Tommy at least had not changed, and the fact that he’d chosen to sit with Nathan was at least a sign that not everyone in the party would have an overtly negative view of his behavior.
Tommy stared ahead, but he seemed to be picking up on Nathan’s mood. “Don’t fuss yourself none, Nate. You were trying your best. Dave’ll get it. It’s not like you knocked the town over, is it?”
“I guess not. I just… Tommy, I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I’m not the leader this party needs anymore.”
Tommy whistled and snorted. “You’re the leader? Man, no one told me!”
Tommy’s smile was as welcome and warm as the Osha root soothing his throat.
“We’re a bunch of capable people, compadre. I know, since Cyndi went, you’ve been trying to protect us all, and you’ve been leading from the front. But you gotta understand, you can’t do it all. Only one guy can do it all, and that’s the Medicine Man in the sky. The rest of us… well, sometimes we gotta understand what our limitations are, you get me?”
The words made sense to Nathan’s head, but his heart was resisting—too many good people had died since they’d left Glens Falls, and Nathan didn’t want to add to the pile.
“I get you. But it’s not easy letting go.”
“Man, that sick chest is peeling your fingers off one by one.”
And Nathan couldn’t argue with that.
The Taurus had survived because, by some miracle, the wall it had been parked behind, which held an ancient carwash beyond it, had fallen away from the Taurus rather than on top of it. It had taken a few dents to the hood but was otherwise okay.
Free finished off fitting the battery while the others made space in the utility enclosure at the back of the F-350 for Dave to be transferred in. Nathan had voiced concern because the precise reason they’d pulled into Wellington had been the F-350 running out of gas. How were they going to move him now if they had no fuel?
Free had just smiled and tapped the side of his nose. “Gas, we got.”
“I don’t understand,” Nathan said, looking at the devastated town and wondering where the hell Free had sourced any fuel.
“On the walk back to the truck with the can of siphoned gas, I saw a wreck half-buried in a ditch by the side of the highway. You’d only see it if you were walking, and if you were traveling north. Musta been there three or four months. Nothing I could do for the driver—he was killed on impact, I reckon. But the tank was full, and when I popped the trunk with my knife, I found four more ten-gallon cans. Three full and one half gone. It was like Christmas, man. I got the Ford, filled her up, collected the cans, and high-tailed it back here, and that’s when the quake hit.”
Thirty gallons of fuel between the two vehicles wasn’t the greatest reservoir for potential travel, but it would probably get them as far as Denver, and there was a good chance they’d be able to trade or work for more gas there. Tommy stuck his head into the conversation with a grin. “I reckon we make Free the leader, Nate. He’s the gas king!”
Free guffawed, “I ain’t no leader, Tommy. I wouldn’t even follow myself.”
Lucy strode over, looking between them. “While you boys talk about who’s gonna be in charge, let me just put your mind at rest. Right now. It’s me. The tanks are filled, Dave’s in the F-350 with Rapier keeping him company, and as soon as you’ve gone through the wreckage of the gas station to see what of our supplies you can salvage, we’re moving out. Capiche?”
Nathan, Free, and Tommy simply looked back at Lucy as she finished giving her orders. When they didn’t move immediately, Lucy clapped her hands like she was annoyed with her butler, gardener, and driver for having a crafty cigarette break on her time.
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” she said with a twinkle in her eye and steel in her voice.
And so they didn’t.
On the road, they drove in silence.
The brief respite Nathan had been allowed from feeling like the world’s biggest heel for pig-headedly endangering Dave turned back to face him. Lucy had given him more Osha to chew on, and Nathan knew that even if she hadn’t given it to him, he’d still be working his jaw, grinding his teeth in frustration. The root cooled the burning in his throat, but it couldn’t take away the thoughts burning in his head. Nathan couldn’t work out if he was just being a self-pitying wuss or if there was something more going on. A lowering of his mood that coincided with so many emotional hits as of late.
For the first time in his life, Nathan wondered if he was suffering internal psychological problems. His thoughts were grim, he was beating himself up, and he had been over-compensating like crazy to try to be everybody’s shield.
