American Apocalypse Wastelands

by Nova

  After lunch Max unfolded the map. We were going to begin the curve toward home.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  We made it back and we arrived hungry. Coming into town we were greeted as soon as we passed the first handful of houses. People came out, waved, stared, and wanted to hear the story. Some asshole yelled out to me, “Hey, Gardener! How many did you kill this time?” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. Regardless, I filed his face away for future reference.

  The girl got her share of attention, too. Hers was of the stare-and-quiet-comment variety. Max traded insults and greetings. A couple of kids started tagging along. It was turning into a parade.

  I hate parades, and I really hate this kind of attention. I also hate clowns. Thank God, a patrol car showed up and took us the rest of the way home.

  Diesel was driving. It was good to see him. After we rolled a bit and got the “How are you” crap out of the way, he asked Max, “You want to talk about your trip or do you want to hear what happened yesterday?”

  “When you put it that way, I guess you should tell me what happened.”

  Diesel told us the story of how Old Guy had died. A Chevy Malibu had shown up at the station. Two guys went inside and began asking about Max and me. They told Gunny they were Feds and needed to talk to us about an “ongoing investigation.” He told them that we were in the field.

  They got threatening, and Gunny pulled a sawed-off shotgun that he had clipped underneath the desk and asked them to leave. After they left, he called the farm on the CB and told Tommy to expect visitors.

  Tommy only had Old Guy, Woof, and the kids there. When the Malibu rolled up to the gate, Old Guy was waiting. Tommy was still rounding up the kids and getting them inside.

  “We don’t know exactly what happened. Probably they got pushy again. Anyway, Tommy heard shots as he was coming out of the house. He saw the gate up and Old Guy lying there as the car passed through. He hosed the car. The guys are dead. Tommy is fine. Their bodies are in a hole out back, and their car is roasted. Old Guy is going in the ground tomorrow.”

  Max sighed. “Damn. He was a good man. Any family?”

  “No. According to people at the VFW, the hall and the farm were his life. He has a son somewhere on the West Coast, but nobody has seen him in years.”

  “You get IDs off the bodies?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t recognize the agency, but that don’t mean squat.”

  “Anything else?”

  Diesel looked at me and grinned. “There is a warrant out for G for murdering a dozen or so citizens of the burg down the road. I don’t expect they are going to do anything about it. You probably got a million or so meetings lined up, Max.”

  “Lovely,” Max replied.

  As far as the warrant went, my attitude was: “Well, fuck them.”

  “I knew you two would like that part of the news. So what’s the story with the kid? Hey, kid. You got a name?”

  She smiled and said, “Freya.”

  I told Diesel, “We found her along the way. We’re almost at the farm. You might as well wait for the telling of the tale.”

  We pulled in and were followed by laughing, running kids and a barking dog after we cleared the gate. Night and Tommy were waiting. It was minor chaos for a bit. It was fun, too.

  The kids stared solemnly at Freya, who stared back.

  “Alright, everyone. This is Freya. We found her in the woods. You can hear the rest after we clean up and eat.”

  What was interesting was Woof’s reaction. He stood still when Freya got out of the car. He usually ran up to me and Max to give us the sniff test and get his head patted or his ears scratched. Instead he hung back, standing very close to the kids.

  I wasn’t the only one to notice how he acted. In fact, I had been curious to see how he would behave toward her. Freya stood there, alone and separated from us by about three feet. I don’t know a lot about twelve-year-olds, but I would have been uncomfortable to have everyone staring at me. But she was unfazed. She looked at us and then extended her hand to Woof.

  Woof looked at her, whined, and approached her hesitantly. She said something. I have no idea what it was, but it sounded reassuring. Woof moved forward just enough to lick her extended hand; then he turned quickly and resumed his position next to the kids. He seemed more at ease now. His tongue was hanging out, and I swear he was smiling.

  That relaxed everyone. The Woof seal of approval was important—enough so that if Woof didn’t like her, she would not have been allowed to stay. No vote or discussion would have been needed.

  Max and I flipped to see who would get to use the shower first. I won. Our shower was outside by the garden. We had taken one of the rain barrels, painted it black, and set it on a platform. The shower floor was a wooden pallet, and the water drained into the garden. It worked well during the summer, but we were going to have to come up with a better idea soon. We took navy showers. That meant get wet, turn off the water, soap up, and turn on the water to rinse. It worked.

  I went in the trailer. It was weird without Old Guy. The energy in our little tin can of a house had changed. I peeked in his room. Someone had cleaned it out already. Just like that, he was gone. I felt a moment of existential angst, but it passed. Shit happens.

  I mentally shrugged and went to see what Night was cooking for dinner. Plus, I just wanted to say hello again. People had started drifting in. Almost everyone was sitting on the porch talking. I stuck my head in the kitchen but she shooed me away. She took cooking seriously. Actually, she took everything seriously. We were definitely a case of opposites attracting each other.

  The rule was, if you had a story to tell, you had to wait until dinner to tell it. That way everyone got to hear it. But until then, gossiping and general bullshitting were acceptable.

