by Eric Wood
“All the while carefully weighing how many they can keep back to poke the other in the back with,” Michelle said. “And round and round it goes. Of course, there’s only so much anyone can do until that army gets closer, so for now we do what everyone else is doing and try real hard to pretend everything is normal.”
“Pretend things are normal?” Sam asked. “They do realize that chasing off some collection of ragged Uninfected bandits from the Wilds isn’t quite the same as facing the force we saw on that screen, don’t they?”
“The answer to that is a bit more complicated than it seems,” Michelle said. “You know that things are different, and Ki and Roosevelt know it, but what about the common folk, just trying to keep their heads down and live their lives away from Wild’s armies and district bosses’ feuds? Do you think they know just how much more dangerous this Ravager army is?”
“I don’t…maybe?”
“Yeah, they do,” Jacinta said. She shook her head wearily and took a seat at the table. She poured herself a glass of some dark, sudsy liquid from a wide glass jug in front of her. “They know this trouble is different; that this might be the end of us. Every one of them knows it, but all the same, no one will say it out loud. No one will say it out loud because they know that there’s nothing they can do about it either way, and if they say it out loud than that makes it real, and if it’s real then it becomes a whole lot harder to hold onto anything like hope.”
“So everyone just pretends like everything is fine?” Sam said. “That’s insane. It’s delusional. It’s—”
“It’s not insane, Sam,” Jacinta said. “It’s the opposite of insane. It’s not giving into despair. If the boot maker or the pipe welder really stopped and faced the fact that a thousand blood-drunk maniacs are coming to burn their homes and eat their families, then boots stop being made and pipes stop getting welded, and then the city is that much worse off, and our chances of surviving the coming storm are that much worse. No, by going about their days like everything is normal, each and every one of those people is doing their part.”
It made a certain amount of sense to Sam, even if he still thought it involved dizzying amounts of denial and self-delusion. “That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” he said.
“It’s why you don’t have to say thank you for us letting you stay here,” Michelle said. “Though of course it’s sweet of you to say. Everything you’re doing is helping us, the city, and everyone else, even if it seems like it’s just a bunch of boring chores. We are each doing our part, which is all anyone can ask of one another.”
Sam thought about that. “Still, we’ve all fought, we all have experience out there. There must be something more…I don’t know, concrete, that me and Abigail and the other two can be doing.”
Michelle laughed at that, and Jacinta tried to hide a smile with the lip of her glass. “You think that Jacinta and I don’t know about your trips to the market, or you all eyeing the walls, or the bosses’ scattered spies in the windows looking down on us? We know you four are hatching some sort of plan, and we don’t doubt that plan will throw some sand in the face of that Ravager army. You wonder why we took you in? Well, we don’t need help around the farm that bad. It’s because we know that whatever trouble you’re cooking up, you’ll have a much easier time carrying it out if you’re not living out of one of Ki’s underground ‘apartments’ or Roosevelt’s cells.”
Sam opened his mouth to protest, but no words came. Michelle had all but come out and said that, far from being their wardens, she and her wife were on their side. He shut his mouth and just nodded.
“Well, I guess we’re all doing our part, then,” he said.
“And that part involves baling hay in—” Michelle checked the grandfather clock to her left “—just over five hours from now. So maybe think about doing your part in getting some sleep, Sam.”
32
Abigail methodically picked, dusted off, and bagged one mushroom after another. The task Michelle had assigned her was both dull and repetitive, though certainly better than any of the animal related tasks the boys had been given. She was likely the strongest, fastest, and most dangerous person in this city, and she had been relegated to harvesting creminis. Earlier today it had been feeding tanks of rust-colored tilapia and then pruning the various bushy green crops whose roots extended down in to those same tanks. Perhaps this was what a ‘normal’ life was like. Doing work that didn’t involve threatening, punching, stabbing, or shooting anyone. She wouldn’t lie to herself and say it was what the kind of life she had dreamt of growing up, but that might have been because she had no reason to know that this was normal. She’d been a teenager the first time she had even seen a settlement bigger than a dozen people, and that had been Mae’s, and that place had been mainly hunters, scavengers, and thugs. How different would her life had been, even with her condition, if she had been born someplace like this? Raised by parents like Jacinta and Michelle, rather than someone like Solomon? She scoffed at the idea—these people only accepted her because they needed her. There was no way they would otherwise. Besides, farming was boring. It was a bit of a wonder to her that people actually chose this life.
