Parched

by Lou Cadle

  Then she headed for the barn again to get the harness she used to climb the tower. She checked it carefully, as she did each time, running her bare fingers over the straps and pulling to test the closures, and then she pulled out her tool belt, loaded it with tools and lubricant, and the bolt she needed to replace and a spare just like it, put on gloves, and walked out to the turbines. She made sure her straw hat was snugged tightly to her chin and started the climb.

  The tower was scalding hot. Her gloved hands didn’t feel it, but her legs did through the worn jeans. Like most of her clothing, the pants were threadbare. The knees and rump had both been patched multiple times in the past ten years. A rope belt kept them from sliding off her hips. She reached the platform, made sure with a tug that it was secure, and stood on it. The sweat was really pouring off her now, too quickly for the dry air to evaporate all of it. The glare was merciless, and the only sunglasses she owned were on her face, though probably working less well than they did eleven or twelve years ago when she bought them online. She was grateful to have them at all.

  Her clothes, her sunglasses, and the turbine itself—all were subject to decay. And in this world, with no car, no Walmart, no delivery of goods via trucks, and no manufacturing of goods to be delivered in the first place, what they had was what they had. It was what they’d die with. None of them expected anything to change for the better. More heat, clothes worn thinner and thinner, things breaking, on and on until they were living like twelfth-century Indians in the last big drought, wondering if this was the day to leave their homes to crumble into ruins.

  But they were worse off, really, because the Indians—the local Hokopai and Anasazi of Colorado who’d survived the Great Drought back then—had centuries of knowledge about how to live off the land, skills taught since childhood, and Sierra and her neighbors and child had to work out everything for themselves from scratch. She’d tried to explain to Zoe what the Internet had been, and how you’d once been able to flip on a phone and look up anything you wanted to—how to make paint, for instance, which you’d only do as a lark back then, in small amounts, for the stores were loaded with it. But Zoe’s eyes had been glazed at the explanation. She didn’t understand it. She had no context for understanding that world that had disappeared when the U.S. lost its oil supply.

  Sierra wrenched her mind away from nostalgia, for those thoughts inevitably led to grief over all that had been lost. She didn’t want to fall from this tower, as her father once had. Pilar had been lucky, for he’d taken no permanent harm. But he could have died.

  And as bleak as the future sometimes looked to her, Sierra did not want to die. She wanted to survive and to help her daughter survive. And maybe laugh every so often on the way to death. And have sex a few times before she grew old, if that was possible without complicating life even more.

  Chapter 2

  Dev listened to Zoe telling him about the birth of the bunnies, trying to keep a silly grin off his face. He loved her so much it could literally hurt, a twisting pain in his gut that was part pride and part attachment and part the terror of losing her.

  But right now it was nothing but a pleasure. As he listened, his irritation at Sierra faded and he felt a bit sorry for her, for not seeing this side of Zoe very often, for not having her every day, watching her wake up and tucking her in at night like he did.

  “We should name them,” she said.

  “Remember why we don’t.”

  “I know. We’ll have them for Sunday dinner one day.”

  “They don’t name each other,” he said.

  “How do you know?” She pointed. “Look, that one with the white spots might be talking to the black one next to it. In rabbitese, so we can’t understand it.”

  “Could be,” he said. “It’s saying, ‘What is wrong with those two big rabbits out of the cage over there looking at us? They don’t have a bit of fur, and their back legs are put on wrong.’”

  “You’re silly.”

  “You’re sillier,” he said.

  “Dad,” Zoe said, making it two syllables. “I’m not a little kid any more. I’m almost ten.”

  Dev thought it was odd that she had a way of measuring time—and who was a little kid and who wasn’t—when she was the only child around. She’d met some other children in Payson and in Wes’s neighborhood when she was younger, so maybe she’d picked up the notion then. Little kids and big kids, grown up and not. “You’re more grownup than I was at nine.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You have a lot of responsibilities around here. Your work helps keep us—eating.” He’d almost said “alive,” but changed it at the last moment. He didn’t want her thinking about her own death, and how that was possible. He didn’t want to think about it either. “Hey, there’s your grandma with a basket. What’s she up to?”

  “Fruit picking,” Zoe said. “Peaches and plums.”

  “Want to go help her? Or do you have other chores?”

  “Eggs are collected,” she said. “Come with me and help.”

  “For a second. I should help your grandpa with the batteries today.”

  “Then why were you with Mom?”

  “Just talking for a minute,” he said. And that is all he’d intended to do, but as frustrating as he found Sierra, her beauty still made him want her. “Let’s follow Grandma. You can tell her about the rabbits.”

  “I did already.” She ran ahead of him, full of energy.

  She ate more calories than the three adults did—they all made sure of that—so she was growing up healthy. He watched her run up to his mom and saw his mom smile up at her. Zoe would soon loom over her grandmother.

