Amy glowered at Mary but didn’t answer.
“Amy did better than you on the last reading test,” Luke said in her defense. Mary just snorted.
“Today won’t be ‘so bad,” another boy put in. He was slightly taller than Luke and had the same lanky look about him. His hair was a darker brown; his face less angular. His name was Daniel. “After all, we have Mr. Deaton for third period.”
Both girls groaned. Education at the ranch was simple. They had one class where the older kids helped the younger ones. The first two periods were taught by Lucille Posch. She had been a schoolteacher before the collapse. She taught reading, writing, and math. Third period varied, with different people coming in each day. Adrian Posch taught Bible study twice a week. Larry Gatlin taught farm management. Matthew Zachary, Luke’s dad, taught social studies (the great American way of life), and once a week Amos Deaton, their leader, taught history.
After third period, they were released to go home for lunch. After lunch, the girls stayed at home and helped their mothers around the house. The boys over thirteen went back in the afternoon for combat training with Isaiah Hall.
“Hey, there’s something you agree on,” Luke joked, looking at Mary then Amy. “You both don’t like history.”
He was glared at from both sides. It was true; none of the girls liked history. Luke had read the one history book that the ranch owned. Actually, he had read it more than once. It was one of his best subjects. Amos Deaton didn’t often go by the book, however. His version of history was filled with lurid battles, often greatly embellished, and long rants about who hated whom and why. It was one of the most popular classes among the boys.
Luke realized that a few things were missing. He had read about the Civil War. The book mentioned nothing at all about the resistance after the war—the resistance that eventually led to the Nations, and by default, to the ranch. In fact, the book seemed to assume that the North’s victory had been complete, and even proper.
It was not a subject he was willing to discuss with Mr. Deaton, however. Surely in time their leader would explain this himself.
Two women were approaching the community hall. The short and plump form of Lucille Posch was flanked by Theresa Deaton’s taller form. They were talking in low, worried whispers. They stopped talking as they came up to the children.
Theresa looked at them uncertainly for a moment and then said, “Amy, your father needs you, up by the array.”
“But she has school,” Mary protested. Mary hated that Amy got away with things that none of the other kids did.
Lucille gave a disapproving look at Amy’s already retreating back. “She’ll be excused, for today only.” She shouted this last part. Amy had already broken into a run.
The second Theresa had spoken, Amy realized what was wrong. Her premonition came back to her full force. She knew exactly what hadn’t seemed right. She had subconsciously missed the razor-thin line of the lightning rod on the horizon.
She raced through the tiny settlement. She didn’t slow down until she was most of the way up the steep trail toward the array, and even then, it was only because she was out of breath.
Her face was beet red by the time she crested the ridge. There, she met her father’s face, almost as red as hers.
I just ran up here, she thought, but he has just been walking around. She was worried about him. Even this small change in altitude left him out of breath.
His look brought her back to reality in a flash. “Is it bad?” she asked.
“Worse,” he replied.
He was right. The rod was down, blown down by the heavy winds. Without its protection, lightning had struck the array. About half the panels were scorched. Marlin was shuffling around attaching calipers to the sides of the panels and taking readings. He muttered darkly as he worked. “About half of them are still working,” he told her.
“Is that enough?” she asked.
He stood silent for a minute, staring up at the skyline. “That’s not all. The charge went through. Everything is fried: batteries, charge controller, inverter. Everything.”
“A meeting tonight?” Patrick asked as he faced off against Luke again. Patrick was a year older than Luke. At nineteen, he would be considered a man next year and no longer required to come to combat training.
That was just as well. Combat training had taken Patrick as far as it could. He was Luke’s height, but broader. He was lean and muscular. Sweat stood out on his bare chest. He was like a mountain cat in brown shorts.
His arm shot out. Luke sidestepped clumsily and swept the larger boy off his feet. Before the dust had settled, Isaiah Hall was among them shouting. “Faster, Luke, you have to finish him faster.”
