She was obviously proud of her work. Somehow that obvious pride calmed Ace’s nerves and fears about poison enough for him to try it himself. Unprepared for the burn, he coughed as the spirit went down his throat.
“Nice,” he managed to croak. Everybody laughed and, magically, just like that the tension broke. Eric tried it, then Maddie Love, the librarian.
“It’s my granddaddy’s recipe,” Sarah continued as everybody else finally tipped their glasses and had a taste. “Just cracked the first barrel a month ago.”
“So,” Anoona said. “Where shall we start?”
“Who are you guys?” Eric asked for what felt like the thousandth time.
“The six of us all met at Grinnell in an Agricultural Technology class. Rodney had just finished an internship at FarmedHere, and Rachel and Sarah were on their way to work at SpaceX when they graduated. Tiny, the big guy running the computers, was just interested in the subject, I guess. I was here studying abroad from Zimbabwe and Hamm, was . . .” She paused and smiled a private smile. “He was just the guy I was seeing at the time.
“But as the shit hit the fan and it became more and more clear that the world was about to make a sharp left turn into an even deeper pile of shit, we decided we’d preemptively make a doomsday plan. The rolling blackouts had started already at that point, so we knew we couldn’t count on the grid or the traditional infrastructure for power or water. Also, the level of violence was quickly getting out of hand, and I’m not just talking about the berserkers. The cops—even in the little town of Grinnell—had started to not show up for work. People knew they could get away with things, but they were also scared, which is never a good combination. The government hadn’t declared martial law yet, but we knew it was coming and as small as Grinnell is, we still knew it would eventually get out of control, especially if the power one day didn’t come back on, which of course is exactly what happened. When it did, just like here in Fairfield, most of the people who left did so to find someplace where the lights were still on. But not us.
“We had been researching where the best spot to wait out the shit might be when we found the website for the Kessler farm. Turns out Fairfield and Jefferson County have a surprisingly high amount of solar adoption for such a small rural community. And so, while everybody else fled to the cities hoping to find power grids that still worked, we appropriated the gear we needed and headed here in two big old semitrucks.
“By then, of course, the Internet was for all intents and purposes down, but Tiny built us a local network here and he has been steadily increasing the connectivity as best he can. We’ve been able to monitor—though just to a limited amount—what’s left of the net in Cedar Rapids and a few other places. But as you can guess, security is always a concern, so we’re just doing it passively for now. We’ve taken a census of Fairfield and most of Jefferson County, which you saw earlier up on the monitors. Nobody here in the area has anything close to what we do as far as tech and power goes—at least as far as we know. If they do, they’re even better at hiding it than we are, which is a scary thought, but we’re pretty confident our position here is a uniquely strong one.
“Hamm is a mad scientist of a mechanical engineer and built the drones you saw tending to the crops and chickens. He was also the one who modified the JIYs for Tiny to keep watch over us.”
It was a lot of information, but it didn’t really satisfy Eric’s curiosity. He realized suddenly that nothing Anoona said probably would.
“So . . . you’re from Zimbabwe?” he said, as if that was the most important piece of information in the history she’d just recounted. Anoona smiled at him and nodded.
“JIY?” Cooperman asked.
“It’s a drone,” Hamm said. “Nobody knows what the hell it stands for. Something in Chinese, I think.”
“What’s SpaceX?” Ace asked. He expected Hamm or Anoona to answer, but it was Mad Love who chimed in.
“Before he was killed, there was a man named Elon Musk who was this outrageous Tony Stark–like industrialist. He started Paypal, which you’ve probably never heard of, Solar City, and the Tesla car company—do you know Tesla?”
Ace nodded, but Eric didn’t.
“Doesn’t matter, the point is he had all these companies working on making mankind’s existence more sustainable, and one of those businesses of his was this private space flight company which was on this mission to colonize Mars, and that was SpaceX.”
“Mars, like the planet?” Eric asked.
“Exactly.”
“You think things suck down here, just think about the twenty-odd astronauts who got stranded on Mars when the lights went out,” Sarah said.
“I’m sure they’re all dead by now, so maybe they’re actually the lucky ones,” Matt Knowles said.
Matt was not somebody Eric knew very much about, even though he’d been with his father’s group for years. He was in his early forties, or at least that was how old he looked to Eric, and he was a quiet man who preferred to read books (the physical paper kind) over talking with others.
“Well, aren’t you just a dark motherfucker,” Sarah said from her perch on the stairs, then added with a wink, “Just my kind of man.”
“Mom said that you didn’t like men,” Anoona’s daughter said out of the blue.
“Exactly, sweetheart,” Sarah chimed back without missing a beat.
“But if you don’t like men, then how can this guy be your kind of man?”
“She’s just making a joke, honey,” Hamm said.
Anoona’s daughter sighed loudly and looked around the room to see if anybody else was as confused by this exchange as she was.
“But . . . why is that funny?” she said a little too loudly, obviously frustrated.
“Hush now,” Anoona told her daughter. “I promise I’ll explain it to you later. Right now we’re trying to catch up our guests.”
