Mr Hoskeens said the weight discrepancy in parcels was noted in recent weeks.
City food operators frequently trade Citizens’ rations allotments as part of business, but lately noticed reduced units of staples such as flour, rice, and corn.
“Without a solid currency, stallholders rely on the one-pound standard measure,” Mr Hoskeens said.
“Rations allocations underpin everything the City’s traders do. If the City’s skimping, this will flow through to everyone.”
Administration rations depot manager Amarillo Rodriguez denied the rumored reductions.
He referred detailed questions about the weight of rations packages to the Five.
Those questions went unanswered.
The Traders Alliance has previously asked the Council to fast-track introduction of a local currency.
*
LATE IN THE fourth week in Columbus, Tom rolled up to work feeling something close to contentment. Breakfast was a mash of eggs, reheated potato, diced shallots, and what Einstein promised was bacon, finished off with a black coffee sweetened with honey from Tom’s limited stash. All that was missing was a cigarette, but he continued swearing off the temptation knowing it was something his family’s lowly economy couldn’t afford, even with them formalizing Dkembe’s contribution the previous night when the rangy young man came home with a tattered cardboard carton of unlabeled cans traded at what the Depot workers called the “Lucky Dip”.
They were a bigger family now, for better or worse.
Any levity in Tom’s mood crumpled as he took in Dan MacLaren’s taciturn expression greeting the team outside Human Resources.
The unit commander tried erasing his grim look, face like an etch-a-sketch, but something lingered in his eyes long enough to leave Tom ill at ease as he traded heartfelt greetings with two of the other Reclaimer regulars, a hard-faced veteran named Timms and a bigger guy called Milwaukee who was living well enough off the steady retrieval work that he’d stacked on a few extra pounds, increasingly seen as a sign of affluence in a City otherwise beset by scarcity like some throwback to ancient times. When he looked Tom’s way, Milwaukee resembled a younger version of the actor Colm Meaney, but without the accent, and possibly the smarts.
“Where’s Kent?” Tom asked.
No one answered, and at pretty much the same moment he registered a few new faces sidle up to MacLaren’s truck, a muscular woman giving Tom a run for his money in the unwanted nicknames stakes eyeing him sideways before going into a brief huddle with their commander. MacLaren grunted a few quick instructions, his effaced military bearing glinting through their confab as he nodded repeatedly to whatever she told him, then he patted the brawny, surprisingly handsome woman on her bare shoulder and hauled himself up into the cab.
Everyone else was moving, but Tom’s frown didn’t budge.
He moved alongside the front of the vehicle as it coughed into life, looking up expectantly as MacLaren saw him and shot a tight grin with a wink.
“Mount up,” the ex-commando said through the open window. “Longer transit today. We’re headed to the new agri-hub.”
“Agri-hub?”
“Plenty of time to explain when we get there.”
Tom fell back against his better judgment, deference rather than discretion the better part of valor on this occasion as he drifted back towards the rear with his eyes questing around and still seeing no one familiar from his regular crew except the two men he’d already seen. The strongwoman was the only female, and as Tom hauled himself up into the back, a latecomer arrived carrying two heavy duty bags unmistakably hauling a cache of weapons.
“What’s this?” Tom asked him.
“Hand up?”
The newcomer had a sunny grin and twinkling green eyes, a look of youth about him banished from the faces of most other City dwellers. Tom surrendered to the moment and helped him aboard.
“Supply run, right?” the man said. “I’m Langhorn. Sam.”
“Samuel Langhorn?” Tom asked. “Like Mark Twain?”
“Yeah, blame my father,” the younger man said, only a kid, really. “And I mean that: you can actually blame my old man. He’s alive and kicking still.”
Tom’s expression gave a double take and Langhorn laughed.
“Don’t be so surprised,” the younger man said. “You’re probably about the same age, and you’re still here, right?”
“I might be gray, but I’m not that old, kid.”
