“So what's the third shack?” I asked, moving from carrots to onions.
“Sickbay,” said Joan. “People who are really bad off, or can't take the tents. Babies, the few we've got here. It's a little better, but without the space heaters, eh.”
I nodded and blinked tears from my eyes. Onions, as it turned out, released irritating chemicals when carved. I offered a slice of one to the girl, who made a face so comically revolted that I burst out laughing for the first time I could remember. It felt good, and I looked up to find Minna smiling at me.
“Anya likes you.”
“Well, that makes two of us.” I popped the onion slice into my mouth, and instantly regretted it. I'm quite sure my face resembled Anya's for a minute or two there. On the upside, the little girl's giggles were worth it. Almost.
Once I could breathe again, I coughed to clear my throat, and looked over to Joan. “Do the women always cook the dinner?”
“No, no. None of that sexist crap. We take turns, boys and girls alike. It's my turn right now, but with the cold coming on, my hands are all rucked up.” She raised her gloves, flexed them and winced. “Early-onset arthritis is a bitc— uh, pain.”
“So we're helping you out?”
“Yeah. Hope you don't mind.”
I flipped onion slices into the stew pot. “Not in the slightest.”
And it was good, in that warm kitchen, with the savory odors filling it, and my new friends around me. I doubted this was the life that my past self had planned for me, and I was glad to disappoint her.
Later on, as we were ladling out bowls of the stew, I looked up to find Rick standing at the head of the line. His jaw was bound, and his head was hanging down. When he saw me staring, he looked away and mumbled something. His posture was the definition of submission, with a good touch of shame in there as well.
I said nothing, merely handed him a bowl. After a moment, I reached back into the stores, and pulled out a straw before offering it to him. All the time my eyes were on his face, and I was ready for the slightest hint of hostility. This stuff was hot, and his face was right there.
But he took it and scurried away, and I breathed a little easier. Well, that had been awkward. Still, after this I doubted that he'd give me trouble again. A thought struck me, and after the last bowls were passed out, I turned to Joan. “That was a test, yes?”
She smiled a big, cheesy grin. “Don't know what you mean, hun.”
“Lies and calumny.”
“Heh. Okay, you're sharp. Yeah, just seeing if there was going to be trouble between you two. Me and Minna were here to back you up or stop you, depending.”
I snorted, but a small smile crept onto my face. Well-played, Joan. She was a good leader for this camp, and I resolved to learn what I could from her.
Later, after everyone else was fed, we got bowls and sat around the main burn barrel. Sparky was there, humming to himself, and Martin brought Roy over. The older man leaned on his shoulder, walking slow. As he sat down on one of the benches he coughed, and I realized that I'd heard him coughing earlier, throughout the day.
“Are you all right?” I inquired.
He waved a hand. “Cold, dry air comin' in. Used to smoke, lungs are sensitive. Y'know they used to include cigarettes in care packages from home, back in the day?”
I shook my head, and he grinned a stained grin. “Smart business move for the tobacky companies. We smoked during the big one, stayed hooked after. Don't never start that shit Lady Dire, it'll kill ya.”
“No plans there.” I frowned. “She does have a favor to ask.”
“For the lady who fixed our showerhouse? Sure.”
“Dire has holes in her memory. Perhaps you could fill in a few things? History, events, the reason for these superpowers that seem to be casual violations of physics?”
“Ha. We'll be talkin' all night and not get done. Um. Maybe just powers, yah? That's shorter than the other stuff.”
I shrugged, and tossed a stick into the fire. It was getting colder, now that the sun was down. Colder than the last night had been. “It's more information than she's got right now, so sure.”
“Mm. Well, there used to be this guy named Tesla. Nikola Tesla.”
“Ah! Tesla's method of broadcast power. Tesla's ion-charged Levitonium gas. And many other theories and concepts, most dealing with electronics.” I smiled as I made a connection. “That she remembers! Sort of.”
“Yeah. Who's tellin' this story?”
“Apologies, continue.”
