by James Axler
“You asked to see me?” the Regina stated, phrasing it like a question, though it wasn’t.
Jak nodded. “Want help you,” he explained. “Am hunter. Am chiller. Could do that. Could protect ville. Feed ville.”
“You want to protect the Home?” the Regina asked, raising one perfectly manicured eyebrow.
“Good at it,” Jak said. “Could do sec for ville. Chilled bear,” he added in afterthought, as though that fact might help him gain her trust.
“The Melissas guard the Home,” the Regina explained emotionlessly. “They guard me.”
“Could do that,” Jak insisted. “Could guard you.”
“You want to be a Melissa?” the Regina asked. She was clearly taken aback.
Jak nodded. “Yes. Melissa. Sec man. Same.”
The Regina shook her head sadly, chewing on the nub of a berry. “Only women may perform the sacred duties of the Melissas. Only they may eat the royal jelly. No men allowed.”
Jak watched her, unsure what else he could say. “I can guard,” he said finally.
“Women only,” the Regina repeated. “Order has built this place, and order keeps it safe and assures its growth. Heaven Falls stands in tribute to what can be achieved by following a structure without deviation. To have a man perform the role of a Melissa would be deviation, and that can simply never be.”
Jak nodded his understanding, his eyes downcast. “Sorry. Didn’t know.”
“You were brave,” the Regina said, “to come to me the way you have. Someone must have seen this in you.”
Jak nodded. Charm had seen it. He just wished he had a way to prove to her how fearless he could be.
And then the Regina said something that surprised Jak, for it was almost as if she had read his thoughts. “She already knows, your woman. She sees the greatness in you and she fosters it, which is what brought you to me. Trust her. Obey her. Let her be your guide. And one day, you shall fly free and prosper in the world beyond, illuminating the darkness, spreading the spirit of the Trai.”
Jak left, having failed in his petition to become a sec man. But he left feeling satisfied, as if something had been showed to him that had been obscured. The future was stretched wide-open in front of him, and he would grab it with Charm. Together they would bring greatness and new brilliance to the lands outside these walls.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ricky had come to live with J.B. and Mildred and he had taken the spare room. J.B. didn’t mind. The kid was no bother and he figured he might have an ally in all this strangeness while everyone else around him was slowly withdrawing into themselves.
He was wrong.
He had pressed Ricky about a few things over their first couple meals together—breakfast and a subsequent dinner—and Ricky seemed happy, really happy. That was how it was with them now, J.B. realized. As if they’d all caught some happiness bug that left Ryan and the others grinning from ear to ear as they went about their workaday lives, digging latrines and building storage shacks for beans or whatever the hell it was they had all been assigned to do.
Ricky got an assignment, too, after a couple days cooling his heels at the shack. The medical woman called Petra had discussed Ricky’s health with Mildred. Then Phyllida, the leader of the Melissas who seemed to perform some kind of more general leadership role within the Heaven Falls hierarchy, had come over and told Ricky he’d be picking apples in the fields to the west for the next couple weeks. It was light duty, but necessary, and there was plenty of work to go around. Sometimes it seemed to J.B. that these Trai folks were feeding up an army with all the stuff they grew and preserved and glazed and pickled.
Ricky took to the work well, fitting in nicely with the mountain community. He didn’t bother J.B.; if anything he bothered him a lot less than he had on their days on the road together, which made the Armorer all the more suspicious.
A disease called happiness, infecting everyone it touches. That was how J.B. viewed it, and he was determined not to get sucked in.
While the others drank the sweet alcohol to stave off the chill mountain air, J.B. kept a clear head and drank only water—a lot of it sourced straight from a little mountain stream he had located out to the east, nothing more than a foot-wide trickle passing over the rocks before slipping back under the ground. He boiled the water and stored it, sipping from a metal hip flask he’d carried around with him before they’d settled here in the mountains with the Trai.
