by James, Guy
“IDs?” Corks repeated more firmly.
Ronnie reached in the glove box, pulled out two small documents, and handed them over to Corks, who took them, and, with the documents in hand, pulled the set of Government Issue specimen IDs from the small leather satchel on his belt.
The glorious leavings of our government, he thought, and examined the specimens against what the new traders—Ronnie and Albert, he reminded himself—had given him.
Less than a minute later, he’d determined that the IDs were good, put the specimen IDs away, and handed the IDs back into the truck.
“You check out.” Corks said. “Pull on through.” He turned away, noting the sigh of relief that had been emphatic enough to shake Albert’s entire body, clumpy rind and all.
That wasn’t unusual either, not really. No one wanted to be left outside to try to make a go of returning home or to the previous settlement they’d visited.
Who knew how much more hardtack these guys would be able to eat on a return trip without losing their minds and running out into the open? They needed something different to eat, and a rest from the zombie elements in the safety of New Crozet.
Ronnie nodded, and when the gates were lifted, drove through them one by one.
Mardu had hardly expected it to be this easy. So far so good.
Now if only they could get a more steady supply of the Sultan, and the viral sprite would resume her place on his shoulder, all would be put right. It was the trading that had driven her away in the first place, and he knew that, but he needed the Sultan’s powers to give to the sprite. It was so fucking frustrating.
Stop it, he told himself. The giving tonight will make it right again. It’s out of balance, that’s all, and only for the moment. The giving will outweigh the…other things.
Maybe, he began to think, if he put it out of his mind, the source of the Sultan and how they obtained it, that is, then that knowledge might somehow be shielded from the virus. Probably not, but it was worth a try.
As he watched the gates part for him, he imagined a Chinese wall going up in his brain, partitioning off the knowledge of what was traded to get Sultan from the part of his mind where the antenna was that received transmissions from the sprite. He would make a more concentrated effort of erecting that barrier later, and at mending the relationship with his god. Now, he had to focus on the task at hand.
As Corks watched the Tackers drive into New Crozet, he patted the pouch into which he’d tucked the Government Issue specimen IDs. What little was left of the government—if it could still even be called a government, being made up of several dozen people spread out among the settlements—had seen to updating the specimen IDs regularly after the towns were established.
They’d posted instructions online, and there had been some updates before the internet turned to rot and fell off. Since then, the several dozen federal employees—though volunteers was the more correct term for what they did—had done little but keep records of where the settlements were and which had gone under, and they speculated among themselves as to which would be overrun next, whether by zombies, outlaws, hunger, suicide or some combination thereof. Now, for all practical purposes, the towns were self-governing.
In the beginning, there’d been no local arm of the government in New Crozet, and that had been a subject of a mild near-uproar, but the government folks had had a point: New Crozet was in the middle of nowhere, and not all the traders went there, which meant inconsistent communications after the internet’s fade to black. It wasn’t quite Bum-Fucking-Egypt, or BFE for short, as Ginny’s home of Balleston had been before the sprawling trailer park had started twerking to the zombie beat, and then the place had quickly become Bum-Fucking-Everywhere, zombie style, because they’d gotten the run of the place, and all the other places, too.
Watching as Ronnie and Albert trundled their piece of shit truck toward the center of town, having passed through the last gate, Corks wondered if their tack was any good at all, or if it was just like all the other tack he’d eaten: hard, bland, and a real painful fucking mess on the way out.
11
Trade spun and tore through the market like a whirlwind, or a whirling dervish, perhaps. Had you been there you would’ve been lost in the hustle and bustle exploding around you for a full three minutes before you’d have even begun to get your bearings. But the people of New Crozet were used to this, as were those visiting them today, the Tackers—the off-grid markets they attended were similar, though the goods traded there were of a markedly different sort—the regulars, and the several newcomer outfits alike.
It was always like this, and this was not their first rodeo. The bulls were being ridden and the onlookers were throwing their cheers and jeers and eating their rodeo treats. It was business as usual.
In the town center, the townspeople who made goods had put up their stands, displaying the best, and the rest, of their wares. The traders had done the same, and now the townspeople and traders were mingling in the center of the market, chatting and examining the goods on display. There was yelling and jostling and muscling for news, all ears eager to learn of anything at all, all mouths yearning to try…anything at all, on that count as well.
“Nell, these Poppers are delicious!” Ronnie Fiechter said, his fingernails attacking a patch of psoriasis on his upper arm and making his entire body and, by extension, his voice, tremble while he chewed up the roasted June bugs.
Nell’s Poppers were being popped by the happy dozen and half dozen, and not just by Ronnie Fiechter, either. The sizzled bugs were practically crawling, and apparently not fast enough, down people’s throats.
Some Poppers, please. How many? Six of one and half a dozen of the other, if you will. Right you are, and how will you be paying today? With moldy carbohydrate supplements? Perfect!
The commodities that had been grown or found were exchanged this way and that, like they were dance partners hell-bent on trying all the different leads there were that day. A twirl here, a dip there, a quick salsa step everywhere.
