by David Peters
“I’m sorry for your loss. We have lost people too but where we live it is safe. We have walls, food and protection from the weather.”
“Why would you help me? I have seen a few people, a few things, move through this area but all they ever wanted was to take what little I had or kill us.”
“We aren’t like that,” Dylan said.
The woman looked at Dylan with an air of mistrust. Niccole turned and gave him a look. The woman didn’t trust men and they weren’t going to be able to help her if she didn’t trust them.
“We aren’t going to force you to come with us. If you want to stay out here, we can leave some food and supplies. Maybe find some clothes that will fit your children.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because, it’s what good people do. Good people help those who need it.”
“And you say you have walls to keep those things out?”
“Yes. Our town is guarded twenty-four hours a day to make sure nothing can get in.”
“And I wouldn’t have to do anything? I mean it isn’t some slave camp or something like that?”
Niccole smiled at her, “No, it isn’t a slave camp. We all work though because that’s what it takes to survive.”
“And my children? My son has had a cough for nearly six months that won’t go away.”
“We have a doctor and some medicines. He will certainly be looked after.”
“They stay with me!” she said defensively.
Niccole held up her hands, “Absolutely! We wouldn’t have it any other way in Paradise Falls. I have two of my own.”
“You have children?”
“Yes. Little Daniel is probably the same age as your youngest there. They would go to school together.”
“You have school?”
“We have rebuilt a lot of things that have been lost.”
“And I wouldn’t be imposing?”
“Never. Do you have things to gather?”
“Not much,” she said as she turned back into the gas station door.
Niccole followed her into the darkened workshop. When she got to the middle of the room she slid an oil stained piece of cardboard across the floor. She bent down and pulled on a small recessed ring in the floor and pulled up a large piece of metal plating. Worn concrete stairs led down to the lift machinery and a large oil trap. Filthy blankets and sheets were bunched into a bed in one corner with a filthy bucket for a restroom in the other corner.
The woman turned to see the look of disgust on Niccole’s face, “It’s filthy and disgusting but it kept my kids alive during the long nights and terrible storms.”
“Please don’t take offense. I do not think badly of you. You have survived against horrible odds and kept your kids alive as well. I’m angry with myself.”
“Why would this make you angry with yourself?”
“You are literally only miles from a safe, clean, warm bed. You have been here all along and we didn’t bother to look. I’m angry because we should have been through here years ago.”
“You are here now, that’s all that matters.”
“There will be others out here and we will find them.”
Dylan had been watching silently from the top of the stairs, “I’ll stop the next wagon, take your time.”
“Thanks, Cowboy.”
Niccole smiled at him and turned back to the family of three, “What do you need to bring from here?”
The woman looked around the room and pulled a picture down that had been stuck to the wall with an old piece of gum. In it, a man and a woman stood behind Santa while two small children sat on each knee. She looked at it and a small tear rolled down her filthy cheek.
“This is all I need. I don’t want to see anything in this room as long as I live. Let’s go kids, time to move to our new home.”
Out front, Dylan was standing in the back of a wagon making room for the additional guests, “I’ve made room for you folks here. I was able to drum up a few bits of clothing that should fit. We can get more when we get to town. In the meantime wrap yourselves with these blankets.”
Niccole helped the three into the wagon. As Dylan jumped down, the woman smiled at the two of them.
“I’m in your debt. I won’t forget.”
Dylan smiled back, “Let me see the smiles on those kids’ faces from time to time and that’s payment enough.”
~14~
“Most of their supplies are in waterproof boxes so we don’t need to get it all put away right off the bat. You can stack those things outside in a blizzard and they will be fine,” Dylan said as he clipped the latches down on a large case of power tools.
Erica nodded, “I’ve got food staging over there and weapons over near the main guard shack. Everything else is, well, behind us in that mess of a pile.”
“That is a lot of stuff. All clothing I assume?”
“Everything from clothing to fishing gear. I even saw a set of skies go in there.”
“Who the hell had skis on a carrier?”
“Didn’t have time to ask.”
Dylan popped the latches on one of the food crates and pulled the lid open, “Are these tuna?”
“Yep. They have tuna, salmon, some kind of rockfish, I already forgot the name, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t identify.”
“Wow. I haven’t tasted anything but trout for, well, a heck of a long time.”
“They have even more dry goods. More flour than we have seen in ages.”
Dylan walked around the pile. He removed his hat and ran his hands through his hair, “Where in the hell are we going to put all of this? This would fill our storage shed several times over.”
Erica flipped open one of the boxes, “These are really insulated so once we get the contents out it doesn’t take up as much room. Especially the weapons. We will need to build a second food shed though. They brought a lot of stores and we need to get that stuff protected. We need a cold cellar of some sort. We’ve needed it for a while now that the fish are coming back to the lake.”
“I’ll get with Porter and see if we can get a work crew on it right away. Travis will have to engineer something for cold storage.”
Niccole walked up and put a tired arm around Dylan, “We made it. We actually got them all here in one piece. There is no reason to fill up your to-do list right away.”
