“So far beyond that no one has ever seen them,” she retorted. “Come on. Let’s go get our new guests.” She shook her head at herself.
“Stop it,” Neil said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop calling yourself a fool for bringing someone else back to the farm. We both knew we wouldn’t be leaving anyone here if they needed a place to go. Or food. And no one at the farm has room to complain about it, since they’re alive because we did the same for them.”
It meant another thirty minutes to pack everything they could fit into the trailer, but then they were finally on their way back. It wasn’t until they climbed into the truck for the last time that Mac began to relax. She hadn’t even realized how tense she’d been until that moment, but she sighed in deep contentment when she plunked her ass down in the middle of the front bench.
Once they were on Aspdin Road and up to speed, Neil put his arm around her as he drove with his left hand. It reminded her a bit of her youth, and being snuggled up against whatever boyfriend she had at the time. Not that there had been many. Once she’d gotten married and then pregnant at sixteen, those sorts of boyfriends hadn’t been a priority. The dating scene changed dramatically for her once she’d had Cameron, too.
Neil stopped the truck when they reached the concealed entrance to the farm, and got out to press his thumb to the biometric scanner plate that was hidden in a hollow at the back of a tree. Lisa gasped beside Mac when the gate swung open.
“Holy crap! It’s like being in a spy movie,” she said wonderingly.
“A little bit, yeah. My daughter and I made sure this place was hidden. We were expecting things to go south.”
“What do you mean? Why didn’t you warn people?” Lisa sounded shocked to the core, as only a young person can.
“I did, actually. I warned people constantly. It’s just human nature to ignore things that require action. I was told by a guy I used to work for, who was a former Ontario Hydro executive, that the power outages would get worse, and that eventually the grid would come down. My friends called me paranoid for wanting to set up a place that was off the grid, but I didn’t care. I knew it needed to be done if my daughter and I were going to survive. When the shit hit the fan, a few people needed a place to go, so they sort of straggled in after-the-fact. And then there were the animals.”
“Animals? What animals?”
“She means the fifty ferrets, dozens of goats, and even more dozens of chickens,” Neil said with a bit of a laugh. “And a Doberman, along with some cats and other dogs that she rescued while I was recovering from being shot.” At the last bit he glared at Mac. That had been a bit of a sore point between them for a while.
“You don’t need to bombard her with everything just yet, thank you very much,” Mac said crisply.
“Ferrets? You have ferrets here? Wait a minute. Did he just say fifty ferrets? He was kidding, right?” Lisa sounded like she was choking.
“Fifty-two if you count the two I already had, though they don’t mix with the ones from the shelters.” Mackenzie waited to see if Lisa would call them rodents, but she just seemed really excited.
“I always wanted a ferret, but they didn’t have any around here. When I went to Nipissing University up in North Bay I couldn’t have pets, and then I got pregnant with Jake. My life was a bit too complicated at the time to have pets. I already had my BA, but I was still trying to get my teaching certificate. I was taking some of the courses through their distance learning program, and was just about to start my practical when the world sort of went to hell. Oh wow,” she finished, when she saw the open area before her.
Gilles stepped up to the truck when Neil rolled to a stop at the house. Mac’s heart started pounding.
“Oh, God. Something’s wrong. Let me out!”
It couldn’t have been more than five seconds before Mac was standing in front of Gilles, but it felt like a millennium.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nobody’s dead or hurt, Mac. Relax. But we’ve got a situation to deal with,” Gilles said. He shoved his hands in his pockets, as though unsure how much to tell her.
“Gilles, spit it out. What the fuck is going on?”
“Well, you’re probably going to want to have a chat with your kid, because she could have gotten herself into some serious trouble. She’s fine, but she went off on her own to check it out when a sensor lit up. She played it pretty smart after she ran into the person who tripped the sensor, but she also got lucky. The worst part of it is, she ran into Brian Newman. Gerry’s father.” Gilles left it at that, giving her a few minutes to sift through the situation in her mind. As it was, Mackenzie was reeling.
“Honey, we need to get Lisa and Jake settled a bit, so let’s go into the house to finish this conversation. For that matter, we can all get something to eat while Gilles fills us in on the details.”
Mackenzie nodded abruptly. Instinctively she wanted all the answers right that second, but she knew Neil was right. If Cameron was okay, she didn’t need to go crazy. At least not yet.
“Maybe we should ask Cameron to join us in the kitchen,” Mac said, as they walked into the house.
“You’ll have to radio over to the cabin then. Billy came back from his archery practice saying she was there. Guess she wanted to hang out with her friends,” Gilles said, raising one shoulder in a half-shrug.
“Is she upset then?”
“Not that I could tell, but I don’t really know her that well. She hasn’t been particularly social with any of us since we got here, and she was a baby when we knew her before.”
“She’s had a lot to deal with in the last few months. You know that,” Mac said, her tone defensive.
“Oh, I know. I wasn’t complaining. Just seems weird to me when I think of what you were like at that age. How we all were for that matter. We talked about anything and everything. I remember losing my cousin, getting shit-faced, and bawling on your shoulder one night. Then you did the same with me when you found out one of your old boyfriends died.”