“Right. Nineteen Oh Eight, that's when it all started, I heard...” He coughed a bit, continued. “One of Tesla's experiments went wrong. Or right, maybe. Gave him and Bryson superpowers.”
“Bryson?”
“His partner, and biggest investor. Never gave up on him, frittered away his family fortune to pay for Tesla's experiments. But they got powers, that's the important thing. And after that, costumes started comin' out of the woodwork. Well, they didn't have costumes then, not at first. It was all men and women of action, adventurers, that sorta thing. But they kept showing up as the years went on. Some of'em fought in the Great War, but most who did died. But after the war, that's when it started for real. The first villains showed up, usin' their powers for crime, wearin' masks so they wouldn't get caught. And heroes started wearin' masks, so the villains wouldn't go after their families. Things been going ever since.”
I frowned. “How do powers work?”
He laughed. “Ain't no one knows that, or if they do they ain't saying. Rumor has it government's got projects workin' on it. Helios Labs out in the bay's supposed to have studied it. Don't know if they still are, now that the cold war's over. Just... Sometimes, when people are doing stuff and having a hard time, they get a power that helps them out. And once they get it, they got it. Ain't too common, but you see it pop up a lot when bad times hit, or disasters strike. Sparky here, he got it when he fell out his window, and landed on a bunch of electrical wires.” He snickered. “Shows you how old we is. Wires, hah! Ain't nothing uses those no more, it's all broadcast current.”
He pulled a hip flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and took a pull. “Mf. Thirsty work.”
“So Sparky's powers saved him from being electrocuted?” I rubbed my chin. “And let him emit electricity?”
The man in question smiled at me, and twisted in his wheelchair, flipping his ground up. “Get clear, Joan.”
Joan shifted, and Sparky pointed. A tiny lightning bolt flickered out with a “POP!” and bits of sand flew up.
“That was a small one,” he wheezed, grinning. “Used to fry Nazis back in the day, could do it again if I needed to.”
I frowned. “Where does the charge come from?”
“I make it. It's easy. Some builds up all the time if I don't think about it.”
Roy sighed. “Didn't used to be. It's been getting harder for you to control and you know it.”
Sparky looked down. “Could say that about a lot of stuff, Roy. You're getting' old too, ain't got room to talk.”
“Fft. Put your ground down, y'bastard.”
Sparky popped the ground, then stretched out an eager hand as Roy gave him the hip flask. A quick pull, and he handed it back, the two old friends grinning at each other.
I studied him. “So you generate electricity all the time, you usually bleed it off into the ground.... Dire's got a notion. You mind if she runs some tests?”
“So long as it ain't a thermometer up the butt I'm good.” He cackled. Joan flicked some sand at him, and he raised an arm in mock horror. I paid them no attention, and dug out my toolkit's voltage reader, measured the readings.
“Well Doc? Am I ever gonna play the piano again? Heheeeee...”
“Er. What?”
Roy snorted. “Ignore him he's in a mood. What are ya hm-ing about?”
“Well, you'd need a generator to power the space heaters, right? Combined with a local broadcast hub?”
“Oh. You're thinki
ng of tapping Sparky?”
“Hell, she ain't even bought me a drink first.”
I pulled out a dollar, threw it at Roy. “Give the man a drink.”
He snorted, but slid the hip flask over again. I reached into the pockets of my backpack, and pulled out the electrical components I'd salvaged after we'd secured the pipes. “Might need a little scrap, but Dire thinks she can build you a local broadcast hub that will work with Sparky...”
It took half an hour, and I gathered a small audience as I worked. Twisting a salvaged metal strip into a loop, threading in aluminum brackets and plates, attaching the wires and circuits, shielding the sensitive parts, and setting up the antenna. Finally, I had something like a torc with spikes poking out of the back. My tools were up to the task and I knew what I was trying to build.
In a perfect world I would have had all the components I needed. But I hadn't prepared specifically to build this sort of item when I'd scavenged a few handfuls of materials from the wreckage. I looked back up to Roy. “Got a television you can spare?”
