Calm Act Box Set (Books 1-3)

by Ginger Booth

  It was agony, but I led him back to my stash. Not even Alex or Adam had seen my hoard before. This appears to be a two-bedroom house, with a linen closet and bathroom between the two bedrooms. In my experience, most people are spatially challenged. It’s actually a three-bedroom house.

  I opened the linen closet. Along with linens, it revealed a few 6-packs of toilet paper, and a sad little shallow pantry of canned goods, sauerkraut and beets and such. I groped behind a bit of wooden molding to release the two door bolts at the right which secured the bookcase to the doorframe. The discreetly wheeled linen shelves rotated back on hinges to the left, to enter the hidden bedroom.

  Zack grinned broadly. “You’re good. If you weren’t here to give it away, they’d never find it.”

  Within, the eye was immediately drawn to some tomatoes and cucumbers growing under lights. Less obviously, I had what was left of a year’s harvest of potatoes and onions. Winter squash and cabbages, apples and pears from the local orchards. Several hundred pounds of wheat flour and rice and oats. Bulk peanut butter. Gallons of oil. Hundreds of rolls of toilet paper. Giant brown cartons of boxed cereal and pasta. Batteries of assorted shapes. A bookcase of home canned goods. And the fridges and freezers.

  I pointed to one fridge and three freezers. “Dried food. Meat and bread dough. Prepared dinners. I mostly cook the summer harvests, eat a meal, and freeze the rest to eat in winter.”

  An astonished Zack opened the meat-and-bread-dough freezer, and quickly closed it again. That one was a minus-40 freezer. “No wonder you’re so generous, Dee. You must have more food than any three other houses combined.”

  I had a fairly good idea of what Shanti had socked away. “I wouldn’t bet on that.”

  “Is this all of it?”

  No. “Yeah…”

  “No,” he said wryly. “Dee, you really can’t lie worth a damn. This can’t stay here. But…”

  “But you don’t have freezers in your caches. So maybe I could just deposit some of my non-frozen stuff…”

  “Or maybe I could fix my plan,” said Zack. He caught and held my eye. “I’m here to fine-tune the cache plan.” He gazed back at my freezers, and sighed. “We don’t even have book-keeping equivalents to account for this stuff. Help, Dee. Please?”

  “Well,” I said reluctantly, “what if you had a third cache, the collection facility. Strictly members only, needs guarding 24/7. Out on Route 1, where power is always restored first, easy enough to get to. You could probably use Bob’s space, that we’re setting up for a workshop. That space used to have fridges and freezers, and a stockroom out back. I think they already have a backup generator. People can go there and deposit their stashes. But they can also trade up for value-added stuff. Sort of like a barter supermarket concept.”

  “So I could come in with a 10-pound bag of rice, and trade it for a few loaves of your bread dough?”

  I scowled at him. “Maybe two loaves of my bread dough. Maybe one. Well, this year anyway. By next year, rice could be pretty rare in New England. It won’t grow here.”

  Zack rubbed his forehead, frustrated. “I don’t like it, for security.”

  I sighed. “No, but I like it for a trading post. We’re always going to have fresh food coming in, Zack. Eggs. Milk. Fresh vegetables and fruit. Meat. And as a member, I feel better going in to the general store, depositing to my account, and picking up a few things in trade. I think it’s worth the risk. Or rather, you need to pay the piper and do this. Although ‘pounds of rice’ is a bad yardstick. Call them ‘clams’ or something. One ‘clam’ is roughly equivalent to a dollar’s buying power last October, maybe. And adjust prices as time goes on. Rice keeps getting more expensive. Cabbage is cheap in July.”

  “And curbside pickup?”

  “A premium service you offer. Curbside delivery, too. If you want me to keep no more than a couple weeks’ supply of food on hand, I’ll need to pick up more food all the time.”

  “Maybe we should have it down by the barricade, as a trading post.”

  “No. This is strictly internal, members only. Down by the barricade should be an open farm market, to trade with East Haven, New Haven, anybody who shows up. We don’t want them seeing what we have for members only.”

  Zack nodded, but looked around the room sadly. “I need this done yesterday.”

