Healers

by Munson, Brad

  She grinned. He liked that look on her.

  “Five minutes,” he said in a far more businesslike voice. He turned his head and called back to the others, “Five minutes.”

  There were grumbles and sighs of relief as his passengers moved to ready themselves. Four hundred miles in a cramped and under-cushioned fighting vehicle made for a long, long trip, even over a highway that had been painstakingly cleared of wreckage and debris. They would all be glad to finally get to New Abraham.

  They had encountered trouble only twice. The first problem was barely thirty miles from the borders of recovering Omaha, where they had encountered a roadblock of trees from a recent storm. They had been forced to stop and clear it, everyone working together ... except Boyarsky, who stayed behind and manned the chain gun mounted on the Cougar, keeping watch. Good thing, too: The noise of their work had been more than enough to attract the attention of shamblers hibernating in the woods. The battle had been short and brutal, and no one – except the infected – had been hurt.

  Still, it put a damper on the generally upbeat feeling of “field trip,” and the second encounter, a couple of hours later, did nothing to restore it. This one was entirely man-made: a makeshift barrier of debris and automobile hulks, pushed and piled into Highway 80, forcing any travelers to stop.

  The only thing Stiles hated more than the infected were the outlaws, bandits, and local warlords that used Morningstar as an excuse to descend into Mad Max-like chaos. He wouldn’t put up with that. As the barricade had come into clear view, he had alerted his people and eased the Cougar to a full stop just a few feet from the obstruction. On cue, half a dozen thugs armed with a rag tag collection of long guns stepped out of the brush and shadows and confronted them.

  Stiles activated the public address system they had installed on the Bradley. “Talk is always better than bullets,” Sherman had insisted. Stiles had silently disagreed, but he’d accepted the order, against his better judgment. But this time … “All right,” he said to the rebels. He could hear his own amplified voice echoing over the landscape. “Enough. Get this road cleared. Now, or we’ll open fire.”

  None of the rebels moved to follow orders. One of them even raised his gun and fired at them. They heard the distant thunk of the round as it bounced off the Cougar’s armor. Stiles knew it wouldn’t even leave a scratch.

  “Boyarsky?” he said over his shoulder. “The M242 machine gun should do it, I think.” Boyarsky moved swiftly and silently to the weapon, trying to suppress a vicious smile. Stiles spoke through the PA system: “Now, you guys. Count of three.” He glanced at Rebecca, who was grim-faced but unmoved. “One. Two.”

  No movement. He shut down the mic for a moment and said, “Boyarsky? Lay down a line of fire five feet in front of them. No injuries. Yet.”

  Boyarsky did exactly as he was told. The deep, bass budda-budda-budda of the machine gun was loud inside the cab of the fighting vehicle. The sound was oddly satisfying.

  “Enough,” Stiles said again, and put the MRAP in gear. It rolled forward, directly into the barricade, and pushed straight through it without so much as a pause, shoving aside cars and cinder blocks and two-by-fours like a sad collection of toothpicks. The outlaws scattered to get out of the way of the trundling juggernaut.

  Stiles tapped the brakes on the far side of the shattered barrier. “This road stays clear,” he said to the outlaws. He hoped his voice sounded deep and ominous through the speakers. “Always. From now on. Any obstruction or interruption to any travelers from now on? We come back and kill you all.” Which we’ll do eventually anyway, he added silently, but right now we have more important matters to attend to. You idiots.

  He moved on without even bothering to look back. Rebecca made a mark on the paper map they had brought along – another bit of intelligence to add to the Situation Map in the C&C bullpen – as they picked up speed. He could feel the sigh of relief from his passengers as they moved away from the outlaws. Half an hour later it was all but forgotten.

  Now, finally, hours later, he could see the lookout towers of New Abraham in the distance: upended containers from long-dead eighteen wheelers, refitted as sturdy new structures to keep watch on the woods and fields around the community. Under normal circumstances, they could expect to take fire from those towers, even this far away. But Rebecca had radioed ahead long ago. They were expected.

