The salvage crews got the first choice of any alcohol as part of their pay. They drank some of it, but a lot of it got traded to Tom in exchange for drinking and eating credit. On one salvage run, Tom convinced Charlie Maddox to run by a few banks and collect all the quarters he could lay hands on.
The quarters were a relic of a nation that existed only in memory; valueless without the backing of the Federal Reserve. On the other hand, pocket change was also relatively scarce throughout the settlement. It was akin to striking gold, especially after Tom defaced each coin with a pattern he’d etched into a chisel. He split the quarters with Charlie 50-50, and hence an economy was born. It wasn’t as fancy and complete as some would have liked, but it was a start.
When Charlie needed things, he swapped quarters for them and pointed out you could get a brew and a pretty decent burger (the less said about the bun the better, of course) for one. Tom still did a good business in vegetables, but the same chalkboard that he’d used for the series of changing names now listed a price list of other barter items. All at once there was a source for luxuries above and beyond the hygiene items and clothing that the settlement stored and doled out as needed.
In quick order, The Last Bar became The Last Bar, Bank, and General Store. There were complaints of course; many people in the settlement invested any and all their free time into such endeavors, but Tom pointed out that he’d accept any quarter in trade, defaced or not. The complainers just had to go out and get them.
That shut up most of the overt complaining; those who were of a sort to whine not being the sort that would go out and scavenge, especially more than once. The scavenger teams risked everything for the settlement, and part of the payoff for that risk was the ability to find a little extra funding, and the right to first dibs on any luxury items. All things considered, it wasn’t that much.
A secondary benefit to Tom’s quarters was the newfound ability to compensate survivors for things other than manual labor. These exchanges somehow ended up creating more paper than his ticketing system had. It wasn’t long before Tom contracted with Charlie to acquire him a laptop, due to the increased complexity of the transactions.
Tom’s dealings with Ronnie were a prime example. The older man’s land fell outside of the boundaries of the settlement, but he’d more than compensated his fellow survivors over the years with his know-how and lifelong farming background. Looking forward to the future, Tom could see a day where they’d consume all the closest available salvage. They needed to plan ahead.
While Ronnie’s farming tended toward corn and soybeans, he also was a fair hand at gardening and had grown his own potatoes ever since he’d been a youngster. You could make lots of good things from potatoes — one of which was vodka, of course. When as Ronnie told Tom Oliver that he’d once made his own vodka for the fun of it, Tom recognized the opportunity at hand.
Which was how Tom Oliver ended up with a rented vodka still — acquired on a short salvage run to Ronnie’s old barn — next to his beer brewing equipment. The compensation worked out well for Ronnie; there was enough to go around to maintain everyone in the basics, but a life without anything more than that is one that isn’t much worth living. This, in the end, was why no one had much to say about Tom’s venture. If nothing else it created something for people to do, and as Tom liked to point out, it wasn’t like he had an exclusive license on any of the things he was doing. In all honesty, he would have welcomed competition. It would have made some of his more high-maintenance customers less difficult to deal with.
Ronnie hadn’t approached Tom just for the material benefits. Oh sure, he liked a beer now and then, but more than anything, just socializing with people made it worthwhile for the retired farmer. His health wasn’t the greatest, he couldn't take a leak without straining fit to bust a gut, but his mind was still sharp and he still had a storyteller’s wit. The vodka, beer, and burgers were just a means to an end.
Ronnie hauled his handkerchief out and covered his mouth as he began to cough. Talking seemed to make his coughing worse, but it had been worth it tonight. The entire bar had been on the edge of their seats for Ronnie’s recounting of the arrest of Chris Naylor and his later urination on Larry Vance. Raucous laughter filled the place when he’d ended the story in a quiet, dry tone that would have fit right in with NPR. The laughter had been so loud that some of those in the bar had jumped in surprise at the volume, but the rest seemed to welcome it.
“Night, RC!” Tom called from behind the bar. He waved his hand in farewell, and Ronnie returned the gesture. Several others in the bar bid him farewell as well, but things were beginning to wind down.