“So do you know what causes the berserkers, then?” JP asked.
“Well, there are two camps on that,” Hamm said. “Those with a religious predilection tend to gravitate toward explanations that involve some kind of demonic possession. Those with a more rational, scientific background tend to like the idea of a viral infection of some kind.
“What the truth is at this point is anybody’s guess. Most of us here never have been the kind of people to put much stock in the Bible, or religion in general, so we tend to lean more toward the virus side of the debate. But from what we’ve read and heard, the odds that it is actually a virus are pretty slim. There’s no berserker antibodies being made. No immune response to it. It’s a mystery on a scientific level. We don’t even know what it is about berserker blood that makes it do the amazing things that it does. If you pull the HGF out and give it to somebody straight, it seems to just get absorbed by the body without any of the magic. Maybe it’ll give the person a little bit of a steroid-like bump, but nothing like what happens if you give them the blood as is. So we can definitely confirm for you that there is something unique and powerful in berserker blood, but I’m sure you already know that. At this point there is frankly just as much evidence for the demonic possession argument as ours.”
“That’s not true,” Anoona chimed in.
“Isn’t it, though?”
“There is some science in what we know about berserkers. It’s not all mysterious huffelpuff.”
Hamm smiled awkwardly at Eric and the rest of them. He hadn’t intended to start a debate and now just wanted to shut it down, but he never knew what was going to stick in Anoona’s pudding. She was ridiculously smart and seemed to take it personally when somebody said something that was less than accurate, but then at the same time she was often mortified by what she called Hamm’s “lack of tact.” He’d never been successful at just placating her with unearned indulgences. Most days this feistiness was something he loved about her, but sometimes it was annoying as hell. This was one o
f the annoying times. He didn’t like looking stupid and being corrected like that when he was just being dismissive to be funny. Why did she not get that?
He tried to clarify his earlier statement. “The fact is, they’ve never been able to predict who is likely to go berserk—at least not in any kind of scientifically accurate way. You can test for HGF in the blood, but with the number of normal people using berserker blood like a drug, you are going to get a lot of false positives.”
He looked to Anoona for permission to continue, assuming this statement was accurate enough for her. She nodded. It was.
“The bottom line is that even though there’s hundreds of groups out there claiming to know who the berserkers are and who they aren’t, no real evidence so far has shown up to support any of the claims. Mostly there’s just a bunch of rhetoric being used to isolate and murder the people who the guys in power don’t like for one reason or another.”
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Cooperman said.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Are any of you berserkers?” Ace asked.
“Not that we know of,” Anoona said. “How about you and yours?”
“Well, it turns out Jennifer Kessler is, or was . . .” Eric said. “She had a, um, episode and, um, killed my brother a couple of days ago.”
“So that’s why your dad is—”
“Yep,” Eric said, cutting her off.
Anoona took the hint and dropped it. Brennachecke’s reputation for an-eye-for-an-eye justice had reached her and her people even though they’d been doing their best to stay invisible.
Hamm changed the subject by asking if anybody in Eric’s group knew anything about the nukes. They’d heard rumors, of course, but never anything concrete. Hamm took a deep breath and then filled them in.
“We don’t know what the story was outside of the US, but New York was the first place hit here in the States. The berserker incidents had long been out of hand. The nukes came after months and months of people being too afraid to leave their homes to do things like go to work, or to do just about anything in public, frankly. The economy was crumbling all over. Officially the US was under martial law by that point, but it didn’t matter because it seemed like everybody had a gun and was shooting first and asking questions later. The maintenance of the infrastructure that had been supporting modern life more or less eventually got so neglected that it just fell apart. Power grids, water treatment, communication satellites, law enforcement, public health—it all just crumbled.
“The military forces in a couple of the large cities, the ones who were enforcing martial law in the name of the government, stopped taking orders from the politicians in Washington. Then, in DC, a popular general by the name of Walter Thomas, who might have even been retired at the time, simply declared himself the leader of the United States and marched on Congress with like twenty thousand troops and just killed anybody that stood in his way. The president was in New York at the time of the coup, so General Thomas launched a nuclear strike on the Big Apple to take him out.
“Then all hell broke loose. The collective armed forces of the United States fractured into a bunch of dictator-led groups, all of whom claimed to represent the true United States government, and, following that bastard Thomas’s lead, started throwing nukes at each other. We know for sure Chicago was hit and we’re pretty sure Los Angeles was too. But by then real information was pretty hard to come by and what you could get your hands on couldn’t be verified anyway, so exactly what the state of the union is at the moment is anybody’s guess.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ace said.
“Oh yeah. And then somebody discovered the whole berserker blood thing, and blood pirates started popping up everywhere. And that’s pretty much where we’re at now,” Anoona said.
“What do you guys know about the berserker blood thing?” Mad Love asked quietly. “I know about Dr. McCay’s experiments in the fifties and the resurgence of his research a few decades ago at Stanford—or maybe it was Harvard—where they showed that giving old mice blood transfusions from young mice had these incredible rejuvenation effects. I’ve always thought there must be a connection between that and the effects berserker blood has on non-berserkers?”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Hamm said. “But I’m afraid none of us here can really tell you much more about how it works. Nobody here has tried—what do they call it? Blood swapping? Well, at least as far as I know.”