He smiled, “I’ll rest when the rear guard comes through that gate and we can close the thing again.”
The wagon with Captain Lewis wound its way through the open area at the center of town. He spotted Dylan and Niccole and jumped down unsteadily.
“Welcome home, Captain.”
“Thanks, but I’m not a captain anymore. I resigned that commission when I parked her in the sand and then blew the hull out of the bottom of my ship.”
“There is a ‘go out with a bang’ joke there, but I’ll pass,” Dylan said as he shook the man’s hand.
“More of a ‘whump’ actually. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as I had hoped.”
Niccole laughed, “You would like Travis, you guys speak the same...”
She stopped mid-sentence and stared at the wagon that was going by.
“Niccole?”
She held her hand up as she walked next to the wagon and stared at the old woman nearly asleep on the bench. She took several quick steps forward and stopped when the young man driving the wagon pulled back on the reigns.
Next to the man was an old woman in a ragged brown dress that looked as if it were made out of old, burlap potato bags. Her hair was messy and pulled back and tied with a small length of blue ribbon. The wrinkles were deeper and the hair had gone completely gray but the look in her eyes was unchanged.
“Mom?”
The old woman turned her weary eyes and smiled warmly, “No, sweetie. I’m not your mom. You do look very much like my daughter although her hair was kept much nicer and she wasn’t as skinny as you are.”
“Mom, it’s me, Niccole.”
Th
e woman turned her head slightly in confusion, “Cookie? Am I dreaming again? I lost you so long ago, I still see you in faces from time to time. Don’t mind me, I’m just an old lady living in the past.”
Niccole jumped onto the bench and hugged the old woman, “No, mom! It’s me, how did you get here? How did you wind up on that boat?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“Where’s Dad?”
Her smile faded slightly, “He was so heroic. Looked out for me until the end but sadly he didn’t make it. It wasn’t for lack of trying, mind you.”
“Did he make it onto the boat?”
“He was hurt pretty badly when we wrecked our car. He stayed behind to protect me when we were running. It was just chaos. He tried so hard to fight but he got burned pretty badly. The last thing he told me was that he loved me and to not worry. It...”
Niccole interrupted her, “It’s the past. You are here now.”
She nodded slowly, “Yes. Yes I am. Will my tent be close to your home? I don’t get around the way I used to. I can usually walk better in these dreams.”
“This isn’t a dream, you are really here. I am really here.”
The woman gently ran her hand down Niccole’s face, “This is real?”
“Yes! I am really here! You can stay with us. Erica spends most of her time with Travis and Daniel sleeps with us. You’ll have a room all to yourself.”
“Who are Erica and Daniel? Is Dylan here too?”
“Dylan is right behind me. Erica is our adopted daughter and Daniel is our little boy. Born right here in Paradise Falls. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
The old woman was quiet for several moments, “I treated you so poorly, Niccole. I know that now.”
“What? Why would you say that?”
“I was pompous, I put myself above everyone else. I was elitist, I felt that I deserved more than others. I felt my station in life entitled me to things I never earned.”
“Why are you saying this?”
“Because of the things I have learned. Things that taught me just how wrong I was, how much I wronged you. One of my biggest regrets was not being able to apologize to you and especially to Dylan. Back then I thought he wasn’t good enough for you but he made you happy and that should have been enough for me. I used to call him your pig-farmer boyfriend. I hated that town so much simply because I felt it was beneath me. All along the truth was that I was beneath them. I know that now. Those people, the people that tried to befriend me, the people I pushed away because I felt they were dirty, are the people that kept me alive.”
Niccole looked over her shoulder at Dylan and saw him hanging on every word.
“I’m not sure what to say, Mom.”
“There isn’t anything to say, sweetie. Just understand I’m not that same person. When I got on that boat and saw that I had nothing to offer and simply believing I was entitled to a certain lifestyle meant nothing.”
Niccole leaned her head on Dylan’s shoulder.
“I had nothing. I lived below decks in a dimly lit room with nothing but a blanket and a pillow. I questioned why someone like me should be put into such a position. Money means nothing now. It took nearly three months of feeling sorry for myself before everything became so painfully obvious.”
“What was that?” Niccole asked.
“We’re all part of the same team, the same group. I’m not above anyone. I needed to do my part because everyone else was doing theirs. Thinking that I deserved to be served simply because I was well off was wrong. It wasn’t even money I had earned, I had simply been born into it. At the heart of it all, I had nothing to offer.”
“What did you do?”
“I started by cleaning latrines.”
Niccole looked shocked, “You cleaned toilets? I can’t imagine that.”
“I told you, I learned. It was the only thing I could do that wouldn’t have someone complaining about losing their job. I eventually moved up to afternoon cook. My corn chowder was one of the town favorites.”
“I taught you how to make my corn chowder!”
“So you did. I called it Cookie’s Corn Chowder and the name stuck. Your nickname as a child is what they called me on the ship. I was reminded of you almost daily. Your recipe is what got me moved out of a steel cell into a regular hut. The air was fresh and I could see the sky out the elevator doors. It was nothing compared to my former life, but you know what?”
