by James, Guy
Senna laughed. “You’re too hard on yourself. You weren’t too bad looking, in your youth.” She smiled wryly.
“Funny,” Alan said. “We both kept to ourselves for a while. No one liked to make friends on the crews. It usually ended in a bad way. But you kept sidling up to me, asking me questions and such.”
“Didn’t,” Senna said. Her grin was broad now.
He laughed. “Sure did.”
“Not me. It was you chasing after me. You were cute.”
“Either way,” he said, “we got to talking. We had nothing in common.”
“Nothing. Nada. Nanka. Zilch.”
“Nothing in common,” he said, “but we…”
“Clicked,” she said.
“Right. And then you got to liking me and you just couldn’t let me go.”
“You’re so yummy,” she said, “can you really blame me?”
“Guess not.”
“We were great together,” Senna said, “even on the crew, doing what we were doing.”
“Agreed. And the rest…is history.”
From then on, he thought, you and I stood together, against the world.
Senna regarded the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. She said nothing for a few moments. “Thank you, Alan. Thank you for telling me about the warehouse.”
He’d taken down another wall for her, and what they had was deeper now. There were more walls, many more, and he had no plans to take those down, no plans to delve into the scorched earth that lay beyond. But then he hadn’t planned on taking this wall down either and now he was in the field beyond it, naked and standing on the human debris that was there, with Senna’s strong presence at his side.
Frowning, he considered how he really hadn’t intended to tell her all he just had, but she always managed to get a little bit more out of him, more of what he didn’t want her to know, more about his past. He sighed. The past itself was manageably painful now, a sore that would never heal but whose nervy whine was something he’d grown used to.
It was the loss of control that disturbed him more, because he was giving up a part of himself by telling her, and even though he knew he could trust her, he didn’t want to tell her about any more of his past. Sometimes he thought he wanted her to know everything. She often said that herself…that she did want to know everything about him.
But he didn’t want to reveal it all because that was an act that couldn’t be taken back, and anyway it was better to live in the present and keep some things unsaid. So he resolved to keep the rest locked away, and pictured his mouth being made of the sealed lips of a vice, his head painted a cheap lime green shade to hide the bare, rusted metal underneath.
Alan stroked Senna’s arm.
Then a gust of wind rustled its way through the farm and billowed their clothes, setting the corners of their garments to flapping. It brought with it the smell of damp leaves and soil, with a subtle undertone of petroleum.
Alan’s nostrils flared in recognition, but then Senna was pulling him after her, toward the house. He could tell what was on her mind by the way she was walking, and he forgot all about the smell the wind had carried to them.
33
A spider was crawling toward the church and its own death. It would be squashed by Larry Knapp, who would take a little too much pleasure in the pointless act. Oblivious to its fate, the spider moved on, completing the literal last legs of its journey.
It had had a good life, having spent some time in Senna’s great magnolia, and more than a week crawling all over Senna’s fig tree, which was done giving fruit for the season, but was still a fun place for a spider to hang out and spin webs and go on spider frolics in the late afternoon.
When the figs were in, it was a fig free-for-all, a frig for all, if you were feeling adventurous in your naming and admitted what always seemed to happen after a session of fig eating. Let the frigging commence. It wasn’t like Senna and Alan needed an excuse, or a reason, or a particular fruit, anyway.
Good as the times there were, the spider had left the comforts of their farm as if called away to a soul-searching journey. There were other things in the world for it to find, other trees to crawl, other afternoon frolics awaiting it in yet unvisited spots.
This particular scuttling in the sun occasion, however interesting the journey was now, and it was quite engaging what with new weeds and blades of grass and clods of dirt to creep over and scraggly corners of human buildings to skulk about in, as wondrous as it was, it would end with death under the shoe of a middle-aged and bitter boozer.
Just like the spider, said embittered boozer was also part of some unknown and unknowable grand plan, even if he was just a signpost or diversion along the way. Or was he more? If he was a way station or a marker, was he inside the lines of the drawing that was the schematic of everything, or was he outside them, and did it ever even begin to matter? These were the sorts of things the spider would marvel at when it found itself under the shoe going splat.
Made of black brick and beige mortar, the church façade was unusual for the town, whose buildings were mostly red brick and white mortar. For the first three years of New Crozet’s existence, the black and beige church had sat moldering, until the town meetings began to grow too large to keep on being held in people’s houses.
It wasn’t population growth that had increased interest in the town meetings, as the town had grown by only two people in those years, but it was that the town’s food production had stabilized, and the perimeter had been improved enough that more people were freed up from the tasks of feeding and protecting New Crozet. The church had been cleaned and a modicum of repairs had been inflicted upon it, and then the meetings were moved into it.
There was a sign outside of it that read ‘New Crozet, Population 203,’ in aluminum lettering that was more sun-swept and mottled with each passing day. There was no sign outside the town, though, because the perimeter was sign enough, and it was no one’s damn business how many people were inside—that wasn’t something to advertise in the post-apocalypse.
