by Alice Sabo
“I don’t think so. Bruno sent over the last of the cherries yesterday, and he said that would be it for this week. He’s gone out to check on everything after this storm, of course.”
Tilly heard Mary calling out instructions in the cafeteria. She cut through the suspiciously empty kitchen. Containers of all sizes and types were stacked on tables in the cafeteria. All of them filled with carrots.
“Wow,” Eunice said, stopping in her tracks. “Did you—“ she began at the same time Tilly did.
“All right, this needs to be addressed right now. We can’t be dropping everything without warning,” Tilly said. She was delighted to see all the produce, but once again, they would need a great deal of help to clean and store it all.
“At least it’s carrots,” Eunice said. “They’ll keep for weeks in a cool place.”
“We need to set up a food acquisition crew,” Tilly announced. “Now.”
“Isn’t that Nick’s people?” Eunice asked.
Tilly frowned in thought. It made sense that it should fall under his purview since he was acquiring and trading most of it. She shook a finger at Eunice in agreement. “I will go speak with him right now.” She hurried out of the room before she was conscripted into washing carrots.
Nick’s new office was on the upper floor across from the map room. Tilly found Jean and two other people that she didn’t know going over notebooks. She knocked on the open door to announce herself.
“Tilly.” Jean beckoned her in with a grim look. “Have you heard?”
“What?” she snapped, a bad feeling settled in her gut.
“Holly Hill lost most of the newly planted wheat. The barley was flattened, but he thinks he can salvage part of it. And a tree came down on the house.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
Jean shook her head. “They were all in the storm cellar thanks to our warning.”
“Yes.” Tilly bit the word. She had already made plans for that grain. Counting chickens that never hatched—she should have known better. All these changes had made her feel like there was a little more normal in the world. That was always dangerous.
“If you didn’t know, what brings you up?” Jean asked.
“Oh. Right.” Tilly shook herself out of her dire musings. “We just got a delivery of carrots in the cafeteria.”
Jean gave her a puzzled frown. “From where?”
Tilly stared at her in surprise. “Holly Hill I assumed.”
Jean flipped through a notebook. “I don’t have carrots listed. He’s sending us some barley next week, I think.” She left her desk to take Tilly’s elbow. “We’d better check this out.”
They went back down to the cafeteria just as the last collection of bags, buckets and baskets full of carrots were being carted in. Tilly grabbed a fellow after he set down his burden. “Where are these from?”
“Golden Oaks, ma'am.”
Jean stepped forward. “Who?”
“In payment for the cheese. I got to say we were mighty happy to get that shipment.”
Tilly went back out to the corridor to snag a couple of idle kids to act as messengers, sending one off to find Nick and the other for Angus.
“I’m Flavio,” the man said offering a hand. “My uncle owns the farm.”
Tilly shook his hand. “Will you stay for lunch? I’d like to get this sorted out. Did you come far?”
Flavio grinned. “We came by train. I didn’t believe Nick when he said they’d added a freight car.” He chuckled. “I thought it was all too good to be true. Him promising us cheese for our vegetables? And some chickens?” He sidled a bit closer to Tilly and lowered his voice. “And maybe some guards?”
One messenger came back to say he couldn’t find Nick. Angus followed the other in the door. He had a handful of papers that he held up with an apologetic face. “I didn’t expect you so soon!”
Tilly stood impatiently through the introductions and handshaking. Flavio had brought a collection of cousins, nieces, nephews and two sons to help with the loading and unloading. Angus gave Jean a sheaf of new contracts that Nick had hand-written with at least six more producers. As Jean and Flavio sat down to go over the trade agreement, Tilly pulled Angus aside.
“We need to talk.”
“I can give you about five minutes, but I’ve got a bunch of people waiting on me.”
“Jean needs about ten more people to work with her. And they need to be keeping the kitchen up to date. And Eunice needs a, um...harvest prep crew. And we need a second kitchen to be dealing with it. The cooks can’t drop everything whenever we get a shipment in, not when we’re feeding over a thousand people three times a day.”
