The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Also, as I’m sure you’re all aware, there have been several break-ins at the quartermaster building. We will be posting a rotating night watch to keep eyes on the place twenty-four-seven until the thief or thieves are caught. Speaking of rotations, the schedule for scavenging trips is posted on the whiteboard out in the hall. Given the situation with food, we’ll be casting a wider net in search of resources until the farm gets its legs under it.”

  Murmurs of agreement swept among the militia.

  “Getting a couple complaints about kids drinking beer. How should we handle that?”

  Harper glanced over at the source of the question, a late-forties guy with longish grey hair, a cowboy hat, and a mustache. She vaguely recalled his name as Randy or Roddy or Robert or something with an R. He’d made his way to Evergreen from Denver as well, joining the militia to keep ownership of an M4 carbine and SWAT Kevlar vest.

  “Well…” Walter shrugged. “We’ve gone back a hundred years.”

  “More like two,” muttered Harper.

  “Anything could happen to any of us at any time,” said Walter. “If they’re being safe about it and aren’t too young, no point quibbling a number. I figure we should draw the line at about fifteen or so. If they’re past that age and aren’t causing trouble, don’t bother giving them any grief about a few beers. We have bigger issues to deal with. Besides, we’re not exactly swimming in booze anyway.”

  “Earl’s fixin’ to change that right soon,” said Fred Mitchell, chuckling. “He’s almost got that brewery running.”

  Most people in the room laughed.

  Walter cleared his throat. “Of course, if they’re causing trouble when drunk, deal with the situation accordingly.”

  What’s that supposed to mean… accordingly? Do we yell at them? Arrest them? Not like they’ve issued us handcuffs. So far, any ‘arrest’ she’d witnessed had involved escorting the problem to the militia HQ at gunpoint. The southern HQ had jail cells, having been the former sheriff’s office, but the militia tended to punish offenses in one of three ways: yelling at people not to do it again, exiling them from Evergreen, or shooting them.

  Fortunately, the third option had thus far only happened as a response to being fired on. No one had been ‘officially’ executed. That, she would refuse to take part in. She couldn’t kill a defenseless person. Well, not unless that person had done something unforgivable to Madison, Jonathan, or Lorelei.

  Dennis Prosser patted Harper on the shoulder. “Hey, guess that means you’re legal to drink now.”

  “Yeah, great.” She offered a fake smile and laugh. “Can’t drink on duty. Gotta stay sharp, right?”

  Cliff smiled.

  “Ahh, more for me then.” Dennis winked.

  Introvert Prime hadn’t been too interested in drinking. It cost a lot, not to mention that with her luck, she’d get caught and in heaps of trouble, plus everyone she knew who drank always complained about waking up the next morning feeling like death warmed over. Everyone except Darci. Her friend spent the majority of junior year high on pot, or drunk whenever opportunity knocked. It defied her ability to understand how no one busted that girl for using weed underage, but she’d been high so damn often maybe people just considered that to be her normal personality.

  Wonder if Darci even realized there’s been a war.

  “Also, we’ve been hearing of an unknown individual or possibly a wild animal creeping around town. Several children have reported someone or something watching them.” Walter beckoned Harper up to the front of the room. “We do not, as yet, know what we’re dealing with or what motivations may be in play here. It’s as likely to be a person in dark clothing as it is a bear. Harper, would you mind sharing what you’ve learned so far?”

  She froze statue still, platter-eyed.

  Come on. Get up. Speaking in front of a group isn’t half as scary as being shot at. She swallowed dry. No, it’s scarier.

  Cliff patted her on the back. “You good?”

  Again, she swallowed dry. Pressure like a bowling ball settled in her stomach. Neither her arms nor her legs wanted to move. Her hands shook, defying her ability to control them. She’d barely managed to handle presentations in school, having to grip the podium and keep her eyes on the paper to get through it. Any eye contact with the class would’ve stolen her voice, and those had been kids she’d spent years around. With a few exceptions, she barely knew anyone in the room with her here.

