The man was just trying to get a reaction. Brennachecke knew it. As long as the MIC wanted to fly, he was confident the man would keep his side of the trade healthy enough to make the deal worth his time. But enough was enough.
“Maybe if you don’t watch your mouth, we’ll all just die right here and now,” Brennachecke said, turning to stare down the MIC with his cold blue eyes, drilling in the very real possibility that if the man didn’t heed his warning, he’d find a way to make it happen.
The MIC laughed at him.
“You want to learn to fly or not?”
Still laughing, the MIC looked at his abduction squad and rolled his eyes mockingly, effectively showing that he was still the authority here. His men laughed the way subordinates do when their bosses make a joke, even if the joke isn’t funny. “These two little bitches are going to let us fly, boys. Like fucking angels. Blood angels, motherfuckers. You like the sound of that, don’t you? Yeah, you do! Take ’em back, put ’em somewhere safe until you hear from me, yeah? And ’cause Daddy Daedalus here is a fucking party-pooper, you keep your hands off ’em or you’ll answer to me, you fucking degenerates. He wants them whole and unsoiled.”
Brennachecke didn’t point out that suggesting he was Icarus’s father didn’t bode well for the MIC’s ultimate success as a pilot, but he did wonder who the idiot was trying to impress with his obviously faulty knowledge of Greek mythology. Then he remembered Beverly’s reference to her sirens out in front of the Raj and smiled in spite of himself. When a man continues to behave in a way that he thinks might impress a woman he’s sexually interested in, even when she is not there to witness the behavior, then it’s pretty safe to say the woman has the power in the relationship. If he had had any doubt before about whether or not Beverly was really in charge of the whole show, it was gone now. Though he’d never used the term himself, Brennachecke knew that the MIC was as pussy whipped as a rich but ugly freshman at senior prom. He also knew that Beverly didn’t care one way or another if the Vedic City pirates learned to fly or not, and that might end up being a problem.
The abduction crew quickly clipped the cables extending from the van to the net and flipped the switch on the power winch inside. Before either of the girls or Brennachecke could respond, the cables whipped taut and yanked Jen and Bobby-Leigh across the pavement and into the van. Once the net and everything in it was hauled up and the van doors had swung shut, the old soldier and the Man-in-Charge turned and silently walked back to the plane. The abduction squad loaded up and returned up Highway 1 to Vedic City.
“I’m going to need to see with my own eyes that they are okay when we get back.”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever,” the MIC said. “Walk me through taking off again.”
Brennachecke sighed deeply. This was his bargain. He’d set the terms. He’d done the math. He’d thought it through backwards and forwards. And yet, if Beverly was the one who really had the power here, he’d done this all wrong. Suddenly, he couldn’t shake the feeling that things were inevitably slipping slowly toward the edge of a great abyss, and at the bottom of that deep, dark hole there would be no justice to be had, for the only thing waiting for him would be the fury of hell.
* * *
Dan had watched unseen at the airport while Brennachecke and the MIC went over the plane. His bow had been ready, but the old sergeant hadn’t needed it. The small posse of men the MIC had brought with him had all been too excited about the possibility of flight to adequately examine the area. He could have probably stood straight up on the roof and waved at them and still have gone unnoticed, but of course he didn’t do that.
He had hidden. He had waited. Brennachecke knew he was there, and occasionally they’d shared a secret glance or two in which Dan assumed the man was telling him all was going according to plan. But then when he’d watched the plane land on the highway a couple of hours later, he’d suddenly not been so sure.
Why the hell would Brennachecke land on Highway 1?
But he had known the answer even before the question had completely formed in his mind. The one question that he couldn’t fathom the answer to, however, was how this affected their plan.
He’d watched the abduction crew return to Vedic City and then had just waited until the plane returned, circled several times, and landed with a couple of hard bounces on the runway half an hour later. By the time Brennachecke stepped out of the cockpit, Dan was almost shaking with adrenaline. He desperately wanted to know what the fuck was going on, but there was no way for him to ask. All he could do was watch and be ready for anything.
When folks want something to happen, it is amazing how slowly time seems to progress for them. Dan saw Brennachecke and the MIC exit the plane and talk to the excitedly waiting men. He watched as they went over the post-flight maintenance. He watched as they went over how to refuel. He watched as the MIC whipped his dick out and took a steaming piss all over the runway. He watched and waited desperately for Brennachecke to look up at him or give him a signal of some kind. But it didn’t happen.
Brennachecke took out a small pad of paper and wrote some things down on it, then showed it to the MIC and his men, all of whom nodded. He wrote something else, but seemed to not like the way he’d written it and crumpled up the piece of paper. Then, as Dan watched, he suddenly looked directly up at him as he tossed the ball of paper to the ground and started again. It was all Dan could do to keep himself from jumping up and running down to snatch up the supposedly discarded trash in front of everybody. But he had to wait. For almost another hour he toiled in mental agony as Brennachecke reviewed flight procedures with the MIC and his men.
