The Silent Years [The Complete Collection]

by Jennifer R. Povey

  It was the first time she saw a Silent in the flesh, and the kids were beating their victim to death. A woman. She could see that much. Her face was blank, and she flailed against them, her strength great enough to throw one of them back, but she could not escape. Dorothy was not sure what scared her more - the face of the plague victim or the odd determination shown by those no older than her boys. The worst part was that the woman was not screaming, was not even making that much sound. Silenced. She reached for her gun, but knew they should not stop.

  Thomas took the decision out of her hands. He hit the accelerator hard. The car sped away, and she saw no more. Perhaps for the best that she didn’t see, but children who had learned to kill? Could they ever be civilized again? Where were their parents? They had all looked like siblings.

  Then she understood the true horror. The woman in the circle had looked like them. She might even have been their mother.

  Tears sparkled in her eyes. It had to happen, though. The mother would have killed all of them if she had the plague, when she hit the violent stage, when she lost her humanity. If. If something else had not been going on. Something like abuse, and the children finally striking back, knowing that the authorities would have other things to deal with.

  Society was breaking down like an old spavined horse. Everything was falling apart, spiraling away.

  She wished she was still worried about gas prices, or about something mundane, like her sons' grades. Everything like that was gone, drifted away on the wind.

  How far had the plague spread now? Into China's teeming millions? She feared that. There were far too many people in China. Would it then spread to India? Europe? Would some pockets of Africa where people had little outside contact avoid the spread of the plague? The half-contacted tribes in the Amazon?

  She felt a sudden hope. No matter what happened, some humans would survive, would breed, would rebuild. This plague could not win in the end. With that thought, she set aside the fear and focused on what was far closer to home — her own survival.

  They drove past the Mitchell place and saw their daughter watching the gate with a shotgun. Despite the gun, she lifted a hand and waved to them, a statement, perhaps: “I'm still human and so are you.”

  We're still here. For how many centuries had humans made that insistent statement? We're alive. We have names. Dorothy mentally clung to her name, something no one had imagined could ever be taken away, but it could be. It could be stolen from her. Ahead, a car weaved off the road, landing in a ditch. Thomas gunned the accelerator again. Common decency, including her own, had already disappeared: nobody stopped to help.

  Chapter Five

  The cows milled around as Dorothy tossed the grain into the trough. This was an easy task. The fact that she might have to eat one of them did not make it harder, but rather allowed her an odd kind of distance. They were just cows, just future meat and milk, not creatures in their own right. That was how farmers dealt with it - to treat them as a resource. The cows. The deer, if they dared hunt them. They could not eat the horses - those were transportation if there was no fuel, and more valuable because of that. They were in the next field, a pair of Belgian draft mares.

  The menfolk should find a stallion. They might need a stallion if... If the world had really ended, those mares and their foals would be incredibly valuable, worth more than any car could be.

  Dorothy watched the horses for a moment. It was amazing how her mind had adapted to the changing value of things. To the changing value of people. If this lasted forever, then sooner or later they would have to find wives for her sons and husbands for Jason's daughters. Marrying cousin to cousin was bad. They had to remember things like that, values important for the family and the future.

  She forced her mind back to more practical matters. They needed a bull, too. A cold thought entered into her mind: they might have to take things from those who had no more need of them. If an entire family was dead, then it was not stealing. For that matter, if they died she would rather somebody took the livestock than leave it to fend for itself. She justified herself with such thoughts, and then pushed her mind onward to think about other supplies.

  They had all the canned food and preserves they could store. Jason had started stocking up when the first rumor came out of Washington State. That made him a paranoid survivalist, but she was not about to complain. It gave them a better chance if they had to settle in for an extended...siege was the only word she could think of that fit. A word that certainly fit her mood. The edge of their land had become a metaphorical wall, not to be crossed in either direction. Would it be enough against an airborne virus? Probably not, but it gave them a small chance.

  Dorothy heard a vehicle approach and tensed, her hand moving to her weapon. She lowered it again as she saw Laura and Leroy.

  They had actually come. She had honestly not been sure they would. Seeing Leroy's dark form, an odd mental shift came through her. He was big - she'd forgotten how big. He'd be able to do stuff the women simply could not and work with Jason on projects that needed strength. They needed him badly. Dorothy realized that thought was more ruthlessness in action, ruthlessness winning over principles, over the way one was supposed to think and do things. She didn't see Leroy as a black man in that moment, but as family and help.

  Or maybe thinking about how to manage without such niceties as electricity and running water had awakened something older in her, something of pre-civilized man where each member of the tribe had to pull his or her weight.

  Leroy could pull a lot of weight. Despite that, she was not about to hug him, merely going over to greet them at a slight distance. "You came. Thank goodness."

  "There was a riot in Chapel Hill. That was the last straw."

  Riots were supposed to happen in New York or Los Angeles, not Chapel Hill. "Victims?"

  "Panicking students holed up in a supermarket, actually. Kind of sit-in hoarding, I suppose."