Tom said it with the mildest snicker. The young man’s enthusiasm was contagious.
“You called me ‘kid’,” Langhorn said. “I rest my case.”
MacLaren reached out through his window to slap a booming hand on the cab’s metal roof.
“Buckle up!”
“And so we ride,” Langhorn said.
He gave another titular grin, moving past Tom to take a bench seat as the company’s lone female for the day hauled herself up into the truck as well, stopping almost toe-to-toe with Tom before giving the slightest handsome grin and pressing past him, the contact deliberate as she took a seat.
*
“WHERE WE GOING?” Tom asked the three men across from him. They’d already had the briefest of introductions – Timms and Milwaukee he already knew, to which he added Langhorn, the woman Brix, and a tough-looking black guy named Hollister – and already Tom’s danger sense was making it hard to sit still.
“MacLaren’s still the mission boss,” Timms said with clear disinterest.
There was something about the way he and most of the others resigned themselves to the trip that reminded Tom of paratroopers getting ready for a drop – or at least how it always seemed in the movies. His own consternation aside, the vibe didn’t sit well with Tom. He thought to try his interrogation skills on Brix, but the muscular woman kept shooting him such smug smirks he wasn’t sure he was willing to go there. Instead, Tom shuttled up to the sliding window backing onto the truck cabin where MacLaren sat inside with the crew’s regular driver Cyril.
Tom tapped on the window and the unit leader slid it open, not exactly hiding the begrudging smile he tried to serve up with his usual boyish charm.
“Tommy Gun,” MacLaren said. “You want fries with that?”
The ex-commando rapped his knuckles on the window’s drive-thru ledge and it might’ve been funny if Tom didn’t register the tactical gloves he wore.
“Fries’d be good,” Tom said – and also tried not to dwell on the glue-like consistency of his recent breakfast. “A little more details on today would be better.”
“We’re headed outside City limits,” his friend answered. “It’s all good. Sit back and try and enjoy the countryside.”
The remark was at odds with the truck crawling towards the First Gates, already levering open as if by pre-arranged signal. Habituated to it, the thoroughfare’s usual crowds milled out of the way just long enough for the truck to pass as if deigning to ease back in its presence.
MacLaren started closing the hatch, but Tom stopped his hand.
“If I wanted outside City work, I could’ve stayed with the Foragers,” he said with a touch of steel in his voice. “Tell me if I’m wrong, Dan, but that’s a shitload of guns we’re carrying.”
MacLaren’s fragile smile didn’t leave his face.
“We’re making a delivery,” he said.
Tom shot him a look to make clear vague answers weren’t enough, but they were so close to each other – Tom leaning in to make himself heard over the engine noise and nearly rubbing again MacLaren’s tawny forearm – that forcing the point was difficult. Especially with MacLaren’s handsome grin deflecting him.
Nursing an uncomfortable smile of his own, Tom eased back just the slightest and MacLaren slid the window shut like a man with a guilty conscience.
*
THE TRUCK HEADED east on the cleared expressway and it was twenty minutes before slivers of open countryside appeared. They passed broken-down industrial parks, used-car dealerships, abando
ned business complexes, community centers and aged-care homes, and then the land opened even more, distant roadways cutting through fields with neck-high weeds, not a Fury in sight, thought plenty more signs of the last days of the holocaust and the nightmare since, burnt-out wrecks and the ruins of distant homes constant reminders of the world left behind.
Brix moved until she was opposite Tom and kept shifting her eyes to meet his. Finally, she spoke up with the question she’d been mulling.
“You’re the guy from the fighter jet crash, whatever they’re calling it?”
“The Raptor,” Tom said slowly to let her know his reluctance. “Yeah.”
“What does it mean?”
Brix looked like a female MMA fighter, but bigger. All other conversation fell silent. The other four riding the back strained ears towards Tom.
“I don’t know what it means,” he said.
“Aviation fuel, does it even go this long without spoilin’?” Hollister asked.
