrases, growling, chuckling, or whistling. Twice, he started singing Eighties hair band music. They followed Brookline to Route 76, the straightest path to the medical center they’d established in a former office building. She still didn’t understand why they hadn’t used the dental place next to the Wendy’s, since it already had a bunch of medical equipment. Maybe the doctors didn’t want to put the medical center in a building so close to the edge of town out of fear of potential attack?
For that matter, Evergreen had an actual medical center farther south on 74 behind the Big R. There’d been talk of relocating services there, but so far, no action. Between the lack of ability to transmit electricity from the solar panel farm there to—she assumed—no one thinking it worth the bother, the converted office building remained their ‘hospital.’ The citizens of Evergreen had more or less accepted society would end up in some strange version of the early 1900s as far as medical technology went for the foreseeable future.
Also, the fancy technology in the real medical center wouldn’t do anyone any good without more power than the solar panels had the ability to create. Jeanette and her electrical team managed to energize the former power grid in a limited area, and it still crapped out if too many people turned on too many lights at the same time. Trying to switch on an MRI machine would cause the solar panels to melt.
Most of the houses around the old golf course (where Anne-Marie assigned people with children to live due to proximity to the school) had power, as well as the improvised medical center, city hall, and numerous houses as far south as Hilltop Drive, where Harper lived. They’d been working to salvage or replace pole wiring as much as they could, but the fairly small solar array could only generate so much juice. If they innervated too much of the former town’s power grid, the wires alone would be so much of a drain there wouldn’t be enough power left to turn on three light bulbs. Harper still didn’t quite understand why long wires caused power loss, but trusted the electricians to be correct.
Chasing bears off, walking around a quiet suburb, and helping sick people to the medical center didn’t come close to what the movies made nuclear war survival sound like… but she had no complaints. She far preferred the mundanity of it to having gangs of crazed leather-clad freaks who flipped a coin to decide between cooking their meat or eating it raw chasing her all over a desert wasteland. The constant Hollywood threat of suffering cannibalism, sexual assault, or some weird gladiatorial fiasco if captured had fortunately not proved out to be truth. Then again, those movies usually portrayed a time set many generations after the war when no one alive remembered what society had been like.
She wanted to believe what Anne-Marie, the town manager, said. The woman believed deep down every person had good in them, and society, no matter what form it took, would generally cling to civilization. Roving bands of psychos existed only in movies, or so she wanted to believe. Harper had seen at least two—possibly three—groups she’d classify as a ‘roving band of psychos,’ perhaps not so much on the ‘roving’ part. Obviously, the Lawless, then the group of gang punks camped out beside a highway where she found her former physics teacher, Ms. Tiller, and finally, the small army of convicts who’d attacked Evergreen in revenge for liberating the people they’d enslaved to work on farms at Kittredge.
Yeah, nuts exist. Most people might be good, but the world’s got plenty of idiots.
Joe slipped in and out of consciousness, forcing Darnell and Leigh to carry him for about half the trip. As soon as they went in the door of the medical center, Ruby Dorsey called for Dr. Khan. The woman managed the day-to-day stuff, and also helped deal with small problems like kids who’d scraped a knee. To Harper, she seemed like the ‘front desk person’ every doctor’s office or dentist’s office had, mostly because the woman sat at the front desk. None of the receptionist computers or phones worked anymore, but for whatever reason, no one had bothered removing them.
Darnell and Leigh carried Joe across the waiting room, meeting Dr. Khan at the start of the hallway leading deeper into the building. Ruby ran to grab a gurney. Between the four of them, they maneuvered Joe into a treatment room.
“What happened?” asked Dr. Khan, while giving Joe a cursory initial evaluation.
Harper hovered in the doorway. “I saw smoke coming out of the window. Found Mr. Vitelli unconscious on the floor. The fire was pretty small, only about”—she held her hands about pizza-size apart—“this big. I put it out. Don’t think the smoke knocked him cold. He woke up and started talking to someone who wasn’t there and did a bunch of weird stuff.”
