by Chris Hechtl
Walt paused on his way out and stopped. “Not at all sure actually,” he said cocking his head. “I'll get with Jayne and get back to you on it. I'd hoped we'd have the rest of the complex sorted out by now, but fat chance of that. Bob's right, the outer perimeter is a sieve. We'll work on it. I'll get back to you. In the meantime, go over the notes, maybe sketch out something. Block it out at least on paper. Shoot me a thumbnail of all the designs, copy to TJ too so she can let her traders know what's in the pipeline. Back the notes and stuff up for later,” he said.
“Roger,” Teri said with a nod, hustling him out now. “We're on it,” she said.
“Good. Good work people. Very good. I'll get you a bonus as soon as I put the word in. Great job,” he said with a nod.
Teri turned back to her crew who were now smiling. She smiled as well. “Well! Now that we've had a good show, let's get on it people!” she said, smacking her hands together. “If we get a bonus for each project we complete I'm planning to take a week off!” The others chuckled at that.
...*...*...*...*...
Walt nodded to himself as he made his way to his next stop. He definitely needed a place for the production line, preferably somewhere close to the source of the parts to keep transportation down to a minimum. Come to think of it, why did it take him so long to think of such a thing for the teams to use? It had been three months they could have used it!
Then again, the damn thing was big, about the size of a... well, it did have a V-6 engine for the generator. He'd have to ask about that, maybe they could use a 4 cylinder? Or make a lighter variant with a 2 stroke engine like from a scooter or motorcycle? He grimaced. No, the bikes were too useful for the scouts to use. Parts weren't at a premium yet, but he wasn't going to cut his own throat to put himself in that position if he didn't have to. He'd have to find out. Teri had mentioned a lawn mower engine. He'd have to have them look into that further. Definitely. They had a mountain of the damn things.
Come to think of it, Kyle had mentioned something about adding ladders to weapons to mount portable lights. He'd check with Jesse in fabrication. He turned, stopped and took his cap off to scratch his head. “Now where the hell was I going again?” he muttered.
A pair of women passing by slowed and then shook their heads. He ignored them as he tried to think. This whole situation was surreal. On one hand it was damn scary, but on another it was the dream of a lifetime. Here they were digging into shit, doing stuff he'd always wanted to do but never had the money or nerve to give a try. Now they were doing it and making it work. The alternative, that if it didn't work people would die hung in his mind for a moment. He shook his head and then sighed as he remembered.
“Oh yeah,” he muttered. The furniture store near the pizza place. He'd check there. Jayne had a volunteer group there, but they were bitchy about going out and doing stuff. Since they didn't want to go to work, maybe he'd just stick that assembly line right there. Easy commuting distance. They'd bitch, but tough.
Whistling he smiled a little and kept on moving to his truck.
...*...*...*...*...
“Fuck!” Rafe blinked at a heavy set guy who slapped his tray hard. “What the fuck man! Hamburger helper again?”
“Dude its food, come on,” his friend said looking around.
“Its slop that's what it is! The guys at the top don't have to eat this shit!” the guy pointed to his still steaming bowl of noodles. There was about a hand sized portion there. “What the frick man!”
“Guy you need to chill,” the server said and nodded his head to the next station. “Everyone's got food. Be thankful for that.”
“Then we need to cut the dead weight some man, get rid of the excess.”
Rafe blinked and schooled his face. He'd heard griping about that a lot lately. He was the newest on the block, just in from a warehouse that had folded when it had run out of resources. He'd gone from one meal a day to nothing for three straight days and had just managed to get to a harvesting team on foot before dark. He'd considered himself lucky, and hell, what they had here was a godsend.
“Look man, it is what it is. Eat it or don't, just quit blocking the works. We've got a lot of people to feed,” the server said waving a hand motioning the guy along.
“He's right man, this is what? Reheated from yesterday?”
“Some of it,” the server admitted. “We don't let the food go to waste. We only have so much.”
