by Elle Aycart
Looking suspicious, she complied. Good, that cream was a life saver. “Why the heck is there a humongous pile of dirty diapers in your greenhouse? You some kind of weirdo hoarder?”
Fuck, she was funny. “A single disposable diaper takes five hundred years to decompose. A baby uses an average of six diapers a day for at least two years. Over four thousand diapers per kid. Do the math. We’re drowning in waste. Diapers contain a plant-based material, cellulose, that mushrooms can consume for nutrients as they grow. In three months, the diapers degrade up to 80 percent, leaving behind only a small amount of nonbiodegradable materials.”
Eyes widening, she stared at the pile of diapers, then at the tables. “You’re growing mushrooms on dirty diapers?”
“You see that machine over there? It’s an autoclave that incinerates biological residue.” At her expression of incomprehension, he clarified, “It sterilizes the diapers. They come out biologically clean.”
“You’re serious.”
“Would I come up with such a crazy story if it weren’t true? The greenhouse has two sections: one in darkness down there, and this one with lamps,” Logan explained. “We treat ground-up diapers with mushroom spores and keep them in the dark for the first month. Then we expose them to light. That door leads to the lab, where we do research into the nonbiodegradable materials.”
She headed to the lab and took a peek. It must have passed inspection, because she came back. “So the trucks?”
“We process diapers from all over the county. Other local companies collect the mushrooms and the superabsorbent gel that’s left over. The mushrooms are mostly used for animal feed and fertilizer. The gel waste is shipped to arid areas, to be used in water retention projects. All the interns I have are chemistry undergrads interested in research into nonbiodegradable materials. They sign up to work in my lab for university credit. They aren’t my prisoners. They’ve just arrived from their home countries. School hasn’t begun yet, so their dormitories are still closed. That’s why they’re staying here. As soon as the semester kicks in, they’ll move to campus and come here for several hours a week.”
“That explains a lot,” she mumbled as if to herself. “How did you come up with the idea to use mushrooms for decomposing diapers?”
“Actually, I didn’t. Mexican researchers did. The biggest diaper reclamation project is down there. I read about it and wanted to see if we could break things down more, maybe convert the byproducts. I also wanted to find out if we could implement the Mexican process on a small, sustainable basis in a rural setting. So I stayed in touch with them and tried to adapt their idea to local conditions.”
“Wait—have you been feeding me these mushrooms?”
“No, absolutely not. Though they are edible. I think some of the preppers have managed to get their hands on a few to preserve.”
“Preppers,” Sky repeated.
“Doomsday preppers.”
Sky looked around. Shook her head. “This is crazy,” she declared.
“Tell me about it. How about you put the knife down and we go back in the house now?”
“Carol brought you homemade chicken soup as an apology for spooking you.”
Sky accepted the bowl. “Should I worry she’s laced the broth with an experimental medicine?” Sniffing proved useless. She’d wiped Logan’s cream off her upper lip, but everything still smelled like roses to her.
Logan smiled and sat on the couch with her. “I think you’re safe. They’re drinking it themselves. Or should that be a red flag?”
Probably. She took a spoonful. Man, she was so tired of eating soup. “Has she gotten out of the hazmat suit? Because let me tell you, she freaked the living shit out of me when I found her dressed like that.”
He chuckled, nodding. “I bet.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what? That you were being quarantined by the town’s pandemic squad, or that I collect dirty diapers for a living?”
“Both.”
“The pandemic squad is difficult to explain, and you had a fever. As for the rest”—he shrugged—“who wants to tell an attractive woman he’s in the poo business?”
“You’re in the business of saving the planet. Being environmentally conscious is very much in nowadays.”
“True, but the trendy stuff is all for show. Principles are only principles when they cost you. Most people aren’t ready to put their wallets where their mouths are. Besides, you don’t strike me as the environmentally conscious type, the way you wrinkle your nose at my hair and beard.”
“Fashion is my business. The failed hipster look you have going on is missing that certain meticulous put-together-ness.”
He laughed. “I didn’t know I had a look.”
Yes, he did. Not that he paid much attention. He seemed to throw on whatever clothes he had at hand. But she figured the end result was striking because the frame was gorgeous to begin with.
She took a sip of the soup, trying to get her mind out of the gutter. “I have another question. Why haven’t they quarantined you?”
“I haven’t sneezed yet, but give it time. I’m under watch and have strict instructions to keep away from public places unless it’s totally necessary.” He turned the full force of his beautiful eyes on her. “No one is detaining you here. They would let you leave town, but your car isn’t repaired yet, and the roads are a mess. I suggest you just sit it out for another day or two. If you must go for a walk, they can’t stop you, but God forbid someone else gets the flu. They’ll court-martial you and find some way to hold it against you for freaking ever, believe me.”
No shit. “I heard there’s a doctor in the town. Would it help if I got a clean bill of health from him?” She never went to the doctor, much less for flu, but this was force majeure.
“Honestly? I don’t know. It’s a fifty-fifty shot. Some of these people make their own antibiotics. They stitch up their own lacerations, splint their own broken bones.” At her stunned expression, he added, “Told you. They’re nuts.”
