by Alice Sabo
“Wow,” he murmured for her ears only.
The strangers boarded the train. Bridget scanned the platform for any signs of trouble, but there were no armed attackers, no watchers, nothing in fact. She shot Jace a glance. His eyes were roving also. He met her gaze and nodded. They were ready. She patted her various weapons in their hiding places as they headed for the stairs. A strange cry sent a chill up her back. She moved to the wall, Jace mirroring her. She was about to pull her weapon when a man and a sheep came up the stairs from the eastbound platform.
“That’s a sheep,” Jace said in a flat voice. “On a leash.”
The animal didn’t like the stairs and protested loudly. It was the sound she’d heard. The man gave them a silly grin. “Afternoon,” he said amiably, as he coaxed the sheep up another flight of stairs.
“Why are people traveling with animals?” Bridget asked.
Jace looked just as baffled. “Where’d they get the animals?”
They followed the man and sheep up the stairs to the main level. There were more people in the lobby, but they all seemed to be headed somewhere. She and Jace exited onto the street through different doors at the same time.
“Holy shit.” Jace stopped dead on the sidewalk staring at a row of busy shops.
Bridget was staring at a vegetable stand. “Look.” She pointed, but her voice was suddenly very weak.
“You folks new around here?” A tall, lean man had appeared at their side.
Bridget glared at him. Jace backed up to stand closer to her.
“I’m Drew, head of the Greeting Committee,” he said offering his hand.
Bridget wasn’t sure how to respond. She shook his hand but didn’t offer any names. It seemed petty, but she wasn’t ready to give an inch.
“Welcome to High Meadow. If you take the shuttle up to the high school, they’ll give you a hot meal and sort out some housing for you. Clothes, too, if you need ‘em.”
The clothing comment made Bridget reassess her appearance. Did she look that raggedy?
“They just feed anybody?” Jace asked.
“Yes.” Drew nodded. “We do ask that people pay back with chores when they get back on their feet.”
Bridget looked at Jace, suddenly seeing how bone-thin he looked. She was probably just as starved-looking. How long had they been living on reduced rations? “Where do you get your food?”
“We have trading partners. It’s all part of the Survivor’s Alliance.”
“You just stand here all day looking for strangers?” Jace burst out. Bridget wanted to give him a solid jab to the ribs for asking, but she wanted to know, too.
Drew smiled. “Naw, we split it out, couple hours each. We got a lot of newcomers since we posted the flyers.”
That statement just made Bridget more curious. She had a whole lot more questions to ask this man.
“Here comes the shuttle, you go on up and get some food in you.” Drew waved down a big yellow school bus.
Jace gave her a look. This could be a trap, she thought. Maybe these people were actually slavers, and they would end up working in the fields to feed these people. She’d gotten out of worst places on her own. She gestured for Jace to board the bus. They needed to know.
Chapter 39
It seems that war is bred into our bones, sunk deep in our DNA. I no longer expect people to understand that all of us are necessary for survival.
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
NICK PACKED THE HEARTY lunches that Trey had made up and added them to the supplies in the jeep. He and Wisp had spent the night at Holly Hill. It gave them a safe place to sleep, and Nick could check in with Trey about how repairs were progressing. As he finished up, Wisp appeared out of the woods, a frown on his face.
“Problem?” Nick asked.
“I can’t feel him. He must still be asleep.”
Nick nodded. “Trey gave us bacon sandwiches.” He couldn’t keep the smug smile off his face. Despite his worries, the tornado destruction wasn’t too bad. The damage to the house was minimal, and most of the barley had been salvaged.
Wisp nodded. “He told me that he’s very pleased with the shipment of coffee from Seaview.”
“And the hooch from Harlan’s buddy,” Nick added. He’d shared a small glass with Trey last night and had slept the better because of it.
Wisp looked down the driveway toward the worker’s cottages. “People seem to be settling in. There is a very harmonious feel to this place now.”
Nick turned to look at the big house. “The repairs seem to be coming along pretty fast. I’m surprised anybody was living in there.” He glanced over to the mass grave where most of Trey’s family was buried. Jean had told him about it in grim detail.
“Once the bodies were removed, it was just a matter of a lot of soap and time before the smell dissipated,” Wisp said softly. “I think it was more psychological. He lost his whole family. There’s a lot of memories in that old house.”
Nick leaned back against the jeep. “He told me that it feels right working with us. Better than the contract with the government. At least now he can see where his grain is going, and the people it’s feeding.” Nick felt a certain pride in how well things were working out with all of the trading partners that he’d put together. There might still be a few more to be discovered in the territory that Angus had claimed. When they got back from finding Wisp’s latest missing brother, he looked forward to setting out again to do just that.
He slammed the back door of the jeep. “Ready?”
Wisp nodded but paused to listen in his own way.
Nick got in the driver’s side. Wisp couldn’t search for his brother and pay attention to the broken roads at the same time. He checked that the battery had topped off this morning and retracted the solar collectors. A moment later Wisp got in the passenger’s seat. “Everything okay?” Wisp’s hesitation worried him.
