by Alice Sabo
Parsons huffed out his disdain, turning on his heel to continue his tour. Nick noticed that a few more soldiers fell into line as they moved further into the building.
“Where do the other people go?” Nick asked. “What do the colors of the tags mean?” He held his out.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Parsons replied blithely. “I’ve enough on my plate.”
“Who’s in charge of the pressgangs?” Nick tried again.
Parson stopped, turning a stern face on Nick. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”
“Why did they shut the Continental Line down?” Nick asked.
That got a better reaction. Parsons shot him a startled look. “How do you know about that?”
“I used to ride it a lot.”
“Really. Hm. Interesting. Afraid that’s classified.”
Nick burst out laughing. “Classified? Who the hell do you think will find out?”
Parsons scowled at him. “You have no idea what we’re up against,” he hissed.
Nick sobered. “No. You’re right. I have absolutely no idea.”
Chapter 38
“How far back have we been sent? We still have the technology but not the population. Can we organize towns around an industry? And if we did so, would it be a good place to live?”
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
TED LISTENED TO THE slap of the windshield wipers and tried to relax. An air of tension pervaded the van, but he wasn’t sure of the source. It felt good to be on the road. And he had to admit that traveling in a motorized vehicle had great advantages. They’d already covered an amazing amount of territory.
Istvan was true to his word. He knew the roads. Wisp pointed in a direction, and Istvan found a way to get there. Although traveling this fast, Ted had no way to assess the area. There might be children that would have come to him, but no opportunity for them to suss him out. He regretted that. But maybe on the way back, there would be more time. Surely Wisp could sense them hiding out there. His feral children. Urchins.
“What a curious word urchins is. There are street urchins and sea urchins. Which makes no sense at all. If I said, ‘Look there’s an urchin,’ would you think child or seafood? I must look into it.”
Everett chuckled, but the rest of the passengers were quiet.
Istvan drove. Wisp sat shotgun. Everett, Clay and Darrell sat in the next seat with weapons close to hand. They could pile out the side doors, ready to fight at a moment’s notice. Ted wasn’t sure if he found that reassuring or alarming. It did make him feel safer, but it didn’t make him feel comfortable. Ted, Nixie and Jean sat in the next set of seats. The final row had been removed to accommodate the gear, food and more weapons.
As if he’d broken the ice with his peculiar comment, the tension eased away.
“I wonder when it’ll stop raining,” Jean asked.
“Angus said the weather site is still offline on the ether,” Clay offered.
“Dieter wants to get the older kids to build a weather station,” Everett said.
“How well would it work?” Jean asked.
“I dunno, but it’s gotta be better than nothing.” Everett said. “If they could at least rig a barometer, that would help a little. Wind direction, that’d be good, too.”
“This rain is wrong,” Istvan muttered.
“Why do you say that?” Jean asked.
“Too long, too soft. We haven’t had weather like this in decades.”
“Does that mean the planet is finally healing?” Ted asked.
Istvan snorted. “I don’t think Mother Earth will be herself for another century. This is just one more step in the journey.”
“Not a good one,” Jean grumbled. “Lottie said if it doesn’t stop raining, we may lose more crops.”
“Right now when we can’t get any train food. Think that’s a coincidence?” Clay asked.
“Stop.” Wisp’s voice cut through the conversation like a sword through cake.
The passengers fell silent. Ted felt guilty that his comment had started the chatting, and now he’d annoyed his brother.
“The van. Stop the van,” Wisp clarified.
Istvan hit the brakes lurching them all forward. He looked around. “Should I pull over?”
“Wait here.” Wisp hopped out of the van into the drizzle.
“Where’s he going?” Clay demanded.
“He needs to be away from people to search properly,” Ted said. He knew that to be true, and stated it with as much certainty as he could muster.
Istvan turned around to view the passengers. “How does he do it?”
Ted bit his lip. This wasn’t territory he felt safe in. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I asked him once, but he said it was too hard to explain.”
“He can feel people,” Everett said. “When we were in trouble, caught in the flood, he knew we needed help. Brought Nick and some other men down to help us get the wagon out of the mud. They didn’t have to do that. Scared the pants off of me that they were some kind of raiders gonna take what little we had left.” He nodded as though agreeing with thoughts not yet spoken. “Nick and him, good people.”
“We never questioned him,” Jean added. “We just accepted that he could find anyone. He warned us a couple times about raiders. Rounded up the fisherman and kids out playing. Brought everybody in so they wouldn’t get...” her voice ran down. “And even when he was working another job, far away, he came back for us when things got bad.”
The door opened making everyone jump. Ted wondered if some of that was guilt because he was pretty sure Wisp would know they’d been talking about him.
“There’s a settlement up on the left that I’d prefer to avoid,” Wisp said, as he pulled the door shut. Water beaded up on his wool sweater and darkened his pale hair. “Can you cut right along here?”