“It means there’s other people,” Milwaukee said.
“Of course there’s other people,” Brix said. “Not everyone’s joined the rush.”
“A fighter jet means military,” Langhorn said.
“Yeah,” Brix agreed. “And military means a co-ordinated effort.”
“You think someone’s got a plan?” Timms asked.
Brix looked at Tom and the other eyes swiveled to follow suit.
“Me?” he asked and gave a gritty laugh. “There’s that old guy on The Mile with all the radios. If there was a military operation, why’s no one heard anything?”
It was a sobering assessment, and Tom only then kenned the scent of hope among the other crew, even after all this time nursing private fantasies there was Government somewhere working towards a solution, a global reset. Lucas would be thrilled as long as they brought back the Internet.
“I can’t explain the fighter plane,” Tom said to them. “We don’t know what else is happening across the world, other countries . . . anything.”
He was sharply struck by the sudden heartfelt wish for the freedom to find out, even if it meant trekking across Fury-infested wastes for the remainder of however long he could expect to live in the new age – and he briefly imagined, maybe one day, his children would no longer need him, and his duty would be served. His dead wife’s face leapt into mind so suddenly it’d be inexplicable to anyone inexperienced to it, but Tom was no stranger to the deeply-held anger that Maya’d left him to such a terrifying task as keeping their precious children safe in a world gone desperately, despicably, dangerously mad.
“There’s other people, other communities out there. We know that,” Brix said. “We gotta think Columbus ain’t the only place where survivors are throwing in together.”
But no one had any wiser observations.
It wasn’t long after that the first tilled field appeared.
Tom blinked as he registered it and the recent efforts it implied. The field and its irrigation pipes wavering in the heat flashed behind them as the truck passed, but then there was a sandbagged checkpoint and the vehicle slowed. One of the two guards on duty raised a hand in acknowledgement, and Langhorn and Timms responded in kind from the rear of the truck as it continued to slow and Tom glimpsed immature corn fields now in all directions around them.
He stood in the back of the truck as it turned in off the road, passing through an open chain-link gate into the yard of a sturdy-looking compound with solar panels making the main building resemble a tortoise. Several big agricultural sheds and what looked like a gas station completed the settlement, the whole thing surrounded by the fencing, a crow’s nest on the roof of the tallest shed, the other sheds open to the elements revealing a couple of well-maintained tractors and stacked 44-gallon drums. A balding man wearing a leather apron hurried out of the main house at their arrival and two women stood halfway between him and the gas bowser, refueling a quad bike, paused more out of curiosity for the visitors than anything else. There was another truck parked in front of them and two men in jeans and work shirts unpacked sacks of fertilizer, taking pains with a few of the heavy bags leaking their precious contents through historic bullet holes of whatever conflict they’d seen.
Three men and another woman idled watching the two workers do their thing. The quartet were geared for war in every way except for weapons. They wore military webbing, tactical gloves and haversacks, wraparound shades on all their faces except for the woman, a hawk-faced, fierce-looking crone pushing sixty, but with a leathery aliveness and powerful blue eyes marking her as a force to reckon with.
The only other people were out in one of the fields more than five-hundred yards away, more buggies parked on a dirt track nearby.
MacLaren’s ride whistled to a stop and groaned as Cyril killed the ignition. Brix was first to stand, grabbing one of the bags of firearms and winking at Tom as she bustled past.
“Nice bow.”
The others poured off the back of the truck and Tom followed.
The man in the apron and MacLaren went into a huddle and Tom knew better than to interrupt their tryst despite his quest for answers. His eyes drifted to the four loiterers, the arriving truck clearly their cue. One of the men patted the hard-working farmhands as he and his colleagues strolled across to join Dan in his huddle.
Tom probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue as Brix and Cyril carried the bagged guns out to them and the four troopers unzippered the things without a pause and armed themselves. The aproned man returned to the main building and MacLaren and the others also drew weapons from the bags sitting in the dirt.
