by Dave Conifer
Three
Even though the driver had slowed the bus nearly to a stop when he realized what Sarah was about to do, she lost her balance after stepping out, and had to scramble to pull her legs out of the path of the wheels. A thick cloud of exhaust enveloped her as the bus picked up speed and pulled away, stinging her eyes and making her cough.
As she was collecting herself and rising to her feet she thought she heard the sound of the bus doors again, but the roar of the engine made it impossible to be sure. In the darkness she heard a grunt. She looked for a place to hide, but then realized that the same darkness that prevented her from finding a hiding place would stop anybody out there from seeing her.
“Sarah?” a voice called out. It was more of a whisper than a yell. “Where are you?”
Her first thought, one which she dismissed immediately as nonsensical, was that Eli had been there waiting for her all along.
“Sarah?” the voice came again. “It’s me. Dewey.”
“Dewey?” she answered into the darkness. “What are you doing here?”
“The same thing you are, I guess,” he answered. They stumbled toward each other in the darkness. After they'd closed to within a foot they could make out each other’s shapes. “Like, I just didn’t think you should be out here all alone. Unarmed, and all.”
“Dewey, I’m not unarmed,” she said. “But you are. And you’re wounded.”
“You’re armed?” Dewey asked.
“I have a Glock pistol and two extra magazines on me,” she said. “I’d say I’m armed. I have a lot of ground to cover. I have to move fast. I’m not sure it was a good idea for you to hop off that bus. Not that I don’t appreciate the thought, of course.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Dewey conceded. “My leg’s bleeding again, too. I can feel it on my jeans.”
“If you're planning on coming along, we’ll have to make the best of it,” she said after a moment. “Anytime you’re not up to walking, we’ll stash you away in the woods. We can always pick you up on the way back.”
“From where?” Dewey asked.
“My house,” Sarah told him. “Why do you think I got off?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said. “I knew that. Kinda.’”
“Look, we have to assume that the whole area is full of the kind of people that tried to hijack us before,” Sarah said. “We have to be smart. And quiet. And this might be the hardest part, but we have to be ruthless. Until we know otherwise, any time we come across anybody, it’s us or them. Can you handle that? Because if you can’t, or if your leg can't hack it, I want you to stay right here and hope they come back for you. It wasn’t my idea for you to be here.”
“Sorry, I guess,” Dewey said dejectedly. “I was trying to do the right thing. Like, I didn’t have time to think about it. You don’t have to drag me along. I’ll just stay here.”
Sarah reached out until she could touch him, and grabbed his hand. “It’s all good, Dewey. It’s safer for me not to be alone. You did do the right thing. Like I said, if there’s trouble and you can’t keep up, we’ll play it by ear.”
“Okay,” Dewey said. “Do you know, like, where we even are?”
“Of course,” Sarah answered. “That’s why I got off here.” She pointed into a space that was somehow less dark than any place else. “That’s a ShopRite,” she said. “I did a lot of grocery shopping there. Not that I think we should go anywhere near it now. It’s surely been picked clean by now, and there might be somebody in there we don’t want to run into.”
“Cool,” Dewey said. “So what’s the plan?”
“Simple. We start walking home. It might take a couple days. I’m not good at distances, but this is a fifteen minute car ride away. And I think we should only walk at night, in the dark.”
“I sure wish we could go in the supermarket and get some food,” Dewey said. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a thing to eat on me.”
“It’s not worth the risk,” Sarah said. “And there's nothing left. We’ll manage.”
She walked through the grass strip and into the ShopRite parking lot. Somehow she could make out the shapes of the abandoned cars. With Dewey following close behind, they stayed on the perimeter, maintaining as much distance from the store as possible. When they reached the road than ran south past the supermarket, Sarah stopped. "This is Main Street," she whispered. "More like a road than a street. There are houses up and down on both sides for a ways. God knows if anybody's inside. If there are, well, we can't see them, so hopefully they can't see us, either. We'll just walk down the middle of the road."
"Should we pick a different route?" Dewey asked. "Like, one with no people on it?"
"There isn't any other route for this part," Sarah answered. "No more talking." She pulled the pistol out. It felt light, and she was unsure of how many rounds were left in it. Instead of guessing, she hit the magazine release with a thumb, dropping the partially-full mag into her free hand, before jamming a full one in and pushing the slide back. The partially-empty magazine went into a pocket. "Okay. Let's go. We'll cover as much ground as we can before the sun comes up."
"Then what?" Dewey asked.
"I have no idea."
Four
]
Just like always, the first thing Nick did when he woke up the next morning was hit the bathrooms. Remembering Roethke’s instructions, he made his way to the back of the building and out into the designated building, which was apparently built originally to serve spectators at the soccer field behind the school. There were standard toilets in the stalls. The attendant explained that the only difference was that to flush them, an external jug of water was poured into the bowl. Next, he recited the universal rule in place to conserve water: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” Nick hadn’t thought about it before, but it made sense to use the existing drains as long as they worked.