They spent the rest of the day traveling. The sun went down behind thick gray banks of clouds, making the light seem to fade by the minute. Ted worried about finding a camp for the night. They couldn’t sleep in their seats in the van.
Istvan took them down a bumpy unpaved lane, splashing mud out of ruts. Trees leaned over the way, laden with raindrops. Branches brushed against the sides of the van with a shushing noise. Ted peered out the windshield seeing little in the headlights but more narrow, rough road. He was starting to doze when Wisp mumbled something. The van turned, then stopped, and the door opened letting in cool, damp air.
The headlights depicted a ramshackle barn.
“This’ll do us for tonight,” Wisp announced.
Chapter 39
“Without an education system, we face a harrowing future. Every person with a skill, no matter how small, must take on apprentices. Several would be better, because we don’t know how many will survive.”
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
NICK FELT LIKE HE HAD stepped into an alternate universe. Parsons led him down a hallway past glass-walled offices and cubicles where people sat at desks working. Men wore suits and women wore slacks and blouses. They passed a conference room where someone pointed at a pie chart on a live wall, while a dozen people around a table paid attention. For a moment, a profound sense of relief flowed over him. This was the normal world. It had survived somehow and would spread out to reclaim the wilderness creeping across the nation.
He looked closer at the people moving calmly through the corridor. Down the hall, a group of men stood joking in the doorway of another conference room. He stopped, making his escort veer to avoid plowing into him. “What is everyone doing?” he demanded.
Parsons narrowed his eyes at Nick. “Working. Did you think we were all running around like barbarians with machine guns and machetes?”
“Working on what?”
“I am not at liberty to say,” Parson growled. “Come along, you don’t make the president wait.”
Nick took a second look at the faces. Most of them looked worn thin. Their clothes hung too loose or wrapped too snug a
round most of them. Many had a haggard look that Nick recognized as too much work for too few hands, but not all of them. There were a handful of plump people in clothing that fit. They swanned through the offices with smug expressions. Nick seesawed between anger and frustration. He had a bad feeling that this was not going to turn out to be the government they needed right now.
He saw an armed guard standing under an exit sign and another by a glass door leading to a balcony. Nick couldn’t say if they were protecting this bunch or keeping them in line. He followed along obediently behind Parsons, paying more attention to his surroundings.
They got on an elevator, a bit of a tight squeeze with Parsons, the three captives and four guards, still with weapons at ready. They went up to the top where the elevator opened into a single room that took up the entire floor and had been sectioned off with room dividers. There were more guards, more men in suits. An enormous table took center stage with men and women in upscale business attire and a handful of men in military uniforms gathered around it. Nick’s twinge of relief got swiftly knocked back by a new thread of fear when he saw that all the men in uniform were armed.
A pair of soldiers stopped Parsons. They didn’t speak, just moved to block his way. These men were also wearing uniforms, not fatigues like the guards, but in a similar sandy hue. Nick examined the cut, the lack of ornamentation and insignia. If they were from an arm of the military, they weren’t advertizing it. That made Nick very uneasy. The men were trim and clean cut enough to look like soldiers, and they held their weapons in a way that spoke of reasonable training. He wondered who controlled this private army.
“I need a word,” Parsons said in a knowing manner, leaning in toward one of the soldiers.
The soldier rolled his eyes. The other sneered. “I’ll let him know,” he said without moving an inch.
“I found an old colleague,” Parsons said, grabbing Nick by the arm. “He’ll want to talk to him.”
The soldier who had spoken shot a glance at Nick, who stared right back. “Colleague?”
Nick gave him a careless shrug. “Old news. But I can share some news about settlements and train stations.”
“Among other things,” Parsons barked, pulling Nick back a step. “We don’t need any information like that,” he cautioned in a rough whisper.
The soldier exchanged a look with Nick, sharing disgust for Parsons’s grandstanding. After another look to his partner, he approached the people at the table.
Parsons turned on Nick. “Don’t talk about stuff like that. He’s not going to want to hear about settlements.”
“Isn’t that who he is supposed to be working for?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re here to save the human race,” Parsons said with an angry wave of his hand. He peered over the shoulder of the remaining soldier, watching the other one speak to a small cluster of people.
Nick checked his fellow captives. Nadine looked angry, but Arnold looked shocked.
“What about the children?” Nick asked.
Parsons looked back to him with a puzzled expression. “What about them?”
“Why are the press gangs taking the parents and leaving the kids behind?” Nick demanded, unable to keep a leash on his anger any longer. All these people shuffling papers, while others were starving, infuriated him.
Parsons glared at him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My settlement has an army of kids who said their parents were taken at gun point,” Nick snarled.
One of the soldiers leaned forward. “What’s your settlement?”
Nick backpedaled, unsure that he wanted any of them to know where he came from. “It’s small, on the Continental Line north of Clarkeston.”
The soldier gave him a slight nod.
