After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  And Nathan, although he was feeling a million percent better, knew that even his level of improvement was still a long way from him being fit and well. It took him a long time to get out of his pajamas and ease back into his clothes without causing another fit of coughing. And before he left the infirmary, for what it was, he had to sit back down on the bed to gather himself before traversing the corridor outside.

  The slow walk he took down the corridor proved to him comprehensively that he was still vulnerable and kitten-weak. Before he got fifty feet, he had to rest his hand against the wall and catch his breath. He was still only able to take shallow respiration at this stage; otherwise, he found that his lungs had been so compromised by the pneumonia that any attempt to fill them fully felt like a harsh stab to his ribs.

  Determined to carry on, Nathan made it to Caleb’s Bar, finding all of his party, and also the wind farm occupants, sitting together beneath one of the glitter balls. The mood seemed companionable between the two groups, and Larry was serving pancakes, syrup, and eggs from the kitchen behind the bar.

  “Nathan!” Caleb called out happily as Nathan came slowly and deliberately into the room. Faces both familiar and not turned to greet him with a variety of nods and waves.

  “Daddy!” Tony ran from the bench and, checking himself just in time, gingerly hugged the mechanic, burying his head in Nathan’s chest. Nathan kissed the top of Tony’s head.

  “Hey, scout… how you… doing?”

  “I’m great, Daddy, really great,” the boy said, taking Nathan’s hand and leading him toward breakfast. “They’ve got eggs. I’ve had eggs! Every day!”

  Nathan couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen an egg—fried, boiled, or scrambled—and he lost himself staring at the glistening, steaming plate

  “Of course, we have chickens,” Caleb said in response to Nathan’s amazed look. He pointed to a small Hispanic woman wearing overalls, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. “Rosa here is the chicken whisperer in the facility.”

  “And lead ITEC guru,” Rosa added with a smile, “although Dave and Donie are giving me a run for my money.”

  Donie high-fived Rosa and Dave gave her a thumbs-up with his good hand.

  Nathan sat down and tucked into the eggs as Caleb handled the introductions. “Me and Larry and Miriam, you know. Next to Rosa, that’s Bill, our welder and general maintenance guy; Tyrone is cables, so is Michael, and Crane is our turbine expert. We all double-up on everything else where we can. Which is why Rosa is in charge of the chickens.”

  Bill, in his mid-fifties and beefy; Tyrone, black as midnight, quick to smile; Michael, wildly red-haired with constellations of freckles and somewhere in his thirties, like Crane, who was a thin, bird-like man with fingers too long for his hands. All of them nodded and welcomed Nathan to the table.

  The eggs could probably have been the best thing he’d ever tasted in his life. He didn’t know if it was because they were just damn fine eggs or if it was because of their scarcity, but to have them in abundance was something special indeed. Coming down the corridor, Nathan would have told himself that he didn’t have an appetite at all, but now, with the aroma of the breakfast and good coffee filling his nostrils, he was completely ravenous.

  Nathan’s fellow travelers all looked easy, relaxed, and as if they were among friends. All except Tommy, anyway, whose face was set, and who was stabbing at his pancakes with what seemed like an angry fork. Nathan made a mental note to check on the big Texan at the earliest opportunity.

  Stop. Trying. To Fix. Everything.

  Lucy’s words echoed through Nathan’s skull. She was right—he rarely gave anyone else time to breathe before he waded in with his fixing tools and mending gear. Maybe this bout of pneumonia would give him a good opportunity to change his modus operandi. To take a step back. Lucy had already, from what he remembered of the journey here after the quake, become the de facto leader in his absence. Maybe he should let her deal with whatever Tommy’s beef was.

  But as it turned out, Nathan didn’t have to wait too long to find out what was eating at Tommy.

  “I’m no expert on your generators,” Free was saying to Larry and Caleb at the table as the conversation drifted from introductions and greetings back to whatever they had been discussing before Nathan arrived. “But you’re gonna run out of parts soon enough. That much is clear.”