“What exactly are doomsday preppers? Is that a metaphor for—”
His snort interrupted her. “No, they mean it quite literally. They’re prepping for the end of the world as we know it. The pandemic squad, you’ve met. Others are prepping for an electromagnetic pulse from the sun, an earthquake, a tsunami, the collapse of the economic system, an oil crisis—you name it, they’re prepping for it.”
“I thought preppers… you know, crazy survivalists, lived in Alaska.”
“Oh, believe me, I’ve come to learn they are everywhere. Minnesota is quite popular for preppers as a matter of fact. It’s a sparsely populated, open-carry state. Far enough away from Yellowstone in case it erupts, far enough away from the ocean in case of a tsunami. Not much fear of other natural disasters either—if you don’t mind the freezing cold, that is.”
Jesus, this was surreal. “How did you end up in a town like this?” He’d said he was a chemist working with a university. That meant a college degree, maybe several. Surely he understood the madness in all this.
“I came to be closer to my sister. Inexplicably, this place grows on you. The drills are fun.”
“Drills? What drills?”
He chuckled. “You don’t want to know. If you’re lucky, you’ll be safely in Paris before the next one.”
“Why do they call you the Alchemist?”
“To bug me, mostly. Although, believe it or not, in a town full of doomsday preppers, being able to create chemical compounds from basic materials and medicines from plants are highly sought-after skills. I’m hot shit around here. A rock star among preppers.”
Sky laughed. “So you’re in a town full of people preparing for the end of the world as we know it, and you’re decomposing diapers in order to save it?”
She’d meant it as a joke, but his expression was anything but amused. “I wanted to do something with my life aside from inventing pills to cure the illnesses we created with our previous pi
lls.” Before she could ask about the bitterness behind those words, he changed the subject. “You said your business is fashion, but you’re a teacher?”
“I want fashion to be my business. As it is now, I’m—correction, I was just an assistant, working for the supervisor of the personal shoppers at a department store. I’m not really a teacher. I’m more of a… desperate, eternal part-time student.”
“What’s your major?”
Ha. Which semester? “Currently, I’m an education major, for the sake of expediency, but that’s subject to change without notice.”
The corners of his lips quirked up. “A flip-flopper.”
He’d nailed it. “I thought the study-abroad program could be my stepping-stone to Europe. Room, board, and a stipend in exchange for teaching English in the fashion capital of the world. Win-win, right? I enrolled full-time to qualify, quit my job, got a letter of recommendation from my boss, and—here I am. Not much chance to apprentice as a buyer for the Galeries Lafayette in these parts, huh?”
“You can’t contact your school and tell them there’s been a mistake?”
“I can, and you bet your ass I will, but I’m sure all the spots in Paris are taken by now. Milan too, which was my second choice.”
He smirked. “You do know we have a Milan in Minnesota too? Population 369.”
Sky laughed. “And I’m sure my sister would have signed me up for that one if I’d given her the chance.”
“Nothing good comes from sisters,” Logan commiserated. “They got both of us stuck with a bunch of crazy preppers. You got lucky, though. It could’ve been worse.”
“Really? How?” Because she had trouble envisioning a worse scenario.
“Your sister could have messed up the location and the internship. She could have sent you to intern with me, grinding diapers and collecting mushrooms.”
Oh, God. So true.
“I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” he continued. “Mounting an armed resistance is a big step up from being half dead of the flu.”
“Sorry I pointed a knife at you.” The guy had tended to her for days, brought her food in bed, kept the pandemic squad at bay. And how had she repaid him?
He waved it off with a smile. “Don’t sweat it. Since I moved here almost two years ago, I’ve had plenty of lethal shit pointed in my direction. I think I’m more offended about the kidney accusation.”
She cringed. “Sorry about that too. I was totally freaked out. I watched a documentary last week about a poor man who woke up in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, lighter by a kidney. I remembered the days I spent in bed and the hazmat suits hovering over me and I… Sorry. Really.” The one time she’d channel surfed for anything other than fashion shows.
“I understand, don’t worry. For the record, though, if these people take the saw out, I don’t think they’ll stop at one kidney. With this bunch, you either wake up with all your organs or you don’t wake up at all.”
That was reassuring. Not.
At that moment there was a knock on the window.
“Excuse me,” Logan told her and went to open the side door. It was one of his interns, with a bunch of papers in hand.
Sky watched as Logan talked with the younger man. Well, “talking with” was an overstatement, because they didn’t seem to be making much communication headway.
“I need to get a frigging translator. UN certified. Pronto.” Logan sighed, sitting down again on the sofa.
“I thought international students were required to demonstrate English proficiency before an American university would accept them.”
“They are. It’s mostly a test of reading skills, though. These kids can read Shakespeare, but they are unable to say, ‘Hi, how are ya?’ to the locals.” He studied her, pensive. “Say, what are you going to do until your job starts?”
