“He’s got a lot of help now,” I said.
Our numbers had grown by leaps and bounds as we made our way through the city. People were more than willing to work to have a safe place to live.
“Not too fond of the building style,” he said. “Seen a lot of these style buildings in the city.”
“Agreed,” I said, “but it makes sense to do it.”
“I know. Doesn’t make me like it.”
I chuckled. “Me neither.”
“I’d rather live in the new barns,” he said.
“You like the horses,” I said. “Most of the new folks we’ve brought out of the city had never seen one before we came.”
“And we have to teach them all how to ride,” he said. “Pop wants me doing that for the next few months. He hit me up just before we took this run.”
“It’s a good choice,” I said. “You’re good with horses and people both. I’m better with horses than people.”
“You’re good at shooting people, and you’re not allowed to shoot them when you’re the teacher,” he said.
I shrugged. “Maybe you ought to be.”
“And that’s why I’m stuck teaching a bunch of city boys and girls how to ride a damned horse.”
“At least you don’t have to teach them how to fight,” I said. “Lamb is teaching the shooting. I wonder who Pop picked for hand to hand.”
“I thought you already knew,” he said. “Jimmy’s teaching hand to hand.”
I was silent for a minute, then nodded. “That makes sense, actually. He never gets frustrated, and no one knows more about it than he does. He’s got well over a hundred years of training imprinted in his brain. He could teach any of that.”
“I wondered why he was staying when we were going to the Circus, so I asked.”
“I figured Pop just didn’t want all our eggs in a single basket. If the Circus attacks, having Jimmy will hurt them, but it won’t stop them. They’d still kill us all. No use giving them the target.”
“He may have had that in mind, too,” he said. “It makes sense. I hate that we have to deal with those psychos at all.”
“If we didn’t, they’d just take the supplies from the others we deal with. We have to deal with them all, or none of them. Kalet went on down the Waterfront this run to supply the General. I didn’t like the setup he had. His ‘enlisted’ were little more than slaves, but none of them decided to leave with us, so there wasn’t a lot we could do for them. Maybe some of them came out with Kalet.”
“I guess we’ll see soon enough,” he said. “He’s riding out to meet us.”
“Probably worried we gave away too much,” I said. “He worked logistics before the Fall. He’ll die when he hears how much we let the Circus get away with.”
“You think we can get away with not telling him?”
“He’ll probably have someone counting the supplies and the trade goods. He’ll figure it out, so we may as well tell him.”
“You’re probably right,” he said with a grin, “but the beauty of the situation is, I can leave you here and ride back to check the wagons.”
He waved at Kalet and turned around to ride down the line of wagons.
“Asshole,” I muttered.
“Was it that bad?” Kalet asked as he turned to ride alongside the wagon.
“Worse,” I said. “The Circus is getting out of hand, but we don’t have anything to offset it yet. How’d things go on the Waterfront?”
“We reached the General’s zone to find them in an uproar. One of his ‘enlisted’ had escaped with a small group of the others. The General was killed in the escape. He’d been using the enlisted as his own harem. Well, he tried it with the wrong one. She was about sixteen, from what the others were saying, and she took the General’s head off with a damn katana. She left his head on a bedpost in his quarters.”
“Damn it, man,” I said. “I didn’t like the setup the guy had on the base. I was worried about the ‘enlisted’, but none of them came with us.”
“That changed,” he said. “Close to a hundred left with us this time. The new guy, who took the name Admiral, is a little different. Still an asshole, but he got rid of the whole ‘enlisted’ program.”
“Willingly?”
Kalet grinned. “Mostly.”
I laughed. “Good man.”
“We have a question we ask every time we enter a zone,” he said. “What would Zee do?”
“Really?”
“Usually the answer is ‘shoot all the bad guys,’ so we compromise and threaten to shoot all the bad guys if they don’t toe the line, and it works more often than not. Most of them have already met you, and you’ve got a little bit of a reputation around the Waterfront. It also doesn’t hurt that Lee has a couple hundred Farmer’s Guards stationed right above them that’ll reinforce us if we hit trouble.”
“I don’t shoot everyone,” I said.
“You’re actually right about that,” he said. “From what everyone’s telling me, you usually bypass the whole shooting thing and do it with your hands. Is it true what they’re saying about the Port of Philadelphia?”
I looked down. “Some of it, maybe. You know how stories grow.”
“Well, the men under the Admiral straightened right up after I told them you were the one who cleaned out the Waterfront. They’d met you, but they didn’t know you were that guy. You didn’t tell them that when you made initial contact.”
“I’m not all that proud of the fact I can rip people apart with my bare hands,” I said. “Even less proud of the fact that I’ve done it.”
“It is what it is,” he said, “and I’ll use it if it saves lives for people to know it.”