“Does it have to be a working one?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Martin, go get the one that blew a screen last month, alright?”
The younger man headed into the sickbay shack, returned with a bulky television. I nodded as he put it down, and my tools soon had the casing off. I clicked my tongue against my teeth as I took stock of the components. Older than I would have wanted, the design wouldn't work as elegantly as I'd hoped. Well... I'd have to settle for “good”, rather than “perfect”.
Ten minutes later I was done, and I held the torc aloft with joy. When I returned my gaze to the crowd, though, the general mood seemed uneasy, for no reason I could say.
“Is, uh, is that supposed to go on Sparky?” Joan asked.
“Well, yes.”
“It's just uh, just that it looks kind of... well, painful.”
“Painful?” I took a glance at it again. “Dire doesn't see it.”
“It's the spikes,” Roy clarified. “They look kinda like something you'd see in an old-style scifi movie, something the bad guy would put on the hero to torture him. That and the evil-looking skull face in the central part of it.”
“That's just an aesthetic touch. The plates practically begged to be assembled into a cute little glaring face.”
“It looks like somethin' a villain would wear,” Roy frowned.
“Look, do you want power for your heaters or not?” I snapped. I really hadn't meant to make the thing look so intimidating. Eh, perhaps they were imagining it.
Sparky laughed. “Oh give it here. I'll give it a whirl. What's the worst could happen?”
Martin muttered something I didn't catch, and I smiled. “Sure, Sparky. Is your ground down?”
“Yep.”
I eased it around his neck, and closed the latch. LED's started lighting up, and Roy laughed.
“Hells, woman! It's even got evil glowing little red eyes!”
“That doesn't mean a thing! It's helpful technology!”
“Guys,” Sparky said. “This feels funky.”
“Put your ground up,” I advised. He did, and more lights lit up, switching from yellow to green. “Yessss...” I whispered. “Yes!” I felt a grin stretch my face, and I rubbed my hands together. For some reason I had a strong urge to laugh, but I resisted it.
Sparky straightened up in his chair, and blinked. “Wow. Alright lady, you know your stuff. I think I'm—”
I put my hand on his shoulder, as Roy yelled “Hey!”. He froze in the act of standing, when he saw that I was unharmed. A bit of static shock at the initial contact, but nothing beyond a brief snap. I grinned. “The siphon's active. Try one of the heaters now.”
Roy settled himself back down and glanced to Martin, who rose and headed into the sickbay shack. He returned seconds later with one of the heaters, put it on the ground and turned it on. The dozen or so people around the barrel leaned forward... and the space heater hummed to life, as its receiver recognized the transmitted current.
Then came the cheers! The group surged to life, moving to the tents, waking people up and pulling out other heaters, lights, radios...
“Hold it!”
Martin's voice rose above the happy chatter, and the people stilled, looking to him. “Do not turn on lights. Keep the heaters inside. Turn that one heater off, now.”
Joan put her hands to her mouth. “Martin. You don't need to—”
“Yes I do momma Joan, this ain't no joke. Right now we just got our power back, how many other people in this city don't have that? How many gonna think we have a generator, or something worth taking?”
“I—I—Surely no one would...”
Her voice drifted off. She sounded lost. Roy stood, coughed a few times, and put his hand on her shoulder. “The kid's right.”
I caught a flash of annoyance on Martin's face, but he hid it quickly. “Thanks man.”
Roy nodded. “No lights. If you wanna run televisions or radios or heaters they go inside, and you make sure any glow is blocked as best you can.”
One of the group turned off the heater, and started hauling it back to the shack. But the mood was still good, the people seemed much happier than they had been an hour ago.
Joan moved up next to me, grinning from ear-to-ear. “You fix our showers, you fix our power situation... we're lucky to have you, hun.”
I shrugged. “You gave Dire hospitality. It's really enlightened self-interest, she sleeps here too.”
“Maybe so, but we still owe you one.” She embraced me, before I could react. Blinking, my arms stuck awkwardly out, I folded them around her back and tried to ignore the smell of the woman.
