Jessica leaned back against her hay bale. She closed her eyes with a feeble smile. Gabriela had cleaned her face well, and the dim light of the barn hid the bruises. For an instant, DD flashed back to a different Jessica, six years old, fresh out of the bathtub, fighting heavy sleep-eyes in her lace canopy bed amidst the pink-flowered sheets.
And so it came to pass, one fine, frosty Ozark mountain morning, just as the sun was rising, Jessica, Jeremy and DD pulled through the gate in the fence around Gabriela’s cousin’s farm, rolling on tires of heavy cotton canvas stuffed with oats. The use of oats had been DD’s suggestion, based on an old family legend, of her great-great-grandfather, whose family’d kicked him off their Ontario farm for the wickedness of stuffing the tires of his home-built motorcycle with oats meant for animal feed. He’d ridden that motorcycle proudly into Flint, Michigan, and down the main street, where it made a mention in the local paper. He’d gone on to be the first machinist foreman on the original Buick assembly line, and his mechanical aptitude had popped up again, generations later, in Jessica. She wondered how he’d have felt to see the urban war zone Flint had eventually turned into. She wondered how the remaining people of Flint, demoralized by unemployment, foreclosures, and exodus, and dulled and confused by lead poisoning from contamination, had fared when the workers arrived to put them in the protectee camps. Were they grateful? Did they fight? Did they even understand?
Gabriela walked over with the children to say goodbye. Marthita ran up to Jessica and leaped on the scooter, burying her face in the young woman’s belly and squeezing her waist as hard as her delicate arms could manage. The girl had been a fixture around the barn through the long winter. She was now telling everyone she wanted to be a mechanic when she grew up, “like Jessica.” DD wiped a tear from her eye as Jessica embraced the little girl, rocking gently with her eyes closed. Jeremy was closing the gate, and as he mounted his RV, Jessica gently set Martha down. Their engines revved, and one by one they pulled off.
Jessica took the lead on the Vespa and the other two fell in behind.
DD reveled in the beauty of the mountains. The sun ascended and struck the frost on the tan ground, sparkling like diamonds. The trees were still brown, but a hint of green, hanging over them like a mist, spoke of the imminence of Spring. The sky was blue, stained with high cirrus clouds like the film of buttermilk left inside a glass. For a moment, the strangeness which had haunted every day since last October lifted, and she was just a mom on a road trip with her daughter and...
The feeling collapsed. She and Jeremy were friends. They had each others’ backs, literally and figuratively, and ever since their first engagement, with the poor violent lunatic, the trust of comrades-in-arms was implicit. But there was no “Honey,” “Baby,” “Dear” stuff going on. Their physical attraction was undeniable, and they’d had some memorable encounters in the woods on warm days, and in the distillery shed, and plenty of clichéd rolls in the hay of the barn, sheep baaing softly under the loft. But the more they were involved in other ways, the less satisfactory the sex was. Occasionally, they’d fall asleep in an embrace after sex, but DD usually had to bring herself to climax afterwards. This was normal for her, and she decided the first time had just been a fluke. They slept separately most nights.
Jessica had asked DD bluntly one day, “Mom, you and Jeremy: what’s the deal there?”
DD just shrugged. Jeremy wasn’t a thinker, but a doer, and DD was still at bottom a scientist, given to exploring ideas and concocting ways to test them. They’d be discussing the day’s plans, the need for more water in the mash, and how the sheep had been restless the night before. Jeremy would speculate there was an animal prowling outside the barn at night, and DD would start brainstorming: an animal, the wind might have changed, maybe one of the ewes was getting ready to lamb out of season (herd mammals circle to protect birthing females, she’d read), and she’d look up and Jeremy would smirk at her and go on stirring the vat of mash he was working on. She’d feel momentarily silly, like someone caught talking out loud to the cat, and fall silent.
