by Dave Conifer
It was Carlo, and he was already striding purposefully across the square. When he was halfway there, Nick saw somebody watching carefully from the direction of the Warehouse. On second glance he realized it was Roethke, a man with whom Nick shared a strong mutual dislike. He must have walked with Carlo over to where they knew they could find him. Nick wasn’t sure what this was about, but anything to delay the climb onto the roof was all right with him. He stepped away from the ladder and hooked his thumbs in his pockets as he waited for Carlo to reach him.
“How are you feeling, brother?” Carlo asked, extending a hand as he looked back toward Roethke.
“Right as rain,” Nick answered, fully aware that Carlo knew better. “Out for a walk with our buddy Roethke?”
“I coulda’ used you last night,” Carlo said. “Hey, let’s walk on over to those picnic tables,” he suggested. “I think you’ll do better sitting down. I got some news for you.”
“I’m fine,” Nick grumbled. But in truth, he liked the idea for the very reason Carlo mentioned. They ambled over to the tables and took a seat across from each other at one of them. By then, Roethke was nowhere to be seen. His job had probably been simply to make sure this meeting happened. That was intriguing.
“So I think a few of the people on The Committee are coming around to your way of thinking, you know?” Carlo began. “At least some of them are. It’s like you’ve been saying. We need more people. More people who are dedicated soldiers and nothing else.”
“And we shouldn’t be overly careful about where we find them,” Nick said.
“What do you mean by that?” Carlo asked, before smiling and shaking his head. “Sorry, man, I’m just thinking about some of the things Roethke said last night when he found out you weren’t coming. I’ll bet he won’t be sending you a Christmas card. He tries to be so refined, but he’s a mean cat sometimes.”
“What I mean is that if we go out shopping for GI Joe clones,” Nick answered, “We’re not gonna’ find anybody. They’re not out there. There aren’t a ton of clean-cut guys in military uniforms just sitting around waiting to get recruited.”
Carlo nodded. “I feel ya’,” he said. “So what do they look like? How do we find them?”
“Well—“ Nick began.
“I have my own answer,” Carlo said, interrupting Nick. “But I want to hear what you have to say about it first.”
“Sure, sure,” Nick said. “It’s pretty simple. The people we want look like us. Or, actually, they look like us if Grover hadn’t let us in. They’re dirty, they’re hungry, they’re starting to get cold. They’ve got a wife and kids back in some cave or a burned out house somewhere, and they’re out looking for a way to keep them alive. They’re out there praying to hook up with somebody like us. And if we take them, they’ll do whatever it takes to stay taken.” He found that he was out of breath after the explosion of words. He sucked in air as he waited for Carlo’s reply.
“Preach,” Carlo said. “I said just about the same thing last night.”
“Roethke probably had a cow when you said it,” Nick said. He would have finished the thought if not for the wave of nausea that came over him. He gritted his teeth and endured it until it passed.
“You know who hated it even worse?” Carlo asked. “Markle. The hunting and gathering guy. Although he’ll make sure you know he’s way more hunter than gatherer.”
“That guy’s a bit macho for me,” Nick commented.
“He’s got it all wrong,” Carlo said. “Basically, he wants to build the walls twenty feet high around this place, and keep everybody out. I told him that’ll only work for so long. The obvious problem is that eventually, when things get bad enough, the armies outside the fortress will be so huge that no wall could keep them out.”
“And besides that,” Nick added, “We don’t have everything and everybody we need to keep going. For instance, at some point we’re gonna’ need somebody who knows how to make things out of metal.”
“A blacksmith?” Carlo asked. “Like at the Renaissance Festival? How about a glass blower?”
“Why not?” Nick said. “Maybe we could use some glass around here. And somebody who knows a lot about solar power, or some kind of energy system.”
“No, I wasn’t joking,” Carlo said. “I agree with you. Those super-crafters at the festivals just crack me up, that’s all.”
“And all those supplies and equipment they boosted from Home Depot won’t last forever,” Nick continued. “We’ve got plenty of raw materials, but that’s not good enough. We’ll need to set up a lumber mill that runs on natural power. Or human power. And a gazillion other things we haven’t even thought of yet. We’ll never be self-sufficient here, at least at the rate we’re going. If we build the walls up and try to hide behind them, we’re doomed.”
Carlo shook his head. “Like I said, I wish you’d been up to coming to the meeting last night. You shoulda’ seen the Professor’s face when I said ‘We need to be like a living organism that changes and grows.’ Something like that. I don’t know where I pulled that out of. He looked at me like I was some kind of freak.”
“But you were right,” Nick said. “We can’t stand still. I don’t know why it’s obvious to you and me, but not to anybody else.”
“You and me and a silent minority on The Committee are the only ones who get it,” Carlo said. “Some of the others might be convinced, but I need help.”
“Can you call another meeting?” Nick asked. “I have some ideas.”
