by C. Martens
Their hostess showed them two small but well-appointed bedrooms and a bath they would share. She asked which of them was going to care for the horses and pointed through the kitchen window to a small barn in the back. The other she asked to bring in firewood. Keylee made it clear in the most friendly way possible that guests were expected to pull their own weight and that she would be a servant to no one.
The horses needed care after the long days preceding, so Emmett excused himself and led them around back. The reason for Keylee being so comfortable on horseback became apparent when two ponies rushed him at the corral and begged for attention. The five newcomers went in the corral opposite after a good rubdown with a burlap sack and a hoof inspection. Emmett made sure the trough was full and threw a bale of hay in the crib. The tack found homes on stall partitions, and the necessities Emmett carried back to the house.
Stepping inside, Emmett saw Randy emerging fresh from a shower. She was putting her affinity for nudity right in Keylee’s face as she toweled off, just as she had with Emmett. Keylee did not blink. Dressing in a long, tailed, man’s flannel shirt, Randy presented herself clothed for dinner.
The stew was excellent and the pie divine. A big loaf of warmed, crusty bread stood on a cutting board and was offered to be sliced by anyone wanting some. Good, salty butter melted easily into it.
Immediately following dinner, after a quick shower himself, Emmett wrapped a towel around and ducked into his room. He did not want to tempt fate. Randy laughed. He came to the fire and his two companions clothed.
Keylee offered wine but told them she preferred pot. When they accepted, she pulled out a pipe from next to her rocking chair and a jar full of herb from the kitchen counter. They spent the evening forgetting the outside world.
Chapter 25
The Olympic Peninsula was a beautiful place and became more so. Spring came with heavy rains, and green things popped from the ground. The work of nature accelerated, and what could deteriorate did.
The three companions had come to an understanding. They were to be a family of sorts, and after some time working out small differences and getting used to each other, they settled in well together.
The yellow dog turned out to be a sweetheart. Keylee called him Chance because she “took a chance on him.” Picked from a litter of accidents, the result of a German shepherd jumping the fence to get to an Irish setter, he was the last pup remaining. He had not been picked by anyone else because he sat away from anyone approaching and watched them. Keylee took him because he was blonde, and she claimed he was the best dog ever. As far as Emmett was concerned, she was right. Chance was smart, loyal, and well behaved. And he had an unusual courage. Although threatening on first introduction, he seemed able to distinguish danger and stayed alert around certain people while becoming friends with others very quickly. Emmett and Randy were acceptable.
Early on, Emmett had made the assumption that he and Randy would be guests and would move on to Whidbey, but Keylee was right. The island was better left to itself. The bother of any commute outweighed any benefit. He started searching for a home on the mainland. When Keylee found out, she was upset. She had the idea that they would all stay together, and it turned out that Randy had that idea, already and unspoken, as well. Thinking about it, Emmett realized that the idea relieved him of an emotional burden. He had been wishing and had not realized it.
The three took turns going to deliver groceries. One week in early spring they came to the blind woman’s apartment to find her absent. The two whose turn it was put the groceries away and left, thinking it odd but possible that the woman was out for a walk. The next week there were no groceries missing from the cupboards. They checked back weekly for another month before deciding their efforts were no longer necessary.
The effort that Brody had been making outside Eugene inspired Emmett, and he convinced the two women to help. They acquired a smaller dozer and began to torch and level buildings as they emptied them of anything useful. A light trailer behind the pick-up became a permanent appendage.
They found no one living, so they claimed the entire peninsula and used it as they wished. They began to refer to it as the homestead. As they burned and flattened structures, they also tore out fences. Soon they had a huge area full of discarded barb wire and netting attached to metal and wood fence posts. The only fencing they left intact ran east to west from Hoodsport to Taholah, right across the neck of the peninsula.
The only building they left standing was a large shop just down the road from the house. It was hidden from the road, and half of it became their storage facility. Even though there was little necessity to build or repair anything as they could scavenge anything and everything, Emmett insisted that the shop be retained for use.
They moved decks, intact, to areas deemed worthy of taking time to appreciate the view and furnished them with sturdy lawn furniture.
One rural home included a large wooden stock tank that someone had taken the time to craft. Admiring the beautiful work, Emmett eschewed its destruction and moved it to a position below the house. There was a small spring leaking out of the hillside, and with some ingenuity, an old cast iron stove, and some pipe, they had a wood-fired hot tub.
The hot tub led to an undercurrent of sexual tension. The two women were attractive, but the tension came from Randy, not Emmett. He had never been sure of himself in the presence of women and certainly never seen himself provoking a sexual response. Being shut down in no uncertain terms in his dating career had trained him to expect failure. Randy on the other hand was confident in her appeal and her powers of seduction, and Keylee triggered her desires. She made subtle overtures and getting no direct response, positive or negative, upped her game. Finally Keylee discouraged her with emphasis. She made it clear that she was not interested and wished to remain on platonic terms with anyone living in the house. Her logic was that it would be easier for everyone to have no attachments and thus no power games being played. The older woman backed off, but she had an unsatisfied crush. Still, everyone admitted that they were probably better off for the clarity.
