Super Pulse (Book 4): Defect

by Conifer, Dave

  “For the tenth time, this is all in your imagination,” Sarah said. “You’ve let that jerk Roethke get into your head. If I had my way, he’d—”

  When the door swung open, Sarah leaped to her feet, throwing Nick’s hand back at him in the process. By the time he saw who’d arrived, Nick estimated that there were at least five feet between him and Sarah. I guess I’m just another secret around here, he thought as he looked at Sarah’s younger daughter, Ashley, who was leading Allie inside and over to the stove where they held their hands up to warm them.

  “Is she talking?” Nick whispered to Sarah. Little Allie, just five years old, had come to Tabernacle under difficult circumstances, and had witnessed the violent murder of her older brother along the way. Since then, to Nick’s knowledge, she hadn’t spoken a word. Ashley had adopted Allie as a little sister, and the two were close. If Allie had spoken to anybody, it would be Ashley.

  “A word here and there out of the blue,” Sarah replied. “She always looks surprised when it comes out of her mouth.”

  “Hmm,” Nick said. “I guess that’s something.”

  “Hey, Nick!” called somebody from outside the door. “You in there?”

  Nick recognized the voice of Dwayne Griffin. If Dwayne was looking for him, he’d better go find out why. “Guess I’ll be going,” he told Sarah as he stood to leave. “Maybe I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “Tell Dwayne not to be so shy next time,” Sarah said. “We don’t bite in here.”

  Nick snickered as he walked outside, where Dwayne and Miguel Cantos were waiting. “Sorry, bro,” Miguel said. “But we got a delivery for you.”

  “For me?” Nick asked. He looked around. “Where is it?”

  “It’s not here, man,” Dwayne said. “It’s over at your shop.” He faced Miguel. “I’m gonna’ run back over there and tell ‘em we found him. We’ll start unloading it.” Before anybody could reply, he turned and walked away.

  “Oh, okay,” Nick said. “It must be from Carly, right?”

  “Uh huh,” Miguel said with a nod. “She’s there, too.”

  “The timing’s not so great. I was hoping to grab some dinner,” Nick said. “I thought this wasn’t coming until tomorrow.”

  “Well, it’s here now,” Miguel answered flatly. “We would have just dumped it outside the shop and left, but Carly wouldn’t let us.”

  Nick nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s get to it. Dinner wasn’t going to be anything to write home about, anyway.” He ran back to his own cabin for his jacket. When he came back outside he looked for Miguel, but he was gone. He’d be making the walk over to the Blacksmith Shop alone.

  Being left behind by both Dwayne and Miguel was a surprise. He was dealing with a lot of cold shoulders lately, even if Sarah was right and many of them were in his head. But Miguel had always been grateful after Nick stood up for him the previous Fall, and Dwayne was right there with him in Lockwood during the mission that had blackened Nick’s name. How could either of these friends hold a grudge? He certainly never thought Miguel had that in him. Maybe it was just a language barrier thing, he thought hopefully as he walked purposefully toward the shop.

  There were four of them out front of the shop when Nick arrived, all dragging hunks of metal off a wooden cart. Most of the pieces were long and heavy enough that it took two sets of hands to get them over to the front door, where they were being dropped into a growing heap. Without a word Nick grabbed the other end of one slab that Del Ketch was struggling with. It looked like it had come off the bottom of a car. They humped it over with the rest and dumped it on Del’s count of “One, two, three.”

  “I didn’t think we should just leave it lying around outside without letting you know about it,” Carly said to Nick after the cart was fully unloaded. “With the way things are disappearing around here and all.”

  “I hear ya’,” Nick said. “Only thing is, there’s no room inside for it.” He wanted to ask them to move it again, this time into the brush behind the shop, but given that none of them had cracked a smile or even said “Hello,” he knew he wasn’t going to say a word about it. This is all in my imagination, he tried to tell himself. They’re just busy. And tired.

  “So where do you want it?” Dwayne asked. “We’ll get it done.”

