by Alice Sabo
“What do you do?” Ruth demanded.
“I run this place. I chart the course we take. My research is a sideline. Also, I keep an eye on the power plant and pretty much anything mechanical. If it breaks, they come to me to fix it.”
“What did you do before?” Ruth demanded.
Angus smoothed his papers with a sigh. Nick saw a rare moment of sadness and loss that drained the vibrancy from his face. Angus never talked about what he did before. If asked, he usually said that it didn’t matter.
“I designed vehicles for exploration on other planets, orbiters, landers, that sort of thing.”
“Huh.” Nick was impressed. He would never have guessed. He grinned at Angus. “So you’re a rocket scientist.”
A bit of life trickled back into Angus’s eyes. He gave Nick a small smile. “Yes. Now, as I was saying, if you choose to stay, we will have a meeting to discuss having you join the community. Everyone here helps to keep this place going. Whether you want to make soap or bread or muck out the stable, we need every hand here to make it work. We are a community, and all that entails. We share the chores and the harvest. We have rules. All of that will be made clear to you before you make your decision. My wife and I run this settlement. If you don’t feel able to accept our rules and our vision, then it’s best if you go.”
Nick felt a rush of pride. Angus was seen as a day dreamer, a whimsical pied piper that many people loved at first sight, but it was this man, the nuts and bolts sincerity of him that had won Nick’s heart. And every time he saw that in Angus, he was glad he’d found his home here.
“What kind of research are you doing?” Kyle asked.
“A bit of everything. I’m trying to compile a census of the established settlements and med centers. I also keep an eye on weather patterns to see if the lack of human intervention has caused any shifts. I’ve been trying to make an estimate of the mortality rate of each year’s flu.”
“How do you collect your data?” Kyle asked.
“Nick mostly.”
Ruth scoffed. “You’re working with hearsay,” her voice was dismissive.
“That’s pretty much all there is,” Angus said, peering at her over his glasses. “Unless you know of a government entity that is doing that.”
“Well, they must be. How else would we know how much vaccine to prepare?”
“We put in orders,” Angus said.
Ruth blinked at him. She turned a stricken face to Kyle. “This is insane.”
“May I look at your data?” Kyle asked.
Angus puffed up with a touch of pride. “It’s a bit rough, still. Jean has been helping me sort through it.” He led Kyle over to a monitor and brought up his research.
Nick followed them over. He didn’t care about Angus’s research, but he wanted to see how they would react to it. Kyle scanned through page after page, too fast for Nick to read, but slow enough that he wondered if the biobot was actually absorbing the data. He started mumbling to Ruth, words that didn’t make sense to Nick. He glanced over to see Angus nodding.
Ruth stepped away looking pale. “This information must be incomplete.”
“Of course. As I said, I get most of my information from Nick. There are a few med centers on the ether that I get numbers from, but there isn’t any dock with official numbers that I could find.”
Kyle looked up at Angus from where he sat at the monitor. “May I?”
“Please do.”
Kyle started a number of searches. Nick couldn’t see what he was typing, but dock after dock came up “unavailable.”
“No, that isn’t right!” Ruth barked at yet another broken dock. “That can’t be. Did you use my password?” She leaned against Kyle to watch his fingers as he typed. A few more unavailable pages came up. “Why are they all down?” Her voice had a tremor of panic to it.
Kyle leaned back, a thoughtful look on his face. “I don’t know.”
“Perhaps we in the trenches are not allowed access,” Angus said quietly.
“I don’t believe that is the difficulty. It seems that they are not operating at this time.”
“Like the Vaccine Center’s dock or the weather dock or the mapping dock,” Nick said tiredly. “Those are the ones we really need. We’re in trouble if the weather dock is permanently down.”
Angus gave Kyle a thoughtful look. “Do you know where the weather center is?”
“The physical location? No, I’m sorry.”
Angus turned to Nick. “I was thinking that might be the next place you need to go.”
Nick slumped a little. “I’d like a couple of days...”
“Of course, Nicky. You’ve been away quite a bit. I only meant that this is our new mystery.”
“I don’t think we ever finished with the old one,” Nick said irritably. “Why did the security guards for Rutledge’s lab kill Lily’s sister?”
Ruth spun around. “What?”
Angus shooed everyone back to their chairs. “Do we have anyone from the lab’s security here?”
“No. We left the last guy at the Creamery. But he told me that not everyone was briefed on the prisoners. Now that we know Rutledge was locking people up, I guess that they were trying to take the kids into custody, too. Iris fought back, and they killed her.”
Angus turned to Ruth. “Have you any ideas why they were there?” Nick heard a faint note of appeasement in Angus’s voice. He was trying to be nice to her.
“I don’t,” she said tersely.
“Nicky, did you interview the prisoners?”
Nick poured himself a second cup of coffee. “I talked to a couple of them, but they were still pretty loopy from the drugs. Mike said he thought that Rutledge wanted his factory. That he’d tried to buy it at one point, but his memory was still fuzzy. Maybe in a couple days people will be more lucid.”
“I do not think any of them are criminals,” Kyle said tentatively. “Wisp said that none of them felt, um, like criminals.”
