Dale reached out for the robot head and looked it over. “What kinda shape is the rest of this droid in?” he asked.
“Really good,” Daniel said. “I don’t think he ever got used at all.”
Dale nodded, admiring the condition of the head, which contained the main processor. “I just ask out of habit. I’m not in any position to be buying more robots or anything.” He looked around the room.
Rodney could see at least three robots with human forms, each with some part removed, or opened for internal work. Daniel looked around, drawn to a small robot with no face that looked less human than the others. He stepped over to take a closer look, but knew better than to touch.
Dale liked the way Daniel handled himself around the equipment. “If I do get any work, though, I might want an assistant some time,” he said.
Daniel looked at him and then at Rodney, who made a “we’ll see” kind of face.
Dale continued. “But there ain’t much work just yet,” he said. “I was hopin’ I could make a bunch of money removing chips from people, now that the Dic...tator is toast,” he skipped a beat, nearly using the vulgar term for the fallen ruler, but thinking better of it in front of Daniel.
Rodney appreciated the effort, but had a question. “I thought that pulling a chip would be a medical operation or something.”
“Not really, just needed sterile equipment. The chip sits just under the skin and leaves only a small cut when removed,” Dale said, sitting down to a computer and punching up a program. “I seen it done a few times during the war, people who wanted out of that rat trap.” He typed a command, located a file folder and then dragged it to an icon for a memory stick. He waited a second and then pulled the stick.
“I’ll sell you this upgrade on the stick for one gold coin,” Dale said. “And if it doesn’t work right, you can come back and we’ll see if we can find a patch, no extra charge.”
Daniel almost glanced at Rodney to check on the price, but decided against it, simply accepting the offer by fishing in his pocket for the coin.
Dale continued his previous thought, “But the thing is, I can’t find anyone that’s got one of those chips. I ain’t met a single person that has one.” He snorted his bemusement. “What the Hell do you think about that?” He stopped himself, ashamed of his language, but too late.
Whether he expected an answer or not, this was the sort of thing Rodney and Daniel had been discussing, so Daniel took up the question thoughtfully. “Well, maybe when all of the Dictator’s people took off, they took the chipsters with ‘em.”
Dale nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking. I was just wondering whether they went voluntarily, or under some kinda mind control or something.” Having survived the greatest conspiracy of all human history, no one could blame Dale for speculating about the manipulation or coercion of billions of people.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Rodney said. He liked Dale, and wondered how he would fare in the new world that Young had been talking about.
“Yeah, I just hope we’re really rid of those guys once and for all,” Dale said.
“I’m starting to believe we really are,” Rodney said, assuring himself as well as Dale. Daniel nodded.
Dale smiled at Rodney, drinking in a bit of optimism, for a change. “Well, I hope to see you around,” he said to Daniel. “Maybe bring your mechanical friend around some time.”
Daniel smiled back. “I sure will. Thanks.”
“Thank you,” Dale said, raising the gold coin in salute.
On the way back through town, Rodney hesitated by Jay’s shop, but decided to listen to Young and skip the locks. He knew Emma had supper planned and supplied, and he was anxious to get home to see her.
“I hadn’t thought about all the chip people being gone,” Daniel said.
Rodney shook his head. He had pumped so much of his energy into merely surviving for so long, and then into starting to rebuild his life, that he had missed this startling universal pattern. Rodney reviewed all of the chip-bearing people he had known and couldn’t think of a single one he had seen since he met Daniel.
“That’s a lot of people missing,” Rodney said, adding the chip-bearing people to the children. He hadn’t told Daniel about his conversation with Young yet and felt a pull to keep that to himself for now, recalling Daniel’s judgment that it would be “creepy” for the Jerusalem people to take children away from their parents. Most certainly, his own discomfort with what he knew stifled Rodney, who felt overwhelmed once more by information he couldn’t digest.
He joked to Daniel. “All this stuff is blowing my circuits. Think you could get me an upgrade processor?”
Daniel smiled, then grew more thoughtful, looking down at the robot’s head, now nested at his feet. Finally, he responded. “I get the feeling we all need to start thinking really different than we used to.”
To Rodney, that seemed like a major concession from a determined skeptic. But, like Rodney, Daniel had only to look at his hand to recall the feeling of supernatural healing. At some point, the countermanding evidence simply becomes overwhelming and a guy has no choice but to believe.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The month of March awakened looking like June, as if that summer month had fallen asleep in someone else’s place and opened her eyes to a happy chance at an early start. The crops in the garden grew much faster than Emma or Rodney anticipated. Even with warmer temperatures and regular, gentle rain at night, the hours of sunlight didn’t match the real month of June. But they enjoyed perfect growing weather and the complete cooperation of the critters living around them. Emma used no pesticides and yet suffered no loss from bugs. She had also surrendered her vigilance about keeping the gate in her rabbit fence closed.
Rabbits only disturbed Emma once, that was when Socks seemed to have a game of tag with two of them, which he chased around the yard, only to turn and run as they chased him. Emma stood with her mouth open at the latter twist, wondering if next the chickens would start delivering their eggs to the back door.