But today, they were all doers. In the crisp mountain air, they were a trio of intrepid warriors on an adventure! They crested a ridge and the ascending contours of the range of mountains, hills really, called the Ozarks, spread out before them to the Northwest. A group of whitetails, three does and a two-point buck, were motionless in the road, silhouetted against the sky, the only visible movement the gentle rising of vapor from the creatures’ nostrils. The trio gently braked to a stop. Life has few of these transcendent moments. Man, women, deer, sky, all hung suspended in perfect harmony. A rabbit broke abruptly from a bush on the other side of the road. Startled, the four deer ran off, their impossibly graceful bounding steps taking them through the underbrush as they vaulted, otherworldly, down the acute slope.
DD sighed in elation and turned to Jessica, ahead to her right, but her daughter’s eyes were still glued to the eponymous flags of the retreating ruminants. She smiled a mother’s smile. The experience is new to her. I guess, always, anything we see together, I will think of how it must look through her eyes.
DD pivoted to look at Jeremy and saw him remove his hand from the rifle mounted upright on the ATV behind him. He knows we can’t carry that much meat, and we don’t want to stop our journey, just as we’re getting started, in order to dress it. But here’s the difference, right here: his country-boy instinct and my city-girl whimsy.
The weather got colder as they moved north, traveling faster than the warming glow of spring, but they were equipped for colder-weather camping. There were a number of old-time, deserted downtowns that’d undergone a scraggly rebirth of sorts, as people moved closer together to avoid melting roads and long-distance walks. Some, of course, had been renovated before the machine sickness, but they no longer hosted expensively-but-casually clad crowds sampling goat-cheese wild-foraged-mushroom bruschetta and pomegranate-pear martinis. Here and there, they encountered others who’d come up with the same relatively obvious idea as Jessica and rebuilt small vehicles for ethanol. The smoke streams of the fires of many stills rose up across the land, no longer hidden for fear of the law. In this area, many people still had livestock when the machine sickness hit, so horses, donkeys, mules, and sometimes even cattle were making a comeback as forms of transportation. Dirt or gravel roads, or roads with wide dirt shoulders, were becoming more popular and reliable, as the machine sickness broke down more and more asphalt paving into chunks and puddles.
When the Ozarks gave way to the flat plains of Missouri and Kansas, the trip became monotonous. They passed a windmill farm, giant graceful structures like a regiment of giants in feathered headgear. Some of the turbines were turning their slow, brutal arcs. Some were turning part-circles, jamming, and swinging backwards. Many were cocked crooked at their fiberglass nacelles, where something plastic inside had plainly given way. One turbine's titanic blade had flown free of its steel column and sat alone in a fallow field. They stopped to investigate and found two of the three blades embedded in the earth. The one that’d struck the ground first had gouged a long furrow twice as deep as Jeremy was tall and plowed up a divot as big as DD's old house. They marveled at the destruction, felt themselves miniscule before it. Then they cast an eye at the other windmills nearby, one of them listing crazily, and hastily moved on.
One day, a drab gloomy sky blew in. They watched clouds advance across the flatlands slowly and inexorably, an impressionist smear of silver rain below, and then found an abandoned metal warehouse and made camp.
“Isn't this tornado country?” Jessica asked. “Would this warehouse hold up to a tornado?”
“There's not much that can hold up to a tornado, if that's your destiny,” Jeremy said.
They wound up staying there for five days, sleeping a lot, huddled around a lumber-scrap fire, as the Midwestern springtime demonstrated its fickleness. They kept one eye on the sky, fearing the yellow tinge that they'd heard presaged tornadoes, but the rain was const
ant and the wind was steady, barely rattling the corrugated sheet metal with its worst gusts.
When the front finally passed over, they resumed their travel and headed north, a rising sun on their left and a spectacular rainbow on their right.