“Not one that you’re welcome at, brother,” Carlo said. “You, my friend, are more a persona non grata than ever after last night. Double on the non grata part.” His eyebrows rose as he cocked his head. “Dude, they understand exactly why you couldn’t make it, okay? I’ll just leave it at that.”
Nick started to argue, but stopped himself. What was the point? He wasn’t fooling anybody. Especially Carlo. Then he thought of something else. It was a good idea, one that might solve a lot of his own problems. The only question was how much he should tell Carlo. “What if I know a place we can look for people? Good people, the kind I think we should be recruiting.”
“Oh yeah?” Carlo asked. “Let’s hear it.”
“There’s a bunch of folks just like us over in Lockworth,” Nick told him. “There just trying to figure out how to stay alive.”
“Lockworth, Lockworth,” Carlo said. “It’s not ringing a bell. I’m from North Jersey,” he added, by way of explanation.
“It’s a few miles east of here,” Nick said. “Toward the shore. I don’t have any maps or I could show you. I even know what street to go to. I wrote it down somewhere, anyway.”
“How far away would you say this Lockworth place is?” Carlo asked.
“Ten miles, maybe,” Nick said. “Fifteen, tops.”
Carlo narrowed his eyes. “So how do you know about these people?” he asked. “What makes you think we can trust them?”
This was the moment of truth. Of all the campers he knew in Tabernacle, the man across the table, the one in charge of repelling yesterday’s invasion, was the one least likely to be receptive to the idea of taking in the people Nick was telling him about. If he knew who they were and how Nick had come across them in the first place, that is. He made a split-second decision. “We stopped for somebody on the way here last week. I know we aren’t supposed to do that, but I wasn’t driving. The guy looked like he was about to die right in front of us, so we, uh, we gave him some food and water. Then we got to talking. That’s how I know about them.”
Carlo didn’t respond immediately. Nick was more than happy to sit quietly as long as he could. Finally, Carlo stood up. “I’ll run this up the flagpole. You know the old saying.”
Nick didn’t, but he got the gist of it. “Okay,” he answered. “Let me know how it goes.” After Carlo was gone he remained seated at the table long enough for another round of nausea to pass before getting up to walk back to the Bath House.
~~~
“You ain’t finished with this place yet?” Del razzed as he and Miguel approached. “I got the plumbing set up a long time ago.”
“Doing my best, Del,” Nick answered. “Where are you guys headed?”
“We need to see about clearing a few fields for planting next spring,” Miguel answered in heavily accented English. “Just planning for now.”
“Yeah, Senor Cantos has it right,” Del said. “Some of the fields ain’t exactly fields yet. We gotta’ knock some trees down. And whatever else is in the way.”
“Right now we’re just making a list of what needs doing,” Jesse added. “There’s nobody around to do it right now, since top priority is building the walls around this place.”
“Too much work, not enough workers,” Nick said. Speaking of work, Nancy had apparently tired of waiting for him, and was now pounding away up on the roof again.
“Tell me about it,” Del said.
“Jesse, let me ask you something,” Nick said, leaning on the Bath House wall. He thought back to the day when he’d found Jesse and his band of followers lurking in the woods outside of the camp. “You’ve been here for only about a month, now, right?”
Jesse shrugged. “Sounds about right.”
“Do you feel like an outsider here?” Nick asked. “Or are you and your folks all in, if you know what I mean?”
Jesse’s face wrinkled in thought for a moment. “I sure as heck know we aren’t original members, that’s for sure. And plenty of people around make sure we know it.”
At that, Nick strained not to look at Del. “I’m not original, either,” Nick replied. “Me and my friends got in at the last minute.”
“But we’re all in,” Jesse said. “We got no strings attached anyplace else. We’ve got no other place to go, and we’re thankful as you can imagine to be here. I guess that says it all.”
“Yeah, it does,” Nick replied. “That’s exactly what I wanted to know.”
“If you guys are done with your little pep rally, we better get on with it,” Del said. “The bosses are pushing us hard. We only have the morning for this. Working for the man. Some things never change, right?”
Once they were gone, Nick couldn’t think of any more excuses to delay climbing the ladder to help Nancy finish that roof. Except that he felt the contents of his stomach fighting its way back up. It always made him panic. He thought about darting into the Bath House, but why make a mess that somebody had to clean up? The tree line was forty feet away. He went that way instead.
After he was done, and he was sitting on his haunches in the woods catching his breath, he felt a lot better. He might even be able to get through the day. Funny how it always works that way, he told himself as he pulled himself to his feet and went back to the Bath House.
Six
With winter coming on fast, Del and Jesse weren’t the only busy ones at Tabernacle that day. Every subcommittee had a list of tasks from The Committee that had to get done before the change of seasons. Everybody was feeling the urgency, and failure was not an option.
Matt and the other leaders of Water Supply had worked day and night to get the plant up and running, and had been taking a few days of rest when Crystal Monroe, the nominal head of the subcommittee if not the practical one, asked a simple question. “Can the water in these barrels freeze?”