Roach, who was standing on the opposite side of the long wooden shelf that held the growing plots, had been sending repeated dark stares across the row of fungus at Abigail. “So, does handling this stuff gross you out?” Roach asked, breaking what had been a tolerable time of mutual silence.
“Why,” Abigail asked, wondering if it wouldn’t be better just to ignore the maybe-former Ravager, “would handling mushrooms possibly ‘gross me out?’”
Roach smiled and tossed her head, casting a greasy tangle of her hair away from her eyes. The bright red of it—Abigail guessed it was paint, rather than dye—was beginning to fade, and revealed pale blond roots. “What I mean is that a lot of people would be all sick to their stomachs if they had to spend their days wrist deep in human blood. Most people, the sheep—the normal people. Get it? They wouldn’t like handling your food. I just wondered if it was like that with you, but like backwards. Because you can’t—”
“I eat normal food,” Abigail answered flatly.
”What’s the deal with the blood then?”
“What’s the deal with all your questions?” Abigail shot back.
Roach snorted a laugh. “Easy there. Just making conversation. Careful, with that temper, people are going to start thinking you’re the Ravager here. And that’s kind of my thing.”
“Is it now? Still?”
Roach blushed a bit at that. “Whatever. I don’t really care why you love guzzling blood anyway. Just forget it.” She suddenly became very focused on the mushrooms before her.
Abigail sighed. “As far as I know, it isn’t for nutrition,” she said. “Part of being…what I am is healing. Most injuries I might take will heal themselves up, but that healing has to come from somewhere. More material, so to speak, more fuel for the healing. At least that how I understand it. Plus, it’s been explained to me that we — Reapers — have some kind of deficiency. Whatever changed us, it isn’t complete, our bodies don’t make something that it needs, so we need to get it from outside sources.”
“From doing the whole vampire thing.”
Abigail rolled her eyes. “More or less, sure.”
Roach nodded, considering. “Interesting. Strange, but interesting.”
“That’s it? Interesting?”
Roach shrugged. “Sure. What more do you want me to say? It’s strange, but we’re all a little strange. Everyone’s got their own thing. Even your little normal boyfriend. You’ve got mushrooms to pick, don’t you?”
Roach turned back to her own harvesting as Abigail watched, thinking. This Roach was not what she expected. “You really know where that data drive thing is?” she finally asked.
“I said I did, didn’t I?” Roach said without looking up. “You’ll just have to trust me. I don’t lie. Not normally, at least.”
Abig
ail continued to watch her, nodding slowly. After a few moments, she returned to her own mushrooms.
“Ya’ll got ten minutes to get that food in you, then it’s the same as yesterday.” She didn’t go as far as to bang a pot, but Michelle’s brassy voice carried a weight many times the size of her small frame. That voice, along with the enticing smell of breakfast, quickly chased the last remnants of sleep from Sam’s head. “Rend, Sam,” she continued,” you’re moving the herd. You know the field rotation by now, or at least you better. Girls: You’ll be harvesting house two today. Corn and Icebergs. Remember, don’t pull up the lettuce. Pick the leaves—gently—then move on. If the roots don’t stay in the dirt, then the little guys aren’t going to grow more. Now eat up, and I expect to see four pairs of boots out front on time.”
She turned and exited the small kitchen, leaving them to the pans of eggs atop the wood stove and the tray of diced fried potatoes on the counter next to them. Sam would have thought that the same breakfast every morning would get old, but it somehow didn’t. He hadn’t eaten meals this tasty since he’d been back in the Colony. Maybe not even then.