That night, they reached Lake of the Ozarks. They needed a bath, so they headed down a dirt road with a sign that said, “Riverview.” When they got to the end of the gravel road, they discovered they were at an RV park. The guard on watch hailed them, holding a rifle at rest across his body and obviously perceiving them as no threat. The park was occupied by residents who’d been stranded there, camping out, when the machine sickness hit; as their largely-fiberglass portable homes dissolved and collapsed, they’d worked diligently to create solutions. A few collectors had antique aluminum Airstream trailers which were pretty much intact, although of course the PVC plumbing was worthless now. The metal frames of even the fiberglass trailers and motorhomes remained, atop tire-free chassis, propped on concrete blocks or chunks of limestone to level them as their hydraulic jacks failed. Some campers had already been living in “park models,” and had units encased in aluminum siding and roofing; others had been built with vinyl siding and asphalt shingles, and were in the same boat as the temporary visitors. It’d obviously been a difficult winter, and two burned-out hulks of motorhomes showed the danger of trying to heat a flammable structure with natural fuels. People had used what came to hand, which yielded a surrealistic neighborhood landscape of concrete, sheet metal, canvas, grass thatching, wood, and rope. The swimming-pool enclosure’s chain-link fence had been stripped off; they saw a corner of it peeking out as the underlayment for an RV wall someone had rebuilt by weaving strips of fabric into it. The pool itself had been repurposed as a reservoir, and DD the microbiologist was impressed at the strategies they’d come up with to keep it sanitary after their sodium hypochlorite ran out. The park had become a tribal unit, congregating at a community fire each day and sharing food. They’d survived the winter with few deaths, obtaining food by foraging local grocery stores, wildcrafting fruits and herbs in the Fall, fishing and hunting over the Winter, and trading their few items of value with the local farmers who, just like those in Gabriela’s community, had nowhere to ship their crops to once the trucks stopped running. They were turning over ground to make a huge vegetable garden with seeds they’d foraged from a nearby home repair warehouse store. They were all too aware that cereals would be the issue: the equipment to till huge tracts of land was lacking, and most farmers had been using hybridized or GMO seed, which wouldn’t breed true. Foreheads furrowed among those whose temperament tended towards planning ahead when the visitors brought the topic up, but no one had any answers other than to hoard small amounts of starches for their families when they could get away with it and hope the mice didn’t find them. DD looked at a 3-year-old toddling happily around her older siblings’ feet. Next Winter is going to be brutal.
The three camped by the tiny public beach on the wide Osage river, tarried a day, and took the most invigorating cold-water swim of their lives in the warm sunshine of the next afternoon.
They crossed the lake itself via a steel-girder bridge on US 54 and took it east of Kansas City to US 36, which became I-72. They had to detour way out of their path on local roads around Springfield, where the heavily-trafficked freeway, rotted by p davisii, had transformed over the winter into an impassible Burren-like landscape. DD knelt to examine what was happening. The cracks in the asphalt had exposed layers of gravel, silt, and sand, in which a variety of tiny green things flourished in the warmth, producing astonishing miniature landscapes of elfin beauty.
Once they reached Indiana, DD’s memory proved faithful despite her frequent doubts. There were many times she was just about ready to turn the party around and retrace their steps, and then she’d spot some trivial landmark: a school-bus shelter with the name of a local dentist painted on it (Dr. Payne, terrible name for a dentist!); a trench which curved away from the road around a huge boulder; an intersection with what’d once been a plastic molded Shell Oil box sign on the abandoned gas station, but was now just a tall metal pole with red and yellow splashes trailing down its sides. It was an overcast and chilly day when the evergreen windbreak finally gave the signal they awaited that this was the right place. With no little trepidation, they turned down the anonymous track that led to Sutokata.
Before proceeding, they formed up abreast, as had become their habit. Jessica was in the center on her scooter, looking down at her mother and Jeremy, on their lower ATV seats, on each side.
“Now, it’s been a while since I was here,” cautioned DD. “I don’t even know for sure the collective is still there, or that the people there are the ones I remember.”
“We should go slow then,” said Jeremy.
“And make lots of noise so it doesn’t seem like we’re sneaking up on them!” said Jessica.
They picked their way down the road as it tapered into a trail, beeping the horns on their little vehicles every so often. Two armed men—no, DD corrected herself, an armed man and an armed woman—stopped them before the compound proper came into sight. Their rifles were leveled at the three strangers, but they were relaxed and their fingers were off the triggers.
The travelers cut their motors. DD immediately noticed the smell of rotting meat, carried from behind the defenders on the light breeze. It made her uncomfortable, the acid taste of nausea welling up in her throat. DD, Jessica, and Jeremy raised their open hands.
