Watching Wren surreptitiously from the corner he’d wedged himself into, Coru was glad to see she looked tired, but happy, relieved the Thackers’ bodies had not been found, but knowing, Coru was certain, they had died in the pandemic while helping others. It wasn’t the news she’d hoped for, but it was better than what it could have been.
Abruptly she turned and stared back at him, her blue eyes drilling into his. He switched to math formulas instantly, running them through his brain furiously, praying he hadn’t shown his hand. After a moment, she turned away and resumed her part in the general conversation, but he knew he’d been warned. He’d need to tread lightly around her.
While the men were gone, the women had worked hard, unpacking all seven of the ATVs. Much of the supplies brought into D.O.A. were now stacked inside this cabin, waiting to be sorted. The rest was now inside the barn, also waiting to be sorted. A job for tomorrow.
Still watching from his corner, it occurred to Coru they needed more men. Yes, it was fifty-fifty, six males, six females, but only three of the males were grown men. After he left, there would only be two. And Bill had a heart condition, so that really meant only Mattea.
They needed more men.
There was a sharp knock on the door. Everyone started, spilling cups, gasping, cut off cries of alarm and surprise.
They looked at one another, big-eyed. They’d been sloppy; their weapons were all outside in their vehicles. Only Nicola had her rifle; Nicola always had her rifle.
“I should have been scanning!” Wren cried out, her expression horrified at her mistake. “I’ll go.”
Coru was across the cabin in four strides. “With me,” he said, taking Nicola’s offered rifle and flipping off the safety.
Wren ran silently in sock feet into her bedroom, retrieved her old protector and handed it off to Mattea. The shot wouldn’t go far, but standing at her door was close enough that Mattea could do some serious damage with it. With the weapon raised, Mattea ghosted along the wall toward the door and peered out. Catherine and Sandy hushed the children, herding them up the stairs into the loft.
Annie sat frozen, her hands splayed across her belly, her eyes frightened.
Nicola pulled a knife from Wren’s knife block and slipped behind Mattea. All this occurred in under one minute. The cabin was now silent. The knock came again.
Wren motioned for them to wait. She closed her eyes and concentrated.
“Wren?” A man’s voice.
Wren’s eyes flew open. She cried out, sobbing, flung open the door, ran through the porch and flung open that door as well, launching herself into a man’s arms. “Dan! Oh Dan! I thought you were dead!” They hugged and talked over one another, both in tears. Coru and Mattea followed. Dan was not alone. Two other men were with him, a big, black man and a freckled-faced redhead, both standing back a few paces, their rifles held loosely in their hands. An elderly retriever stood in the background, content to see how things played out, it seemed. Coru did not replace the safety on his weapon. He and Mattea exchanged looks and slipped quietly behind the intruders, at the ready.
Wren pulled back from her death hold on Dan, looking tearfully into his face. “Mona?”
He shook his head.
“Oh Dan. I’m so sorry.”
He nodded in the direction of his two companions. “These are two of our neighbors.” He waved toward the freckle-faced man first, “Jarvis Kincaid,” then the black man, “and Sean Abbott. We’re all immune. We all lost our families.”
“How did you find me?”
“We stay in the woods now. We watched these two,” his eyes flicked to Mattea and Coru with interest, but only for a moment, “and another, older man loading up the beds from my farm. We waited, then followed them down here and waited some more. I wasn’t sure who’d taken over your place. So, I risked a peek in the window.”
Wren hugged him some more, pressing her wet face into his rough wool jacket. “Oh Dan, come in, come in. Your friends too. Oh! And you’ve got Ol’ Henry too! Hey Henry.” The dog came forward, its tail swishing a greeting to an old friend.
Mattea and Coru exchanged glances again and agreed. The men could go in, but they would be watched carefully. They all filed back into the cabin porch, Ol’ Henry squeezing in just before the door swung shut, Wren and Dan still hugging one another.
