“I’m unique like everybody else but I’d be an awfully dark snowflake, Eagan. Bad simile.”
“That’s a metaphor, sir. Why they put you in charge, I’ll never know.”
“You want the job, shitbird?”
Eagan only laughed, and Taggart watched the kid turn and walk back to the radio.
I’d trade places with you if you’d let me, Taggart thought. I’m barely keeping this together, and we’re going nowhere but uphill any time soon.
* * *
1300 HOURS - ZERO DAY +165
Jaz closed the door to the Clan’s HQ—Cassy’s house—and made her way to the outdoor kitchen for lunch, having delivered the reports Cassy had asked for. Still no sign of Nestor and one of the Lizzies from the raid a couple days prior, and Jaz was pretty sure there would never again be any sign of them. Their absence didn’t much bother her. People died all the time and if they weren’t close then crying over them was a waste of perfectly good angst. Save that crap for the peeps you know.
She ducked into the pavilion with one of the wood trenchers the Clan used for plates, loaded up with a bowl of stew and some fresh bread. An indoor kitchen would be nice this time of year, but it wasn’t so bad since they’d found a huge military surplus tent to eat in. More like a pavilion, really. And the kitchen’s rocket stoves vented through “earth tubes,” flexible piping buried just below the surface that snaked back and forth from the rocket stove exhaust on one end of the new mess hall to the vent stack on the other end, rather than straight up a chimney. The earth around the tubes got nicely warm and radiated heat up into the pavilion, so whereas it was in the low thirties outside, it was probably fifty-five degrees inside. Maybe sixty. Most toasty, compared to eating outside like they had been doing.
Spotting Choony, she sat next to him and when he smiled at her, she smiled back. “What’s up, Choon Choon?”
“Nothing much. Contemplating how I can dislike this Constant Stew so much when there are so many people out there who would kill their brother for what I’m going to leave in my bowl when I’m done.”
“Dude. Morbid. Just eat it and try to imagine you’ve had something else to eat in the last six months. Like, Mac and Cheese with hot dogs.”
“I think I’d prefer the stew—”
“Shut up!” Jaz laughed. “I love this tent thing, and the rocket pipes.”
Choony grinned again, and of course he was gonna make fun of her somehow. He just loved making fun of her. Probably must be like when sixth graders throw the dodgeball at some girl they like. The Choony-Monk version of it.
“You refer to the corrugated tubing that ventilates the rocket stoves and emits radiant heat into the soil to warm the interior of the Army-surplus vinyl ‘Tent, Medium, General Purpose’?” Choony asked without a trace of humor, his eyebrows raised in disapproval. “Nomenclature, Jaz!” he lectured. “Learn the nomenclature.” He stacked a frown onto his disapproval.
“I hate your face,” she said, grinning, and punched his shoulder. Not hard, because he was a Buddhist and wouldn’t play back. It wouldn’t be fair. “Ready for the meeting tonight?”
Choony shrugged and set his spoon down, turned to look at her more directly, and let out a long breath. “Not really. I’ve barely gotten my bones warmed up since spending the last two days out there in the snow dodging invaders and bandits with you, playing Special Envoy to all those new survivor groups we didn’t even know about a week ago.”
“Yeah, but the whole point was to get them here, right? Have the Grand Poobah meetup, kiss hands and shake babies, do Cassy’s politician thang…”
“Yes, of course. I’m not complaining—that wouldn’t change anything—but I wonder if it was worth the effort and the man-hours we spent on this. Some of their diplomats aren’t very…” He paused.
“Diplomatic?” Jaz finished for him. Her friend Choon Choon was too polite sometimes, and truth was truth. Of the half-dozen who’d already made it to Clanholme for the meeting that night, half were definitely not the sort of people she’d want living with the Clan. Good thing they were out there instead of here, or there would definitely be a ‘diplomatic incident’ with a couple of those goons. She’d bet searching some of them would recover half the Clan’s flatware and more than a few of the Clan’s supplies. Clanners were too trusting for their own good, she figured.
