“He tougher than Tris?” Danny asked. His twin sister, Hayden, scoffed.
“Tougher than Tris?” Isaak said. “I don’t know about that, but he was tearing limbs off those zeds like, like, like—”
“Who’s tougher than me?”
Tris sauntered over with her arm around Eva’s shoulder. She wore her Red Kangaroo fur jacket.
“The big guy.”
Sonny nodded at the four men and women who had just walked in. He held his daughter’s hands while she walked up his thighs and flipped over backwards to stand upright.
“Bear,” Biden said.
“Bear,” Tris said. “Yeah, he is a tough one.”
“Not as tough as you, baby,” Eva said, looking up into her scarred lover’s face.
“You know what the statistical probability of you ever running into your friends again was, Biden?” Hayden asked him.
“No. Do you?”
“No, but it’s got to be enormous.”
“They’re still down there,” Biden said, thinking of others. “In the city.”
“Tris, we gotta go down there,” Isaak said. “Rescue those people. Bring them back up here.”
“Hell yeah,” Danny said. “Time to bring the pain to Zed himself.”
“No you don’t, Tris,” Eva said. “You need to stay right here with me.” She leaned over and kissed her woman on the cheek.
A few feet away from them Chris elbowed Brent, none too subtly, causing Brent to blush and ask, “What do you want man?”
“I’m thinking about that,” Tris said, ignoring the two men and Eva. “But tonight let’s try and have some fun.”
“Damn, that woman looks like she’s ready to pop,” Hayden noted of Julie.
The newcomers were welcomed and introduced to everyone. Bear noticed how people eyed him, somewhat warily, somewhat respectfully. He stayed close to Julie while some of the women talked to her.
“When are you due?”
“Doctor Malden says in about five weeks.”
“Do you know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl?”
“You’ll love it here. This is a great place to give birth. Mary just had her baby three weeks back and everything went fine…”
“Hey, big man.” Chris walked over to Bear with three cans of beer hanging from their plastic webbing. “You want a beer?”
“No, thanks.”
“Daddy, what’s this man’s name?” Torrie asked her father.
“Introduce yourself, sweetie,” Sonny prodded her.
“I’m Torrie. What’s your name?”
“Bear.”
“Bear? That’s a funny name.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. Why don’t you call me Jimmy?”
“Okay, Jimmy, look what I can do.” Torrie walked up her father’s thighs and flipped herself over in a flash of skirt and little flowered purple panties.
“Wow,” Bear said, “that’s cool.”
“Watch me do it again—watch me do it again!”
“Hey man,” Chris said to him, “let me be blunt with you. You ever think of being a professional wrestler?”
“Once or twice, a long time ago.”
“Look, Jimmy, look at me!”
“Ah man, let me tell you, if Vince McMahon was here and he could get a load of you…”
“Your friend is very kind,” Lauren said to Mickey, “to humor Chris like that.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that guy?”
“He’s…I don’t know, he marches to a different drummer than most of us. But he’s a good soul.”
“Yeah, he’s good people,” Brent said as he joined them. “But you know what he wanted to play on the stereo?”
“Wasp?” Lauren laughed.
“Yeah, exactly.”
“What’s so funny about Wasp?” Mickey didn’t get it.
“You ever hear the song, Animal? Chorus goes—”
“I fuck like a beast.” Mickey laughed .
“Speaking of singing,” Lauren said. “Singh introduce you to his little choir over at the med center?”
“Yeah. That’s something, ain’t it?”
“That’s crazy,” Lauren said.
“This place is incredible,” Julie said. “You rely on ditches for protection?”
“You saw them when you came in, right? They’re fifteen feet deep, vertical on our side. We expand them when we have to in the warmer months.”
“Real bitch digging ditches in the earth when the grounds frozen like this.”
“Danny,” Hayden said, “you never built a ditch with your hands.” She explained to Julie, “We use earth moving equipment. I don’t even know what the stuff is called—”
“You guys had walls around where you were staying?” Danny asked Julie.
“Yeah.”
“Walls suck.”
Lauren continued, “Clavius is always expanding and we can’t be spending half our time taking down and rebuilding walls.”
