Jeremy didn't wait until they got to Philadelphia. With the road still nestled below the sound-dampening barrier walls, he let the camo Charger coast to a stop and cut the engine.
He twisted in his seat. "You got a cigarette in that bag of yours?"
"Hope unfiltered isn't too strong for you," she said.
He rolled his eyes. She reached into her bag and got out two hand-rolled and hand-grown twists of shredded tobacco. Jeremy lit up, inhaled, and drew back his head, holding the white cigarette away from his face.
"Tastes funny."
"That's because it's real."
He brought it to his lips and took a drag and let the smoke trickle from his nose like some sort of gangster. "Three of us had a talk, Lucy."
She cocked her head. "What about, Jeremy?"
"New York is dangerous. We don't want you to go there by your lonesome. You should come with us."
"That's mighty generous, but I need to find my friend."
He nodded, gazing across the highway at the rusted-out cars, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. "We can't let you leave, Lucy. For your own good."
She raised her brows at Wilson. "You agree with him?"
Wilson glanced at Jeremy and for just a second she thought he might buck orders. And if he bucked, that was the end of it; he followed because of his daddy issues or because Jeremy owned the car or what have you, but if Wilson ever stood up for himself, he'd discover he was the real authority here.
But an angry look came into his eye and he wouldn't quite meet her gaze. "It don't have to be like that. We can be partners."
Lucy set her umbrella across her lap and tucked her knees together. "And if I don't want to be partners? If I get out and walk?"
Jeremy reached into the gap between the driver's seat and the gear shift and withdrew a chrome .45. "There's bad men out there, Lucy. You wouldn't last a day."
Lucy couldn't say she was surprised. When a man saw a woman on the road, he saw a trip that could only end in rape or death. Something about that sight in their mind's eye made too many of them plenty happy to take on the role for themselves and ensure it came to pass.
She had to admit she got a kick out of teaching them to expand their minds.
She jerked her head at Tommy. "You really that tired of fucking him? He looks pretty cute to me."
The three of them gaped. Jeremy's hand moved on the pistol. She spat her cigarette in his face, swung up her umbrella, and pulled the custom trigger of the pistol-grip shotgun that composed the umbrella's handle and shaft. The bang was loud enough to blind a man. The top of Jeremy's head vanished. The driver side window shattered. A hail of safety glass bounced across the road.
Wilson grabbed for the umbrella's closed spokes. Lucy swung down from his grasp and shot him in the solar plexus. He banged into the door and collapsed over the gear shift. She turned, tucking her shoulder against her head in case Tommy had a mind to sock her one, but he'd flung open the door and scrambled onto the asphalt.
She scooted out into the afternoon sunlight and whistled. "Stop right there, boy."
Tommy's shoes skidded in the overgrown grass of the median. He turned with great reluctance, as if fearing she'd shoot as soon as she saw the whites of his eyes.
She aimed the umbrella at his chest. "I want that car, Tommy."
"Take it!"
"I would, but someone has made a terrible mess of it. Mind running a rag around it for me?"
He dry-heaved. "You'll shoot me after."
"Could be. I will certainly shoot you if you don't."
Blinking back tears, he walked toward her. "All our blankets and such are in the trunk."
"I seen your rifles in there, too. So don't try to get smart with me."
Keeping the gun on him, she opened the driver's door. Jeremy spilled onto the pavement. Gunk sopped from the bowl of his skull. She kicked him out of the way, took his pistol, and knelt to pull the trunk release at the base of the door frame. Finished, she circled around Tommy, keeping the umbrella pointed square at his chest. He extracted an armful of blankets from the trunk.
"And get those pants off you, for God's sake," Lucy said. "I do not want you leaking piss in my brand new car."
Miserably, he wiggled out of his jeans and peeled away his soaking briefs. His balls were shriveled against his body. He opened Wilson's door and lowered the body to the pavement. Inside the car, he tried to swab up the mess with the blankets, but much of it was heavy and thick and he had to scoop it out with his bare hands. He began to cry, retching between sobs.