* * *
Cassy stood behind a simple lightweight podium they’d looted from a church somewhere and looked around the big military surplus tent. She was grateful to have it, and not just for a much more comfortable place to eat than the great outdoors. Having so many people in her own tiny living room would have been very unpleasant, assuming they could even fit in there. There were representatives from Ephrata, Brickerville, Liz Town, Taj Mahal, and Lititz, of course, but they were the only familiar faces. Newly-allied Lebanon sent a representative, and his story about the journey to Clanholme was pretty strong stuff. It hadn’t been easy, and one of his small entourage hadn’t survived the trip.
In addition, there were seventeen others who showed up. They’d been invited by Clanholme and the other alliance members, each dealing only with the newfound survivor groups assigned to them in the last alliance meeting. The division of responsibilities had worked out pretty well, and this meeting came together much faster than it would have if Cassy hadn’t delegated responsibility among the other alliance leaders.
Granted, many groups hadn’t sent representatives. That was a problem for another time, though. The dozen or so missing groups would either abide by the alliance’s decisions or they’d be cut off from both help and trade. No one had enough resources to just hand them out to people who weren’t on the same team—you helped yourself and your own first, if you wanted to survive these days. The dying time wasn’t over yet and they all knew it.
Cassy cleared her throat, and the faint conversations died down. Then she introduced herself and the Clan, talked briefly about what Clanholme was all about, and the challenges she and her people faced. In a corner, two transcriptionists from among the Clanners took shorthand notes. Then she had the other representatives all come up front and do the same, one at a time—all twenty-three of them. In size, their groups ranged from an isolated family of five to a farming group of fifty or so. Some had weird names like RetCon or the Barony of Renfar but most took their names from the tiny places where they lived, like Colebrook.
Almost universally, the smaller ones had the biggest problems with food. Security came in second, but the five original alliance members—Clanholme, Ephrata, Liz Town, Lititz, and Brickerville—had been pretty good at clearing out bandits in the last few months, something many of the new groups hadn’t realized. They’d assumed the bandits were dying off, but hunger was only part of the reason for the disappearing raiders. Cassy noted that their features relaxed a bit as they heard about all the alliance team had unintentionally done for them.
The next part of the meeting was spent talking—not lecturing, but a conversation with the group—about specific issues they each faced, about how those could be resolved with the resources of the group, and about how that help could be repaid. Clanholme needed bearings for a new windmill for their client and friend, Taj Mahal. Colebrook had extra bearings but needed two huge stones moved, and Cassy offered the use of the Clan’s two working vehicles to pull them out of the way. It was a typical bargain of the night, people bartering their groups’ time, services, and goods for goods and services they themselves needed. Cassy figured they would all come out the better for tonight’s meeting—and that was exactly what she had hoped for.
The conversations lasted well into the night, and only one major hiccup threatened to tear apart the amity. Renfar had a closely allied survivor group, the RetCon people, but Liz Town had demanded the ally come under their control since Renfar was itself under the wing of Liz Town. Without the Lizzies’ sacrifices holding off Hershey, the whole area would have been overrun, and they felt entitled to claim their area’s primary loyalty.
But Renfar had spent its own time and come to the aid of the smaller RetCon group several times and felt it was their relationship, not Liz Town’s.
Cassy was a master diplomat, there. Her time working in the Marketing Department before the EMPs paid off when she applied her office-politics skills to the issue. In the end, Renfar kept their primary standing with RetCon while increasing their participation in Liz Town’s efforts to hold off Hershey—which is what Liz Town had really been after in the first place. The dispute could have been a disaster that ripped away the entire western area of the alliance, especially since RetCon didn’t want to be “under” Liz Town. She’d turned it into a compromise that made everyone stronger and built on Cassy’s unspoken but well-earned credibility and authority.