“Hmm.” Angus nodded. She could see his eyes go out of focus as his brain took over. He beckoned to her before heading back to his office.
Tilly followed in the hopes that she could solve this one problem immediately. Angus went to a side table which was piled high with papers. He poked through until he unearthed a binder stuffed with random-sized, hand-made papers. “Here we are.”
He brought it over to the only empty surface in the room, the coffee table in the center of the discussion circle. He unfolded a hand-drawn map of the area around the train station. The streets were marked out and numbered boxes lined most of them. He tapped one of the boxes. “This is Nick’s warehouse. We should really have the deliveries brought there.”
“Carrots maybe, but you can’t leave ripe cherries sitting for very long,” Tilly countered.
“Yes, I suppose, but you shouldn’t have to process all the food if most of it will be distributed elsewhere.”
“That means we need a system for getting a lot of food distributed quickly. That isn’t something the kitchen staff should need to worry about. And speaking of that, if we get much more people in, we’re going to have to feed them in shifts.” Tilly could tell her words were coming faster and hotter than she meant, but this needed his attention.
Angus waved a hand to calm her down. “I’ve got more people going out. Holly Hill is taking another dozen. Martin is beefing up all of his outposts, I think he’s taking at least fifty. Stan asked for another ten for Creamery guards. And according to his notes, Nick promised Golden Oaks Farm, six workers, and eight guards. The Divvy Committee has placed five families in houses now. And three of them stayed at home for the storm and were just fine.”
Tilly shivered at the thought of staying in a simple house during the kind of storm that they had last night. Then Angus’s numbers kicked in, and her brain went down a different tangent. “In that case, we need a grocery store.”
Angus stared at her, his mouth open. “But,” he sputtered.
“And that’ll mean stockers and cleaners and cash registers. How much coin have you minted?”
Chapter 32
As we grow our food for larger numbers, processing plants will be needed. Mills for grains will be the first thing we need.
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
NICK TOSSED HIS GEAR into the back of one the new jeeps. Martin had somehow gotten his hands on a bunch of all-terrain vehicles. Most went to the Rovers to use for patrolling, but he’d kept four for High Meadow. They only held four people comfortably, five in a pinch, with a good sized cargo area, and were perfect for this kind of mission.
Wisp arrived with his pack and a cooler full of food. He’d told Nick that he would ask Eunice for travel food. Nick had already added some Greeting Baskets to the cargo area just in case they discovered some new groups.
“Did you hear about the carrots?” Wisp asked.
It took Nick a minute to register the comment. When he realized what Wisp meant, he laughed. “Damn. I bet that surprised Tilly. I totally forgot. That means Creamery delivered as promised. Good. Was it just carrots? I thought they were supposed to bring some other vegetables, too.”
“There were closed sacks. Could have been something else.”
“We need to get back in time for dinner,” Nick grumbled.
“Eunice took c
are of us,” Wisp said as he patted the cooler. “Venison and cheese sandwiches.”
“Hmm. Not bad.” Nick felt better as he slid into the driver’s seat. The sun was shining when they came up out of the garage. It was a perfect day to go for a drive. He glanced over at the horse meadow’s new occupants. “How many do we have now?”
Wisp followed his look. “Three new horses, a donkey and an old cow.”
“Maybe we should move the cow to Creamery.”
“One horse, the donkey and the cow are a herd together. I think maybe they were all from the same place. If you take one away, the others will try to follow. I don’t think it’s much trouble to keep them together.”
Nick thought about that. He’d been picking up baby animals from all over, a kitten here, a puppy there. It hadn’t occurred to him that he was breaking up families. But it was important to spread them around. There were so few that inbreeding could be a problem.
He drove out to the new loop road. It wasn’t really new, just a piece of a road that they took care of now. A few of the bigger potholes had been filled with broken-up asphalt and dirt. The missing Rovers were estimated to be about ten miles out, but Nick would make several stops along the way for Wisp to take a reading.