Eric’s eyes met Anoona’s and he finally asked the question that had been bothering him since they’d started talking. “Why did you take us in? What do you want from us?”
“Nothing,” Anoona said.
“Well, that’s not exactly true,” Hamm said.
Here it comes, Eric thought and braced himself.
“We have the capacity to support up to maybe forty adults here at the moment. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the weather is changing. Tiny has talked with some guys in Cedar Rapids who think we’re about to have a very long period of extreme cold. Not another ice age or anything, but they think it’s going to get pretty bad and stay that way. I mean, just look outside right now. It’s snowing and it’s July.
“We need more people to keep up with the maintenance and defense of this place, especially if the weather cuts into the yields of the solar fields and we get to the point we can’t support the work drones anymore.
“We’re actually planning on quietly recruiting some key people we’ve been tracking for a while. A couple of doctors, a vet, and a bunch of farmers and mercenaries. There is also a mechanic who has a little group of pretty skilled tinkerers holed up in a camp behind the old car wash by Walmart.”
“Fesler’s people,” Cooperman confirmed. “Yeah, we’ve done business with them. They’re solid.”
“Exactly.”
“So you were already going to recruit us to join you guys for this long winter you think is coming, when we just showed up on your doorstep?” Eric asked more than just a little incredulously.
“Um, well, to be honest, Eric,” Anoona said, “your father’s group was not really on our list. No offense.”
Funny thing about people saying “no offense,” Eric thought. It almost always comes after they’ve said something that could only be taken as one.
“Why not?” Ace asked.
“Well, we made our list with particular skill sets in mind. Doctors, people skilled with engines.”
“We’ve got skills,” JP said. “Does anybody in your group practice TM, Transcendental Meditation?”
“Oh for the love of God,” Eric groaned. “Shut up, JP! Now is not the time.”
“No. No, it’s okay. I get it,” Hamm said. “And to answer your question, no, JP, none of our group practices TM at the moment. But we are aware of it and its connection to the community here, or at least to the community that used to be here. However, the priority for us is survival at this point, not enlightenment.”
“You’d be better served reevaluating that one,” JP muttered under his breath, but everybody heard him.
“So we’re not on your list, but you still wanted us to come in,” Eric said.
“Not exactly,” Anoona said, dodging the question.
“Just tell them!” Sarah shouted from the stairwell.
“Your relationship with Beverly is a pretty serious risk factor for us and what we’ve got going here. Until you showed up and gave us no really acceptable alternative, we had no intention of bringing any of you in,” Hamm said.
Eric felt the blood drain from his face in embarrassment. How did Anoona and her people know that he and Beverly had slept together? Jesus, was there anywhere in Fairfield safe from their spying camera drones? He felt like he had to respond. Had to deny. Had to explain. Had to—
“Way to soften the blow there, jackass,” Sarah said, but Eric was too overwhelmed to hear her, or to see Anoona throw up
her hands with an awkward shrug that sent the message that, though she was frustrated by Hamm’s lack of tact and wished he’d said it better, everything he said was the truth.
“I don’t understand,” Eric blurted out before he could finish getting his panicked thoughts in order.
“Well, it just comes down to the fact that, frankly, nobody in our group at the moment is much of a cold-blooded killer. I mean, maybe in self-defense, but preemptively? That’s not who we want to be,” Hamm said.
“Oh my God! What the fuck is wrong with you?” Sarah said, her hand now on the AR-15, ready to yank it up and open fire on the newcomers if they went for their weapons—which if anybody ever listened to her they would have left upstairs.
Eric was still too totally stuck on the idea that Anoona knew he’d slept with Beverly that he missed the meaning behind what Hamm had just said.
“Lucky us?” Ace said in an attempt to break the tension and counting his blessings that Anoona’s group had opened their doors to them instead of cutting them down where they stood.
“Beverly’s gone, probably dead, so what relationship are you guys talking about?” Matt Knowles asked while he too counted his blessings to still be alive.
Eric opened his mouth to say something, anything to keep the truth of his betrayal locked away in the darkness, but Anoona got her words out before him.
“Is that really what you all think?”
Silence filled the room as her words sank in. It was Ace who finally broke it. “She’s not dead?” he asked.
“No, she’s definitely not. Nor is she gone. Do you guys really not know that she’s the Blood Queen of the pirates that took over the west side of Vedic City?”
Eric’s world, which was still spinning out of control at the thought Anoona knew he’d slept with Beverly, suddenly stood perfectly still. Everything he thought he knew about who his father was and what he was doing was suddenly launched into space at 1,038 mph, which was still not fast enough for him to avoid being swallowed up by the oceans of doubt that kept moving all round him, even after the ground under his feet halted to a stop.
Transcendence: Chronicles from the Long Apocalypse: Book One Page 21