Late in the night, Cassy came to her last talking point, and she was at the top of her game as she laid out her vision for the near future of the region, a Confederation. The groups would continue to manage their own affairs internally—no one would be asked to submit to some authority that had no idea of their developing culture, their immediate needs, their problems.
Instead, the Confederation would exist to handle issues between the member groups—a neutral arbiter that would hear both sides in any complaint and either negotiate a solution or issue a verdict that both sides would be honor-bound to follow. They’d follow it even if they had no honor, though, because to do otherwise would get them cut off from the Confederation’s resources, including trade and mutual aid.
The Confederation would also coordinate a unified system to defend the groups as a whole against outside aggressors and would provide the supplies needed for that. Only on this issue, where the larger groups would provide the bulk of the fighters, would size matter. The six largest groups—the original five, plus Lebanon—would determine the overall strategy and select a leader to get a given job done, and the smaller groups would have to go along with it. But the smaller outfits didn’t resist, since they wouldn’t need to provide much materiel or manpower to the effort, at least not when compared to the bigger settlements. So they went along with it to get the one thing everyone wanted and only the Clan knew where to get in abundance. Food. By the time they all had their own farms delivering enough to support themselves, they’d be used to the arrangement, or so Cassy hoped.
And if deeper problems developed, the six larger allies would allow any of their “client” survivor settlements to choose another group. If Renfar didn’t think Liz Town was being fair to them, for example, then at the start of any season they could put themselves under Lititz’s protection and guidance.
It was messy, and it would need constant refinement as time went on, but it did the one thing Cassy knew they’d need to survive when spring came around—it established the basics of a nation. Despite the current ’vader threat to Brickerville, she reminded the assembly, the Empire was still coming. They had to be ready to deal with it from strength.
Only with the foundation laid tonight could the patchwork allies stand against someone like the Empire—organized, evil, and they didn’t give a damn if you wanted to give them your food or not. Alone, the allies would submit or die. With their efforts as part of a confederation of interests, there was a chance they’d survive until next winter without becoming just so many more Empire slaves.
A slender thread of chance, perhaps, but it was better than none.
* * *
2310 HOURS - ZERO DAY +165
Nestor looked at his group of survivors and tried not to grin. The three women and the man he’d first rescued, another two men shortly after, and two more men plus another woman he’d saved from ’vaders, who were about to put them down rather than leave them unattended while they went off to fight. They had one more guy, but the next day he had tried to take over control of the group while Nestor slept, and the Other put an end to him. Guess he should have tried while Nestor was at the helm. No one gave Nestor any lip after that, though he tried not to act like a tin-pot dictator. He was in charge here, but they could leave at any time—without the group’s supplies, of course.
Nestor was still piecing together what had happened with the man who tried to take over, since his memory wasn’t perfect once he handed the reins to the Other and he didn’t want to tell them about his mental hitchhiker. But he’d experimented a bit since the battle and found he could just sort of let the Other come up for air without letting him loose. Especially if he was scared or nervous—as he had been during the running gun battles they’d had with the ’vaders—and he found he could control the bastard in his head. Okay, not control. But he could let him take over only when needful and then jam him back down into the genie’s bottle, so to speak. With Nestor at the helm, he had the upper hand and was learning to use the Other like a tool, brought out when needed and put away afterward. The Other hated it, of course, but now that Nestor had won a few tough mental battles for control, the Other stopped trying so relentlessly to take over.
Anyway, that left him nine people in his “survivor group,” as Cassy called the little settlements all around, and all were now armed with the enemy’s AK-47s. He also had two Russian fragmentation grenades after searching a dead invader—though how they got Russian grenades, he didn’t know. The group had stolen a wagon loaded with food, water, some blankets, and other supplies. All in all, he was doing just fine at the moment. They’d spent a day finding a good place to shelter near some running water, made a quick encampment, and inventoried everything.