Catherine screamed from up in the loft.
Coru and Mattea shoved past Wren and the newcomers to the entrance. Catherine flew down the stairs.
Bill was lying on the floor, clutching his chest.
17
DREAMSCAPE
Wren slipped out of the cabin carrying her boots, after she was sure everyone was finally asleep. Once she’d eased the porch door closed, she slipped on her boots and looked around. Okay, if I were a weird guy who insisted I sleep outside to ‘guard’, where would I go?
She wasn’t playing fair, she knew, but all this mental math to keep her out of his head was getting on her nerves. Normally, she wasn’t this curious about people, but these were not normal times. She was grateful for her ability now, her way to sort the good from the bad.
Yes, on paper, Coru looked like one of the good guys. He worked hard, pitched in, led when he needed to, followed when it was warranted. He had good ideas, solved problems, was good to the kids, and had been wonderful with Bill since his heart attack, or whatever it had been. There were no machines here to give them a definitive answer. What they were calling it for the moment, was an Episode.
Didn’t that just send shivers through her?
Bill’s episode had frightened her to the core. She simply could not go on without Bill’s calming presence. He was integral to their success here at D.O.A., of that she was certain. Catherine of course, was all over Bill, mothering him, feeding him, tucking him back onto the couch whenever the poor man made any move to escape her. Poor Bill. But still, she agreed with Catherine. Bill had frightened them all, badly, especially the children. He would just have to put up with a little more attention before he would be allowed out and about on his own. He was much too valuable for them to lose.
But back to Coru. She was here to learn about Coru, her only mysterious guest out here on her precious acreage.
So why was Coru so bent on hiding himself from her? It wasn’t a need for privacy, or resentment at her intrusion. Those feelings she knew the moment she read them. No, Coru was hiding something, and it was big.
He wouldn’t be up in the loft in the barn bedding down with the rest of the men. He’d taken a bedroll and headed in the opposite direction, closer to the old cabin, but not inside it. They hadn’t even had a chance to go inside and assess its viability yet. Tomorrow was the big day, or maybe the next. The men needed a warm place of their own by winter, which now that she was making note of these things, was such a short time away. They’d barely started summer and she was planning for winter. How bizarre was that?
Was he down by the boat launch? That was their biggest weakness. If it were her, that’s where she would go. She turned toward the old cabin and garden and struck out across the meadow that separated the two cabins, glad of the short grass and dandelions to soften her tread. She reached the garden, walked its perimeter, rounded the end, where the water tanks were raised up on big wood platforms to aid the gravity fed hoses for watering, and approached the top of the boat launch.
Here she left the grass and walked down the silty soil, stopping just before the rocky shore, and looked around. No sign of Coru Wisla. Here she dropped her shield and searched the night. She picked him up at once, not here, but up the trail that followed the other side of the fenced garden, but before the road began to slope up to the gate. Also good. He could cover the landing and the road at the same time.
He was sleeping, and dreaming some wondrous dreams. Wow. The raw images in his head were … were something, or somewhere she’d never seen before. In his dreams, he was upset with someone. Her step faltered, suddenly ashamed of her duplicity. He’d never given her reason
to believe he would act against them. It was only the covering of his private thoughts, a natural enough reaction to learning her ability. But he’d already known of her ability. How did he know? Who had told him? He’d come searching for her, yet now that he was here, would not approach her.
She was here to find him out. It was her responsibility to make sure everyone here on D.O.A. was safe, good, and had the group’s best interests foremost in their minds. She moved closer, each step carefully made. Reaching a big pine, she gripped its ridged bark, taking comfort in its solid structure. Here she could listen quietly, and not reveal herself. She leaned against the tree, opened her mind completely and dove into Coru Wisla’s dream …
“WHAT IS THAT SMELL?” Moira demanded, twitching her tunic as if the motion of the fabric would somehow wave away the offensive odor that had seeped into the pod despite the air purifiers pumping noisily around the clock.