I relaxed into her embrace. It felt good. I hugged her back, patted her shoulder awkwardly.
She let go, smiled. “You remind me of my sister.”
“That's good, Dire hopes?”
“Oh yeah. Only one who stood by me after... Well, after some bad times.” Her smile faded, and she stared off into the darkness. “Haven't seen her in years. She calls now and again, but I... ah, you don't need to worry about any of that.”
“If you say so,” I said.
“Here. Minna and I will take care of the dishwashing, don't worry about it. That's something nice we can do for you.”
“All right.” I watched her go, and as I turned my head back to the fire, I caught Martin staring at me from across it, his eyes white, with the rest of his dark face lost in the shadows. He looked worried.
I raised an eyebrow, and he shook his head, but I felt his eyes on me throughout the hour that followed, as the stars rose beautiful and beyond number without the city lights to hide them. As time passed more and more people headed in to shelter, and Roy pushed Sparky into the sickbay, after confirming with me that the siphon was safe to leave on him overnight.
As the camp grew quiet, the noise from the city grew. Gunshots, distant screams, and once an explosion that sent a plume of fire into the sky from the towering buildings downtown. Worse than it had been last night, and I frowned as I listened to the sounds of a city driven to chaos. Why? It made no sense.
“You got a weird look on you,” said Martin. I looked up, to find him moving closer, scooting around the fire to take the lawn chair that Minna usually occupied. He settled about ten feet away, moving slowly the whole time. I noticed that we were alone out in the flickering light of the fire.
I gestured toward the tall buildings to the southwest, and the smaller, older structures of the Brownstones neighborhood north of it. “Trying to figure it out. This is the second night, and it's no worse than the first. One would think the disruption would be less, not more, as people come to terms with it.”
He shook his head. “Ain't how it works,” he said. “Kind of the opposite.”
“How so?”
“First night everything's dark, power's off, maybe some places have water maybe some don't, but it's like oh, we've been through this before. Just gotta w
ait for the authorities to fix shit. Then it'll be fine.”
“But they didn't,” I said.
“Naw, they didn't. Can't, maybe. This why-two-kay thing people was afraid of looks like it came true, so maybe they won't fix it for a while. Maybe months. Maybe years... Probably not gonna be that bad, but some people gonna think that.”
“Why Two Kay?” I asked. “Second time Dire's heard that term. Or something like it.”
“It's Y-2-K, stands for year two thousand. It's like a flaw that was built into old computers. Ones that are too important and too limited to change. Folks said that when January first came, the computers would shut down, and everything they ran would crash until the computers were replaced.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Pretty sure that's not how it works. At worst you'd have to adjust time-stamps, maybe do a few hard reboots.”
“But yet here we are, and it started on midnight on January first, so who knows?” He shrugged. “You ask me maybe it's some supervillain pullin' shit. But no one asks me, so hey.”
I looked at the dark city again. It had fallen silent, during our conversation, a lull that almost made it seem like the looming, dark buildings were listening. Waiting for any sign of weakness.
Then came a series of stuttering gunshots somewhere in the distance, and a roar of engines, and Martin shook his head. “Yeah. First night, people be all like eh, this'll pass. Second night? No power? Starting to sink in that fresh food might be a while coming? Well, now people are gonna start thinking stuff like shit, I gotta survive. Gotta feed my family. They're gonna hit the convenience stores, the grocery stores and restaurants first, go from there. Maybe grab extra blankets cause it's getting colder, too. The ones that ain't desperate will try to pay at least, but the ones that can't or think we gone full on apocalypse are just gonna take. And some of them, the bad ones, are gonna think 'shit, it's the end of the world and I can party like it ain't nineteen-ninety-nine are gonna do the shit they always wanted to do, cause why the fuck not?”
“That's a rather bleak outlook,” I said, tossing a chunk of old planking into the barrel. The fire set it smoldering immediately, and I rubbed my hands in the heat.
He shrugged. “I know people. Joan or Roy, they told you I deal, right?”
DIRE : BORN Page 6