  I opened the minus-forty and pulled out bread and meat for a week, and tossed them on a chair. “Start by carting the freezers to the workshop.” I continued adding potatoes and frozen dinners, shelf-stable milk, fruit and vegetables, toilet paper, etc., to my pile. “I want these containers back, Zack.” My set-aside pile grew to over two weeks’ worth of supplies for the three of us. “And I want my minus-40 freezer back by spring, you hear? I like freezing dinners.”

  Carting all that stuff into the van took time, and the book-keeping even more so. Their first-pass system was inadequate for half of my haul. We needed to add a wide range of products that they hadn’t considered, of radically unequal value. A pound of rice was not equivalent to a pound of ready-to-eat meatloaf or dried berries or chicken breasts. There were also some items I wanted back verbatim – no equivalents accepted.

  “And I want to donate 5% to Reverend Connolly’s food kitchen,” I added. “So make sure to create and credit an account for Reverend Connolly. And you can have the clerks ask that, whenever someone deposits food at the trading post. ‘Would you like to donate 5% to the food kitchen?’”

  “On top of the 20% we already take to support the defenders?” Zack asked.

  I shrugged. “Most people don’t have it. But I do. Shanti does. Though she may want to donate it elsewhere. For me, this is a convenience. I’m willing to support the food kitchen, but I don’t get around to it.” I considered. “Do you really need 20%? Seems like a lot.”

  “It’s for trade, too. We need ammo and guns. Favors like a drone strike.”

  “Ah. That.”

  After an hour, as Shanti promised, Mangal started carrying stuff to the van, too. Zack’s minions weren’t allowed into their house. Actually, they only entered my house because I couldn’t carry the freezers without them.

  It really was agony watching them cart my food security away. Shanti looked like she was biting her nails, too. And from the level of loot in the van, neither of us were confessing to our whole hoards, not just yet. The book-keeping was a helpful distraction. Being able to mark a few things we wanted back verbatim was a relief. My saved meatloaf and quiches and dried fruit were mine. Shanti felt the same way about her dried chilies. Oy, that woman’s cooking was hot. A few more book-keeping tricks needed devising for her stash.

  Zack needed some very sensitive, creative, and trustworthy book-keeping talent for this operation.

  Eventually the van headed off. I gnawed my fingernail, hoping they plugged in the fridge soon.

  “Thank you, ladies, Mangal, for your contributions. But especially thank you for your help working this out,” said Zack. “I know that wasn’t easy.”

  Shanti nodded jerkily, arms hugging herself, eyes still tracking the van. Mangal looked at his wife with clear misgivings. I think my eyes darted nervously to the garage. I had more hidden there.

  “I also know you didn’t give me everything,” Zack continued wryly. He held up a hand to forestall objections. “And that’s fine. You’ve contributed enough to support my defenders, the Reverend, and yourselves. This is voluntary, and that’s still your food we’re protecting. But please – don’t get yourselves hurt defending what you’ve kept back. You’re more important than whatever you’ve still got tucked away. OK?”

  Shanti and Mangal’s reaction didn’t budge from their previous nervousness. Then Mangal put his arm around Shanti to draw her inside. “Thank you for your service, Zack,” Mangal offered unconvincingly as he turned away.

  “They really don’t like me, do they?” Zack asked.

  “They like you fine,” I said, hugging myself miserably. This clawing, needy sensation from having my h
oard taken was awful, like a drug addict craving in withdrawal. I’d worked so hard to amass that security. Any distraction was welcome. “They just can’t support violence. You know that.”

  “Yeah. I know that.” Zack sighed. He looked around at the weather, ready to stride off. The lowering clouds were getting dark, and starting to sprinkle.

  He did know that about pacifists. And that was strange, in a military man, I thought.

  “Carlson,” I thought, and said out loud. “Cyndi and Ron Carlson? On Shoreline.”

  “Yeah, that was it,” Zack agreed. “You knew them?”

  I nodded. “Not well. Good people. Cyndi was a Master Gardener. She tried to talk me into getting certified, but I never took the time. Ron was a paramedic. Both really active in volunteer work. Cyndi had the most beautiful hollyhocks and hydrangeas.”

  Zack started. Maybe he’d stopped to admire the flowers and chat, too. “Oh. Them. Guess I never knew their names.”

