The day after: An apocalyptic morning

by Jessy Cruise

  "I know what he can do for me," one voice proclaimed boldly. Skip was unable to see whom it had belonged to.

  "Please," Paul reiterated. "To your seats. Everyone will get a chance to meet him."

  Reluctantly they retreated, shuffling back to their tables. Skip noticed that the men were all looking at him as well, although not with hostility, as he would have thought. They seemed to be more amused than anything else. A few of them even winked at him before going back to their breakfasts.

  "Well," Paul said. "Shall we begin?"

  "I guess so."

  It took almost an hour but he managed to meet and say a few words to every single person in the room. Names were thrown at him and he promptly forgot them. Faces smiled and flirted at him and he smiled back. His hand was shaken by soft hand after soft hand, only occasionally with a rough, male hand thrown in for variety. He found that Paul had not been exaggerating when he'd described the town as being full of beautiful women. Though not all of them would qualify as centerfold material, a portion of them did. And of those who didn't, it was not by much of a margin. There was not a single woman among them that a reasonable, average male would consider to be grossly unattractive. If effect, it was kind of an exercise in sensory overload. Especially with the flirtations thrown in. These flirtations ranged from the barely subtle to the outright bawdy. One woman, a petite brunette of about twenty-five, actually invited him to come to her house for "a proper introduction" after he was done with the tour. Several others made no bones about telling him that they were unattached at the moment and looking for a man. The only ones that did not openly flirt in some way were the ones that were sitting next to one of the males, usually in a protective stance. And even they were not unfriendly. On the contrary, they seemed just as happy to have him among them, probably to help occupy some of the unattached women.

  One remarkable thing that Skip noticed as he moved from woman to woman, table to table, was the fact that they were all freshly made-up. Though their clothing was mostly jeans and sweaters or flannel shirts, their faces all had carefully applied layers of cosmetics and their hair was all neatly and fashionably styled. Most had hair ribbons or clips that matched their clothing and all had nail polish on their fingernails. Jewelry was also quite prominently displayed; earrings, necklaces, bracelets, diamond rings; everything except wedding rings, although many of them still had the fading tan lines on their left ring fingers. He also smelled many different varieties of perfume wafting upward, some quite strong and nauseating, some soft and arousing. It was quite a culture shock to see and smell all of this self-pampering less than twenty-four hours after he had been living and eating and sleeping mud and filth.

  As they moved from group to group, after the initial chitchat and introductions were made, Paul, and, to a lesser extent, Jessica, would explain what Skip's proposed place in the community was. During the first stop Jessica tried to seize the initiative by declaring: "This is the man who snuck in here with a gun last night and scared us half to death. He's traveling with two small children that he left alone all night out there so he could do that. Now he wants to know if he can stay here."

  Paul immediately took her aside after this statement and a heated, though quiet discussion took place between them, ending with Jessica frowning and pouting. After that it was Paul who did most of the talking. "Skip is a former cop and a former army pilot," he would say. "He knows a lot about security and military Mickers and is offering to help us defend this place against outsiders in exchange for citizenship for himself and the two teenagers he's traveling with." From there, a brief discussion would usually ensue, although it was fairly obvious by the third stop that most of the women didn't give a rat's ass WHO he was, just that he was an available man. Jessica did manage to put in at least one snide comment per stop, usually related to the fact that he had left Jack and Christine to fend for themselves all night, but the sting of these words was usually muted by the obvious fact that no one really liked her that much. Not one person, male or female, raised any objections to his staying and it became apparent before they were halfway through the process that the community vote on the Micker that was scheduled for dinner that night would be little more than a formality.

  Finally, as the breakfast dishes were being carried into the kitchen portion of the court and the groups began to disperse towards wherever it was that they went when they weren't eating, Paul and Jessica led him on a tour of the rest of the center.

  "Hopefully Jack and Christine are all cleaned up and dressed by now," Paul said as they walked through the hallway next to the bath area. "Baths start after breakfast for those who are scheduled today. A good way to get voted out of this joint is to put any kind of a kink in the bathing schedule."

  He said this with a mocking tone of sarcasm that was plainly evident to Skip but apparently not to Jessica. She nodded in solemn agreement to these words, as if that was the most serious offense that one person could inflict upon another.

  "Here's the nerve center of Garden Hill," Paul said, leading him into an upstairs office that had once housed the homeowner's association. Several desks full of paperwork and clipboards occupied its space. In a corner were the computer terminals and monitors that had once sat atop them. "In here is where we the committee and a few helpers keep track of inventories, work schedules, housing assignments, and just about everything else that goes on here. Jessica and Dale spend a lot of their day here doing the paperwork and I spend about half of my day here. The other half I'm out breaking up fights and fixing whatever's broke."

  "You have work schedules?" Skip asked.

  "Oh yes, there's a hundred things that need to be done around here on a daily basis. Food detail, water detail, hot water detail, wood gathering and drying, child care, and of course the guard detail. We can also monitor the guard posts with the two way radio set there." He pointed to a CB that was hooked up to a car battery. "It ain't much, but it serves its purpose."