As they talked, the wind, which had been nothing more than a cold whisper on his exposed skin for most of the day, started to kick up a notch. He watched as it drove the wadded ball of paper slowly down the runway and toward the rows and rows of dead abandoned corn. He knew he should be monitoring Brennachecke with the hostiles, but he couldn’t focus on anything but the message he knew was scribbled on that piece of paper. If Brennachecke had signaled him before he left with the MIC and his men back to Vedic City, Dan missed it; he was too obsessed with the note that had now been blown into the thick of the corn. But the old man was still alive when he left, and Dan had overheard plans for an early start tomorrow, so he didn’t really care.
Once they were gone and he was alone again, he scurried off into the corn and grabbed the note. Anger flashed through him as he read it, though he couldn’t for the life of him understand why. He was expecting more, he supposed. But that was stupid. The man had only had a second to write it. So the fact that it just told him to get food and stay warm shouldn’t have really come as a surprise. He just felt so in the dark that it was hard not to take the minimalist instructions personally. Nothing could stop him from resenting the fact that there was so obviously something of significance going on and that he didn’t know what that something was.
The plan hadn’t changed. That was the gist of the message. But the feeling that Brennachecke had new information and that, even though he’d found a way to securely communicate, he was still withholding that information from Dan spun irrationally around in his head.
What are you hiding, Brennachecke? he wondered over and over. And why?
Fuck this, Dan suddenly decided. He’d do some reconnaissance tonight and get his own answers.
Chapter Seven
The African in the Corn Belt
The Kessler farm was gone. Sure, the buildings were still there, as was the land, but the artesian organic core wrapped up in the nice Maharishi-approved Vedic shell that had made it what it was had been replaced the way a surgeon might pop a pig heart into a little boy to keep him alive if better alternatives didn’t present themselves (and these days, better alternatives never presented themselves). The pig heart the farm got transplanted with was strong, and once in, it beat and beat and beat away, transforming the place into a frea
k of nature that could survive. So while everybody, including the small clan that had taken it over, still referred to it as “the Kessler farm,” it certainly no longer warranted that particular namesake.
Neither Anoona nor any of her people were practitioners of Transcendental Meditation or part of the TM movement. None of them were even from Fairfield. They had found Kessler’s farm on the Internet—or what remained of it in the chaos after things started shutting down—and had sought it out as a sanctuary against the rising uncertainty in Grinnell, where the group had all attended the university.
“Who are you guys?” Eric asked, his mouth agape as he took in an overwhelming amount of technology he’d not seen since he was a child, and some he’d never seen before at all. His people had been led into the house by Anoona and her two guardsmen, Rodney and Hamm, but everybody was too shocked by what they saw once inside to make it much further than the foyer. Every one of Brennachecke’s people was wondering the exact same thing as Eric, but none of them could find the words.
“Seriously, who are you guys?” Eric repeated, but this time his question wasn’t directed at them as much as it was to himself. Anoona’s crew appeared to consist of only seven people. There was Anoona, Rodney, and Hamm. Then inside there was the fattest man Eric had ever seen—who he would later find out was ironically called “Tiny” by everybody. There was a little girl, who was maybe twelve years old and obviously Anoona’s daughter—or at least Eric thought it was obvious, since she was the only other black person in the crew. As they all slowly filed into the house, a young lesbian couple named Sarah and Rachel came out of the kitchen to greet them and to round out the number to seven. Though Eric had never seen lesbians before, it wasn’t the people that were blowing his mind at the moment; he didn’t even register that the two women were rather intimately holding hands and wrapped in each other’s arms as they joined them. His brain was too busy trying to process what he was actually looking at in the space all around them.
The living room had been converted into a state-of-the-art command center, where Tiny—overflowing out of his chair—was running what looked like several computer systems at once. There were twelve huge monitors mounted on the wall, and at Tiny’s fingertips there were two complete keyboards and a variety of versatile touchscreen controls. Tiny himself wore a pair of augmented-reality glasses and haptic gloves, but Eric didn’t recognize either of those things for what they were yet.
One of the monitors was divided into sixteen video grids, and it was those that had caught his eye almost immediately. Each one was a live video feed of some kind. He saw the dead cornfield they’d walked through. He saw Highway 1. He saw several angles of the exterior of the Kessler farm and its buildings.
His gaze jumped from feed to feed until he suddenly saw something so beyond his experience of the world that his whole face twisted up in a knot of confusion. He was looking at a video feed from what looked like some kind of warehouse filled with racks and racks of something green and plantlike. Surrounding the racks, buzzing around like giant insects, were four tethered robotic drones. All of this was under rows and rows of what looked like oddly colored florescent lights. The racks were automated to rotate whatever the plants were, tray by tray, into the light. Hoses fed misting sprinklers below the trays, feeding the plants—he thought they had to be plants—water and nutrients. It was an automated factory farm of some kind, he supposed, but it was so far from anything he’d known existed that he couldn’t be sure.
His eyes moved to the next video feed over. He saw what looked like another warehouse, only this one was full of chickens—shelves of them. In fact, the shelves looked just like the ones holding the plants in the other feed, just without the water hoses. More of the automated tethered drones tended the flock.