  “We should hold a community service for the dead. I’ll call the Reverend. You could speak at the service, remind the community why you built the caches, say the trading post is open for deposits. Come on in and check it out. That sort of thing.”

  Zack breathed a soft laugh. “Dee, if we make this work, you rate a huge share of the credit for it.”

  I shrugged off the compliment, and frowned slightly. “Haven’t seen you much lately.” It wasn’t about the car, anymore. He’d found me an adorable little electric car to replace the one he’d used as a firebomb. He didn’t pay for it – it was abandoned somewhere. “Are you avoiding me?”

  “Busy,” he said. He looked away when he said it.

  “Uh-huh. Me, too. What did you and Adam talk about at the barricade that day?”

  “Ask him,” he said sourly. “Gotta go. I have a meeting in New Haven this afternoon.”

  “Is that… safe?”

  He looked surprised. “Sure. Most of New Haven is a great town. DJ is making good progress on the rough side of town, too.” He clarified, “DJ is Captain Zack of the Hill section of New Haven. He’s damned good. Most of the new blacks here are people DJ sent me.”

  “Huh! I didn’t realize you had a guild of neighborhood captains.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll need it.”

  “Soon?” I asked, eyes narrowing. “I thought things were getting better.”

  Zack’s face set along harsh Captain lines. “Dee, we haven’t been up against anyone organized yet. See ya.”

  17

  Interesting fact: The location of Ark 1 was a closely held secret. Ark 1 would take the President of the U.S. and his family, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court, for continuity of government. Speculations included Mount Weather, in Virginia; the Greenbriar Resort in West Virginia; Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania; and either Cheyenne Mountain or Peterson Air Force Base, both in Colorado Springs. These sites were also candidates for Arks 2 through 5. The Vice President, Congress, and Senate had ark berths, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other key teams, such as FEMA and the CDC. Federal funds also built several brain trust arks.

  I finally had a date for Adam’s ark shakedown cruise – Sunday January 26th. He even gave me five days’ advance notice, a lot more than I expected.

  I almost wished he’d given me only an hour before I had to run out the door. This outlook was ungrateful and perverse, but heart-felt. I didn’t want to go. And thinking about it wouldn’t help. I was going. I wanted to see Adam. I wanted to see his ark. I was curious.

  We were also just starting to get real traction and attention with Amenac at work. Shelley was getting involved with Trey Cowan, who it turns out was not gay, just unusually opinionated about fashion for a straight guy. She’d made a play for Jake from Niantic, but he found her too brainy for him. Trey either liked brains or considered himself smarter than Shelley – probably both.

  And Alex had a new litter of guinea piglets, and was breeding his lady rabbit. And my baby cabbages needed bigger pots. And I had steering committee meetings for the trading post and agriculture. And, and, and…

  Someone else could cover for me, on all of it. I mattered – oh, I mattered! – but nothing would fall apart if I went away for a few days. If I took a little ‘me time’ to be an ambulatory stage prop in an ark rehearsal. If I spent a little time with my squeeze for the first time in a few weeks. We could talk about that… proposal thing.

  I was pretty sure that proposals that end in, ‘Yes! I do!’ don’t begin life as ‘that proposal thing’, discarded on the nightstand to gather dust.

  What I wasn’t so clear on was, why not Adam? He was fun to hang out with, a fantastic playmate in bed, gorgeous, smart, successful, appreciative. He made me feel great just being me. And he seemed to feel the same way.

  “Zack?” I rang the doorbell again. I could see him through the window, or rather, his ragg socked feet up on the arm of the couch. Maybe he was asleep.

  I’d already tried to ‘run into him’ at the Route 1 barricade during my lunch break. I had a good time there with Trey Cowan, being taught not to shoot. The man was convinced I was a menace to society and a waste of perfectly good ammunition. Since I was never going to hit anything anyway, he and Jamal persuaded me to trade in my semi-automatic rifle and ammo – once Trey’s – for a little lady’s purse pistol. They happily devoured the picnic lunch I brought along.

  But Zack was taking the day off, and the evening, too. “Captain’s got stuff on his mind,” was all Jamal cared to share on the topic.