“Man, screw you, this is bull,” the blowhard said, slapping his hand against the wall. “Commies all of you. Everyone deserves to eat what they want man, this is America!”
“Problem here?” a cool soprano voice cut through the chatter the guy had started. Voices quieted as Spencer and Jayne came over.
The blowhard sized her up. His friend tried to get in between but he brushed him off.
“Yeah, yeah there's a problem here. This is slop man, not fit for pigs. I wouldn't feed my dog with this crap.”
“Sure it isn't dog?” someone asked. Jayne wasn't sure if it was a poor joke or not.
“I heard they are keeping them for meat,” someone stage whispered.
“I heard that's the cats,” someone else said.
“Nah, violins?”
“Shit, man, not funny, I've, well, I had a cat,” a woman said, wiping at her eyes.
The blowhard looked around, sizing up his support. Jayne stared at him coldly, crossing her arms.
“Out with it, we don't have all day.” she said. “Let's take it out of the line,” she said, pointing to the free area near a door.
“Fuck man, I ain't losing my place in line,” the guy's friends said. “I don't know about you, but I'm hungry,” the guy said, shaking his head.
“Some friend you are,” the blowhard said coldly.
“Hey man, I didn't start this. Don't start shit you don't want to finish.”
“You want to make something of that?” the guy snarled, fist clenching and starting to get into his former friend’s personal space.
“I still want to know what the problem is,” Jayne said, looking from one to the other.
“Its the food, he's not happy about the food. Same shit different day.”
“He's got a point, pasta day in and day out. I'd like a burger.”
“Me too. Me too,” people echoed. The crowd nodded or echoed the sentiment.
“So would I. Guess what, we're out,” Jayne said, spreading her hands apart. “Out of steak, out of burgers. Well, we've got some but guess what? We can feed a lot more people making beef stew with steak than we can if they just eat the meat. Same deal with the burger. We can feed a dozen people with four burgers and pasta over one burger per customer.”
“You've got food! One burger ain't going to cut it!” the guy said, glaring. She looked at him. “I'm a big guy, I can't... damn it I need more than famine rations to go on! Right?” he looked around for support.
“Famine rations is right,” someone echoed.
“Talk when you know what you're talking about,” Rafe snarled, standing on his toes to be seen over the crowd. “I'm from the warehouses on Perris. We ran out of food and damn near starved. Three days without food. We ate cat food, dog food, whatever we could get our hands on. This? This is a blessing. I had people licking the wrappers from candy bars for anything, any calorie they could get when the pet food was gone. Hell they were eating the wrappers after a while! Shut your yap.”
He looked around. Some of the people reluctantly nodded, but too many still had set faces.
“You live it up, living on the best while we've got slop!” the blowhard said. “What, it take you ten minutes to make this slop?”
Spencer rested a hand on Jayne's shoulder but she brushed it off as she got closer to this guy. It was starting to get ugly, things were starting to escalate out of control. He started to rally against her but she put him down hard and fast before Spencer and security got involved.
“You think its fun cooking this shit day in and day out?” she demande
d spreading her hands. “For thirty thousand people? There is a reason we have small, eight ounce portions for each of you. That's oh, a pound and a half of prepared food per person per day. That's oh, forty five thousand pounds of food to deal with every day.” She glared for a moment, sharing her glare with the crowd. The guy's eyes were glazing over. So were some in the crowd as they tried to get through the math. She knew it wasn't easy for some. John Q public's intelligence dropped with the number of people in the group.
“Oh that doesn't compute? Okay, I'll make it simpler. That's twenty two and a half tons of food a day for you people. Now, lets see here, we've got approximately one thousand three hundred and forty five and a half tons of food. That's a little over fifty nine days worth of food for everyone.”
“Um...”
“What do we do when its gone? Gee, glad you asked,” she snarled rolling right through his protest before he could get in a word edge wise. “When we get down to a thirty day limit we cut down to two meals per person per day. When we get down to fifteen, its one meal per person. That's one of these meals per person per day.”