  After making sure his mother and Zoe didn’t need him for anything, he went hunting for his father. Arch was as irascible as ever—except when it came to Zoe. He’d found a tenderness for the little girl Dev couldn’t remember seeing aimed his own way. He’d resented that once, and then felt guilt for the resentment, but the past year or two he thought he’d come to terms with it. Arch was the man he was, and nothing could change that. You took him as he was or not at all. And because his obsessions about guns and preparing for the worst had helped make Zoe possible, how could Dev complain?

  “Dad?” he said, as he approached the house.

  “Under here,” came the muffled voice.

  Dev squatted down. His father was in the crawl space under the house. “What are you doing there?”

  “Checking connections.”

  “Let me do it.”

  “I’m almost done. Where were you?”

  “With your granddaughter.” He didn’t mention Sierra, and not just because it wasn’t his father’s business.

  His father had not taken well the news that he and Sierra, despite making a child together, weren’t going to be a couple. Though it had been ten years since Sierra had laid down the law to Arch, he could still get short-tempered about it. Dev thought Arch felt betrayed by Sierra’s choices more than he himself did. Arch felt he’d turned her into a warrior, and then suddenly she no longer wanted to be one. He had barely come to terms with that when Sierra came over one morning, announced she was pregnant, and told Dev’s folks how it was going to be. Yes, Dev was the father, and yes, she knew they’d be terrific grandparents, but no, they should disabuse themselves of the notion that she, Dev, and the child would be anything like a typical family.

  “Zoe’s too attached to those rabbits,” his father said.

  “I know.”

  “She’s too tender for this world.”

  “Maybe so,” Dev said, though he didn’t agree. He’d finally learned to not disagree with his father—noncommittal responses seemed to be good enough most times.

  “Damn,” his father said.

  “What?”

  “Just dropped the flashlight—no, here it is.”

  “I can finish for you.”

  “I want you scrubbing the contacts on the batteries. Disconnect them a third at a time, test every one, and tes
t them again an hour later. Got it?”

  “I understand.” He didn’t see the point though. The batteries, ten years old now, were never allowed to bottom out. If they had to stop using electricity at night in winters to make sure of that, they did. But despite their careful monitoring, the batteries were getting old, and they wouldn’t last forever, and no amount of testing them once every three months would change that fact. Testing made sense only in times when you could run into town and buy batteries to replace the weak ones.

  The day was coming—and not too far into the future—where they would still have solar power, but only while the sun shone. The batteries would become useless, and so they’d only be able to use appliances in the day—and only on sunny days, at that. And then the day would come—though Arch probably wouldn’t live to see it—where the solar panels themselves quit giving them much power. And it would be, for all intents and purposes, the year 1700 again. Except they were missing a horse or ox, and a plow for them to pull. So maybe that meant it would become the year 1550 instead. Except they couldn’t smelt bronze. Earlier, then.

  Dev went to the shop and found the small tool kit designed just for this job: pliers, rag, pencil, pad, sandpaper, and wire brush stuffed into a folded rabbit-skin pouch, his own handiwork. He went to the outside door that led to the battery bank, unlocked it—though he wondered why they bothered to lock it any more—and began the chore.

  It had been years—literally, years—since anyone had attacked them. The last two strangers showing up weren’t even an attack but begging. The first group had been sent packing, but the second group—well, Zoe had been old enough to voice an opinion. “We can feed them a meal. Or give them some apples.” It had been late fall, and the apple crop had been good.

  “That means you’ll have less applesauce in March,” Dev had told her.

  “It means worse than that,” his father had said. “It means they know we have food, and they might come and steal it from us at night.”

  “Not after we’ve been nice to them,” Zoe insisted. “I want to meet them.”

  Dev and his father had exchanged a look over her head. His mother, with a shotgun, and Curt, with his crossbow, were holding the group out on the road. “I guess I’m okay with that,” Dev had said, but he hadn’t been. He was torn between giving Zoe something like normal human interactions, praising her for being kind, and the reality of their new lives. They should not give away food. But he couldn’t say no to his daughter’s impulse toward kindness.

  And Zoe had marched up to the people and asked if they were going to steal from them. There were six of them, two families—or what was left of them, as he soon learned. They apologized for not being able to pay or trade. “We can work,” the oldest male said, a kid about twenty years old.

  “No,” Arch said. He didn’t want any strangers to see all that they had.

  “You’re on your way somewhere,” Zoe said, like a professional negotiator. “So you don’t want to stop. Wait, and we’ll get you some apples. Okay, Grandma?”

  His mother had looked at Dev and shrugged.

  Dev and Zoe collected two dozen apples. “That’s four apiece,” Zoe said. “And maybe we should give them a trap so they can catch meat.”

  “No traps,” his father had said, putting his foot down. “The apples are more than enough.”

  Dev’s father grumbled about it after Zoe had gone to bed that night.

  “It’s good she has compassion,” Dev had said.

  “Compassion is for rich times,” his father had said. “These are lean times. I want you and me to stand watch tonight. We’ll do the whole deal too—night vision, rifles. If they come back to steal from us, they’ll regret it.”