There was some silver and gold changing hands too, but relatively little of it. It was a nice-to-have but it only had the value people assigned to it, and with the passing years fewer and fewer traders would accept it. It was better than some trinkets but worse than others, such that its value had become entirely subjective.
Some would trade an old relic or an appliance or board game for gold, because they thought the metal might make a fine decorative piece. A few coins glued together and you had a coaster to put hot mugs of coffee substitute on. It was something for the nostalgia-afflicted, and little more than that. Others were more than happy to unload their shiny pirate money.
The green stuff, however—cash, was unmarketable. Nobody wanted it. You couldn’t eat it, it made a pathetic scratchpad, and it was ugly as heck so it was worthless as a decorative piece, too. Tom Preston, when he was younger had collected two-dollar bills, and after the outbreak he’d found ten large of the same, which made twenty large, total.
Apparently someone else had been way more into the two-piece notes than he’d been. He’d carried the fat stacks around for some time, and then put them to sleep in his sock drawer for a year or two, where they’d slumbered dreamlessly, until he’d put them to better use in his fire on a particularly cold winter night.
Not close enough to popcorn, Alan thought as he watched the June bugs move crunching into the people with whom he shared a town, and into the visiting traders.
No Poppers for me, he thought. No thank you. No thank you very much.
The sun was getting in his eyes so he slipped a scuffed-up pair of Wayfarers onto his face. He was okay without his real glasses in daylight, but as soon as dusk hit or if there was rain, he needed them to keep the angles of things from being eroded. By morning, he’d forgotten all the Krokodil dreams of the night prior, and that was nice, because who needed that shit in their head on a market day? This was one of the four annual markets, which made it one of the four happiest d
ays of the year, and why let a nightmare or two ruin that?
12
The market was having its usual effect, reinvigorating the town’s slow and dwindling pulse. You could just about get lost in the newfound energy and forget that the world was no longer normal, and never would be again.
The Klefekers’ peanut stand looked like it had sprung up out of burlap sacks overflowing with peanuts, which in turn looked like they had grown up out of a mattress of discarded peanut shells. One side of the stand was covered with packages of shelled and unshelled peanuts alike, all roasted in their own oil. On the other side of the stand were three rows of peanut pies, the Klefekers’ prize hogs, so to speak.
Senna’s table was brimming with zucchini, peppers, acorn squash, peach preserves, fig jelly, a treasure trove mix of herbs, and the odds and ends of her fruit and vegetable selection du jour: potatoes, grapes, onions, tomatoes, sweet corn, snap beans, and some too small cukes. The peach preserves and the fig jelly were the most sought after and most expensive items, followed by rosemary, oregano—of all things, and then the potatoes and grapes.
Nell’s table was covered in exactly what you’d expect: all manner of things that could creep and crawl, which were at the moment, and thankfully so, lacking both said creeping and crawling aspects on account of being dead and dried or fried up or all three, though not necessarily in that order. Her famous Poppers, which could barely make it on top of her stand fast enough before being snatched up and paid for by both the visitors and the locals, had a history of being eaten by Native Americans, who’d roasted the June bugs over coals and had eaten them like the popcorn goodie that they were.
Keeping the Poppers company were jars filled with ants that had been toasted with salt in cast-iron pans and bottled up for safekeeping. Containers of crickets and grasshoppers were festooned about the table like decorations, each bearing a slightly different variation on the same theme, they were bugs and insects alright, but some were roasted, others were fried in peanut oil or sunflower oil, others dried with apples, berries, or onions and garlic.
The sky really was the limit when it came to all the different flavor combinations that Nell could come up with, but she mostly stuck with what worked, and that was the Poppers, of course, the dried cricket powder, which was used as a protein supplement in soups and stews and what-have-you, and her protein slurry, which, she claimed, had everything the human body needed to survive and thrive. It was sweetened with cane sugar and dried fruit, and as to what was in it besides that, well, just about every unsavory crawly thing that can be dreamed up and then mashed to a squishy pulp.
If you convinced yourself that it was medicine, and most people who bought it did just that, it was still a bit hard to fathom swallowing. But, like Mary Poppins once said: ‘A spoonful of sugar…’
And the spoonful of sugar helped, and medicine it really was, because it kept survivors going and put the red back in the cheeks of many who’d seemed to be on their last legs on a diet of runny grits and half-rotten vegetables before the farming operation in New Crozet had really kicked off.
Chase Ham’s table had jars of rice, packets of chewing tobacco, and two standalone, potted tobacco plants. Not so much on the wacky tobacky, although the dirt weed did grow well in Virginia and some of the townspeople—most notably the older folk like Amanda Fortelberry and Henry Rushing—grew it and partook in it on occasion, and in Henry’s case, the occasions were frequent.
Apparently the hippie lettuce really did wonders for rheumatism and the general old person malaise. And when you’re living in the human equivalent of a wildlife sanctuary and you’ve lived far too long already, improbably too long, people ain’t exactly judging you for cramming a cigweed in your piehole and giving it the ol’ toke.