Isaiah pulled Patrick to his feet. “Again,” he growled.
Patrick looked at the graying combat instructor. Isaiah’s hairy arms bulged with muscles and his wide girth carried no hint of fat. He wore the same brown shorts they all wore, and a faded white t-shirt. He wore his hair cut in a butch and his wide face bore a constant scowl.
Patrick’s eyes flickered, and his fist shot out. With a grace born of years of training, Isaiah sidestepped and swept Patrick off his feet. He dropped down, his elbow following Patrick’s progress. It stopped inches from Patrick’s face.
“This isn’t a game,” he snarled. “Do you think the terrorists think this is a game?”
“No sir!” Patrick and Luke sang out together.
Unappeased, Isaiah continued. “Do you think the enemy thinks this is a game? Do you think the New World Order is playing around? No. It’s kill or be killed. This training just might save your life someday, boys. Remember that. Free sparring,” he said, looking at Luke. “You and Patrick are up first.”
“Spring dance is coming up,” Patrick commented as they faced off again.
“Yeah,” Luke replied warily as the two circled each other. He wished he’d been partnered with Kurt or Daniel. That Patrick would win the match was a given. He was the best fighter they had at the ranch. Losing was not the problem.
Luke was never sure which was worse—the fact that Patrick’s concept of light-contact sparring often left bruises or that he was a master at taunting his opponent into making a mistake. He exploited Kurt’s fear, Daniel’s caution, and Shawn’s slow wit. Luke knew what was coming. He told himself not to rise to the bait.
“Taking the grease monkey?” Patrick laughed.
“Yeah,” Luke replied calmly, though he could feel the heat rising on the back of his neck. Of course, he wanted to say, we’ve gone to every dance together since we reached “courting” age. He hadn’t actually asked Amy, but they’d surely walk up together and spend the whole evening together.
“I hope you were paying attention. You’ll need hand to hand with that one,” Patrick joked. Somewhere in the background, Shawn sniggered.
Luke’s face burned. What was it? Patrick’s smug grin or Shawn’s snigger? The two always picked on Amy. They never gave her a chance. He wished, as he always did, that he could wipe that smug expression off Patrick’s face.
Patrick dropped his guard. He was midway through mouthing the word “feisty” as Luke darted in.
Luke hit the ground hard. Once again, Patrick had used his anger against him, leading him in and then sweeping his feet out from under him. Luke clambered to his feet chagrined.
Head low, he exited the circle. At a gesture from Isaiah, Kurt shuffled fearfully forward. “At least that won’t be the most embarrassing defeat today,” Daniel commented at Luke’s side. Luke nodded as Patrick squared off in front of his new opponent.
“Grease Monkey again, eh?” Shawn jeered from Luke’s other side. “Glad I don’t have to take an ugly girl like her to every dance.”
What a dumb fuck. With so few kids at the ranch, teasing got pretty redundant. Shawn was too stupid to even see that he had left himself wide open. “You want me to ask Daniel’s sister for you?” Luke replied. “She’s what, twelve, this year?”
“
Shut your face, ass wipe,” Shawn growled a bit too loud. Isaiah scowled in their direction. “Ain’t going with no twelve-year-old.”
“What about Elisabeth?” Jimmy Manualson piped in, referring to Amy’s sister. “She’s fourteen.”
“Kurt’s already asked her,” Shawn moaned.
They all looked at the scrawny kid trying to dance out of Patrick’s reach while still remaining in the circle.
“How did he ever get up the nerve?” Jimmy asked. “I thought he was terrified of the beast she calls her father, not to mention her sister.” He gave a worried glance toward Luke, Amy’s friend and chief defender, fearing he had said too much.
Luke, his anger spent, just shrugged. “He just did, I guess.” He had already told Daniel the true story; no one else needed to know.
