The Age of Embers {Book 3): The Age of Reprisal

by Schow, Ryan

  On the property near the garden, a couple of the other guys found the property’s low point and began digging a giant pond. One of the diggers, Marvin Bell, had a retired farm up the road that had been hit by drones. He had resources, land, some equipment, but the house was gone and his family had perished. On the upside, he had a cow, several chickens and two horses that survived. Marvin wasn’t living with them, but he was part of the community. Jill had a soft spot for Marvin. She saw the agony sitting unchecked in his eyes. If he didn’t do something to occupy his mind, the grief would swallow him whole. Jill knew the last thing he wanted was to go down that road. Every so often, she caught him wiping his eyes.

  Looking around, so many of them lost something, someone.

  This was hell.

  Most of the men who saw the softer, sweeter side of Jill, worked to get into her good graces. One retired builder who lost his home even offered to build a school for the kids. She didn’t ask him, but it seemed like he needed to build it more for himself than for anyone else. The response to her generosity extended far beyond her good looks. She didn’t think those even mattered anymore. For her, she felt the men and women resonated with her solid “take charge” personality more than the way she looked. Even in the midst of chaos, she could keep her head and not yield to her emotions. Calm in the midst of the storm was the military side of her coming into play. This was also how she got through most of her life: without showing emotion. Just taking things an inch at a time.

  Inside her head, however, was an entirely different tale. Little did they know how truly emotional she was…

  “You don’t want to go too deep, rather you should dig out a pond that’s both wide and long,” Marvin’s neighbor, William Landry, from up the road said.

  Jill turned around, unaware that he’d shown up.

  William was a farmer Jill met before the attack, a man in his early fifties who had a big heart and a desire to help others. If Jill liked anything about the country, it was that people like William still existed.

  “The weight of the water on a deep pond can put too much pressure on the basin and cause leaks. When you get to the depth you want, flatten out the surface and keep the basin sealed as tight as possible.”

  “How do we do that?” Jill asked, shading her eyes from the afternoon sun.

  “You need to spread as much clay as you can over the regular dirt, then trample it down.” He’d pulled up a hunk of clay, smooshed it between his fingers and said, “This is what will preserve your water levels in times of heat and evaporation.”

  “So when we finish digging,” Cole asked, “we spread it out and stomp it down first, right?”

  Cole Taylor was one of the men in the ditch. Well, not necessarily a man. Cole was an eighteen year old kid Jill found trapped in a car a half mile up the road. He was a student at Sierra College who was trying to get home to his family when his vehicle was hit by drone fire.

  Although Cole wasn’t shot, he’d crashed into a tree and lacerated his leg. He’d lost a lot of blood. His complexion had a greyish tinge to it by the time Jill pulled him out of the car. She got him back to her house and bandaged up. He was still bleeding, though, which was why she first went to Sutter Hospital. By then half the building collapsed and most of the survivors had fled. There she met a woman who lost everything. She was an RN in her early-sixties named Janice. When Jill told Janice what she was up against with Cole, the RN said she was good with a suture and thread.

  In truth, Janice was phenomenal. She was also single and alone. Cole needed help and she could use an on-site nurse, so Jill asked both Janice and Cole to stay. That was the compound’s start. Janice seemed to brighten with purpose, and Cole healed up well. He still had a bit of a limp, but he tended to smile a lot and say he was good.

  When truly pressed by Jill—because something about young Cole brought out her nurturing side—he said, “Despite the tragedy, I’m good because I’m not dead. I have you and Janice to thank for that.”

  Cole knew he wouldn’t get home to see his parents. He said it was okay because he didn’t get along with his dad very well anyway and his mother was an alcoholic and uncharitable with her love. When Jill tried to push him out of the house just to see what he really had in mind, he fought to stay with her and Janice. He offered to do whatever it was he could around the farm. He sold her on how they needed him as much as he needed them.

  She let him stay. Now Cole was her responsibility.

  In answering Cole’s question, Farmer William said, “That’s right, Cole. Spread the clay out, stomp it down more than you think. Make sure it’s packed completely. In the mean time”—he said, dropping the hunk of clay and brushing the soil off his hands—“maybe you could have someone separate the clay from the soil. One of the kids perhaps? A couple of them?”

  “They could stomp it down with us, too,” Marvin said, mopping his brow.

  Marvin was in his forties by the look of him and a quiet, private man. He appeared one day to see if everyone was alright and he stayed to help. He’d shown up every day since then, ready to work, always wanting to “lighten the load.” Being friendly came easy, but being open about himself did not. Jill knew he was hurting, just like her and Cole, albeit for different reasons, reasons he would soon admit.

  His family was gone. Jill helped him bury the rest of the Bell family. She held the service. Their first nurse, Janice, hugged him while he cried. Cole stood by himself, arms folded looking at Jill. Jill was dying inside, thinking about Rock, where he was at, if he was alive.

  She was the first to leave the service.

  “You’ll need to lay down a barrier of organic material first,” William said, pulling Jill from her reverie. “It’s critical to seal the base as much as you can naturally. If you don’t get it right, if there are cracks in the basin, the rocks and soil beneath the surface will suck the water down and your pond will leak itself dry.”