“Yeah, but you’re not her tribe of friends, either. She’s got Kirk and Leigh, and if she’s gone over there she could very well be there to unload. I think you’re right that she’s been holding a lot in over the last few months, but killing someone isn’t something her close friends are really going to understand. She didn’t know I would understand better than anyone.” When she stopped speaking, Gilles gave her a strange look.
“What do you mean?”
“I never told you, I know. It wasn’t until I told Cam that I realized how long I’d been holding it in, and how many people I loved that didn’t know that one big thing about me. I was the one who killed her father. The police knew. It was self-defense. I think,” she finished lamely.
Mackenzie realized then that they’d arrived in the kitchen, and Lisa was staring at her, wide-eyed. She grimaced.
“Relax. I don’t make a habit of it. He’s the only person I’ve ever killed, and it wasn’t done with conscious intent,” she said acerbically.
“Uh, Mac, what do you mean you ‘think’ it was self-defense?” Gilles was giving her the same look Lisa was.
“I mean, he was threatening me with the knife, but I managed to grab it from him. He lunged at me, and the knife was already pointing toward him. I’m just not sure if I had time to move the knife away, and if I did, whether or not I would have. He was there, threatening to kill me over a lousy thousand bucks, and when I begged him not to leave my daughter without a mother, he got this look on his face like he was going to head off to her bedroom first. That’s when he stopped paying attention to the knife he was holding, and I grabbed it to keep him from doing whatever it was he was thinking of doing to Cam.”
“I would have done the same,” Lisa said, touching her arm gently. “Jake’s birth father wasn’t violent like that, but even thinking about someone being a threat to him fills me with fear. I’ve basically felt like that ever since my mother died. Occasionally I
would hear people outside on the street, and the first thing I would do was grab the big knife out of the block on the kitchen counter.”
Gilles’ expression was one of understanding, as well, now that she’d explained things a little bit better. Mac could see he was curious about their new arrival, too.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Gilles. This is Lisa, and the little one is Jake, though I guess you’ve surmised that already. We found them in town. I went to school with her mother, Michelle. But there’s something a little more urgent we need to discuss regarding survivors.”
While Mac was explaining what had happened in town, Neil pulled out the makings for soup and sandwiches. It might not be a full supper, but they were both too tired to do anything major for dinner. Added to that, Lisa wasn’t used to eating full meals anymore, so simple would be better.
“Is Jake eating any solid foods yet? You said you were still breastfeeding him, but I thought maybe you might have been giving him some of your mother’s preserves,” Neil explained.
“Not very much, though it hasn’t been easy. I know he needs more sustenance than he can get from my milk, but there was so little food I was trying to spread it out for both of us. I’d like to start him on solids, but I don’t know what I can give him now.”
By the time Mac had finished telling Gilles about the cannibals, and he’d gotten over his disgust a little bit, Neil had already boiled up some peas and carrots and was just dumping them into the blender.
“Why don’t I feed him the vegetables while you eat? You’re still really hungry, I’m sure,” Neil said.
“I don’t know if he’ll take food from a stranger. Then again, he hasn’t really seen any strangers until now, so maybe he’ll be fine.”
When Neil smiled at Jake, and held out his hands to see if he would reach for him, Mac felt her heart constrict. The kid looked nothing like Neil, but Mac couldn’t help wishing in that moment, that it was possible for her to have more children. Neil would have been the father she’d always wanted for her kids.
“Mac!” The sharp quality of Gilles’ voice indicated that she had missed something he’d said.
“Sorry. What?”
“I asked if Huntsville was the only place you saw people like that.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, they were the only ones that we know of, but then they’re also the only people we interacted with, aside from Lisa. Everyone else just stared as we drove by, so we have no way of knowing how they’ve been surviving. Of course, they were in remote areas, so they could easily have their own gardens and such. Most people did out here, even when there were grocery stores.”
“True,” Gilles responded thoughtfully.
“Gilles, would you mind helping me move the exercise equipment out of that room over there once I’m done feeding Jake here?” Neil nodded his head to indicate which room he meant, and Gilles said he would.
They hadn’t really discussed where they would be putting Lisa and Jake, but for now it was the only thing that made sense. There was a toilet and shower directly off the room, though none of it was really finished yet. Just the floor was down because she’d gone with radiant, in-floor heating when she’d been planning the building.
The other closed-off rooms in the house were already occupied, and there were no spare cabin-like buildings they could move into, though Mac made a mental note to start planning one. She had no problem with sharing land and supplies with people. Not even strangers. But when it came to her privacy she was very leery of sharing her own house for long stretches of time.
It was a good thing it was already the end of February. The lack of snow was also a blessing. They could get started on another building right away. Of course, they had to get the new panels set up, too, so their power reserves weren’t hitting close to empty by the time the sun came up every day. They already had six cabins built for the people who had come along after the power went down, so those eight panels would be a big help. She had originally bought more than enough to supply power to the main building, and the building that was being used to house the ferrets, but circumstances had changed with all the extra people.
