He nodded and shot her a toothy grin. “Oh, I see.”
“The man’s definitely hitting on you, girl,” Mulligan said over the radio.
“Oh hush,” Leona whispered into her microphone.
“The commander of the next vehicle that’ll arrive is a black man,” Andrews said. “His name’s Jim Laird. I don’t know if that’s important, but there is a fair degree of diversity at Harmony.”
The black man motioned toward the crowd behind him. “As you can see, I’m pretty much surrounded by white folks out here, so any color addition is something I’d welcome.”
“Well, a melanin infusion might be in your future. I’m sorry, sir ... what’s your name?” Andrews asked.
“Sean Griffith.”
Andrews held out his hand. “Hey, I’m Mike.”
Griffith clasped Andrew’s hand in his, and his grip was strong. “Hey, Mike!”
“I’m Leona,” Leona said when Griffith turned toward her. She stuck out her hand, and Griffith took it.
“Hello!” he said, grinning again. He held onto her hand a little too long and it became awkward. Leona smiled at him.
“Sean? I’m not really single,” Leona said.
“Preach it, sister,” Mulligan said over the radio.
“Oh!” Sean released Leona’s hand immediately, favoring her with a big toothy grin. “I’m so sorry. Didn’t mean to latch onto you like that. It’s, uh, you know ...”
“It’s all good,” Leona said, smiling back at him. “Really.” With that, she stepped forward and hugged the man. Andrews was surprised. That was entirely uncharacteristic of her, and he began to wonder just how well he knew his executive officer after all.
“That’s okay,” Mulligan said over the radio. “I’m not targeting him with the minis or anything.”
The hug did it. The crowd pushed closer to the vehicle, and Andrews was suddenly overwhelmed by dozens of people wanting to shake hands. They introduced themselves in a flurry, and clapped him on the shoulder and the back, peppering him with questions about the rest of the country, about Harmony Base, about the trip to Oregon, and about the rig. Andrews answered as many questions as he could, but there was precious little to tell in the time he had available to him. Every few seconds, a new face would appear, and he would have to reset and start a new conversation. It was difficult to make it seem meaningful, and he found himself quickly inundated.
“Captain, we’ve lost line of sight on both of you,” Mulligan transmitted from the rig. There was no lightness to the command sergeant major’s voice.
“We’ll just have to deal with that, Mulligan,” Andrews responded.
Buchek stepped in quickly. “All right, folks, all right! Give the captain and the lieutenant some room, now!” He motioned at Griffith. “Sean, help me out here!”
“Ease back, guys,” Sean said. “Let’s all be cool about things, all right?”
“Hell, I want a hug too!” a wild-eyed man with a bushy beard and long, lank hair crowed with a cackle. He looked at Leona like a thirsty man might regard a cold premium beer.
“Maybe the lady will set up a booth and you can pay a dollar for a hug,” Sean said. He stepped between Leona and the man, holding up his hands while smiling.
The press of bodies abated then, and Andrews sighed in relief. He turned toward Leona, but found himself facing the man Trumbull then. He was taller than Andrews, and had a wider frame, but the way his clothes hung off his body told him that Trumbull wasn’t the man he once was. He definitely looked like a linebacker who had been lost in a desert.
“You really here to help us?” he asked. His gaze bore into Andrews like two drill bits.
“That’s all I’m here for,” Andrews replied. “We may be running behind on things, but at least we showed up. Right?”
Trumbull looked at him for a long moment, then slowly nodded. “Okay. Okay.” He reached out and shook Andrews’s hand. “Sorry if I was in your face too much before.”
“It’s cool, man. It’s cool. Everyone’s been through a lot, some more than others.”
Trumbull sighed heavily. “Yeah. Ma’am,” he said to Leona with a nod as he turned and walked away with the rest of the crowd. Reluctantly, the crowd slowly dispersed. There were other things that had to be attended to, and the arrival of the SCEV, while exciting, wasn’t helping the work get done.
