by Nancy Kress
Hesitation. Carlo, she knew, dabbled in religion. Then, “No, Mom.”
“Spring?”
“Not at all.” Her sweet-tempered boy. “Senni?”
Senni said coldly, “You haven’t left much choice, have you? This hardly seems a time to bring in more dependents, with what happened on that farm near Hobbs. But naturally I’ll go along with whatever you say.”
“Good,” Theresa said. They were all nervous about the other farm, forty miles away. Its owners had disappeared from the Net, and Wenton rumor was that refugees had attacked, killing the owners. There was no law enforcement to check up on the farm, and so far no one else had either, probably from fear. The same thing had happened eighty miles east, in Texas, and there the investigating neighbors had also disappeared. Theresa said, “Now, about rooms — “
Spring interrupted her. “Mom, we need an extension on the house. Harvest is over. The herd is here for the winter—anyway, six more GPS collars broke and we can’t just keep track of the herd remotely any more, so they have to be here. Work is slack enough right now that Alex, Rafe, Sam, and I can build it in a week.” Alex and Rafe, both slight boys next to Theresa’s hulking sons, looked startled. Sam scowled. “All right?”
“Yes,” Theresa said, “good. Now let’s get breakfast.”
Five mothers-to-be, all carrying triplets. It was going to have be a hell of an extension.
For the first time since Madison’s death, she felt better.
CHAPTER 15
Keith died two weeks later. Theresa, amazed that he had hung on this long, got the news on the Net. The computer had been moved into the new part of the building, which had four more tiny bedrooms and a smaller gathering room that Scott called grandly “the den.”
She found Lillie on her knees, weeding the winter herb garden in the relatively calm air after sunset. The girl, seven and a half months along, looked up over the massive curve of her belly.
“Lillie, should you be doing that?”
“Sure. I’m fine.”
“You look like a beach ball.”
Lillie laughed. Theresa could say things like that to Lillie. None of her own kids had ever seen a beach. Lillie’s morning sickness had ended after four months and, like the other five pregnant girls, she was healthy, strong, and active still.
“Lillie, I have something to tell you. It’s going to be hard. Your Uncle Keith died this morning.”
“I’m glad,” Lillie said simply.
Theresa stared at her, then slowly nodded. Lillie was right. Keith had been lingering too long in weakness and pain. And how like Lillie not to cry or wail, but to accept. Julie would have needed emotional attention for days.
Lillie said, “Do I need to do anything? Go to Amarillo?”
“No.” Funerals were simple now; you put the body in a sheet or box and buried it as soon as possible. Embalming, viewings, waterproof caskets, funeral directors… all gone. And by Theresa at least, not missed. “I made the arrangements on the Net.”
Lillie nodded. Sweat stuck tendrils of brown hair to her forehead and nape. The armpits of her maternity smock, a basic tent, were stained dark. Even in November the days, if not the nights, were warm. “I’d like to be alone for a bit, Tess. To walk out a ways.”
“Just don’t go too far.” Theresa would have Jody keep an eye on her.
Lillie hauled herself to her feet and waddled off, her bulky figure silhouetted against the fiery sky.
Theresa sighed and went to find Jody. Instead she found Spring and Julie, sitting in the seclusion of a drooping cottonwood tree. Julie’s head was nestled on Spring’s shoulder. He put his hand under her chin, lifted it, and kissed her.
Oh my dear Lord.
They hadn’t seen her. Theresa crept silently away. She hadn’t seen it coming. Not at all, not at all. Julie was heavily pregnant, and fourteen years old! Spring was twenty-four. And Julie, timid and weepy—why couldn’t Spring at least have chosen Lillie instead?
Theresa sat on the ground behind the barn and laughed at herself. A mother, choosing among pregnant fourteen-year-olds for her son! And it was inevitable that her boys choose somebody, sooner or later. Already she suspected Carlo was visiting a girl in Wenton. And for Spring, that tender-hearted rescuer of wounded rabbits and broken-winged birds, Julie was probably inevitable. Get used to it, Theresa.