“Only problem with a ditch,” Panas said, “is they’re meant to protect against Zed, not other human beings.”
“Those people you told us about were scary,” Hayden said. “To think there’s people like that out there…”
Not anymore, Bear thought.
“Jimmy, look what I can do—”
“Honey, leave Bear alone. Go play with the other kids and Buddy, okay?”
“Okay Daddy.”
“We get Zeds in ones and twos,” Sonny said, “but sometimes we get them by the hundreds, couple of times in the thousands. Where they’re coming from, I don’t know. Why they come here, I can only guess.”
“They don’t get past these ditches?” Bear asked, his eyebrow raised quizzically.
“No. We’ve got men and women stationed every couple hundred yards. If a zombie makes it to a ditch, they’re taken out.”
“Zed don’t surf!” Danny spat and Mickey wondered if the kid even knew what movie the original line came from.
“You said if a zombie makes it to the ditch?” Bear asked.
“We’ve got teams of people out there,” Sonny clarified. “They go out in teams of four and stay out for five days to a week.”
“I’m going out next week,” Danny piped up. “Gonna light Zed up.”
Hayden scoffed, pouted her lips and rolled her eyes.
“He’s a young gun,” Sonny noted sardonically. “Wants to kill zombies, don’t you? You’ll get your chance, kid. When the teams spot any movement, if it’s something they can handle, they take care of it. If it’s not, they radio back and alert us.”
“What are we talking about when you say it’s something they can’t handle?” Mickey said.
“Zed, man,” Danny said. “Zed in his glorious hundreds and thousands.”
“We’ve had droves of them come up through here,” Sonny said. “We either go out and meet them, like Tris and her crew the other day were doing, or the team will lead them to a specified area where we’ve got an advantage.”
“It’s like a duck shoot,” Danny said. “Hundreds of the damned things just standing in a draw—like one of the trenches—and we blast ‘em.”
“Then we burn them, bulldozers come in, cover up the remains.”
“Yeah, this place is friggin’ enormous,” Mickey said. He was going to say fuckin’ huge but there were children within earshot and he didn’t want to curse in front of them.
“We’ve got several square miles covered,” Sonny agreed. “But you can imagine even that starts feeling small after awhile.”
Brent killed his beer and looked at the can. “How long is it safe to drink a beer after the expiration date, anyway?”
“I think as long as it doesn’t have any dents in the can it’s okay,” Mickey said.
“Sounds good to me. Time for a refill. Later.”
“Later, Brent.”
“Hey, Lauren. That’s a museum piece you carry there, isn’t it?” Mickey said of the MP-40 on her back. “Nazi weapon?”
“Yeah.”
“Schnauzer or something?”
“Schmeisser.” She laughed, not sure if he had been kidding around.
“I noticed outside yesterday, you guys all carry the same weapons?”
“Pretty much. We usually go out with the same kind of rifle and at least one pistol in common. Helps with the ammunition. Instead of everybody having a different kind of weapon, different ammo.”
“Makes sense.”
“But we also carry any personal pieces we want. For me, that’s this.” She snapped the strap of the MP-40.
“Everyone here is armed?”
“All the time.”
“You ever have zombies get in?”
“Never. The perimeter is patrolled twenty-four seven.”
“And you haven’t blown each other away?”
Lauren laughed and Sonny said, “Gun control, or whatever it was called, meant a whole other thing before…before we were here. Before this. Yeah, we all pack, but we’re not killing one another.”
“I guess that was one of the good things about America having so many guns,” Mickey said. “When the zombies came you could literally find a machine gun on the street if you looked long enough.”
“Yeah, Charlton Heston would have been proud,” Sonny said.
“Soylent Green!” he fake yelled. Lauren nodded and laughed. Then he asked, “What is this, some kind of utopia?”
“Seems that way, sometimes,” she said. “But it’s not. I mean, it’s really great. But let’s face it. There are people here who don’t really get along. There are people,” she looked at Steve in his sunglasses across the room, “who are still assholes. And we’ve got probably four or five billion zombies beyond the walls, out in the world. So, utopia? No.”
“Yeah, but it’s so much better than being out on the road.”