“Mother, put on the mask, it will help,” Coru said, knowing that once again Moira would ignore him and continue to complain. It wasn’t enough that others had moved from their shelter in order that First Councilor Wisla and his wife had comfort while at Surface. He knew the displaced family, the wife expecting their second child any day now, was currently squeezed into a pod half this size.
“It’s ugly.”
“It works.”
“But why must it smell so abominably down here? Surely something...” She waved her slender hand, “Could… filter…or block… the stink!”
“You weren’t so worried about the smell here at Surface prior to your forced descent a week ago,” Coru said. “Your sudden concern for Surface Citizens has arrived rather late in the game, don’t you think?”
Moira’s expression softened to a pretty pout. She looked up at her son through her lashes. “Coru, be sweet to your mother. You know stress is bad for my health.”
Coru considered his mother’s face dispassionately. This look, this tone, had always worked with his father; he however, thank the earth, was immune to Moira’s bleating. It had taken her years to wear down his patience; now her theatrics left him cold.
“You are currently enjoying the most luxurious quarters Surface has to offer, at no small cost to the family whose home you have commandeered. Appreciate what you have and wear the damned mask.”
All pretense of vulnerability dropped from Moira’s face. “Fine.” Her gaze swept the small gun-metal gray housing unit, clean and sparsely furnished. “But I simply don’t see what a person is to do to fill the hours down here. It’s cripplingly depressing.”
Coru barked a laugh. “First truth you’ve uttered today. It is depressing to be surrounded by, and to live in, the dredges of mankind’s contribution to the earth. And what ‘a person does to fill the hours’ is to work to make things better.” He shrugged back into his bio-suit. “You should try it sometime.”
“Is this your subtle way of assigning blame to me?” Moira demanded.
He snugged his mask to his face with a shake of his head and opened the hatch to the cold low hanging fog slipping through the streets, forcing off-gases into the city from mountains of industrial waste.
“Ugh!” Moira lurched for her mask and clamped it to her face, her eyes sparking in anger. “You forget who you are addressing, Coru.” Her admonishment was muffled.
“That would be impossible.” Coru closed the hatch, sealing his mother inside with her indignation. He ran for the bus, waiting for him at the corner.
Instead of going over the day’s assignments while traveling out of the city on the crew bus, which was his habit, Coru watched the passing view, imagining what Moira would see if she were in his place. The row upon row of neatly arranged metal pod quarters would seem repetitive and dull to Moira, but Coru knew them to be a triumph over the previous squalor of patched-together shelters that were notorious for cold and wet and the illness that naturally followed. These tidy metal pods were a victory against the elements. They had united families and communities, given the occupants a sense of place, security and perhaps a future, fragile as it was.
Yes, the air purifier pumps were not aesthetically pleasing, appearing more wart than machine on the sides of each pod. They were as noisy as hell and riddled with breakdowns, but they worked. The captured water distillers attached to the round, riveted roofs of the pods were comically rudimentary, but they worked!
As the bus moved away from the newest residential area of New Fargo, the fields of pods changed to row upon row of greenhouses, these constructed with found materials and glass salvaged from the almost deserted city center of Old Fargo. Where Moira would likely see acres of cobbled together chaos, he saw a stitched together quilt of hope. For the first time in many years, fresh vegetables and berries were grown without the worry of possible contamination from the surrounding ground water. Again, banks of crude water distillers were the acting heroes.
Further still, small domestic animals were raised in controlled environ. Chickens, pigs, sheep, goats, even ponds of shrimp. Their harvest: meat, eggs, milk, cheese, feathers, hides and wool. Nothing was wasted; even their excrement was lovingly collected for the greenhouses.
All this had taken years of sweat equity. He had come in late in the game, having worked on Surface only six years now, nevertheless he took great pride in the successes Surface citizens had achieved by working tirelessly together. Nothing gave him more pleasure than witnessing the depleted and humbled, yet somehow still determined people still here on Surface beating back the ruin of the earth. Here he would spend his life, a higher calling than any Cloud Rez could ever offer.