Even the toughest shields have a breaking point.
Nathan hated the idea that he could be suffering in this way. A broken rib or a chest infection, he could get his head around completely. You just waited for the body and the antibiotics you pumped into it to do their stuff, and then, after a while, the body was fine.
But the head?
He couldn’t just go online and find a therapist, or a med-psych. He couldn’t just make an appointment and sit on a couch talking about the relationship he’d had with his father. Or whatever it was psychiatrists asked people about.
Nathan only had the comedy realm’s idea of what it was like laying on a shrink’s couch to go on. No one he knew had ever had mental health problems… no, scratch that—no one he knew had ever admitted to them. Even when he thought about Free and the way he’d withdrawn after the crash that had killed his wife, and the way, at least until Lucy had come along, he’d been more morose than not, and been so quick to anger, Nathan remembered well that his friend had never once taken him aside to talk about how he was feeling.
Guys don’t do that, right?
Since Free had gotten with Lucy and they had worked out, he’d become lighter and way less intense. And now Nathan could suddenly see in himself the same traits that had initially appeared in Free. He’d become withdrawn, serious, and wouldn’t listen to reason—or even to being shouted at, as Lucy had discovered—and now it felt like he was slipping into the dark well.
Not even Tony could draw him out, his boy sitting next to him in the back of the Taurus, with Lucy feeding Brandon milk powder they’d mixed with water and warmed on the engine block in a metal pan.
Nathan had never felt more alone. Just sitting there. Aching for Cyndi.
Tommy was driving the Taurus, with Free following behind in the F-350, Donie and Rapier riding in the back with Dave.
The quake had ripped great cracks down the highway for a good ten miles, and they had to drive slowly and carefully to avoid dropping a wheel down one. They also came across two collapsed concrete bridges that were, luckily, only clover-leaf-on-and-off-access ramps to crossroads beneath.
Twenty miles from Wellington, there were no signs that the earthquake had ever happened at all. The telegraph poles which had been at crazy angles or fully overturned back near the epicenter of the quake were now standing tall as if nothing had happened. Sleet spat against the windows of the Taurus, though, causing them to smear with slick ice, and the roof of the car rattled like Nathan’s chest.
“How you feeling, Dad?” Tony asked, looking up from the comic book he’d been carrying in his pocket when the quake had hit.
“Like the Incredible Hulk just stomped on my chest.” Nathan’s attempt at humor was thin and forced, but Tony didn’t seem to mind.
He smiled, and said, “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” and put his nose back between the pages. They’d done their best to clean the boy up, but his hair still held traces of dust. Elm’s remedies had kept Tony’s asthma pretty much at bay for some time, at least—Nathan was glad Tony hadn’t suffered a recurrent attack and was able to just sit by his dad in the back of the car and read. Tony loved reading, and as he’d lost all the books they’d taken on their first journey from Glens Falls over the months, he’d been able to get his fix with scavenged comic books.
Tony liked Spider-Man and Batman, and wherever they stopped to look in any derelict store, he would whoop with joy if they found any magazines he could liberate. You can’t eat comic books, which is why they nearly always found a few even in a well looted store, but they were sure feeding Tony’s mind. In the absence of a school and a teacher, as the Big Winter had descended, Cyndi had homeschooled Tony as best she could, and Nathan had to admit that her schooling had been up to a pretty good standard.
The boy whose eleventh birthday had come and gone on the road, between where they’d buried his mother and the roadblock outside Casper, had been given a stack of comic books by Free as a present. He’d managed to keep them out of Tony’s line of sight until the morning of his birthday, and then produced them from his jacket with a mighty Ta-Dah! that had gotten Lucy howling and clapping. It had also delivered an icy pang to Nathan’s heart because he hadn’t thought to do it. He’d been too concerned with getting the food, lighting the fires, checking the horses, and making sure the axles on the wagons had enough grease.