  Freya was sitting in the corner. She was so still that had she been someone else she would have been invisible. But she was one of those people that you found yourself watching, looking away from, and coming back to. She didn’t talk. I was beginning to wonder if she spoke English beyond a few simple phrases.

  A lot of people in the old days had been like that, especially in the food service business. They would fool you. You would say, “Hello, how you doing?” They would respond. Then you’d ask them something else, and the conversation would flounder. Their entire vocabulary consisted of rudimentary greetings and the menu, and half the time they couldn’t get that right.

  Max usually told our stories when we had one. I would just sit back, listen, and watch people’s faces. It was going to be interesting to see how he handled the bunnies from the sky.

  We also had to discuss what we would ask for when I called Big Daddy. I planned to tell him what we’d found in Bruxton and ask for some goodies. Since we had not found anything of importance, it would be interesting to see what the payoff would be. Probably a big nothing burger with a side order of unreturned calls.

  The gossip, if you want to call it that, was about the town’s accelerating death rate. Getting insulin on a regular basis was fast becoming a problem. It just wasn’t happening anymore. Almost any medication that required a daily dosage was difficult to find.

  As supplies dried up, the problem worsened. Scarcity meant that prescriptions shipped through the mail often did not arrive. Postal workers probably made more money selling Grandpa’s blood pressure medicine than they got in pay.

  There were reports that the big pharmaceuticals didn’t even make medications in North America anymore. On top of that, ever since the dollar got the big slap-down, manufacturers wouldn’t ship products unless the distributor could pay in a “real currency.” And prices got marked up to the point where if you didn’t absolutely need it to live, you went without. If you needed it that badly, then you had to decide how far you were willing to go to stay alive.

  There was also the growing problem of people migrating to and from the Zones. Or just floating, unable to get into a Zone but unwilling or unable to do what was neede
d to survive outside of one. These people were not predators. At least I didn’t see them that way. Rather, they were jackals and professional victims—people who were at a loss how to survive and who, increasingly, got no tolerance or sympathy from the rest of us.

  Max told our story the way he usually did. He skipped over the actual killing unless he thought a point needed to be made. Instead, he emphasized the terrain, what we saw and didn’t see, and the town itself.

  He mentioned the communications array and the indication that something was going on. That the setup screamed the Feds was a given. What they were doing was less clear.

  I noticed that Max omitted the bunny drop. I caught him later and said, “What, no bunnies from heaven? You skipped the best part.”

  He stopped, looked away for a second, and then faced me. “I did it on purpose. We don’t need to be starting anything with people that the kid can’t finish. If it wasn’t a fluke, it will happen again. If not, well, such is life.”

  I thought about it. “Okay. I agree, but I still am going to tell Night.”

  Max laughed as he walked away and said, “Fine. She would have gotten it out of you anyway.”

  The next two weeks flew by. I called Eddie—our contact on the Community Policing and Freedom Assistance package—using the landline at the station.

  I called him right after calling the number Big Daddy had given me. Big Daddy hadn’t answered. Instead I got a female who gave me only one-syllable responses after I started talking. She also hung up without saying goodbye. Rather rude of her, I thought.

  Eddie was noncommittal about providing anything more. He told me everything was scarce at the moment, but that anything was possible. He also said it was important for us to submit our monthly status and crime reports in a timely manner, and asked if we had gotten the spreadsheet he had e-mailed us. We needed to update that for him as soon as possible, he said.

  I told him we would get back to him on all of the above, and gave him our order list. Of course, he wanted me to e-mail him a copy and fill out the special request form available on their web site. I gave him the order over the phone anyway.

  We wanted vitamins, chard seeds, MREs, helmets, ammo, more weapons, feminine care products, antibiotics, insulin, socks, underwear, generators, cloth diapers, and all of Clint Eastwood’s and Monty Python’s movies on DVD. We had decided to ask for the world and hope that at least we’d get Latvia. I added the movie request while I had him on the phone. Once Night got bigger, I figured we would need something else to do in bed.

  Food storage and distribution was a major headache. Damn, I had to fight back the desire not to hurt some of these people. You’d think in a town this small people would see the need to pull together, shut the hell up, and do what I told them. No. We had to talk about it, argue about it, and compromise.

  Night pulled me aside at one point and explained winwin negotiating to me.

  I listened and then asked her, only partly kidding, “If I can’t shoot them, can I disappear a couple of them?”

  “No. That is not an option.”

  The food distribution and storage was running aground on control, power, and political issues. I listened to people claim it was socialist, that we were outsiders trying to take over, that we were alarmists, and that everything was going to be okay “real soon.”

  I think the speakers actually believed what they were saying most of the time. I understood that. It was when they started talking shit just to camouflage their real agenda that I got pissed. The worst ones were the preachers, which came as no surprise to me, and we had a lot of them.

  We had six churches in a town of less than a thousand people. When news got out that the pastor of the Episcopal Church was going to run the new food bank, the other pastors decided they needed to host one also. Why? Because they saw it as a source of power. Forget about feeding the hungry; it was about feeding their egos.