  Dorothy shuddered. "I don't blame people for hoarding. What choice do we really have?"

  "What choice do the cops have? There isn't enough food to go around." There was a bitter note in Laura's voice. "Too many people, and now we're paying the price."

  Laura had expressed that before. "Don't preach to me," Dorothy retorted. "I haven't had six children."

  "I know, but you know what I mean. We should keep the population down after this. Keep it to what the land can actually support."

  Dorothy considered that. "The way things are going, that might not be an issue. We may need to have six children. Or you, anyway, you're younger."

  She did wish Laura hadn't put it off. It was better to have one's children young.

  "Working on it," her sister interrupted, one hand dropping to her belly.

  "Oh." Was this good timing or bad? Bad, she decided. She would not want to be pregnant right now. She would...

  ...run out of contraceptives if this lasted more than a month. That was a bridge to cross later. There was nothing she could do about that particular problem. She would just have to try and survive and hope, or kick Thomas out of her bed. He'd probably understand.

  Still, if this became permanent, then women would go back to having baby after baby. She was glad she had no daughters who would have to live that life. Children were good, but being worn out until you died? That was why civilization was a good thing; it gave one that bit of freedom and control. A woman should be able to have control over her body, and how many children she had. Contraception was not evil, and it was something women would miss now it was no longer available.

  For now, Dorothy clung to her beliefs about such things. She was not sure how drastic the population drop already was. Unlike Laura, she did not think it a good thing. She had at least a basic grasp of the fact that the human species might be in danger. Yet, not enough of one to change her attitudes towards childbearing.

  Laura regarded her for a moment. "Penny for your thoughts?"

  "They aren't worth so much," she said, quite since
rely. "Just trying to work things out."

  "We have a better chance of making it than most. We have food, a certain amount of isolation."

  Leroy had gone into the house, carrying some luggage. Both women glanced after him. "Good men," Laura added.

  For once, Dorothy did not argue with her. Everything else aside, she could not argue that Leroy had ever treated Laura badly. "Livestock, but we need breeding males." Did she mean livestock or men? She meant livestock, but everything crossed for a moment. Control over how many children, but what if they needed all the children they could get?

  Dorothy did not say that she was willing to steal said breeding males if necessary. She was not sure if Laura would go moral on her.

  "Do you really think we'll be here that long?"

  "I think we have to plan for the long haul. We have to plan as if civilization is gone and we have to survive with what we have here." They had a fair amount, but not enough.

  Laura let out a sigh. "A lot of people are going to die."

  "In some ways isn’t that a good thing?"

  "Not for the people. I never supported population reduction by death, I just said people should breed less." It wasn't a bad philosophy. Laura sighed. "Two. Replacement. One of each would have been better."

  Dorothy nodded. She did understand how her sister thought, and she had been happy enough with two herself.

  "I was just going to have the one. I suppose now, I might..." Laura glanced down at her belly, "have no choice."

  "Let's hope you only have one in there," Dorothy couldn't help but tease.

  "Get behind me!" Laura exclaimed with mock horror. "I am not lugging two around at once!"

  "I was very relieved to find both of mine were solitaire, I have to admit." Dorothy glanced at the house. "Then again, I talked to one woman who had twins and said it was great to only have to go through each phase once. Especially the diaper phase."

  "I guess I can see that, if you're planning on two anyway. Listen to us, talking as if the world was not collapsing around our ears."

  "Maybe we need to actually be sisters. We haven't in so long. And a bit of normality is how you stay sane. Let's go find some food." Dorothy indicated the front door.

  Laura just smiled and stepped into the house. Perhaps it was a knowing smile, as if she knew she had won.

  Dorothy did not care.

  -#-

  The television was on when Dorothy finally came out of the kitchen. Not cable, but network, the broadcast weak and uncertain, showing only death and destruction. At first, she could not identify the location, only that it was some city, somewhere. There were no living people except the cameraman and the reporter. The reporter was wearing a biowarfare suit.

  "We have established that there is a ten percent immunity rate, but it seems that most of the population of Wilmington has fallen to either the plague, its victims, or the resulting chaos."

  Translation: people were unable to get food or medication. Dorothy thought of turning the news off, but found herself unable to take her eyes off the screen.

  "In Raleigh, people have barricaded themselves into an apartment block. We no longer know what is going on inside."

  She shivered a bit. No. Don't lock yourself in, not when the person next to you might become violent. People didn’t turn that quickly, right? If it came here, who would be first?

  She made a decision. If she found herself unable to speak and be understood, she would walk away from the house and shoot herself. She should still have enough reason to do that, and it might save the others.

  Could she shoot somebody else, though? She realized she could not be sure until she had to. Shoot an animal, yes, she'd been there, done that. There were tons of deer. They would never run out of meat, not here. They probably wouldn't even have to learn to like possum and squirrel.

  They would not starve. But another thought hit her.

  The baby.