  “Unfortunately, I have to concur,” Caleb responded sadly as he sipped at his coffee. “We just don’t have the fuel or the transportation to go searching the wilds for suitable parts. And even if we could find the things we needed, it’s a full-time job keeping the wind farm going. If we went out to find the materials we need, by the time we got them back, the turbines might already be beyond repair. I think we can keep this facility going for at least the next year if we’re careful. After that… well.”

  Free used his fork as a pointer as he spoke, his eyes lit up with possibilities. “Well, that could be where we come in. We can give you the time. We’ve got two good vehicles, which Nate and I can keep going. We’ve been lucky finding fuel so far, and I reckon, given how quickly people have moved south, that we shouldn’t have too much trouble finding more. We could pool our resources; we’ll go out, find your gear, and bring it back here, you keep the props spinning while we’re away.”

  Caleb and Larry began nodding. “An equitable division of labor,” Caleb agreed.

  And that’s when it happened.

  Tommy threw down his fork onto his plate and got up and stalked from the room without a word, dragging the eyes of everyone with him.

  Tony tugged at the cuff of Nathan’s shirt. “Why did Uncle Tommy leave, Dad? Is he mad at someone?”

  “Sure looks that way, son. Lucy? Free?”

  Free shrugged. “Time of the month?”

  Lucy patted Free’s arm. “Don’t make things worse.”

  Nathan’s ears pricked up. “What things? What is he making worse?”

  Lucy looked down at the table and sighed. After a moment, she’d collected herself enough to speak, but before she could answer, Caleb clapped his hands and stood. “Well. I think we should leave Nathan and his friends to sort out their difficulties without us around,” he announced. “And I’m sure we all have plenty to be getting on with.”

  Caleb and the wind farmers got up from the table, taking their coffee cups along with them—and in Tyrone’s, case a thickly draped plate of pancakes—and left the bar.

  Before he went through the door, though, Caleb turned to Nathan and the others. “I’m sure it’s not a catastrophic problem. One that will be easily solved by judicious application of diplomacy.” With that, Caleb closed the door behind him.

  Nathan looked around the table. Free was avoiding his eye. Donie reached out and held Dave’s hand. Tony put Brandon in his carry cot and stroked his head as he listened.

  Lucy sighed again. “Tommy doesn’t think we should stay here. He thinks we should still continue to go south. The winter is worsening and he thinks we’re too exposed, too far from safety up here on the ridge. Free and I… well, we think we can make this place work out for all of us. Once we build the shelters.”

  “Build what shelters?”

  Free looked up from his plate for the first time. “You’re not the only one who comes up with ideas, Nathan. You’re not the only one who knows how to fix things.”

  Undoubtedly a direct quote from Lucy. Every day in every way, they were becoming a stronger couple. A single unit who thought with one mind.

  In this case, Lucy’s mind.

  It seemed that, while Nathan had been out of action, there had been quite a lot of action going on.

  Dave piped up. “I think Tommy would rather be our go-to guy instead of Lucy.”

  Donie said something under breath that might have been sexist pig, but it was lost to Free thumping the table with his fist, making plates and cutlery bounce.

  “Dammit, Nathan, we wouldn’t have got you out of that silo without him,
I get that. But he’s Lone Star State through and through. And he wants his way. I guess he respects you for whatever reason…”

  The words dried up in Free’s throat, and his cheeks colored with embarrassment. “Sorry, no offense…”

  “None taken.”

  “But he’s been throwing his weight around, making work schedules, negotiating with Caleb without consulting Lucy or any of us first, and generally getting on our backsides. He just wants you and Dave to be ready to travel before we hightail it out of here.”

  There was only one way for Nathan to proceed now that he’d heard one side of the story, and that was to talk to Tommy. Although the Texan had only been with the party for a few months, he’d put his neck on the line for all of them, not least of all Nathan when he’d been trapped and brainwashed inside of an ex-nuclear bunker by a whacky religious cult.

  Tommy was good people. Nathan knew that. But then, so was Free, who he’d trusted with his life on several occasions. Tommy wouldn’t want to get out of Dodge unless there were good reasons, and Nathan felt sure that, given time, Tommy would tell him.