“I haven’t been outside for awhile. Hey, want to get some fresh air?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s grab a couple more beers. Take them with us.”
“I’m one of your doctors,” Singh told Gwen, “and in my professional opinion, one beer won’t harm you, even with the pain killers for your arm.”
She smiled and held the can out. Singh hooked the pull ring and popped it for her.
“Gracias,” she said.
“De nada.”
They were standing next to Steve, his roommates and a few other people and could hear their conversation.
“She’s pretty hot for a pregnant woman,” Steve said. “I’d do her.”
“You keep talkin’ shit somebody’s going to shut you up one of these days,” Biden observed.
“I love it when you talk dirty to me, Biden, I really do. Hey Mother, want another?”
“Are you an asshole?” Gwen broke away from Singh, confronting Steve.
He looked at her with her arm in its sling.
“Depends on who’s asking.” He winked.
“Doesn’t depend on who’s asking,” Brent said. “He is an asshole. I live with him. I know.”
“Don’t mind Steve,” Singh said. “He’s just…he’s just Steve.”
“I didn’t know they made those t-shirts in that size,” Gwen said. Steve was sporting his what-happens-at-Grandma’s-stays-at-Grandma’s t-shirt.
“Yeah, for the developmentally disabled,” Brent said.
“That’s me. Gifted and talented.”
“That what they’re calling it these days?” Hayden said.
“That isn’t what they meant when they told you you were special Steve,” Brent said.
“What was Singh talking about when he mentioned ‘job complexes’ this morning?” Bear asked Sonny.
“What we’re establishing here in Clavius is a participatory economy. Have you ever heard that term?”
Gwen, Julie and Bear all shook their heads.
“I hadn’t either. The way things were done in this country, and most of the world before all this, right? We called that capitalism, right?”
“Right,” Gwen said.
“This stuff bores me.” Danny faked a yawn and his sister shot him a dirty look.
Panas inserted himself into the conversation, “We called our political system a democracy. But what did that mean? That you got to go out and vote once every couple of years? Meanwhile, things continued the way they always were.”
“The golden rule, Arnold called it,” Danny said.
“The golden rule?” Julie asked.
“He who has the gold, rules.”
“Now, you can feel free to disagree with me,” Sonny continued, “but let me see if I can’t make you agree with me that our democracy was extremely limited, if it was even a democracy. And I say that to you as a one hundred percent god-fearin’ U.S. of A. good-old boy.”
“Believe him,” Danny said. “He’s a superpatriot.”
“We’re listening,” Bear said.
Panas looked at Sonny and when he gestured with his open hand Panas picked up the conversation. “Democracy is a way of life, not just a political system. You know who said that? John Dewey. Dewey also said that the democracy that limits itself to the political sphere is a democracy that denies itself.”
“What does that mean?” asked Gwen.
“Well, consider your jobs before all this, okay?” Panas said. “Were your jobs democratic? Was the economy democratic?”
“I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean,” Bear said.
“Did you get to decide what was produced, or how it was produced, and how the profits were spent or re-invested? I doubt it. That’s what we mean. Here in Clavius we’re setting up our work places so that the workers have a great deal of autonomy and say in what goes on.”
“In other words,” Danny said, “there are no bosses.”
“No bosses, yes,” Sonny said, “but we organize councils around each work place.”
“How does that work?” Julie asked.
“Let’s say—Mickey, he’s like Lauren. He likes movies, right? So he gets a job in the new TV station we’re trying to get off the ground—”
“TV station,” Bear said. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No, no joke. He gets a job with our ‘entertainment industry’, if you will. Well, everyone in his particular part of that industry will vote to send a representative to a larger council that meets weekly—”
“Or whenever needed,” Panas said.
“—or whenever needed. At that council all the concerns of the particular workplaces are shared, progress is reported on—”
“This is some boring shit just to talk about it,” Danny muttered.
“The kid’s right,” Sonny said. “It’ll make a lot more sense when you can kind of see it in action. Otherwise it risks being very academic. Maybe tomorrow if you’re all up to it we can have you visit some workplaces, see what we’re talking about.”
Crusade (Eden Book 2) Page 24