The first stop was not far from High Meadow. Wisp stood on the road frowning into the distance. Nick tried to quiet his mind to keep himself off Wisp’s internal radar.
“I don’t feel him,” Wisp said in a puzzled voice. “Ep,” he clarified at Nick questioning glance.
“Is that a good thing?” Nick asked. Wisp didn’t answer at first. He continued to frown down the road.
“He’s probably asleep.”
Nick hoped it was true, and that there wasn’t a darker reason for his brother’s absence.
They drove through the bright day stopping every so often for Wisp to check the area for trouble. They found a small family farm that had lost the roof on their barn, but the house was still habitable despite its old design. The house had to be two hundred years old, but apparently strong enough to handle the superstorms.
Nick offered to get the Rovers to come help, but the family declined. Seems they hadn’t used the barn since the Hoofed Flu took their entire herd of cows. There was an odd mix of ages living there, that might have been family, but facial features said otherwise. The people accepted one of Angus’s flyers about the meeting and a Greeting Basket. They said they’d heard a siren and assumed it meant trouble, so they’d hunkered down. Nick gave them another flyer that explained the warning sounds.
The first visit was so smooth, Nick got back in the car with high hopes. The next couple stops Wisp didn’t sense any people in the area. Nick marked the map, and they moved on.
“Trouble,” Wisp warned him, even before the swath of fallen trees came into view.
The tornado’s path must have come fairly close. Scattered debris covered everything. Trees had been tossed across the wreckage-strewn ground or were snapped off where they stood. Branches and trunks built a haphazard wall across the road. Lumber and fabric lay among the leaves and twigs in the muck. Nick picked up a broken chair. “Not a good sign.”
“Over here,” Wisp said as he led the way.
He had that tight expression that meant he had pulled in his senses. It was a warning to Nick that something bad was coming up. They clomped through puddles and detritus to the tilted walls of a half-collapsed house.
“How many?” Nick asked in a low voice.
“Two alive. For now.”
Nick circled the house. He couldn’t find a safe entry into the fragile shell of shattered timber and broken glass.
Wisp pointed out three bodies. Two were in the yard crushed under a tree. The third was under a fallen wall, just a swollen arm exposed. “Here,” he said, standing at a shadowy break in the crumpled house.
Nick eyed the precarious entrance. “Is this safe?”
“I can’t read inanimate objects,” Wisp said with a seriousness that told Nick that he wished he could.
The structure creaked and popped in a light breeze. Nick didn’t feel good about going inside.
“I can go,” Wisp offered.
“Not with a half-healed head wound,” Nick grumbled. He stepped over a splintered beam and into the darkness of the collapsed house. Carefully placing each foot, he kept expecting to plummet into a basement at any moment.
“It only has a crawl space,” Wisp called to him.
“You’re reading my mind again,” Nick shouted back.
A whimper drew his attention. In the faint light filtering in through a gap in a sundered wall, he discovered an arm. Moving slowly and mindfully, he squatted to assess his approach. The arm was attached to a woman. She moaned, twitching slightly. He tried to sort out what he was seeing in the dim light. She didn’t seem trapped. Speaking softly, he knelt next to her and ran his hands over her to check for injuries. A gasp told him of possible broken bones.
A clatter and rattle had him ducking, but the noise wasn’t overhead. Wisp appeared in the gloom carrying a thin sheet of wood. Together they managed to get the wood under the woman as a make-shift stretcher. She cried feebly as they slid the stretcher back the way they came.
“My daughter!” she yelped. It was the loudest sound she’d made and still barely a whisper.
Nick looked to Wisp. He frowned into the darkness. The house clicked and sighed. A rain of particles fluttered down through a beam of light looking like fairy dust. “Got her.”
“Wait.” Nick didn’t want to leave Wisp in the house, and he didn’t want to leave the wounded woman in here either. “Let’s get her out first.”
