“Place cleaned up pretty good,” Dkembe said.
“But that smell –”
“Good work,” Tom said to his lieutenant as casually as he could, though making sure he’d heard it. The young man had proven himself too easily cowed time and time again, and Tom wanted to break him of the habit without breaking him in the process. He drew himself back to Luke’s interruption almost unwillingly.
“What’s that weird smell, dad?”
Tom nodded to them, and with the vehicles gone, they crossed the oil-stained garage to the next partition with the day outside filtered through the chain-link awning of green outdoor mesh over their heads creating the illusion of cover alongside the blasted-plain red brick two-floor building they were now calling home.
All of them except for his daughter, anyway.
Wilhelm called it “the spoils of victory”. To Tom, it just made good old-fashioned plain sense to shift homes, though he’d hoped for the company of more than just his children and their attendants when it came time to move in. Even the “housewarming dinner” Lila planned for later that night seemed heavily ironic with the weather turning to shit outside and her determined to “try out” the live-in arrangements at the Enclave. The grey-filtered day had the cold and the wet competing for which would piss Tom off most, and as a few more drops started pattering overhead, the rain clouds were winning.
“This way,” he said. “What you can smell is the . . . indoor nursery.”
“Nursery?” Lucas said. “Like . . . babies?”
“No.”
Tom scoffed a laugh, bemused and puzzled at the same time to imagine what the fuck his son was thinking went on here before, though Tom himself struggled to call it benign.
“Ortega was growing plants indoors under lights,” he explained.
“That smell. . . .” Lilianna said.
“. . . is cannabis resin,” Tom said. “Marijuana.”
“Whoa, this is a dope farm?”
It was about the most Kevin had said in their whole week together. Tom actually stopped short of the wooden gate through to the back section to light a curious grin on the kid who was obviously more switched on than Lucas at least in that one regard.
“Yeah.”
“Are you gonna keep doin’ it?”
The small boy’s beaded gaze locked on Tom’s mouth with a singular intense focus that continued to confirm what the older man suspected, the boy’s speech sometimes hard to ascertain, as rarely as it came anyway, and as malformed as the boy himself, whom Tom suspected was deaf, or at the very least hearing impaired. Also revealed in Kevin’s hard-eyed stare were the gears and levers of the ten-year-old’s shrewd calculations.
“No,” Tom said and sighed slightly, somehow anticipating the look the boy then offered, clearly thinking his de facto guardian short of common sense.
“It’s a good trade on the street,” Kevin muttered.
“I know,” Tom said.
His daughter interrupted in that cocky way she only did with Kevin.
“My dad’s hardly going to become a drug dealer, Kevin.”
She finished with a cute laugh of derision. Tom might’ve felt sorry for the boy on the receiving end of such a finely-tuned and sharp instrument, except Kevin clearly had no idea what a drug dealer was, as well as a single-minded self-confidence in his original assessment of the plan where he imagined them settling down into the deal-bag business rather than somehow overseeing the logistics of the transport, receipt, execution, butchery and refrigeration of the promised, treasured incoming consignment of one hundred per cent prime post-apocalyptic wilderness-raised beef.
“Dumb,” was all the boy said.
Tom let it go, confident in Luke’s ingrained response to gently rebuke his friend with a rough push as he’d done on the dozen other occasions where Kevin quietly ridiculed Tom and Tom just as quietly let it go.
The boys and Lilianna fell in lockstep with him as he worked the garden gate open, letting them through into the nursery proper and its unintended entryway, a section of all-weather metal sheeting creating an alfresco alcove, with the metal weapons’ racks, high school-style lockers, and huge industrial sinks bolted against the wood-and-sheet-metal boundary fence bordered on the other side by two big dirty Home Depot work tables only recently swept clean of potting mix and dirt. Beyond those, Ortega’s cannabis crop drooped under its own weight, the lights and irrigation tubes switched off for the past week. The resin in the air was so pungent, they shielded their eyes against it, walking in from the dirty side parking area. Kevin’s eyes, narrowed also with his disdain for Tom’s lack of acumen, widened again at seeing the profundity of it all, then he renewed his unspoken assault with his eyes on Tom’s profile as Tom ignored him like the benevolent father figure he was pretending to be, the compassionate grimace not a good fit for his face focused instead on the sweeping gesture he made with his good arm, now free of the sack of provisions he set upon one of the benches.