One of the benefits of the hot tub was that it promoted conversation. The discussions ranged from politics and religion to fairy dust and Sasquatch. The one topic that kept coming up was the causes behind the plagues. Although he had information, Emmett kept his mouth shut until Randy brought it up one evening.
“Everybody has a theory.” Randy reached for the wine bottle, exposing her back and a breast as she reached above the steaming water. She offered to refill glasses. “Ever hear of crowd sourcing? Everybody in Eugene had ideas.”
“Yeah, but that’s not a representative sample,” said Emmett. “The number of people is too small.”
“Well, it’s all we’ve got,” as the bottle was returned to the chill at the edge of the tub, “and there seemed to be a common theme in most of their minds. That it was all intentional. That some radical group wanted to end civilization.”
Swirling the water in front of her, Keylee weighed in.
“Maybe we’ve been looking at this in the wrong way,” she said quietly, as though she were thinking but hesitant in speaking her thoughts.
Emmett and Randy waited for her to continue. She was often slow to voice her opinions, but they were insightful if she were not distracted. They lazed back and enjoyed the liquid warmth.
“One of the first things I learned after getting out of school and getting a real job was a list of things required to maximize profit. Maybe we could convert the list to motive for the plagues.” She splashed water on her face for the effect of the warmth followed by the cold. “I think it correlates.”
Randy was interested immediately. “So give us the list. I’ll give it a try.”
Emmett had noticed the bottle being poured was almost empty, and he reached to open another. He remembered Keylee mentioning that her job had been in product development.
Thinking, not wanting to forget anything, Keylee responded. “There were seve
n points, six really, with the seventh as icing on the cake. The first was that a product had to be protected. It had to have a patent.”
Emmett came into focus. “Secrecy,” he said quietly, “secrecy corresponds with having a patent. Both protect the product or in this case, the intent.”
The two women looked at him closely. They knew he was smart, but he normally hid it well. They could tell he was in a zone.
“The next thing is addiction. If a product is addictive you have a market. Strong need works as well. Even if there are small numbers of people at first.” Keylee looked at Emmett expectantly.
Emmett responded, “The addiction is moral imperative. If the people in control see it as necessary.”
He was staring into space, as though forgetting where he was. Randy had seen him do it as he was reading. He would read something worthy and zone out while he extrapolated what it meant to everything else he knew or believed.
Keylee continued, “The third ingredient is an easy delivery system.”
All three had the same thought and enunciated it in unison.
“Bottled water.”
They all looked at each other. This was getting creepy.
After some thoughts passed between them in a non-verbal way, Keylee spoke again.
“The fourth is that it takes the place of sugar or fat. In other words, it gives you something you really want.”
The three friends stayed silent. Emmett had something in the back of his mind, but he could not tease it out. The woman with the LGBT political experience made the connection.
“It’s entitlement. We talked about it in politics. Some people feel entitled, even against all reason. Maybe they felt that they deserve to own the earth without the rest of us. That the rest of humanity is keeping them from what they deserve.”
The water was cooling, and Emmett hopped out to stoke the fire. The little stove ate wood if the water was to be properly warmed. He slipped back in as Keylee offered the fifth.
“Okay, the next is ‘no calories.’ How does that fit?”
Right away Emmett had it. “No regret, at least after the fact. They see it as a way to get something they want, and they see people as expendable. Once the deed’s done, there’s no reason to have a problem with it. The ends justify the means.”
The sixth on the list was already figured out by Keylee, and she couched it in those terms.
“The wealthy have no concept of the real value of money, so they don’t really understand the cost as it applies to real people. They can buy low, in this case get rid of the riffraff, and move on. And the ‘sell high’ part was what they got out of it. Look at us. We pay for nothing. Money has no meaning. The buy ‘low, sell high’ is another example of a small investment for a huge profit.” She looked around at glasses and found them all empty. “So they get rid of everybody and have all the resources. Except I’m not so sure it worked as they expected.”
“That’s true,” Emmett frowned with the effort to think through his buzz. “Two plagues may have been a plan, but three? I doubt they saw that coming.”
The second bottle being long gone, Keylee handed another to Emmett for him to open. She stood up, glistening in the moonlight, and looked directly into his eyes as she handed it to him. Emmett ached for her. She was beautiful, but she had never made herself romantically available, and they were probably better off for it. He assumed the wine must be affecting him.
“That was only six, Keylee.” Randy broke the moment in a quiet voice. “You said there were seven, an icing on the cake.”
Keylee turned, still standing, and faced Randy. Her back was now to Emmett, the dimples over her butt just above the waterline. She raised her arms to embrace the moon, and she swayed slightly. The wine was getting to her as well.
“Number seven? Good for the environment. Icing on the cake.”