  “What is this organic matter you’re talking about?” Jill asked as a light breeze carried through the property.

  In the background, the trees rustled a bit and a murder of crows took flight. By then, Cole and Marvin stopped digging and had turned to listen to William.

  “Manure, straw, grass, leaves,” he answered. “You need as much of a layer of it as you can get between the soil and the clay. When the clay goes over the top of that and gets trampled down, it tends to create a biochemical reaction to seal the basin, which is far better than just plopping the clay down on its own.”

  “You’re basically talking about compost?” Jill asked.

  “That’s exactly right,” he said.

  “I have several compost piles,” Marvin offered. He’d already started his crops and used what compost he needed for the season.

  “Are you going to import water or get that well working?” William asked.

  When Rock bought the property a year ago, the whole place was in disrepair. Had it not been distressed, he wouldn’t have been able to afford it. The property had fallen on hard times in the crash of 2008; it fell on even harder times in 2015 when the former owner went belly up after his wife left him for reasons unknown.

  Everything was on its way to complete ruin by then.

  There was a lot of dry rot in the walls, the roof needed replacing, and the kitchen had a leak that went into the floors. They’d had to all but gut the place and start over.

  Jill had no idea how Rock had lived in the house in that kind of state. It wasn’t like that anymore, of course, but not everything was fully complete.

  One of the things that didn’t work, one of the last things on the “To-Do List” was to get the well looked at. She was going to leave that to Rock when he came back home. On the night before the attack, the day she finally felt the “crazy” leave her, she left a message, asked him to come home. She was excited for him to see what she’d done, to see that she loved him enough to do this even though the house wasn’t hers.

  She sighed, tried not to feel too sad for th
at vanishing dream. The home she painstakingly slaved over was now in the process of being repurposed. She was addressing ignored issues (like the well) and readdressing the functionality of the home for new issues (a water system independent of modern day plumbing). So much of what she’d done for beauty was now being undone for practicality. This was no easy hurdle for her to get over. Still, she saw the need and just went with it, tough as it was at first. Function over beauty was the new norm.

  That’s what she continued to tell herself.

  She and Marvin had just ripped out her brand new dishwasher as well as her washer and her dryer to make room for the hot water heaters and their platforms. The water heaters were going to be indoor water storage tanks. But at a gallon of water a head, how the hell was she going to get enough water storage to even make a dent in the supply needs of a group that size? She still hadn’t figured that one out.

  The group had grown from Janice, Cole and Marvin to more than twenty people rather quickly. Now the idea of managing a group that large left her spiraling inside. She had no idea how to tackle all the necessary tasks, much less deal with the devastation Rock had brought upon their relationship.

  “Jill?” William asked, waving his hand in front of her face. “Earth to Jill?”

  Her eyes cleared and she suddenly felt the stain of depression setting in. Had she just disappeared mid-conversation? Blinking, looking at him, seeing Cole gazing at her with concern in his young eyes, she said, “I’m sorry, William. My head is a running list and I guess it’s just…I mean—”

  “It’s a lot, I know,” William said, his expression softening to her struggle. “My wife finally adjusted to this kind of life after five years. Now, with everything being even…harder, she’s going through it again. But don’t worry, we’re a community. We pull for each other, all of us, no matter what.”

  She thanked him, put a hand on his shoulder then said, “What was the question again?”

  “I asked about your well.”

  “Oh, yes. Sure. I’d like to get the well working, but with no electricity—”

  “If you have a 220 volt generator, that will power it up since most of the wells are 220 volt out here. It would have to be old, though. EMP proof.”

  “We don’t have a gas generator that works,” Jill asked. “Ours was too new. We lost it in the EMP.”

  He made a strange face, then said, “The guy who ran this place before you, he was a half-asser. Did things like he didn’t care.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jill said.

  “It worked when you got the place, right?” William asked. “The well?”

  “No, not really,” she said. Looking back at him, taking him in for the first time since she drifted off to never-never-land, she said, “I don’t know anything about wells.”

  Cole and Marvin went back to work digging. A couple of the kids were walking water buckets to the fields where she and Rock had planted lettuce, cabbage, potatoes, beets, carrots, broccoli and a few other late summer veggies. A hundred yards away, several guys were building a small school, the sound of two by fours being cut permeating the afternoon air. In a minute, one of the guys would start pounding nails.

  “Well, like I said, you need a generator to power it, but if that doesn’t do it, you’ll need a hand pump.”

  “Unless you have a generator that works, I’m going to need a hand pump,” she said, “but the well’s capped.”

  “Actually you have two wells on the property,” William said.

  That was news to Jill.

  “Really?”

  “I don’t suppose you know which was drilled first?” William asked. Jill shrugged her shoulders, hating how uninformed she was looking and feeling right then. “Have you tried to open it? The one you saw?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s pop the top then, see if there’s water down there. If there is, we can install a hand pump and maybe you don’t have to hump all this water in.”

  “I don’t have a hand pump,” she said.

