by Garth Owen
Pickers
2. The Trip
Garth Owen
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Previously-
Part 1: The Find
Following up leads, the pickers found directions to a seed bank in the French Alps. They have resolved to travel there and find blight resistant grain for the home they left ten years previously.
Along the way, they have picked up a passenger, Chloe, who needs a lift to another town.
The roads were mostly memories, scars through the landscape. But the rough, pockmarked surface generally grew smoother around settlements. It made sense for the route to and from the fields to be easier.
They had just rumbled off rough track onto a tarred single lane which arced away to the right, disappearing behind the gentle roll of hill down to the valley floor they travelled along. The surface change made little difference to the quality of the ride in the wagons. The big wheels and long travel suspension soaked up the ruts and potholes with ease. Maxine accelerated, and the pitch of the whine from the electric motors and rumble of the tyres rose. Behind her, Remy said, "Let's not go so fast. Something is not quite right here. I'll go up top and have a look." He turned in his seat and stepped directly onto the short ladder to the roof hatch.
In the passenger seat, Chloe watched as Remy stood, halfway up the ladder, whilst the captain's chair unfolded from its storage place in the roof. She turned to Maxine, who was now sitting up straighter, paying more attention to the road ahead and off to the sides. "What could be wrong?"
Maxine opened her mouth to say that she didn't know, but recognised what her father had seen before she spoke. After a knowing nod, she said, "There's no crop in the fields, just wild grass. They haven't been tended."
Remy reached down to the rack beside the ladder and took one of the hunting rifles, then climbed all the way out onto the roof. The hatch slammed down as he kicked it into place. Maxine reached down to the centre console and clasped, without looking for it, the pistol she had stowed there. She nodded, reassured by its presence, but it was a move that had Chloe wondering where her catapult and darts were. "There's probably nothing to endanger us." Maxine said. "Farms and settlements are abandoned all the time. We just like to be on alert when we spot things like this. Just in case."
"I'm going to get my catapult."
Sat with the catapult in her lap while she twisted a dart in her hand, Chloe felt silly. Inadequate, certain she would be no use if there was any trouble. She looked across at Maxine, watching the way her eyes scanned the road ahead, then darted left and right, checking the fields and the slope of the hill. She told herself that she wasn't going to fall in love with this pretty, dark woman, the way she had with her friend Tania. Probably not, anyway, she only had a few days on the road with her.
"Smoke up ahead." Remy's voice came from a speaker above them, making Chloe jump so that she poked the dart into her thumb. Maxine looked across at the noise, to find Chloe shaking her head with embarrassment.
"Hold tight." Maxine warned, as she spun the steering wheel hard and they turned sharp left off the paving and into the grass. The tall vehicle leant a long way over, and Chloe held tight to the arm rest. She hoped Remy was strapped in up above.
They could see buildings up ahead now, and the wagon straightened out to head toward them. Chloe pulled herself up straight in the seat again, and looked out of the window to her right. Wagon two had accelerated to catch up with them, but was still running along the road.
The grass was wild and high, it would have come up almost to Maxine's shoulders. But it barely reached higher than the bottom of the doors of the wagons. They left a cloud of chaff behind them as they cut a line across the field.
There were two buildings ahead, at right angles to each other, with a gap between them filled in by a low wall. Both single storey, they were constructed from jigsaws of light brown stone with roofs a patchwork of red tile and corrugated metal. The shorter building had two storeys and several windows, whilst the longer one was a tall single story with blank walls facing them. Something on the other side of them was burning, sending a dark smudge of smoke up into the sky.
Ahead of them, the colour and texture of the foliage changed, to the golden green of wheat nearly ripened. Maxine slowed the wagon and turned left to keep from going through a viable crop. "Track ahead of us." Remy said through the speaker. Maxine pulled on the steering wheel to stand up from her seat a moment, nodding when she spotted the stone littered line her father had been referring to. She aimed for it, heading for a strip of darker greenery that ran parallel.
They reached the deep green strip, and the wagon tipped forward. Suddenly, the foliage was as high as the windscreen. Chloe's hand slapped the console in front of her as she stopped herself being thrown forward. Remy shouted some words she didn't recognise, and could only presume were curses.
Just as suddenly as they had dropped into the gulley, they hit the bottom, splashing into shallow water. Maxine twisted a control on the steering column, sending more power to the motor driving the front wheels, and they soon regained their lost momentum. The grass and reeds were denser and taller in the stream bed, but they gave way to the mass of the wagon. They started climbing the opposite bank.
As the wagon left the channel, its nose reared up, front wheels off the ground. Maxine twisted the power controller again, transferring drive to the rear pair of axles. They passed the point of balance, and the front end came back down again, bouncing once before Maxine had the power back to all six wheels equally and they were accelerating away from the obstacle.
Now they were raising dust, rather than hay, as they raced along the track. A spur from the gravel covered road turned sharply around the end of the farm house. Maxine scrubbed off speed as they approached, then turned in sharply. They stopped sharply on the cobbled yard, and Maxine was out of her seat almost immediately, pausing only to grab her 9mm from the middle console.