Warm weather always roused contentment and expectation in Rodney, an echo of his summers on the ranch and his childhood longing to escape the confines of school and indoors. For a carpenter, of course, the warm weather brought the most enjoyable work and a greater quantity of it. The war had left plenty of buildings in need of repair and Rodney’s war-time reputation made him the favorite carpenter in the area. In March, he hired Ben Jackson to work with him, after Ben complained that Rodney was getting all the work. Ben had been a friend of Pete’s from back before Rodney knew him and had moved to Somerville to get out of the street fighting and house raids in Kansas City. A steady and reliable carpenter, Ben made a perfect addition to Rodney’s growing operation.
Out west of town, near Chester Butler’s place, Ben and Rodney repaired a roof that had been collapsed by a bomb blast. The owner, Betty Cochran, hired them to return the roof to weatherproof condition, as she started cleaning out the damaged section of her two-story farmhouse. Falling flat onto the floor for the most part, the roof had protected much of the interior from subsequent rain and snow, but there was some mold and rot to deal with nonetheless.
Late one morning, Betty returned from town huffing and puffing. She was nearly seventy years old, stout and in good health, well able to keep up the house and small farm, once it was repaired. But she had been looking for some help, from a young couple that used to do odd jobs on the farm. She returned without them and steaming with indignation.
“What’s the matter, Betty?” Rodney asked, as he stacked some shingles on top of a little pile he had started that morning.
“People have just gone crazy, that’s all,” she said, sputtering.
“What happened?” Ben asked, swiping some slivers of wood out of his tight, black beard. He used the break in the work to stretch his back, a constant problem, and to get a drink of water. Ben was about Rodney’s age, a good deal heavier, but still in decent shape for the work. His dark eyes glinted under
a strong brow, his skin a rich brown, darkened by the sun.
Betty stopped and put her hands on her hips, tipping her head back so she could see them under the brim of her white floppy hat. “Have you heard about these people getting together to go to Jerusalem to find their lost kids?”
Rodney and Ben both nodded.
“Well, it’s news to me and one of the craziest things I ever heard.” Betty’s penchant for speaking her mind often amused Rodney, but this was serious and he shared her doubts about the prospects of the expedition.
“How did you hear about it?” he said.
“I was trying to get the Whitmore’s to come out and help with the cleanup, like they promised they would last fall. But they lost their kids and somebody convinced them that their children are in Israel, of all places.” She nearly screeched the last syllables.
“Have you seen the pictures on the Internet?” Ben asked her. “There’s a bunch of kids there and I know that some people say they were brought there by the new ruler.”
Rodney and Ben hadn’t discussed this topic together before, so Rodney was surprised to hear how well-informed Ben was.
“I don’t have the Internet here,” Betty said. “What did you see?”
Ben described much the same scene that Rodney had watched several times and included some of the unusual antics of the children in the crowd, who seemed to group together in the celebration.
“What are they all doing there? Is this some kind of end-of-the-world cult or something?”
“Well, what they say is...” Ben hesitated, not sure of what he believed on the subject. “That the Messiah is on the throne there, and they’re dancing around in celebration about that,” a slight hint of his Trinidadian heritage coming out in the way he said this, Rodney noted.
“Messiah? So it is a cult,” Betty said.
Ben wasn’t content to see it that way, but also constrained by the customer relationship, so he just shrugged and said, “I suppose you could see it that way.” He turned back to the house, back to knocking rafters apart with a sledgehammer, putting his considerable weight to good use.
Betty watched Ben walk away, sensing that he wasn’t saying all he was thinking. She turned to Rodney to get some help. “What do you think is going on?”
Rodney shook his head and took a deep breath. “There’s so much going on that’s hard to explain these days, that I don’t even know where to start,” he said. “From what I can tell, those people might be right, their kids may be there, but the crowd there is huge, more people than I’ve ever seen together in one place, so I don’t know how they could hope to find anyone.” He stopped there, knowing that any of this could be overwhelming, and all of it was too much to address.
“So they’re just gonna get on an airplane and fly over there and start looking?” Betty asked, concerned for people she had known since they themselves were small children.
“All I know is, if I thought I could find my lost kids on the other side of the world, I’d go looking for ‘em,” said Rodney.
Betty seemed to descend from her distraught alarmism to a more sympathetic posture, when Rodney put it this way, but she reserved the right to be mad at somebody in this story. “Well, whatever the case, I’m out of help for the cleanup.”
Rodney thought a second and then said, “I’ll go home for lunch and see if Emma and Daniel want some work.”
Betty perked up. “Oh, that would be great.” She beamed, glad for something hopeful and simple.
“It’ll be nice to have a bunch of people around,” Betty said, thoughtfully. “Everywhere I go these days seems lonely to me, not enough people left, I guess.” She stood next to the back door for a moment, thinking about this. “Strange thing is that I feel more lonely when I’m alone than I used to. Does that seem possible?”
This tripped something for Ben, who had paused with his sledgehammer when he saw Betty about to enter the house. “It seems just like what I been feeling myself,” he said. “Used to be I had lots of things running around my head, but now I just feel more quiet sometimes. I guess that’s good.”
