Earth's Survivors: box set

by Wendell Sweet

  “Ha, ha... I think,” Conner said uncertainly.

  “What, my love, are you going to do when it's me and you have to be there holding my hand, if thinking about Lilly in pain now makes you wince?” Katie asked him.

  “I figured I'd pass out early, like, right off the bat. That way by the time I wake up it'll all be over with,” Conner said and smiled.

  “Ha, ha... I think,” Katie said.

  “I'll be fine,” he told her. “I just thought that there was only pain at that moment, the few seconds that the baby was born. No one ever said anything about regular pain.”

  She arched her eyebrows. “No? Well, it's like this. The pain starts, and then it comes and goes. I haven't felt it either, mind you, I asked Janna. Then, over time the pain becomes regular, contractions, which is... Never mind, I can see it's killing you already. Suffice to say, No, there isn't just few seconds of pain, there is an hour or two... Sometimes more, several hours,” she said.

  “Wow,” Conner said. His face was white, even in the early gray dawn-light.

  “Wow is right. You're not good with pain are you, baby? I mean, like, for real not good with it, right?” Katie asked.

  “Um, no. I thought about piercing my ear once,” He colored, the red looking out of place after the white. “I had a friend do it. He pushed the needle in and I passed out.” Conner cleared his throat.

  “Damn, and I thought you would get a nice tribal piece to match mine,” Katie joked.

  “Ha, ha, I hope,” Conner said. “I mean, I love the way it looks on your body, but me? Whoa. I don't think I could do it, Baby.”

  “Easy. Relax. I was kidding,” Katie said with a laugh. “Although I'd probably like it.” She focused her eyes on his once again and the laughter bled away from them. “The thing is, childbirth is painful. So you'll have to deal with it. And I have two of them... Two!” She said as the laughter crept back into her eyes.

  “I better go pull that wire, Baby. They're probably waiting on me,” Conner said.

  “Babe, do you know how many babies there would be if men had to bare them?”

  “Well... Uh...”

  “None. There would be none, Babe. Not one.”

  “You're picking on me now, right?” Conner asked.

  Katie smiled. “Kiss me now and then go pull your wire. I've got to get back to Lilly... Have you decided what to do about Pearl, Watertown?”

  Conner frowned. “No choice. Like we said... Like we all decided, they have to go. I should be going with them... It's a bad deal.”

  “No!” Katie said sharply. “...Never mind that... Never mind it, it's just hormones talking. … But don't you say that again or even think it. Your place is right here. They want to be there. They understand what they need to do. Not you. You belong here with me. With the babies,” she said quietly. “You promised me that... I love you,” Katie finished.

  He kissed her. “I love you too... No more.”

  “I do love you... I'll be with Lilly... Soon?” She asked

  “Next couple of days. James and Dustin have guys working on finishing up the trucks... The pretense is gonna be this cold... We don't know how long it will be... We have to get while the getting is good,” Conner finished.

  Katie laughed. “You are such a nerd, but I love you. Get while the gettin's good, drop that g, Honey. How are you ever gonna sound streetwise?”

  He pulled her to him and kissed her longer and they both pulled apart a few seconds later with nothing further to say. Conner turned and walked down the pathway that lead to the valley floor. Katie watched until he was lost in the gray-blackness of the fog and then turned and went inside the cave.

  ~

  Roux: Harlem

  Roux watched from his tree once more, squatted on a thick limb. Harlem was an exception to his rules and he didn't understand why that was. Yes, there were dead in Harlem, but they were dead that stayed dead. He had watched them himself as they fell, knowing they would rise, and being shocked when they did not.

  Unexpected was probably the word, he decided, that best explained the turn of events. And there was more. There was something more on the air. The feeling that he had missed some sort of opportunity to change everything. Harlem. The world beyond Harlem. All of it. But whatever the small thing was he had missed it completely.