“I know it’d be easy to keep this going, but like Lila says, it’s not really my thing,” Tom said and managed not to say it bitterly, no one forcing him to justify himself to a fucking ten-year-old, but there he was doing it for the sake of the overall effect of calm leadership he wished he could hand on to someone else like he’d done with so much of the construction work bundled onto Dkembe and their new recruits.
“Where’s Attila and Kent?”
“Trading for ethanol,” Dkembe answered.
Tom had about a hundred questions, but Kevin piped up again.
“I can do this,” the boy said and met Tom’s gaze as directly as he could.
“Do what?”
“Keep the plants alive. Growing.”
“We don’t want the plants alive, Kevin,” Tom said quietly. “That’s how we’re helping pay for the ethanol . . . and about every damned other thing we need.”
“Dumb, though,” the boy said and scowled, though he broke off the eye contact as he did it, looking around like looking for someone to blame. “It’s a . . . one of those . . . opportunities.”
“Look at you with the big words now.”
“Lilianna,” Tom warned her.
His daughter gave a humorless laugh, hands up leaving the poisoned chalice of Kevin’s default parenting to him and washing her hands of it in the one fell move, sweeping through on a tour of the marijuana maze as if she’d taken offense. Tom ignored her too. Lucas’ hawk-like gaze tingled between his shoulder blades as he looked back at Kevin.
“Ortega had a whole bunch of people working here keeping the lights on and the water flowing, and we don’t have time or resources for that shit right now,” he said.
“But –”
“You’re a smart kid, Kevin,” Tom said to him. “There’s plenty of work for you too.”
“But the weed –”
“Kevin,” Tom interrupted. “Shut the fuck up now, OK?”
Kevin was no stranger to threats – implicit or otherwise. His jaw snapped shut almost audibly, and that was the first time they heard Gonzales laugh. It was about as pretty as the rest of him, which meant not at all. Tom had to restrain the urge to throw a balefire glance the skinny man’s way, nodding the responsibility to Dkembe instead and moving towards the side door to their new homestead, Pamela de Jong’s ghost dying again and again in his memory and the innocent doorway framed still with the dark stains of her blood.
*
TOM STOOD IN the empty doorway longer than he’d planned, annoyed at himself for ever thinking his quick check on the bare room he’d imagined for Iwa Swarovsky was anything but another unconscious chance to steep himself in contemplation about the romantic disasters of his life. The doorway was empty and so was the room. The bare wooden boards stained by old paint led to a brick fireplace. The window from the second floor offered a good view of the approaching street and a safe elevation from the ground, the same as the tenement above the bicycle mechanic’s on the other side of The Mile.
But Dr Swarovsky�
��s apartment was deserted there as well.
“I swear, dad, that annoying little kid. . . .”
Tom turned his head, otherwise still framed in the doorway with his left arm seemingly much recovered. Standing there seeing if his daughter’d finish her unfinished thought, it felt good to press his arm and shoulder into the solid doorframe, the aches therapeutic after nearly losing use of both limbs countless times amid the madness of the previous week, and the City nearly pitching face-first over the brink into chaos. Things weren’t that much better now, but at least the daily gun battles had ceased. Unfortunately, so had a lot of the regular trooper patrols relied on to keep the peace between the City’s sixty thousand-or-so remaining non-insurrectionary Citizens. There just wasn’t the manpower to spare as the weather took its inevitable turn and there was a rush to shore up many City projects, as well as the security needed to do it with Madeline Plume and a dozen of her Lefthanders still under lock and key, and whispers on every street corner about the remnants of their dread, failed conspiracy.