  There wasn’t a shambler in sight during the last half-mile. Stiles was well aware that New Abraham’s version of The Watch had run a patrol just hours before, making sure there would be no unpleasant surprises when they opened the gate for the visitors from Omaha. Now he watched, smiling just a little, as those massive gates rolled open very slowly … and a single figure, all in black, stood dead center in the road, blocking their way. He held an M4 carbine with a full magazine across his broad chest. Stiles heard the flat, no-nonsense voice of the man with the rifle though his PA pick-ups. “Halt!” the man said. “Who goes there?”

  Stiles keyed open the microphone “You know goddamn well who it is. Now get outta the way. I have to pee.”

  He heard the tinny laugh of other citizens just beyond the reach of the mic, then the broad-shouldered gentleman with the gun stepped aside. They rolled forward and stopped just a few feet after the back of the Cougar cleared the massive posts of the entrance; no one moved until the gate had been rolled shut and completely secured. No need for distractions, he thought as he set the brake, pulled himself out of the driver’s seat, and punched the release of the Bradley’s rear hatch.

  The cold Kansas wind slapped sharply at them as they trotted down the ramp and met the big man and his people. Keaton Wallace didn’t look as if he’d aged a day. In fact, the re-establishment of his beloved community seemed to have stripped off a few years. He was still a wide, flat man with hands that were two sizes too big and a face that made a smile look like a clenched fist. His dark eyes still cut through the air like daggers, even though the lawman was clearly pleased to see them.

  Stiles gave him a short, manly hug; Rebecca’s was much longer and a good deal more affectionate. There were handshakes and introductions all around, and Stiles got his first look at some new arrivals, as well as some old friends.

  Jose Arctura, the burly Latino mechanic who could make anything with four wheels go faster and longer than it had ever been meant to go, gave him a hug so hard it nearly broke a rib. “So good to see you, man!” he said. He actually sounded choked up. “We miss you guys! So glad you’re here!” After a beat too long he pushed him away and turned him around to face a beautiful dark-eyed woman in her early twenties wearing a set of thoroughly washed khaki overalls that were identical to Jose’s own. “You remember Adelina!” the mechanic said, obviously brimming over with pride. “My beautiful daughter!”

  In fact, Stiles wouldn’t have recognized her. It had been only a few months, but Adelina had grown up considerably since their last encounter.

  She blushed as she grinned at him. “Hey there, Mark,” she said. Her own accent was barely audible, unlike her father’s. “Good to see you again.”

  Stiles found himself nodding a little too enthusiastically. “Yes,” he said. “Great to see you, too.” He could feel Rebecca’s eyes on the back of his neck. He turned as another woman approached – this one considerably older and more stout, with a tangle of dirty blonde hair he remembered all too well. “Eileen!” he said, truly pleased. “I had no idea you’d made it through!”

  “Oh, hell, soldier, they couldn’t kill me. Better men have tried.” She punched him in the arm, but it was clear she was happy to see them all. “I know you got stuff to do right away, but you come by the new place at sundown; we got a whole thing planned for y’all there.”

  “You know I will,” he said. He turned to the others in the crowd, and now the faces were almost all unfamiliar. Another attractive woman, this one with her hair cut short and her hands buried deep in th
e pockets of her parka. She was looking at him with a very small smile on her wide mouth.

  “I want to thank you,” she said.

  Stiles thought about lying for a minute, then gave up. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember you.”

  “I’m Marie,” she told him. “You guys saved my life.”

  Only then did Stiles realize who she was. One of the women that the idiot warlord Lutz had kidnapped, along with so many others, in the old Abraham. Sherman, Krueger, Brewster and the other remnants of the Ramage party had assaulted Lutz’s compound, rescued her and other women, and lived to tell the tale. And here she was, safe and sound.

  “I wish I could take the credit,” he said gently. “But I wasn’t here for that one. I’ll tell the real heroes you say ‘hey.’