The nearest door out of the wagon was behind the ladder to the roof. Maxine swung through the gap between it and the third seat, shouldered the door open and dropped out of the vehicle. Chloe found herself reaching out to the disappeared girl, just holding in a little call to her to stop. No, she wasn't going to fall in love with her at all.
Wagon two skidded to a stop on the opposite side of the yard. Veronique and Tony were already moving from their seats. The fire was in a corner of the yard, about as far from the buildings as possible without going into the fields. It had the look of a bonfire, but the shape at the heart of it could have been a small van.
Chloe had lost her catapult in the violent manoeuvres across the field. After a moment, she found it on the floor. She slung the bag of darts over her shoulder and headed for the door. When she clambered down from the wagon, she found the family between the big vehicles, attentive, but not too tense. "It looks like a false alarm." Maxine told her.
Chloe pointed at the fire. "But, this...?"
Remy pointed to a cluster of bottles, scattered around the fire. Some of them had yet to crack or start melting. "Sunlight through one of those may have started it."
"The doors and window shutters are all open, and it looks like the buildings have been emptied with some care." Tony said. "We're going to do a quick search through them, but it looks like someone just packed up and moved away."
"It looks like a false alarm." Maxine said again. "I wonder where they went? And why they left?"
Remy shrugged. "It's not the first Celeste of a farm we've found, and it won't be the last. If there is no-one here t
o help or trade with, we'll just have a quick look around, then carry on." Veronique and Tony were already heading for the farm house. Remy surveyed the yard, then shouldered his rifle and walked toward the barn.
"Does this happen often? Rushing into abandoned settlements?" Chloe asked Maxine.
"Occasionally. We have rolled up just as raiders were attacking, on occasion. And last year, something like this happened and we were able to stop a family losing a year's crop. But, really, it doesn't happen as often as Papa suggested."
"So.... the most dangerous thing about this whole thing.... was your driving?"
"Maybe I was a little enthusiastic." Maxine admitted, after feigning a pout. "Sometimes, when a farm is abandoned, they don't round up all the livestock. Let's see if we can find something for the pot."
* * *
There had been chickens, but they had been nervous birds, and kept running away before they could be caught. In the end, Chloe had taken down two of them with her catapult. The stone stove in the farm house had been primed with embers from the bonfire, and now a chicken stew simmered on top of it.
Chloe was stirring the pot as Maxine entered the kitchen. She looked at the handful of metal Maxine put down on the table, before asking, "Can you be certain they are not coming back? Are we not just stealing?"
Maxine sat on the table and swung her legs as she thought through her reply. "We never take from a place unless it's abandoned. I promise. We are not like the raiders, who charge in and take stuff by force, killing, raping.... I've seen what they do to communities. We're nothing like that."
"I didn't mean to...."
"I know. I know. This place.... the people who used to live here didn't leave in a hurry. Their move was planned. Maybe they got an offer on somewhere better, or found family and went off to be with them. But, they packed as much as they could and took it with them. What's left, they didn't need or didn't want. Or were the size of this table, and they just couldn't move it. Well, maybe they wanted to take the wine stash Papa found. They must have forgotten about it."
"I don't know. Some of that wine wasn't fit for drinking. Okay for cooking, though."
"We are scavengers, sort of. But we do it to provide material for other folk to use. We're like part of the ecosystem, Papa says."
Chloe scooped a sample of stew from the pot. "Come, taste." She said, holding the spoon up and blowing on it. She carefully fed Maxine the stew. "Good?"
"The wine makes it."
"Do you have more stuff to scavenge?"
"Not really, like I said, they did a good job of clearing this place out."
Chloe turned to face Maxine, resting a hand on her waist. "The stew should.... stew for a while longer. There are rooms upstairs." She said.
"There are, aren't there." Maxine stood on tiptoe moving in for a kiss.
Their lips hadn't quite touched when the clatter of the door made them jump and move apart. Tony faltered on the threshold, aware that he had interrupted something. "Ah, er.... We've found a decent amount of hooch fuel in the still. You're the expert at filtering that stuff, can you come and work your magic." He said after a moment's pause.
"Suppose I was wrong, there is still some stuff for me to do." Maxine said.
"The, ah, stew smells good." Tony said before following Maxine out of the building.
* * *
There were two vats of mash in one corner of the barn, foul smelling tubs where starchy and sugary waste fed the fermentation. The result was a beer, of sorts, that only crazies would drink. This wasn't booze for human consumption, it fed the solar still on the south side of the building.
"I'm surprised they didn't take it with them." Tony said as he studied the complex arrangement of copper piping and vessels.
"You couldn't get this out of here without destroying it." Maxine said, tracing the path of one piece of tubing with a finger then giving an appreciative nod at its clever orientation. "And it would break my heart to destroy something this beautiful."
"So they just left it to keep on distilling, meaning there's some alcohol fuel in there for us. Sweet."
"Yeah. You should get some of the mash and prime it so there's some for the next folks through here. I'll find a container for the distillate."