“What?”
“It was the first time in my life I felt as if I had earned everything I had. It doesn’t come across well in words but it changed me. It changed who I was and how I looked at the people around me.”
Niccole looked at Dylan then back to her mother, “We do have a lot of catching up to do.”
She yawned long and hard, “I would love to do it but I could really use some rest. My tushie is fairly numb and I can’t see well even when I am awake.”
“Sure, Mom, follow me. We are over in the cabin with the blue door.”
“Lead the way, dear.”
“You have this under control, Dylan?”
“Yeah, shoo. I have this.”
“Thanks, Cowboy. I’ll see you back at the cabin.”
Chapter 6
Dylan watched the faces around the small living room. Caperson sat with his arm around Jen while Annie slept on her lap. Daniel was asleep on his newly-found grandmother’s lap as she leaned into Niccole. Charles sat alone in one of the brown leather chairs, his head leaned back and his eyes on the ceiling.
“We did pretty good for the first two years. Lots of food and supplies. Some things ran short and it began to show. It takes a lot to keep a ship that size running in top shape. We didn’t have a lot of that stuff for long so we were far from fully operational.”
“What did you do for fuel?” Niccole asked.
“Stennis is a nuke ship. We had another ten years of fuel assuming everything ran as it should. We ran short of some fairly critical chemicals. Nuclear power plants are fairly hands on beasts. Takes a lot to keep everything in just the right balance. Things wear out, leak and break. It starts to get pretty shitt—,” he paused as he looked at the children and corrected himself, “sorry, pretty bad. Stupid things that you wouldn’t think twice about when you have a ship with several tons of groceries a few miles away. Normally, we worry about running out of chocolate bars and having some kind of mutiny. You tend not to think about the more important things.”
“But you had the crops and fishing?”
“It took some practice but we were getting the hang of it. No shortage of fresh water as long as we could store it somewhere that could spray the fields. We could use the desalinization plant and make more than we could ever use. We had to be pretty creative in how we moved it around.”
“So you must have been near Seattle if you picked my mom up?” Niccole asked.
“We were in the area but it’s a long story.”
“Nothing but time and good tea here, Charles,” Dylan said.
Charles smiled, “If you insist.” His face grew tense as he started, “We had just wrapped up a stopover in Victoria at the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Kind of a goodwill visit to let some of the guys blow off steam. We were about eight hours out and beginning to sync up with the other ships in the fleet when all hell broke loose. Everything had gone south, everyone was screaming for air cover against something they couldn’t fight. We had calls from as far south as Sacramento and as far north as Juneau. It was insanity. No one knew a damn thing but they were more than happy to order me in eight different directions at once.”
“We started sending birds right off the bat. Our Hornets could make the hop with buddy stores but they would get there and not have a target. It only took three days, we were steaming circles a hundred miles off shore in the open Pacific, when they started giving us city blocks to hit and we worried a lot less about what we hit. We were dropping two-thousand pound bombs on coffee shops and strip malls. Cluster munition
s on schools. It went against everything we had ever trained for. Air Force was dropping every piece of ordinance they could find. Seattle was a wreck. Even after the downtown districts had been turned to rubble, we would still look for targets and find them when we could see through the smoke and ash.”
“It continued to get steadily worse, they just couldn’t get a handle on how fast things spun out of control. We had been running combat ops for six days straight. I had been in the CIC nonstop and was starting to see things. Everyone was getting punchy, making stupid mistakes. That’s why we are still here.”
“How did being tired keep you alive?”
“People made stupid mistakes and it kept us from being on the receiving end of other stupid mistakes. Don’t get me wrong, it was bad but we were working so damn hard it kept us from being on the receiving end of worse.”
~1~
The CATC, or Carrier Air Traffic Control center was filled with a dim red light and the blue and green overtones from the multitude of monitors arrayed around the room. The organized mayhem was slowly but surely losing to the side of chaos. Voices would raise and lower as the crew fought with exhaustion.
“Four-Zero-Two November Charlie, maintain zero-six-thousand, maintain current approach on heading three-one-zero,” a female voice said calmly.
“Four-Zero-Two November Charlie, approaching three-one-zero at zero-six-thousand,” a distant voice replied over the radio.
“Eight-Two-Nine Native requesting expedite, bingo fuel,” said a concerned voice.
There were so many civilian aircraft that they had begun to attach the word ‘native’ to any flight that originated from the carrier or one of the ships in the fleet.
“Roger that Eight-Two-Nine Native, approach three-one-zero, you are first in line.”
There was a pause as the flight controller tried to visualize what she was saying. She drew the mental lines of the two new aircraft in the large aerial dance going around the carrier and caught her mistake early. “Four-Zero-Two November Charlie, break heading two-seven-zero. Eight miles, break heading,” she paused as she adjusted the course. She followed the tracks out and verified traffic altitudes before adding, “heading three-zero-five. Watch for traffic at your two o’clock.”