All work and no play…
“What about there?” Tommy piped up from the driver’s seat, bending forward over the wheel to look through the sleet-smeared windshield. Nathan looked up and was surprised to see seven giants standing proud and gray against the darkening sky.
Huge turbines moved in the air like the propellers of impossibly large aircraft. That they were moving fast, spinning with mechanical grace while facing into the wind, wasn’t even the most wonderful thing about these huge, majestic machines.
It was the buildings at their base, at one end of the line of turbines. These buildings were solid and square, and perhaps in the past, they’d been service stations for the wind farm, but around their eaves, blazing in an afternoon falling toward winter dark, Nathan could see rows of lights—twenty or thirty of them. All alight and ranged above a flickering pink neon sign that declared the largest of the squat buildings to be “Caleb’s Bar!”
Lucy rebel-yelled. “A bar! An honest to goodness bar! Civilization at last!”
6
“Well, howdy-doody—hold on. Back up a tad. Do people really say howdy-doody? Do I sound like an idiot from a 60s sitcom yelling howdy-doody at strangers? How about I just say: Welcome to Caleb’s Bar! And, come on in!”
The dapper black guy with a pencil mustache, an exquisitely arranged, slicked-down kiss-curl on his forehead, a precisely geometrical bow tie that looked like it had been cut out with razors, and a scientist’s standard-issue white coat, had been waiting for them as their two vehicles had run up the curving stretch of gravel track that led from the highway off-ramp up two hundred feet of ridge, to where the wind farm hummed, swooshed, and spun in the settling dark.
He opened his arms expansively by way of underlining the welcome. “I’m Caleb, and this is my joint.”
As the words left his mouth, the expression on his face changed in the same way that it had when he’d questioned his own use of “howdy-doody.”
“Joint does make it sound a rather down-market establishment, I’m sure you agree, and I can tell from your shapely frame and noble bearing, young lady, that down-market is just something you will not tolerate, amirite?”
Lucy and the others just stared at the little man who couldn’t have looked more out of place if he’d been painted purple and had a blue flashing light on top of his head.
Nathan finally stepped forward from the semi-circle of the party to take the lead, but Caleb took one look at him and shook his head vigorously. “Oh no no no no no no no no!” Caleb reached up, touched Nathan’s burning forehead, felt both his cheeks, and then, in a move too surprising for Nathan to have time to react or step back, Caleb hugged him gently and placed his ear against the mechanic’s chest.
“My friend, you need to sit down before you fall down. Amirite? Of course, I’m right. Everyone inside now; this boy needs help.”
Lucy raised a hand. “We have another injured man in the Ford. We’ll need to bring him in, too.”
Caleb waived a dismissive hand and said, “Come one, come all. Everyone is welcome at Caleb’s Bar.”
Caleb put his arm through Nathan’s and started to lead him toward the door. “I need to help the others with Dave…” he began, before his cough reared up again, antagonized by the freezing air and the dampness left after the sleet fall. Caleb was having nothing of it. “I’m sure your friend will cope.”
Caleb threw his head back to the others. “Amirite?”
“Get inside with the kids, Nate; we got this.” Tommy boomed, and so Nathan let the little man in the white coat, who looked like Little Richard transformed into a scientist, lead him past the buzzing neon sign in the dark doorway of the building.
Tony followed with Brandon, and Nathan heard the others going to help Dave get out of the F-350. His head was swimming, the backs of his eyes felt thick in his skull, and there were the stumpy thumbs of illness pressing hard into his ears, but what he found inside the building set all that aside and filled Nathan with the sense that he’d walked from a harsh reality into a dream.
While the others had been outside securing the vehicles and helping Dave toward the building, Caleb had taken Nathan, Tony, and the baby along a short, dark corridor with nondescript, tan-colored brick walls that reminded Nathan of a modern school building. Caleb then pushed through a set of green double doors which took them on through into a glittering impossibility.
Once, the room had been a refectory area that would have seated thirty or forty people comfortably. There were rows of steel tables and attendant benches, and at one end of the room was an area with a countertop that led to an area that had once been a kitchen.