  “Okay, okay, forget Tommy for a moment,” Nathan said after the moment’s thought. “What are these shelters you’re talking about?”

  Free’s tension drained away as he set about telling Nathan his big plans. “We get ourselves an excavator; I’ve seen plenty abandoned on the road between here and Casper. We dig ourselves a shelter in the hillside. Concrete the walls, power it from the turbines. Gives us a place to get insulated against the worst of the winter—this place won’t stand up to a succession of ice storms—but keeps us close enough to the generators to ensure everything going okay if something breaks. Power is the future, Nate, and this place is the future right here.”

  Nathan could come up with a thousand reasons why the shelters were a crazy idea, not least of all what it would take to haul the materials and machinery up here to the ridge. But he didn’t want to come out and dampen Free’s spirit from the get-go, either, and receive a response like the one Free had given Tommy.

  Maybe Tommy had seen the inherent problems in the plan, too. Couple that with thinking he should be, to quote the others, “the go-to guy” for the group, not to mention his natural lone wolf personality and his force of will, Nathan could easily imagine all the reasons that Tommy had gotten up from the table and left.

  “Okay, we need to all get our heads together and make a plan about what we’re going to do.”

  “That’s it, Nate,” Lucy said. “We have got a plan. We’re staying here. And that’s that.”

  9

  Nathan didn’t feel he had the strength to tackle Tommy for at least another twenty-four hours or so.

  He was healing, that was for certain, but he felt transparent with fatigue, and he spent most of the next fifteen hours after breakfast sleeping. Thankfully, he wasn’t visited by the Cyndi dream again, but it had sure made him reluctant to turn off the light in the room he now shared with Tony and Brandon. He would have happily stayed awake all night if guaranteeing not having his wife and ex-friend in his dream wouldn’t have also meant being utterly wasted for the next day.

  When he was eventually ready to go speak to Tommy, he found him in the facility’s modestly equipped gym—Tyrone and Michael had salvaged the majority of the equipment from the nearest town’s private residencies—bench-pressing prestigious amounts of black iron weights on his back.

  Nathan sat on a nearby bench and waited for Tommy to acknowledge him. Sweat was breaking out all over Tommy’s forehead, and there were dark patches of it already around the chest of his gray tee-shirt.

  Tommy kept pressing much longer than was polite to do so. Nathan reckoned he was gauging how Nathan would employ his opening gambit. Perhaps expecting to be scolded or at least argued with, it was obvious he wasn’t going to invite the confrontation. If Nathan wanted one, he was going to have to take the initiative.

  Not feeling he wanted to be corralled into making the opening bet in this game of interactive poker, Nathan also waited. So, Tommy kept pressing, and Nathan kept waiting.

  The exertion was making Tommy’s face red with the effort, and Nathan wondered how long the other man would go on lifting the weights before he reached the point when his muscles gave out and he’d be forced to talk.

  Surprisingly to Nathan, it was much longer than he’d been expecting, proving that Tommy Ben was a darn sight more fit and hale than Nathan had credited him with being.

  Now, Tommy was staring at the rising and falling bar.

  Nathan was waiting silently.

  There was a tremble in Tommy’s wrists, but he wasn’t going to let it get the better of him. Suddenly, Nathan felt consumed with the idea that, in his attempt not to lose face and make the first move, Tommy might actually do himself an injury rather than acknowledge Nathan. Someone had to make the first decision to be the grown-up.

  Okay.

  “Okay, Tommy, I’ll speak first. You can stop lifting now.”

  Tommy, now soaked through with so much sweat that his tee-shirt was completely black, let the bar drop back into the safety position, and reached down by his side where there was a towel and a large glass of water.

  Tommy curled up and swung his legs together. Turning to face Nathan, he took a long guzzle from the glass before swiping the back of his hand over his mouth. “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “It seems there’s been some bad blood.”