  "How do you pick who is on what detail?"

  "We try to rotate people from one thing to another on a regular basis," Paul explained. "The people here tend to get kind of antsy if they're stuck with one job for too long. Everybody gets to try their hand at everything, with a few exceptions like guard detail. There are a few women here who can't or won't learn to shoot a gun. It's my feeling that it's best not to force such people."

  "Uh huh," Skip said. "How many such people do you have?"

  "I don't really see how that Mickers," Jessica said. "You have to remember that these are mostly women of breeding. They never thought they'd end up having to walk a guard post."

  "And the rest of the world never thought it would end up dead either," Skip replied. "So, how many?"

  "About twenty or them," Paul said before Jessica could object any more. "And a good portion of the rest of them don't take the job that seriously, as you've seen."

  "Oh yes," Skip said. "That's going to have to be the first thing to change. We cannot have people screwing each other on guard duty. It is completely unacceptable."

  "For once I find myself agreeing with you," Jessica said. "As Paul told you yesterday, we have a bit of a problem with... well... fornication here. All of the women who are unattached..." she said that word with a great deal of distaste in her voice, "... are constantly flaunting themselves in front of the men. That little fight you saw this morning is a perfect example. And the men are simply pigs about it, showing very little restraint. I am firmly of the opinion that the only way to counter this problem is to exile a few people."

  "Exile people for screwing?" Skip asked. "Don't you think that's a bit harsh?"

  "Not at all," she said. "We may not have the ability to perform marriages here but the sanctity of the couple is still very alive and well. This is a sanctity that must be protected at all costs, wouldn't you agree? It is what civilization is based upon."

  "There isn't any civilization any more," he told her. "And I've been out there, you haven't. I'm not sure you quite grasp what yo
u would be sentencing people to if you booted them. It's truly a fate worse than death. Now as a punishment for murder or for rape or something along those lines, yes, that's probably a fitting response, but for 'fornication', as you put it, I don't think it's appropriate."

  She smirked a little. "So just how would you suggest punishing those who threaten the fabric of our society with their wanton behavior? I've been over this time and again with Paul and Dale both and what happens is that nothing is done and the problem continues. How would you handle it, Mr. Adams?"

  "I don't know," he said honestly.

  "You don't know," she said, shaking her head.

  "Obviously it is a problem," he said. "Any time you have high class women rolling around on the floor clawing each other's eyes out and guards boffing each other at their posts because that's the only place they can do it, you have something that needs to be addressed."

  "They need to be punished harshly," Jessica insisted.

  "You can't enforce a ban on sex," Skip told her. "That would be even more futile than prohibition or making marijuana illegal. People are going to do it no Micker what you say and with sex, they don't even have to distill anything or grow anything or buy anything to imbibe. All they have to do is find a place to be alone."

  "That's why we should exile them," she said, as if he were an idiot.

  "And pretty soon," Paul put in, "we wouldn't have anyone left here."

  "After you kick out the first one or two, the rest would fall in line. Trust me on this."

  "No," Skip said, shaking his head, "what you'd have would be an open revolt. Trust me on this. I'm very familiar with human nature."

  Jessica scoffed at his views. "Well, either way, the decision is not in your hands. We on the committee will find a way to deal with this problem."

  After the upstairs tour Skip checked on Jack and Christine finding them sound asleep in rollaway cots in the same storage room where he had spent the night. Both were cuddled tightly under warm blankets and snoring the snores of the nearly comatose.

  "They didn't even get anything to eat first," Janet, Paul's official companion and the woman that had taken charge of getting them bathed and clothed, told him. She smiled affectionately at them. "They just wanted to sleep."

  "That's kind of how I felt last night," Skip replied. "We've been sleeping on the ground in the wind and rain all this time. After that, you can't imagine how nice those cheap roll-aways and fresh linen look. If I never see those arctic sleeping bags or a lean-to again, it'll be too damn soon."

  "Poor things," Janet said, shaking her head a little. "Paul told me what you've been through and what they went through this morning. It's a shame that people so young are forced to have experiences like that, isn't it?"

  Jessica, who was standing with them, gave a little snort of disgust - she still seemed to think that Jack and Christine had made up the tale of their gunfight this morning - but said nothing. Janet shot her a brief look of annoyance - a look that Skip had noticed nearly every person they contacted give at some point - but kept her mouth shut as well.

  "Well," Paul said, "On that note, shall we go tour the outside now?"

  "Sure," Skip said. "Let's do that."

  They went on a two-hour walk around the entire subdivision and its guard posts, Paul showing him the defenses that he had set up and introducing him to the guards that were currently on duty. Though Skip had been able to catch brief glimpses of the terrain on the walk to and from the bridge that morning, he was now treated to a detailed look of everything in Garden Hill.

