Super Pulse (Book 4): Defect

by Conifer, Dave

  “You mean, charcoal like them little briquets you put in your grill to cook burgers?” another asked.

  Nick couldn’t remember the man’s name, but knew he’d come from Lockwood. “Kind of,” Nick answered. “But better. When it comes to charcoal, homemade is better. It burns hotter and lasts longer. And it’s easy to make. You’ll see.”

  “I’ve seen that we got bags of it in the Warehouse,” the voice persisted. “Kingsford or something. What are we making it ourselves for?”

  Nick tried to hide his annoyance. This man just didn’t get what they were up against, even after the trials he’d suffered before being rescued from his hometown. Their future wasn’t in the finite supplies they managed to loot from the local hardware stores. “That won’t last forever,” he said, probably too dismissively. “And there’s no more where that came from. I already used a lot of that up, actually. And most of what we make will be for the Blacksmith shop. I’ll be using tons of it there.”

  “Good enough for me,” the voice said, finally conceding.

  “Now, I need a couple volunteers up here,” Nick told them. “Bring a big barrel and your little can. I’ll talk the volunteers through it. Then, the rest of you can try.”

  A twenty-something kid with wild reddish hair and a long chin-strap beard stepped forward, dragging a barrel and can with him. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  Nick remembered him, just not his name. He’d been working with Dwayne Griffin on rebuilding a solar inverter back before it got too cold to do anything but wait for Spring. “Thanks. Hey, what’s your name again?”

  “Anthony,” he answered. “Anthony Palozzi. Just call me ‘Ant.’”

  “Great, thanks Ant,” Nick said. “I need one more.” He was shocked when Christie Moon weaved forward through the pack. He hadn’t even known she was there. He and Christie had a rough history, but they’d somehow managed to become friends. It had been ugly, but the two shared a bond after her husband’s demise led to the Lockwood mission last fall. In fact, her husband’s demise was that bond. They’d always be connected.

  “I’ll do it, Nick,” Christie said as she joined Anthony in the front.

  The group gathered around as Nick gave instructions to the two demonstrators, urging the rest of them to break into groups, spread out and mimic what the volunteers were doing. First, they filled the can with the scraps from the firewood pile. “Use the small stuff from the left side,” he advised. He’d learned by trial and error that the quality of the wood didn’t matter; a bit of rot wouldn’t harm the final product at all. That made this project even more beneficial, since they were using some of the wood that would otherwise have been cast aside.

  “After you fill it, it has to be turned upside down and dropped into the bigger barrel,” Nick said. “The trick is to keep from dumping out the wood when you’re flipping it over. You have to flip it real quick, or just find a way that works for you. The point is that it should be upside down with all the wood still in it.” Even though he knew what to expect, he laughed as most groups fumbled helplessly, spraying their wood scraps as they tried with futility to invert the smaller can without losing its contents. It was a learned skill.

  “What I do is turn the barrel on its side and slide the can in,” he said. Some groups tried this, while others came up with various processes, most of which resulted in comical failure. One woman actually ended up in the barrel herself, but emerged triumphantly while pointing out that she’d successfully inverted the can without losing as much as a twig. Nick made a mental note to eliminate the ad-libbing next time. He’d show them his way and that would be it.

  Twenty minutes later, after everybody had wrestled their cans into place, they moved on. Firewood was stuffed inside the barrels around the inverted cans. “Now we just have to start the fire and cook the wood in the small cans for a couple of hours.” He looked around. “That’s right. We’re actually cooking the wood. If you look at the bottom of the barrel, you’ll see that I cut some holes. That’ll feed air to the fire from below.” He walked around with a can of gas, pouring some into each team’s barrel. After he used a butane lighter to ignite the first barrel, the groups lit scraps of wood and passed the fire around. “Don’t get used to this,” he warned the group as he held the gas can up. “Once we start production we’ll make fire the old-fashioned way.”

  After every barrel was burning the group dispersed, with Nick and a few volunteers remaining to keep an eye on the flames. The rest returned four hours later, after the fires were burned out and the barrels cooled. Each group extracted their cans from the barrels and dumped the contents.