  Tommy said nothing to even confirm or deny the statement. He was going to make this hard work, Nathan realized, but now that he’d started the boulder at the top of the hill, Nathan was determined to let it run.

  “If we fight among ourselves, we won’t be able to defend ourselves from the people who would want to do us harm.”

  Tommy shrugged. “If you’ve just come to give me the team talk, coach…”

  “No. That’s not why I’m here. I just came to talk.”

  Tommy scoffed. “Have you checked with Lieutenant Lucy if that’s an appropriate course of action to be taking?”

  Nathan shook his head. “I came to hear your side of things.”

  “My side? I ain’t got no side, Nate. It’s me against the lot of them. Crazy amateurs with stars in their eyes. Have they told you about the shelter?”

  Nathan nodded.

  Tommy continued, hands expressive, his eyes alive. “The Big Winter is hard on our heels, Nate. Even if we started tomorrow—and we can’t without an excavator—then it would take what? Three or four months to build. But that’s time when we could be trying to survive up here in the brunt of another season of ice storms.”

  Nathan was impressed with the passion in Tommy and how it had begun bubbling to the surface. Tommy was a practical, pragmatic man who Nathan knew he hadn’t taken enough time to get to know. He’d met them some weeks before Cyndi’s death, and survival had been tough both before and after that terrible moment. Nathan knew that he’d personally been, possibly understandably, wrapped up and preoccupied with his own stuff—too much so to probe too deeply into the makeup of Tommy Ben.

  Tommy gripped Nathan’s shoulders. “Do you want to expose your kids to that? Because, man, they’re not even my kids, and I don’t think we should.”

  Nathan recoiled at the idea. “No, of course I don’t want that for my kids. I’m not a fool.”

  Tommy let his hands drop. “But your friend Free is…”

  It sounded odd to hear that, like Tommy was suddenly distancing himself from the group. By singling out Free as ‘Nathan’s friend’ and not his own, perhaps Tommy had made the decision already to separate himself from the group. Perhaps all this was… a slow tearing of the collective. Tommy getting ready to leave on his own and make his own way south. The thought made sense to Nathan, and he voiced it.

  “You’re gonna go, whatever happens?”

  Tommy stopped short of giving a firm ‘yes’ to Nathan’s question, but the shrug of his shoulders and the breaking of eye contact told Nathan it was the most l
ikely outcome.

  And Nathan knew there was no way he could even countenance the idea of splitting from the group himself and taking his kids with Tommy, but he was also getting the distinct impression that he was closer to Tommy’s way of thinking on this than Free or Lucy would ever want to acknowledge.

  Their minds were already made up.

  The Colorado wind farm was going to be their punch back at the Big Winter and everything it had taken from them. Nathan could see where they were coming from, too—the nomadic life wasn’t one that he had any affinity for. If he could have been back home in Glens Falls, with the first buds appearing on the cherry trees in his yard, with his sons and… well, his sons, then he would have given almost anything to make that happen. But Nathan knew that wasn’t a possibility. Not even a distant one. He agreed with the notion that a permanent place would be for the best, but they shouldn’t settle for the first seemingly stable place they came across. The wind farm had power, yes, and a bar and chickens, but it was a long way from anywhere, and it was exposed. Once the turbines stopped working, as they would, if not this year than the next, they would have to move on anyway. Not least of all because the water was drawn up from a deep bore by electric pumps. Once the pumps were fritzed…

  Nathan sighed and left Tommy to his exercise, and wandered slowly back through the facility to the main entrance. Taking up a spare parka hanging on a hook by the door, he went outside.

  The eight turbines snaked in a row along the top of the ridge. They were heeled into the thrumming wind and were whhhaaaping around with beautiful precision. Nathan got a true sense of the awe Tony had tried to convey to him when he’d told him of his trip up into the nacelle. Now, Nathan craned his neck up and shielded his eyes against the sun, which had found a rare hole in the volcanic dust-filled atmosphere to shine through almost uninterrupted. The clouds were long streamers of white and purple. There was a chill in the air that the sun couldn’t shift, though, even as Nathan moved fully out of the shadow of the building.