“Don’t worry about Kevin,” Tom said.
“You don’t think he’s right?”
Tom smirked that his daughter was sufficiently paranoid to ask that, and proud of her for doing so. Once upon a time, people who were stupid at age sixteen could afford to stay that way their entire lives. But these weren’t those days. He kissed her cheek instead, irritating her by giving her carefully pulled-back hair a ruffle. And like the smart girl she was, Lilianna took that as her cue to lean in.
“So about tonight. . . .”
“Our dinner?” Tom said.
“Yeah,” she said and bit her lip prettily. “I was wondering if we could maybe do that tomorrow night instead?”
“The dinner was your idea,” Tom said.
“I know,” Lilianna replied. “I just thought you might be . . . annoyed if I skipped out?”
“No, that’s fine,” Tom said with a straight face. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do . . . just make sure you cook something simple the boys will eat before you . . . what, something to do with Beau, I’m guessing, and the Enclave?”
“Dinner?” Lila said instead.
“It’s your night,” Tom said.
“Yes, but –”
“You called it a housewarming, but only because you were cooking anyway.”
“Yes, but that’s why I said you’d get mad about me skipping out.”
“Not if you don’t skip out.”
“I wanted to . . . there’s a dinner –”
“An Enclave dinner?”
“Jesus,” Lilianna said genuinely flustered now. “I wish you’d stop calling it that.”
“That’s what it’s called.”
“It’s not what it’s called,” his daughter said.
“Well, it’s what it damned well is,” her father growled. “And it is called the Enclave, or did I miss something? Wilhelm calls it that, right?”
“Not anymore,” Lilianna said. “Since Delroy Earle keeps writing about it and saying it’s the City’s back-up plan –”
“Which it is.”
“– and that we get extra rations credits and things like that, Councilor Wilhelm says we’re calling it the Bastion now.”
“The Bastion,” Tom said. And it wasn’t a question.
“That’s right,” Lila answered anyway.
“I thought the ‘age of spin’ died when the Furies rose up,” Tom said. “I guess I’m wrong. Where there’s a newspaper trying to report the truth, there’s a politician trying to put his own polish on things.”
“Why are you so down on Councilor Wilhelm?”
Tom’s mouth remained half-open while he tried framing a reply and stood there blinking like a lizard in the desert sun instead. He tried rebooting himself only to fail again. He swallowed painfully.
“I’m . . . ‘down’ on him, am I?”
“Seems that way.”
Tom exhaled and didn’t notice the gentle plume of frost, too perplexed by his child’s lack of detached skepticism to say anything of any use. He moved to pat Lilianna on the shoulder and maybe let the whole conversation die. Her relocation was underway despite his grave misgivings. Lilianna only stilled further discussions by telling him each time it was “just a trial”.
“I think you’re just angry about the doctor,” Lila said suddenly. “Swarovsky,” she added, as if Tom was for some reason uncertain who she meant. Likewise, her subtle eyebrow movements back towards the doorway he’d only just quit. “You know I’m sorry, right?”
“Lila,” he said, and again not so much met a dead end as felt everything including his thoughts dissolved into unthinkable ribbons of gossamer air.
“What?”
Tom shook his head.
“What’s happening at the Enclave?” he asked instead.
Lilianna knew when to pick her battles. She gave a short feminine grunt.
“There’s a . . . sort of a party,” she said. “A dinner. A remembrance.”
“For the kids who died?”
“They weren’t kids, dad –”
“Lilianna, they were kids, no matter what else you call ‘em.”
“Comrades?”
Lila looked about to cry. Tom didn’t begrudge her her grief. God knows, the showdown at St Mary’s Church was intense and Lilianna had thrown herself into the thick of it. At the same time, her father also knew she’d barely been inside the place more than a night or two and now she was waving flags and proclaiming fealty to Ernest Eric Wilhelm III’s vision for his “Bastion”.
