“You’re not going to starve, Millie. We’re going to help each other, and we’re going to make it through this. I’m only asking you to spend a little more effort on security to keep out the people we can’t trust. If they get in, they can take what we have, and they can kill those we love. We have to make sure the perimeter is strong and that we’re on our guard.”
The room was silent, defeat weighing heavily in the air.
An older man in bib overalls stood up. “These times are hard.”
He was leaning on a cane, but he shifted his weight to a bale of hay stacked to his left side and thumped the cane against the ground with his right hand. “Maybe we all got a little soft, eh? Tractors with GPS. Machines to milk your cows. My wife even had one of those fancy little robot vacuums that whirred around the house and picked up the dirt and dust.”
Everyone laughed, even the white-haired woman who had been sitting next to him.
“But now times are hard again. They’ve come before. We survived them. They’re here now, and we will survive them. They will come again. The Good Book tells us not to fear. It tells us to stand strong. It tells us to believe.”
No one spoke. No one contradicted him.
“The lights will come on again, folks. I might not live to see it. Some of you will. When they do, you’ll be surprised at how tough you have become. How you don’t need, or even want, that luxury. How you’ve learned to depend on the sweat of your own labor.”
He leaned the cane against the hay, stared down at his hand, rubbed his thumb against his palm, glanced up, and smiled.
“You’ll be surprised how you’ve learned to depend on God’s goodness because that isn’t gone. Only hard to see at times. Like the sun…”
He pointed toward the roof of the barn, where as far as Carter could tell the sun was still hidden behind heavy clouds.
The old guy sat down, and another farmer took over the meeting—talking about hunting parties, how they needed to limit the number of deer they harvested, and what other wildlife was available.
Georgia stood up and asked again for medicine so they could pool their resources and catalog what they had.
Carter pretty much tuned out. His thoughts had turned to his mom and Max, wondering if they were on their way home.
TWENTY-SIX
Carter waited around after the meeting broke up, thinking that Roy would tell him what work he needed to do next. But Roy was surrounded by men, and Georgia was talking to the few women who had attended. Carter figured he could find something that needed doing, so he walked out of the barn, surprised to see the barest hint of sunshine peeking through the clouds.
Usually in Texas farmers worried about drought. But since the flare? It seemed as if nature was determined to drown their crops. Maybe it was another El Niño. Hard to say without the weather channel. He was thinking of that—weather apps and floods and work that needed to be done—when he practically walked into a group of teenagers.
“New kid, right?” The spokesman for the group looked to be about seventeen. He had a bandana wrapped around his head holding back his hair, which was shoulder length and greasy. In his right hand, he flipped an unlit cigarette between his fingers, back and forth—over and again. No doubt it was a trick he’d practiced in front of the mirror.
“I guess.”
“Heard you went to the Markhams’ last night.”
Carter shrugged.
“What did it look like? The wound?”
“I heard it was messed up,” a shorter, rounder boy said. “Heard he might lose his arm.”
“Is that true?” the first asked. “Because I’m thinking a one-armed farmer doesn’t stand much of a chance.”
The two of them found this terribly funny. The rest of the group—another five or six girls and guys—smiled, or shuffled their feet, or stared at the ground.
Carter probably should have kept his mouth shut and kept walking, but somehow that quiet, stay-low, and don’t cause trouble kid that he’d always been had vanished. Perhaps it had been burned away by the flare. Instead of walking off, he stepped closer and said, “I’m thinking that a one-armed farmer would stand a better chance than a dumb—”
A girl stepped forward, effectively between him and the apparent leader of their group. “I heard you had a plan to improve Roy’s water reclamation system. Can you show me what you’re going to do?”
Carter’s gaze flicked to her. “I guess.”
The leader of their group was still attempting a stare-down, which made him look pathetically like a character from a bad western. Carter wasn’t sure he wanted to let this go. A confrontation up front was better than watching behind your back, but the girl was now tugging on his arm, pulling him away from the group.
“Great! Which way is it?”
At first Carter didn’t know what she was talking about, and then he remembered her question. “Uh—over here.”
As they walked away from the group, he heard snippets of conversation—the words weed and midnight meeting and moonshine. He almost turned back, almost warned them about the dangers of ignoring curfew, but the girl tugged on his arm and pulled him in the opposite direction.
“You don’t really want to mess with them. Brandon, he’s kind of an idiot.”
“The one with the cigarette?”
“Yeah. He’s a big smoker. ’Course, everyone’s kind of run out of cigarettes, so he mostly plays with them instead of smoking them.”
They were walking toward Georgia’s vegetable garden on the opposite side of the barn. Carter stopped next to the three metal tanks.
“My name’s Monica.”
She held out her hand. Carter shook it because he didn’t really know what else to do. Monica was probably his age, weighed a good bit more than he did, and had long, wavy brown hair. Her eyes were crinkled in amusement, and a smile tugged at her lips. What was she in such a good mood about?
“I’m Carter.”