"Don't you feel sorry for them," Lucy said. "All I wanted was a ride. Your friends were the ones who decided to get violent."
Tommy didn't reply, but he stopped crying, indicating there was a hint of steel in his spine after all. She wasn't worried. If Jeremy and Wilson had been sharks, Tommy was a remora, there to remind the sharks they were big, grateful to snatch up the scraps that tumbled from their toothful mouths.
He went to the trunk for a fresh blanket and pressed it into the puddled blood. Once it was sodden, he faced her, hands stained red. He wore a dark t-shirt and his thighs were bright white and squiggly with long black hairs.
"I can't get any more," he said. "I need some water or something."
"It's okay, Tommy. You done just fine."
The anger he'd built up swabbing the hot, bloody car fled from his face. "I did what you wanted. I cleaned it best I could."
"I know." She let the tip of the umbrella droop. "Now git."
He glanced down the highway. "I ain't got no pants."
"And I got a gun in my hand and a yearning to use it."
Tommy let out a shuddery breath, then bolted down the black asphalt. She watched him go, then consulted her map, turned on the Charger, and drove north. With the late afternoon light bouncing from Manhattan's distant towers, she pulled into the Knickerbocker Country Club, which was the funniest thing she'd seen all day, and stashed the car. The boys had a lot of goods in their trunk and it was close enough to retreat to should the city prove a challenge.
Before walking to the bridge into Manhattan, she made sure to oil and clean her umbrella. Based on Tilly's letter, she was all but certain her friend was dead. And that meant she had a lot more killing to do.
2
When her one and only daughter announced she was getting married, Ellie's first response was not her proudest one.
"Who?"
"Who?" Dee honked with laughter. "The drifter who slept behind the Masons' barn last winter. I'm pregnant, but despite the fact he's a toothless hobo, he wants to do the right thing."
Ellie gazed across the sunlit kitchen and thought unparental thoughts about the girl she'd rescued from New York when the plague's shadow fell over the world. "Tell me you're not actually pregnant."
Dee raised a brow. "Would you kick me out?"
"Of course not. But I might kick Quinn Tolbert's balls into the lake."
"You're supposed to be happy."
"For the sake of clarity—and Quinn's balls—will you answer the question?"
Dee sighed and stared at the light on the lake past the window. "Not that I know of. So you can stop strangling that rolling pin."
Ellie glanced down at her hands, which were whitened with flour and her death-knuckle grip on the pin she'd been using to roll out the week's bread. She went frozen with a sudden case of Split.
She'd first heard the word in town and understood its meaning at once: the disconnect that came when your brain, focused on its daily tasks, remembered how different your life used to be before the two apocalypses. She, for instance, had once been incapable of cooking anything more complex than macaroni. Instead, she'd ordered takeout four times a week and nuked leftovers on the days in between. Between college, post-grad, and the DAA, she'd never had time to cook, let alone to learn how to do it.
But first and foremost, cooking was women's work. While the DAA had been progressive in hiring, in general attitude, it was positively caveman.
Half its agents thought of themselves as the techno-analyst version of James Bond while the other half saw themselves as the techno-analyst Jason Bourne. In that environment, the women had to out-man the men. So hell no she didn't know how to cook. Cooking was for housewives.
Then the plague taught her how few meals could be eaten completely raw. Particularly when you lived in a seasonal place like the Adirondack mountains, where frost and snow meant edible plants were only available in quantity for half the year at best.
So she had learned, bit by bit, to cook. Starting with boiled pasta and rice, with chicken and veggies stir-fried in a pan atop the wood stove. And after a few months, when she hadn't yet burned down the house, and learned that as long as you were paying attention, it was hard to utterly destroy food, she discovered cooking wasn't all that hard. In fact, the power of deduction told her that people had probably been doing it for thousands of years.
After an enthusiastic couple years of experiments and kitchen enhancements, she'd settled down, favoring methods that produced the most food for the least effort. With the exception of harvest season, for the last four years, she'd spent every Wednesday baking bread in the brick oven in the yard. And she thought nothing of it. In fact, she looked forward to it.
