“I heard it's really cold,” Lilly said to no one in particular.
“It really, really, really is,” Arlene said. She was standing in the stream, water up to her waist, shivering.
Katie dove under the water, bobbed up in the middle of the stream and swam downstream. “It's not bad. Keep moving,” she called back, “Keeps you warm!”
Lilly peeled her clothes quickly and looked doubtfully at the water, “Okay, if you say so, here goes!” She ran into the water and dove under. She surfaced next to Katie.
“It's so cold. You lied,” she laughed. She splashed Katie who giggled and splashed her back. A few seconds later everyone was involved in the water fight.
“Now that warmed me right up,” Arlene said a few minutes later as the water fight came to a close.
“Yeah, me also,” Lilly said. She was out of the water on the grassy bank drying herself off and getting dressed.
Katie sat close by with Amy. The two of them working to brush each others' hair out.
A few minutes later, Janna Adams came down, “I Thought I'd better get down here while I had the chance. Dinner's going. I have a little time to myself,” she said.
“I can't believe how well you run stuff,” Amy told her.
“Yeah, for real,” Lilly said. “You so much have it together. I wish I did,” she said.
Janna looked embarrassed. “Oh, it's just helping out. If I didn't do it, somebody would,” she said.
“That's true,” Katie said, “but I doubt they'd do it anywhere near as well as you do.”
Janna blushed again. “Thank you, Hon,” she said.
Lilly smiled. Janna Adams was about the only person she knew of who could call Katie Hon. She meant to ask her why that was someday, but she was pretty sure she already knew why. Janna was like everybody's mother. She was the ultimate nurturer. And a mother could get away with things no one else ever could.
A few of the women were still in the water. They all waited for each other and left as a group.
~
The evening meal was one of the best Conner could remember in a long time. Venison, beef, asparagus, rice and biscuits.
“How did you manage to make rice, or real biscuits,” Amy asked Jan.
“Really,” Katie chimed in.
“Bisquick, and a really big pot,” Janna Adams said.
“Bisquick, duh,” Katie said looking at Amy.
“Where did you find all these huge pots though, Janna?” Katie asked.
“The restaurant, Katie,” Janna said.
“And the Bisquick. We didn't even think of Bisquick,” Amy said.
“Oh, they have cases of the stuff over to the little store,” Janna said. “And flour too. You know, their store room is all concrete block. No rats like those others. I thought you knew,” She said.
“Nope,” Katie said, “You're the best, Jan. This is really good.”
“Absolutely,” said Amy.
“You bet.”
“Best I ever had.” And many other similar compliments flooded the air. Janna Adams flushed but continued to smile. “Thank you,” she said, “Thank you.”
~
After dinner, several of the people in the camp helped to do the dishes and clean up, including some visitors. The evening was warm, and everyone sat around one of the larger fires drinking coffee and talking low, watching the light fade from the day.
~
The fire burned hot but low, the heat feeling good as the temperature of the air dropped. The fires were still many, meat spread upon drying racks before the smoke and flame. A small group had been sitting, watching the stars come out, when one by one nearly all the others had come to sit and watch with them.
Quiet conversations passed back and forth between them. But it seemed as though there were other things on everyone’s minds, and the conversations began to die down after a short time. Conner broke the silence that had held for a few moments.
“So, James,” Conner began. “I... I don't want to put you on the spot, but after you left today we all, several of us anyway, talked a little about what we're going to do, and that led to what you and Janna had talked about, and I didn't really feel I knew enough about what it is you want to do, and really I didn't feel it was my place to explain it. So... I thought...” Conner finished.
“Sure,” James agreed. “What is it you want to know?”
“Well,” Lilly said. “Pretty much all of it, James. At least me. I don't know what it is you want to do, and I'd like to.”
“Same here, James,” Aaron said.
“Us as well,” Jeff Simmons said.
James nodded, “Okay then,” he said. “What we really want to do is start the world over, but leave all the bad stuff out. I know that sounds like a pipe dream, and I've realized that, because that's what it mostly is, a pipe dream. There is no way to leave all that stuff out. Some of it is built into who we are, you know?” He paused.
“So now that this has happened, and the opportunity to really do something is here, I've had to revise my ideas. And I may have to revise them again. It has long been a dream of some native people to go back to the land. To become, again, the people we used to be. But the reality of that life is a different thing. That romantic ideal is a long way from the life we would have to live.”
“So it's a compromise. Back to the land? Certainly. But we are not Quakers, or Amish, we'll use whatever modern advantages we can find or put our hands on that will help us. Certainly horsepower in the form of vehicles to at least get us to where we're going. After that? Will we need them?” he shrugged, “And how would we get fuel? No. I think we use them to get us back to where we want to be, and that might be it. It's probably going to be horses after that, so, somewhere between here and there we are going to have to get horses, and not just a few, a good sized herd. Maybe fifty, a hundred would be better. Seed? We'll bring all we can get. I don't know if anyone here has ever seen Indian corn, the stuff that sustained my people, but it was very small, sometimes no bigger than my index finger, and not much bigger around either. Generally it was bigger, but not much. Modern corn? Vast improvement. I guess you get my drift. We're thinking of taking every advantage we can with us. But, we're thinking back to the land too. No canned goods, although we'll certainly take more than enough to survive on until we have our own crops, animals, like that. It isn't going to be an easy life, that's for sure, but we are going to do it.” He paused and the silence held for a few minutes as what he had said settled in and everyone thought it over.