“Yeah. Everyone knows that. You’re from Abney.”
Carter nodded, wondering why everyone would know about him. He didn’t have to wonder long.
“We heard about what happened on your way here, when you were traveling with your mom and Max. Pretty scary, huh?”
“Yeah, it was.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Fair enough. So explain all these tanks to me. Why do you need more than one? Why the trellis with the metal thing on top? How does this even work?”
“Do you always ask three questions at once?”
“Sort of. Yeah. I guess I do.”
Carter laughed. The sound surprised him. It had been a while since he had found anything worth laughing about, but Monica’s enthusiasm took some of the worry out of the air.
“All right. Well, this isn’t finished. I had a few hours to work on it this afternoon, but there’s still a lot left to do. As you can see, this barn roof is huge.”
“Most barn roofs are.”
“Correct. Lots of surface area. Roy had positioned tanks to catch the water at all four corners, but he still wasn’t reclaiming even half of what he could have.”
“Because of what drops down the sides.”
“Exactly.”
“But it’s not like anyone has enough rain gutter to put across the entire thing.”
“True.” He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward the barn. “Tell me what you see when you look at that roof. Describe the angles.”
“Like in geometry?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, there’s a pitch at the top.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And coming down from there about…”
“Forty-five inches.”
“You measured it?” She looked over her shoulder at him.
“Not exactly, but I can tell from looking.”
“Okay. Forty-five inches down, the roof angles out wider.”
“That first slant, the area before that angle
, is thirty degrees.”
“The second slant looks about double that.”
“Exactly. It’s more than seventy inches long, and the angle is sixty degrees. Most barns are built this way because it distributes the weight of the roof.”
“Which is a big roof.”
“Very big.”
“Barns are always bigger than houses around here.” Monica pulled her hair back with both hands, as if she were about to gather it up into a ponytail, but then she let it fall down her back. “So what’s your plan?”
“Add two sections of gutter, in the middle of the sides.”
“How long?”
“Only a couple of feet, but you’ll be surprised at what we’re able to harvest. That sixty degree angle? It helps slow the water, only a little, but enough for it to increase what we catch.”
“I don’t get it.”
Carter turned back to the tanks, picked up a metal cup, and filled it from the smallest tank.
“Hold out your hand, and see how much you can catch.”
He dumped half of the water on her hand.
Monica shook her head. “Too fast. I only got about three drops.”
“Exactly. When water is coming straight down, you catch some, but not a lot. Now try it again.”
This time he tilted the cup at an angle. The water still splashed over her hand, but she was left with a palm full.
“Angles slow it down,” she said.
“Just a little.”
He went through the rest, how they planned to use a pipe set on top of a trellis to divert the water to the large, medium, and small tanks. He’d found a black hose which he hoped to use to connect the tallest tank to the medium, and the medium to the small. “Use gravity, don’t fight it,” he explained.
“All right. I’m with you so far. With the tanks full you can fill up pitchers and water the garden.”
“It’s rained so much, we’ve barely needed it,” Carter admitted. “But Roy says the weather will be much drier next month.”
“It always is.”
“That last pipe we’ll fit into a garden hose, which I’ll punch small holes in, make a sort of soaker hose. Then we’ll run it through the rows of Georgia’s garden. She can come out, turn on the flow—not much, just maybe a quarter turn. It will water the plants directly—much more efficient than the sprinklers we used on our lawn back in Abney.”
“I want to do this at home.” Monica placed her palm flat against one of the tanks. “I think I can even find the supplies.”
“Just be careful if you decide to walk up on the roof. It’s scarier than it looks.”
Monica tilted her head, a smile forming on her lips. “City boy.”
“I wouldn’t call Abney a city.”
They were walking back toward the group of adults leaving the barn when Carter reached for Monica’s arm.
“Whatever those guys were planning for tonight, tell me you’re not going.”
“Like I said, Brandon’s an idiot.”
“Yeah, but sometimes…” He glanced left and right, and finally he looked directly at Monica. He didn’t know her. She seemed like a nice person, though, and the world was going to need more of those. “Sometimes you do something just because you’re bored, or you don’t want to feel…I don’t know, on the outside.”
“I’m not bored, and that group? I don’t mind being on the outside.”
“Good.”
He thought they were done, but she turned back toward him and asked the very thing he’d been wondering, “Why do you care?”
He didn’t know how to answer. Couldn’t really explain that she was the first person—outside Georgia and Roy—to pierce the bubble he’d been living inside since Kaitlyn’s death. He wasn’t even interested in her. But it would be nice to have a friend. In that moment he realized how much he missed his friends back in Abney.
Instead of attempting to explain all of that, he said, “I don’t want the next gunshot wound Georgia gets called to fix to be yours.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Shelby had thought they would all be leaving together, but of course Clay and his group didn’t need supplies from deep in the heart of Austin. They didn’t need to put themselves or their cargo in jeopardy. Their car was now full of children. They were headed home.
