Besides, Tim’s resentment of DD had developed, since he'd been sent here, into a smoldering hatred. It must have been she who betrayed him to the police, resulting in his being in custody when the world fell apart. If not for her, he reasoned, he'd have been in Houston in a luxury apartment, snorting coke with pretty little Sam, as they’d dreamed. He lay awake at night imagining how he might get back at her. This would be a delightful revenge!
LIV.
Pastoral
That Spring was an orgy of invention and discovery at Sutokata. The commune’s normal Spring workload was imbued with new urgency by their awareness that self-sufficiency was no longer a high-minded abstract goal, but rather a necessity. That necessity was compounded by the need to develop innovative ways to cache and conceal their weapons, wool, skins, clothing and bedding, ethanol, and preserved food against, not just the odd raider, but the potential of visits by the larcenous police. The lengthening spring days were full of back-breaking work, but that work was slightly less back-breaking because Jessica had converted a gasoline tractor to run on ethanol.
They turned over the muddy earth and seeded it with corn, wheat, soy, and vegetables. The herd animals were turned out to graze on the sprouting grass of the pasture. Fences were mended, ditches dredged, outbuildings patched and rebuilt. As the days continued to lengthen after the equinox, and their bodies hardened to the labor, Amit and Josh began to pal around with Jessica in the evenings, as they inspired each other to devise new ways to circumvent the loss of plastics and oils. A 50-50 mixture of goldenseal and amoxicillin, suspended in ethanol and water, had to be carefully applied to the solar panels twice weekly to keep them from becoming infected. Jessica was working on building an ethanol-powered generator for the inevitable day when the solar panels would fail. Amit and Josh had a project going involving chlorophyll extracts and different growth and conduction media to see if they could develop a supplemental, organic solar power generator. But the real excitement came when Amit told DD about his Shewanella cultures. It turned out that DD’d supervised a graduate student who was using DD’s own groundbreaking genetic engineering techniques to increase the electrical production of shewanella-based bioelectric cells. The grad student had increased the output by two orders of magnitude, and DD remembered the techniques well enough that they could, through trial and error, replicate them. Handicapped as they were by the lack of internet access to find out what research had come before them, it took hundreds of long hours of work to remake lost progress.
The work felt so much like play, Josh said one day, “I think if we had a quantum physicist here, we could make a faster-than-light biological engine.”
“As long as he wasn’t good-looking,” said DD.
“Why not?” straight-lined Amit.
“It would be too frustrating,” DD replied. “Because when he found the position, he can't get the momentum; when he found the time, he wouldn’t have the energy!”
“Mo-om!” groaned Jessica.
“The last physicist I knew checked into a hotel with a photon. The desk clerk asked if she had any luggage, but the photon said no, she was traveling light,” said Amit.
“That’s bad,” groaned Josh. “I’d tell a chemistry joke but I’m sure I’d get no reaction.”
As the weather got warmer in central Indiana, birds returned (Josh and Amit stepped up the goldenseal washes on the solar panels accordingly). Streams thawed; the air took on an earthy aroma. The frantic plowing and seeding of Spring gradually passed; the livestock were situated in their Summer homes, and the farm settled into its summer rhythm.
The days grew longer, and more evenings were passed outdoors. The badminton set was resurrected from its storage in a shed and found to be completely destroyed by p davisii; a few hours of work were required to replace the nylon net with wool, restring the racquets with gut, and make new birdies out of salvaged corks and feathers from the chickens. The Sutokatans turned into children again, batting the shuttlecock back and forth.
One day, the shuttlecock arced high into the air, paused at its apex, but never came down. The players on the ground, four on each side, stood with their racquets hanging at their sides, staring dumfounded at the sky. Something had swooped in, captured the birdie, and buzzed off into the treetops.
“What was that?” Said LaDwon.
“A hawk?” Suggested Brownie.
“No, it wasn’t alive,” said Doug. “I'm sure of it.”