  He turned his eyes back to Harlem. There were men looking back at him and his army behind him. He had hoped it struck fear in their hearts. He had hoped they could see the uselessness of fighting him. Of holding out. But these men seemed unmoved. These men seemed confidant of another outcome entirely, one that Roux himself had not even been aware of until just a few days past. Loss.

  There could be loss. If there could be one place where the dead did not rise to join his army then there could be another place, and another. It could change everything.

  He held himself steady, his fingers tented against the roughness of the bark, his body motionless. A second later he dropped effortlessly to the ground and walked slowly back through the trees to the park proper.

  There was the other thing. The knowledge on the air that he had somehow made a mistake. A mistake that he did not even know about at the time, but that was now becoming clearer and clearer. He almost understood it. Almost. Second by second he gathered it to him on the air and understood a little more.

  Roux entered the large park and let his eyes travel over his army. Thousands upon thousands here and more waiting on his word. In other cities the same things were taking place. Battles against the breathers. The cities were falling, he could feel it. Sense it with his eyes.

  His eyes lifted to the tall buildings that stood silently in the early morning light outside of the park: Marching away into the fog and cloud cover that hung over the city. Immense clouds of flies lifted and settled, looking like some sort of black ocean spread over the city outside the park. But the air was cool and the flies would be gone soon.

  The flies did not bother him. They were partners of a sort. The flies carried death to those he could not reach. And that death would then bring them to him. He squatted, tented his fingers to support his body, and scented the air with his eyes.

  ~

  “So this is it?” Conner asked. He was standing in the tunnel with Aaron and they were pulling wire. What it amounted to was bringing the wire bundle from up top to the power room. All the other circuits were in. The batteries had been charging for three days and they were topped off. The clinic: The large open meeting area of the cave. The entire tunnel and all three entrances; the bath and shower house, and the new space inside the other cave that was being converted into a barn, were all wired: Lights; a few precious outlets for the clinic.

  They had also wired Sandy and Susan's home, Josh and Sharon's, and installed lights in all the storage rooms. This line, the last line that had to be pulled to the circuit box, went up to the guard post and fed two huge outdoor lights for the field.

  At the entrance to each of the three caves they had installed lighting. They had also installed low voltage lighting for the ledges and the pathways, steps and even the narrow pathway that led to the top of the mountain.

  “This is it,” Aaron agreed.

  To pull wire, Conner had learned, you started at a junction box and determined how much wire you needed to reach the next junction box. You could begin by running what was called a fish, a long, stiff steel line through the conduit, snagging the wire or attaching it once you reached the other end, and then pulling it back to you, dragging the wire along with it. Or you could begin by pulling or pushing the wire through the conduit to breaks in the conduit where you could work it into the next section. In any case the goal was to get the wire in the conduit and to the place you needed it.

  The wire could be run as is and left, but there were too many problems that could arise from that. In the conduit the wire was protected from the elements, small animals and accidents where it could be cut or crushed. But pulling the wire wasn't all that hard, Conner decided, it was m
ore of a smooth, careful pull so that you didn't damage or kink the wire. You continued in that manner from junction to junction until you reached the panel box or the circuit completed itself and terminated at an outlet, light or some other box.

  When this line was completed, Dustin would power up the main panel box. There was what Dustin called a main trunk line that ran down to the power house. It could both supply power when needed, or take away and store excess power when it was generated. The power house itself was still being worked on and was a few weeks away from being operational.

  They had tested the power house and it worked well. They had installed the battery banks for it and the diesel engines that would run the generators during down time. What remained to do was to divert the stream into the channel that turned the wheel that was attached to the generator. That channel was deeper, angled so that the water would pick up speed as it came. The channel was finished and encased in concrete. Behind the power house they had created a large lake that Cindy had envisioned and would work on stocking with fish next year. All that remained to do was to open the channel, it was currently blocked off, check the flow rate and then gear the wheel so the RPM would be correct for the generator. Conner understood the basics of all of that, but had no idea how to actually do much of it. Dustin had two crews working to finish it. Dustin himself, as well as James were nowhere to be seen today though. They had never left the barn last night. The work was nearly done on the OutRunners trucks and they intended to make absolutely sure it was finished sooner, rather than later. Jake had come in to pull wire for an hour before Conner had cut him lose sending him down to help James and Dustin.