Rodney listened without comment, not ready to open the doors to his own psyche just then, but he did feel a resonance with what each of them had said.
As promised, over lunch Rodney retrieved both Emma and Daniel, with the hope of a little more income. Daniel insisted on including his Robot, whom he had named Chip, as well as Socks, on the expedition. Rodney was pretty sure Ben and Betty wouldn’t mind the extra bodies, even if one was a coyote and the other was made of plastic and circuit boards.
Just before they all five got into the van, Lilly appeared around the corner of the house. Daniel’s first thought was regret that he had missed her landing.
“The garden looks grand!” she said with gusto.
Emma smiled at the fourth appearance of her gardening mentor. Lilly had checked in two weeks before, bringing a second round of seeds and claiming she wanted to see some of her little friends, as well. This time, however, Lilly came with a different agenda.
“I wonder if you could do me a favor?” Lilly asked Rodney.
Rodney looked surprised, unable to imagine anything he could do for the woman he thought of as Mother Nature.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised,” she scolded. “I can’t do everything on my own.”
Rodney recovered and said, “Yes, of course, I’d be glad to do you a favor.” This was the first time Rodney had actually spoken to her, only observing her from a distance on two of her previous visits.
“Alright, I wonder if you would be willing to introduce me to Betty. She needs some help with getting her garden going and I haven’t visited her yet. I was waiting for a good opportunity. You see, she hasn’t had much contact with folks like me, if you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” Rodney said, distracted at the mental picture of the confluence of two such epic personalities as Lilly and Betty. He could see where a bit of introduction might help.
“Wonderful!” Lilly said. “I’ll meet you over there once you’ve introduced your family to her first.”
Hearing Lilly call Emma and Daniel his family made Rodney feel as if it were official, or sanctioned, even without a preacher and a wedding. He caught a look from Emma that said she was thinking something similar.
With Daniel, and his nonhuman cohort, in the back, Rodney and Emma drove past town to Betty’s place. Emma noted how many trees had bloomed, and even dropped their blooms in favor of new leaves, so early in the year. She also noted how very few of the fields along the way showed any sign of cultivation, leaving her wondering about Lilly’s work in the area.
Ben was already back to work when Rodney arrived with his van full. He came out to say “Hi” to Emma and Daniel, whom he had already met and he gave Socks a good scratching, after getting the coyote’s approval of his scent. For the robot, Ben had only a doubtful look.
The welcoming voices outside, brought Betty out of the surviving section of the house, to greet the new arrivals. Polite handshakes and cheerful voices filled the yard of the little farm and Rodney felt especially good about Betty meeting Emma. With the loss of so many family members, a disturbing number of people now lived alone and Betty’s admission about loneliness concerned Rodney. As he expected, Emma and Betty fit nicely together, smiling and laughing almost immediately, as they talked about the farm and the house. On the other hand, introducing Lilly to his hostess and customer, made him a bit nervous.
After the first wave of greetings and explanations, Lilly appeared from around the van, as if she had just gotten out of the back of the vehicle. Rodney smiled at this shrewd maneuver. Betty certainly wouldn’t have responded well to a crash landing next to her back porch.
As that grand spectacle of a woman walked calmly up the drive, Rodney noticed that Lilly wore a plainer dress than when he had seen her last. The simpler outfit seemed to Rodney to be another shrewd calculation.
Lilly smiled as she approached, looking at Betty and then at
Rodney, cueing his line. He took the cue with hardly a beat dropped.
“Betty, this is a friend of ours that has been a ton of help with our garden. I thought you might like to meet her, as well.” Rodney amazed himself with that spontaneous composition of semi-fiction. Emma didn’t miss the performance and sought to assist.
“Really, she has been a big help to me. Betty, this is Lilly,” Emma said, finishing the introduction.
Rodney resisted thumping his forehead with the palm of his hand, realizing that, with all of his suave word craft, he hadn’t actually made the introduction.
Betty reached out her hand to greet Lilly, but the look on her face resembled a mask formed into a smile, rather than her usual demonstrative face. Rodney remembered his first meeting with Hyo and Young, when he saw that look on Betty’s face.
Even Ben looked a bit off guard, though he and Rodney had spoken about his encounters with people such as Lilly. Daniel, for his part, distracted all of them when he led Chip toward the cleanup site. The robot’s upgrades resulted in a companion with very nearly a ten-year-old boy’s capacity to interact. The old-fashioned motors for arms and legs, however, caused this six-foot-tall ten-year-old to move as if he had a serious brain injury.
Lilly regained their attention, saying to Betty, “I’d love to discuss your plans for a garden and for raising animals. Were you thinking of goats and chickens?”
Betty tilted her head. “Yes. How did you know that?”
Lilly didn’t answer directly. “It’s a good farm for that,” she said. “You could repair some fences, if you’re inclined, and house the chickens over there.”
Betty nodded, recognizing each of these suggestions as just what she had planned. But Lilly was just warming her up.
“I have seeds for your garden, most anything you could want to plant around here. It’s earlier than you’re used to planting, I know, but you must have noticed that the weather has changed, so there’s no reason to wait.” Lilly grinned like everyone’s favorite kindergarten teacher.
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 19