  “Yeah, why not?” Del grumbled. “We dragged that cart all the way from the Junk Yard like a team of oxes. What’s a few more feet?”

  “Oxes,” Carly said under her breath, obviously trying to hold in a chuckle.

  That made Nick smile. “Nah, I’ll take care of it. You all go on and get your dinner. Chow time doesn’t do much for me lately, anyway.”

  They didn’t need to be told twice. Once they were gone, Nick dragged the lighter pieces out of sight behind the shop. Most of it was too heavy for him to lift by himself. That’s okay, he decided. If it’s too heavy for me to move, it’s too heavy for anybody to steal. After clearing enough room for the door to swing open, he wiped his hands on his pants and called it quits. The next morning he’d fire up the forge and see about following The Committee’s latest orders. It would be nothing but weapons and farming tools. In that order. He just hoped he was up to the task, given that he hadn’t yet done anything in the shop except practice on scraps.

  ~~~

  Penny Hellikson was excited but nervous as she walked by herself through the cold, muddy camp to the Cannery, where she’d be attending her first work session with the new Farming subcommittee. Although it had been split off from Food Production months earlier, there hadn’t been any activity. There hadn’t been a subcommittee leader, either. All that had changed now, it seemed. This was the afternoon when she’d meet her new boss and get to work.

  And important work it was. She didn’t know the details yet, nor did many others, but apparently the defectors had stolen astonishing amounts of crucial supplies. It was her understanding, though, that somehow the huge stash of seeds that the Scavengers had amassed since the Fall was still safely stored in barrels and bins in the back of The Cannery. Getting them into the ground and growing some food was paramount now. This was especially true, she thought, in light of what Sarah’s daughter had been seeing at the Medical Center about how bad the all-venison diet was for everybody’s health.

  After entering the small building she paused to look around. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw there were about a dozen others already there, waiting to get started. Surprisingly, she knew only about half of them, although there was nobody she hadn’t seen around the camp before. The ones she didn’t know, she assumed, were new residents from Lockwood. That surprised her; with everything that had recently happened, she’d have expected the outsiders to be relegated to less important jobs where they couldn’t do any damage.

  “Hi Penny,” said Nancy Shaughnessy, who’d approached Penny from behind. “I didn’t know you were on this team.” Penny knew Nancy had come from Construction, where she’d worked a lot with Nick. This new subcommittee was turning out to be comprised of borrowed members and new campers. That was probably why nobody seemed to know anybody else, at least not very well.

  “I’m so glad you’re on this team,” Nancy said. “I hardly know anybody here.”

  “Me neither,” Penny said. “I think most of them are from Lockwood. Yuck.”

  “That must be it,” Nancy agreed.

  “After what they did, I don’t think they should be here,” Penny continued, her voice growing louder and angrier. “If we had to take them in, let ‘em work on cleaning the bathrooms and cutting firewood, maybe. But not here. Not where there’s anything they can steal,” she finished, emphasizing the last word at a volume all could hear.

  Nancy made an agitated face as she gestured for Penny to quiet down. “Penny,” she said in a whisper. “Everybody can hear you.”

  “Who cares?” Penny said. “Let them hear me. Maybe it’ll stop them from stealing the seeds. They’ve already taken everything else.”

  “What’s got into you?” Nancy
asked, no longer bothering to speak quietly. The room had gone quiet, and all eyes and ears were now on them.

  Before Penny could answer, a man and a woman, both about thirty years old, had stomped across the room and were standing firmly in Penny’s personal space. Penny had no idea who the two were, which of course told her exactly where they’d come from. “Yeah, we’re from Lockwood,” the man snapped. “What about it?”

  “What about it?” Penny yelled back. “I’ll tell you what about it! We brought you into our camp and saved your lives, and you pay us back by stealing nearly everything we have and sneaking away with it! That’s what! You—”

  “I’m still here, and I didn’t steal anything from you!” the woman shouted. “And neither did anybody else in here! If you want to—”

  “We took a lot of chances going over there to rescue you!” Penny interrupted loudly. “My husband got killed! I lost him and my kids lost their father! It was all such a waste. And now we have to watch the rest of you crawling around here, and as soon as you get the chance you’ll—”

  Penny halted in mid-sentence when Nancy grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her away from the confrontation. “Get a grip,” she told Penny. “Get a hold of yourself. Breathe, okay? Let it go. This isn’t you!”

  But the angry man followed them over to where they’d retreated, and wasn’t ready to let it go any more than Penny was. “You can’t talk to my wife like that!” he shouted, his finger jabbing dangerously close to Penny’s face. “I’m sorry about your husband, but you’re not the only one! You think we didn’t lose anybody before your people came? My wife watched both her kids get murdered on the street by—” his voice broke. He coughed, his fist balled up over his mouth momentarily. “By those thugs. The ones your husband and the rest of them kicked out of our town.” He paused, growing calmer as he pulled his matted hair back from his face, now streaming with tears. “I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore,” he said through his tears. “I guess we should be thanking you. I don’t know anymore.” He turned and walked away.

  “That’s about enough of this!” It was the unmistakable voice of Grover Monroe, Penny and the rest of them knew immediately. They’d never heard him speak so loudly. She wondered how long he’d been there. Had he witnessed the whole fight? Somehow, even at that volume, he retained his trademark baritone. The crowd parted as Grover made his way through. When he reached the door in the back he pulled a key from his pocket before turning around to face the group. “We have a lot to do. There’s no time for any of this nonsense.” Although he was twenty feet away now, he looked directly at Penny. “The issues you spoke of aren’t your responsibility. It’s under control. It’s handled. You can and will focus only on your own job. Understood?”

  Penny understood nothing, including why Grover himself was even there. It didn’t alleviate her concerns or diminish her anger, the latter of which she had only discovered seconds ago. But one thing she knew was that when Grover spoke, or even showed up at all, it was time to shut up and follow orders. Not trusting her voice, she nodded her agreement.

  “And you?” Grover asked, turning to the husband, who’d returned to be at his wife’s side. Both of them nodded as well, with a feeble “Yes,” escaping the woman’s lips. Penny realized that she still had no idea who they were or even what their names were.

  “If emotion is your game, then of course you’re free to like or dislike each other,” Grover continued. “But if you want to stay here at Tabernacle, you will do your jobs and keep your feelings to yourselves.”