Food was plentiful, but J.B. ate sparingly. He worked outside, and they worked him hard, but he didn’t want his body to go to fat, and the food here was universally sweeter than he preferred. While the others enjoyed another all-you-could-eat feast in the center of town, with dancing and games, J.B. endured it solemnly from the fringes of the crowd, picking at his food without relish, watching his friends as if they had become strangers, aware that they probably had.
If Mildred noticed a change in J.B., she said nothing. But J.B. wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she had noticed nothing, so wrapped up was she in her own work, the herculean task of cataloging and memorizing the thousand-and-one different medicines and potions that the Trai had created and refined from their little selection of ingredients, the herbs they grew mixed with the nutraceutical benefits of the honey.
Mildred seemed dazzled by the whole setup to J.B.’s eyes, and he couldn’t talk with her without her slipping into “shop talk” about this or that remedy, this or that discovery or revelation or healing miracle. The farmhand called Paul, the one whose face had almost gotten torn off by a mutie bear, recovered quickly, and Mildred assured J.B. that the man showed no signs of scarring or pain.
“I’ll bet he’s real broke up inside,” J.B. muttered, thinking about how it had to feel to have your face torn off by a wild animal.
Mildred shook her head. “It’s like it never happened,” she told him. “The man’s a walking, talking miracle.”
She didn’t mean the man, of course; she meant the medicine that the Trai had applied to heal his wounds. That was the miracle, and it was one that Mildred spoke of taking out into the world, bringing healing to the masses.
J.B. didn’t understand how Mildred felt. He couldn’t. She had grown up in the twentieth century, that great age of medicine where every problem had a solution, every disease a cure. It had led to a place where men set off nuclear bombs to make their points heard, because not enough of them were dying by the old, natural ways. J.B. wondered whether that was really what Mildred wanted to return to.
* * *
ON THE NINTH day, J.B. returned home to a visitor. The Armorer had spent the past three days sawing and whittling wood to build a grain store. It was a big project, but he had been left largely undisturbed, which suited his temperament well. When he returned home, his shoulders ached and his hands felt raw from lugging rough wood around all day.
J.B. sensed the presence before he even opened the door. The door was unlatched—there were no locks in Heaven Falls, but J.B.’s honed instincts kicked in automatically when someone had visited, spotting the telltale signs that the door handle had moved, a boot had scuffed the stoop.
J.B.’s body went to its default mode, and he moved in a crouch, hunching in on himself and reaching into his jacket for the chisel he’d brought home from the construction site. It was a feeble weapon, but it was all the Armorer had now—that and his fists.
Warily, J.B. pushed open the door at fingertip length and stepped back onto the porch. “Who’s there?” he demanded.
“Just an old, old friend,” Doc replied from inside, his voice as rich and sonorous as ever.
J.B. smiled, slipping the chisel away and stepping into the main room of the shack. He saw Doc sitting by the smoldering fire, his legs up on a low table that J.B. had constructed in his free time.
“What’s the news?” J.B. asked, closing the door gently behind him.
“You have a date,” Doc began, “in two days’ time. A walk-around of the beehives with me and my team. That is, if you are still
interested.”
J.B. looked at Doc eagerly. “Outside the gates?” he asked.
Doc nodded. “Yes, we will be looking at the external beehives in the morning, just as you had requested.”
J.B. leaned down and grasped Doc’s hand. “That’s perfect, Doc, perfect. I’ll be there, wherever you need me. Two days’ time, you said?”
Doc nodded. “My place, first thing. We leave about an hour after sunrise.”
“I’ll be there at dawn,” J.B. assured him.
Now all he needed to do was to okay it with his foreman, but he figured that wouldn’t be such a difficult ask. His foreman—actually a woman called Helena—was kind of a taskmaster, but she encouraged J.B. to try his hand at new stuff and he figured she wouldn’t resent him looking into what other occupations were available here to the Trai. He was a newcomer; he could be expected to have itchy feet.