“Settlements, kids, it’s all a moot point if we don’t get the work done,” Parsons barked, taking control of the conversation. “We’re going to have to slaughter at least a hundred cows because we lost the farmers, and I don’t even think we have enough people to do that.”
Nick spun back to Parsons. “Slaughter them? Why?”
“Because we don’t have anyone to take care of them. They’ll just die anyway.”
Nick thought fast. “I know some folks that could take care of them.”
Parsons waved a hand in careless disregard. “It’s not up to me. But you see, these are the things we are trying to deal with here.”
“Why not let everyone know? There are some very knowledgeable people out there,” Nick said.
“Are you nuts? We’d be overrun.”
“By whom?”
“The fact that you have to ask that question just shows how ill informed you are.”
The soldier returned. “He’ll see him.”
Parsons smirked, stepping forward, but the soldier blocked his path. “Just him.”
Nick followed the soldier over to the table. As he got closer, he could see that it was a map of the United States with the train lines laid out. A few settlements were marked in, including High Meadow and a couple he knew were abandoned. There were also a number of labs and factories indicated. He tried to memorize locations, before anyone realized what he was doing.
The people around the table stopped speaking, turning all eyes on him. An older man with gray hair and a worn expression beckoned as he walked away to a cozy seating of leather armchairs. He gestured to a seat across from him as he sank down with a groan.
“What can you tell me about the settlements?”
Nick stared at the man trying to make an instant assessment. There had been no greeting or introduction. He didn’t even know the man’s name. The president looked like a bored business man, not the leader of a shattered nation. Until Nick understood what they were doing here, he didn’t want to say too much, so he said the obvious. “They’re nervous about the winter food supply with all the train stations closed.”
“I imagine they are.”
Nick remained impassive under the man’s scrutiny, his blue eyes cold with skepticism.
“That’s not new information,” the president said with forced patience. He glanced back to the table with a look that said his time was being wasted.
“Why is this all a secret? Why did you shut down the trains? Why is the weather center offline?” Nick couldn’t stop the questions pouring out of his mouth.
“You’re not here to ask questions.”
“Why am I here?”
“To help us bring the country back together.”
“In what way?”
“We’re working to get the state governments reestablished.”
Nick’s jaw dropped before he could stop himself. He couldn’t imagine how that could help. “To what purpose?”
“Better regulations. Settlements are popping up like mushrooms. We need to register them, get a handle on what they are producing, so we can distribute the wealth more evenly. And of course reduce redundancy. No point in having everyone grow wheat.” He chuckled as if that were a joke, but Nick’s heart sank. That statement alone proved the man’s ignorance of the reality outside his cloistered existence.
“I thought you had a...um, department for settlements.”
“We do, but it isn’t very efficient. Settlements are spread out across the whole of this immense country. We need to inspect them, verify the population, the products, quality of the products they’re producing. Then we can centralize the shipments and redistribute more equitably.”
It sounded canned to Nick, worn at the edges from overuse and patently false. Creeping dread tiptoed up Nick’s spine. He had worked in government long enough to know how to parse this kind of double-speak. They wanted to take food away from anyone producing it, and he had serious doubts about the redistribute part. “Many of the settlements are barely self sufficient so they don’t have anything to, er, export.”
“See that’s the thing that people don’t understand. A few bushels of wheat here, a dozen cows there, it isn’t enough to sustain th
e town, but if you put it all together, there will be enough for everyone.”
The math didn’t add up, but Nick nodded because he knew he was expected to. If he started objecting now, they wouldn’t tell him anything more. “I see.”
“So what can you tell me?”
“Well, there’s raiders. I knew of a small settlement that was producing dried fish. They had a good stock of it until raiders came in. Killed almost everyone there.”
“And the fish?”
Nick shivered at the blatant disregard for the human losses. “Destroyed.”
“Are they going to start back up?”
Nick gritted his teeth, forcing down a burning anger. It took great effort to keep a calm expression on his face. “No one left to do the work,” he said in a neutral tone.
“Damn shame. Although, I’m not sure what we could use the dried fish for. Soup?” He made a face. “No, we need cattle men and dirt farmers right now. Know any of those?”
“Ran into a family that had been farming, but raiders again. Ran them off and burned the crops.”
“All of them?”
“The folks lost two men and a woman to the raiders.”
“No I mean the crops. What were they growing?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“That was a mistake because that is the sort of information we need. We are putting together a committee to prepare a report on the settlements to forecast production numbers. Once we have that in hand, we will be able to act.” The president looked past Nick’s shoulder waving to someone across the room. “Sorry son, I need to go. A million things to see to.”
Nick jerked to his feet, a whole new bubble of anger working its way up his chest. Son? The man was hardly a decade older than him. “What about the raiders and the pressgangs?”
He got a vague hand gesture in return as the president melded back into the circle of people pointing and murmuring by the table.
The soldier rejoined Nick. “Nice chat?”