In fact, Shawn had lumbered up and asked Elisabeth out. Elisabeth, unsure of how to get out of it, had told him that Kurt had already asked her. Then she tromped off to Kurt’s place and announced that they were going together. Kurt hadn’t disagreed.
After combat practice was over, Luke rushed toward the low metal building that served as the ranch’s garage. He was worried. Amy had never come back to class. That was not terribly unusual, not nearly as unusual as her dismissal had been. Coupled with the rumors of a ranch-wide meeting, however, he was sure something was up.
The entire yard surrounding the garage was littered with junk. Car parts and other less identifiable bits of metal sprouted weeds, and clumps of weeds sprouted bits of metal. Paint peeled from the metal siding of the garage in huge flakes. The whole building was slowly sagging to one side.
Neither the paint nor the sagging was particularly unusual. Most of buildings around the ranch were showing their age in this way. The ranch was at war, against nature and other less visible enemies. Paint and maintenance were not priorities.
The mess was another matter altogether. Most of the houses were fronted with orderly garden rows, reflecting both the lack of space in the valley and living proof that one of the enemies, at least, was being beaten.
The garage and its occupants had always been another matter. Luke had heard some of the older members’ murmurs, and had heard the boys repeat it often enough. The ranch had made a deal with the devil, in the name of Marlin Beland. Sure, he too had a small personal garden in front of his house. The house the ranch members had built for him, that is. It was tended by his daughter Elisabeth, when it was tended at all.
Meanwhile Marlin and his oldest daughter Amy lived a life unlike any other at the ranch. They didn’t work on the communal farm, help with the hunts, or care for the sheep. They ate the food the ranch provided; wore the clothes others wove and sewed for them. The ranch supported them.
Or so they all say when things are going well, Luke thought. He’d spent enough time in Marlin’s company to see the other side. While the men grumbled that Marlin had not helped with the harvest, he was busy pressing the meager soybean crop for oil—oil for cooking and more importantly for biodiesel. He and Amy maintained the tractor and repaired the tools. While the women complained that they got no help with the canning, he was the one who fixed the seals on the pressure cookers. He maintained the solar array and the freezer, and manned the smithy. Amy worked almost as hard, helping her dad in the shop, helping Jaime Hall with the ceramic kiln, and a dozen other chores to boot.
And when questioned about the mess in front of his garage, ’Marlin would just say that he’d get to it. It had been thirty years now, and he was no closer to getting to it. Most had giving up trying, but that didn’t keep them from grumbling.
The loud clanging of metal on metal broke his reverie. Amy came bursting out of the side door of the garage, her face red. She stomped off toward her home, taking no notice of Luke. He had to rush to catch up to her.
“Amy?” he said hopefully.
“That bastard!” she fumed. “‘This is important business, little lady,’” she mimicked.
Luke didn’t need to ask who she was mad at. “He’s our leader,” Luke offered. “Don’t you think you should show some respect?”
“No,” she retorted. “I will when he does. Dismissing me? I have helped maintain that system for the last five years. I know it as well as Dad. Hell, I was the one who jury-rigged the charge controller after the last one burned out. Why won’t he talk to me about anything?”
Luke’s first impulse was to say, “Surely your dad will tell you what he says anyway, so why does it matter?” but the impulse was stopped as what he had heard sunk in. “The charge controller?” he said. “Is something wrong with the solar array?”
Amy nodded. “Damn thing’s fried. Direct lightning hit last night.”
“Is it fixable?” Luke asked. “I mean, what will we do if it’s not?”
“It’s not,” Amy replied. “And I would probably know what we’ll do if that bastard Amos hadn’t told me off. ‘Men’s business,’ my ass. He knows Dad will tell me later anyway. They’re all like that. They bring all their problems to Dad. They refuse to talk to me. They know damn well that once they are gone, Dad will turn to me. What choice does he have? They expect so much from him. But will even one of them openly admit that I can do the work? No!”