* * *
MILDRED VISITED THE kindergarten on the eighth day and again on the afternoon of the ninth. She wanted to get a clear idea of what was affecting the babies—and something certainly was. While she hoped it wasn’t anything too serious, monitoring it over a couple days helped her gain a better idea of the deterioration concern.
The kids were lethargic, just as Krysty had outlined, and they seemed kind of vacant, and couldn’t pay attention when she spoke to them. Mildred tried shining the light of a candle with a mirror at the babies in their cribs, but they didn’t flinch or show any interest. Mildred suspected that maybe their eye muscles weren’t responding the way that they should, part of the lethargy that seemed to have gripped them.
On the afternoon of the second day, Mildred pulled Krysty aside and set out her conclusions over a glass of sweetened water while the older kids played in the enclosed yard.
“I think it’s infant botulism,” Mildred began, concern on her features.
“Is it serious?” Krysty asked.
“It can be,” Mildred confirmed. “Untreated it can lead to paralysis and if that goes to the chest muscles, then a patient can stop breathing.”
“That is serious,” Krysty agreed. “Where did it come from? Is it catching?”
“No. Botulism is an infection of the digestive tract—the gut,” Mildred explained. “It’s not contagious. It’s caused by impurities getting in during food preparation.”
“But it causes paralysis?” Krysty asked.
“Yeah,” Mildred said, looking out at the children playing in the yard. “Kids can be more susceptible to it. Infant botulism has its own category in the medical journals.”
Krysty looked at Mildred as if the woman were speaking gibberish.
“Old books of diseases,” Mildred clarified. “We used to use them before the nukecaust.”
“You remember this stuff?”
“A lot of it comes back when you’re faced with symptoms,” Mildred admitted. “Triggers that old knowledge I didn’t remember having from when I was training. You read about a lot of diseases when you’re training to be a doctor.”
“Where would such a thing start?” Krysty asked, pitching her voice at a low whisper. “And if it’s not contagious, why are several children affected? From what the others here have indicated, it seems that they’ve come into contact with this before. Children have died. It’s not unusual.”
“The infection’s bacterial,” Mildred said, “and it generally comes from food getting into the gut and festering the way it does. There are a lot of bacteria out there, swimming around in the air these days. This...outbreak, if you want to call it that, could have come down in a rain shower for all we know.”
Krysty looked pensive. “You always told me that most of being a doctor was looking for the obvious. Rain showers aren’t obvious.”
“Did I say that?” Mildred asked.
Krysty nodded. “Once or twice. So if not a rain shower, how else?”
“The world got messed up six ways to Sunday when they dropped the bombs, Krysty,” Mildred noted. “We shouldn’t discount that.”
“But the adults are fine,” Krysty reminded her.
“Adults are stronger,” Mildred said. “They build up immunities. Resistances. Unless...”
“Yes?” Krysty urged.
“Unless the kids are eating something different from everyone else,” Mildred said.
“No,” Krysty assured her. “Everyone gets the same, pretty much. We get a fresh delivery of bread, honey, cured meats, dried and fresh fruit each day, some other stuff. The tiny ones eat less but we all pretty much—”
“Honey could...” Mildred began and stopped.
“Could what?” Krysty asked.
“Kids don’t have the resistance to the bacteria that can exist in honey,” Mildred said. “In fact, they used to say that children under twelve months old shouldn’t eat anything with honey in it.”
“Who said?”
“Medics, doctors,” Mildred explained. “Damn it, why didn’t I see that? If these babies are eating honey and there’s any kind of contagion... Well, they’re the ones who’ll react. And react just the way you’ve seen. Lethargic, unable to focus...”
“And the round tummy on the girl?”
“Constipation,” Mildred said.
Krysty looked behind her at the shaded windows of the nursery where the babies were held. “So what do we do?”
“Stop feeding them honey,” Mildred said. “Change the diet for the little ones.”
“And if they already have this botulism infection?”
“Hold all the babies here until I can get them checked properly,” Mildred instructed. “Their parents, too. I’ll bring Petra and the others in, set up a room at the medical faculty and flush the toxins out of these kids’ systems.”