  ~~~

  In short order, Grover explained that he was there because a leader for the new Farming subcommittee hadn’t been chosen yet. There was no time for delay, he explained. Planting season was coming fast. So he would oversee the work until a permanent leader was found.

  The task of the day was, in a word, sorting. The Scavengers had done a good job of acquiring seeds since orders had been placed several months ago. One of the mysteries in Penny’s mind was unraveled when Grover told them that the huge cache of seeds weren’t actually in the tiny Cannery, but had been stored in the Warehouse. Only the roster of workers and lists of seeds was there. So once Grover had retrieved those, the entire group left the building and filed across the road.

  “I still don’t like it,” Penny grumbled to Nancy as they walked, not caring who heard her so long as it wasn’t Grover Monroe. “They don’t belong.”

  “Penny, they’re the ones who stayed,” Nancy countered. “They came here today to work, just like you did. You’re tearing down the wrong people.” She put her arm around Penny’s shoulder. “You heard Grover. We have work to do. Let’s just get it done.”

  “He’s a freak,” Nancy snapped. “He’s like some kind of robot with a computer for a brain. Did you know he rejected us at first? All our neighbors could come to Tabernacle, but not us, because Tom didn’t have any useful skills,” she continued, the anger dripping from the last two of her words. “It was only after Tom showed he could be a good soldier that they let us in. But then they assigned him to be a glorified babysitter once we got here.” She shrugged. “I wish he’d stuck with that job, now that I think of it. The soldiering didn’t work out so good.”

  “Task at hand, Penny,” Nancy replied. “Task at hand. That’s how you’ll get through this.”