It was full dark when she went back to the house, its candles gleaming through the small windows. Jody met her on the porch. “Where’s Lillie?”
Theresa felt her stomach sink. “Isn’t she here?”
“We thought she was with you.”
“No, I was going to … but I forgot because … she went for a walk, she said. Her Uncle Keith finally died, and she wanted to be alone.”
“Which way?”
“West. But you can’t…” Jody was already gone toward the barn to saddle his horse. A half moon, stars… all her boys could ride at night if they had to. Heart hammering, Theresa went inside.
How long?
They were back in an hour, Lillie seated on the horse, clutching the pommel desperately. Lillie, child of New York subways and a spaceship, had never learned to ride. Jody walked alongside, leading the horse. Theresa couldn’t help her image: Joseph and the pregnant Mary. None of her kids except Carlo would even recognize the icon.
“She’s fine,” Jody called. “But, Mom, we’ve got trouble.” Inside, he told them: a large band of refugees camped by the arroyo a mile to the west. Lillie had seen them before they’d seen her, and had caught the glint of moonlight on guns. She’d been starting back when Jody found her. He’d taken a closer look with night-vision binoculars.
“They have at least one shoulder-mounted missile launcher. Military, looks like. About thirty men and women, no kids that I saw. Military tents. This is no ragtag bunch of migrants, Mom.”
No. Theresa knew what it was. How had they escaped it this long, so many years, with the land growing more arable and desirable and prosperous? Dumb luck, she guessed.
She said quietly, “Lillie, take the other girls into the bedroom. You go, too, Sam and Alex and Rafe.”
“No,” Rafe said.
Theresa looked at him. She remembered him as a skinny, intrusive, intelligent nerd, and he still was. She almost tended to forget that he and Alex (but not Sam, noisy as ever) were around, so completely had they become her sons’ responsibility.
Rafe said, “We’re in this together. You said so over and over, Theresa. Whatever you’re going to do, tell us.”
“All right!” Theresa snapped. Rafe wasn’t the problem, anyway. Scott was.
She continued, “We have a few guns and ammunition and five people who can shoot. Nowhere near enough to stand against what Jody and Lillie saw. We’ve known that for a while. But we also have something else, something left over from before you came back, Rafe. A bioweapon.”
Scott jerked in his chair, rose to his feet.
“It’s an engineered virus,” Theresa said steadily. “Ten built-in replications after release before the terminator gene kicks in. Airborne. Lethal within five minutes.”
“Jesus God, Theresa!”
“Scott, don’t lecture me. Just don’t. I knew this day would come eventually, and when I had the chance to buy this stuff left over from the war, I did. I’m not letting all of you die because I’m too squeamish. That would be like being presented with a choice and choosing them to live, not us.”
Her knees trembled. Yes, she’d known this day would come, but she’d dreaded its coming, too. Thirty men and women … who would kill without any trembling. Remember that. At least there were no children with them. She hoped.
Theresa looked at the faces around the room. The rains had tapered off and the solar panels generated every clear day, but she tended to store the power or use it for farm needs. Candlelight flickered shadows around the room so that she saw a cheekbone here, a chin there. But it seemed to Theresa that she could see all their eyes, every pair. Shocked, frightened, impassiv
e, angry.
“You can’t,” Scott said. “You don’t even know that those refugees are going to attack here!”
“I know. And so do you. They’re camped closest to us, we’re on a line from the other two attacks, people don’t carry around missile-launchers for fun. And anyway,” she said, her voice rising in fury, “what if the attack isn’t on us? What if it’s on the Graham farm, or even on Wenton? Is it the moral high ground to let those people die because we’re not the direct target?”
Scott said, “You’re going to kill — “
“Yes! Would you rather sacrifice these kids and unborn babies and my sons and daughter and grandchildren? Would you, Scott? Because if the answer is no, you better not judge what I’m doing.”
“You’re not the law, Tess!”
Abruptly the fury went out of her. “Yes. I am. Out here, now, I am.”
She put her hands over her face. Jody took them down, gently. “I’ll do it, Mom. Tell me where the canister is.”