  She blushed and looked down. “Yeah,” she said in a very small voice. “Tell them … tell them I wanted to say thank you. Please.” She turned and fled, her hands still deep in her pockets. Stiles almost called out to her, asked her about her story …

  Rebecca put a hand on his arm. “Come on,” she said gently. “Keaton wants to give us a tour.”

  *****

  “Everybody forgets,” Keaton told them as they walked. “Kansas is hurricane territory, and Abraham is no different. We know what it’s like to rebuild. We do it all the time.” He was leading them down their new Main Street, not much different than their old one, except that virtually every structure along both sides had been built from scratch in the last six months.

  Stiles remembered what had been there before, after the town’s destruction by the RSA. Or rather what hadn’t been there. The firestorm the renegades had triggered had burned the small town literally to the ground. Not a single home, store, or office remained habitable or even standing after the attack. It looked like a single massive bomb had gone off in the center of town and incinerated everything.

  But there had been storm cellars and basements and bolt-holes, some as old as the days of the original settlers, some built since the outbreak. So when the RSA’s final assault had come, the last few survivors knew what they had to do: hide, hunker down, and wait for the storm to pass.

  And it had. Eventually. Some didn’t reveal themselves until weeks after a joint U.S. Army/Omaha contingent had come back to town to look for survivors and set up a tough but temporary barrier around the town center. Even then, some didn’t believe it until Keaton himself returned and the rebuilding began.

  Now the healthy skeleton of a whole new community was rising up out of the wasteland. From less than a hundred survivors of Old Abraham, now more than three hundred had been recruited, wandered in, or fled here from threatened or former communities all over northern Kansas and southern Nebraska, even some from as far away as Colorado to the west and Missouri to the east. Stiles could see it in the pride that Keaton betrayed as he led them across town, in the faces of the men and women who stopped what they were doing – building and farming, mostly – to look at the group of strangers tagging along after their leader. You couldn’t stop these people. Nobody could.

  “So we have a whole new economic base here,” Keaton was saying, and Stiles forced himself to pay attention. “Chickens and corn; corn and chickens.”

  “With an extra helping of chickens,” Stiles said.

  Keaton chuckled. “You can say that again.” He stopped them at a major intersection and pointed west. “We put most of the poultry out that way, with its own double perimeter fence and gates.”

  “And guards,” said one of his assistants, a tall fellow with too much hair named Harmon.

  Keaton nodded. “And guards. Not the best arrangement, maybe, but trust me, boys: You want to stay downwind.” Everyone smiled at that.

  They started south again, moving towards an oversized warehouse made from corrugated steel, obviously U.S. Army issue. “The corn is pretty much all around us,” Keaton said as he walked. “A lot of it outside the fence. When we need to work it, an armed squad goes along. Our isolation works to our advantage there; we’ve cleaned out most of the shamblers already, haven’t seen a sprinter in … how long, Katie?”

  A round middle-aged woman with tightly curled gray hair and a clipboard didn’t even have to refer to her notes. She knew the number by heart. “Four weeks, three days,” she said, brandishing her papers. “We keep track.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Rebecca said. She was suitably impressed.

  Boyarsky, Brent, and the others were taking it in but saying very little, lagging slightly behind and looking just a tiny bit bored with the whole affair. The Dentist, on the other hand, was right up front, walking almost side-by-side with Keaton, her long legs keeping pace with no trouble.

  “Very impressive, Sheriff,” she said.

  Keaton gave her an appreciative look – appreciative in more ways than one, Stiles thought – and smiled. “We’re working on it.”

  She smiled back at him – actually smiled. Stiles thought about it; he was pretty sure that was the first time he’d ever seen The Dentist actually smile at all.

  The oversized warehouse/hangar was unmarked. In fact, Stiles realized, there were almost no signs in New Abraham at all. Either you knew where something was or you didn’t need to. They all entered through a simple metal door that had been drilled into the corrugated steel wall, neatly but without ceremony.

  It was blissfully warm inside. The entire group suddenly relaxed. Most weren’t even aware they had been hunching against the bitter Kansas winter wind. Jose Arctura, his daughter, and an intense young redheaded woman Stiles hadn’t seen before were waiting inside for them, standing in front of a huge, humpbacked vat with a set of blinking lights set into the side.