Now, the room was lit by what seemed like a billion tiny lights sparkling off two rotating glitter balls hung from the ceiling. Brandon’s eyes sparkled in wonder at the illumination. From the corners of the room, Vari-Lites blasted harsh white beams at the mirrored spheres. Caleb reached into his pocket, brought out a small remote control, and pointed it into another corner.
A booming soundtrack kicked in. Jungle rhythms and glacial synths. The Vari-Lites changed and warped their beams in time with the music. Nathan felt his aching chest vibrating with the subterranean sounds and his ears all but crackled with the beat. Tony looked around, amazement washing over his face and his cheeks blowing out with shock. Nathan could see that the jolt of the noise was starling the baby but couldn’t hear the howl that was coming from his wide open mouth. Tony pulled the child to his chest and began to comfort him.
Caleb left them standing near the entrance and took up the beat of the music. He went dancing across the floor of the refectory, past benches and tables decked out in red feather boas, and tall, stainless steel, tubular art installations that had a simultaneous mid-80s and fallen-from-an-unknown-future vibe.
Caleb reached the counter and picked up a DJ’s headset with a small microphone which sat in front of his lips as he turned, swirled, and clicked his fingers to the incessant beat.
“Cool, huh?” Caleb’s voice was coming from speakers around the room. “Who said the apocalypse couldn’t be fun? Amirite, boys?”
Nathan waved his hands at Caleb, calling uselessly, “Turn it off… the baby… I can’t…” It was all too much for him. The fuzz in his head, the vibration in his guts, and the flashing lights, and so he stumbled to the nearest bench and sat down, the room spinning.
The music came to an abrupt halt and the lights stopped spinning, the glitter balls no longer reflecting a billion sparkling lozenges of light.
“Daddy, are you okay?” Tony asked, putting a small hand on his father’s wrist in the sudden silence, his voice sounding loud and harsh in Nathan’s ears. The baby, now settled, was again mesmerized by the lights, his eyes sparkling with reflections. Tony’s voice sounded like it was coming down a long tunnel, though, or out from the mouth of a well. Nathan tried to focus on his son, but his eyes were wonky as hell.
“Of course, he’s not alright,” Caleb said,
appearing at Nathan’s shoulder and once again placing a cool, dry hand on his forehead. “Larry!” Caleb called out into the ether, and Nathan sat frozen—his chest now felt like his lungs were duking it out with each other in the mother of all bare-knuckled fistfights and began to tighten and constrict. Nathan’s breathing hurt, and it was as much as he could do to blink his eyes with any sense of normality.
From behind the counter, a plump white guy in overalls, with smuts of grease on his face and hands that looked like they were made from walnuts, appeared. He lifted the countertop and ambled companionably across the space. Not in a hurry, but not in an attempt to be slow. This was a man who got to places at his own pace, not at the diktats of others.
“Cal, I’m halfway through the generator maintenance on stack four. You know I’m busy. I know I’m busy. Can’t you just… ooooh.”
Larry had stopped in his tracks about seven feet from Nathan and was looking at the mechanic with a pained expression on his face. “He’s not well.”
“Ten out of ten,” Caleb said with a tinge of sarcasm that was affectionate rather than harsh. Nathan got the impression these guys had been more friends than work colleagues right from the off, even though Caleb was obviously the one in charge.
“I’d like you to go back and ask Miriam if she wouldn’t mind making up a bed in the infirmary…”
“We don’t have an infirmary, Caleb. I know that; you know that. In the same way this canteen isn’t a disco, that storeroom isn’t an infirmary. If you’d like me to go ask Miriam to make up a bed in the storeroom, then I’m your guy. Otherwise, let’s keep the delusions of grandeur to a minimum, yeah?”
Caleb arched an eyebrow and straightened his bow tie with precise fingers. “Larry, you have no poetry in your soul.”
“Very much like we don’t have an infirmary.”
“Shoo now. Shoo. Go speak to Miriam.”
Larry turned and ambled away at his own pace, back toward the kitchen.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 56