The boys and girls must have been prepared for the separation. Maybe they’d seen other kids go. Or maybe they were so shocked from all that had happened that another change couldn’t pierce their exhaustion. Four girls and two boys were in the backseat—six kids sharing three seat belts. They looked as if they ranged in age from four to preteen. Two were white, two Hispanic, one black, and one Asian. And none of that mattered. What did matter is that, according to Clay, there were families willing to shelter them, to give them a home permanently if need be.
She started to ask if traveling with six children in the backseat was wise, if he shouldn’t take fewer kids and be safer. What if they were in an accident? But then she remembered what they’d driven through, the wave of desperate people that was slowly rolling toward the school. Clay was right to move the kids, to get them out of harm’s way. He and Kenny and Jamie were crammed into the front seat.
“Having second thoughts?” Max asked.
“No.” She glanced at him and was certain he knew what she’d been thinking. Instead of forcing a confession from her, he winked.
Max Berkman, winking at her as they headed off into unknown danger. Yeah, that was what her life had become.
“Do you think…” She glanced toward Clay’s full car. He’d started the engine. Donna was standing next to the car. They were about to move away.
Max was watching her, but she couldn’t wait for his approval or opinion or whatever it was she wanted. Instead, she jogged over to the idling vehicle.
“I wanted to thank you again.” She glanced from Bill to Donna to Clay. “And I wanted to say that we’ll try and come by after we find the insulin. We’ll come by, and if any of your kids needs a ride out to Clay’s—”
She’d turned her gaze to the kids in the backseat. She stopped midsentence because her throat was tightening and tears were stinging her eyes, and she didn’t know how to say what she needed to say.
“That’s good,” Clay said. “Welcome to the Remnant.”
And then he was gone.
Shelby walked back over to Max and Bianca and Patrick and Bhatti.
Bill and Donna joined their group.
“We keep the cars nice and tight.” Bill waited for each person to nod in agreement. “No one gets between us. If I stop, you stop. If I don’t stop, you keep going. No matter what.”
It was the opposite strategy from what Clay had used, but, then, they were going to a more dangerous area. To Shelby, it made sense to keep as tight a group as possible.
The rain had stopped, but water stood in puddles everywhere, even dripping from their cars. Bill wiped the water off the hood of the Dodge with the palm of his hand, pulled out a laminated map, unfolded it, and slapped it down.
“We’re here, still a couple miles northwest of the center of Austin. The governor has cordoned off the roads from 15th to Mesquite.” He ran a finger from the northeast side of the capitol area across to the southwest. “And from Colorado to San Jacinto.” He traced from the eastern to western sides.
“Not that big an area,” Patrick said.
“Not really, but from what I’ve heard, they’re planning to push out.”
“So we have a straight shot if we take this road,” Patrick leaned forward and traced a line southwest.
“Which we are not going to do. It’s gangster land from corner to corner that way.”
“So how do we get in?” Bhatti asked. He’d been staring at the map intently.
Shelby realized that he was from Austin. Wasn’t he? When Max had first asked him to help with their patients in Abney, Bhatti had said he was from Austin, and that he’d left to get away from something. He’d never said what, and that had been the b
eginning of her distrust of the man.
Now he was completely focused on Bill, as if his answer about their route mattered more to him than it did to Shelby.
“We’re going to follow North Lamar down.”
“Beside the park?” Bianca had to wiggle in between Shelby and Max to get a good look at the map. “Isn’t that dangerous? Won’t there be people living there?”
“Yes. But it’s families for the most part. The gangs have taken over what apartments they can find. They aren’t too interested in sleeping out in the rain.” He stood back and began refolding the map. “We take Lamar south, past the capitol buildings, then turn east and approach from Congress Avenue.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
They were back in their original seats. Max driving, Shelby riding shotgun, Bhatti sitting behind Max. When Max looked in his rearview mirror, he could see Patrick driving, Bianca by his side. And when he looked ahead, he saw Bill, driving a very old, very beat-up sedan.
Bill’s plan was to drive at a steady 20 mph—no faster because they didn’t really want to run over anyone, and no slower because they didn’t want to become a target.
The school quickly became a dot in their rearview mirror. They drove out in the opposite direction they had come, through streets with more large houses that quickly transitioned into a typical downtown Austin neighborhood, albeit an upscale one—townhouses and remodeled historic homes. The dwellings weren’t burned down here, but the scene was no less catastrophic.
“What happened to the people who lived in these houses?” Shelby asked. “Were they forced out, or did they just leave?”
“Probably a combination of both.”
It was plain that those now living in the homes were not the homeowners.
Most of the balconies were filled with people to the point that Max was afraid they would collapse. They leaned out, watching, sometimes shouting down to someone below. In places, people had sheets hung around the balcony, as if it had been blocked off to form another room.
People slept in the yards, in tents, on benches, and on the porches. They carried trash sacks of goods, pushed shopping carts, held on to children. The scene was a giant, thrumming mass of displaced humanity. Displaced and increasingly desperate.
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