Krysty nodded. “I’ll do that. And you’re sure it’s not contagious?”
“Positive. You’ll be all right,” Mildred assured her as she got up to leave.
That evening Mildred returned with a group of medical assistants and they began to test the children. Mildred was working from memory, but she had found something she recognized and she did all she could to pass that knowledge to her colleagues.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dawn arrived with birdsong and fingers of sunlight, but there was a tint of yellow to the sky where the pollutants hung.
J.B. was awake before the birds, working through his plan in his mind as he lay next to a sleeping Mildred in the bed they shared. There had been no passion between them in the ten days since they had arrived in Heaven Falls; in fact, they had hardly touched. Mildred had been consumed by her role at the medical tower, and it seemed to J.B. that she was spending all her tenderness there, because when she came home she was exhausted and it was all she could do to stop talking about salves and potions for two minutes straight. J.B. didn’t mind. His relationship with Mildred had always been patchy, passions flaring when the opportunities arose. Right now, he had other things on his mind, too, concerns about the walled ville they seemed to have settled in.
Ten days. That was about the longest he and Ryan had ever stuck in one place. Certainly the longest they had been in a place without having a plan to get out again. J.B. had an idea about that, but Ryan wasn’t buying it; Ryan just wasn’t interested. That nagged at J.B., too, as he got out of bed and dressed.
Once clothed, J.B. shoved his sheathed Tekna combat knife into his waistband and pushed it out of sight. He dearly wanted to carry a blaster but, just now, that was an invitation to get himself into an uncomfortable line of questioning he couldn’t get out of, or worse, get himself chilled without any questioning, uncomfortable or otherwise. He crept out of the house, careful not to wake Mildred or Ricky.
* * *
DOC WAS EATING breakfast when J.B. arrived at his cabin.
“What is it like out there, J.B.?” Doc asked by way of greeting as the Armorer slipped through the door.
“Cold,” J.B. replied.
Doc showed J.B. the plate from which he was eating. “Have you had breakfast? Mig
ht I interest you in some delicious bread, warmed through over the fire?”
J.B. nodded and took an unadorned slice, cut as thick as his thumb joint. He needed to eat. The rule of the Deathlands was always to eat when there was food available, because you never knew when it would be available again. This ville had changed that, but J.B. was planning to go out beyond the gates this day, and he didn’t know for sure how long he would be gone. He hoped it would just be for the day, but hope didn’t keep a man alive.
Doc added honey to a corner of crust and invited J.B. to help himself. “You had no trouble, then, joining my crew for the day?” he asked.
J.B. shook his head. He had told his superior at the worksite that he wanted to explore his horizons—which was truer than she realized—and she had been understanding. “A body’s got to find the hole where it fits,” she’d told him. “You come back tomorrow and tell me how it went. Maybe I’ll lose a diligent worker or maybe I won’t.”
Breakfast over, Doc and J.B. left the cabin and trudged into the center of the ville. All around, people were starting work. There were burly farmers turning fertilizer on the fields, construction crews laying the foundations of new buildings and artisans working wood in the workshops.
Doc’s fellow beekeepers met them in the shadow of the white towers. J.B. was introduced to the team leader, Jon, and his deputy, Thomas, whose wild brown hair looked like an out-of-control mop.
“J.B.?” Jon queried. “That stand for something?”
“John Barrymore,” J.B. told him. “I’m a John, too.”
Jon laughed at that and slapped J.B. on the back. “Good man. I have a feelin’ we’re going to get along all right.”
* * *
THE BEEKEEPERS STARTED their work by checking on hives inside the walls of Heaven Falls. J.B. had grilled Doc about the procedure on the way over, so he knew what to expect. He was issued a pair of thick gloves that were streaked with varnish but still durable, and he stepped in to help harvest honey from the hives under Jon’s watchful eye. Doc was used to the work by now, and he and Thomas worked through two hives each in the time it took Jon to show J.B. the parts of one.