“What about the farms?” Someone asked. “And all the food that the harvesters bring in.” A few people nodded expectantly.
Jayne looked around, pursing her lips. “The food from the farms? Don't make me laugh,” she said, shaking her head and throwing her head back, eyes flashing as her hands went to her hips. “Please. We're getting a hundred pounds of food a week from them now. Don't get me wrong, its great, its really good to see it starting to come in, but it’s just that, starting. We need food now. We need to have the same amount of food if not more every day to offset what we eat. Not to mention what the animals eat.”
She waited for the murmurs in the crowd as they digested that. She nodded. “That's right. So the harvesters bust their ass and risk life and limb for you to sit nice and comfy here and eat and bitch about what they bring in. They don't have a choice as to what they find, they just get it to us. Don't like pasta? Pasta keeps in boxes and containers. Sorry, meat doesn't. Still don't like it? Fine, right now we've got other options. We're working on it people. But the harvesters are going to run out of food to find eventually. We've canvased a lot of the city, pretty soon we're going to be shopping further and further away.”
“So what do we do?”
“We bust our asses and find more food while expanding the farms as fast as we can. We watch as these people bust their asses for precious little thanks or compensation while you bitch and moan.” She glared at the blowhard balefully. “We also make what we've got stretch for as long as we can. Exactly what we've been doing. Just because we don't go and advertise it doesn't mean we don't know what we're doing folks.” She looked around and glared. Slowly faces fell. She could feel the tension bleeding off. Spencer nodded to her when her eyes met his.
“Now, let's get this sorted out and back on track. People behind you are hungry and want to eat. We've got a lot to do before we have to prep for dinner. We've got twenty more minutes before we have to clean up and start prepping for that. Then this whole shebang starts all over again. So, let's get out of Hermes’ way and back to doing what it was you were doing,” she said with a wave. She walked off stiffly, head high. Slowly the line reformed as people sheepishly straightened out.
“Shit man, didn't know it was that bad,” a guy said.
“Its not. Not yet, it just sounds that way. The government will bail us out,” another guy said, giving Jayne a look.
“You sure about that?”
“Um...”
“You really going to wait on a government hand out? Going to be a long damn wait man. I saw the shit they sent us. The MREs are good, but they only sent us a couple of days worth. Drop in the bucket. Seen any airplanes dropping more?”
“Um...”
“Yeah, see, that's what I'm saying. We don't know. You don't know, we don't know. What I do know is the lady is right. Look I work in the docks. We're bringing in about twenty, maybe twenty five tons of food in on a good day. Most of the time? Most of the time its like twelve or fifteen, it all depends on the neighborhood. That's a good day anyway even if it doesn't cover what we're putting out, and it doesn't factor in losing our people to get it. But if we're shut down for a couple of days for weather, like oh, say, rain, that means we're not bringing jack in. The lady's right.”
“Shit,” his partner said, blinking. “I didn't think of that.”
“Yeah.”
“Why can't they go out in the rain?” a woman asked as she picked up her tray.
“You want them to get killed?” the man asked with a snort, turning to her as he watched the server measure out a portion of pasta and glop it onto his tray. There were a few bits of meat in it, but not a whole hell of a lot. The blowhard was right, it was some sort of hamburger helper. Mystery flavor apparently. What the hell, food was food. At least he was alive to eat it. He nodded politely and moved on. He turned as he shuffled along. Rafe was just ahead of him. He cocked his head to listen. “Seriously. The predators hunt when its dark out. Apparently when its cloudy some of them come out to play. I for one don't want to mess with them out in the open.”
“Amen,” a guy said shivering. He shook his head. “She's right man, I did it for a week. Couldn't hack it. I got scratched once and well...” He shivered convulsively and rubbed at his arm. “This one guy just got chewed up. Right in front of me. The medics tried to save him while there we were trying to step over his body to get to the food. No man, not me.”