“No clue.” She didn’t have a penny to spare. She had to save all the money she had, whether to fund the weeks here in Minnesota or to pay for a new ticket to Europe, if by any miracle she pulled off the relocation. “I won’t have a place here until the job starts, and I can’t go back to New York. I’ve sublet my apartment in Brooklyn.” And given up her job. Her pride wouldn’t allow her to go crawling back to her boss.
“Can your sister help you?”
Sky shook her head.
“Family? Boyfriend?”
She shook her head again. Her entire social circle, friends and family, lived from paycheck to paycheck.
“What do you think about staying here? Food and shelter in exchange for English tutoring for my crew?”
“You mean stay in this town with the crazy preppers?”
“Come on. You’d be doing me a huge favor. Think of living among survivalists as an anthropological experiment.”
She was tempted, really tempted. And it would solve her immediate financial problem. Still. “I don’t know.”
“The kids are extremely bright. High achievers. With a little help, they’ll be using conversational English in no time. The language knowledge is there, somewhere in their heads, waiting to make its way to their tongues, so to speak. They just came to a foreign country. They don’t know me or each other, and they’re shy. You could help break down that barrier.”
“The problem isn’t the kids, Alchemist, it’s the crazy doomsday preppers.”
“You don’t have to answer right now,” he coaxed. “Tomorrow the preppers are having a pasta party ahead of their 10K charity run. You could meet the whole bunch then.”
A 10K in this weather? With everything covered in snow? “Do preppers usually participate in 10Ks?” Somehow, she couldn’t picture it.
He nodded. “If they’re allowed to have bug-out bags, they do.”
She was scared to ask. “What the hell is a bug-out bag?”
“A must around here. It contains all you need to survive the first seventy-two hours after a disaster. Gas masks. Medicines. B-rations.”
Of course. She didn’t know why she’d even bothered asking.
Chapter 5
Logan scanned the town’s main street, quickly locating Sky. She was outside the grocery store, standing on the corner of a bench, gusts of wind blowing her long, red hair. She was using a big tree nearby for leverage, jumping precariously on her stilettos as she held her cell phone up with the other hand.
He went to her. “Celebrating your newly gained clean bill of health by breaking a leg?”
He’d walked her to the doctor, then left her on her own. He hadn’t wanted her to think he was keeping an eye on her, especially after her assumptions about being kidnapped. So he’d gone about his business, buying the supplies he needed and letting her look around by herself.
What she was doing up on that bench, he couldn’t even begin to fathom.
Her lips pursed. “I checked every inch of the street, and this spot is the only one where I can get an internet connection. And only if I keep my cell up and jump a bit. This is insane. How do people live in these atrocious conditions?”
He barked out a laugh. Long ago he would have agreed with her. If not having access to the internet constituted atrocious conditions, though, he didn’t want to know what she would think about some of the bunkers he’d seen.
“Come on, Butterfly. Get down from there.”
She narrowed her eyes on him. “Who are you calling Butterfly, Mountain Man?”
“You. Flitting up and down as high as you can go. There’s no need for that. I know a better spot.”
“There’s no better spot. I combed the whole street.”
He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her down. “Let’s go. Are high heels all you’ve got?” They made her legs look incredibly long, but she was going to kill herself.
“Yes. Pretty much. I’ve got sneakers, but they’re white and cute and not meant for walking.”
Sneakers not meant for walking. Of course. “You didn’t expect rain or bad weather in France?”
“For that I have stiletto covers. I didn’t think
I’d need them in town. I thought the sidewalk would be shoveled.”
He had no clue what stiletto covers were, but they sounded like a lost cause if ever he’d heard one. “It has been.”
“Really?” she asked incredulously.
“Really.” It wasn’t scraped off right down to the ground, as she was probably used to, but she would’ve been fine if she were wearing boots like a reasonable person.
A gust of wind made her hairdo all but take off. She patted it down. “Jeez, my braids must be a mess.” That morning, she’d braided some of her hair in two braids at either side that united at the back, all the while muttering about how difficult it was to do without the YouTube tutorial.
She’d looked all put together even on the days she’d stayed home, feverish and with her nose running, but now she’d taken it to a whole other level. Clothes, makeup, hair—she was color coordinated down to her nail polish. He hadn’t seen anything similar since… since he didn’t care to remember.
He hated and loved that look in a woman, in equal parts. It really got his motor running. Last time he’d given in to it, though, the motor had driven him and his heart straight into a wall. The shinier the package, the more dubious the inside.
“Here we are,” he said as they turned the corner. “It’s at the end of this street.”
She looked around. “There’s nothing here.”
“You’ll see.”
At the end of the street, he opened the gate to Shayna’s backyard. Sky stared at the sign. “Hacker Shack? What is this? An internet café on somebody’s lawn?”
Logan nodded. “The only place in town with non-satellite, uninterrupted cell connectivity.”
“You kidding me? Why the heck not on Main Street?”
“Because the only reliable signal is here.”
She shook her head, chagrined. “They need a big, flashing neon sign on Main Street pointing in this direction.”
“Not really.” Shayna had more clients than she could handle, especially considering that the café was located in her backyard. In a shack. Beautifully decorated, but a shack nonetheless.