Ronnie took the steps one at a time with an excruciating slowness that would have driven him to frustration if he hadn’t long ago resigned himself to the fact of his own age. It was what it was, and there was no need to complain about it. His wife, God rest her soul, had once complained that he could have given lessons in stoicism to a Spartan. Ronnie didn’t know about all that — Greta had been an honors English teacher at Lewisville High for most of their four decades together — but he did know that complaining didn’t fix anything as fast as buckling down and doing something about it.
Not long after Z-Day he’d made a similar comment to that black fellow, Vance, and the retired Marine had given him a solemn nod. “Charlie Mike, Ronnie. Continue mission.” Ronnie smiled at the memory. Charlie mike. Well, it’s easier to say than ‘grin and bear it’, isn’t it?
He step-shuffled out of Tom’s driveway and onto the pavement of the county road. A couple of hundred feet down the road, walk down Martha’s old driveway, and his bed would be waiting. Maybe tonight he’d be able to get some sleep without that dumb kid across the way screaming every time he had a cough.
Overhead, thunder rumbled and a light sprinkling of rain began to fall. Ronnie extended a hand, palm-up, and appreciated the feel of the drops against his skin. Right on time, the rain was. Get the fields a little wet, let the sun keep the soil temperatures up so they could start planting. This year, maybe, they could even extend them some. None of the plow teams had reported any attacks. The first few years, they’d had to use jury-rigged noise emitters as a distraction to draw the dead away from where they wanted to farm. It had been a complex dance of farm, stop and try to clear things out when the dead started trickling back in, then distract in another place. If they could increase their acreage enough this year, maybe they could start running a surplus instead of living on the knife’s edge.
All in all, not a bad way to spend a retirement, Ronnie judged, and stepped off of the paved road and into Miss Martha’s driveway. Well, now it was that teacher lady’s house, and a bunch of the kids, but damn if he could remember her name half of the time. When in doubt, Ronnie just resorted to “ma’am,” and that was just fine. He was still plenty sharp upstairs, like his dad, and his grandpa before him, but sometimes names slipped his mind. And after what Greta went through with the Alzheimer’s, I’ll take a few messed up names every day of the week.
The house was silent as he shuffled past. The teacher lady — Val, that was her name, he remembered in triumph — ran a tight ship, and her charges went to bed not long after the sun went down. Good kids, every one of them, respectful and polite whenever they had occasion to speak with him. Val and some of her helpers would shush them when they played outside, as though they might bother Ronnie or any of the other residents of the horse barn apartments, but Ronnie liked the noise just fine — it reminded him of happier times. It sounded like life.
Halfway across the back yard to the horse barn, Ronnie pulled up short and gave an annoyed grunt. He’d only had two of Tom’s beers tonight, but they were already demanding release. Vance’s daughter, the doctor, had laid it out for him a couple of months back. Enlarged prostate, most likely. Nothing to do, nowadays. She’d been nice enough about the diagnosis, almost apologetic in fact. He had a couple of years, maybe more. Maybe less.
Of course, all things
considered, the worsening cough was more likely to be the end of him than slow-spreading cancer. Bunch of things that could be, and hard to nail down without the benefit of an x-ray. The doc had been apologetic about that, too, tip-toeing around references to pain management before it got too bad.
Hell, I’m almost eighty years old. Not like death is a foreign concept, girlie. Ronnie stepped around the windmill’s holding tank and unzipped the fly of his overalls. Charlie mike, young lady.
He stood for a long moment and tried not to strain so hard. He was finally rewarded with a weak stream, and he tried not to tense up despite the urgency of his bladder. Patience, patience. It might take a while, but he’d get there, and then . . .
White-hot pain blossomed in his lower back. He staggered forward, and urine splashed the front of his bibs. He couldn’t care about that; the pain was the center of his existence at that moment. Despite the pain, and the crippling urge to curl forward away from it, he managed to keep his feet, until a rough shove slammed him into the side of the holding tank. He fell, turning as he went, and landed face-down in the wet grass.