It was too dark to see if Wisp nodded, but he returned to the stretcher. They inched across the uneven ground. A sharp wind blew through, scattering dust and dirt into their eyes. The house moaned and shifted.
Nick was dripping sweat by the time they got the injured woman free of the wreckage and only half of it had to do with the ambient temperature “Okay. You stay with her,” he said as he wiped his face.
“You won’t find her,” Wisp said.
The woman had fainted, but he felt wrong leaving her alone. “Show me,” he said to Wisp.
After another moment of concentrating, Wisp led him around the house to a jumble of fractured lumber. After searching the jungle of wood, broken furniture and shattered windows, Nick saw her. The teenage girl had crawled into a teepee of up thrust flooring and fallen ceiling supports and huddled there weeping weakly. She was all mud and blood, and Nick couldn’t see how it would be possible to get across the wreckage to her.
Then Wisp did.
It reminded him how the biobot had gotten his name because it looked like he melted between the beams. In the uncertain light, with dust filtering down over him, it looked like he did the impossible. He moved like a dancer around the shattered pieces of the house until he reached the girl.
She grabbed on to him so hard he tottered a step. Nick winced, knowing that her fear was probably giving Wisp a headache. And when Wisp turned, a frown pinched his forehead, proving Nick right.
He came back through the sharp-edged maze and was nearly free when the wind shifted. Dirt swirled up in a dust-devil between Nick and the house. Broken joists screamed and shattered windows rained glass. Nick took a step toward the house, arms outstretched as if he could stop it with a fierce hope. Wood slammed down in thunderous crashes as the house went through its final paroxysm.
“Wisp!”
Debris flew up from the collapse engulfing Nick in a suffocating cloud. Eyes tearing, coughing, he staggered closer. Until a hand grabbed him, pulling him out of the dust.
“I’m here,” Wisp said, looking exceptionally calm.
The girl was crouched by her mother. Wisp had smears of mud and blood on his shirt and neck. Nick coughed and spat dust and grit. He had no idea how Wisp had gotten out before the collapse, but he wasn’t going to examine that too closely. He brushed a layer of grime out of his hair and slapped at his clothes.
“You okay?” he asked gruffly.
“I’m fine.”
Nick glared at him but got no response. “Let’s see what we can do.” They stabilized what broken bones they could find before settling the woman into the storage area of the jeep. Wisp moved supplies into the back seat so that the girl could join her.
While Wisp walked away for another scan, Nick gave the girl a sandwich and a bottle of water. Her mother hadn’t regained consciousness. Taking her back to High Meadow was a gamble over rough roads.
“Forward or back?” Nick whispered when Wisp came over for his water bottle.
“I think I can feel the next outpost. It’s closer than High Meadow.”
“Hey,” Nick said softly to the girl. “We’re going to take you someplace safe where your mom can get patched up, okay?”
She clutched the sandwich in a muddy hand but gave him a wide-eyed nod. Nick took that as agreement. Wisp had scouted out a route around the downed trees. He gave directions through driveways and back lawns. Nick was worried about his injured passengers, but there wasn’t any other way through. This was going to be a big clean-up project for the Rovers. They had chosen this road specifically because of the new outpost they’d set up. He worried that the damage might extend that far, and that they would find a lot more wounded when they got to the outpost.
Because of the storm debris, Nick had to drive slowly. Wisp stopped him a couple times. The first turned up nothing but a bad feeling. Another twist through an overgrown alley and down a driveway brought them back to the main road. Not far along they found a goat who had a tether tangled in a downed tree. It sounded like a baby crying, which had put Nick on edge. It didn’t look hurt but was very docile when they approached. A little further down, they saw smoke rising from off the road somewhere. Nick stopped the vehicle but wasn’t sure what they could do.
“We can’t do anything,” Wisp said, echoing his thoughts.
“But we can’t let it burn,” Nick moaned.
“Everything is so wet, it shouldn’t spread too far. Are the Rovers prepared for wildfires?”