When he was finished he made sure to wash his hands at the sink, after the attendant showed him how to operate the gravity-based plumbing system. The soapy water ran down the drain in the porcelain sink to the same place the toilet drained to, wherever that was. Finally, the bathroom stop complete, he headed off to breakfast.
His body, having taken quite a beating over the past few months, was already sore and stiff before the encounter on the bus ride. He wondered if he’d ever stop aching. Even walking was painful, he noted as he reentered the school. Maybe he’d get some downtime soon, he thought. That was the only cure for it.
"Nick, somebody came by last night after you went to bed," Matt said. They were in the cafeteria, seated at tables as if they were back in middle school, hungrily devouring bowls of oatmeal. It was the first hot food they'd had in months, and judging by what they saw around them, they weren't alone in that respect.
"Yeah," Ellie said. "Great news. We get to shower tonight. Seven o'clock. I'm already counting down the minutes."
"Really?" Nick asked before shoveling in his first heap of oatmeal. "You can't tell me they have running water here."
"Not exactly," Matt said. "Although we will have electricity for two hours a day. Not that anybody has anything to plug in anymore."
"They must have brought some of the generators here," Nick commented after wiping his mouth.
"They have these things called shower bags, or something like that," Matt said. "It sounds like they get heated in the sun, so the water will be warm. Basically, you stand in a stall and let the water pour out of the bag on you."
"They have soap and shampoo, too," Ellie said.
"Everybody gets five gallons," Matt continued. "Not much, so you have to use it wisely. You're standing in a tray, so you can scoop some of the water from around your feet and reuse it."
"Hmm," Nick said. "I don't know about recycling it like that, at least for me. Except for jumping in that cesspool of a creek once or twice when it got hot, I haven't bathed in a real long time. That water coming off my body is going to be nasty."
&nb
sp; "Sounds pretty good, though, right?" Matt asked. "They've got a whole schedule planned out. Some people are getting their showers right now."
“Take advantage of those five gallons,” Tom said. “Who knows when the next showers will be.”
"What about shaving, Matt? You gonna' stick with that? Right now you're the only guy around here who doesn't look like the Duck Dynasty guys."
"That's getting to be a hassle," Matt admitted. "I hate it, but that's probably going to have to change."
"Don't forget the mandatory teeth brushing," Tom said from the other side of the table. "Three times a day. No exceptions. I wonder if they'll have a sign-in sheet next to the sink. And maybe the toilet's next."
Nick looked around. "For real?"
"Not about the toilet," Tom said.
"Yeah," Ellie said. "For real. They mentioned it last night. It makes sense, really. We all need to stay healthy. It's not going to be good if everybody's teeth start rotting out. It's not like we have a dentist."
"Yeah, I hear you," Nick replied. "It's just -- I understand it, really I do, but I'm gonna' have a hard time getting used to living with all these rules about when I'm allowed to sniff or cough."
"They have clothes for us, too," Penny said. "A few things, anyway. You can tell who already had their turn in the clothing center by looking around in here. Most people look like us, but a few people are definitely wearing new duds."
Nick smiled. "I was wondering about what was going on with those folks. Nothing matches, and nothing fits, but if it's clean, I'll take it."
They continued to eat in silence. Nick thought the same thing was on everybody's mind. Not wanting to be the one to bring it up, he was glad when Matt did.
"Dumb question, but how do you think Sarah and Dewey are doing?"
"I've asked myself that same question about ten billion times," Nick told him. "I'm glad there's two of them, at least. But it got brutal out there a lot faster than we knew. I'm worried about them. Really worried. I hope Sarah held onto that gun. That could make a big difference, especially in her hands."
A few minutes later, when most of them had finished eating and wandered away, Nick sat in front of his empty plate. His elbows firmly planted on the table and his chin resting on his fists, he was lost in thought until Penny’s voice startled him. “You miss her, don’t you?” she asked as she took a seat next to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“What? You mean Sarah?” Nick asked. “No. I mean, I’m just worried about them.”
Penny smiled. “You sure that’s all it is?”
“Of course,” Nick replied. An amused look came to his face. “Well maybe.”
“It’s okay, Nick,” she told him.
“Yeah, but she’s a married woman,” Nick reminded her, “and she left to go find her husband.”
Penny squeezed his shoulder before standing to leave. “I think we all know how that’s going to turn out.”
~~~
On the way into the meeting Nick crossed paths with Joe Garrison, the “Weiner King” whom he hadn’t seen much of since signing up. “Hey, I heard you had some adventure last night. What happened?” Nick spent a few minutes detailing the story of the nearly-hijacked bus.
Joe smiled and shook his head. “Linda’s something else. She’s a tough customer. A country girl from up by Flemington. How do you like that haircut on her?”
“She seemed okay to me,” Nick said. “She can handle a gun, that’s for sure.”
“She’s hard-nosed,” Joe told him. “From what I hear, she wasn’t always that way. Her husband got killed when somebody raided their house out in the middle of nowhere. She cut her hair after that. She knew a friend of a friend of somebody in this group, so they signed her up.”
Nick wished there was more time to talk. With so many strangers around, it was nice to see an old friend. Joe was rushing off to join his family before the meeting began, but promised to come by later to catch up.