Puff away, old-timer, the zombies sure as shit ain’t enjoying the cheeba. From what the survivors of the outbreak could tell, zombies weren’t big on the chronic, and too bad for them, because there was more than enough of the stuff to go around now, and no drug policing agency to speak of, and zombies did sort of have the rest of forever to chill...so, it was their loss, really.
13
There were other New Crozet tables, but the standouts were Nell’s, Senna’s, Chase’s, and the Klefekers’. Other tables were focused on corn, oats, cotton, flax, sugar, and hemp. Sugar was next in line after the town’s top offerings, followed by corn and oats.
Among the visiting traders a standout was a group that had brought, of all things, Twinkies, which Alan and Larry—they had this much in common—had made a beeline for and found that the aged treats really were still edible, if the absence of sharp stomach pains right after scarfing the sponge-cake, trans-fat bombs was any indication.
The Tackers were another popular group, and, unlike the other traders’ vehicles, the Tack Truck was designed like a food truck, so that the Tackers could do their business from inside it, selling their tack through an open panel in the side of the truck. The novelty of that and their green status in the market drew people’s interest, though the idea of hardtack was hard-pressed to elicit more than a lukewarm response, until this particular one was sampled, that is, and the delightfully special nature of the biscuits they’d brought was revealed.
As usual at these things, food and clothing ruled the day, with a touch of mild amusements thrown in here and there. One group of traders had brought balloons, and another had found a stash of one thousand piece or more jigsaw puzzles. One was of a log cabin birdhouse, and Senna quickly secured that one for herself, trading a small jar of peaches for it and four other puzzles.
The puzzles were missing a good number of pieces, and the traders had been honest about that—and they’d better be because they were regulars—but she thought the children might enjoy playing with them nonetheless. The puzzles New Crozet still had were missing too many pieces these days to be worthwhile.
Jack found and traded half an onion for two balloons, one for Sasha and one for himself, and then set off to find her in the rabble.
Another group of traders was trying to unload a few Scotch-taped Christmas tree ornaments, and someone else had a collection of cuff links, but no one in New Crozet had any interest in those.
Rosemary was going about the market trying out the goods and honing her negotiating skills. Her mother trusted her with more than a bit of what they grew, and Rosemary did splurge on occasion, sometimes spending almost half her money in a single transaction—when it came to the snails, for example—but when she did get aggressive with her spending, it was always on food and always after a good measure of haggling, a tactic she’d discovered a knack for.
She was sharp as a tack and relentless when it came to bargaining, and she almost always got her way or came close. The traders, she’d discovered, were very eager to unload as much as they could before setting off for the next settlement or back home to their own.
After stuffing his face with one too many Twinkies under Senna’s not-even-a-bit reproachful and definitely tender eye—Senna loved watching him eat, and only wished he would do it more, as he needed the energy—Alan began to make his way over to the Tack Truck. He’d been helping Senna with her stand while shoveling food into his mouth, and now that Betty Jane Oswalt had come back from one of her potty trips to resume her place by Senna’s side, he could wander about some more. The Tackers were new, and he wanted to have a word with them. He pushed his old Wayfarers, which were beginning to slip off his face and let a tad too much light into his eyes, back up his nose.
Senna watched him go until Betty Jane tugged at her shirtsleeve, asking for some help to fill a trader’s order of peach preserves. This guy, apparently, wanted near all of it. When Senna next looked up, her man was gone.
14
“Come and get your tack,” the ugly Tacker cried.
“Come and get it. Premium hardtack here. You’ve never tasted anything like it.”
His head was poking out of a serving window in the side of the truck. The other Tacker was behind him
, arranging their inventory by the looks of it.
The shutter of the serving window kept trying to grind its way shut on top of the ugly Tacker’s head, and it did so now, causing him to push it back up again and curse not at all under his breath.
The shutter clanged to the top of the window and lingered there for a moment before it began to edge downward again. It was persistent in its workings, you had to give it that.
He was hard-selling the stuff, but there was no need for that. Or maybe he wasn’t hard-selling it at all, Alan thought, but that was just his way. And anyway, it was hardtack, so what the hell? He seemed to be having a good time pushing the stuff, which, if the pockmarked biscuit could be made to replace his skin, would’ve made him a heck of a lot better looking.
Alan was always wary of new traders, and it was rare to get newcomers of any sort these days, but he was glad that the Tackers had braved the forest to come here, and was looking forward to talking to them later and learning about their trip, about how they’d come and the lay of the land. Was it improving or was it exactly the same? Probably the latter, he knew.
Still, the other traders, the regulars, seemed optimistic, but they always did. It was part of their grift, or if you were the generous type, their sale, and it took a hardened optimist—if there was such a thing anymore—to be a trader and travel among the settlements in the first place, that or a loon. Alan shrugged. It wasn’t like him to think this much about things.
He got in the back of the line for the biscuits. He’d had hardtack a number of times—they’d eaten it plenty on the crews, where it was referred to as z-biscuits, short for zombie-biscuits, and a play, at least in some minds, on sea biscuit, which was what sailors had once called the stuff.
Seeing it again made Alan feel a slight tug of nostalgia. He wanted to remind himself of just how plain and hard and barely edible the crackers were.