  'Where's your head?” Aaron asked.

  Conner laughed and looked at Aaron. “This military base under Watertown... I want to say if it exists, but I guess that is just denial.”

  “Yeah... But we all knew it. It shouldn't really be a surprise at all. We knew the government fucked us over.... Suspected they did, anyway.” Aaron said.

  Conner was nodding.

  “So... We decided the way we had to... Adam and Billy know what they are going into. Pearl certainly knows. Why is it still renting space in your head?” Aaron asked.

  Conner frowned. “Responsibility, I guess. I feel like I should be there.”

  “Katie would kill you if she heard you say that,” Aaron said unsmiling.

  “Been there. She was upset when I said pretty much that same thing this morning. She said I promised... I couldn’t break my word.” Conner said quietly as he pulled at the wires wrapped around his gloved hand slowly, coaxing them through the conduit.

  They both fell silent and Conner began to get his thoughts back on the wiring once again. Over the next few weeks they would be running wire to the houses in the valley and stringing wire for lights along the pathways that lead to the houses, school and barns. The pathway lights would be something like streetlights for the valley.

  The wires to the houses wouldn't be good for much more than basic light, but eventually, with more wire, they would be able to run more circuits. Probably next spring, or maybe even next fall before they could get to it, and that depended upon a lot of things, including how this mission went with the OutRunners.

  “It's hard to believe that we are nearly out of wire already. We loaded so much on those trucks I really thought we had enough to last us,” Aaron said.

  I thought that same thing. I was just thinking it,” Conner agreed.

  “Really? Because it looked like you were lost in thoughts of Watertown again,” Aaron said quietly as he pulled another three feet of wire through the conduit.

  “Yeah, well, that too, I guess. Hard to stay away from it.”

  Aaron nodded.

  Conner went back to thoughts of electricity. There was a windmill planned. The windmill itself was already up. It had gone up in two mornings of work a few days back. But it needed a custom computer program to run it and it also needed the proper software. It was a project Dustin would eventually get back to.

  A second and third bank of solar panels to supplement the ones that had already been installed, were planned for the tops of the ridges on both sides of the valley. He and Janna Adams had carefully crafted a computer system that Dustin would use to run the power system. Conner had readily conceded that most of the real programming work had been done by Janna Adams. He was okay, but more of an HTML and Java guy, not the hardcore C++ language that Janna used to build the bones of the software. And Conner had no doubt that Dustin would soon be better than both of them combined. He had that natural ability to pick up nearly anything you threw at him.

  The computer system would regulate the power flow between the power plants: Monitor all the separate systems for usage; keep track of the two storage sites where the batteries were kept. That included charge states and incoming and outgoing power levels.

  The line was stuck. Conner grasped the ends of the wire with his linesman pliers and kept a steady pull of pressure as Aaron worked the kinks out of the plastic jacket and sprinkled it with baby powder.

  “Push it backwards just a little, Conner.” Aaron said. “Good... Good... Pull it forwards now.”

  Conner pulled and once again the wire pulled steadily along through the conduit.

  The conduit was nothing more than inch and a quarter pipe in ten foot lengths. It fastened together with couplers, or elbows where it needed to make a turn. Those transitions also offered a place to pull the wire from.

  “Okay... Getting there,” Aaron said as both men went back to pulling wire.

  ~

  “How you feeling, Lil?” Katie asked as she came into the room.

  “Ugh, like someone shoved a two year old inside of me.,” Lilly said.

  Katie laughed, Lilly laughed too.