  “Thanks, Grover Junior,” Penny said. But the tight-lipped smile that crossed her face signaled Nancy that it would be okay. For now, at least.

  ~~~

  Penny was assigned to work on the potatoes, which would be the first crop to be planted. As Grover explained, potatoes would thrive during the cooler growing season, and would struggle once the weather turned hot. She hadn’t known until that day that the “seeds” for potatoes were potatoes themselves. It all made sense. Now she knew why sometimes potatoes that had been stored in dark, damp surroundings emerged from their hiding place covered with strange little bumps and appendages. They were trying to grow. “Once they’re in the ground,” the surgeon told his would-be farmers, “It should only be about ninety days before we can start harvesting.” And of course a good portion of the crop would be saved for the next planting, tentatively scheduled for late Summer.

  The potatoes in the Warehouse had indeed started the germinating process, just as Penny remembered they often did. They were divided into barrels that had been borrowed from the Water Plant and moved to a spot near the front door. When the time came and the designated Crop Fields had been plowed, these barrels would be transported there so that planting could begin.

  Penny glanced around at the other subcommittee members to see what they were working on. The corn “seeds” were lifeless kernels that had been stripped from the cob. She found it hard to believe that they’d grow at all. She didn’t get a good look at the wheat seeds, which resembled shelled peanuts from a distance. Grover was telling the wheat workers that although there wasn’t much wheat grown in New Jersey, it was actually a tolerant plant that should adapt reasonably well. “With any luck we’ll be baking bread by September,” she heard him say.

  The last of the bulk crops that year would be soybeans, seeds for which had also been acquired in large numbers. In addition, there would also be smaller plots set aside for growing carrots, cucumbers, radishes and tomatoes, from what Penny could see.

  Despite the incident with which the work session had started, and her dissatisfaction with some of those with whom she’d be working, Penny was happy with her new assignment. Working out in the sun on something so important was going to agree with her. It was just what she needed, and she was looking forward to it. There was something about being around the seeds, which would eventually flourish and grow into food, that gave her a calming hope for the future of her children.

  Thirteen

  The Shardlakes spent their first night in Atlantic City together in a room near the top of the Havana Tower at the Tropicana. Lying awake with worry for most of the night, Matt realized after a few hours how many
questions he had about his captors, and this colony in which he found himself and his family imprisoned. Aside from Rollie and a few of his henchmen, he hadn’t even seen any of them. He knew that some answers would come soon, when he’d be working side by side with them to fix their water supply. That didn’t do much about driving the questions and concerns from his head long enough for him to fall asleep.

  The next morning he was up early enough to see the sun rise over the ocean. Ever curious about whether he was in his new home or simply a jail cell, he poked his head into the hallway and encountered an armed man with a sour expression on his face. Rollie had called this guard “Chappy” the night before, he thought he remembered. After a quick nod he retreated into the room. Jail it was, he told himself grimly. He also made a snap decision. That would have to change. These people needed him. If they expected his help, they were going to have to treat him and his family better than this.

  “Are you sure?” Ellie asked when he explained all this to her a few minutes later. “It’s so unlike you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Matt answered. “I don’t know where it’s coming from. I’m usually ‘Matthew the Milksop,’ right?”

  “I never said that,” she answered.

  “I know,” Matt said. “I did.”

  It just seems risky to start making demands,” Ellie said. “These men scare me. Look what they did to get us all here.”

  “I’ll be careful about it,” Matt promised as he watched one of his sons stir underneath the blankets. “Maybe I’ll play nice until it looks like I’ve actually gotten something done for them. But I know I’m right. And I know they’ll go along with it. If they’re running out of water, they’re desperate for my help.”

  ~~~

  Matt thought it was about eight o’clock when Rollie himself arrived alone, carrying a covered plastic tub that looked like something that had been used for washing dishes in its earlier life. His stomach rumbled when the unmistakable aroma of hot foot wafted towards him even after Rollie had stopped moving. “Hungry?” he asked in a whisper. “I brought you something, since we’ll be leaving before the carts come through.”