  But, she hadn’t been asked to discuss the inner meaning of some 150-year-old piece of poetry… what she had to say could potentially stop a nut-job from hurting someone, especially a kid like Lorelei who had no defense against a creep. That girl would probably run over to hug Jason Voorhees.

  Then again, she was so lovable and cute even an undead killer would probably pat her on the head and keep going.

  Harper gritted her teeth, stood, and nodded. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  She moved to the front of the room and, careful to look people straight in the chest, started to describe everything she knew about the situation. At first, she spoke in a wavering voice that some strained to hear, but a few minutes in and no one seeming to tune her out, her nerves settled. She risked eye contact with Cliff. He nodded. Gradually, her voice gained confidence, her posture straightened, and she went from feeling like a kid talking to the police after witnessing a crime to a member of a group explaining a situation to her equals.

  “… and that’s as much as I know. Does anyone have any questions?”

  “All the sightings have been up near the school?” asked Ken Zhang.

  “So far.” Harper nodded.

  Walter tapped a paper on the desk. “Janice hasn’t had any reports like this from her area.”

  “Could the cow attack, animal tracks, and unknown party seen by children all be the same thing?” Sadie clicked her fingernails on the M-16 balanced across her lap. “We don’t know for sure that a lion killed the cow, and the only ones who’ve seen something are little kids. Could be anything.”

  “Grace Hughes also saw what she thought was a man watching her,” said Harper. “Most wild animals wouldn’t hide, right? They’d either run away or come charging.”

  Mixed murmuring sounded mostly like agreement.

  Harper glanced at Walter. “As I’m sure Walter’s already told everyone, the unknown person is possibly armed. A compact 9mm handgun was stolen from Katherine Bowden.”

  “Yeah, we figure everyone is armed until proven otherwise,” said Fred. “Safer that way.”

  Most everyone chuckled.

  “All right.” Walter scratched at his forehead. “For the time being, get it out there that we don’t want any children traveling alone. Harper, would you mind letting Violet know to keep students at the school until further notice until an adult is there to pick them up?”

  “Sure.” She nodded. Sensing her ‘speech’ done, she eagerly returned to her chair, practically melting into a puddle of social anxiety as soon as her butt hit the cushion.

  “Ya did good,” whispered Cliff.

  She let out a weak chuckle. “Maybe I should have a beer.”

  15

  Power

  The militia briefing over, Harper returned to the school to inform Violet and the other teachers about the situation. They decided to tell the children that a possible mountain lion roamed the area rather than stoke nightmares about a kidnapper.

  She left the classroom after only a brief visit and resumed her patrol route. While possible that the kids had seen a mountain lion or bear, she knew she’d heard cloth. Calling a person who hid among trees and spied on kids a possible kidnapper might be jumping to a conclusion, but normal people didn’t do that. What possible reason could anyone have for doing something like that? Crazy parent afraid to make contact with their kid? Crazy person in general merely trying to avoid being seen?

  I should be grateful they haven’t tried to grab anyone. Wait, that boy Jax… the kid said the ninja tried to grab him.

>   The oddity of it bothered her. Worse, her gut told her to be afraid. She’d ignored it with Tyler and it almost cost Madison her life. She had no intention of brushing aside her worries this time. And so, she roamed the area around the houses with the mindset of a soldier hunting the enemy, not simply following the roads like a small-town cop.

  A group of men passed on the road, pulling a wagon made from the back end of a pickup truck, loaded high with huge chunks of cut timber. Liz Trujillo had suggested gathering firewood in the warmer months and stockpiling it. By the time it grew cold and people needed it, the wood will have dried and become ripe for burning. None of the men noticed her watching from the trees, which surprised her.

  Guess that standing still thing really works.