Ronnie got his arms under his chest and tried to push himself up, but a weight slammed into his back, above the spot of pain. He opened his mouth to cry out from the agony of it, but a hand grasped the back of his head and shoved his mouth into the grass.
A hot warmth was spreading from the point of pain in his lower back; blood, he supposed. His feet were starting to go numb, and he realized that he must be bleeding out.
The weight on his back shifted, the hand still pressing his face into the ground. More spots of pain blossomed, punctuating the harsh words whispered into his dying ears by a voice he not only knew but never would have expected.
“You . . .” Stab.
“Make . . .” Stab.
“Too . . .” Stab.
“Much . . .” Stab.
“Noise!”
Finally, the weight lifted from his back, but Ronnie was already beginning to drift away.
Derisive humor tinged his final thoughts. Guess we were both wrong, weren’t we, Doc? Wasn’t cancer or a cough.
The coldness of the rain on his exposed skin dueled with the spreading warmth of his wounds, but even that began to fade. By then, what he had been was gone, and he no longer cared.
Chapter 9
Miles was already half-awake when something rapped against the window across the bedroom. He levered up on one elbow and gave it a quizzical glance.
Real or not real?
In the light of day he was usually able to keep his internal freak outs to a minimum. It was worse at night, though he went through spells. Sometimes he slept with a pillow over his face, to muffle any cries he made in his dreams.
When the noise repeated after the space of a few seconds, he breathed a sigh of relief, pulled the covers aside, and stepped across the bedroom.
They’d boarded up the windows of the bedroom to the height of Miles’ chin. The windows in the old farmhouse were quite tall for ventilation purposes, so there was two feet of exposure above the final barrier. When things got too stuffy in the summer, they could lower the upper sashes and allow air to circulate through the house.
He pulled the drape aside and peered out over the top board. The sky was still gray with the promise of dawn, but he could make out the figure of his father-in-law standing outside. He looked harried.
“What?” Miles yelled. Tish grumbled from the bed, but he ignored her for the moment. Larry just gave him a look and pointed to the back door. Miles gave him a thumbs-up and turned away from the window. He snagged his watch off of the bedside table on the way.
Halfway down the hall, he had the watch strapped on. Miles angled the face to read the hands. Five thirty? What the hell . . .
His pace quickened, and he unlocked the back door and pulled it open. “Is Trina all right?” he asked, in a rush.
Larry looked grim. “She’s fine. She’s still asleep. This is something else.” His father in law wiped his face with his hand and was silent for a moment of consideration. “I need you and Tish both, she needs to check something.”
Miles shook his head, not understanding what the other man was trying to tell him. “She’s still asleep, but . . .” He looked at Larry’s face and studied it for the first time. The other man seemed almost haunted. “Pops, what’s going on?”
The other man frowned. “I think somebody murdered Ronnie last night.”
Last night’s rain had been slow and steady, and the grass stuck to Miles and Tish’s shoes as they followed Larry behind Val’s house. Despite the early hour, several people were milling about on the road. The presence of the graveyard shift deputies, Brett Simmons and Jenny Faqir, dissuaded them from coming any closer.
Numb, Miles thought, we never scavenged crime scene tape. We’ve never needed it. “Brett, Jenny,” he said as they passed.
The pair nodded greetings. Brett, who was red-headed and pale at the best of times, was paler even than was normal for him. Jenny was usually upbeat enough for an entire team of high school cheerleaders. This morning she was as reticent as Miles had ever seen her.
Ahead, Larry came to a stop at the back corner of the house. “I came out to take a leak. No moon, so I had a flashlight.” He swallowed. “The first thing I saw was the blood.”
