Renewal 2 - Echoes of the Breakdown

by Jf Perkins

  Renewal – Part 2: Echoes of the Breakdown

  By J.F. Perkins

  Copyright 2011 J.F. Perkins

  Kindle Edition

  Website/Blog: http://www.jfperkins.com

  Renewal - Part 2: Echoes of the Breakdown

  Chapter 2 - 1

  Terry was reeling from the revelations of the last two days. He and Bill were retracing their paths through the cornfields, heading back to Teeny Town. The village had been established right under the collective nose of the county government, the official local authority of the reconstruction of America. As they approached the huge defensive gate between the northern barns, Terry saw that his boss was leaning against one of the barns, spitting tobacco juice on the ground. Dusty held up his hand in greeting, and Bill gave him a meaningful nod in return.

  “You figured it out, huh?” Dusty asked, watching Terry closely.

  “I think I did. I’m still confused about things, though.” Terry replied in a muted voice. The confidence he felt earlier had given way to a sliding feeling of apprehension. What happens next?

  Dusty seemed to read his mind. “I’ll bet you’re wondering what to do now...”

  “Right... I have no idea where to go from here.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it right now. We’ll have plenty of time to plan your entire life later.” Dusty smiled and tousled Terry’s hair in a way that suggested he was talking to a small child. Terry pulled his head away, and both men laughed at the reaction.

  Bill said, “For now, let’s see about some lunch.”

  The men led Terry back to the place they had met earlier that morning, and slid right back into the back corner booth with the solid plank walls separating them from the rest of the tavern. Terry noted, for the second time, the strange disconnect between those plank partitions, and the shiny Formica tabletop. He knew the planks were much newer, but the table looked the part of the sleek, glossy future that had been stolen from Terry’s generation.

  “What’s on today, Sam?” Bill shouted cheerfully at the bartender.

  Sam answered with a weekly standard. “Barbecue pork, corn, beans, and Texas toast!”

  “Three.” Bill said, holding up the appropriate fingers with a friendly smirk. Then he turned to Terry.

  “So, Terry... I’m sure you have questions. Might as well ask ‘em while we wait for some food,” Bill said, turning to face the young man.

  “About this place? I have a million questions, but that’s not my problem right now. It’s all about the rest of the world, you know?”

  “Yes, I do, but, as you might expect, my concern is what you intend to do about Teeny Town. The rest, we can figure out.”

  “Well, Bill, I’ve spent the last twenty minutes trying to fit everything together in my head. I’d have to say that there’s no doubt that I have to keep this place a secret. If the county knew about everything you’ve got here, they’d be out here to ‘recover’ it.”

  Bill and Dusty both moved restlessly, shaking loose some tension they weren’t even aware they were holding.

  “Good,” Bill said, “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.” He reached across the table and gave Terry a couple of slaps on the shoulder. “Really glad.”

  “The problem is, it seems to me that the best way to do that is to go back, file a false report, and keep going like nothing happened. All I really want to do now is to stay here and get to work.” Terry looked at both men, waiting for some secret formula to be shared.

  Instead, Dusty said, “Well, it was easier for me. My foster parents were in on the deal, and as far as anyone knew, I was spending summers on my uncle’s farm in Bedford County. By the time I grew up, nobody even thought to worry about where I went.”

  Bill added, “Yeah Terry, I’m sorry, but if you want to maintain the illusion, it looks like you’ll have to work twice as hard. You’ll have two lives to live.”

  “Great. Here I thought I had stumbled into the land of milk and honey, but really, I just found another version of there ain’t no free lunch,” Terry said with a cynical twist of his mouth.

  The men laughed, thought better of it, but when Terry smiled in return, they laughed even harder.

  Three thick, steaming pottery plates arrived, piled high with red-sauce barbecue. Terry thought of all the dry, fired-cooked goat he had eaten in his life, every time believing it was a real treat, and his entire childhood adopted a pale gray hue in his memory.