  “I'm not kidding about the two year old though. This kid is huge. I feel like I'm stretched as tight as I can go,” she said.

  “Baby you are big, that's for sure,” Katie told her.

  “Hey, Lil,” Amy said, as she came up behind Katie.

  “Aim,” Lilly said. “Did you bring it?“

  Amy held up a big bag that held three outfits Lilly had made for the baby, a couple of blankets and a pair of booties. “Right here,” she said.

  “Thank you, Aim,” Lilly said. She pulled herself up a bit in the bed as the pain began to move through her lower back and abdomen again. Katie held her hand.

  “You're welcome,” Amy said as she moved up to hold her other hand.

  “Twenty minutes,” Katie said. “The other one was only fifteen.”

  “Ugh,” Lilly said.

  “Honey, is that a word?” Amy asked.

  “Yeah, it's cave woman for I can't believe I let Grug stick his thing in me,” Lilly said, laughed and then groaned.

  “That bastard,” Amy said.

  “Who?” Lilly asked.

  “Why, Grug,” Amy said. “I can't believe he did this to you.”

  They all laughed. Steve came in with Sandy as they were all laughing. “How we doing?” He asked.

  “The last one was twenty, the one before was fifteen,” Katie told him.

  “Sounds like a little work yet then,” Steve said. He snapped a pair of latex gloves on his hands and lifted her gown. Sandy held it as he examined her. “Coming along nicely,” He told her. “You're dilating. I would expect that those contractions might start getting closer together very soon... How are you feeling?”

  “Unbelievably big,” Lilly said.

  “Well, you are,” He chuckled lightly, “But it's looking very good. I'll be back in just a little while. Meantime if you need me I'm right in there.” He pointed back toward the door.

  Sandy smile at her. “I tested positive,” She told her.

  “What?” Lilly said as another contraction began.

  “I'm pregnant,” Sandy said.

  “You must be nuts,” Lilly said through gritted teeth. Her voice was a snarled growl from talking over the pain of the contraction.

 
; Sandy laughed. “A little, yes,” she agreed.

  “Little less than fifteen,” Katie said solemnly.

  “I figured, now that we have a doctor... Me first and then Susan wants a child.”

  Lilly rode the pain out. She took some deep breaths and looked a Katie. “That bastard,” she said. “Grug.” She couldn't get more than one or two words in a breath.

  Katie and the others laughed while Lilly rode the pain out.

  Sandy frowned.

  “Not you,” Lilly said once the pain began to roll back down. “I'm happy for you... Honestly, Sandy. Susan too... It's that damn Grug.”

  Katie squeezed her hand and smiled.

  “That one hurt a lot,” Lilly told her.

  Katie squeezed her hand again.

  ~

  Outside the morning progressed, but the sky stayed the same leaden gray.

  Josh walked to the cave entrance and looked out over the valley. The sheep were out and the goats with them. A great deal of the space behind him was now the biggest barn the Nation had.

  He had yet to convince the horses into the barn, but the Bison had come in after only a few days. They had readily eaten the grasses and hay Josh had given them, and many of them could already be hand fed. A few of them were downright curious and would walk right up to Josh.

  The goats and the sheep used a small area of the barn. There were a half dozen cows who were already pregnant, crossed with the bison. Almost a dozen bison cows who were also pregnant, and they had culled the males down to just four of the biggest. Two they had gelded to use as Oxen, and the other two they intended to keep for stud. One in the barn, the other in the field. Never together at the same time as they tended to be very territorial when the cows were present. They were every bit as aggressive as the bulls were.

  He walked back into a corner of the barn where Queenie was. The kids had named her Queenie and her mate Rex. He had made the little area up for her earlier when Shar had told him it might be her time. Just yesterday Angel had, had her puppies. Six, all with gray fur. That litter was down in the valley in the second barn.

  Shar was bent over in the corner when he approached.