He stepped aside and let them take in the sight. The windmill Miles had reminisced over just yesterday was now the scene of unspeakable horror. Ronnie’s overalls were so stained with blood it would have been impossible to tell the original color if he hadn’t seen them before. If not for the blood Miles could almost have convinced himself that the old man was sleeping. Almost. The crumpled form at the base of the overflow tank was bad enough. What was above the body made Miles lurch to the side and vomit into the damp grass. He stood there for a long moment with his hands on his knees. A gentle hand rubbed his back, and he straightened. “Sorry,” he whispered to his wife. Tish gave him a sympathetic smile, and he turned back to the horrific tableau behind Val’s house.
Someone, presumably the killer, had left them a message on the water tank, written in Ronnie’s blood. The lean-to they’d constructed over it to shield it from the sun and keep the water a little cooler had protected the lettering from the worst effects of the rain, although some had still slanted in under the roof line and washed into the statement. Trails of drying blood dripped down from the letters, but the intent of the message survived.
A WISE OLD OWL LIVED IN AN OAK
THE MORE HE SAW THE LESS HE SPOKE
THE LESS HE SPOKE THE MORE HE HEARD
WHY CAN’T WE ALL BE LIKE THAT WISE OLD BIRD?
Larry broke the silence. “Tish, honey, I need you to check the body. There might be clues or something.” He groaned. “Ah, I feel crazy even asking.”
“I’ll look,” she whispered.
She stepped over to the prone figure on the ground. She pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of the pocket of her jeans and pulled them on. They were heavy-duty dishwashing gloves, but most important, they were reusable. Disposable latex surgical gloves were just one more item on their list of things to use only in time of absolute need. Ronnie, at least, didn’t need to worry about the sanitary condition of the gloves. She pulled at the blood-soaked clothing, stepping to either side to adjust her point of view as she looked up and down Ronnie’s motionless form.
Larry stepped closer to Miles and said, sotto voce, “Val’s keeping the kids away from the back windows.”
Miles looked at his father-in-law and felt a wave of relief wash over him. “Thank you,” he said. “Damn, I didn’t think about that.” He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hand. “Gah, what the hell are we going to do, Pops?”
“We got to figure it out, kid. This is going to send people into an uproar . . .”
A loud voice from behind them brought Larry to silence.
“What in the world is this?”
As Larry and Miles turned, Brett Simmons was already
stepping forward, “Mrs. Benedict, this is a crime scene, please stay back . . .”
The subject of his entreaties blasted through them as though they weren’t even there. “Deputy Simmons, you will address me as Councilwoman Benedict or I’ll bring up a resolution to put you on the wall so fast your head will spin!”
“Oh shit,” Miles said, then, with a sigh, “Here we go.” He stepped forward and injected enough sweetness into his tone to cause spontaneous diabetes. “Councilwoman Benedict, as Brian said, this is an active crime scene. Please stay back while we assess the situation.”
If nothing else, Norma Benedict was the prime example showing that Z-Day had selected survivors on the basis of luck rather than fitness. She hadn’t been a politician before. As best as Miles could determine she’d been a receptionist for a shipping company. When the survivors had put forth the original proposal to create the council she’d not only been in the forefront cheering it on, she’d managed to wrangle enough support to nab one of the three seats on the fledgling political venture. Short, opinionated, and loud, she grated on even the most patient of nerves, but when it came time for campaigning she turned into a warm-hearted caricature of everyone's favorite grandmother. Miles knew for a fact that if the rest of the settlement could see the way she treated her “subordinates” she’d be out on her ear at the next election. He’d never been lucky enough, though, to have enough witnesses for tales of her sound and fury to spread. Larry was more phlegmatic on the issue. “There are always lousy officers,” he’d proclaimed once. “We had a doozy of a Major once. Your Uncle just ignored the stupid orders and filtered the rest down to what was actually doable. Same principle here.”
“I will not stay back, and I will be assessing the situation for myself, Marshal,” Norma barked. She marched between Brian and Jenny. The latter settled for rolling his eyes; Jenny was beginning to turn a bright shade of red. Miles made eye contact with her until she read his poker face and nodded. This was neither the time nor the place for a bureaucratic pissing contest.
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