The end of the world was a hell of a thing.
She set down the pin and dusted flour from her palms and took a deep breath. "If you're happy, I'm happy."
Dee glanced over her shoulder, as if sharing a look with someone who wasn't there, and laughed. "No you're not."
"If you're happy, then I will make minimal criticism of your rash and foolish decisions involving people of questionable character."
"You think Quinn is questionable?"
"I haven't decided. His dad sure is."
"Well, we're getting married in the spring." Dee lifted the lid from the block of white cheese Ellie kept on the counter and inspected it for mold. "So you've got plenty of time to decide whether you like the people who will soon be part of your life forever."
"The spring?" Ellie said. "Why so long?"
Her nonbiological child gaped in affront. "Invitations? The food? The dress? We'll be lucky to be ready by next fall."
She knifed a wedge of cheese from the block and walked outside, shaking her head. The screen door banged. Beyond the window, Dee wandered to the dock and stood at the edge, munching the cheese, watching the yellow mountain light shimmer on the waves of the lake.
Ellie closed her eyes. Sometimes she didn't understand her daughter at all.
She didn't see much of Dee for the next week. Not that there was anything wrong between them. As far as she knew, anyway, although she'd grown old enough to recognize her habit of assuming everything was fine unless someone explicitly said otherwise. Which, in practice, proved to be one more example of a rational stance spoiled by irrational humans.
But in this case, she felt reasonably confident Dee's physical distance had less to do with ill will toward Ellie and more to do with her love for the Tolbert kid—or her love for their looming nuptials. With sudden horror, Ellie knew Dee would ask her to bake the cake.
It was October, however, and this new doomsday was slated for April. Or possibly May. In fact, all the details remained scant. Instead, their talk seemed to be geared toward preparing for the preparations themselves.
Ellie didn't understand it in the slightest. Weddings were one of the few things the Panhandler virus had made better. If Dee and Quinn wanted, they could row out to the island and be married this afternoon. Dee could throw a bouquet picked from the shore. Do you love each other? Then quit worrying about the color of the napkins and go start your lives together.
She punched her dough and flipped it on the floured counter. As it thumped, someone knocked at the front door. Ellie's shoulders jumped. She sighed and rinsed her hands in the bucket of lake water, thumbing clumps of flour off her fingers. Out front, George Tolbert stood on the porch, a smile slanting his lips, backlit by the yellow October light.
"Mizz Colson," he said.
She didn't bother to inform him that she was technically a miss. "Hello, George."
"May I step inside the abode?"
A sudden imp tempted her to say no. George Tolbert smiled too much. He paid more attention to the cleanliness of his clothes than his fields. And that drawl of his. It added up to a charming and not uneducated Southern man of the land, a fellow who could get along with Appalachian dirt farmers just as readily as Upper West Side professors.
And that was exactly why Ellie disliked him.
"Yeah," she said. "Kitchen's a mess."
"Mess is nothing more than a welcome sign of honest labor." He stepped over the threshold. His aphorisms sounded as old as the colonies, maybe even the Greeks, but as far as Ellie knew, they were original. Drove her batty.
She offered him a seat in the shade of the back porch. "Care for some tea?"
His elegant little eyebrows crawled up his forehead. "You have tea?"
"Brewed from the finest weeds I can find."
If he was disappointed, he hid it well. "Splendid."
She nodded and excused herself. She kept a red cooler in the shallows under the dock where the mountain-fed waters of the Lower Saranac kept her tea a few degrees from chilly. She opened the cooler and fetched the metal jug out of the water inside. It dripped all the way back to the porch.
"Take sugar?" she said.
George smiled. "Any chance I get."
She was hoping he'd say no—she had a couple hundred pounds of the stuff tubbed in the cellar, but once it was gone, it was gone for good—but gave him two spoonfuls anyway. Resentment spiked through her gut. Based on her and Dee's usage, she knew exactly how long that sugar should last. Visits like this threw that figure off. Meanwhile, she had dough waiting on the counter.
