by P. S. Power
“They should understand enough about what it takes for a unit to function not to leave you hanging like they have been. They wouldn't do it with one of their own.”
They bound the wound together, tight but not so much he wouldn't be able to walk on it, then since the rest of them were telling Nate and a gathering of people what had happened on their way back, he signaled Burt to come over to look at the stuff. Then it started to rain again. That would make washing interesting at least.
Justine ran over too, happily looking at all the new tools and bricks. The large boned girl, tall and sturdy seemed pretty pleased, pointing at the new materials she spoke.
“So, a hot water heater and some covered buildings for it. What else do we need?”
A tiny voice, Sammi, came from behind him.
“A way to make bullets or weapons that will work that don't need them. Cradles for the babies, more warm clothes if we can get it and more meat. We have a lot, but it will go faster than we think in the cold months ahead. People will need to eat a lot more. Plus, we can cut down on potential problems by simply being able to take in some of the people that might come. If they reach us, people will be desperate, and an offer of food and warmth for the winter will probably get people on our side fast.”
The others kind of stared at her, but Jake nodded.
“Carl has a hunt going on, and I won't be walking into town again for a few weeks. We can send Vickie and some others for cradles maybe? Or Tipper. She'd be better in fact, because I'd rather not be around her right now. That's just me though. I don't know what to do about the bullets, check out gun smiths? Westwood didn't have one. Too small.”
Burt shook his head and muttered, “Clyde did though, on route nine? About forty miles from here and in an area we haven't cleared at all. Can that truck make it there and back on the fuel it has?”
Jake didn't know, it had over half a tank, but how far that would take them was just a guess. They could try it though, and load a cart for the gear if they had to walk.
“But I can't do it if I'm hoofing it for a while. Maybe someone else will? I guess I should work on the water heater and the forge stuff?”
For now at least. He limped to the wooden cart he'd made and started unloading fabric with Rita, who kept staring at him as he limped along. Jake didn't get it. Was she mad about something? Maybe his use of her good fabric? It was an emergency though, so hopefully the woman would understand. She didn't look too angry at least and finally wondered off with an armload of stuff and came back with Carley in tow.
“Jake! What the hell? Go sit down, hey, people get out here and unload these carts!” She had to go get people, real yelling not being an option, but she sounded happy enough about it, enthusiastic to see all the new supplies. Especially real wood that didn't have to be used as raw logs. She nearly freaked out over that.
“So cool. What's the plan?” She said, watching Jake as he stood.
Jake shrugged and gave her a soft look that came with a smile.
“You tell me. If the wood collection is going well for now, we can start on the bath houses. Pick who you want to work on it and we'll all make it happen. I'm on the water heaters myself, so we need to work together to make sure it all lines up.” She could manage it after all. Carley was actually pretty competent once she forgot that in her world women weren't supposed to be in charge... Even if they actually were. For a second she looked like she'd have a problem with the idea, but then she nodded.
“Right. I see what you did there. We'll start tomorrow. I'll get with Justine, she's good at building things. Who knew, right? Makes me glad you didn't kill her and everything.” She smiled and started unloading the cart, waving Jake away.
“Go and sit somewhere. Read a book maybe? It'll be good for you. All you do is work anymore.” She said it as if it were a bad thing.
Jake stuck his tongue out at her and gave a nearly silent laugh.
“Fine, I'll do that, but when everyone complains about how lazy I am it's on you. Just know that in advance.”
“Deal, if they complain to you just send them out here and I'll let them take over your jobs for a few days. That should stop any noise like that.”
Going inside took longer than it should have, his leg stiffening up now that it had a chance to. It made him limp worse, which he hid, if for no particular reason. No one watched him or anything, not that he noticed so it wasn't that he didn't want them to see him in a weakened state, to prevent attack. He stopped and went to the wash area and scrubbed himself, which made his leg even stiffer, from the cold, got dressed in clean, if very worn, clothing. If he was going to touch books, he wanted not to ruin them. Plus, it was like a ritual for him to wash as soon as he could after he killed anything.
The fiction section had a lot more books, since he'd added some from various houses, just grabbing what he could find. A few non-fiction were in there too, but only one of them seemed to be about firearms. It had pictures of very nice and decorative weapons on the front, but turned out to be about air-rifles instead. He nearly put it down until a random passage caught his eye.
It was possible to make fifty caliber air rifles. They could be charged by hand and even have multiple shots. The designs were in the book, it looked... complicated and tricky, but currently they didn't have anything with that kind of stopping power. It would punch a hole in a car door for instance. Through a car door it actually said when he re-read it carefully. Could they make that? The hard part looked to be the air cylinder, which had to be made very precisely, but the rest of it could be done with available materials. Once he had the forge working at least. He liked the basic idea, if he could figure out how to make it so it would fire faster...