  “Dig in, boys,” Bill said, already talking around a mouthful.

  As they began to eat, Sam delivered three more pottery mugs full of a red, cloudy beer. Terry hadn’t had this much beer since he and two of school buddies had found a wooden keg full of beer on a loading dock and proceeded to help themselves. They would have gotten away with it, too, if they had been able to walk when they were caught. They ended up pitching hay for three months to make up for that little adventure.

  Terry washed down another mouthful of food, and asked, “Do you always eat this well?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. We’re making up for lost time. We work hard for the privilege, but not nearly as hard as we did back in the day,” Bill replied.

  “That’s for sure,” Dusty said. “Even after Kirk found me, I remember a whole lot of tree rat and turnips.”

  “I’ll take goat over squirrel any day,” Terry added.

  “Amen to that.” Dusty took another swig of his beer, and slid out of the booth. “Well, boys, I’m heading back to town. Terry, I’ll make sure that no one worries about you until tomorrow, but you need to head on back in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir. I will.” Terry said between the rapid forks full of beans.

  Dusty gave a sloppy salute to Bill and walked out of the tavern.

  Terry set his fork on the plate, leaned back as far as he could, and burped out loud. “I feel... not full, more than full...”

  “We call that feeling ‘stuffed’.”

  “Stuffed, yeah... That’s a good way to put it.” Terry smiled and Bill snorted, trying not to laugh at the young man across from him.

  Bill thought about how he lived his first eleven years without ever being truly hungry, and then it was many years before he ever felt full on a regular basis, much less stuffed. He found it sad that Terry didn’t even know how to describe the feeling of eating more food than he needed.

  “Well, you ready for a little more tour?” Bill asked as he placed his cloth napkin next to the empty plate.

  “Yes, Bill. If I can walk with this belly...”

  “Alrighty then, up you go.” Bill slid out of the booth and pantomimed tugging Terry out of his seat. They were both laughing as they strolled past the bar.

  “Wait, Bill. Don’t I need to pay Sam?”

  “I tell you what, Terry. Sam and I have an agreement, an account. This time it’s on me. Later on, we’ll talk about how you pay, ok?”

  “Ok, if you’re sure,” Terry said, then over his shoulder, “Thank you, Sam. That’s about the best food I ever ate.”

  “You’re welcome, young fella. Come back any time.”

  This time, Bill led Terry out through the east gate of Teeny Town, following the gravel lane towards a long spur of woods that extended from the three lakes north of the village, almost to the top of the rise to the south. The men walked through a newly sprouted field of what Terry guessed was beans until they crossed another lane that seemed to curve around the entire settlement. From that point, the road ended and they crossed open pasture until they slid into the shadows of the trees.

  The land dropped sharply into a gully. Terry leaped across the trickle of water, flowing slowly north to Brewer Creek, and scrambled up the far side, following B
ill deeper into the woods. Terry decided that the goal was in the pasture beyond the woods when Bill stopped at the base of a white oak, and yelled, “Hello, the lookout!”

  Terry heard a feminine voice from directly overhead. “Hello, the old man!”

  Bill rolled his eyes and replied, “Drop the ladder, sassy britches!” He stepped back from the tree to avoid the rope ladder that spun and leaped out of the sky, nearly clubbing Terry in the head on its final bounce. “Terry, hold the ladder for the old man, will you?”

  Terry set his foot on the bottom rung and grabbed one side of the ladder as Bill scrambled up like a very not-old man indeed. Terry grabbed the second rope as Bill climbed out of reach. Bill’s legs disappeared quickly onto a platform forty feet off the ground, and then his head popped out in the same spot. He called down to Terry, “Come on up!”