Angus grinned. “Your brother is amazing! I am so delighted to have him here.”
“And now you have two biobots,” Ruth said, some bitterness in her voice.
“Four actually, with the little folk. I haven’t had a chance to talk to them yet. Kyle, you said that your skill is biochemistry?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent, excellent.” Angus got that distracted look about him. Nick knew he’d be gone for a bit, wandering off after a stray thought.
“You two get settled in okay?” Nick asked.
“The room is adequate,” Kyle said.
“Do you all live in here together?” Ruth asked.
“Mostly. I hear Bruno, one of the survivors of Riverbank, is working on some housing down the street in the old neighborhood.”
“Wisp told me about Riverbank,” Kyle said in a near whisper. He hunched his shoulders looking dismayed, which suggested to Nick that Wisp told him everything about Riverbank.
Angus lurched to his feet with a grunt. “Kyle, I would like to show you something.” He went over to his desk and poked through a few precarious piles of paper. He returned with a small blue notebook. He stood before Kyle clenching the notebook for a moment. “Please let me know what you think of this.” He handed the book over slowly.
Kyle took it reverently. “This is more of your research?”
“No!” Angus responded sharply. “Absolutely not. I, we, well let’s just say we stumbled upon it.”
Kyle nodded, a look of mild consternation on his face. He opened the notebook and started reading.
Nick finished his coffee and contemplated a third cup. He trusted Kyle a bit more than Ruth because he had come to trust Wisp, but he was concerned that the information in that little notebook was a game changer. What Ruth would want to do with it was up in the air. She trusted Kyle, so if they could rely on him to convince her... His thoughts stumbled there, because he wasn’t sure what they needed to do with it.
Kyle shot Angus a startled look. “This is...”
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Angus jumped on it. “Is it?”
Ruth saw the look on Kyle’s face and leaned forward. “What is it?”
They all waited for Kyle to answer. Nick felt a collective breath held.
“I think it is,” Kyle said in a hushed voice, as if afraid of being overheard.
Ruth inched closer and asked again, in a whisper, “What is it?”
Kyle closed the notebook and held it firmly closed. “The BEHHM Virus.”
“Is that what you folks call it?” Angus asked eagerly. “What does it stand for?”
Ruth sat a little straighter. She put out her hand to take the book, but Kyle would not relinquish it. “Let me see it please.”
Kyle looked at her with indecision on his face.
“More minds at work on a problem solve it quicker,” Angus said.
Kyle handed over the notebook without a word. Ruth leafed through it skipping over the journal pages to the ones with formulae.
“BEHHM,” Angus repeated, “What does it stand for?”
“Biobot Eradication High Human Mortality,” Kyle said.
“Did it really kill off biobots?” Nick asked.
“That was what we were told it was intended for, but I have not been privy to the statistics of its efficacy.”
“Anecdotally?” Angus ask carefully.
Kyle shrugged. “It did not affect me or Wisp.”
“Or your other brothers?”
Kyle gave Angus a look of surprise. “No. None of my brothers who were alive at the time were affected by the virus.”
Angus nodded, tapping a finger to his lips. “So it was genius that created the virus, but all based on the wrong assumption.”
Kyle frowned at Angus. “What do you plan to do with this?”
“I don’t know what to do with it,” Angus said plaintively. “I don’t know if it’s real, or the ravings of a madman.”
“Or a little of both,” Nick added.
Angus gave him an agreeing nod before continuing, “And if it is real, is it useful?”
“My God,” Ruth said in an awestricken voice. She looked up from the notebook at Kyle. “If this is...” She leaned toward him pointing to a line. “This.”
“Yes.” He gave her a tight nod, pressing his lips tightly together.
“This could be it,” Ruth raised frightened eyes to Angus. “Where did you get it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Angus said waving away the question. “Is it useful?”
“I can’t say,” Ruth said, her eyes wandering back to the notebook. Like Kyle she shut the notebook and held it closed. Angus looked to Kyle.
“The virus has mutated regularly,” he said. “It is interesting to see how it began, but at this point, it is a completely different organism.”
There was a bland vagueness to Kyle’s statement that made Nick think he was lying. “So if this is useless, a young woman was killed for no reason.”
“Well, at least not for this reason,” Angus said gesturing at the notebook.
As if she knew the course of the discussion, Lily skipped into the room. “Oh, sorry, I forgot to knock.”
Angus gave her a warm smile. “That’s OK sweetheart, is my wife looking for me?”
“Um, no, I don’t think so. But my mom said that she thinks you should talk to her.”
“Where did your mom come from?” Nick asked. He was glad to see that the shadows and sharp angles were gone from Lily’s face. She was safe and well-fed, and it did his heart good to see that small success.
Lily giggled, looking younger than her age. “You brought her, silly.”
Nick felt a tingle of danger work its way up his spine. “What does she want to talk to us about?” he asked in as casual manner as he could muster. Both Kyle and Angus sat a little straighter letting him know his concern came through.
“Grown up stuff, I guess?”
“How old are you?” Ruth blurted out.