The thing emerged from the trees and circled overhead. It was brownish like a hawk’s feathers, but its hum told them it was plainly mechanical. It released the birdie from its claws, then landed on the ground near the players. Sheila picked it up.
“It’s a drone,” she said. Sure enough, the thing was built of carved wood and metal, six tiny turbofans around a central container of liquid divided into two compartments, and spring-loaded dowels for pincer arms and landing legs. Wires wrapped in fiber connected all the parts. It resembled a crane fly, but it was the size of a woodchuck. The group stood around marveling at the thing, and Josh stepped out from his hiding place in the bushes grinning and holding a curious remote control made of two pieces of fused and melted glass, one piece a socket imbedded with wires, and one a smooth round ball. On closer inspection, a cavity within the socket piece contained liquid compartments just like the drone.
“What?”
“How?”
The group began to form questions, but Josh cut them off. “Biobatteries.
“This shewanella bacterium produces an electrical current by creating two different oxidation states on the aerobic and anaerobic sides of the membrane. That makes an electrical current, which flows from one side to the other. It works!” His glee was obvious.
“Epic!” exclaimed Jesse.
“It’s interesting looking,” commented Gillie. “Kind of beyond steampunk tech. Kind of rustic pioneer tech.”
Everyone had to have a turn controlling the drone. That lasted forty-five minutes or so, until it stopped responding.
“Need to put it in a warm place and add nutrients so it can recharge itself.” Josh whisked the drone indoors.
During these languorous Summer days, they started having dinner outdoors on wooden tables when the weather was clear. Afterwards, a guitar, a banjo, a fiddle, a bodhrán, a bongo, a concertina, maracas, a saxophone, a flute, a trumpet, and a variety of harmonicas might find their way outdoors to combine with voices high and low in a tapestry of kaleidoscopic musical variety which covered almost every conceivable genre, style, and era, veering from sublime harmony to catastrophic cacophony.
The local police didn’t raid them again over the summer. Visitors and new arrivals brought rumors as to why. Rumor had it that the mysterious Federal cops had shot one of the local police over some demand the local guy made. The demand itself grew in the womb of rumor, from a simple case of ammunition in the Spring, to a helicopter and SWAT gear by Independence Day. Regardless, the local police had apparently degenerated into a squabbling pack of hyenas after that incident. Some speculated that they also were running low on uncontaminated fuel, and so the radius of their predations was shrinking. DD expected the Feds to reappear at any moment, which marred her enjoyment as Spring flourished into Summer, but they never showed up. Yet.
One July evening after dinner, DD was in the herb garden with Jessica, pulling weeds. Mother and daughter were on their hands and knees between rows of leafy, fragrant flora. The moist dirt still gave off a faint trace of heat left over from the sun, now a hand’s breadth from the horizon.
“The mint has just gone crazy with all this rain!” DD observed.
“I know, so has the pennyroyal,” agreed Jessica. “I’ve gotta go pee.” She grabbed the pile of discarded weeds next to her with her right hand to carry it off, and pressed her left hand against her lower back as she rose to a wide squat and then staggered upright. The loose, long-sleeved men’s’ denim shirt she was wearing had come unbuttoned. DD glanced up, did a double take, and then stare
d. How could I not have known?
“Jessica!” Sharply.
“What, mom?” She saw her mother’s gaze and pulled the placket of the shirt together, smearing dirt onto it from the uprooted herbs in her hand. An awkward, motionless moment ensued.
“Yeah, so...” Jessica began.
“You’re pregnant.” DD observed.
“I’m sorry mom!” Jessica was suddenly nine years old again, causing DD to flash back to the night she was caught climbing out her bedroom window to meet the girl next door with a pack of cigarettes and a can of beer. Her lip trembled.
Don’t let this be like that. Don’t let me lose her again. DD stood up, more quickly than her child had, and stepped over a row of fragrant basil to wrap her arms around Jessica. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” She held her for a moment with her eyes closed, rocking gently, then took her firmly by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “In fact, it’s great! It’s wonderful!”