From his position at the pulpit, Tom Preston, the town’s head peacekeeper, called the meeting to order. Tom was a big man, six-and-a-half feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. He too had worked on the rec-crews after the outbreak, and toward the end of his tour he’d worked on the same crew with Senna and Alan.
He’d been one of the few to walk the line between cleaner and spotter, being proficient at each task. He wasn’t at Senna’s level as a spotter, but he was good enough to be used as spotting support, especially in the most volatile of infected zones.
Tom’s wife, Elizabeth Clark, was in the front row with their daughter, Rosemary. Elizabeth was watching Tom closely. Rosemary was looking around some, but mostly just resting her head on her mother’s shoulder. Tom was as close as the town had to an official, though he had no more power in the town hall than anyone else. The town was ruled by popular vote, and everyone had the right to speak their thoughts and propose initiatives.
Alan and Senna were there, sitting together in the second row. They were holding hands, their fingers interlaced. Senna appeared calm, while Alan fidgeted, and every so often she’d put a calming hand on his knee to stop it from bouncing, and that would work for a minute or two, and sometimes even three.
Like the other settlements that were still around in the United States, New Crozet had sprung up in a place where, by luck and by chance, a large enough group of survivors had found refuge. It seemed an odd place, isolated as it was even before the outbreak, but it made sense that a settlement would have taken root there because it was so quiet. While the zombies had been seeking larger clusters of prey in the cities, the outskirts were left relatively safe for the few who were fortunate enough to live there or to escape there.
In the years after the outbreak, New Crozet had used the internet to keep in regular contact with the other settlements in the U.S., and what had passed for the post-outbreak government, headquartered out of Santa Fe, Ne
w Mexico. The transmissions were brief and focused on matters of survival and trade. There was little point to much else.
Over time, something had broken down, and the web had gone silent. The green servers that had kept information flowing went dead, and without the manpower needed to restore them, news and updates kept going around only if they were carried by traders to the markets.
There was rarely any word from Santa Fe anymore, and never anything meaningful when there was. The settlements were now policing trade themselves, with Senna, Alan, Tom, and Nell as New Crozet’s points of contact for the leaders of the other settlements.
And all the safety procedures that had needed working out were long in place. It came down to: build a perimeter and never leave it. Outside, in the no man’s land of the virus, there were probably no more reclamation vigilantes, and the Fleshers’ and slavers’ and other outlaws’ numbers had been whittled down by the virus over time, and they were now all but unheard of.
Alan glanced around nervously, and the bouncing of his knee started up again. Churches had always made him uncomfortable, but was this place even a church anymore?
Was it still a place of worship? And if so, of what?
No, he decided. No. It had been before, and that was it. It was just a cultural snapshot now, of a time that was long past.
Though he’d just dismissed the thought, his mind brought it to the fore again. No, he thought, more fervently. This isn’t a place of worship. What we meet about here is real.
34
From his seat in the back row, Corks was eyeing the stack of Bibles in the corner behind Tom, and Alan followed his gaze. The stack had gotten shorter over the years. Maybe some people were keeping up with the whole religion thing, after all. If that was the case, they were doing it in the privacy of their own homes and weren’t advertising.
But that was assuming that the Bibles were being taken for their former, pre-outbreak purposes, rather than for more practical reasons. Maybe the disappearing Bibles were used to teach children to read, or as doorstops, or to prop up uneven table legs.
Returning his gaze to Corks’s face and running his eyes over it, Alan felt bad for the man. Eruptions of mosquito bites were having their red, scratchy way with his skin, and he was itching at them from time to time, while obviously struggling to keep his hands away from his face. It was a battle he was losing.
Senna and Alan had caught up with Corks before the meeting, and they’d all agreed to speak to Tom about the other night in private. Everyone was too excitable this close to market, and it was a thing best discussed out of earshot of the likes of Larry and some of the older folk, not to mention Nell, although she wasn’t at the meeting now.
Focus, Alan thought, stop flitting around. His mind was all over the place, and so was his jumping knee. Senna put a hand on it, squeezed, and for the time being, the leg stopped twitching.
The town hall meetings didn’t have an attendance policy, and they didn’t need one. The townspeople always came unless they had something more important to deal with, which was rare. And enough of them were there enough of the time that town decisions, which were becoming increasingly scarce, could be made without delay.
Today, most everyone was gathered in the church. Notably absent were Nell Rodgers and Rad McNealy. Nell was usually the most vocal participant at the gatherings, and Rad, her son, was a close second, who was sometimes beat out by Larry.
Nell and Rad had made their intentions to miss the meeting known in advance, much to the relief of many of the other folk. Perhaps, with Nell and Rad gone, they could talk about something other than bugs and bunkers. They couldn’t be there today because they were busy preparing their goods for sale for market. A batch of Nell’s slurry had taken a turn for the sour side, and she was trying to salvage what she could of it.
Alan thought of Nell’s merchandise and swallowed, trying to push the nausea back into its hiding spot.
Before the outbreak, Virginia’s leading cash crops had been tobacco, corn, soybeans, wheat, peanuts, apples, cotton, potatoes, tomatoes, barley, and, recently before the apocalypse, chickpeas, and, if we were really keeping score, weed. New Crozet still produced these goods in amounts that were suited to the small town, with the notable addition of bugs and insects for human consumption.