Luke let her vent. He knew it’d be useless to try to get any more out of her until she had calmed down. Just like it was useless for her to expect any of the men at the ranch to accept a woman as a mechanic.
“Do you know about a meeting tonight?” Luke asked as Amy wound down.
She nodded. They had reached her house, and she flopped onto a crude wooden bench by the front door. “Sure, that’s what Amos is seeing my dad about now. Trying to figure what they are going to tell people tonight.”
“There’s no hope of fixing it?” Luke asked.
“The panels themselves still produce a bit of electricity, but all the batteries are gone. The freezer took some damage as well. There’s nothing we can do. We might be able to rig something up to draw water during the day at least, but that’s about it.”
Larry Gatlin strummed a poorly tuned guitar while his wife sang a coarse rendition of Bobby McGee.
“Freedom ranch, just another place with nothing left to use . . .” Luke quipped as they went by.
Amy snorted but didn’t comment. Luke was always coming up with shit like that. He had stayed up at her place since that afternoon, talking to her to calm her down, helping her sister harvest spring greens from the family garden for supper, and then staying to discuss things with Marlin when he came home.
Amy shivered as a cold breeze played on her shoulders. Around her, other women were pulling their shawls close around themselves. I should have brought my coat, she thought to herself. The days were warm, but it still got cold at night.
Directly ahead of them was a faded, gray, two-story farmhouse. It was a mottled, uneven gray, the color you get when the last remains of a dozen paints are mixed together. It too was falling off in chunks. This building served the ranch as its only communal space. It served as a church, an armory, a school, a dance hall, and tonight, a meeting hall.
Light streamed out of the lower-story windows. The buzz of conversation flowed out of the open doors. Amy paused and pulled back; she was in no hurry to join the growing throng.
Instead, she turned back and looked at the ranch. The rest of the ranch was unlike the two large buildings at the center, the communal space and the garage. The houses of the ranch were mostly underground. They were built into the side of the valley in a wide half circle. Posts of rough-hewn pine logs were set into the slope with earth berm roofs laid over that. All that showed was the occasional window.
Only years of familiarity allowed Amy to pick out those windows tonight. Flickering tallow lamps should show right about there, she thought, where James Derry would normally be reading Bible passages to the kids before bed. And just over there should be the dull glow of Jaime Hall’s wood stove. When was the last time the whole ranch showed up for a meeting?
Amy shudder
ed and turned away. She was filled with a sudden foreboding. She had an image in her mind of all the windows empty and dark. She shook her head to clear it.
“You okay?” Luke asked.
She looked up at the community building without answering. She hadn’t realized that he had stayed outside with her. “Do they even use the second story anymore?” she wondered aloud, looking up at the empty windows.
“Sure, but not much,” Luke answered. “The library is up there.”
“So you use it, anyway.”
He blushed but didn’t answer. After a few minutes, he said, “The meeting should be getting started anytime now. We’d better go in.”
As they entered the building, Amy could tell by his reaction that Luke had never seen a meeting this well attended. He always attended any public function and took great pains to be involved.
He had managed to drag Amy to one of the other meetings. The six or seven attendees had gathered around one long table. That table had been all that had prevented a fistfight between Amy and Theresa Deaton. Luke had never tried to get her to come to another meeting.
Now, however, the table had been shoved into one corner and chairs of every description lined the main room. The community building didn’t have enough chairs to sit everyone, so kitchen chairs and rough-hewn patio chairs had been borrowed from a number of families.
Most of the women had either knitting needles or crochet hooks out and were crafting multi-colored afghans from the last remnants of yarn. All were experienced, chatting while their hands worked. In another month, there would not be so much as a skein of yarn left anywhere in the ranch.
In one corner, there was the rhythmic sound of Larry and James Gatlin running the blades of their shears over a whetstone. In just a few days, they would begin shearing the sheep. The women would trade their knitting needles in for carding and spinning supplies, and the cycle would begin again.
Children of a New Earth Page 2