  “It don’t look like charcoal,” grumbled the same voice that had dogged Nick from the beginning. “I thought—”

  “What you mean is that it doesn’t look like the stuff you buy at the supermarket in a paper sack,” corrected Nick. How did we ever let this guy into Tabernacle? “Trust me. What we just made is better. I’ve used it.”

  After the lesson was over and everybody had left, Nick scooped the new charcoal into wheelbarrow and rolled it into the Blacksmith shop, where he dumped it into a bin. They’d stumbled a bit, but in the end the students had turned out a good batch. They’d only get better at it. As far as he was concerned, the Charcoal Factory was born. It wasn’t much of a yield, but the group had been small. Once they started production he hoped they could have more people and assign them to babysit multiple barrels, so as to produce much more per run.

  Nick enjoyed a deep feeling of satisfaction as he collected the barrels and cans to store them behind the Blacksmith Shop. It could have gone better, but he knew it would work. As soon as he could, he’d look into finding a way to put a lid on the cans, to make it easier to flip them without spilling their contents. Overall, though, it had been a tremendous success. The work he’d do producing charcoal, as well as what he’d eventually create in the Blacksmith Shop, was important. He was contributing, and it felt good. He didn’t think there was anybody in Tabernacle who could feel any different about it. Not even Roethke.

  ~~~

  As it turned out, neither Matt nor Ellie Shardlake nor their twin toddlers were anywhere to be seen at the dinner hour. It took a bit of snooping for Nick to confirm this. Now that winter weather had set in, campers were no longer able to eat together outside at the communal tables that had sprung up among the cabins in the Village. Instead, they took their food from the delivery wagon into their own cabins, where they ate in the company of their housemates.

  “Like, maybe they’re eating down at the Water Plant,” Dewey suggested as he poked at the meager portions of venison and dried blueberries on his plate. He looked across the table at Nick. “I know, I know, that’s the first place you looked.”

  Nick stabbed the slab of deer meat on his own plate with his fork and held it up. “What are the chances that you were the one who sliced this delicacy up?”

  “Tell me about it,” Dewey snorted. “Like, about a hundred percent?” Against his wishes, he’d been assigned to work as a butcher several months ago, despite his aversion to anything having to do with blood. Since then he’d toiled daily in the Slaughterhouse, cutting up venison to be sent to the Smokehouse. Rarely did a night pass without a few minutes of Dewey’s laments about his day’s work. Nick had been lobbying to have him reassigned to the Blacksmith Shop, or even the up-and-coming Charcoal Factory, but so far the rulers of Tabernacle had turned a deaf ear.

  ~~~

  “I’m a little worried about Matt,” Nick admitted later, when he and Dewey were back in their cabin preparing to sleep. “And his family. It isn’t like him to drop out of sight like this.”

  Before Dewey could answer, the cabin door flew open and two Sec Forces stepped inside. Eying their muddy boots and watching the snow flurries by candlelight as they fluttered inside, Nick felt a surge of anger. Why does authority always act this way here in Tabernacle? But he stifled his feelings. Better to stay out of trouble, a lesson he’d learned the hard way.


  “A Sentinels Meeting’s been called,” one of the Sec Forces said tersely as the other took a step into the cabin and looked around. “Ten o’clock, at the Meetinghouse.”

  Nick suddenly recognized the second of the stern intruders. She was one of the widows who’d come from Lockworth. Her name was Jane, he remembered. She’d been one of the women who he and Dewey had cornered in a basement the first day there. He still remembered her cowering with the dozen young children she’d been leading on a food-scavenging mission. He wondered if she recognized them. If she did, her expression didn’t betray it. She looked different; her face was no longer so skeletal now that she was enjoying a steadier diet, albeit an unimaginative and repetitive one. He wouldn’t have pegged her as Sec Force material, but she seemed to be pulling it off. After both Nick and Dewey silently nodded their understanding, the armed visitors turned and left, pulling the door closed behind them.