  Who would have access to food also became an issue. What about those Pope-worshiping Catholics? Didn’t they have their own? Or the illegal immigrants? Never mind that we only had a handful of those, and they were already starving. One dumb-ass wanted to feed only those who had been “saved” or who would agree to let the Lord into their lives, preferably as a member of his congregation. I was really, really tempted to shoot him on the spot.

  Night came up with the idea of treating the food bank as an actual bank, which created a new problem. Each resident could pay in cash, gold, or labor to the food bank; in turn they would be guaranteed enough food for a meal every day for a period of time.

  There was no way in hell we were going to be able to grow or hunt enough food for everyone. Night figured that with cash we could buy the basics in bulk whenever we found them and store them for later use. It was a good idea, but more than anything, it convinced the preachers even more that they needed their own food banks.

  We ended up compromising. Each pastor could start a food bank. Anyone in their congregation who signed up was their responsibility. If they ran into difficulties or it didn’t work out, that was their problem. The town committed itself to providing one meal a day for children under fourteen and adults over seventy.

  I asked Night later, “Why are we feeding the really old? I mean, I understand it is good and noble and all, but why?”

  She replied, “Don’t worry about it. Most of them will be dead by the new year anyways.”

  We had to stop locking up locals for petty offenses. Public drunkenness, domestic disturbance, possession of minor amounts of drugs except for meth—those sorts of things only got a warning. The warning was just a little different now. Usually we would say something along the lines of, “If I have to come back here again for the same shit, I am going to kick your ass.” After we did that a few times, most of the locals learned that we were serious.

  I never threatened anyone with an ass-kicking, although I did bust a barrel across one drunk fool’s head just because he thought that he could get away with talking shit to me. I did not tolerate that. Generally, locals were polite to me and I was polite to them.

  If a man was a wife-smacker, then we usually told the woman, “Next time shoot his ass. We don’t care. If you don’t want to do that, then leave.” So far we hadn’t had any woman tell us she had no place to go. If one did, we would have found a place for her.

  If the man pushed it, I told the patrol officers to kick his ass. If it seemed like someone was escalating things, they had orders to shoot his ass on the spot. No one got shot over that. I didn’t expect them to. They were all related or had known each other for years. They knew that if it got ugly enough, I would find them. That seemed to work.

  If you were not a local, we would put you in holding. Depending on what brought you to our attention, we might call the state police and have them run your background. Most times we didn’t bother. If it wasn’t a crime of violence, you saw the magistrate, paid a fine, and were moved on. If you smacked a local and were at fault, then you resisted arrest, paid the fine, and were moved on.

  We finally got our town alarm system working. The Episcopal church had a bell, which we convinced the pastor to donate. It sat in the front of the church as a historical artifact, and it was one heavy piece of metal to move. We ended up having to use the front-loader, which we had donated to the town after building the berm. We had held back the Bobcat, though.

  It was Night’s idea to ring the bell once every four hours. She figured it would get everyone used to hearing it. Plus, it let everyone know that someone was alert and watching. The system was simple: One ring meant all was well. Two rings meant all available officers and militia were needed at the station. Constant ringing meant all block managers should get their blocks ready and armed; all militia report to the town square and all officers to the station.

  The people who thought we were alarmists began to reconsider as they watched friends and family die from lack of medications. They also became more appreciative of our security efforts when stories of carjackings an
d raids at isolated farmhouses began making the rounds with more frequency. Cattle rustling was coming back in a big way, too.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Freya did not speak English. Well, not much. That put a bit of a damper on finding out who she was, why she was in the woods, and how she got hawks to deliver bunnies on demand. Initially, we left her with the kids at the farm, the idea being that she could watch them, help with chores, and learn to speak English.

  That did not work out very well. After the second week, the kids wanted to know if Auntie Night or I could take her into town with us.

  I asked them why. All they said was, “Uncle G, she isn’t a kid. She’s old.” I asked them to explain but they couldn’t. They just kept saying, “She isn’t a kid.”

  The squad came back from its second foraging trip to the surrounding countryside. They brought back a couple iron stoves, some lanterns, and some old tools. One of the tools was a hand-cranked drill. We passed that around and stared at it. The rest, as far as I could tell, was junk.

  When I got a chance to talk to Diesel alone I asked him, “What was it like out there?”

  “Weird, G, and probably going to get weirder. We’re not finding much of anything. Hell, a couple places we pulled into, we were coming in as other people were leaving.”

  “That had to be a bit tense.” I laughed.

  “Yeah, well, we showed them ours, and they showed us theirs, and we both decided it wasn’t worth it.”

  “So what were the people like? Talk to me, Diesel.”

  He rubbed his face and reset the faded ball cap on his head. “People were hostile. Of course, we didn’t look like a bunch of bicycling Mormons.”

  I nodded. That made sense. A handful of warriors armed with rifles and sawed-off shotguns would tend to make people standoffish.