Natalie, the pretty young woman who’d broken down and cried during his first rescue, said, “So why don’t we just go to your Clanholme place, then?”
It was a good question. There were glances between the others, who were probably just as interested to know the answer.
Nestor replied, “There’s no way to get there right now. Not from here. Everything south of us is ’vader territory, unless you think you can creep through ten miles of occupied territory. That will clear up soon, but certainly not tomorrow.”
“Then why not go back to Adamstown? You wouldn’t even have to come with us. There’s nothing to eat there anyway, but nobody wants us Adamstown people. We had some nasty people ruling us and some of them were friendly with the ’vaders. Any of them will kill us for escaping if they catch us. We were better off where we were!”
One of the men, Randy, cut her off. “Shut up, Natalie. You know damn well they started killing their slaves after the battle started. We’d have been shot, too. It’s the damn Clan that did this to us, and you want us to go kiss their asses?” Then he nervously glanced to Nestor. “I know you’re not really a Clan member, but no thanks.”
Nestor nodded, only half-listening. He’d told them he was from Scranton, and how he’d just sort of ended up at Clanholme without any intention of doing so—captured after helping some Clan children avoid getting eaten by feral dogs. None of them counted him a Clanner. That was good enough for now, but it bothered him. These people didn’t understand anything at all.
Then Natalie let out a tiny growl. She sounded frustrated, and Nestor couldn’t blame her. She said, “I don’t want to go to the Clan anyway. They almost killed Nestor here, and he saved all our asses. He wouldn’t have had to if the Clan had left the Rabs well enough alone. Why’d they have to go and kick up the hornet’s nest, anyway?”
Nestor poked the fire coals—they kept it to only coals, in a Dakota fire hole, to avoid making a bunch of smoke—and said, “The invaders have Brickerville surrounded. I was told the attack was to allow at least some of the residents to escape before the invaders level the place.”
Randy spit into the dirt with sudden violence, and Nestor eyed him warily until he said, “Screw Brickerville. I hope those bastards get what’s coming to them. And Ephrata, too, after what they did.”
Nestor raised an eyebrow, now very interested in the conversation. “Really? What did they do? The way they tell it, Adamstown is full of raiders, cannibals, and degenerates.”
Natalie was the first to reply. �
��That’s not true! A week after the lights went out, we went out to scavenge what we could. The food had already run out. There were a couple Mormons in town with lots of food, which we took and distributed—selfish pricks—but what’s a lot for a family of Mormons isn’t much for a town full of people. Reading is east from here, and believe me, you do not want to go that direction.”
“Why not south, then?” Nestor asked, trying to picture the layout in his mind. It was mostly farms down that way, if he remembered right.
Natalie replied, “The Rabs used some sort of brown gas on just about everything south, killing all the plants and most of the people, so no food there. We went west but between the two of them, Ephrata and Brickerville had already looted just about everything we could have used. The people in some other small towns, Denver and Reamstown, tried to fight for it, but they got mopped up good by Brickerville’s war party. The only good thing the Rabs did was gas Swartzville, or they’d probably have used us for dinner by now. As it turned out, their survivors joined us.”
Randy interrupted before Nestor could respond, “And as for the north, there’s a band of forest for miles, but running along that band is all the Reading suburbs. Hell, we’d have been their dinner if we hadn’t set up raiders all through those woods. The suburb folks would come through, get whacked, and well, somewhere along the way some of them got eaten.”
Nestor felt his stomach churn. “Oh come on. You can’t just say that no one wondered where the meat came from. People didn’t just get accidentally barbequed.”
“People came back with mounds of cooked meat for us all to eat. We didn’t think to ask where they got it. Figured it for deer or a goat or something. It was only afterward that we found out what it really was.” Randy looked uneasy and hesitated a moment before he continued, “The thing is, we kept starving and they just kept coming, so… Do the math.”
Dark New World (Book 4): EMP Backdraft Page 26
