“Yeah, just enough to keep us from starving. Anyway, remember that, when you hear them out there talk about how much extra we have. Speaking of which,” she turned and strode resolutely away.
She led him out of the fields and into a large barn next to the main building. It looked like the barn had once been red but had faded to its current muddled brown, settling into the pattern of eternal winter dampening everything, even colors.
She pulled open the door, throwing herself against it (she really was rather small) and motioned for him to enter first. He felt like a hostage again as he entered in front of his warden.
Against the far wall was what looked like a mountain of food. David had never seen so much in his life. There were crates upon crates stacked against the wall, some filled with jars, a few with cans. There were gunny sacks that looked like they must be full of wheat, along with cans of all shapes and sizes. Awe exploded inside him, and he was at once full of joy at the sight and anger at the fact that they refused to share what they had.
“Looks like a lot, huh?” Ann said, standing beside him, regarding the mound of supplies with a slight grin.
“I don’t get—”
“Why we don’t share it with everyone who asks?” she finished his thought. “I know, everyone who has come in from the outside has said the same thing, that they’ve never seen so much food in their lives, at least not since before.” She looked over at David with unadulterated curiosity, as if he were an animal in a zoo. “It’s really not that much. When you think about how many of us there are here—”
“How many of you are there?” he interrupted.
“I’m really not supposed to tell you that.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Why?”
“What if you decided to lead the Outliers in a massive raid against us? I don’t think that will happen, I don’t think it would do much good, and they know that, but still. Knowing exactly how many of us there are? I don’t think so. If they want to try it, they’ll just have to guess.” They really didn’t trust him. He understood, but couldn’t help feeling a little offended.
“Fair enough. Rough estimate?”
“How many people do you think there are here?” she asked him.
“Well,” he started, knowing that if he was wildly off, maybe even if he was dead-on, she would just laugh and that would be the end of it, “if I had to guess, I would say there’s, maybe, sixty? Seventy?”
A derisive chuckle escaped her throat before she stifled her amusement. “More than that.”
“A hundred…?”
“I’m not going there. That’s all you get.”
He cursed himself, hoping she wasn’t saying that just to throw him off. There had to be at least fifty; he had seen that many people so far this morning, right?
“There aren’t a lot of us,” she repeated, “but believe me when I say, this will get us through the winter, and there won’t be much left over. It doesn’t help that winter still lasts for most of the year.”
David understood this; he had held real hope that his garden would save him, and even feared the predicament the Base was struggling with for himself, but the earth didn’t favor him too much. Oh, and then everyone had disappeared.
“So this wouldn’t be enough to feed the Outliers as well?” David summed up.
“Did you put that together all on your own there, Skippy?” she said with a sardonic smirk. He expected as much. “We do help them out, as much as we can, or at least we did. We stopped when they started raiding the fields and taking it rather than waiting for us to bring it to them. Bunch of assholes.” She added her last remark with a stony expression, and David saw in her face the added difficulty in bringing the two factions to peace; after finding a way for them all to survive together, they would have to find a way to live together.
David heard an odd noise and turned around, realizing as he scanned the walls lined with stalls that the barn was nearly empty, the pile of food contained within taking up a small fraction of the available space. Maybe it really wasn’t as much food as it seemed at first. He could not find the source of the sound, and wandered toward the right side of the barn, Ann following behind.
“What was that noise?” he asked her.
“Oh, everyone loves this when they get here,” she replied.
He looked into stall after stall, all empty. That could not have been what he thought it was, there was just no way. He came around a dividing wall and there, standing in front of him, hay sticking out of its mouth as it chewed lazily, was a very skinny cow.
“The rest all died.”
“How did that one even make it so long? I haven’t seen a single animal, even a wild one for…” David trailed off.
“I know. A lot of the animals the old farmer had died off on their own. Then when it looked like we were never going to see the sun again, we started butchering the ones left, which was just to put off the inevitable, or so it seemed at the time.” They were walking out of the barn, Ann putting a padlock on the door he hadn’t noticed was there before. Her anger seemed to have abated, perhaps she was enjoying her role as tour guide more than she thought she would.
“We stopped when the fields starting actually growing something,” she continued, “and there were still a few animals left by that point. Betsy is the only one left though. At least we still have milk for the young ones.”
“People are having babies?” A part of him rejected the idea as ridiculous, while another reminded him of the way he had felt when Elizabeth fell on him on their journey to the Base. It was inevitable.
“Yeah, there’s a few little squirts running around the place. Kids get most of the milk. Most people would rather wait, though, and see if there will even be enough to feed their kids before they bring a new life into this world.” David couldn’t help but be struck again by the maturity of Ann, who was so young yet seemed to understand not only so much that went on in the Base but so much about life itself. This is no world for children, he thought to himself.
“I thought babies were extinct,” he joked.
She smiled at him, a quick, rueful grin, and let a chuckle slip between her teeth.