  Skip found that Paul, in setting up town defense, had not done too terribly badly for someone without military of law enforcement experience. Even before the tour he had figured out that the former firefighter had a healthy amount of good old common sense and seeing what he had done for protection only served to reinforce this view. For the purpose of keeping isolated stragglers from entering the walled area where everyone lived and worked, he had covered every base, leaving no part of the subdivision exposed to someone slipping inside during the daylight hours. Except for the bridge approach, all of his guard posts were located in the upper floors of two-story houses along the outside wall. He had four of these positions, each manned with two guards armed with scoped rifles and binoculars. Between the four of them, the entire perimeter of the irregularly shaped subdivision was visible as long as the guards did their jobs and kept watch.

  The problem with this set-up however, was twofold. In the first place, while it effectively kept stragglers at bay, it would be almost useless against a concentrated attack by more than ten or fifteen people. They were simply allowed to get too close to the walls before they were spotted. Along those same lines it was a defense that depended heavily upon the guards maintaining a diligent watch - something that they had already proven themselves incapable of - since there was potentially only a Micker of a few minutes or so between when an invader would first appear and when he reached the safety and invisibility of the wall. Another problem was that, when they did spot a straggler heading in, the way they drove him or her away was to fire at them, not aiming to hit, just to persuade them that they did not want to be there. This was a horrible waste of ammunition since it usually took two or three shots to accomplish this goal. Skip, as diplomatically as possible, pointed out these flaws in the plan as he observed. Paul seemed to take it well.

  As for the guards themselves, they tended to be male and female teams. Of the four interior guard posts, three of them were coed posts. Though they did not actually walk in upon any coitus in progress - probably since the guards knew that they would be getting a visit from the boss on that morning - it did not take extra-sensory perception to figure out that there was a great deal of sexual tension between each pair. Nor did it take much to figure out that a guard position was the ideal place to carry out an affair since they were located inside of an actual bedroom and had an actual bed in them.

  "Who makes the guard roster?" Skip asked as they left the final post and began heading out towards the hilltop position that overlooked the bridge.

  "I do," Paul told him. "I do it mostly on a volunteer basis since I don't really want to send people out there that don't really want to be there. Of course the cost of that is that I end up having couples with an agenda volunteering. I do make sure that everyone who mans a post is able to shoot their rifles and pistols, but that's about the only qualifying factor at this point."

  "Might I make a suggestion?" Skip said.

  "Hey," Paul told him, "You're the new security chief. You don't make suggestions, you make changes."

  "If he's voted into town," Jessica said from her position right behind them. "And only if the committee approves them."

  "Right," Skip said. "Well, the first thing that will change is that male and female combinations will no longer be allowed on guard duty. It's going to be either two males or two females. That should cut down on the 'fornication' wouldn't you think?"

  "People aren't going to like that," Paul said dubiously. "You're going to have a hard time getting volunteers if you implement that rule."

  "Guard duty is not for people to like or dislike," he said. "It's for people to do. It is a job, not a fuckfest. Nobody here seems to realize that that is the most important job in town. Without an effective security force, you might as well just set all of your food outside the wall right now because at some point, someone is going to take it away from you. We'll need to develop teams of people who specialize in this duty and will take it seriously. And they will then be the only ones to do it. We'll partner them together every shift so they can learn to rely on each other and I'll train them up into an effective fighting force that can back each other up if it becomes necessary."

  "These are not military people that we have in this town," Jessica said. "They're women of breeding and men who fix things or mow lawns."

  "They're going to have to be military people," Skip said. "And in addition to the guards, every person in this town needs to lea
rn how to shoot and fight. Everyone. If we're ever attacked in force the job of the guard force is going to be to simply hold until the rest of the town can grab weapons and man whatever positions are needed to fend them off."

  "You must be kidding," Jessica said. "These people can't do anything like that."

  "If they want to live to see the sun again, they'd better learn," Skip said.

  "Well, let's find Skip and his friends a house, shall we?" Paul said as they reentered the main office in the community center. It was just before lunch and the odor of cooking food - it smelled like some kind of rice dish - was wafting upwards from below.

  "A house?" Jessica immediately said. "Don't you think that's a bit premature?"

  "Yeah," agreed Dale, who was going over some paperwork at his desk. "We haven't had the vote yet. We don't know if they're going to be staying."

  "They'll be staying," Paul said. "You know that as well as I do. So how about we concede the inevitable and start figuring out a place to put them."

  "But, Paul..." Jessica started.

  "If I'm wrong," Paul said, giving a little roll of the eyes, "then how much trouble is it to move them back out? They don't have anything anyway."

  This argument seemed to do the trick. Skip, who watched the conversation from his position in the corner, wondered, not for the first time, just what it was that Jessica had against him anyway. True, he had upset her little power trip but he was not directly responsible for that. That had just been Paul insisting upon what he knew was a needed addition.

  "All right," Jessica said, opening a drawer on her desk and pulling out a sheaf of papers. "I guess we can at least look. I think a small house would suffice for them, wouldn't you?"

  "By all means," Paul said. "I certainly wasn't suggesting that you give him a bigger house than yours. How about the one on the corner of Sycamore and Cypress? It's one of the small, three bedroom models. That should do them, don't you think?"

  "That was Bob and Vickie Whalen's house!" Jessica immediately protested. "They were good friends of mine."