“Where were you thinking of to do it?” David asked.
James nodded as though he had expected the question, “I'm looking at a huge area of what was forever wild lands. Encompasses quite a lot of the middle of the old country, stretches south, north, east and west. Several million acres, mountains, valleys, and a lot of it is the same as it was when this country was settled, never been touched. There have been expeditions back into it a few times, but no one has lived there since natives lived there.”
He borrowed the map that Conner had shown Jeff earlier, pulled a black grease pencil from his pocket and circled the area.
“Take us a few weeks of steady travel to get close to it. Then there's a lot of preparations to make. And, well, we don't know what to expect on the way. Who we may meet, who might want to come,” James said.
Susan looked at Sandy, then whispered something in her ear. She nodded. “We want to go,” Susan said and Sandy nodded again.
“So do we,” Dustin said. He was holding Allison's hands.
“We really do,” Allison said.
“Then you will,” James said looking at Conner.
“It's your call, Dustin,” Amy said.
“But what about you,” Dustin asked Amy.
“I... I want to talk it over with Aaron. It sounds good,” she looked from Aaron to Katie to Conner, tears threatening in her eyes.
“I asked James,” Conner said, “not to force anyone to decide - we have lots of time for
that - but to see what it is. I... I for one am impressed. But this isn't something I can decide alone. Katie comes first on my list of things that make up my world. We'll talk it over, same as all of us will, I guess,” Conner finished. Amy looked grateful.
“If you don't mind, we'd like to think about it as well. I guess that's taking for granted you'd let us in if we decided we wanted to come,” Jeff said.
“And we would. You're welcome,” Janna Adams said.
“I know we've been thinking along the same lines,” Sharon said. “I know we've kind of crashed in on you. You've been so kind to us. It's appreciated.”
James nodded.
The light was rapidly bleeding from the sky as the conversations broke up and people began to drift away.
“Did you get a room at the motel?” Conner asked Jeff.
“Jessica and... Lilly?” He asked looking at Lilly where she sat with Jake.
Conner nodded, as did Lilly and Jake. Lilly smiled.
“She took care of that today, so we will be sleeping on real beds tonight, I guess.”
“Oh, you'll love it,” Conner said. “After the ground? Absolutely recommended, the best night's sleep I've had Well, I was just thinking of another night, but it's the best night in a while, that's for sure.”
“What?” Katie asked.
“Well, the night I was first with you. Everything had happened, things looked so bad, and there you were. It was my first good night's sleep since it all happened,” Conner finished quietly.
“Oh,” she said, “that's so nice. It was like that for me as well. Just to know someone cared... about me.”
“It was like that for all of us, I think,” Jeff said.
“It was for me,” Aaron agreed.
“Yeah,” Amy agreed, her eyes on Katie.
“This is such a changed world,” James said. “Since when have you sat around and had a conversation that was this true or personal?”
“I can't recall,” Arlene said, “Probably, if I'm honest, never.”
“Me either,” Jake said. He sat with one arm around Lilly's shoulders.
“I do now, with Jake, with others, but I never did, not even with my close girlfriends,” Lilly said.
“That's what I mean. It's a changed world, and I for one am glad for it.”
A few minutes later Jake and Lilly and Katie and Conner got up to leave for the night's first post. They made their goodbyes and left the others.
“...Now, what about crops, and what about domesticated animals? I mean, why can't we have our own herds?” Jeff asked James as Conner and Katie were walking away.
“Well, I thought about that too,” James began.
~
Conner clicked on his MP3 player, chose the play list he wanted, clicked it down to the bottom of his screen and then clicked up Gimp and loaded the graphic he wanted to work on. His mind wasn't on it though. He stared at the screen for something like ten minutes before he gave up and closed down the graphic, pushed away from the desk and listened to the song that was currently playing - Solution Six, by somebody new that he had never heard of - while he decided what it was he really wanted to be doing.
The graphic was a small logo for one of his clients. It was done, but like everything else he did, he would play with it long past the time he needed to. It seemed to him that everything in his life was like that. He was constantly fussing with it. It was never really done, finished, complete. It wasn't life; it was him. He could tell himself it was because he wasn't satisfied with his life, that he felt it wasn't complete, but that did nothing at all to solve the problem.
He could know, and did, that what he missed was a relationship. Sharing himself with more than just the girl in the electronics section at Walmart where he bought whatever computer supplies he needed. And what did that amount to? A smiled, Hello, how are you, a quick, reserved, superficial conversation, Oh, the blank CD sleeves are two aisles over. Another superficial smile and a thank you. Those were the types of relationships he had.