“It’s funny, you know,” he said quietly. “I’m sad about the choice Iwa made, sure. But that’s just nothing compared to the rest of it.”
Tom motioned like the power had drained out of him, and Lilianna followed with a look of concern as they headed back to the head of the stairwell leading down to the building’s ground floor and its killing corridors still scarred by shotgun blasts, the torture room Ortega kept at the back now prepped for storage.
“When we set out for the City,” Tom said, “as your father, I worried those years with just the three of us might mean you two would have a tougher time adjusting back than either of you thought. Couldn’t believe I was so stupid.”
“Dad. . . .”
Tom shook his head as they descended practically side by side.
“No,” he said to her. “I’m really not being hard on myself. It actually is funny, you know, in that sad, ironic, world-weary way you know I love so much.”
They shared a bittersweet ironic smile and exited the stairwell back into the entryway, the brick building’s old front doors boarded up and reinforced from behind and a bunch of storage shelves set across from them. Ignoring the basics of fire safety, Ortega had every exit controlled to force egress and entry to the house through the one choke point out in the nursery and then via the vehicular gate, and Tom hadn’t made any changes except to remove the padlock on the last external doorway down near the cell where he could still smell Abe Ben-Gurion’s piss.
“What’s funny about it then?”
“Out in the wild,” Tom said. “Out on the road, it was just us.”
“You miss it.”
“Somehow.”
“But there were so many times. . . .”
“I know.”
“And every time we thought we were safe, like at the Library –”
“I know.”
“We lost them, too,” Lilianna said softly. “And people, dad. Every time.”
“We haven’t lost people here too?” he asked reproachfully. “Wasn’t that the point you were just making about your friends?”
“OK, yes,” Lila said.
“Well, I’ve lost people here too,” Tom said and grated the worst of the sullen bitterness from his voice so that at least he still sounded like an adult man and not a whining teenager himself.
“I’ve lost both of you,” he said.
“Hey that’s not true –”
“
I know it’s not true,” Tom said and sighed, though it was more like a snarl. “Doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel that way though.”
He motioned at her offhandedly and led the way back outside.
“This was always coming,” he said. “I’d rather you were safe here and able to meet someone closer to your age and maybe . . . I dunno what you’re doing, really.”
“Building a future?” Lilianna offered with a vague sense of hope.
“Is that it?”
“I dunno, dad,” she answered again. “I’ve never done it before.”
Tom chewed on that one a moment. They stopped moving. The boys were out in the nursery whooping about something, and neither he nor Lilianna wanted them to break their moment.
“I guess I didn’t do much of a job on my one and only effort,” Tom said. “And Iwa prefers to go trekking halfway across the fucking country than stay here and build a future with me, and frankly, I don’t really blame her.”
“You wish you were going too.”
Tom chuckled at his daughter’s therapist tone and pulled himself up short.
“That really is a conversation for another time,” he said. “Way into the future. Let’s just concentrate on the here and now, huh?”
“OK,” Lilianna said. “So, about that dinner?”
Tom sighed and dropped his head in surrender.
“Looks like we’re having horse burgers again.”
*
THE TWO BOYS snapped their eyes up as Tom re-entered the nursery. Kevin took one scan of Tom’s eyes fixed on Lucas and started to discount himself from the scene until Tom raised another one of those Pope-like hands to still him with benevolence.
“Kevin,” he said. “You’re quite right that we don’t want to waste the set-up Ortega had here. But we’ll use those tubs to grow our own vegetables, not weed, no matter how much . . . money or . . . bullets or whatever that might bring in, OK?”
The ferrety boy watched him so intensely that for a moment Tom wasn’t entirely sure he’d heard at all. Then Kevin gave an ultra-quick nod, like maybe just in case saying nothing made Tom mad. Tom sighed, pained at the boy’s retreat into what had long since become a normal baseline paranoia. And Tom sighed again as he dropped concerns over something so potentially beyond his control.
After The Apocalypse Season 2 Box Set [Books 4-6] Page 2