  Harper checked around every area she thought offered a hiding place from which someone might ambush a solitary person on the road. Figuring it would be difficult to drag a struggling child or teen far without being noticed, she focused on areas near unoccupied houses. If the guy intended to kidnap someone, they would likely want to get the victim out of sight as fast as possible, drag them into a house where they could do whatever horrible things they had in mind without anyone catching them. Disgusted with herself for even thinking that, she decided to search unoccupied houses for any signs that someone had prepared for such a crime, stashing rope or whatever.

  She did find some muddy footprints in one place that made her think of the house with the stolen granola bars and handgun, but other than learning that someone with dirty shoes had been exploring the place, didn’t spot anything else suspicious.

  Eventually, she reached the south edge of her assigned area, where Lewis Ridge Road ran east-west. The sight of the town’s lone operational tractor-trailer parked next to a building beyond a multicolored stone wall attracted her curiosity. She walked down a strip of gravel-paving into a parking lot, which also held a fleet of non-working dump trucks, plows, and some excavators. Someone mentioned the building here had been a county asset, a base of operations for the road maintenance crews.

  Jeanette and her team unloaded solar panels from the back of the trailer, arranging them in rows. It seemed the wide-open parking lot would serve as another staging area for a solar farm since the nearby tennis courts had been filled. Wires as thick as a child’s arm spanned the grass between the courts farther down the hill to the south and the maintenance garage.

  “Careful,” said Jeanette, trotting over to Harper. “Kids shouldn’t—oh, wait, you’re… right. Sorry. Didn’t recognize you at first.”

  “It’s okay. Just saw the truck and got curious.”

  “Collected a bunch of panels from the last run to Littleton.” Jeanette grinned. “It’s starting to look like we’ll have the production capacity to power up the north part of town, if we can get the distribution worked out.”

  “Awesome.” Her eyes widened at the prospect of working heat and hot water again. “Any idea when it’ll be done?”

  “Like I said, based on the number of panels we’ve collected, we can produce sufficient juice. Even set up a decent battery unit.” She gestured at the road works building. “Of course, Ned’s already talking about limiting power use to absolute needs like heat, hot water, cooking.”

  “What else would anyone use it for? Not like there’s internet or TV now.”

  “Computer games and such, if any of them still work. Not sure how he plans to enforce something like that without sending you folks snooping into everyone’s houses. Figure by this time next year, Evergreen might feel sorta normal again. Once we get the solar up and running, gonna start looking into the possibility of some wind-powered generators. Those should last longer than solar panels.”

  “That’s…” She bounced. “Amazing news. You rock.”

  “Aww, I’m only an electrician. Never really worked solar before, just kinda winging it.” Jeanette leaned side to side in a stretching motion. “Well, I oughta get back to it. And please stop looking at me like I’m Jesus… I just plug wires in.”

  Harper laughed. “Sorry. Just… you know, electricity is one of those things that I never really thought about before. You think it’ll stay up? Or should I get used to living like the 1800s?”

  “No telling how long my franken-circuitry will keep going. Haven’t heard anything from the outside world. Depends on how much of the grid is smashed. Lots of places had a real crap show of infrastructure. Some substation yards I’ve seen were still using gear from like 1930. It’s unbelievable how little electric companies cared about modernization. The US power grid was so unstable it’s damn amazing it worked at all. I can almost guarantee you it’s all junk now. That EMP wave would’ve fried damn near everything. Though, some of those old-ass copper loop houses might have survived it. Kinda ironic that the ancient crap took it better than cutting edge. Maybe humanity has like a technology ceiling that we shouldn’t go past. Horse-drawn carriages and electric light bulbs might be the ideal.”

  “Hah. Yeah…” Harper let out a somber chuckle, and squinted at the small ocean of glimmering silver panels set up in the distant tennis courts.

  Jeanette waved and headed back to help her crew arrange the panels and bolt them to the framework they’d been building.