A server nodded. “Shit yeah, I'm Tim by the way. Damn near lost an arm. Figured this is better than that. And don't get all down on the bosses. They are here cooking and eating the same stuff we serve half the time. Usually we have to chase them out to do their own work.”
“Really?”
“Yeah man, sometimes we have to chase them down to eat period. Jayne, the lady that was talking, she's into salads. Won’t eat anything else for lunch, if we don't have it she doesn't eat and skips lunch.”
“More for the rest of us I guess.”
“Yeah well, it ain't right,” Tim said shaking his head.
“At least we don't have to pay for it. I mean just labor.”
“Shit, banks are closed. Who's got money? Ain't worth spit anyway,” a woman said in disgust.
“Just be glad things are working so well here,” Rafe said quietly. The others looked at him. “When things got bad we started to eat pet food, then the animals. It wasn't pretty,” he said looking away. People shuddered.
“Damn man, that's bad.”
“Yeah well, we got down to licking wrappers and shit. I had to leave when we were...” he shrugged helplessly. “We cleaned out every house and business around us. Or so I was told. There wasn't anything left so order just broke down and one day we just left. I... well, I'm one of the lucky ones I guess. Harvesters picked me up on their way home.”
“Damn,” a guy said shaking his head.
“So, yeah, I don't care what we eat. I'll do anything they want. Its worth it,” Rafe said, taking his tray and moving off to an empty table. The others were quiet for a while.
“Harvesters man, they the unsung heroes here. I lost my boyfriend to a Gremlin in a pantry first, no second week after the invasion,” a cold looking woman said shaking her head. She ran a hand through her brown hair. She had a set of scars over a tattoo on one bare shoulder, and another set of scars on her arm that looked like they were just barely healing. “I'm pregnant, damn if I'm going to let my kid do something like that,” she said, one hand going to cradle her swelling belly. “Not if I can help it anyway,” she muttered stroking it gently.
“You should get extra, you've got another mouth to feed,” a woman said. “Here hon,” she dished some of her food onto the woman's before she could object. “Have some of mine deary,” she said.
“Thanks,” Tanya sniffed, wiped an eye and walked off stiffly. Her shoulders hunched a bit after a few steps.
“Unfortunately we d
on't have the food to spare, she's on multi-vitamins and supplements though,” a server said when they turned to look at him. “All the pregnant ladies are. Doc's worried about development. Hell, I'm worried about cravings.”
A lot of people paused and suddenly looked thoughtfully at their food as the line slowly moved. A few looked a little green. “Yeah, I mean, they sacrifice a lot to get what they can to us man, I can't say jack about that.”
“What about well...” the guy who had started the row waved.
“What about it?” a woman ahead of him challenged. “Fair is fair. Share and share alike. I don't give a shit if anyone thinks its commie or not. We're all in this together. They are right about that. You don't see the guys and gals on the front here now do you? We only see them when they are stuck in cause of the weather. They eat out in the field or skip lunch.” She shook her head. She knew her husband, he wasn't big on eating lunch and was doing a hell of a job as a harvester. He'd told her it was his way of providing for her and the kids. “We've got to stop tearing each other apart and start hitting back,” she said with a firm nod and making eye contact with them all.
“Hey, I work in the farms. She's right, we're going to have a harvest, but not soon. I heard egg production is up, that's good,” a guy waved his spoon from a nearby table. He turned to his table mates. They looked amused, apparently they'd heard him and his spiel about the farms before.
“Seriously, I mean, we've got a couple of hundred chickens now. Each time we get a new one it adds an egg a day to our production. That's why we haven't been eating them. We've been breeding them and it takes like six weeks to get them big enough, and I think the guy said something like two to three months before they start laying. Maybe less. I'm not sure, we'll see.”
“So no fried chicken in the future? Bummer.”
“Funny. Just give it time. When the egg layers get up to speed we'll shift some of the chickens for food. Right now the only ones we're using for food are the excess roosters. Those we don't keep to trade I mean,” he said.