  Dev had agreed to split the night watch with his father. Better safe than sorry. But the people did not return—not to steal, and not to beg, either. The apples each of them would have otherwise eaten were not missed—not terribly, at least. But Dev was just as happy that these moments of people showing up had ended. Everyone was either dead or had figured out a way to survive where they were, and they were staying put, or so it seemed.

  In two days, he would reflect again on that thought and feel grateful that his mother had not taken Zoe down to harvest amaranth with the other women.

  Chapter 3

  Sierra steered the old electric car down the rutted highway. Grass grew through cracks in it, and the edges of the asphalt road had crumbled away. Long ago, the Arizona sun had baked away the lane markings, but as they were the only ones who used the road, that hardly mattered. Sierra could have driven on the left-hand side of the road had she wanted, though habit kept her to the right. Kelly was next to her, and in the back seat were Joan and Emily.

  Emily didn’t say a word, of course—had not said one, so far as Sierra knew, in the ten years since she’d been raped by men in Payson at the age of 13. Joan chatted on about the hens and gardens, but Kelly was unusually quiet today. At a pause in Joan’s report of what she was trying to make the hens lay more, Sierra said to Kelly, “Are you feeling okay?”

  Kelly seemed to come back to the world. “I’m fine,” she said. “The heat has me a bit spacey, is all.”

  “I know. Don’t overdo it, okay?”

  “You just don’t want to lose the medic,” Kelly said. She seemed to be teasing.

  “I don’t want Zoe to lose her grandma. She adores you.”

  “She loves you too.” Kelly wiped away sweat.

  Sierra wasn’t sure about that but would not argue the point with Kelly. “Pilar says—and Curt backed him up—that we shouldn’t use the air conditioning in the car. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s good. The breeze through the window feels nice.” She had her window cracked open a few inches.

  Emily leaned forward, tapped Kelly’s window and pointed down. She did communicate, but only like this. Her actions said, clearly, “It’s fine with me if you lower the window all the way.”

  Kelly understood her. “I’m fine. We’re almost there.”

  Sierra slowed for the turn-off that led to the amaranth farm. Once a six-house neighborhood, it had been half burned down by marauders during the weeks just after the end of gasoline deliveries. Where the remaining residents had gone, they had never found out. There had been no bodies or fresh graves, so maybe everyone had survived the attack. Their own group had cleared out the remains of the homes over the years, and used what building supplies they could salvage for fencing off the grain farm. The lots of those three houses, their gardens, and the gardens and yards of the other homes were now the grain farm, two cleared acres amid the dying pine forest.

  Sierra made the turn onto the road and pulled up to the first house.

  “Something’s wrong,” Kelly said.

  “What?” Sierra’s senses went on high alert.

  “Look,” she said, pointing ahead. The corner of a wagon was visible, the kind of open wagon a horse might pull.

  “I didn’t bring my rifle,” Sierra said past a suddenly dry throat. “Joan?”

  “No.”

  “I have a .35,” Kelly said, reaching down for an ankle holster, “my revolver. But no extra rounds. It’s not going to be enough if this is more than a couple of people to deal with.”

  Joan said, “What are the chances they have weapons?”

  “Or ammunition?” Sierra said, calming down as she realized how unlikely it was that they did. “Kelly and Arch had more to start with than most people, and we’ve been careful with it, but even they’re almost out. Anyone who has been on the road would probably not have a lot left. Would they?”

  “Right now, I have only the seven in the gun,” Kelly said. “What should we do?”

  “Maybe go home and get more weapons,” Joan said.

  “Or more people,” Kelly said.

  “We should have some idea of what we’re getting into before we go back,” Sierra said.

  Just then, a woman appeared by the wagon, dragging a piece of wood. She saw them and called out
something—Sierra couldn’t hear what—to someone out of sight.

  “Go, or not?” Sierra said, reaching for the car’s starter.

  As a group of four people appeared by the wagon two seconds later, the point seemed to be decided. None had a gun. One had a baseball bat, and another had what appeared to be a slingshot.

  “I’ll get out,” Sierra said, handing Kelly the keys. “Roll down your window and cover me, I guess.”

  “You have a daughter,” Kelly said. It was a warning, a plea.

  Sierra’s hand stayed on the door handle. “We all have kids—except Emily, and she can’t talk to these people.” Or wouldn’t talk, but it made no difference, as it came down to the same thing. “It’ll be fine,” she said, though she didn’t know if she was reassuring Kelly or herself. She opened her car door.

  She heard Kelly’s window power down as she came around the front of the car, mindful both of the reach of the man with the club and the shot Kelly might need to take from the window.

  “Stop right there,” one of the strange women said.

  “I’m Sierra. We’re here to harvest our crops. And you are?” She directed it toward the woman who had spoken, though she never for a moment lost focus on the men with weapons.

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your concern.”

  “As you seem to be squatting in our place, I believe it is our concern.”

  The woman glanced back, making eye contact with one of the men, the one with the slingshot. “We don’t see any sign that anyone is living here.”