Leigh nodded. “Incoherent speech, repetitive activities… I’m thinking he’s probably in hypoglycemic shock… or he’s got a brain tumor.”
Dr. Khan rummaged a tester from a drawer, seeming both surprised and relieved when it turned on. He pricked Joe’s finger. His eyes went wide a few seconds later when the device beeped and displayed results. “Excuse me a moment.”
Harper sidestepped as the doctor rushed out of the treatment room. He ran down the hall to a small break area, returning in a moment carrying a cup, which he coaxed Joe to drink.
“What are you giving him?” asked Darnell.
“Sugar water. You’re correct, Miss Preston.” Dr. Khan smiled at Leigh. “Blood glucose was forty-two.”
Leigh cringed. “Holy cow.”
“If he hadn’t fainted, he could have put the fire out pretty easy,” said Harper. “It’s pure luck I happened to walk by in time to catch it before it spread across the whole room.”
“Dude’s seriously lucky.” Darnell whistled. “Kinda backward his living room carpet catching fire saved his life.”
“Mr. Vitelli probably shouldn’t live alone.” Harper bit her lip. Until he dies for not having insulin.
“A legitimate concern.” Dr. Khan set the empty cup on the counter. “He should be all right in a few minutes once the sugar gets into his bloodstream. With extreme dietary care, he can potentially manage. The odds are better if he’s type two. If he’s type one, it’s… well… even with perfect dietary management, his prognosis for survival in the absence of insulin is not rosy. Mr. Vitelli should not be living alone.”
“Yeah.” Leigh bowed her head.
After so many months of patrolling the area around the old golf course, Harper had a fairly good sense of who lived where. She might not have known everyone on a ‘first name’ basis, but she knew names and a little bit about each person. People like Joe Vitelli, single adults living alone, would likely be asked to relocate for a family with kids if the houses closest to the school ever filled up. However, they still had plenty of empties. Regardless, the guy needed to have someone with him pretty much all the time.
If he happened to be a type one diabetic, he wouldn’t last much longer. Despite seeing him on and off while patro
lling for months, she’d never realized he had a medical condition, which meant he either got astoundingly lucky or had a stash of insulin—or he’d only recently developed diabetes.
The stuff goes bad pretty quick, doesn’t it? And we haven’t had working refrigerators for very long… and the power goes out all the time, sometimes for days. Distribution of electrical power had become so iffy, Jeannette’s team had installed a few solar panels and some kind of battery directly on the quartermaster building roof, dedicated to powering the ‘community refrigerators.’
While the others discussed the possibility of talking Joe into moving, Harper decided she had no further need of being there, so made her way out. Head full of somber thoughts, she nearly walked straight into Arturo Rosales not far from the medical center door. He appeared to be on the way to go inside.
“Sorry,” said Arturo, grabbing her arms for balance.
“My fault. I should have been looking ahead, not down.”
He let go. “Everything okay? You look kinda glum. Usually, it’s me who’s the downer.”
She managed a weak smile. Consumed by feelings of uselessness, the former lawyer had come close to shooting himself a while back. Talking about depressing things probably wouldn’t help him much… or maybe hearing about someone in much worse shape than having skills the world no longer needed might help.
“Just found someone having diabetes problems. He’s probably not going to last much longer since there’s no way to get insulin anymore.”
Arturo grimaced. “Ouch. Darwin’s back to being king.”
“Don’t be a douche,” muttered Harper.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
She raised both eyebrows. “Not much other way to mean calling someone a Darwin Award winner.”
Arturo chuckled, shaking his head. “No, not a Darwin Award. That’s for people who die for extreme stupidity. I’m talking about how we’ve cheated nature, cheated death for a long time. Stuff like cancer, diabetes, even old age… nature had a design and we’ve been messing with it. Maybe we shouldn’t have. Sick and weak animals die off in nature. Did we mess up humans as a species by not letting natural processes get rid of bad traits? I’m not saying it’s a good thing people are going to start dying to stuff they’d never have died to before the war… just, you know, saying it’s how nature would’ve worked if humans didn’t have such big brains.”
Evergreen (Book 5): The Nuclear Frontier Page 2