  “Why do they call it a ‘Sentinels Meeting’, anyway?” Dewey asked. “Like, are you the sentinel?”

  “Beat’s me,” Nick said. “Somehow it makes them feel important to give everything a dramatic name. You could be the Sentinel for our cabin if you want it. But I’m guessing we know what this is about,” Nick said. He shook his head. “It seems bad. It’s got to be about Matt, don’t you think? I hope it’s not what I’m thinking. I’m losing all my old neighbors. All my friends.”

  “You don’t know it’s that,” Dewey countered. “What are the odds that, like, the whole family, you know, bought the farm at exactly the same time?”

  “It doesn’t seem that unlikely to me,” Nick answered. “Why not? They’re together a lot.”

  “You mean, like, if one goes down, they all go down?” Dewey asked.

  “That’s pretty much what I mean,” Nick replied.

  “I don’t think so,” Dewey said. “I bet somebody found them, safe and sound, and they just want to spread the word as fast as possible.”

  “I was hoping to hit the sack soon,” Nick said. “So much for that.” A Sentinels Meeting, a recently-established mechanism to facilitate instant communication across the camp, pre-empted everything. When one was called, a designated representative from every cabin was required to attend. There were no exceptions. Nick was the representative from the cabin he shared with Dewey, so now he knew how he’d be spending the evening instead of diving into bed to escape the cold the way he usually did.

  ~~~

  Forty-five minutes later Nick bundled himself up, wearing two layers of clothing on bottom and three on top. He was expected in the Meetinghouse in ten minutes, but he usually made it a point to be fashionably late when The Committee summoned him. Sometimes the small victories like that kept him going.

  “Hey, like, wake me up when you get back,” Dewey said. Nick had thought his roommate was already asleep, and wasn’t even going to say goodbye. “So you can tell me what happened.”

  “Sure,” Nick agreed. “I just hope it won’t be a long meeting.” He opened the door and stepped outside without another word.

  He’d taken only a few steps into the darkness, his mind harking back to his Construction subcommittee boss’s unfulfilled prediction that somebody would figure out how to pave over the sea of mud they lived in, when the sound of splashy footsteps from behind him cut through the silence. In that instant, Nick somehow knew in his heart that the noise signaled the presence of the man who’d seemingly made it his mission, ever since Nick had joined the group and come to Tabernacle, to make him miserable. It had to be Roethke. Nick knew full well that if Roethke had gone out of his way to stand in the icy rain waiting outside the cabin door, there was something dangerous afoot, something that Roethke was planning to exploit at Nick’s expense. That was Roethke’s way. But what could it be?

  “Hey, Roofer, I thought I’d do you a favor and give you a head’s up on the meeting agenda,” Roethke said as he approached Nick. “One might say it concerns you. If one was in the habit of understating the facts, that is.”

  Nick knew for certain now that not only was something indeed awry, it was something that hit close to home for him. Roethke could never hide his glee when there was bad news that involved Nick, and he always made sure to deliver the information as quickly as possible, and in person, so he could watch Nick’s face as he twisted the knife.

  “Nice to see you too, Roethke,” Nick said, trying to hide his sudden agita but knowing full well that Roethke was watching for it. “Did you come to walk me over?”

  “I already told why I’ve come,” Roethke answered. “But we’d better walk while we talk. Unlike you, I don’t take punctuality lightly.”

  Both shoved their hands into pockets, put their heads down, and began the hike across camp to the Armory. There were others making the same journey, of course. It was too dark to identify them, but there were wet, sloppy footsteps to be heard in every direction.

  “Is this about Matt?” Nick asked. The rain and frigid winds stung his face. All he wanted to do was make it to the Meetinghouse and get inside. “Nobody’s seen him since this morning. Including me,” he added.

  “Yes, it’s about him,” Roethke allowed. “But not just him.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Nick acknowledged. “His entire family. I’m kinda’ worried. We all are.”

  Roethke grabbed Nick’s arm and pulled him into the shadows. “You really don’t know anything about this, do you? You’re not just playing dumb? It’s always hard to tell with you.”