“That’s understandable,” I said.
“Now let’s talk about the price we had to pay to keep the Circus happy.”
I sighed. There aren’t many things I dread more than explaining to the quartermaster why I had to give away ten times our normal amount to the Circus. There are many things I’d rather do, like roll down the street wrapped in barbed wire, in this Fallen World.
* * * * *
Chapter 52
“It doesn’t look like it’s too heavily guarded,” I said.
“That was our assessment as well,” Spriggs returned.
“Alright,” I said. “Keep your distance while I make the approach.”
I rode Dagger forward into the power plant.
“I guess he’s safe to do it alone?” Angie Clayton asked.
“After what he did at the Port, I’m guessing he’ll be just fine,” Phil answered.
“I’m still having a hard time imagining that.”
“A lot of us saw it firsthand and still have a hard time believing it. Ray told me it was easier to believe after he’d seen Jimmy in action.”
I could hear them behind me even as I got further inside the plant. My hearing was still getting better. The ribs didn’t hurt anymore, so I assumed the nanites had finished reconstructing them.
As I approached the front door of the plant, a rifle barrel poked out the hole where the small window used to be. It made a decent firing slot in the metal door.
“The name’s Zebadiah Pratt,” I said with my hands held out from my sides. “We have food and supplies. You have a power plant. We want to put it back into use, if that’s something that can be done.”
“Not one for small talk, are you?”
“Not so much,” I said. “If the plant’s able to be used, we’d like to use it to drag that damn city—kicking and screaming if need be—back to a civilized state. Electricity would go a long way toward that.”
I shrugged and continued. “As for food and supplies, they’re available. We have a system we use in the city. Each person in the zone receives a certain amount of food. Our number one goal is to feed people.”
“Pardon me, but if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.”
“You’re right there,” I said. “Usually it is. Go confer with your folks, an
d I’ll wait here. But we need this place if we’re to succeed in saving that monster over there.”
I pointed to the east.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” the voice said.
I dismounted Dagger. He nudged me with his head, and I patted his neck. “Hungry again?”
He snorted, and I pulled a carrot from my pocket. I was feeding him the third carrot when the door opened, and I turned to find an older man, with the rifle still in his hands.
“We may as well step inside to talk,” he said. “I doubt we could stop you if you chose to take it anyway. Everyone’s scared to death of the fact it’s a nuclear plant, so they stay away. Tell your people to come on in if they want.”
I waved the wagons forward. Gary walked in and took Dagger’s reins. “You want someone to go in with you?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll go in and see what’s up.”
I followed the guy into the plant.
“They’re in here,” he said.
I followed him into a cafeteria and stopped in the door. There were four men and six women sitting around a large round table.
The guy I followed in shrugged and smiled. “Told you there wasn’t much we could do about it if you just want to take the place. If it means anything, we know how to do most of the work in the plant. They used to call us the geriatric shift. We’ve been here since the place opened.”
I chuckled. “You have no idea how much that relieves me.”
“The bad news is, we don’t know much about the power grid. We all specialize in the nuclear side of the place.”
“My guy set up our power from the hydroelectric plant up north,” I said. “He can do that part. My question is, how do you keep people out of the place?”
“No one wanted anything to do with it after the nukes fell. The place terrifies them. We keep the lights off at night, and we’ve been living off the supplies in the freezer for the last couple of years.”
“I’ll be damned,” I muttered.
“We saw your people on the security cameras when they were looking at us last month. We didn’t know what to expect from you. They had snipers and a lot of soldiers.
“We hunkered down, but the cameras got a picture of one of your guys we recognized in the group you brought.”
“He’s our specialist. His job was going to be seeing if he could restart the plant.”
“That’s no problem. The problem is, it’ll trip as soon as we open a circuit out of the plant.”
“Then he and his men are going to have to fix that,” I said. “We need the electricity, and the coal plants would be hard to start up without coal. Our hydroelectric plant is too far out to be a feasible alternative. That leaves us with one of the three nuclear plants in the area. Limerick is our prime choice due to location. It’s closest to the Farms and easier to garrison than any of the others.”
“Garrison?”
“If we get her up and running, she becomes a target. There’ll need to be a large garrison to protect the place.”
“Okay, that makes sense.” He sat down in an empty chair at the table. “I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. We can’t be lucky enough that your motives are that altruistic.”
“Altruistic up to a point,” I said. “Let me tell you a little story about farmers, raiders, and clowns. Then you can come to your own conclusions.”
I’m not sure I could make up a story any stranger than the one we’d been living since the Fall, so I told them the truth.
Sometimes the truth is all you need in this Fallen World.
* * * * *
Chapter 53
“Honestly, we should have gone there earlier,” I said. “They lost four people when they had to start foraging for food. It wasn’t really out of our way.”