The four of them lined up without a word, took plates, filled them up, then maneuvered to different positions around the room to eat. Roach ate standing, as she did each morning, her shoulders hunched possessively over her plate as she shoveled the food into her mouth. Rend leaning against the far wall, eating slowly with his eyes closed, methodically chewing and swallowing each bite. Abigail and Sam sat at opposite sides of the heavy wooden farm table, each glancing occasionally at the other, neither speaking.
Abigail was still upset with him, even if she wouldn’t admit it. Sam, for his part, just wanted her to get over whatever it was that was bothering her, though if she expected some kind of apology from him, she was just going to have to keep on waiting. Even if he knew what he did wrong — and he definitely did not — he felt, rightly or not, like he was always apologizing. He hadn’t done anything wrong, at least nothing he could think of – and he had thought about it plenty. He wasn’t just going to apologize for the sake of it. As far as he knew, if he apologized for the wrong thing, he was just as liable to make her even more angry. No, better to just keep his head down and wait for her to get over it. That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it?
You’re on your own with this one, kid, Vincente said. Women problems are above my pay grade.
“You think you’re going to be able to keep up today, Abs?” Roach asked. “If I remember right, last time we did lettuce I roasted you.”
“I didn’t know at the time that it was a race,” Abigail answered, without turning away from her food. “But yes, I believe I can avoid a roasting today.”
Sam had to keep his mouth from falling open. Not only had Abigail somehow tolerated being called ‘Abs’—something he would never in a million years be able to get away with—she had answered Roach’s teasing without more than a touch of annoyance. She practically smiled when she answered. Maybe she had gotten over whatever was bothering her. He didn’t know a lot about women, but he knew that this was his chance to smooth things over between the two of them.
“You’d better be careful who you challenge, Roach,” Sam said. “Not only is Abigail fast, but she probably won’t like losing too much. She’s liable to put you down, and you won’t have me to stop her this time.”
He smiled at Abigail, who answered with a stony stare. She dropped her fork hard against her plate and stood up abruptly. “You’re such an ass.” She turned, dropped her plate in the sink, and was storming out of the room before Sam could comprehend what he had done wrong.
“Smooth,” Roach finally said.
“What did I do?” Sam asked, shaking in head in confusion. He apparently still had a lot to learn.
The goats seemed to like him about as much as Abigail today. A dozen yards away Rend was having little trouble keeping his half of the herd moving in a tight, orderly procession across the reclaimed ancient parking lot and toward the eastern pasture. The only thing Sam’s half seemed to be able to agree upon was that they had no interest in listening to him. Sam tried pleading with the goats, and then swearing at them and kicking a few small rocks, but nothing seemed to work. He threw down his long hardwood crook and turned away from the beasts, his hands on his hips, fury and frustration filling his mind. No one would listen to him, damnit. Somehow, everything he did, everything he tried, it was always wrong. Abigail, these stupid goats, this whole mad city—the whole world, it seemed—was against him, and he didn’t know how to get things right. He’d been making decisions as situations arose for weeks now, getting by barely by the skin of his teeth, and he only seemed to be getting further away from his goals. Even these damned goats wouldn’t cooperate.
“Looks like you are having a little trouble.”
It took him a moment to realize that the voice speaking to him was real, and not in his head. Rend had made his way over while Sam had been lost in his frustrated thoughts. He was leaning on his own longer crook, looking over at Sam with an annoyingly serene smile on his face.
“I’m thinking real hard about having goat burgers for dinner tonight,” Sam said, glowering at the offending animals. They now somehow seemed to be regrouping in to something approaching a cohesive herd.
Rend chuckled at that, and then resumed the odd sort of conversation he was having with the goats. He clicked his teeth at them a few times, whistled, and knocked the butt of his crook on the ground a few times, which somehow seemed a clear and compelling message to Sam’s anarchic band of goats.
“How are you doing that?” Sam asked, half amazed and half annoyed at just how easy Rend was making their job look. “Is that some sort of, um, Howler thing?” He quickly added, with a flush of embarrassment, “Shit, sorry. Free-Person thing, I mean.”