Then the dam burst. Jessica nestled into her mother’s neck and sobbed. It took a few minutes to purge the tear ducts. Like mother, like daughter. Nothing like a good cry to get you over something.
“Mom, I was going to tell you but there was never a good time.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. I understand.”
“But what will we do? I can’t get to the hospital! If there even are hospitals any more.”
“You really don’t know? Oh, honey! Akisni is a midwife. She apprenticed at the Farm in Tennessee. In the 80s, women used to travel for miles to Sutokata just to have a natural birth with her.”
Jessica looked hopeful. “Really?”
“Cross my heart. Let’s go find her now. I’m sure there’s a lot she’ll need to get ready.”
Strawberries, blueberries and cream. Fresh peaches and apples from the orchard. Meadows full of brilliant wildflowers which lasted just a single day in a jar on the windowsill. Rest breaks under the trees, the vivid green of the leaves overhead sharply distinct from the inebriating blue of the cloud-spotted sky. The Summer passed as a series of haikus.
August came, and harvest began in earnest. The honey light of the sun began to slant and the sunsets were earlier and earlier. The wind blew more strongly across the fields. One surprising morning, a thin coating of frost dusted the grass and their breath was visible on the crisp air of dawn. DD heard the obscene and tragic sobbing of a pig that was being slaughtered, and the smell of burning hung on the air for days as bacon and ham was preserved in the smokehouse. Flocks were culled and sausage was made. Fruit and vegetables were canned; the women (and two of the men) had a constant factory going in the kitchen, generating rows and rows of colorful glass jars with wax seals standing proudly on the shelves in the basement.
After the Fall’s raid, the collective decision had been made to create concealed root cellars to store a third of their preserved food (just enough to survive the winter on short rations, not so much that the raiders, if they came back, would know anything was missing). To make these cellars, deep holes needed to be dug, using their mini backhoe (fuel-converted, thanks to Jessica) and consuming an alarming amount of precious ethanol.
Jessica’s ankles had begun to swell to the size of softballs when she stood very long, and Akisni’d frowned and ordered her to take a supervisory role–only! –over Josh and some of the others in her mechanical projects. Jessica obediently lazed around the distillery shed and directed them as they upgraded the size of the tanks and the diameter of the piping. They pretended to need her guidance, consulting her attentively every few minutes so she wouldn't feel the urge to get up and start working. They were determined to triple their output of ethanol by the time harvest was done.
LV.
If You Want It Done Right...
“That's absurd. We can’t have protectees coming and going at random! There is enough chaos and disorder as it is!” Lee’s successor told Tim.
“I’m not a typical protectee,” Tim pointed out, “and it wouldn't be at random. This program is critical, Jeff. Top secret! I don’t even know if Lee’d want me to share as many details with you as I already have!”
Jeff stood, lightly chewing his lip, head down, and mulled it over. Jeff had contacted Lee not long after the machine sickness hit, when Jeff realized that he’d no way of contacting his own superiors. Jeff and Lee had gone to the law enforcement academy together and they still watched a game together every now and then. Jeff had figured out over the years that Lee was probably working for either NSA or DHS, but Lee was always one to play by the rules, so he never told Jeff which one, and Jeff never asked. Jeff had stayed with the FBI and never risen far in the hierarchy, but he was ablaze with a strong sense of patriotic loyalty; he wanted to remain faithful and serve his country in its hour of greatest need. He tracked Lee down, first visiting his house, then using old-fashioned plodding police work to track him to the camp. Lee was glad to have the help of someone he knew he could trust, a familiar face in a world where everything was topsy-turvy.