It was hard to come by bullets, but with something like that they might get by.
He sat for hours reading the book, trying to figure out what was needed, then going over the texts they had on blacksmithing too. That really would have to come first, but it would be useful to have a weapon like that if it could be managed. He'd try it if he ever got a chance. Maybe. His leg throbbed through dinner, a meal that made the room look empty with the ten person hunting team still gone. They planned to be gone four days, preserving things as they went somehow. Jake needed to learn that, whatever it was they were doing. It could come in handy.
After dinner he helped dry dishes with the kids in the kitchen, Yvonne still helped as well. The slightly older woman looked happier now, more than he'd ever seen and told him that she was just feeling good for some reason. Better, like kicking a bug or something.
Or an addiction to Holsom? Sammi got what he was thinking and nodded gently.
“A lot of the women are feeling better suddenly. It's a good sign I think. People are settling in.”
Once they finished it was bed time, even though it couldn't have been more than six-thirty or so at night. No one was really sleepy yet, except him, because being wounded did that. As he lay in bed trying to sleep, he heard them.
A lot of them.
Almost all of them.
Jerks.
People making love in the dark, soft moans and groans of pleasure mixing with the gentle sound of body hitting body. He heard this off and on for hours. Finally, feeling very alone, he tried to fall asleep anyway. It was too much, and just for a minute, one that stretched for about an hour and a half, Jake kind of wanted to die.
Zombies hadn't pushed him to that, or super-zombies, not corrupt police or near starvation. But this... He shook his head slowly, tears that hadn't fallen for so many other things creeping down the side of his face. Tears he'd never cried for Rachel, or his parents came out now. Silently, but it made him feel weak. Unloved. Unworthy of love from anyone. The loneliness was sharp too, aching in his gut. Finally he tried to force himself out of it.
Life wasn't fair, but it still wouldn't be fair in the morning, so he might as well get some rest.
He woke up in the dark to the sound of soft snores and heavy breathing, signs of sleep, with something rubbing on the wo
unds of his leg. In the moonlight from the window he saw green shining eyes. Sammi. She shushed him and crawled up his body putting her lips nearly in his ear.
“I'm using a cloth, so just relax. I know the licking freaked you out, though it really does work better, releases more healing factors. Let me get the bandage back on...” Which she did quickly, working his jeans enough that anyone watching would have thought some very bad things were going on. Then she touched his neck and he suddenly dropped to sleep, wondering if it had really happened at all.
In the morning Jake ate breakfast then set to work on making the huge water heater. It wouldn't make itself and the charcoal was still warming the ground, so it hadn't gone out yet. For once, without asking, everyone else, almost everyone, came out and worked too. The ground was cold now, not frozen. Winter would be upon them all soon, and even the lazy people were starting to feel a bit of panic set in.
They had less than six weeks before they could expect snow and that was just on average, it could come even sooner, as little as a month. Jake thought about it for a second, remembered the stove for the greenhouse too and worked faster.
There really always was more to do.
Chapter Ten
The hunters didn't come back on day four. Or day five. For a while Jake wondered if they were coming back at all. There was just so much that could stop that now, zombies, other groups or even fighting amongst themselves. Just because he'd come back, that didn't mean no one had a grudge or two saved up. Everyone started getting a little tense, worried about it. Waiting and wondering.
Well, not Jake, but the others. The hunters were mainly men and a lot of the women had selected partners once given the idea, not just the pregnant ones. They had more women than men too, so eight guys being gone all at once made a big mental difference around the place.
They came back on the eighth day, loaded down with meat that had been smoked and cut into large roasts, hunches and chunks. They carried all this on two man litters and had four of them full. The smoking had taken longer than Carl had thought, since they had to build the little smoke house too. The hunters used part of the wood from the barn at the place Jake had started working on for that, just pulling the boards off the side.
They had actually taken a lot of animals, but lowered the carrying weight by getting rid of most of the bones. A good enough idea, but Jake still lamented the loss of the barn. He'd have to go and fix it if he ever got a chance before it let too much rain and snow in and fell apart. Not that he had animals to go in it, but it had been his. Kind of. Was still his.
It was set up for him to live there.
Everyone seemed very glad to have the team back, which he got. It was a fifth of their people now, nearly, and Carl along with Barry and Spence from Vickie's team were a good part of the cleaners. If they lost them it would make a difference. For one thing Jake would have to stand extra night watch duties.
They had real, honest and official bath houses now, with an insulated outdoor hot water heater. It held five hundred gallons of water at a time and was high enough to fill up tubs inside each house. They had two in each but several sinks too, so people could wash up that way if they didn't want to wait. The floors had crude drain pipes that carried the water away, but they'd freeze if they weren't deep, which meant that someone had to dig the three foot deep trenches to the underground wash out plain that Burt designated. It was about fifty feet of pipe, which they had, but meant a lot of work if they wanted to take a bath anytime soon. They cleared the charcoal first, finally, and then Jake started digging while the pregnant women chipped large pieces of burnt wood into smaller bits. By taking turns digging and being careful they got the pipe in the ground at an angle, so that the water would always be flowing downhill and set up broken rock shards in a large pit so it would always soak in.