“I think so. I have a strange feeling, but I can’t identify what’s causing it.”
Nick started the jeep but waited for another nod from Wisp before proceeding. He didn’t like hearing that Wisp had an unidentified bad feeling. They drove down cracked and potholed highways for most of the day. Nick stopped mid-morning to stretch his legs and relieve his bladder. When Wisp walked away to get some space, Nick quieted his mind to try to stay off the psychic radar.
“We’re still headed in the right direction,” Wisp said.
Just after lunch, they turned north on to a better strip of highway and went through one of the Rovers checkpoints. They gave Nick a newly made map of passable roads in the vicinity. Despite their questions and complaints, Nick refused to stay longer than it took to top off their water bottles and drop off some letters.
By late afternoon they were approaching the border of Angus’s territory. “Do we keep going or stop at the Sentinel Post for tonight?” Nick asked.
“Stop for a minute, so I can take a reading.”
While Wisp walked down the road, Nick dug through their supplies for a snack and a bottle of water. This part of the highway went across a ridge above an old town. Silent, empty buildings hulked in the distance. It brought back memories of the time before. He wondered if all of those buildings were full of bones, or if the local authorities had had enough people to remove them all for burial. And he wondered if he walked by those buildings if there would be skeletons in the street. It was a very sad, dark mood that descended on him. He’d been part of those people searching for the living in a morass of dead and dying. He’d been there for the riots and the mass graves and the chaotic exodus from the cities.
High Meadow was a bright golden note in a screaming dirge. And they teetered on the bare edge of sustainability. Every trading partner and every group of refugees changed the odds. He hoped that Angus and Tilly would be able to juggle long enough to ensure their survival.
“I’d like to keep going,” Wisp said intruding into his morbid musing.
“Fine with me.”
&nb
sp; “There’s no one there,” Wisp said with a gesture toward the town.
“Just the dead.”
Chapter 40
We can turn to the arts for some of our essentials. Potters, wood carvers, papermakers, weavers, many arts began in a craft.
History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss
BRIDGET SAT WITH JACE in a mostly empty cafeteria trying not to wolf down the stew and bread they’d given her. “Bread,” she murmured as she dipped a chunk into her bowl.
“Unbelievable,” Jace replied, his words muffled by a full mouth.
She spooned up more of the savory broth. The flavor was different but delicious. There wasn’t even a hint of stew-goo in it. The roll was chewy and yeasty and made her swoon just to inhale the fragrance of it. A woman in a clean white apron had given her a tray with the stew, bread, a saucer of cherries and a mug for coffee. Another miracle. She finished the stew but pocketed the cherries and the small knob of bread remaining.
Jace watched her squirreling the food away. “If I eat all this, it’ll make me sick,” he admitted.
Bridget nodded. She felt like she’d already gone over her limit. Her stomach was uncomfortably full. But she wouldn’t waste any of it. She sipped the last of her coffee.
“Where the hell do they get coffee?” Jace asked in an undertone as he finished off his own cup.
She was having trouble taking it all in. These people had food and clothes and animals while she had been holed up at the Depository guarding against enemies that didn’t exist. But there were enemies somewhere that these folks were armed against. That much was obvious in the way they’d been questioned and watched. She hadn’t wanted to hand over her weapons, but they made it clear that she couldn’t go in the building with them. If the situation was reversed, she wouldn’t let anyone near Dunham with a weapon, so she understood. But she wasn’t happy about it.
Another smiling man came over to talk to them about housing, and how long they’d like to stay.
“We need to talk to the person in charge,” Bridget said.
“That’d be Angus and he’s pretty busy. I’m sure I can answer most of your questions,” the smiling man offered.
Bridget knew she might have to fight her way through a couple layers of bureaucracy to get to talk to this Angus person. “We’re from another settlement. We want to talk about a um...collaboration.”
‘Oh, of course.” He got to his feet. “I’ll see when he’s free.”
Jace waited until the man was gone to speak. “Do you think that’ll actually get us through to the big man?”
“Dunno,” Bridget said sullenly. She didn’t have enough experience with these people to know what kinds of games they might be playing. Boldly, she went over to the big coffee urn to help herself to a second cup. No one reprimanded her. She inspected a carafe of brown liquid that she thought might be maple syrup.
The woman in the apron came out of the kitchen. “It’s sorghum. Kind of like molasses, but different. Some people like it in their coffee. Me, I’ve always been a tea person.”
“Where do you get the coffee?” Bridget asked innocently.
“Nick’s our trader. He barters for things with a bunch of partners.”
A suffocating sense of failure washed over Bridget. There were people out in the world, surviving while they had been hiding in that damned building. “You folks seem pretty well off,” she said bitterly.
“It’s hard work. We all do our part. Things changed the day they stopped making the train food. We’re working towards a safe winter, but we’ve got more people coming in every day, so it’s a gamble.”
Bridget nodded as if she fully understood those words, but a million new questions swirled through her brain. Who stopped making train food and why? Where were these people coming from? Why did High Meadow offer to take people in if the situation was so unstable?