“So,” David started, knowing she would probably have a good answer for his question, “what’s the situation between the Base and the Outliers at the moment?”
Her grin faded and she turned her head to look over her shoulder, a little to the right of the front gate.
“Those—” she began and caught herself. “We were helping them out as much as we could, giving them what food we could spare and trying to do what we could for them. We really were. Then they started coming in and taking whatever they wanted. We haven’t even had a meeting with any of them, like we used to, for weeks now. They just keep coming in, keep getting shot, keep dying. There was a group that came in a week ago, made it all the way to the barn before someone saw them. All four of them are in the ground now. And there’s one of ours that just joined them. One of them got a shot off before he bit it.”
David withered a little inside, reminded of the challenges he faced. He came to make peace, to find a solution, but the people of the Base really did hate the Outliers, and he was sure the loathing was multiplied on the other side of the wall.
“That’s a shame,” David said, not knowing how to respond.
“Yeah.” Her face was like granite once more, giving off nothing more than a strong indifference, which he knew now was merely a shield. “Something’s gotta give, you know?” She focused her heavy eyes on him, and he wanted to look away, away from the pressure, away from the hopeless way she looked at him.
He broke his gaze away, looking ahead at the farmhouse. She grabbed his arm, clenched it hard, holding him in place. He reluctantly turned his face to hers. The beggar was gone; a soldier stood in its place.
“It’s going to be a war,” she almost whispered. “If this doesn’t get solved, there’s going to be a war, and I think everyone knows that would be suicide for all
of us; that’s why neither of us has started it. They surely want to take over, take our place here, or at least take a spot among us. We need them gone, so that we can be sure of our own survival. People are starting to talk, though, and I’m sure it’s not just within these walls. There’s a storm coming, and it’ll be a blood-bath. Just remember that.”
With that she took a step in front of him and set a course for the front door of the house. David let her gain a slight lead before following, head bent, studying the soil, his imagination adding rivulets of blood to the dirt and grass.
It was a little after noon when they made it back into the farmhouse. Ann escorted David to his room, told him he was supposed to stay there and left, saying she had other things to do. David flopped down on his cot, weighed down evermore by the task in before him.
Before Ann left, she stopped in the doorway and told him the Mayor would be in to talk to him, that he should just stay in this room. She was hesitant about it, and David wondered if she was not supposed to tell him the Mayor would be the one coming. Perhaps he had made a friend. Or perhaps she had just forgotten until she was nearly out the door. Better not get his hopes up too high.
CHAPTER 24
He sat up on the wrinkled canvas, head in his hands, wondering if he had bitten off more than he could chew. Should he just go back to his valley, where he could die in peace? No, he had to help these people, and he didn’t want to die. Maybe that time when he thought he was the only man left had endowed him with some sense of responsibility for humanity. One moment he had made the decision to terminate his species. At the time, he felt he had that power. Somewhere inside he now had the opposite urge. He had the red button in his hands, he could decide whether he and everyone else lived or died. That may not be true, but it certainly felt like it. He wished he knew where his backpack and, most importantly, his bow had ended up. It had always helped him relax to fire off some arrows into a stump or a fallen log. Even that had been taken from him.
He stood up, intending to pace the room, but the cupboard he had been assigned measured no more than five feet wide and was crammed with the cot from wall-to-wall. A wave of claustrophobia crashed over him. Needing to escape the tiny space, he threw open the door and stood there, looking down the hall. He took one step, followed by another, and found himself wandering through the labyrinth.
He had two objectives in mind, both of which he thought fair: he wanted to find his things, and he wanted to speak with Elizabeth. He had been tied up like a thief and interrogated, and he was tired of being bossed around by this ungrateful bunch he had come to save. Maybe he would just take his pack and go. Maybe he would try and spirit Elizabeth away from this place. Maybe he would burn it to the ground and let the Outliers come on in.
He knew he wouldn’t do that. It went against his most recent beliefs about humanity.
He had to try to save them, to set them up for a long and happy future, so that he could share in it. He feared the Outliers would wreck any chance of mankind’s fresh start if left to their own devices. He did have to admit, though, he was unsure there was any way to help both sides. Now was not the time to think of that, though. He was sure to find out more once he went out to live among the Outliers. A path would present itself.
If it didn’t, he could always slip away in the night.
Settling on that back-up plan, he felt better, less confined, and more independent. And, strangely, more willing to help the Base (and the Outliers, for that matter) out of their current predicament.
The thick soles of his boots fell on the floorboards with a knock, knock as if someone were at the door. He was amazed at the size of this place; there were bedrooms galore, the large dining room, a cellar (he did not have to see this again to know it was there). Most of the doors were closed, and he feared what would happen if he opened the wrong door, so he ignored those.
The couple of rooms he poked his head into were bare. One had a cot like his, a stack of books next to it, and a large crate full of clothes, with nothing else but a smattering of candles and blankets. Another contained a wooden table and a few chairs, a large straw mattress tucked into one corner. This one had a dresser as well, and David wondered if any one person had enough clothing to fill it. Nothing he saw in these rooms excited him terribly and he resumed his exploration, disappointed in the lack of open portals into the lives of the people of the Base.