“Who are you and what do you want?” challenged the man. His white face was flushed with the chill under his knit cap and above his wool coat.
“I’m DD Davis. I’m a friend...” what if they don’t know who I’m talking about, “of Akisni and Snowbear.” What if we came all this way for nothing?
The weapons came down and the guards visibly relaxed. “Let’s just take you to the main house and see about that,” the woman said in a friendly tone. “Mind if we ride on the back of your vehicles?”
Jessica led the way, and the two ATVs, with the Sutokata residents perched on the cargo boxes behind the drivers, guns aimed at the sky, followed behind. They passed a side trail and DD got a glimpse of two people laboring hard, digging a deep trench in the muddy, freshly-thawed spring dirt. The rotting-meat smell here was especially strong. Maybe a horse or cow died and they're burying it?
They entered the main house and were settled into chairs while one of their captors/greeters, who introduced himself as Joe, went to find Snowbear and Akisni. Heidi, a medium-height brunette in a Baja shirt with a wool knit poncho over it, leaned on the butt of her rifle and smiled pleasantly. Akisni was right in the adjacent kitchen, and she immediately bustled in.
“DD!” Her voice was full of elation as she wrapped her arms around her old friend. “How did you make it here? You must tell me everything!” She released DD from her warm enveloping hug, holding her arms as she took a good look at her face. Then she turned to her companions. “Who are your friends?”
“This is Jeremy, my friend from Galveston, and this,” she paused for effect, “is Jessica.” Akisni’s eyebrows shot up.
“Jessica? Little Jessica? Buttercup?”
“The goat tamer herself!” grinned DD.
“Oh, my God! I can’t believe it. Moments like this make me feel old!”
“Tell me about it!”
“Jeremy, was it? Nice to meet you.” Akisni shook his hand. “We are always happy to get news of what’s going on outside. Let me fix you some tea.” She stepped out of the room, only to return a few moments later. She offered a choice of blends, “Mint? Chamomile? Red Clover? Cinnamon?” and disappeared into the kitchen again. Snowbear was found outside, where he was patching fences around the summer pasturage, and by the time he came inside, they were all quite cozy in chairs with tea and rolls.
“So, that’s the quick version of how I wound up in Houston just before the machine sickness hit,” finished DD, “and a summary of how Jessica disappeared a
s a teenager and broke my heart.”
“I’m so sorry, mom.” Jessica pressed her lips together and looked at her mom earnestly.
“It’s okay, Buttercup. You weren’t in your right mind. What’s past is past.”
“Here’s Snowbear,” said Akisni, rising and handing him a cup of his favorite tea, which he turned to take from her after giving DD a brief hug. “Honey, I was getting caught up with DD, but I didn’t let her tell me about what’s happened to her since the machine sickness. She came all the way from Galveston and I knew you’d want to hear everything she had to say about what things are like out there.”
“Well,” Snowbear sat down. “Let me get comfortable then.”
The trio told the tale of their winter near Fort Smith, their journey, and all the people they’d connected with. The Sutokatans were pleased to hear that small communities had sprung up spontaneously to deal with the new isolation, and fascinated to hear about some of the innovative solutions other groups had come up with to the loss of plastic and oil.
Snowbear and Akisni became excited about the possibility of converting gasoline engines to ethanol. “It honestly never occurred to me to do something so simple! Is it difficult?”
“Not really,” Jessica said.
“What about heavy machinery? Like a tractor or backhoe?”
“If it's gasoline powered, the conversion should be pretty straightforward. Diesel, not so much. I'll look at your equipment tomorrow and see what it will take to do it.”
“I’m sure Amit and Josh will want to pump you all for ideas and information,” said Snowbear.
“Who?” Asked DD.
“Our biologist and our electrician.”
“Amit? You don’t mean Amit Viswanathan by any chance?”
“Yes, that's Amit. Do you know him?”
“Are you kidding? I know of him. He’s a legend! He did the pioneering work in my field. He was the first man ever to patent a genetically-engineered organism! Is he actually here, at Sutokata?” Her voice rose in excitement.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 22