  “Let’s figure that out later. First, you have a pipe wrench and a tape measure, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Follow me.”

  She and William uncapped the well, dropped the tape measure down a good seven feet before they hit standing water, then sat back and said, “What now?”

  “I’ll try to rustle you up a hand pump. I’ve got a couple, but they’re rusted and they might not fit, or hold a decent seal depending on the degradation. In the mean time you need a way to store water, and not just in whatever hot water heaters your group can rustle up.”

  “We have some pickle barrels the kids are cleaning right now. Fifty-five gallon drums, that is. And we cleaned the old troughs, lined them with plastic since there’s some rust.”

  “How many troughs?”

  “Two on the ground,” she said. “We’ve got another ready to load in the back of the truck. We’re making runs once the hot water heaters are tapped and in place.”

  “How many gallons will they hold?”

  “Thirty-eight,” she said. “All three of them.”

  “You need a two-hundred and fifty gallon storage tank if you’re going to keep all these people here,” he said looking around. Then, leaning in, he said, “And I wouldn’t pick up any more strays if you can help it.”

  She gave a quick, almost defeated laugh, then said, “That’s what’s on my mind. Unfortunately it’s also been beat into my brain that you leave no man behind.”

  “Big hearts can stop beating under less intrusive circumstances,” he said, cryptic.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning be kind, and be helpful, but if you’re too kind, if you give away too much, it could be to your own detriment. Even worse, it could be to the detriment of all these people as well.”

  “Copy that,” she said. “And thank you for everything you’re doing for us.”

  “You bet,” William replied. “I’ll check on that hand pump and head over after lunch if you’d like.”

  “That would be great.”

  Water was the most critical thing she could think of. First water, then food. For now, many of the refugees brought what food they had when she found them, but resources were dwindling and the weight of running a compound was beginning to take its toll. There was too much to do. She screwed up after Janice and Cole. Should she have turned some of these people away? Should she send some of them on their way now?

  As she ran the list of people camping on the property, of the kids she’d invited to stay indoors at night—and of the guys they added with Rock coming back—she couldn’t think of a single person she would have turned away. Except for Maisie. If she could somehow have one less mouth to feed, it would be Maisie’s stupid mouth.

  That got her thinking of Rock again.

  She couldn’t seem to get her mind straight about him. She’d pushed him away, and technically they were on a break, but you didn’t force a break with your partner thinking they’d head right out and wet their carrot.

  But Rock did.

  After all she’d done for him, for them, he found his way into another woman. For the tenth time since he got home and she learned Rock had sex with Maisie, she fantasized about leaving this all behind.

  She could just grab a bug-out bag and sneak out under the cover of night, never come back.

  Her strategy for survival, however, would be a lonely one.

  Then again, the pragmatic side of her argued that the less people you had to take care of, the greater your chances of survival. As she trudged through the dirt and weeds heading back to the front of the home, as she looked around at the people working there, she knew that everything she’d done—all the people she brought here—would prove to be a huge mistake.

  Then again, maybe she finally found something worthwhile to do in her life. Maybe her life was now bigger than pretty houses and happily-ever-afters.

  In front, an old Dodge with creaky springs and more rust than actual paint, meandered up the ro
ad and came to a stop in the driveway. Attached to the truck was a trailer that held three hot water heaters, each of them strapped down with ropes.

  An older man hopped out of the driver’s seat, his clothes dirty, cobwebs in his hair. His name was Robert and he ran a pizza shop up the road. He and his wife were there when their home burned down. They lost a child, but the two of them survived. Robert’s wife barely even spoke since that day. Mostly she cried, and mostly at night.

  “Looks like you scored,” Jill said, eying the trailer and its contents.

  Robert’s best friend, Doug, got out of the truck, glanced at the water heaters and moseyed over.

  “We need to get them set up inside, stabilized and properly tapped,” Jill said. “Take the large one to the vacancy in the kitchen. That’s a one hundred and twenty gallon, right?”

  “It is,” Robert said. “The others are eighty-five gallons.”

  “Good find you guys,” she said with a weak smile and a pat on the shoulder. “You can go ahead and put the smaller ones in the laundry room.”

  “I can Jimmy-rig a spigot,” Doug said.

  “Can you do three?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good,” she said. “Do it.”

  Gregor and Alphonse were headed her way. She liked Gregor’s willingness to get in and work, and she liked that his guys were every bit as willing as Gregor to earn their keep, but she didn’t know their plans and she didn’t want to ask just yet.

  “What can we do to help?” Gregor asked. “Alfie and I are bored.”

  “We need food. Which means we need to do a scavenger run,” she said. “You up for that?”

  “Hell yeah,” Gregor said. “We’re definitely up for that. What about you, Alfie? Ready for a little B&E? A little petty theft?”

  “It’s either that or we starve,” Alphonse said, deadpan.

  “So, yeah,” Gregor said, eyes on her, “we’re good to go.”

  “Why don’t the two of you take the Dodge, hit a few of the houses up the street. I’ll get you directions while Robert and Doug unload the hot water heaters.”