  Terry, without a stabilizing helper on the bottom, ended up climbing the edge of the ladder, more like a knotted rope than a ladder, and he took quite a bit longer than Bill to reach the top. When he pulled himself over the edge, and stood up panting a bit, he found himself facing a young woman, maybe his age or thereabouts. She wore leather boots and tan work pants, leather gloves, a heavy shirt with leather patches on the shoulders, and a seriously large knife strapped to her hip. By the time his eyes reached her face, centered on greenish-gray eyes, scattered with light freckles, and framed by copper-red hair, he was thoroughly intimidated. The bolt action rifle didn’t help in that regard. He was instantly entranced, and couldn’t look away.

  The woman, on the other hand, was looking at his tall, strong form, deep hazel eyes, and sandy brown hair, but none of that mattered, because she could smell his fear.

  “Get a good look, did you?” She said.

  “Uh, well... see. I was...” Terry tried to speak.

  Bill rescued him. “Terry, I’d like you to meet my second daughter, Sally. We named her after a special woman, and all we get in return is attitude. Sally, be nice to our new friend, Terry Shelton.”

  Terry stuck out his hand automatically, since the autopilot was the only part of his mind still functioning. Sally just looked at him for ten long seconds. Terry was about to give up, when Bill gave his daughter a sharp look. She shrugged, leaned her rifle against the tree trunk, and returned Terry’s handshake with a perfunctory single pump.

  Terry found his voice and said, “Pleased to meet you, Sally.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” she replied, picking up her rifle and turning towards the guarded edge of the platform.

  “In case you couldn’t guess, Terry... Sally is also known as Red Sally, Sally the Red, Here-comes-Sally-run, and The Terror of Teeny Town, depending on who you ask. Somehow, I think she takes after her Uncle Kirk more than me, but I don’t ask too many questions about that.” Bill smiled. “My folks used to say you could blame these obviously misplaced children on the mailman, but I don’t think that excuse works anymore.”

  Sally looked over her shoulder, and said, “You forgot Bloody Sally and Sally-so-mean-she-hurt-my-little-feelings...”

  “True, but I think we’ve scared Terry enough, don’t you?”

  Sally turned to face the men, and gave Terry another hard, thorough look and replied, “No, not enough... Not yet.” She smiled just long enough to make Terry’s heart leap twice in his chest, and then turned around again.

  Bill said, “All right, my little maniac, you’re relieved of watch. We’ll take it until the shift change at four.”

  “Great!” Sally said, “That’ll give me enough time to make some babies cry.” She handed her rifle to her father, and promptly slid over the edge. Just when Terry thought it was safe to breathe again, she stuck her head back over the edge and said, “See you later, Terry.”

  “Uh, bye Sally...”

  He heard a zipping sound, a quiet thud as she hit the ground, and tried to figure out how to watch her walk away without being obvious about it in front of her father. In the end, he couldn’t find an excuse to go to that particular side of the platform and had to settle for her tiny silhouette walking across the bean fields.

  Bill, of course, missed nothing and smiled quietly to himself as he quickly scanned every approach to the watch.

  “Sorry about my daughter, Terry. She’s a good girl, but a little too tough for her own good, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, she’s tough all right.” Terry said, just a little too wistfully.

  “Anyway, this is one of our standard watch platforms. There was a time when we actually lived on platforms like these, for safety. My dad figured out ways to make them hard to spot from the ground. You can see the inside is organized, flat and square, and pretty well protected from gunfire, but the main trick is that we cover the outside with limbs and twigs and anything else we can find that makes cheap, easy camouflage. It’s easy to see out in all directions, but it’s hard to see us until you know what to look for. Even then, it’s really hard to see where to aim.”

  “It’s impressive, sir. Even when I knew what to spot down by the lakes, I couldn’t see all of them.” Terry said.

  “Yep. Now take a few minutes and tell me what you see.”

  Terry watched the 180 degree arc facing out from the village. Bill noted that fact approvingly. No need to watch areas covered by other platforms. Then Terry pointed almost due east.

  “I see movement in the scrub, about 500 yards out.”

  “Keep watching.”

  The movement progressed slowly to the north, until Terry saw a figure stand up, and raise his right hand. “The guy just waved,” he said.