§
Between the casual efforts they were involved with on the homestead and the ease they cultivated in living, they also made trips into the Seattle Tacoma metroplex occasionally. There were people there, and those people used the universal communication symbol that seemed to have become the norm. They stuck a vehicle in the middle of a road and attached a hand-lettered sign to it.
There were signs that led to disappointment and once to a dangerous situation, but after thoroughly investigating any they found on major thoroughfares, they discovered fourteen people. Five adults formed a commune, much like the one in Eugene, with three children. An older couple lived together in a small gatehouse in a ritzy neighborhood. A young kid, a motorhead, had a large warehouse next to the freeway and was in the process of filling it with fast iron. The remaining three were hard cases. They were paranoid and prone to shooting anything that moved, and they were especially dangerous as they had found each other and combined forces.
Of course there had been others, but there were so few people that it seemed almost unnecessary to carry weapons. Still, those few who were paranoid and quick to be defensive or offensive created great danger.
The SeaTac survivors held gatherings, and the homesteaders were considered to be part of them. Some other outliers were invited as well. In total, there were twenty-three that came to the socials. Adding in the malcontents that declined any contact, that made twenty-six, a far heavier concentration of human beings than what remained in most communities.
Where before people had measured themselves by how many people they counted as friends on social media, now they were glad to have link contact with a group of just under a quarter of a hundred people total.
There was a bar located between Seattle and Tacoma where they met. Not large, but more than enough for the number attending, it had a juke box and a dance floor and was close to a liquor warehouse. The older couple hosted the functions, and everybody took turns cleaning up, more or less.
§
Four men on solar lectricycles pulled into town. They stayed hidden as they evaluated their new surroundings. The path they had left as they moved up the coast was filled with grim reminders of what the worst of humanity could inflict, and they saw nothing in the immediate vicinity to change their ways. The three locals that stayed separate and liked heavy artillery were contacted and offered membership in an organization expected to grow. The meeting went well for the four strangers and for two of the locals. They survived.
Pulling his Bowie knife from the body of the local that had made it clear he would be in charge, Cord Sullivan smiled and wiped it clean on the man’s jacket. He turned to the surviving local man and recently widowed girlfriend.
“Now that we have that out of the way, I hope you’ll understand where the power structure really is.”
He looked each of them directly in the eye. The local man studied the ground and shrunk in on himself, and the young woman was uncomfortable and scared but suggestive in her manner. Both would do as they were told.
Already late in the evening, Cord left the body where it was as he reached out a hand to the woman and invited her to his side. She accepted willingly and seemed relieved. The rest could find what comfort they could by their own hand, but he was the dominant male and would enjoy the fruits of his labor. All was right with the world.
§
The comlink vibrated and woke Emmett. Not used to late calls, he accessed the identity from habit as he answered. The older couple from SeaTac was calling.
“Emmett, we’ve got bad news. I’m sorry, but Randy’s dead.”
They went on, but Emmett was no longer listening. He rose from his bed in a daze, naked, and stumbled from his room. Pounding on Keylee’s door and screaming for her, he tried to evaluate what he had heard and make sense of it. Randy had gone into town for the monthly gathering, leaving Emmett with the cramping Keylee.
The link still spoke, but he was not hearing it as he transferred the call to Keylee’s link. She appeared at her door and was shocked to find Emmett unclothed, but as she touched behind her ear and listened to what was being said, she forgot the state of hi
s undress.
Keylee led Emmett into the sitting area by the fireplace, and they both sat and questioned the man calling. The news was bad. Randy was dead.
The small, fast little car that had recently found a home with them was sitting outside. Randy had a delivery to make, so she had taken the truck. Ending the call, Emmett and Keylee rushed to dress and arm themselves. Keylee grabbed a couple of caffeinated drinks as they exited the house. The big mutt was ignored in his efforts to come along until Keylee reached to shut her door.
“C’mon, Chance.” The dog wiggled behind the seat and into the back.
Gravel sprayed. Two hours later they were pulling up in front of the gathering place.
§
The black man standing guard at the door was another outlier. He knew the car as it pulled up, and he waved Emmett and Keylee inside with his rifle.
The interior of the bar was a shambles. There were three bodies on the floor, two with jackets over their faces. One was Randy. She had a hole in her chest. Her pistol lay in her outstretched hand. Emmett was pretty sure the wound was from a shotgun.
The yellow dog approached warily, hackles up and stiff legged. He nosed the body gently and then lay down next to it, his nose across her thigh. One of the women sitting away from the door started to cry.
Emmett and Keylee looked at each other. They had nothing good to say, so they stayed silent, but their eyes enforced their feelings, and they understood each other.
The other covered face was a man from the commune. He was small and had been prone to frequent rages at society in general, ranting about how mankind was deserving of what they were getting. The older man, the usual host, advised them that the small man and Randy had protected the rest from people that had invaded, intending harm. Between them and the man outside with the rifle, the threat had been beaten off.