“Well, that wasn’t too terrible,” Leona said.
“So what would you folks like to do first?” Buchek asked, rubbing his hands together. Like the crowd, the clouds were thinning overhead and he regarded them speculatively for a moment. “Looks like we might get some sun today.”
“I guess first we’d like to look around a bit and see what supplies you folks need up front,” Andrews said. “Clearly, medical supplies are at the top of the list. We have a full starter package we can pull from the rig’s stores and hand off to you. It’s not going to support this many people, but it’ll be of some help, for sure.”
“Anything you want to donate to the cause would be greatly appreciated,” Buchek said. “But there’s got to be something you want from us, right? Something you need us to do?”
“Be human,” Andrews said. “Help us to help you.”
Buchek regarded him silently for a moment. “There’s got to be more than that.”
“There isn’t. Not this time,” Andrews said. “I promise.”
Buchek reached out and put his hand on Andrews’s shoulder. “Just to be clear, if you’re lying to me? I’ll kill you personally,” he said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’ll spend ten minutes gutting you for everyone to see, just to draw a crowd and provide some entertainment.”
Andrews considered that for a moment. “Well. Here’s hoping you’ll find another diversion.”
“Yeah.” Buchek released him. “Here’s hoping.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Once the crowd had slowly dispersed, Buchek offered to take Andrews and Leona for a walk around the community, or an “inspection tour” as he called it. After some discussion, it was decided that Mulligan would join them. KC would remain behind in the SCEV to ensure no one tampered with the rig. The young crew chief was unhappy with the duty, so Andrews made it clear that she would have enough time to get out and see the sights. In the meantime, the vehicle had to remain secure, and that meant at least one person had to remain locked inside. As the others had field experience, it made sense that they be out and about, assessing the community and making plans to support it. KC still wasn’t fully mollified, but she understood the reasoning.
The cloud cover parted and for several hours, the sun shone brightly. Everyone covered up, wearing hats or long-sleeved shirts and pants. Due to the reduction in the ozone layer, the sun’s rays were substantially more powerful than they had been. For the crew from Harmony, the effect was almost dazzling, and Andrews found that even his sunglasses didn’t help all that much. Damp pavement quickly dried, and the sunlight in combination with the light breeze caused the droplets of water clinging to the foliage to evaporate rapidly.
“You all right?” Buchek asked him. He had slipped on his own sunglasses.
“Yeah, fine. Just a little bright out all of a sudden.”
“Well, you’ve been underground for a long time,” Buchek said. “Believe it or not, I actually know how you feel. The sun’s a lot more intense than it used to be.”
There were several dozen structures organized inside the tall walls that had been erected to deter intruders. There was a two-lane main drag that had at most two blocks of businesses, though none of the buildings were more than two stories tall. The structures were weathered and had zero curb appeal, as no one had the time or wherewithal to maintain them, but they weren’t ramshackle constructs that were falling apart. Organized around the center of Sherwood’s downtown area were a collection of houses or small warehouses that had been converted into living quarters. Buchek explained that for the first two years after the war, most of the citizens in the
community had lived underground in an abandoned copper mine near Black Butte that they had steadily renovated in the years leading up to the war. Buchek was unapologetic when he admitted that he and most of his fellows were committed preppers, folks who had spent years if not an entire lifetime preparing for a long-term emergency that might render them cut off from the rest of society. While global thermonuclear war hadn’t been their main worry, the process of preparations had included a multitude of steps that were also applicable to that particular emergency.
“So what were you most afraid of?” Leona asked.