Relationships? Did he really consider those to be relationships? He did. After all, he knew her name, Becky. Becky N. Sometimes he wondered what the N stood for. And sometimes he even thought about a conversation that had nothing to do with electronic needs.
Pathetic, he told himself. I must have better relationships than that. Oh, the pizza kid. I almost know his name... Johnny, or Tommy something.
He needed relationships. He was missing life. It was going by, and he was stuck watching it pass by the glass like a lonely man riding the bus, watching the world slide by stop after stop, day upon day.
Anyway, he knew all of that. He knew what bothered him, drove him, and it was useless. It was useless because he wasn't willing to do anything about it. He remembered thinking recently, in fact, that it would take something drastic to take him from the kind of life he had built for himself and into the kind of life he really wanted. And that was also part of the problem: He didn't know what kind of life he did want. And he didn't want to invest any actual thinking into it.
So there he was, staring at his monitor again, watching the little red sound graphic jump up and down to the music. A blues piece. Catchy, but not exactly uplifting, still it held his attention with its murky lyrics, but he knew it was probably dragging him right into his own blues at the same time. Weren't blues supposed to take away the blues, he asked himself. Maybe, but it never worked that way for him. It only reinforced his own blues. He needed a real life, he told himself.
The furnace kicked on, and a few seconds later he felt the heat along with the slight metallic odor that the new furnace had come with. The furnace guy who put it in, call me Rocky, he'd said, had told him the smell would go away. So far it hadn't. Maybe by next spring, he thought. In any case, it decided him. He needed to get out of the house, go for a ride, do something, anything but sit around and stare at his monitor.
It was cold, but the roads were clear. He grabbed the keys to his car and decided to head out just that quickly. He opened the door, and the cold air slapped him in the face. And just that fast, that world was gone again, and he found himself sitting up on the mattress in the slightly musty smelling motel room. Cold air slipped past his bare chest and he shivered involuntarily.
Katie finished closing the door and then turned, slowly making her way to the bed in the near absolute blackness, her night vision ruined by the bright moonlight and fires outside.
“A little to your left, baby,” Conner whispered.
“I woke you up,” she whispered back as she readjusted her path and found the bed, slipping across the mattress on her hands and knees. He caught her and pulled her into his arms.
“Not you,” he answered.
“I was trying to be quiet,” she said as she snuggled down beside him, her cool flesh setting his own on fire. “What was it?”
“What?”
“That woke you, baby.” Her cool hands slipped over his back and pulled him closer to her.
“The old world... You... Nothing at all,” He told her. His lips found hers and they stopped talking.
FIVE
Conner And Katie
April 23rd
Conner awoke before dawn. He lay quietly, feeling the heat from Katie's body where it pressed up against his, and thinking about what the future might be.
The first thing he had thought was that whatever had happened to the world would be made right. That somewhere there was someone still in charge, and eventually that person would get everything back on track. The world would be fun again. Television, phones, electricity, the Internet, the mortgage on his house, all of it. That turned out to be a pipe dream. The whole idea had dissipated quickly. Even so, when they had finally started out, he had held out some hope, and they hadn't come far, but Jeff and his people had, and it was the same everywhere. There was no man sitting in an office somewhere waiting to get everything back in shape, and if there was, he would have to be a complete idiot, because he'd be waiting an awfully long time.
Katie stirred and pressed closer to him, and then settled back down. Gray light began to creep into the room. He could see the outline of her body.
The movement, the light seeping into the room, sent his thoughts along an entirely different line.
For the last two days he had found himself thinking in an entirely new direction. All the old shit is gone, and that's okay. He didn't care at all if he never saw electricity again. In fact, he'd rather not have it, and even if there was a way to fix it all, he didn't want to go back. He was positive, in fact, that they couldn't go back, none of them, was positive he wouldn't be able to live that way again, when less than a month ago his entire life, his entire focus, was wrapped up in the old way. Hadn't he been watching the countdown show for the end of the world? Reality TV every night? The big party for the end of the world? And really, that had simply been a joke.
Nobody, at least most people, didn't believe the world was going anywhere. It was just another thing to occupy the head. Even the terminology, World Ending, was bullshit. The world did not end. We think so highly of ourselves that we believe that the end of society means the end of the world, and I guess it did for us... some of us. But the end of the world? No. The world will go on and on when we are nothing at all but dust upon the ground.
Now it really was gone, and not only didn't he miss it, he didn't want it to come back. He didn't want to chase across half of what had been the United States looking for some semblance of the old world. His mind was at rest; he was happy. He allowed one hand to stroke the length of Katie's body. Very happy, he decided. Katie stirred again. One of her own hands came down his side, across his abdomen, searching.
“Hello,” she said, finding what she wanted, “No fair, you're awake.”
“I was just admiring,” he said. He felt himself grow hard in her hand.
She turned towards him, planting little kisses on his chest and stomach as her head disappeared below the blankets.
~
Most of the camp was up and awake by the time Katie and Conner came out, got some coffee and set down at one of the tables.
“You two hungry?” Janna Adams asked.
Earth's Survivors: box set Page 56