“No one even knew they were there, son,” Pop said. “We’re doing our best to find everyone, but who’d have thought they’d stay at a nuclear plant?”
“I guess most people would be scared of the plant, like Jim said. They were lucky as hell. They had one rifle.”
“Well, I’m glad we were the ones to go check the plant out. Is Spriggs at the plant?”
“Yeah, he’s like a kid in a candy store.”
“He’s been invaluable to what we’re doing. He needs to be protected at all costs. Our only hope to rein in the Circus rides with that boy.”
“That’s only if I read the Heads right,” I said.
“I think you did. They were Corporate Heads, living in luxury. I think they’d give just about anything to get that luxury back. You said they were running generators. You can only do so much with generators.”
“That’s what I’m counting on.”
“On a different note, tell me about Leandra Hiddle.”
“She was the one who kept their zone together. The others saw her success and joined her, merging the six zones they call the Consortium. She’s tough, but she’s a good person.”
“Can she hold the Waterfront, or do we need to send someone from here to do it?”
“With the Guardsmen we provided, I think she’ll do a good job. We have two zones in the city to use as distribution points. My biggest worry is keeping horses there to pull the wagons. Not much grazing. We’ll have to haul a lot of hay and grain into the city for them.”
“The amount of fuel we’d go through using the trucks to distribute to the zones is too high. We’ll need the horses there. There were several parks we might get, but they were pretty scattered. I figure we can build some stables just north of the Port warehouse. There’s a lot of room for it.”
“I think you’re right,” Pop said. “I’ll be going into the city with you next week. I need to see it for myself. We can run the trucks with the first supply drop to the Waterfront. Grady and Kalet are delivering the first supply run to the Depot. I think we’ll need a pretty big garrison at both places.”
“I’m thinking of a couple hundred men at each site.”
“Sounds about right. We’ll have Hiddle and her folks, plus a couple hundred Guardsmen on the Waterfront. Then we’ll have Faulkner’s bunch and a couple hundred Guardsmen at the Depot. I don’t think there’s a force in the city that would be a danger to them, except the Circus.”
“The Admiral has quite a few people, but I think he’ll toe the line,” I said.
“Kalet seems to think so too,” Pop said. “Something to do with the Port of Philadelphia. You never really said what happened there. I had to pry it out of Jimmy.”
“Like that’s hard to do,” I said.
“It’s refreshing to know I can ask him a question, and he’ll tell me the truth.”
“I don’t lie to you, Pop.”
“Yeah, but your truth is different. You seem to leave pieces of your report out. I remember hearing where Dagger was injured, and you used the veterinary nanites on him, but there was a conspicuous time jump where you said Jimmy took care of most of the attackers.”
“He did.”
“Yeah, but you left out the part where you took care of the others, and got shot several times in the process. I’m not sure if I made it as clear as I meant to make it. I don’t like it when my boys get shot.”
“It’s a dangerous job, Pop,” I said. “Now I could stay in the background and let our men get shot, but they can’t heal like I can, since Jimmy gave me the nanites. I can’t make myself do that.”
“I know, damnit!” he cursed. “Doesn’t mean I like it any better. What I don’t like is you hiding the facts from me. I understand you’re going to be in the thick of it, so don’t leave any more conspicuous holes in the reports.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Now tell me.”
“I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want you to know what I did. I ripped people apart with my bare hands, Pop. Who does that? I was that killer again. The guy Neave taught me not to be. The worst part is how easy it is to be that guy now. I don’t want to be him, but I seem to need it more and more in the world we live in.”
“How do I manage that, Pop?” I asked. “The city is full of degenerate bastards who prey on those weaker than they are. How do I live some normal life here on the Farms while they kill one another in the damned streets?”
He shook his head and pointed east. “Not so long ago, you would’ve let that place burn. Hell, you wanted to start the fire. You’ll never be the killer you’re afraid of anymore. Neave made sure of that. I worried about you when you came home from the war, then you two started seeing each other, and I knew you’d be okay. She may be gone now, but she’d already healed a lot of the damage Obsidian had done. The last thing she would’ve wanted is for you to sink back into what she dragged you out of.”
“I know, Pop.” I chuckled. “I can still hear her calling me a bonehead sometimes.”
He laughed. “Pretty apt description. You know you’re allowed to be happy, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Then I’ll restate what I said earlier,” he said. “Tell me about Leandra Hiddle.”
I eased back in the rocker on the front porch and looked off to the east toward the city, thinking about brown eyes and black hair. Maybe it wasn’t impossible to find some happiness in this Fallen World.
* * * * *
Chapter 54
“Two and a half hours,” Pop said as we pulled into the Sugarhouse parking lot. “That would’ve taken three or four days not so long ago.”
“Yep, it would be easy to get spoiled,” I said.
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