“How did you get this place started?” Lisa was looking at Mac, waiting for her answer and spooning up more soup in the meantime. Mac had just taken her first bite of the sandwich Neil had shoved in front of her right before he started feeding Jake, so she tried to swallow it in a hurry. Instead it stuck in her throat.
“Hang on,” she choked out, and ran around the counter to get herself some goat’s milk. Once she’d managed to finish swallowing, she offered some to Lisa who looked like she wasn’t so sure about drinking it. When she did finally try it, the surprise on her face made Mac laugh.
“I know. I was expecting it to be really weird-tasting myself the first time I had it, but in a way I was looking forward to it. It’s lower in lactose than cow’s milk, and I’m lactose-intolerant. I love milk, though, and everything it goes into, so having the goats has been great.
“To answer your question, I’ve been planning this place for about twenty years. My daughter and I bought the land a couple of years ago, finally, and it wasn’t long after that we bought the steel buildings. I waited until they had something appropriate in their clearance section on the website, and then bought what we needed at a huge discount. I had a rough idea of the dimensions I wanted, and what framing style I needed. So, someone ordered this building first, and for one reason or another cancelled the order. I probably only paid about fifty or sixty percent of what it would have cost to order my own building.”
“Yeah, but where did you get the money for it? This couldn’t have been cheap,” Lisa said skeptically.
“It was around a hundred and fifty grand, even with all the solar panels and whatnot, which is way less than most people pay for a house and land. When you don’t have to pay for labour, you can do a hell of a lot more with your money. And I was lucky enough to be making a very good living. I did start-up consulting, among other things, and we lived in a really crappy area of Hamilton while we waited to do this. That allowed us to pay cash for everything, instead of making mortgage payments. Though I suppose now that it would have been fine to take on a mortgage. It’s not like the banks exist anymore to demand payment.
“We had just managed to put in our first garden when I saw things were getting really bad. We weren’t exactly ready, and we had to scramble around to get the goats and chickens we needed. We’ve been breeding the chickens as fast as possible, too, so we can switch the ferrets over from kibble to eggs. I had a lot of kibble already, since I’d always planned to go get the ferrets from the various shelters, but I know it’ll only last so long.
“We have to keep everything balanced, too, and calculate what we really need to feed everyone who lives here, and still supply the livestock. No point in having too many eggs, and then having to feed a bunch of unnecessary chickens. I chose chicken eggs and goat’s milk for our protein, because I can’t bear to slaughter animals. I grew up on a farm, so I should probably be more practical about it, but I still can’t do it,” Mac said ruefully.
“Everyone here feels the same way?”
“Not really, but since there’s been no need so far to make that decision, we’ve all just left things as they are. Gilles knows how to hunt, as do I when it comes to a theoretical standpoint, but we haven’t done so. Neil used to hunt with his mother when he was a kid. I’m sure others are capable, too, but I haven’t asked.”
Mac polished off her sandwich while talking to Lisa about the room she’d be staying in temporarily with her son.
“We don’t have anywhere else to put you until we get another building put up, but you’ll have a bit of privacy still anyway. I’m not real good about having people live with me, since I tend to be pretty solitary, so we’ll have you in your own place pretty quick. There won’t be a lot of furniture in it, until I get a chance to build some for you, but at least you’ll have your beds and a home of your own.”
“You tend to be
solitary? I wouldn’t have guessed that from the number of people I saw when we drove up, or the size of this place.”
“I’m lucky enough to have friends who understand me. Anyway, Gilles and Neil are getting your room ready for you, so you can at least get yourself settled for the night. There’s plenty of food in the fridge and cupboards, so feel free to take whatever you need or want. If you throw your dishes in the dishwasher, we’ll get along fine. There are a lot of ways to entertain yourself here, too. Someone will have to show you how to access the server for the movies and TV shows we have stored, but I don’t have time right now. I hate to just leave you on your own like this, but I have a serious situation I need to deal with.”
5 ~ THE TRUTH WILL OUT
“Okay, Gilles, tell me everything,” Mac demanded.
“It’s probably not as bad as you think, though I’m sure you’re going to want to say something to Cam about her going by herself to check out a sensor without telling anyone she was going.” Gilles went on to explain everything he knew about the situation.
“So you were already on your way to check it out when you heard the shots then? And you didn’t tell him Cam was the one who killed Gerry?”
“No, but you could tell he knew it was her. He’s not the kind of guy to go after her, Mac. He just wanted some answers is all. I hated having to tell him his son tried to kill Neil. It broke his heart, but I don’t think it was unexpected. He knew what his son was, even though he tried to raise that kid right.”
“I still need to meet him and see for myself. I won’t take chances with my daughter like that,” she said.
“I know. I’d be doing the same thing if it were my kid, and it wouldn’t matter to me what anyone said,” Gilles responded, patting her shoulder.
“Fuck. This is the last thing we need right now. I need to be getting ready to head down to Cleveland. Ian’s insulin will be turning toxic soon. Sarjit has managed to make some the old-fashioned way, but it doesn’t do any good to have it here, when Ian needs it down there.”
Tipping Point (Book 2): Ground Zero Page 6