But Lee’d stayed true to his protocols and never trusted Jeff with the need-to-know material about this program the arrogant, but obviously brilliant, Tim Schneider was involved in. So, when Lee passed on suddenly after drinking his coffee one morning, Jeff was thrown into a position he knew nothing about. The camp physician said it was likely rat poison in his coffee that’d killed Lee. Plenty of people at the camp had reasons, both good and bad, to hate Lee; how the poison got into his coffee turned out to be a muddled question worthy of an entire detective story, and unfortunately Jeff was no Sherlock Holmes. Regarding Tim Schneider, Jeff knew only that Lee’d trusted him. Tim was no ordinary protectee, not least of all because his paper protection-camp file was entirely missing.
The Bureau’s protocols and procedures were there for a reason, and normal procedure would have been to contact base and wait to be contacted back for briefing. However, lines of communication had completely broken down. There was no base, no superiors, no level of secrecy above his, no one who could fill him in. So, he had to take Tim’s word for what was going on.
Fortunately, Tim had filled him in thoroughly on the whole situation, and the skills Jeff had learned during his training in interrogation told him that Tim was basically honest and trustworthy, if somewhat curt and snippy at times. So, DD and these hippies were eco-terrorists. Their plan was nefarious: introduce the machine sickness, and then, when the country had reached complete disarray, introduce a second bacterium which would allow them to control the production of energy and rule the revival of technology, which would allow domination of the world under the new order of life. Apparently, Tim and Lee had a mole in the commune and they’d had an agent, Isaac, traveling back and forth to communicate with him. But now, according to Tim, either the mole or the agent Isaac had apparently been compromised. The only way to tell which one it was, was to allow Tim to go to Sutokata himself to sort things out. As Jeff saw it, this was plausible.
Besides, Tim was irritating, and it would get Tim out of Jeff’s face for a while.
“Okay,” Jeff decided. “You can go.”
LVI.
What a Coincidence!
The radio, which Snowbear powdered liberally with beta-lactam antibiotics on a regular basis, sat hissing quietly in its carrel on auto-scan. No chatter’d been heard on it for months, until one gorgeous June day, a voice came through. DD was sitting with Akisni in the common room carding wool; she looked up and furrowed her brow. The voice was garbled and the words couldn’t be heard, but she thought she recognized the voice. I must be losing my mind. That sounded like Tim.
A minute or two later, she was sure of it. She felt her blood rush to her head as she identified the voice of Tim Schneider. “Is anyone there? Attention, is anyone there?” It couldn’t be him!
Akisni didn’t notice that there was anything wrong with DD (funny how you can be overwhelmed with blinding emotion and the person right next to you not notice). Akisni got up and rubbed her hands with alcohol from a small bottle before p
icking up the microphone. “This is Sutokata. Who’s calling please?”
“Oh, thank God! I am completely lost and there is a gang chasing me!” He was panting with exertion and fear.
“State your position, please.” Said Akisni.
“I am at mile marker 6 of State Road 2332.”
“You are only a little ways from us! Look to your left and you’ll see a row of spruce trees, like Christmas trees.”
“I see them.”
“That’s the entrance to Sutokata. How far behind are your pursuers?”
“A good four or five miles. I can definitely make it.”
“Sending our people out now to meet you.”
Akisni ran out to mobilize the patrols to head down the path. DD ran after her to try to stop her, but Akisni, determined, was an irresistible force. She kept brushing DD off and shushing her until the two ATVs with four armed residents had been dispatched down the trail to meet their refugee.
Finally, DD got her attention: “Akisni, I know who that is! I recognized his voice!”
“Who is it, then?” Akisni asked impatiently.
“It’s Tim!” Akisni’s blank stare showed she’d no recollection of Tim’s name. “My assistant! The one who was embezzling from the University.”
In Akisni’s eyes, her memory clicked. “But you don’t know he was embezzling. They just told you that when they were trying to get you to give them your secrets. Anyway, are you sure it’s him?”
“It’s him! Akisni, I’ve thought a lot about this. It all adds up. His spending above his means, the weird reaction of the cultures, which he ordered, that caused the machine sickness, the Sinopec transactions and Amit hearing from the Chinese. It must have been him.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 24