The days flowed into one and other for about a week, Jake got up, worked before breakfast, ate, tried to learn to use the forge to make basic tools, hammers, tongs and chisels first, then in the afternoon he worked at sawing wood rounds from logs. It was hard and he failed at making tools every other day at first. By the end of the week the most complex thing he'd made was a metal tong that could be used to take things out of the fire better than the much abused oversized pliers he'd been using.
The next week, his leg still healing up, but feeling a lot better already, probably thanks to Sammi and her magic saliva, as gross as the idea was, Jake made a saw. A real one, with hammered and folded high carbon steel. Not too much, just enough to strengthen the metal, it still had to be springy and flex under pressure or it would just snap. It took three days and then he had to learn how to sharpen it using files and stones, but it gave them a second two person cutting saw for rounds. When Justine saw it she smiled at him and pointed at the windmill she had ready and waiting.
“Power conversion gears next please.” Her eyes actually lit up at the idea, so Jake decided to give it a try. Plus she sounded cute when she said it, like gears were a special treat, just for her.
Those were actually a lot harder than a mere saw and took a week each, since he had to make them fit each other just right and the metal was a lot thicker. Nearly two inches in places. They didn't work the first time either, and it took another week to fix. In the end they had an electric generator though, which meant they could run a couple of lights and charge some batteries most of the time.
As long as the wind blew.
People felt cheated by it, if only a little. Jake wondered if they thought that having a generator meant they'd be able to live like they used to? Hot water inside, light on demand and toasty electric heat? If they did, they were fools. The old world, Jake had come to understand, was gone.
If things were better here than anywhere else that didn't start out prepared, then even if they got things back eventually, it really wouldn't be the world they started with. Too many dead, too much trauma and fear for too long.
He felt caught up for a minute though, nearly at least, two saws worked in the yard and six people split wood constantly, as fast as the rounds came off. Faster really. Splitting was the easier task until they got to the green wood. Then it slowed way down and they had to use the hammers and awls to break the things apart. The sawing went as fast though, possibly faster than before, since Jake could actually sharpen the blades now and did that every other day or so. Samuel was learning to do it too, so they could take turns.
That meant that it was time for another road trip, he decided, before it got too hard to drive. There was solid frost on the ground each morning now, and in a few weeks it would freeze hard for sure. He went to Nate after diner and just shrugged.
“Going into town?” The man asked lightly, obviously getting what some of Jake's looks meant by now. Or reading his mind. Either way worked for him.
“I want to go into Clyde. There was a gun-smith there and the place is tiny, barely a town, we haven't cleared it, but if the shop hasn't been burnt or stripped, well, we might get something useful. I want to take the police van and the small wooden cart. I checked, the one Burt made will fit in the back.”
The other man had a nice beard now, salt and pepper and fuller than Jake could manage, he thought. The look that came from his eyes, brown, to match the hair of his youth, was considering. They all knew they needed bullets and that meant making them or finding a stash. Possibly both. They also knew that odds were good that the gun-smith in Clyde had been about the fourth thing the police of Westwood had raided. The same rationale applied for them after all and Clyde was only about twenty-five miles past their compound with very little but farm land between one point and the other.
They were getting desperate though, mainly because of Heather and her annoying habit of being right. Especially her dreams. It was pretty freaking annoying as far as Jake was concerned.
She'd saved Justine just two days before from a structural collapse by going out with Randy and setting up a single pole in the middle of the new wood working shop that was going up. When the
half constructed roof fell in, the off-center and slender pole held it up until the large boned woman had managed to crawl out. When asked why she hadn't just told people of danger the girl had shrugged and told them that hadn't worked. Not that she dreamed it wouldn't work, but that it hadn't. It was just weird.
The thing with her being right all the time was that she kept waking up screaming about the cannibals. Coming out of the snow. That meant they needed ammo. A wall, she assured them, would do nothing. Again all she said there was that it hadn't worked. Then on top of all these deep insights and foreknowledge she'd turn around and pester Jake about why they couldn't still be friends and berate him for being selfish and cruel.
Because obviously it was all his fault.
Certainly, that made total sense. What with the way he... Nope, no sense at all.
Just to spice things up Tipper and Carley had both decided he was being too standoffish and mean as well and told him so without preamble one day about a week before, hitting him from two sides at once. He hadn't said anything, choosing to take the high road and just leave the room. If they were too stupid to get it by now, or too selfish, they probably never would.