George sipped his tea and smacked his lips, though she suspected that was to hide an involuntary wrinkle of his nose. "Reminds me of the old days. You do well for yourself, Ellie. Commendable blend of the old and the new. Or should that be the old and the medieval?"
"Thanks," she said, ignoring his philosophizing. She sprawled in a chair and drank her tea, which she'd intended to cool down with after a long afternoon working the oven. "What brings you across the lake?"
"Nothing less than the blessed union of our two children." He smiled wryly, eyes crinkling. "Though to speak in confidence, I cannot wait for the day it's over."
"Tell me about it."
"The list of wants they've compiled—why, we might have to hire help from town."
Ellie shrugged. "If they want bells and whistles, I better see less talking and more working. These fields won't harvest themselves."
George laughed. "Maybe they would if we had a few more kids."
Despite herself, she laughed too. "Why hire help when you can give birth to it?"
George grinned, rolling his glass of tea between his hands. Condensation slipped to the patio. He nodded for several seconds, smile fading. "Since we've broached the subject that brought me here, I'll dare to crash brazenly forward. Fact is, we are about to incur certain expenses. Not just in raw materials, but in time. Something I have precious little of this time of year."
Ellie glanced toward the yellow wheat swaying beside the lake. "I'm right there with you."
"Well, I face an additional wrinkle. I'm having problems with my tractor, Ellie."
She chuckled. "There are days it feels like I spend more time keeping them running than I save by using them."
"Indeed. I believe I have worked mine to death at the moment I need it most." He bit his lip and lowered his eyes. "I'm not too proud to confess I'm in trouble. Any other year, I'd muddle on through, but with those two kids at my house, eating up my larder when I ought to be filling it for winter, not to mention the coming celebration..."
"Yes?"
"I was searching for the right words to a delicate question. Having failed to find them, I will employ these instead. Forgive me for noticing you've got a spar
e machine."
She stopped herself from sighing. "With something this vital, I like to have insurance."
"Does it run?"
"What do you think?"
He worried his lip and gazed across the lake. "Then I wonder if, for the sake of our two families—which I suppose are about to become one—I could use it."
"Yeah, you can borrow it," she said, although she was stingy by nature and the very thought of watching him drive off on the backup she had spent so many hours maintaining caused her skin to constrict. "I shouldn't need it this harvest."
"I appreciate that. I'll have to come begging again for the spring planting, though. Given that we might soon have hungry new mouths to feed, I wonder if I might simply have it."
"Have it," Ellie repeated. "Hold on. Are you talking about a dowry?"
George Tolbert cocked his head, eyes snapping to hers. "I'm asking for help guaranteeing this family's future. I'm about to absorb considerable expense."
"I'm not?"
"I'll level with you. Quinn doesn't know it, but I'm struggling to put food on the table. These days my cellar stores more air than grain. As you stand more able to withstand the coming tax on our resources, and have a spare machine where I have none, I thought it made sense to ask."
"For a dowry." Ellie set down her tea with a clink of glass on glass. "Sooner or later my John Deere is going to wheeze its last, George. When that happens, I'll need a replacement. That's why I made sure to find the time to get one running. You can borrow it this fall. Then I suggest you spend the winter finding one for yourself."
His eyes went hooded. "Working machines are few and far between."
"George, why do I believe your conversion to communism was sudden and recent? Find one that's broken and fix it."
George set his tea on the patio table, glaring at the bits of weeds floating in the bottom of the glass. "I hope it's that simple, Ellie, but lives are like words: the plainest ones are the hardest earned. I'll send Quinn around for the tractor. I appreciate its use."
She saw him to the door and watched him walk down the path through the trees. For now the path was clear, but in a few weeks it would lie under a crunching carpet of orange and yellow leaves. With Dee occupied at the Tolberts', Ellie would have to rake them for herself. There was always too much work and too few hands.
Reapers (Breakers, Book 4) Page 2