  Maybe it was bad idea, coming to tell him I’d be away for a few days. Maybe I should just call and not make such a big deal out of it. I turned away from the door to spot an enormous rubbery bovine nose off the end of the porch. I walked over to see the whole cow, one of the Vermont standard black and white type, a Holstein. She slowly turned enormous brown eyes on me. Finding me wholly uninteresting, she returned her attention to a bale of hay.

  “Dee?” The front door had opened behind me, and Zack leaned out.

  “You have a cow! How – cool.” I stumbled to a stop when I turned to look at him.

  Zack was dressed in unrelieved plain black, black mock turtleneck over black chinos.

  “It’s cold,” Zack replied. “Come in.”

  It was cold, that clammy kind of just-above freezing that feels colder than snowfall. I followed him in.

  “Another funeral?” I asked softly. It was Thursday. We’d just had the service for the Carlsons and the Kallinikos family on Sunday. The Kallinikos were robbed and murdered two days after I contributed to the cache. They’d lived two blocks from Zack. “Anyone I knew?”

  “I don’t think so. She left me the cow.” He looked vaguely exasperated by this bequest. “I think I need to hire a dairy maid. Not Alex,” he forestalled my suggestion. “I’m already keeping Alex busy enough. But he’ll know someone.”

  “Was this the woman who made cheese from your goat’s milk? The contra dancer?” That last was a guess.

  Zack nodded. “Grace. My ex. An ex-girlfriend, that is.” He rallied. “You needed something, Dee?”

  I met his eye gently. “It can wait. How about a cup of tea?”

  “I’m not very good company today,” he said huskily, and swallowed.

  “That’s OK. I’m a foul weather friend. You’ve been there for me.”

  He acquiesced easily enough, and we settled into the cozy kitchen.

  “You tried shaving the sassafras!” I smiled warmly, but kept my voice low.

  “Yeah, I don’t think November was the right time of year for that. The sapling’s leaves were deep red. Not much flavor, so I just use a lot. Next summer, maybe I’ll try this again.”

  “Tell me about Grace,” I invited, when he joined me at the table. The orange wood-like shavings needed to boil for a while.

  He shrugged. “We dated for a couple years, but we couldn’t make it work. We broke it off over a year ago.”

  “You were still close, though,” I observed. “She still made
cheese for you. She left you a cow. What’s the cow’s name?”

  “She just called it – her – ‘Cow’. Grace had a thing against anthropo… whatever. Projecting human qualities onto animals and plants.” He sighed. “She had a lot of policies like that.”

  “All that political activism, and organic correctness – was that you, or her?” I hazarded. It had never seemed quite Zack, to me. Not incompatible, just not quite right.

  “Her,” he agreed. “Not that I object, exactly.”

  I nodded. “Was the funeral service nice?”

  “Quaker funeral,” he said flatly. “They meet at Yale. Her parents and brother made a point of telling me how grateful they were that she’d broken off with me. That it was better this way.”

  “I thought you were surprisingly patient with pacifists, for a soldier.”

  “Not a soldier anymore,” he denied. “I accept pacifists fine. They don’t accept me.”

  “It’s a huge part of who you are. I don’t know about this Grace and her family, but I know Mangal and Shanti. They like and respect you. They wouldn’t judge.” I was surprised at how irate I felt against this unknown dead woman and her family, if they rejected Zack for being who he was.

  Zack gazed out the picture window unhappily. The goats were playing king of the hill on a couch-sized chunk of pink granite, laying decoratively in the back yard.

  “How did she die?” I asked softly.

  “Hard to say. Found dead in a chair in her home by a neighbor. The family declined any investigation. She was diabetic, very thin, never very robust. One Friend in the meeting was moved to say something about whether we should judge suicides these days –” Tears were standing in his eyes.

  “Zack,” I interrupted, and placed a hand over his. “She died peacefully in her own home. Yes?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, and nodded. “Yes. That’s true.”

  “That’s hard enough. And that’s all it needs to be. I think this sassafras is about to boil away. I’ll get it.”

  I rose and turned off the burner under the tea, but then turned to Zack’s back and put an arm across his chest. I hugged him to me from behind. He accepted the hug wordlessly for a minute or so, then squeezed my hand to request release. I poured out half-empty mugs of sassafras tea, and sat down again with them.