MacLaren scanned around and his eyes fell on where Tom stood, unable to do it with the casual air he desired. He met Tom’s gaze and immediately shied away.
“You wanna tell me something, Dan?” Tom called out.
MacLaren walked towards him with a pained smile.
“This is the first of the planned agri-hubs,” he replied – again not answering Tom’s question.
“The distances and fuel loads means we have to see if this can work,” he said.
“It’s a Council project. We have to increase the food supply. This is a trial for the Council plan to see if we can maintain strongholds out here, rotate workers in and out like at the checkpoints.”
Tom kept his best poker face, continually inviting the other man to meet his gaze. Instead, MacLaren gestured across the compound, their viewpoint revealing a couple of dormitories behind the main shed.
“The rations issue is serious,” he said. “No one wants to confront it.”
“So what’s with all the guns?”
MacLaren gave another pained smile and twice met Tom’s eyes.
“Ah. . . .” he said at last. “This is another of those things no one wants to confront.”
“Jesus, man, you’re sweating,” Tom said. “Out with it.”
“Of course I’m sweating,” MacLaren laughed and pointed. “So are you.”
The errant camaraderie was missing, at least for Tom. He sucked his teeth a moment with a sinking yet deadened expression that made his jaw lock as he briefly thought about taking a swing at his alleged friend.
“Fucking hell, Dan,” he muttered loud enough for MacLaren to hear. “What are you doing here? I’ve got my children back in the City. I didn’t sign up for this, and nor did you, right?”
“Why me?”
“Do you remember telling me you didn’t think you could face going back out into the wild?”
MacLaren laughed again and waved him off, eyes almost anywhere else. The nervous awkwardness beneath his burly, male model exterior set off warning bells.
“Dan?”
“This isn’t the ‘wild’, Tom,” MacLaren said. “This is back into the field.”
“Field?”
“I’m first and foremost a soldier,” Dan said. “And so are you.”
“Me?” Tom scoffed. “You’re the one trying to fix your daddy issues with showing who’s got the biggest ordnanc
e. I’m not looking for any more trouble than I have to.”
“And you have to, Tom.”
“You’ve shanghai’d me,” Tom snapped. “What are we even doing here?”
“You have to do this because it’s who you are, Tom,” MacLaren said, and as he spoke, strangely grew more calm. “You might not’ve been military back in the Before. I know that. There were plenty of men like you with a warrior’s spirit stuck in dead-end jobs.”
“Warrior spirit?”
Tom didn’t know whether to be flattered or scorn him for such an absolute and completely arbitrary ideal. He settled for resting his hands on his hips and simply staring back at the man he’d considered a friend with an irritated, slightly exasperated mien. For his part, MacLaren refastened his gloves and glanced around a few times, the other members of the team assembling into the one group a respectful distance away on the far side of the truck.
“You’re the hero of the Raptor crash,” MacLaren said. “You were with the Council when the ammo dump got hit. I knew Hugh, too. He was a good man. I don’t get it. But what I know is, you’re in the middle of the action, Tom. And I wanted you on my team. I trust you to have my back.”
Tom blinked away the homoerotic overtones, still stuck in his chagrined mood. Too choked with annoyance to speak, he took a moment, studying Dan’s profile. MacLaren looked in command and in control. And Tom wasn’t convinced.
He took a deep lungful of air and forced himself to release it slowly, and by the time he was done, somehow his chest loosened and he could speak.
“What’s the mission?”
*
ORTEGA DECIDED A little unauthorized investigation wouldn’t be against whatever his relationship was with the Five. And MacLaren was his ex-right-hand man.
“It’s straight forward,” Dan said. “We have intel from the northern checkpoints taken from survivors who’ve come through. It establishes a rough search area due north of here where Raiders have been most active.”
“Are you planning a recon, Dan . . . or search and destroy?”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 37