  The room was quietly, constantly busy: bins of corn and corn husks, bubbling vats, a precious few computers and control consoles glowing with the almost-forgotten glow of electricity. Stiles counted at least thirty people hard at work, so intent on their tasks they barely spoke to each other. They clearly didn’t need to; they knew what they were doing.

  “So welcome to our oil well!” Jose said, throwing his arms wide, obviously proud of his accomplishment. “Except it isn’t oil at all, it’s ethanol – well, modified ethanol, really. Kind of a special brew. Made from corn.”

  The redhead delicately cleared her throat. “Biomass,” she corrected. “Corn and other things. Lots of things.”

  Arctura’s grin grew even wider. “Exactly!” he said. He swept his arms to the wide, towards the redhead, in a grandiose formal introduction. “Ladies and gentlemen: Brenda Long, Ph.D., and our expert. She built this.”

  She made a pretty, sour face. “I helped build it,” she said. “All these people – and especially Jose – did way more than I did.”

  Stiles was charmed by her modesty, but he was already in more than enough trouble with Rebecca. He chose to simply nod stoically. Then, in a slightly dizzying round-robin, Jose and Brenda explained what they had been doing for the last few months.

  Just before Morningstar had come to America, serious research into the use of ethanol as an additive or replacement for gasoline had begun in earnest, all over the country. Brenda wrote her doctoral dissertation on the work, and had just received her degree and a grant at Kansas State when the first sprinters attacked the campus. Twelve of her fellow students and teachers had hidden in the K-State lab basement for weeks, eating out of raided breakroom refrigerators and vending machines, until they ran out of food. Seven of them were still alive when they heard an announcement of an Army refuge blaring from an overflying chopper. Three of them made it to the refuge. Two came to New Abraham. And Brenda had brought the secrets of biomass conversion with her, in her rescued notes and a remarkably sharp mind.

  “I won’t bore you with the details,” she said, still blushing slightly.

  Too late, Stiles thought, but he understood the importance of this information. It was world-changing; maybe w
orld-saving. “Bottom line,” he said aloud, to save them all from another half hour of exposition, “you’ve figured out a way to convert corn and grasses and everything in between into fuel we can use in trucks and generators and heaters.”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding almost grateful. “That’s right. It’s not as efficient as we would like, nor nearly as automated,” – she waved at the thirty or so workers all around them – “but it works. We can supply fuel for the transports and tankers that take food and fuel to Abraham, and even some for the Army and its vehicles.”

  “Which is where I come in,” Jose said. “The engines need some pretty serious re-working to use that fuel, and me and my guys, we’ve been retrofitting everything we can find to use this stuff.”

  “Like I said,” Keaton rumbled, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other. “Food and fuel, fuel and food.”

  “And eggs especially,” Rebecca said, looking as impatient as the rest of them were beginning to feel. “Right now: Eggs for the vaccine.”

  “Correct” Keaton said, turning back towards the door. “Let’s go take a look at that—”

  “You know what?” Stiles said. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. We’ll take your word for it. Lots of chickens. Tons of eggs. Why don’t you just show us to our hotel, or houses, or quarters or whatever so we can, ah, freshen up. You and I and Rebecca can talk numbers later. Maybe at Eileen’s, tonight?”

  Jose’s daughter Adelina had been watching wordlessly the entire time, wearing an expression that Stiles couldn’t quite identify – something between pride and impatience. Or annoyance? Hard to tell. But now, with Stiles’ comment, he saw that break into a small smile that she quickly hid as she lowered her head.

  Keaton gave Stiles a wry look. “Okay,” he said. “I getcha. Jose? Brenda? Thanks for the information. And all this work.” There was a chorus of sincere thanks all around. They both nodded and grinned, happy for the chance to show off a little, and equally anxious to get back to work. The rest of them crowded towards the entrance. The Dentist remained shoulder-to-shoulder with the sheriff. Her eyes were shining brightly.