“Myself? Electromagnetic pulse or a pandemic,” Buchek said. “I really thought that a CMD event might take down the entire power grid and leave everyone trapped in the bronze age, or that global warming would release some old bug like the Black Death that was frozen in the ice sheets. It’s one of the reasons I spent almost a million dollars of my retirement money cleaning up the mine. I knew we’d need a place that could provide shelter and concealment for a while. Other people felt the more immediate threats were things like societal unrest or a severe and long-lasting economic depression—they thought those were the big gotchas lurking in the background. Can’t say I disagree, I thought of those things too. But we’d always gotten past those things before.” He snorted. “I hope I don’t sound crazy.”
“You’re talking to people who have been living underground for over a decade,” Mulligan said. Like Andrews and Leona, he was fully kitted out for combat even though it didn’t seem necessary. His gear and weapons made him look even bigger than he already was, and several of the citizens of the Sherwood community stopped to stare when he walked past.
“Hey, big man! Were you a basketball player?” one twenty-something shouted from a nearby wood shed.
“Nah,” Mulligan replied. “I threw grenades for a living, not basketballs. So Stan, you weren’t thinking Ranier or Washington were going to blow their tops?”
“What, you mean with them erupting into volcanoes or something?” Buchek waved a hand dismissively. “Never even thought about it. I probably thought more about nukes than volcanic eruptions. There were some people in the community who worried about those things, but most of us were more concerned with civil unrest.”
“You thought the country was headed for civil war?” Andrews asked. Even though he’d been young during the days before the Sixty-Minute War, he could well recall the acrimonious political and societal climate of the time. It seemed that everyone was at each other’s throat for one transgression or another.
“It wouldn’t have surprised me,” Buchek said. “Especially with the roller derby that was the US economy back then ... giant booms, fantastic busts, mounting unemployment ... things were becoming messy.”
“So how did you folks come together to create this place?” Andrews asked.
“My family owned a lot of the land, including where the mine was dug,” Buchek said. “Another couple of families owned the remainder. We made Sherwood into a hunting and camping retreat. In fact, it was my father’s only real source of income during the last fifty years of his life. He wanted me to pursue something different, so I did banking first, then aerospace. The family made some good money off the mineral rights from the copper mine, but that came to an end when the mine was tapped out.”
“So all the buildings here were part of your family business?” Leona asked.
“Yes, ma’am. There are six houses, fourteen cottages, and the hunting lodge. That big warehouse over there is where we stored our equipment—you know, trucks, some tractors, a backhoe, things like that. Most everything was gone or picked over by the time we came up from the mine, though. Even parts of the buildings were gone, where people had stripped off the wood and the like for fuel. Had some squatters in some, but we allowed most of them to stay. Those folks who had been aboveground for those first few years, well ... they were all gone by year five. Even the kids.”
“Disease? Cancer?” Andrews asked.
“Both, and in two instances, suicide by firearm,” Buchek said. “Some people just lost hope. It’s a semi-recurrent theme, I’m sorry to say. Everyone’s been damaged by what they went through, by memories of who they lost, by the general hardship of trying to survive where so many others are dying.”
“I hear that,” Mulligan muttered. Leona turned toward him and touched his arm. Mulligan smiled and patted her hand. If Buchek noticed the exchange, he did so without comment.
“One of the things I never foresaw was the mental health issue,” he continued. “I was smart enough to recruit a doctor and engineers and guys with military experience, but I never thought to get a psychologist. Maybe if I had, some folks would still be alive.”
“We can provide that support as well,” Andrews said.
Buchek stopped and looked at Andrews squarely. “Son, what exactly can you not provide? I ask this because it seems like you’re on a mission to sell me a shit-ton of services.”
“We can’t bring back the dead, and we can’t turn back the clock,” Andrews said. “And it’s going to take some time for us to be able to pull things together. We’re still a good distance away from the majority of our stock, but we really can make a difference for your folks.”
Buchek tilted his head. “I’ve been sold a lot of Shinola in my day. Sold more than a little bit of it myself. I appreciate what you’ve given us so far, but you probably don’t want to overpromise anything.”
“He’s not,” Mulligan said. “We’ll be able to do what we say we can, just give us some time.”