  Laura would have to give birth with no medical assistance, not even a midwife. Even if they found a cure for the plague, society was wrecked. Technology required infrastructure, and the infrastructure was gone. And while, yes, women had managed childbirth for centuries, a woman needed a midwife.

  Janine fainted at the sight of blood. Dorothy would have to do it with no training, nothing except a mother's instinct on the matter. She wondered if those instincts were really what weak men called witchcraft.

  Men, of course, did not understand women's things. They weren't meant to, and she wondered how much of humanity’s problems were due to men meddling in childbirth. Men were supposed to support and teach the children, but women were the ones who did the lion's share of the real work. It was called labor for a reason. She would have to do her research...and she made her way to the side of the room. They'd grabbed their computer and hooked it up to the net here.

  She could not get online. She stared at the screen, at the web browser that could not find any site. Somebody had shut it off. Or perhaps it was a local failure.

  She remembered the pictures of that dead town. It had weathered how many hurricanes only to be destroyed by this plague. But that was not their town. Was the entire infrastructure starting to fail? This was the end, she thought. Or a new beginning...but for her, the end. The children would survive and carry on. They had to.

  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. What was that from? She could not remember - some poem maybe. Everything humanity had built could fall back into ruin. She wondered if those who had said the Earth would be better off without humans thought so now. If any of them were still capable of thinking at all. She was capable of thought and reason and, for a moment, as she turned the computer off, she felt an inexplicable gratitude. She was alive, her family was safe, her children healthy. How long would it last?

  The sound of a shot gave her an answer, an answer she truly wished had been wrong.

  -#-

  Jason had shot a man standing at the front gate. Had he been in time? She did not know. None of them wanted to handle the body, not even with gloves.

  For a long moment, it lay there. It, not he. The face showed no fear, no recognition of death. It was oddly slack, as if even in life it had possessed no animation. The body was dressed in rags. Had Dorothy been Catholic, she would have crossed herself. Lacking a natural cultural gesture to make, she only lifted her hand to her mouth.

  Eventually the men threw ropes around the body and dragged it away. Jason grabbed a can of gasoline, his intent clear. Burn it before it infected them. Were they already too late? Airborne, she remembered, and a sense of chill grabbed her.

  They were all exposed to the plague now. Jason's quick response might have saved them, but it also might not have. And there was nothing she could do to change things for better or worse. The lack of control was an almost physical pain within her.

  She wanted to weep. Instead, she forced her face into a neutral expression and went back inside.

  Laura was working on dinner, and glanced towards her with fear in her eyes. "Did he..."

  "Yes. I just hope it's enough."

  "That's all we have right now. Hope."

  She had a point. "Yeah, but..." Dorothy tailed off. "Not sure I have that much of it right now. I think I watched too much of the news."

  "Can't get that any more. I tried. Nothing but snow on the over the air channels." The cable had already gone. "At least we..."

  "Don't say it." Laura glanced up at the lights.

  "You work on dinner," Dorothy said suddenly. "I have something else I need to do."

  She had not thought of this. No power meant no heat... Well, that they could manage with blankets and stuff. They would be fine in the summer with solar power, but winter was coming. They might not have enough power for the electric stove. So, they had to set up another way to cook, just in case. Or just in case the system failed and they couldn't repair it. She found Janine in the living room.

  "Janine. Don't you have that big camp stove in the garage?"

  "Yea
h."

  "We need to set up some kind of kitchen outside the house, and jury rig it so it'll run on wood."

  "Gonna need the guys to help move the thing."

  Dorothy glanced at the rather petite woman. "Maybe. We might be able to shift it between the two of us. If not, then the guys can certainly help. And we're going to need a tarp."

  "There's one in the garage."

  They'd have to rig the tarp fairly high. "I'm not having a wood stove in a wood house," Dorothy muttered.

  "What about heating?"

  "I'll talk to Jason." She was finding herself pushed into this leadership role, mostly because Janine was simply not up to it. Janine was the kind of woman who was solely her husband's other half; she had no life of her own. Jason liked it that way.

  Dorothy realized that they were going to need more help to get the tarp up. She saw Leroy and signaled him over. "Hey. We need a tall guy here."

  "What are you doing?"

  "Setting up an external kitchen. We're not going to have electricity from the grid forever, and the solar might not be enough." Dorothy realized she had fully accepted that things would not go back to the way they had been. She would never again drive into Raleigh to see the Christmas lights.

  Leroy breathed in, then out. "This is not going to be permanent," he said with the air of a man determined to keep it from being so.

  "We can't know that."

  Leroy stretched, then started to lift the tarp over the rope, a task well suited to his height. "Surely there's contingency plans for this kind of thing."

  Dorothy noticed that Janine had slipped back inside, leaving her and Leroy to talk. It was an uncomfortable moment; she had never allowed her sister's husband to have any closeness with her before now.

  "Depends on how many of the people in charge of those plans got sick, and whether any of them were infected when they went into their bunkers." She was not stupid, the government would be in a bunker somewhere waiting this out. But if even one person in those bunkers had had the disease...