In the remaining video feeds he saw empty rooms in the house, and then in the last frame of the grid he saw himself and all his people staring dumbstruck at it all. There was a little square graphic around each of their faces with their names and other key information next to it. One of the screens had a detailed 3D-rendered map of Fairfield and the surrounding Jefferson County. There seemed to be some cross-referencing between the information generated next to the squares around their heads and the map, but exactly what information was being passed was impossible to tell. Anoona’s crew was being captured by the video system as well, but instead of squares, her people’s faces were surrounded by circles.
Anoona followed Eric’s gaze and smiled.
“Facial rec. We’ve got most of the people in the area in our system.”
“I don’t . . .” Eric began, but then just closed his mouth and shook his head.
“Where are the cameras?” Ace asked.
“Exteriors are JIYs handing off at twenty-minute intervals in algorithmic sweeps,” Tiny said. “Interiors are mounted.” He pointed up and Eric and Ace saw a black lens mounted high in the corner of the room. The camera was so small, if Tiny hadn’t pointed it out to them they’d probably never have noticed it.
“Jesus, man, how do you have the power to do all this?”
Tiny laughed good-naturedly. “We’ve got almost fifty megawatt hours incoming, if the weather’s friendly.”
It was Hamm that spoke next, saying, “Kessler had a bunch of solar panels already. And we brought a bunch more with us. Since we got here, we’ve also been scavenging from local sources like Eco Village and MUM. We’re up to over three hundred cells at this point.”
No sooner had Hamm spoken than Tiny touched something and Eric suddenly saw them for himself on one of the monitors. Where Allen had once sown his organic heirloom seeds now stood panel after panel of solar cells. The Kessler farm had quite literally been converted to a solar farm.
“But the real kicker is the shit ton of storage we got in the basement,” Rachel added with a smile.
“Yeah, we managed to appropriate a shipment of Tesla Powerpacks on our way here,” her girlfriend, Sarah, explained with a distinct note of pride in her voice, but Eric, Ace, and the rest of the new arrivals had no idea what she was talking about.
It was all too much. They may as well have all been cavemen visiting the space station. Eric, for his part, had still been a child when Fairfield had gone dark for good. The only electrical power he’d experienced in a long time was produced by a Honda gas generator, the use of which his father had rationed so severely that it was almost as if they hadn’t had it at all. His head was spinning and he was sure he wasn’t the only one with his mind blown.
Who are these people? he thought to himself, and then his wonder shifted to more important questions: Why had they revealed themselves? And what did they want with him and the rest of his people?
They didn’t seem to mean them any harm, but these were not times when such instincts could be given the benefit of the doubt. No, he thought coldly. These were the times when anything that seemed too good to be true, as a rule was exactly that: too good to be true. There was undoubtedly a catch here. He didn’t know what it was yet, but he was sure it was coming. He just hoped that when it did finally jump out from the shadows at them, they would all live to tell about it.
Anoona smiled at him and chuckled. Her teeth were blindingly white against the darkness of her skin. She was beautiful, he realized suddenly, as the novelty of her blackness wore off a little. He found himself blushing in embarrassment for no reason he could understand. His throat felt tight. His lungs didn’t seem to be able to get enough air into them to keep the oxygen flowing sufficiently to his brain. He felt his skin prickling.
“It’s a lot to take in, I imagine,” she said.
Eric was so distracted by the tech, by how black she was, and by how strikingly beautiful he found her, that he had a hard time hearing her words through the naive, if not slightly racist, fog that was enveloping his brain. He couldn’t respond, so he just nodded. Nobody else said anything either, so he guessed he wasn’t alone in his st
upor.
“There’s a bunch of couches downstairs. Why don’t you all head down and make yourselves comfortable. Sarah makes some pretty solid hooch. Hamm and I will bring down a bottle and some glasses and we’ll try to answer whatever questions you guys have.”
* * *
There were indeed a number of couches downstairs, seven of them to be exact, all arranged in a big circle that took up most of the space of the main lower-level room. It was enough sitting room for the twelve of Eric’s group as well as Anoona and Hamm to be comfortable. Anoona’s little girl had come down with her mom and now sat on her lap.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody drank the hooch that Hamm had brought down and passed around.
It was an awkward moment that stretched and stretched, until at last Roger put his glass to his lips and tasted the alcohol. Ace reached out to stop him, but it was too late.
“We’re not trying to poison you,” Hamm said with a sympathetic smile.
Ace blushed, but didn’t say anything in response. His eyes were glued to Roger to see if in fact Hamm was telling the truth or not. Roger, for his part, just rolled his eyes at Ace and smiled as the liquid spirit passed his lips and pleasantly burned its way down his throat, warming his belly.
“Wow,” he said. “That is some silky-smooth oaky goodness right there.” Roger looked at Ace and smiled as if to demonstrate beyond any doubt that he was not poisoned, but the smile just wasn’t enough.
Sarah, who had been watching the awkwardness from the stairway (in easy reach of her AR-15 assault rifle that was waiting just out of sight in case things took an unfortunate and unnecessary turn toward violence), revealed herself and spoke up.
“Yeah, Anoona just calls it hooch to break my balls. You’ve all got full-on, properly distilled and aged straight bourbon in your glasses there.”
Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One Page 20