There was an old plastic bucket wedged between the mash vats, the thin metal handle barely holding on to it. Tony took a deep breath and held it as he dipped the bucket into the mash, trying his best to keep from getting any floating debris into it. He was pouring the brown liquid into the still when Maxine returned with a jerry can. She crouched with it at the opposite end of the machine and opened a tap to start the clear ethanol flowing into it.
There had been a sieve hanging beside the still, which Tony had used to catch the few bits of detritus he had let into the bucket. He flicked it to deposit the scraps by the wall. Before he went back to the vats, he said, "So, are you and our passenger...?"
Maxine looked up at him, as if daring him to be more explicit with his question before she would answer him. She relented on making him uncomfortable, and said, "Yes, we're fucking."
"Is she going to stay with us, do you think?"
Maxine gave a little sigh. "No. She wants a bit of fun before she has to settle down."
"You certain? Because I didn't mean to join the family, at first. If you're half as good as your sister, Chloe may want to hang around."
"I do not want to know how good my sister is, thank you."
Tony started back to the vats, wanting to put some distance between himself and Maxine's expression. "I could have said that better."
"You think?" The ethanol had stopped flowing. Maxine closed the tap and sealed the lid on the can. She sat on it as Tony brought the next bucket of mash over. "We're having fun. She's lovely, but there is no way she'll want to stay with us. No matter how good I am, she's a town girl, not a picker."
"Shame."
"Yeah, well.... At least we won't have to bring another person in on our next job." Maxine stood and picked up the jerry can. "Look, you and Vee, it was almost perfect chemistry from the start, but it still coulda failed if you weren't going the same direction as we were. I'm glad it did, though, even if you do ask some rude questions some times. Another couple of buckets and it should be primed to produce loads more ethanol for someone else to collect."
As his sister-in-law left the building, Tony was taking a deep breath before dipping the bucket into the vat for another fill.
* * *
"You know what I miss when we're away from civilisation? Bread." Remy announced, when he could scoop no more of the stew from his bowl.
"I'll fix the bread maker. One day." Maxine said.
"I thought you threw the bread maker away when it broke, to make space." Tony said.
Maxine thought for a moment. "Oh, yes, I did, didn't I."
"Is there any more of the stew?" Remy asked. "It was delicious." He studied Maxine's expression and the direction of her gaze as Chloe blushed at the praise. It confirmed what he had thought. His daughter's eyes flicked in his direction, like she could tell he was looking at her, and her brows lowered as she considered his little smile. She turned her head to Tony, and Remy could feel, just, the shrug he gave.
Chloe, oblivious to the family interaction around the table, was ladling more stew into Remy's bowl. "You had a bread oven, in one of the wagons?" she asked.
"A bread making machine." Veronique said. "It could be programmed to do everything, all we had to do was put the ingredients in and turn it on. The loaves were all the same shape and size, but we changed the recipe sometimes."
"It was one of those bits of technology that most people abandoned as everything collapsed." Maxine said, still flashing suspicious looks at her father. "When the crops have failed and governments are falling over and you don't know what the heavy weather's going to do from season to season, the ability to make a small loaf of bread in your own kitchen mustn't seem so important. But I liked the idea, and once I had a transformer hooked up to i
t, it was quite useful for us."
"I don't know where these two got their skills from." Remy pointed at his daughters with his spoon. "Max is a mechanical genius, and you don't want to know what sorts of things she can dream up for weapons, and Vee has the knack with computers and the sciences. Almost no-one uses computers any more, another thing that didn't seem so important as the weather was trying so hard to kill everyone."
"I have seen some of Maxine's tricks with the bow." Chloe said. "Would anyone else like some more?"
"Oh, that fast firing trick?" Tony mimicked drawing and releasing a bow multiple times, before handing his bowl up the table. "There are some who weren't so impressed by that trick. Of course, they were on the wrong end of it."
Was that awe, fear or something else that Chloe tried to hide as she turned away to fill bowls, Remy wondered. It was an interesting one Maxine had picked this time. He didn't want to think about his little girl having sex, but Remy wasn't so blind that he never noticed when it was happening. Maxine had fallen for that boy who had been only interested in an easy fuck with no commitments. That had ended in sulks and sadness and, no doubt in the privacy of her bed, tears. And there had been the girl from the other picker caravan, though Maxine had been so sure that no-one else knew what was going on. They had obviously parted on far better terms.
"I couldn't do what you do. It all seems so dangerous. I would never survive out here." Chloe said, and Remy didn't want to see how his youngest daughter reacted to that.
* * *
Maxine recognised the expression on her father's face, even in the limited light from the moon. He wanted to ask her personal questions, ones about her sex life, and that made him uncomfortable. Perhaps to put it off a while longer, he opened with, "All quiet out here."
"A few wild dogs somewhere out there. And those bloody chickens. I swear they're making a fuss because we've taken over their home." Maxine got up from the captain's chair for her father, and handed him the hunting rifle that had been across her lap. "You know, I had a chat with Tony earlier. About Chloe."