~~~
”In case you didn’t know, my name is Grover Monroe. I’ve met a lot of you already. I’m sure I’ll meet the rest of you soon enough. I know we haven’t shared a lot of information with you,” Grover conceded from the podium in the front of the cafeteria. “There were reasons for that. We didn’t want to give anybody on the outside a chance to spoil our plans. But now that we’ve pulled out, I want to open up and share as much as I can with you.”
"First of all, let's talk about our trip here. It was more eventful than we hoped. We lost three buses. Two broke down. That's understandable. They were thirty years old. When we pulled them out of junkyards and reconditioned them, we realized they might not all hold up. We also lost a bus at the end of the convoy when it was attacked. Luckily we got all our people off safely. By the way, one of our tractor trailers also broke down along the way, and we had to abandon it. We're still going through the inventories to decide how to adjust for the supplies we lost."
Nick and the rest of the Outhouse Coalition, minus Dewey and Sarah, were spread across a row of seats halfway back. Now that Nick saw the entire group seated there in the cafeteria, he estimated that there were about a hundred and fifty members, fewer than half of whom he recognized from Crestview.
“Our entire group is run by a supervisory committee,” Grover continued. “Someday, maybe we’ll try to be more democratic about who serves on this committee. For now, it’s just me and a couple of others. This morning, it happens that only one other member of the Committee is here. Stand up, would you, Ted?” Roethke, who’d been seated behind Grover, stood up and waved unenthusiastically at the roomful of members who were watching in silence.
“Ted Roethke is a scientist who happened to be doing some work at North Camden Hospital, where I work as a surgeon,” Grover explained. “Ordinarily he runs a nuclear physics laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. Like many of our group, he doesn't live in Crestview, but he's from nearby.” He waved at Roethke, who sat back down.
“So he just happened to be at Grover's hospital,” Matt whispered to Nick. “Doesn’t explain why he’s on the Politburo.”
"I didn't think Roethke was that kind of doctor," Nick whispered back. “The kind where he’d be at a hospital.”
“Now, about where we are at present,” Grover said. “It’s good that we’ve moved to a safer location. It’s a better place for us. But it’s not our permanent home. We only came here because it was too dangerous to stay where we were.”
“What’s wrong with staying here?” came a voice from somewhere in the crowd. “We have everything we need.”
“Yeah, what’s the point of moving again?” said another.
“I absolutely understand,” Grover answered. “It’s a better place to be. We’ve bought ourselves some time by coming here. But it’s not a permanent solution.”
“I’m glad to see it’s okay to oppose the great Grover Monroe out in public,” Nick whispered to Matt. “It was starting to look more like a dictatorship.”
“Too early to tell,” Matt whispered back. “I’m not ruling out firing squads.” Nick snickered before turning his attention back to Grover.
“We’re good here for now,” Grover repeated. “But not forever. We’re still too accessible. We’ll be found and attacked as soon as word gets out that we’re here, and that we’re well off. More importantly, it’s not good enough for what we have to build. We’re going to create a long-term home where we’ll be self-sufficient. Everything we need, we’ll make, catch or create. It’ll be a place that has the resources we need, like a good supply of fresh water and plenty of wildlife. It’ll be harder for outsiders to get to us there because we’ll be further from population centers. It’ll be big enough to give us room to grow. And, equally importantly, it will be easily fortified.” He stopped to take a breath, gulp some water from a cup in front of him, and to survey the crowd.
“Yes, as you might expect, we already have the site of our permanent home picked out,” Grover said. “It’s Camp Tab
ernacle. Not that far from here, but deeper into the Pine Barrens. It has everything we need.” The crowd burst into conversation. Apparently this was a girl scout camp, one that had been visited at least once by many of them. If his marriage hadn’t gone south, Nick figured he’d know about it, too. Grover let the chatter continue for half a minute before calling for quiet.
“It’s not ready for us yet,” Grover said. “It’s big enough, but there aren’t enough winterized shelters for us to live and work in. Not yet. The Construction subcommittee already has a few people there building it out. Some of you have been assigned to Construction, and will be joining them soon.”
Now Nick knew a little more about why they wanted him. The chances that he was on that subcommittee were high, he thought.
“We hope to be in before Christmas,” Grover said. “That gives us about three months. We think we’ll be safe here until then.”
“I guess we know what you’ll be doing for the next three months,” Matt said.
“Same for you, water boy,” Nick whispered back.
There was no need to whisper. The room was abuzz with conversation. But not for long. All it took was a single gesture from Grover and the room went quiet again.
“Yes, I called it the Construction subcommittee. Construction for short. This is how we do things. For every need, every task, we have a subcommittee. You’ll all get your assignments shortly. You should probably already know generally what you’ll be assigned to. We recruited you based on what we knew you could contribute.”
Nick was impressed. The coldness of the operation was stunning, but, at the same time, he was more confident than ever that this group could pull this off. Grover was all business, and in the air was a strong sense of authority and an expectance of silent obedience, something that didn’t feel quite right to him, but being part of this was far better than being on the outside. And maybe this was the best way to get things done fast. Winter was coming.