  “Yep. For today, the right-handed wave lets us know that it’s our people, and that everything is clear. We have a set of hand-wave signals that we change frequently to keep it hard to guess, and different signals for trouble. Our biggest emergency signal is gunfire, of course. If that occurs, the whole community goes into defensive mode in less than five minutes. When you first showed up, the front watch gave us a signal, and we cleared out everything visible from the main road. We had a good idea that it was you, though, thanks to Dusty. Aggie and I were waiting for you all day. Anyway, we always have patrols out, just in case. You’re looking at one of two close patrols. We also have two long patrols that go further afield. They’re tasked with keeping an eye on the neighbors. Each patrol contains at least one experienced adult. The rest are usually younger than you. We do that to train our young people to be alert for danger.”

  “How do you spare all the manpower?” Terry asked.

  “It’s not so hard now that we have a good-sized community. It allows us to divide up the labor more than we once did. We have a lot more specialists now, where we used to get by with a bunch of people who could do most anything, but none of it particularly well.”

  “I still can’t believe what you have built here. It seems too good to be true.”

  “Well, now... That’s a long story.” Bill said, with a laugh.

  “Seems like we’ve got some time...” Terry looked hopefully at Bill.

  “True. How about I pick up where I left off?” Bill asked.

  “I was hoping you would say that,” Terry replied.

  Chapter 2 – 2

  We sat behind that rotten log for a very long time, listening to human chaos laced with sporadic gunfire. My dad, never one for idle chatter, kept talking to us in that low voice. After a while, we began to think that he had either lost his mind, or he was just thinking out loud. Even if he was having some sort of fit of insanity, we had already seen too much to doubt his thinking.

  I could feel the powerful waves of emotion sloshing around inside. My mom went from panic to resignation to sadness to anger in an endless cycle. Kirk was just angry, seething, probably too young to discern the reasons for fear. Lucy was crying quietly into the hand she kept over her face. Tommy and I were watching everything, too young to understand the implications beyond what we could gather from our family and the activity around us.

  We saw groups of people walking
north, down the road we had driven when we had arrived the day before. We saw other, smaller groups walking the road in the other direction. According to my dad’s rambling words, they were most likely trying to walk back to Manchester, where they expected the opportunities for help to be better. They were still thinking in terms of delay rather than disaster, hotel rooms instead of wandering homeless through the end of the world.

  Dad was wondering out loud if anyone would notice the escape hatch he had cut into the fence wire, when someone finally did. We saw a short, stocky Hispanic man and his young boy emerge from the brush behind the school. Dad whispered for everyone to get down and be quiet. The man looked around, and apparently came to the same conclusion my dad had. He and the boy trotted across the small field of tall grass and into the woods where we were hiding. The man was looking over his shoulder, back toward the school the entire way, so it was no surprise to us when he almost tripped over Dad’s shoulder. He didn’t make contact, but the shock of seeing us was enough to make him lose his footing, falling in the dead leaves just behind my father, dragging his young son down with him.

  My dad rolled over quickly and was trying to bring his rifle to bear on the man. The man held up one hand while trying to scoot backwards away from Dad with the other.

  “No! No! We’re ok. We’re just trying to get away.” The man said, the hand still in the air while the other was now trying to get his little boy behind him.

  My dad had the rifle aimed by then. He held it on the man for a few seconds, saw that the man was scared, unarmed, and that the boy was clinging tightly to his father, and let the muzzle swing away.

  “Sorry. We’re a little jumpy... Sorry about that.” Dad said.

  The man dropped his hands to his sides to support his awkward position on the ground. “You think you’re jumpy? You should see what it’s like in there.” He pointed toward the schoolyard with his chin.

  “Yeah, I can imagine from the sound of things. I wish we had a better view. Anyway, sorry about the gun. I had no idea who might come out of the bushes. My name is David.” Dad set the rifle down and held out his hand to the man.