When the newest bamboo grove came into view with its miles of draped weeping hoses of filtered water crisscrossing the plot, he stopped his musing and quickly scanned his plans for the crew. Rupture site six was just over this next ridge and it was time to get his head back into the game. There would be nothing out of the ordinary today, basically more of the same from the last eight weeks. Everyone understood what they needed to do.
The bamboo initiative crew had found this rupture back in April, while scouting out potential growing fields. Coru’s team, experienced in oil and gas spills, was sent in immediately. Once the rupture was located and the valves on either side also located and shut down, the team was faced with the task of cleaning up millions of gallons of sludge. It was obvious immediately the ways of cleaning up spills in the past simply would not cut it at rupture six. This was by far the biggest environmental disaster Coru had ever been charged with cleaning up, and for a number of reasons he wanted badly to do a good job of it.
For one, it was dangerously close to the location they had chosen to set up New Fargo.
For two, it was his personal mission. In his opinion, oil and gas pipelines left to rot in the ground when other technologies had taken over their usefulness was a crime against the planet. The government had had the money and the time to safely remove the danger that lay beneath the ground across the country back then and chose instead to ignore it.
The third and most personal reason was his age and station. Even after six hard years on Surface, he was still a twenty-six-year-old Cloud Rez ‘golden boy’, a more useless and humiliating badge he could not imagine. He was the youngest team leader, a position he’d fought hard to attain, driving to overcome the double shame of Cloud Rez being his home address and First Councilor Cyprian Wisla being his father. A success with rupture six would erase any doubt he was a Surface citizen first. But how? Weeks of slogging around in an environmental soup of swill got him nowhere. Until he spoke to Payton. A history buff in the family could be useful from time to time.
The bus pulled into the lot. Coru followed the other workers as they poured out, each donning their masks and gloves as they exited. He could see the exhaustion in their slow movements. Another day in hell.
Thomas Tower hurried across the packed mud toward him, his expression grim inside his mask. “Hey Boss. Finally got that load of supplies you’ve been waiting for. That’s some seriously weird shit.�
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“It’s some seriously weird plan.” Coru grinned at his friend. “It ain’t pretty, but I’m pretty sure it’ll work.”
“I’m open.” Thomas shrugged inside his suit and fell naturally into step with Coru. Thomas had been the first Surfacer to accept Coru, and the bond between them was unbreakable. “Pumping it back into the ground won’t hold us for long.”
Once inside the makeshift headquarters tent, Coru withdrew the schematics he and Payton had spent weeks putting together. He spread them out for his team to look over and waited to see their expressions. He wasn’t disappointed.
Craig said, “This is what the holding tanks are for. This…”
Seeing the split wide smile on Craig’s face was icing on Coru’s personal cake. This was a game-changer.
Thomas looked serious, still studying the screens. “Has this been tested?” He looked up at Coru. “Anywhere?”
His chest bursting with excitement, Coru replied, “Here,” and motioned around them. “It’ll be tested here.”
A branch snapped in the woods, the blue prints Coru had struggled so hard to create with his brother disappeared in a wisp of smoke, and Coru was awake and alert, his hand on his rifle, scanning the darkness all around him.
Wren trembled against her tree, both afraid of what had snapped that branch and being discovered listening in on Coru’s dreams.
They both remained motionless, straining to hear. After a time, there was a rustle, a footfall, then another. A moose appeared from behind a tree in Coru’s eyes, startling him, then flooded his brain and his heart with wonder. Wren experienced his joy at seeing the moose, a bull, with a full rack, and was driven to tears at his overwhelming reaction to see this magnificent animal. He’d never seen one before.
Lost Sentinel: Post-Apocalyptic Time Travel Adventure (Earth Survives Series Book 1) Page 19