“Just a person, now. The Free is more of a poetic saying; something the more militant of us would say to differentiate ourselves from people like you. Them. You’re not really like the rest of them anymore than I’m like a typical Free, anymore. Let’s just say I don’t particularly feel like a…” He turned and smiled. “Like a Howler today, and so the answer to your first question is no, what I am doing is not a Howler thing. Rather, it is a shepherd thing.”
Sam nodded. They were all just people, weren’t they? He didn’t think of Abigail as a Reaper, did he? She was just Abigail, but at other times he couldn’t set aside that she was a Reaper and well, that was still a lot to get past.
Just Abigail or a Reaper? She’s both and you need to figure out what that means for you Sam, Vincente said.
Sam shook off the imaginary question, not liking the probable answer to it. “Well, in that case, how did you get so good at shepherding? Did you tend goats, before all of this?” He asked Rend.
Rend laughed. “No, I have never tended to an animal in my life before Jacinta showed us how this is done. We Howlers are hunters, not farmers. I’ve plenty of experience tracking deer, or boar, or rabbit, but none of this type of work. You do have to admit a Howler farm would look pretty odd, no?”
It would at that, Sam thought, especially a real—for lack of a better word—Howler walking after a line of goats. “If you haven’t done this before, then how come you’re so much better at it than me?” He turned to the goats and added, shouting, “Huh? How come you listen to him and not me? Am I saying the wrong thing, goats? Am I not apologizing the right way, huh goats? What do you want me to do?”
“Well, yelling at them like that can’t help things,” Rend added. Sam turned an angry glare at him and Rend shrugged. “The answer is that the goats listen to me because I listen to them. Goats, deer, people—they all respond better if you listen to them, put yourself in their place. With the goats, this is a bit more metaphorical, but with people—say perhaps, someone you care about—this is much more literal. Can I offer you a small bit of unsolicited advice, Sam?”
Sam shrugged. “It sounds like you already are.”
“Well, maybe i
t’s one part advice, one part observation. It seems to me that you are someone who leads by example.”
“I wouldn’t say I do too much leading at all,” Sam said.
“We may disagree there. Still, from what I have observed, you have gotten where you are simply by doing the right thing, and then expecting that everyone else will follow.”
Sam started to object and Rend raised a hand to stall him. “There is nothing wrong with that—on the contrary, there is a lot to admire in this particular leadership style, but it can only go so far. To go the rest of the way, you have to consider the needs and the wants and the perspectives of others. Maybe not as much when it comes to the wants of a goat, but the wants of, say, a partner?”
“You’re saying I don’t do a good job of putting myself in Abigail’s place? I won’t argue with you there. I’ve tried, but I can’t. She’s just too different from me. No matter how much I might want to, I can’t think like her because I don’t know how she thinks.”
Rend’s laughter boomed. “Of course she’s different from you. Not because she is a Reaper—that’s far less important than you think—but because she is a woman. Males of all species have been trying and failing to understand the thoughts of females since long before either of us was born. No doubt those same females could say the exact same thing about us dumb males. Goodness, I’m sure even Jacinta and Michelle have problems comprehending each other’s thoughts from time to time. No two people can ever really understand what it’s like to think like another. But you can still try, and just as important, you can look like you’re trying. Right now, you kind of look like a spoiled kid moping about because he can’t get his way.”
That last remark stung, but maybe that was because it had a bit of truth to it. “That’s a lot of thoughts,” Sam said with a weak smile. “Did you learn all of that in Howler school?”
Rend smiled back, making a ‘more-or-less’ gesture with his hand. “Ask yourself what you really want, Sam. And ask yourself if you can really achieve any of that by yourself. Or if you would even want to. Ask yourself that, think it over, and then try again. And occasionally nudging the goats with the bottom of this bent stick does that job. Though I wouldn’t recommend that same action with Reapers you might be trying to apologize to.”