In the years before the virus took over, entomophagy, the eating of insects, had begun to gain ground as a possible means of curbing world hunger. The insect-eating advocates had had no idea just how important the practice would become in the future. After the initial outbreak and the mutations of the virus that followed, insects and honey were the only animal products that were still safe to eat.
If the virus took the insects, all life would end within a century, or sooner. What was it they used to say? Forty years? Fifty? Alan couldn’t remember, but he did recall that bugs and insects played a vital role in the ecosystem, without which all other life wouldn’t be possible.
While he didn’t have a head for stuff like that, Senna probably knew the precise reason. Maybe he’d ask her the next time it came to mind, or maybe he’d think better of it.
There was some difference between insects and bugs, too, and, again, he couldn’t remember what that was. It was a difference in the number of legs they had, or in what they did in the environment, or something.
Nell’s products were all high in protein content. Protein content, protein content, protein content. Always with the damned protein content. Senna was always harping on about how he should eat more of Nell’s stuff because it was high in protein and he needed more protein because he was a man and so on and so forth.
His knee bounced a time or two more, and Larry Knapp, who was also in the front row, looked over at him and was kind enough to offer up a dirty look. Then Larry pursed his lips and gave a slight but unmistakably judgmental shake of his head. As usual, he looked like he’d been into his beer cask a time or two that day.
Probably three, Alan thought.
Alan’s expression hardened, and he stared Knapp down until the man averted his gaze, leaving Alan to stare at one ruddy cheek.
The only products of Nell’s that Alan usually ate and without much resistance on his part were the roasted and milled cricket powder, which he mixed into his grits, pretending that it was some sort of dehydrated nut powder—which flavor of nut he wasn’t sure—and honey, which was in short supply of late. He told himself that this was adequate for his nutritional needs, but he wasn’t sure. Who really knew that sort of thing, anyway?
It was probably enough animal food, he often told himself, the honey had bee parts in it, after all. And he didn’t doubt that Nell’s other products were nutritious, they just weren’t for him. They were just too…buggy.
Stinkbugs, for example, were plentiful in Virginia, had an apple flavor that most of the townspeople loved, but had a smell that he couldn’t get past. Nutrient dense protein supplements like those, he could do without.
Just the other night he’d run into Nell when she was taking down some of her grasshopper traps, which were tall, standing sheets of galvanized tin roofing, their ends stuffed into old oil drums, and with powerful lights set to shining on them at night. With the tin roofing reflecting light into the darkness, grasshoppers were attracted into the traps in large numbers, and landed on the upright, glowing roofing and then slid into the old oil drums where they were captured, then harvested by Nell, then stored, and finally fed to the townspeople.
When he’d passed by he’d given her and her hoppers a wide berth. He knew that the jumping things and their cricket brethren were ground up and ended up in his oatmeal and mashed potatoes on occasion, especially when Senna snuck that stuff in there, but he didn’t want to think about it. He squirmed in his seat briefly.
Unlike Alan, Senna loved all of Nell’s products. And she would, seeing as how she and Alan had pretty much the opposite taste in all things, except spending time with each other. Spices, which were becoming increasingly difficult to find, would have mad
e the insect dishes more palatable.
Alan’s expression brightened at the thought of spices. He glanced over at Senna and smiled inwardly, but he felt nerves gather in his stomach, too. He knew that she’d love the gift he’d gotten her, but that was only part of it, a small part. How she’d react to the rest, he couldn’t know.
He’d once had a taste for earthworms, and he’d joined the other townspeople in gathering them after the heavy rains when the soil became so saturated that they were forced to come to the surface or drown. The earthworms’ bodies were filled with dirt, which was removed by soaking them in water for a day, or for shorter periods, depending on how hungry the soaker was. Nell didn’t deal in worms, leaving it to the townspeople to collect them after the rains and purify and prepare them on their own and as they pleased.
The dirt didn’t ruin the earthworms’ taste, but added a sandy texture that some—though only a few in New Crozet—found unpleasant. Alan hadn’t minded either the gritty texture or the worms’ bitter flavor, but he couldn’t eat them anymore. His tastes had changed, or perhaps he’d been spoiled by all the good produce the townspeople grew. Of course, Senna loved them, especially after drying, which mellowed the bitter flavor and made them an easy addition to a variety of dishes.
Then there were the periodical cicadas, which lived underground for seventeen years before emerging and molting, reproducing, and dying. They’d come out last year, and the townspeople wouldn’t stop talking about how soft, juicy, tender, and utterly delicious they were, and Senna, of course, had kept bringing them home and trying to get Alan to eat them.
He was glad to be rid of them for seventeen years. They were revolting, objectively revolting if you asked him, and he didn’t like being around other people eating them. It was silly, given his circumstances, for him to feel this way, but the idea of eating the bugs turned his stomach. He made a mental note to avoid Nell’s tent at the market, though he knew it would be hard to miss, as popular as it always was.