  “About what?” Nick asked, yanking his arm away. “You tell me. You came all this way to pester me, Roethke. So tell me what you know.”

  “I will, then,” Roethke said. “It’s not just the water boy and those always-hungry kids of his that are absent without leave. There are others. That’s what we’ll be talking about tonight.”

  That’s scary, Nick thought. But what’s that got to do with me? Knowing Roethke, there had to be something. He was about to ask, but held back. That was exactly what Roethke was going for. Instead, he stepped around Roethke and resumed the sloppy trek without another word. But already it was dawning on him. If there were others missing as well, he had an idea who they might be. And it wasn’t going to be good for him if he was right.

  Ah,” Roethke said, after double-timing it to catch up. “No snappy yet witless retort? You’re suddenly without words? I take it you’ve finally deduced what I’m alluding to?”

  “Nah,” Nick said. “I have something in my teeth from dinner that I’m trying to dig out with my tongue. So how about you quit with the riddles, and spit it out?”

  Roethke sighed in apparent exasperation, an exasperation that Nick knew was feigned. It was part of his act. “A lot of others besides your bowling night buddy are unaccounted for. Thirty-two of them, to be exact. And a lot of materials, food and supplies. You know, the ones we carefully rationed out per diem to last us until Spring?”

  It was getting worse by the moment. “So what’s that got to do with me?” Nick asked, unable to help himself. The icy rain was changing back to snow. He gathered his homemade scarf around his neck and jammed his gloveless hands as far into his pockets as they would go.

  “Simple,” Roethke said, stopping in his tracks and waiting for Nick to do the same. “Except for the water boy, the defectors came from among that rabble you insisted on dragging back from that backwater town. Those faithful converts to Tabernacle you were so proud of? They’ve deserted us, and robbed us while they were doing it. So way to go, Roofer. Anytime you have any more visions for our future, please be sure to share.” He turned and resumed his stride toward the Meetinghouse, leaving Nick standing in the mud with his mouth hanging open.

  Three

  “Hey,” the driver of the seventies-era Oldsmobile said, reaching over to the passenger seat and patting the shoulder of the man who was wedged up against the door with his eyes closed. "Maybe you should wake up." When the passenger’s eyes opened halfway, the driver wasted no time. “Hey, what do you see up there?” He poked
his passenger again, as if to prod him back to consciousness faster. “You see what I see?”

  Having met just a few hours earlier, they knew each other only by apparent nicknames. When asked, the passenger had introduced himself as “Squid.” That was the first name that popped into his head when he realized that, for no logical reason, he didn’t want to divulge his real name. The driver immediately replied that his name was “Plankton.”

  “Plankton? You’re kidding, right?” Squid had asked.

  “Not unless you are,” Plankton had replied. “Squid.”

  Squid knew he had no right to complain. Now, several hours later, he still didn’t know what to make of Plankton. His words made sense most of the time, but he spoke in a lilting, whimsical style that Squid couldn’t wrap his head around. And he always had that faint smile on his face. He reminded Squid of his wife that time when she had dental surgery, and the anesthesia took a long time to wear off.

  Plankton was a big guy, at least six foot three, Squid estimated. Although he spoke like he’d grown up in the states, he had the dark hair and swarthy skin of somebody with biological roots in the Pacific. The Philippines was his best guess. Unlike most contemporary men, his salt and pepper hair was short and he wore no beard. That look was difficult to maintain in current conditions. A stickler for personal grooming himself, Squid had tried to do the same for a while before giving up and joining the bearded masses. All in all, Squid was still working on his assessment of his new partner.

  After sitting up all the way, Squid looked over his shoulder into the back seat, where the diminutive black woman who’d introduced herself as “Lou Barley” was watching quietly. He doubted that was her real name, but what’s in a name these days, anyway? She’d come in a package deal with Plankton. His first impression was that Plankton and Lou hadn’t been traveling together very long, either.