There was no reason to think it couldn’t. Del had installed the pipes in the lake low enough that they’d be well below the ice line. During any winter deep freezes, however, the water would be flirting with the freezing point even before it came into the plant for treatment. After dwelling on the question, the Water Plant had been retro-fitted with five wood stoves, the same ones found in the residential cabins in the Village. The heads of the subcommittee initially agreed that some or all of the stoves would be lit if the temperature dipped below forty degrees. It created a new headache, transporting firewood and replenishing the stoves, something they’d thought they’d avoided when choosing to use chemicals rather than heat to purify the water. But all in all, it was a workable solution. They felt lucky that Crystal had brought it up.
~~~
One of the many components of the camp that hadn’t been thought of was a laundry facility. Most campers had, at most, two sets of clothing. Since cleanliness was seen as an essential way to keep everybody healthy, several hours a day in the Bath House were allotted to campers to wash their clothes on a rotating basis. If it was determined that this was insufficient, a new, separate laundry building would go up. That wouldn’t happen until the spring, after more pressing needs around Tabernacle were met.
~~~
Responding to the sight of long, greasy, tangled mops of hair that most campers wore, rarely by choice, one of the teens who worked in the Day Care had a solution. Dana Wright had worked in a Kids Cuts barber shop for nearly a year before the power went out. Most of that time had been spent sweeping up hair and ringing up customers, but she’d received at least some training and had even cut some hair when the staff was thin. Bored with child care, she asked for and received permission from The Committee to open a unisex hair salon.
The Committee was surprisingly enthusiastic about the idea, with several members kicking themselves for not thinking of this sooner. Besides the obvious morale boost, shorter, cleaner hair would have health benefits. To enhance these benefits, they sent Dana to the library to learn about homemade lice treatments, which she could administer and distribute as needed. When it turned out that a vinegar-based salve could do the job in most cases, the Cannery staff learned to produce it using the leftover apples.
By mid-October, campers could make an appointment on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Dana’s shop, which she set up in an empty cabin in the corner of the Village. Some of the cuts weren’t pretty. Men who wanted crew cuts had to settle for close-cropped scissor jobs that were comical to look at. Beards were hacked shorter and shaped, providing improvements in both sanitation and appearances. Nick was quite pleased after his beard was trimmed, because it meant that he would carry less of his dinner around with him on his face after leaving the table.
Women normally settled for shoulder length cuts, for the most part, and were thankful to again be able to get a comb through their hair. The salon was a rousing success for many different reasons. Campers who emerged from the salon with quirky new appearances learned to laugh at themselves while appreciating the advantages of shorter, neater hair.
~~~
Food Production was always busy, and with any luck, that wouldn’t change. Penny Hellikson had been involved in planning where the fields would go next spring, and what would be planted in each. Once that was over, she’d begun putting in time in the Cannery. That, unfortunately, was also winding down, because nearly all the remaining stocks of cranberries, peaches, blackberries and blueberries had been dried and stored away for consumption during the lean winter months.
At the very moment of the recent invasion, the leaders of Food Production had been in a meeting at the behest of Chairman John Markle to talk about renaming and modifying the Cannery facility. Later, after Penny learned about the meeting, she was flabbergasted that so much time had been wasted to discuss something so meaningless, but she kept it to herself. In the end the name was not changed. Although they didn’t yet have the technology to can food at the volume needed to be practical, and were still re
lying on smoking and drying to preserve it, it was thought that this could change in the near future. All agreed that the name could stay.
The hunting was going well enough, but John wasn’t satisfied with limiting themselves to deer. There were a lot of rabbits and squirrels out there, but hunting them with bows or guns would have been ridiculous. So he and a few others made occasional visits to the library, which was still up at the middle school until there was a place for it at Tabernacle, to learn how to remedy that. They’d already designed some simple snares and traps that they thought could bring in a steady flow of small game, which would create more variety on the camp menus. Now all they had to do was build the traps, and of course learn how to use them.
~~~
Although the org chart hadn’t been revised yet, many members of the Farming subcommittee were immersed in an offshoot task, dealing with the stable of farm animals that were brought in during the last week of October. Based in the barn that at one time housed horses were eight cows and more chickens than anybody could count. Milk and eggs were still a rare highlight on the menu, but it was hoped that they’d be more regular in the future once the new team mastered their tasks. The only concern was providing forage to keep the animals fed during winter, but that was an issue currently under study. Their ancestors had found a way to do it in the past, the subcommittee members reasoned. So there was no reason it couldn’t be done now.
~~~
Carly Loder and her father, Hal, who comprised the entire staff of the Transportation subcommittee, had insisted on taking custody of all motorized vehicles now that there weren’t any immediate plans for them. One by one they were driven through the camp to the Garage by the lake. It only took one day for each of them to be rolled inside, partially disassembled, checked out thoroughly and declared fit for duty. “We’re nothing but a glorified Jiffy-Lube,” Nick heard Carly tell her father when he happened to be passing by one afternoon at closing time.