She gazed at her first-born. Yes, he was the right person. Spring was too sweet-natured, Carlo too entangled in religious conflict. Carlo sat in a corner, his face gray. Well, she couldn’t talk to him now. At least he wasn’t interfering.
She led Jody out to the porch. Scott took a step as if to follow her, then didn’t. Outside, the infernal wind howled around the barn, blew her hair into her mouth, sent a chair carelessly left outside flying across the yard. Night wind, hot angry breath of the violated land. Well, the wind was her ally now.
“You’ll have to circle around the far side of the arroyo to get downwind of them,” she told Jody. “The dispersion distance is supposed to be only a mile, but I don’t trust it. Some micro might reach here. I only have six masks. I think I better take everybody in the bus, maybe three miles out into the desert.”
“All right,” Jody said neutrally.
“If they catch you — “
“They won’t catch me.”
They walked hand-in-hand to the barn, Jody keeping Theresa upright against the wind and her own trembling. She showed him where the canister was buried and gave him the code to activate it. His horse was already saddled from looking for Lillie. In ten minutes he was gone.
Theresa fought her way back to the house. “All right, everybody, into the bus. Now. We need to get out past the dispersion distance. Come on, we don’t have time to waste.” She didn’t look at any of them directly.
They crowded into the ancient bus, eerily silent. The only noise was the wind. Theresa drove until she reached the start of a patch of desert, a reverse oasis in the greening land. When she turned off the engine, it was pitch dark.
Julie sobbed softly.
Someone cleared his throat.
The baby, carried in Senni’s arms, woke and whimpered for the breast.
Then she heard Lillie’s clear voice. “How long before we can return, Tess?”
“I’m going to give it five hours.” Twenty minutes per replication, ten replications. After that, even if remnants did reach the house, the virus would be inactive.
They would all have to endure five hours here. So they would.
Maybe a few of the kids would be able to fall asleep.
When they returned to the farm, Jody was there. He nodded at her. Carlo pushed past his brother and headed for the barn. Scott went directly to his room, looking suddenly much older than his fifty-three years.
Jody and Spring sat with her, drinking coffee, saying nothing, until Theresa told them she could sleep now, from sheer exhaustion.
When she woke late the next morning, all three of her sons were gone, plus, surprisingly, Sam. They’d taken the cart and the decrepit horse that drew it. Carlo must have been driving; Jody’s and Spring’s horses were gone but Carlo’s bay snorted in its stall. Theresa thought of saddling him, but she was at best an indifferent rider and the wind blew at its full force. She returned to the house.
They came in after sunset, filthy and silent. She had already brought the well hose to the back shed and filled the two oversize plastic garbage cans sometimes used as vertical bathtubs. When the men were washed, she had their dinner ready. She’d sent everyone else to their rooms or the “den,” damn if she cared how cramped they were in there for an entire evening. Scott had left a day early to do his doctoring in Wenton, leaving word with Senni that he’d spend several nights there. Just as well.
After he’d eaten ferociously, Jody said, “We buried them all. Mass grave. The weapons, plus anything else I thought we could use, we brought back on the cart. It’s all in the barn. You can look it over tomorrow.”
Theresa nodded. Slowly she said, “I never wanted this for my children. Not for any of you.”
“We know,” Spring said. He smiled. “Stop feeling guilty, Mom. You’re not responsible for every single bad thing that happens to us for our entire lives, you know.”
Jody said, “Motherhood is powerful.”
“But not that powerful,” Spring added.
“I want to say,” Jody added, “that Sam was an enormous help to us. He more than carried his share.”
Sam flushed with pleasure. He was sunburned, a whole day spent in that dangerous high-UV sun. Not good. But his angry, sullen look was gone. He’d been needed, and praised.
She said, “Carlo?”
He looked at her directly. Seeing the pain in his eyes, she could have wept. Carlo said, “We did what we had to. But I don’t have to pretend it wasn’t a mortal sin.” Abruptly he pushed his chair from the table, stood, and strode out.