  We might have power sometime soon. Giddy, Harper walked up the driveway and back to her patrol, daydreaming of working lights and trying to remember what it felt like to take a hot shower. Not having to wait an hour or so for water to boil in a pail whenever she wanted a hot bath would totally rock. Being able to take a hot bath more than once a week would be awesome. What Jeanette said about the power grid eventually got her wondering about the state of the country as a whole. What happened to power plants? Some places used nuclear reactors for electricity. How long would they operate without human intervention? Did their computers have the ability to realize all the people went away or would they go haywire until melting down?

  She didn’t think they would explode like a nuclear bomb. That plant in Japan had a meltdown and didn’t create a mushroom cloud. The idea of a nuclear plant left unattended for weeks terrified her. Even if the systems had been programmed to handle the sudden absence of a crew, what if some random idiot got inside one and started pushing buttons?

  Those places are tough, right? Maybe the people working there when the war happened survived. They could’ve been alive long enough to shut everything down. Not like she could flip on the news or check the internet to hear about nuke plants across the country. More than likely, little remained of power stations, nuclear or otherwise. Most of the ashes that had fallen like snow over Lakewood, even two months after the bombs fell, had come from fires. Ordinary power lines caught fire under the EMP surge, transformers had exploded. The breaker box at home had burst into flames. Fortunately, Dad kept a couple fire extinguishers around and put it out.

  Harper sighed out her nose. Evergreen might have power again, if only for a few years… but it seemed like it would take a lot more than a few electricians and some solar panels to fix the rest of the country.

  16

  Evaporated

  Children’s laughter filled the backyard.

  Harper stared into the cabinet, surveying the canned food she had to work with. She peered out the window at her siblings plus Becca standing in a cluster by the large tree behind the house. Despite wearing a pale pink sweatshirt and jeans, Madison decided it warm enough to run around barefoot, even though Harper thought it still a touch chilly. Lorelei also took her shoes off, putting her prized pink socks in a safe place on the dresser. She didn’t want to get them dirty or ruin them by going outside sock-footed.

  She smiled at the kids, then turned her attention back to the question of dinner. Last night’s bread and jam had been a touch lean, so she wanted to give everyone a bigger meal tonight, but worried that doing so would result in a problem by Tuesday before she could go back for another ration.

  I should ask Cliff to try fishing at the lake.

  Amazingly, no one had complain
ed of having canned ravioli so often. They’d recovered several pallets of it from the Walmart run. Harper bit her lip, debating back and forth between intelligence and emotion. With a sigh, she decided to be cautious and not use up too much food too fast. She could short herself three raviolis to give one extra to each of the kids.

  “Rawr!” yelled Jonathan, out in the yard. “Time’s up! I’m coming!”

  Where is Cliff? He should have been back by now.

  She started to reach for her belt, where she’d worn her iPhone for the past three years… and grabbed empty denim. “Duh. How the heck did people survive without cell phones?”

  Shaking her head, she opened two large cans and dumped them into a pot, then scraped as much of the sauce out as she could with a wooden spoon—nearly dropping both when Madison screamed.

  “Gotcha!” shouted Jonathan.

  Harper braced herself against the counter, taking a few breaths to recover from the spike of adrenaline her little sister’s scream triggered. She peered out the window. Jonathan dragged Madison out from under the trampoline that had been in the back left part of the yard. Hide and Seek… Annoyed, Madison folded her arms and pouted, standing there with a scowl while Jonathan resumed searching around for Becca and Lorelei.

  Oh, screw it. She grabbed a small can of ravioli and opened it, too. Rice is super filling. I’ll save that for Tuesday. After dumping more ravioli into the pot, she scraped the can clear of sauce. That should be plenty. Harper went to the front door and wandered out onto Hilltop, looking left and right in hopes of seeing Cliff on his way home.

  “Hmm. He’s late. Something happened.”

  That didn’t necessarily mean he’d gotten in trouble. Most likely, he responded to a crisis and couldn’t leave until it had been settled. At least, she hoped he hadn’t been hurt. Not hearing gunshots went a long way to reassuring her he’d get home eventually.