Lily smiled, despite Ruth’s abrupt tone. “I was just twelve, and we had a party and Harley let me ride Socks!” She gave a little hop of joy. “He said I can ride him again.”
Angus’s eyes twinkled at the sight of her. Nick felt his spirits rise a little more.
“Tell your mother that we would be glad to speak to her. She should come by whenever she’s free.”
Ruth’s eyes followed Lily to the door. She whipped back around and skewered Angus with a penetrating look. “Her eyes are red.”
Angus tipped his head to the side. “I think it’s more like burgundy.”
“Her eyes are not normal.”
Angus nodded. “It’s a side effect of the flu I think. Children have very strange eye color these days.”
Ruth sputtered. “What?”
Nick settled back into his chair, letting Angus weigh in on this.
“I noticed it about three years ago. We had a child born here with orange eyes. Very unusual. And then purple. Somehow the flu must be affecting our DNA.”
Ruth’s mouth dropped open. “But, but, no...” She turned to Kyle. “Have we done this?”
Kyle licked his lips, blinking a few times. “Possibly. Probably.”
Nick felt a deep anger building. “You? You people making the vaccines did something to change the kids?”
Ruth’s hands fluttered as if she was trying to physically shape her thoughts. “No. Well, yes. But not for that. We were improving, strengthening...” She grabbed Kyle’s hand.
“The work we did was to combat the disease. The change in eye color is incidental,” Kyle said bluntly.
“Like killing off eighty percent of the lab was incidental?” Nick snapped. Angus frowned. Nick hadn’t had a chance to tell him the whole story.
“No.” Kyle raised a hand as if to stop him. “That was fool hardiness on Rutledge’s part. But Lily is twelve,” he said to Ruth.
Her eyes widened. “She’s too old for our work to have had an effect on her. Someone else must have done that.”
“That would be my husband’s handiwork.”
All heads turned at the sound of a new voice. Melissa stood in the doorway watching them. Angus jumped to his feet again. “Please come join us.” He offered her a chair. “I think there might be some coffee left,” he said giving Nick a stern look.
“No, thank you, I’m fine. I’d like to have my say and get it over with.”
Angus took the notebook from Ruth and offered it to Melissa. “I believe this might be yours.”
Melissa leaned away from it. “No. I want nothing to do with it. The man was sick, insane. But he didn’t start out that way.”
Chapter 47
“Biobots were highly trained, and the few remaining were of inestimable worth.”
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
Wisp could feel the high spirits of the farmers. It was contagious enough that he found himself smiling as he finished his breakfast in the solitude of the field house. He walked out to the fields to find them. Mary and Joshua were walking hand in hand around the football field. Something green and grass-like was growing about knee high. He approached slowly, so that they would see him coming.
Mary swirled around, a wide smile on her face. “This is marvelous.”
Wisp had to smile back. “They try hard.”
“They have chickens!”
“This is an excellent set up,” Joshua said. “The field covers are ingenious. We lost a lot of crops to weather. How long have they been breeding this flock of chickens?”
Wisp shrugged. “I am new here, too.”
“Really?” Joshua frowned at him. “I thought you and Nick were old friends.”
“We met during an attack.”
“That makes fast friend,” Joshua agreed with a grimace. “Nick said they have guards here?” He looked around the field.
“They call it the Watch. They have men out on the roads.” Wisp reached out to find the outlying men. “A few in the woods. They are well trained by Martin.”
“Will I have to joi
n?”
Wisp could sense the oscillating emotions in Joshua. Fear and relief, excitement and dread. He was afraid to accept that they were in a good place. “I don’t think so. Angus says that people should work to their strengths. If you know about working the land, they will want you to do that. They aren’t too sure about things.”
Joshua nodded enthusiastically, gesturing to the field. “This is pretty small for a field of wheat. And I’m not sure what else they have growing here. The round field over there has hardly enough potatoes for a family much less a settlement. And they have a couple of places that they could use better in rotation.”
“They will be very pleased if you choose to stay.”
Mary’s smile wilted a bit. “Do we have to live in there with everyone else?”
“No. Have you met Bruno?”
They both shook their heads. “I heard he had a vineyard,” Joshua said.
Wisp sifted through the thoughts and emotions for the taste of Bruno’s mind. He was away from the med center. “I can take you to him.”
Mary looked a question at Joshua. He smiled. “Why not? As long as it’s not too far,” he added with a pointed look at Mary’s swollen belly.
Wisp led them at a comfortable amble across the campus, past the incipient orchard, which also caught Joshua’s attention. “What are they growing here? Apples?”
“I’m not sure.”
Joshua inspected each tree. Wisp realized there were some subtle differences in them. “Fruits and nuts?” he asked.
Joshua grinned pointing at a sapling. “I swear that’s an olive tree.”
“Olive?” Mary’s emotions hopped up into joy, and Wisp felt a slight echo in the child. “We could get olive oil.” She laughed. “No more cooking with old bear fat!”
Wisp winced at the thought of it. He was fine with toasted over a campfire if it came down to it. They had butter from the Creamery now. Nick brought back oil occasionally. Without animal fat, there were very few options.