There was almost no one in the house; he saw an elderly woman in the kitchen, who did not look up from the pot she was stirring when he poked his head through the door leading from the dining room, and a couple of other wanderers, who appeared to be uniformly elderly or unwell. He wondered where everyone could be, wondered if they were all out at the fields helping harvest the last of the year’s bounty. He found a flight of stairs at one end of the house and climbed up in the hopes of finding a window through which he could get another look at the population of his potential new home. The stairs were narrow and steep, his legs burned when he reached the top.
A long hallway stretched out before him, lined on either side by doors. He could hear some noises escaping through one not completely closed at the end of the hall, so he glided up to it and peeked in. There was a large desk, an armoire, and a woman inside the room. She had her back to him and was seated in a large chair, only the top of her head, lush with golden locks, stuck above the back of the recliner as she thumbed through a book.
“Elizabeth?” David asked as he opened the door enough to squeeze his head through, the creak of the rusty hinges nearly blotting out his words.
“David?” she said before she even turned around. Her face lit up and David felt a river of blood rush into his own. She smiled, and that infected his own expression. “I’m so glad you’re okay!” she shouted, running to him. Her arms wrapped around his stiffly surprised frame. She pulled away quickly, a look of fear appearing in her eyes and on her lips. “I swear I did not know what they were going to do to you, I tried to stop them—”
“It’s all right,” David interrupted. “I’m fine. I know you wouldn’t do something like that. Or at least I hope…” he finished with a suspicious grin, hoping to pull the happiness back over her features. It worked.
“I can’t believe they locked you up in the cellar, as if you were some kind of criminal,” she said as she took his hand and pulled him to a seat next to her on her queen-sized mattress. “They thought you had kidnapped me or something, at least that’s what the guards told the Mayor after they had knocked you out. I nearly did the same to them. They’re lucky there were two of them,” she muttered.
David had to choke back laughter at her threat as he studied her slim figure, clad now in a dingy pink sweater and black jeans that were almost more patch than denim. Her room was the nicest he had seen thus far, with actual furniture and a thick mattress, but it was still generally bare, and it occurred to him that it really was no nicer than his own cabin. Now he truly believed that she had not been mocking him when she complimented his rough home, crooked walls and all.
“It’s really okay,” he went on, straight-faced. “I understand. No one takes chances anymore. No one can afford to. I would have done the same thing.” He said this to calm Elizabeth but realized as the words were born that they came from a place of truth in his mind. He really did understand, and his bitterness was melting away. He might have been a little more congenial about it though.
“They shouldn’t have treated you that way,” she repeated, unwilling to let the subject go.
“So this is your room, huh?” he asked to divert her attention.
“Kind of,” she answered. “I share the room with another girl, but she’s helping out in the fields. I would be too, but I ‘need to get some rest’.” She put her fingers up to mime quotation marks and her voice dipped into an impatient tone. Another piece in the jigsaw David was assembling of this girl fell into place. He wondered what pieces were left.
“Are you hungry?” she asked suddenly. “I hope they fed you while you
were down there. I know—”
“I’m fine, really.” David put his hand on hers and she relaxed visibly. “So what are you reading?”
She got up and walked over to her desk to retrieve her book. “I’m trying to solve our little problem.” David wondered what she thought was a big problem, if starvation and war were so negligible. “I found a couple of books on agricultural history,” she opened to a picture of a cluster of men in loincloths digging, “and I think I may have found some things we could try to get our fields producing more. Irrigation canals, things like that. The Mayor is so hesitant to take risks with the lives of the Base, he never gives my ideas a chance. Doesn’t want to ‘rock the boat’.”
“I think anything’s worth a try,” David responded, studying the ancient farmers.
“I know!” she exclaimed. “If we tried something new and got more food to grow, there would be no Base and Outliers, just one us.” This David understood, and he wondered if maybe he had anything to do with this project of hers.
“But what if you tried something new and you killed all the crops?” he intoned, and her face fell. “There are two sides to everything.”
“I know. I don’t want to risk what we have but I just can’t stand the thought of those people out there, dreading the winter, wondering if it’s their last.” Her eyes flitted to the window that looked out over the front of the Base, and stayed there.
“We’re going to make sure it’s not,” David said, taking her hand once more, hoping he wasn’t overdoing it. “You and I. I’ll do what I can out there, but I may need your help. I might just need an inside man,” he smiled conspiratorially, “because I don’t think I can very well be seen strolling in and out the front gate. What do you say?” Not really knowing exactly what this would entail, he stuck out his open hand, the one not holding hers, and she grasped it.
“You got it, partner,” she said, laughing as she grabbed his hand in a rough shake. “So,” she went on, taking her hands from his and folding them in her lap, “what do you think of the Base? Besides the dungeon?”
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