The smiling man came back in. She chugged the coffee, refusing to abandon a drop of it. He beckoned to them from the doorway. Jace joined her as she walked over. They were led through the busy halls of the high school to a small classroom that had been converted into an office. An old man with wild white hair and piercing blue eyes looked at them. Bridget felt a frisson of alarm. He looked crazy. And then he smiled, and his face changed completely. She had a memory of some old show with a kindly wizard.
“Come in, please. I’m Angus.” He gestured them to a circle of armchairs. “Walt tells me you’re from another settlement.”
Bridget sat down fighting against her inclination to like Angus. “Yes. We want to set up some trading.” She thought that was probably a safe topic. At the very least, it would give her a better feeling about these people.
“Excellent,” Angus said. He pulled out a notebook that looked like it had been made by a child. The pages were all different sizes, and it had been sewn together on one edge. “Where are you located?”
Bridget felt Jace stiffen, just as she clamped her mouth shut. “That’s your first question?” she asked carefully.
Angus’s blue eyes looked confused. “What should my first question be?”
She didn’t have an answer for him.
He went back to his desk, and she worried that she’d offended him. He fussed with the desktop for a minute before a map came up on a live wall. “Come look at this,” he said.
The map had a lot more detail than Bridget had hoped for. She hurried over to check it out.
“This is the territory that I am claiming for the Survivor’s Alliance.” He indicated a squiggly line that encircled a chunk of the countryside. “Is your settlement inside or outside of this line?”
She had to step back to find Fielding Station and even then, it was just an approximation. “Outside,” she said, her hopes going dim.
Angus circled the outside with his hand, “North? South?”
“North,” she admitted. Earning a grunt from Jace.
“I don’t think anyone has claimed territory north of here, so it shouldn’t be an issue. We may need to set up armed convoys, however. People are getting desperate, and we can’t be too careful.”
She blinked at him. Armed convoys of what? She was going to ask him for food, but they didn’t have anything to give in return. “What kinds of things are you looking for?”
Angus gestured them back to the armchairs. “Can you tell me about your settlement?”
“Like what?”
“How many people, what sorts of things you produce, what you’re looking to trade?”
Bridget wanted to tell him everything. She wanted to lay all her problems in his lap and have him sort them out. And that feeling set off every alarm in her head. “I...um...I’d rather...um...”
“You’re not ready,” Angus said. He stood, indicating the meeting was over, and her heart sank. “Take some time. Look around. Talk to some people. Then, when you’re ready. Come back and talk to me.”
She looked at Jace. He shrugged. “Okay.”
“I’m always here,” Angus said. “You might want to walk the grounds, look at the animals. Check in with the Watch or the Rovers. They can tell you the kinds of trouble that we’ve been having with raiders. Stop by the infirmary if you need to. I’m afraid newcomers have to sleep in the storm shelters until we find a place for them. Walt will get you set up.” He smiled at her until she nodded.
When he went back to his desk, Bridget grabbed Jace’s arm and pulled him into the hallway. “We need more information.”
Jace shook his head back and forth with a baffled look. “What kind of place is this?”
Bridget scanned the hallway. There didn’t seem to be any guards. “He said to take a look around.” She jerked her head towards the opposite end of the hallway. “Let’s look.”
They walked the entire interior. The only time they were stopped was in private quarters and the armory. She managed to get a look at their weapons and was impressed at how much they had stockpiled. The Wardrobe amazed her. She swapped out her ragged shirt for a better one.
Jace got a pair of new pants, and they both got new socks.
But when they found the kids in their classrooms, she had to fight an ache in the back of her throat. “They’ve got a school?” she whispered. She and Jace peeked into the various rooms and listened to the lessons for a few minutes.
“Is that the teacher?” Jace whispered close to her ear.
“Must be a Font,” Bridget murmured. She’d been eyeing the tiny woman at the front of the room when Jace’s question triggered the answer.
“A what?”
She pulled him a little further down the hall. “Biobot,” she whispered. “They’re supposed to be super smart.”
“Of course. Why so small?”
It took a minute for her to get past a few particularly gruesome memories. “So that if they went crazy, a kid would have a fighting chance.”
Jace opened his mouth twice before any words came out. “That’s...so...wrong.”
“I guess this one isn’t crazy.”
“There’s two of them. Maybe that makes a difference.”
She shook her head. Biobots were a loaded issue. The fact that High Meadow seemed to have some walking around worried her. She didn’t know what it meant. “Let’s keep looking,” she said with a tug on Jace’s new shirt.
She wandered past the infirmary watching people going in and out. She stopped one to ask about it. The woman was bone-thin and carrying an equally thin child. “Did they take care of your baby?”
That got her a big smile. “Yes. He’s going to be okay. They just checked him out, and he’s finally gaining weight.”
“What was wrong?” Jace asked.
The mother’s mouth trembled. “I couldn’t nurse him.” She shifted her grip on the baby who cooed. “There’s a group of new mothers here. They’re sharing milk.”
“Oh.” Jace looked like it was more information than he wanted to hear.
Bridget gave the mother a smile and a nod before grabbing Jace’s elbow to steer him away. “She couldn’t feed him,” she whispered.