Spring said, “He had a funeral. A mass, or whatever you call it, over the grave. Prayers and crosses in the air. I thought he’d never get done.”
“Let him have it, if it helps him,” Theresa said.
“Mom, he’s going into Wenton to that priest’s church, Father What’s-His-Name, spending the entire day with him, every Sunday. Did you know?”
She hadn’t. “I thought he was seeing some girl.”
“Carlo?” Jody laughed. “No. But I am.”
She was caught by surprise. “Well, you certainly took time for it that I didn’t notice. Who?”
He said defiantly, “Her name is Carolina Mendoza.”
Mexican. From the new encampment, growing larger every month, a few miles beyond Wenton. The source of migrant labor, especially at harvest… but of brides? How had Jody even met her? The Mexicans guarded their women zealously. Theresa didn’t ask. She said carefully, “Do her people mind you seeing her?”
“She doesn’t have any people,” Jody said. “Just a cousin. She’s been knocked around a lot. But she’s sweet and good and beautiful and very soon I’m going to marry her and bring her here.”
Careful, be careful. “Have you thought this through, Jody? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I’ve thought.”
But about what? Theresa wanted to say. Jody had been a teenager during the war with Mexico, which had been a confused and misbegotten side conflict to the global biowar. The warming, the depression, the greenhouse gases, the UV exposure —all of it had been harder on Mexico than on the United States. More people had starved, had died of diseases, had died of floods and storms and wildfires, had died period. Mexico had been desperate. Mexicans had flooded over the border in numbers too big to stop, or to economically tolerate. The state of Texas had gone to war, using illegal bioweapons in defiance of Congress and the entire federal government, and in a week the war was over. The anger and fear, on both sides, were not.
The bioweapon Jody had just used at the arroyo came from that war.
He said tightly, “Say it, Mom.”
Say what?”
“Whatever you’re thinking. No, just answer one question. Is Carolina welcome here?”
Even brief hesitation would be fatal. She said, “Of course.”
The relief that flooded Jody’s eyes made her chest tighten.
Spring said, “Of course she’s welcome, if you’re marrying her. But Senni won’t like it.”
/> “Senni never likes anything,” Jody said.
Spring grinned. “Well, tell her that if we can have five pregnant genetically engineered girls carrying fifteen mutated babies, then we can have one senorita. But I have something to say, too, Mom.”
Theresa groaned. “No, Spring, no. She’s only fourteen years old!”
“Fifteen last month. And I want to marry her, Mom.”
“Who?” Jody demanded, and despite herself, Theresa laughed. “Jody, you’ve been so wrapped up in your own girl that you haven’t even noticed your brother falling all over Julie.”
“Julie? She’s fourteen!”
“Fifteen. You going to give me a hard time, big brother?” Jody shook his head.
“Well, then,” Spring said, “we can go to Wenton together and have a double wedding. I hear Father What’s-His-Name is back in the marrying business. And that will please Carlo. Hey, maybe Carlo can marry Emily or Sajelle!”
“Ha ha,” Theresa said. “Now get to bed. It’s back to the cows in the morning.”
Somehow they had moved from murder to marriage. Theresa shook her head to disperse the sense of unreality. It didn’t go away. But, then, she was getting used to that.
CHAPTER 16
Lillie went into labor the second week in December, in the aftermath of a storm so severe it knocked down the wellhouse. Flash flood in the arroyo carried off and killed two head of cattle. The men, plus Senni and Carolina, were all out on the farm, repairing damage. Theresa was minding her grandchildren, Dolly and baby Clari. Lillie, Emily, Sajelle, Bonnie, and Julie all worked at tasks near the house, so Theresa could keep an eye on them, too.
Lillie looked up from making tortillas at the wooden table. “Oh!”
“What is it, Lil?” Bonnie said.
“I think it’s starting. A sort of sharp pain in my gut, here.”
Theresa said, “You can’t be up to sharp pains yet, Lillie. Your water hasn’t even broken.”
“It just did. And we don’t know what the pribir did to change labor,” Lillie said logically, then doubled over with a look of surprise that was half comical, half pain.