“Sure,” Buchek said. “Time’s probably the only commodity left, right?”
“Why don’t you give us the rest of the nickel tour, so we can get a full picture of what we’re dealing with,” Mulligan suggested.
Buchek did just that. The community was in good condition overall, though there were many rough edges. Sanitation was an ongoing concern, as was clean drinking water. Sherwood had access to two reservoirs, but both had a fair amount of toxins present that charcoal filtering and boiling could reduce but not eliminate. Food was another issue. There was enough to go around, but only just. Wild game was consumed, and the people avoided eating any of the major organs like the liver for fear of contamination. A small amount of crops were grown, mostly tomatoes, potatoes, and beans, but the environment wasn’t suitable for large-scale farming despite fertilizer being available. The rainfall was substantial, and when it shone, the sunlight was too bright. Most of the crops were grown inside greenhouses, but those weren’t large enough to provide enough food to get through the year. The only reason Sherwood had lasted as long as it had was from the flu that had killed almost everyone in Bend. It had hit Sherwood as well, and had taken over a hundred people before it had finally run its course.
“It seems heartless to say it, but the flu was probably a blessing in disguise,” Buchek said. “I’d never admit to that publicly, but we’re straddling the red line between being able to feed people or eating them ourselves.”
Andrews thought back to San Jose. “Cannibalism isn’t unknown in the rest of the world,” he said.
Buchek nodded. “I don’t doubt that. Desperate times lead to desperate people. You aren’t about to tell me you folks are eating each other in Harmony Base, are you?”
Andrews laughed. “No, no. Not us. But the folks we’re helping in San Jose.” He took a few minutes to retell the tale of how they had happened upon Law’s group of survivors while looking for replacement parts for the base’s generation system, which had been destroyed during a surprise earthquake. Buchek looked highly skeptical when Andrews relayed the account of Law’s bioengineered mental powers, courtesy of the nanotech he’d been exposed to, and how he’d used those against various members of the SCEV team.
“You gotta be pulling my hog over that,” Buchek said.
“It’s true,” Mulligan said. “As crazy as it sounds, it’s fucking true.”
“Well, what was that like?”
“It was like being
raped,” Leona said. “It’s the only thing I can match it up with.”
“Leona had it worse than the rest of us,” Andrews said. “Law interrogated her pretty closely. Having another mind inside your head when you never gave permission? Seems about right.”
“That so.” Buchek looked at Leona then, as if seeing her for the first time. He stopped and reached out to put his hand on her shoulder. “You, young lady, are apparently made of some pretty strong stuff.”
Leona smiled at him thinly. “Fucker almost broke me,” she said.
Buchek raised a brow. “Almost, or actually did?”
Leona thought about it for a moment. “Almost,” she said.
“Then like I said ... you’re made of some pretty strong stuff.” Buchek resumed walking then. “So, Captain, why are you helping these people?”
“They’re the only ones we’ve found, Stan. And once Law was out of the picture, they wanted our involvement. Their new leader was named Xavier. He was sensible enough to realize that when another team returned and contacted them without shooting them up, that he was looking a gift horse in the mouth. They acted the way they did out of fear of what Law could do to them. Without him being around, they were a hundred percent willing to do whatever they needed to do to return to normalcy.”
“That Xavier sounds like a pretty smart guy,” Buchek said.
“Was. Died from lung cancer a month or so ago. Doesn’t matter—the die’s been cast. We’ll eventually need to relocate them, as they’re starting to have kids. They can’t be on our dole for the rest of their lives,” Andrews said.
“Is that another reason for you coming up here?” Buchek asked. “Looking for a place to relocate those folks?”
“It is,” Andrews admitted.
Buchek grunted. “Well. I’m not keen on having former cannibals in my community. But there are other places where they could set up and start over. But I have to tell you, Mike, from what you’ve told me so far? I’m not loving that.”
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 22