“That would be wonderful.”
“I noticed there was no new washout around the foundation. No bad hurricanes this year?”
“None so far. Rumor is, no tropical weather at all. Of course, you know how rumors are. But there was a man up from Corpus Christi…”
“Yeah? How long ago? My dad and sister are there.”
“Oh, a couple months ago, and then there was some crazy guy who built a Polynesian outrigger canoe and paddled all the way from Fort Myers, and they both said no storms last season. And so far, no sign of any this year. Maybe it has something to do with those weird clouds we get over the ocean now? I don’t know. The canoe guy said big bubbles of steam are coming up out of the deep water.”
“Hm.”
“Now you look lost in thought.”
“Oh, I’m just thinking about DD. Someone told her the Gulf was boiling, and she didn’t want to believe it.”
“Didn’t want to? That’s a funny way to put it.”
“Yeah, well.” He paused. “DD was the one who started the machine sickness.”
Joanne laughed. “No, really. She told you that?”
“No, she really did! She was a microbiologist, and she made a bacteria…bacterium…to eat oil spills, but something went wrong. It eats everything made from oil and spreads like the common cold. She was really tore up about it; still is. Wants to find some way to fix it.”
“Hm.” Now it was Joanne’s turn to get lost in her thoughts.
“Well, no point in wasting daylight! Let me earn my keep.” He rose. “I’ll get that sad-looking tree down and fix your front steps before someone breaks their neck. What else you need done?”
Atom Smashing
Tim Schneider’s legs pumped like the pistons of the great Texas and Pacific locomotives which had traversed the Texas plains a hundred and fifty years earlier. His lungs were bellows consuming the humid air and expelling carbon dioxide. The ravenous spark in his eyes and the intentness of his body’s generation of speed, speed, speed, his lack of care for the roughness of the muddy and rocky ground he cycled over, the remains of the great freeway system which had once been America’s hope and more recently, its undoing in the Age of Autos, deterred anyone who might consider attacking him. He was a gamma particle, tearing through his surroundings with so much energy they could not affect him. He was an ICBM aimed at a single target: the protectee camp where he would be waiting for Isaac when Isaac arrived with the ampule of culture which Tim had killed for.
Tim’s already stridorous breathing became a snarling growl as he recalled Isaac vanishing into the woods with his prize. Tim knew if he could beat Isaac there, he could work the Federal Agent at the protectee camp, could play Jeff like a violin. Tim could play anyone he couldn’t intimidate. It was a gift.
He cycled between the cotton fields, still polka-dotted with unharvested bolls, and turned down the long driveway to the gate in the high chain-link fence around the collection of Quonset structures that made up the camp. He dismounted his bike a hundred yards away and listened; the camp was too quiet. It usually had a background music to it, the thrumming white noise of the conversations and movements of thousands of men crowded together in spaces built without soundproofing in mind.
Tim had thought this out during the days he’d spent riding from Indiana to Texas. At the very least, he needed to intercept Isaac before he got into the compound, get the culture ampule away from him, and bring it to Jeff himself. But it would be even better if Tim could figure out who Jeff’s superior in the agency was (better still if he could identify the vague agency, so he knew a little better whom he was dealing with) and go directly over Jeff’s head with the ampule, cutting out the not-too-bright middleman. Then, Jeff would consider Tim a loyal team player, while at the same time, the higher-up would give Tim credit for doing Jeff’s job—undermining Jeff and leaving the door open for more power and latitude for Tim.
This current situation added a new wrinkle, though. The camp appeared nearly deserted. Tim furrowed his brow. He took a few steps towards the gate, walking the bike, but froze when a voice called out, “Stop right there!”
The voice came from the administration building behind the second gate, at the end of the chain-link corridor connecting the two entrances. Tim hadn’t been able to see the man inside the darkened window, but now he saw the barrel of a rifle pointed at him. Tim was unarmed; he’d fled Sutokata too soon, without any weapons or food. He’d also lost probably ten or twelve pounds in the four and a half days since he’d left—barely stopping to sleep, drinking until he bloated whenever he happened upon a trustworthy water source, but now pissing ochre and verging on dehydration. He was a scarecrow, a shadow of his buff and sexy former gym-rat self. Not that he’d ever been a fighter (unless he knew he had the jump on someone). He was not about to try to fight anyone in this state.
“Leave the bike. Walk to the gate.” Tim complied. “Turn around slowly.” Tim did, arms out, then stopped facing the gate again.
“Keep turning.” Tim made four more revolutions like a hot dog on a gas-station griddle, before the unknown overseer said, “Stop. Stay right there.”
Tim dropped his hands to his side and waited. Two men came out of the admin building. One of them he didn’t recognize, but the other one was Cholo, a Tango Blast gang member who had taken great pleasure in demonstrating what Tim could expect more of if he failed to deliver the expected cut of each sugar bundle smuggled into the camp. Tim’s throbbing quadriceps muscle twitched a little at the sense memory of having his kneecap lovingly tapped with an axe handle.
Cholo, wasn’t. He was a big man with a wide, red, smushed-in face, straight brown hair and eyes, and an indeterminate accent. He’d grown a beard, made sparse by the acne scars on his cheeks, and he was leaner than Tim remembered, but he still had a good seventy pounds and six inches on Tim.
The other man, the one with the rifle, kept it pointed at Tim. “What do you want?”
Tim turned his palms forward again, evoking his boyish-innocence aura and said, “I only want a place to sleep. Is Jeff still in charge here?”
Cholo grunted, “I know this guy. He used to suck up to Jeff. Used to run sugar.” He asked Tim, “Got any sugar with you?”
“Afraid not,” said Tim diffidently. “But I know how Jeff can get something even better!”
“Jeff’s dead.” The other man made a decision and lowered his gun.
“Oh, no!”
Tim was rapidly recalculating his situation. Deserted camp, Jeff gone: no payoff for Tim. But also no attaboy for Isaac. Isaac might know how to contact Jeff’s superior. So, instead of ambushing and killing Isaac and taking the ampule, Tim would have to find a way to cultivate his trust once he arrived. He unconsciously ran multiple different tactics and scenarios in his head.
Out loud, he just said plaintively, “What happened?”
“Ran out of food and supplies. The admins had the peacekeepers line us up and march us out the gate. Then the admins pushed the peacekeepers out. Then they locked the gates. Me and Cholo was having a conference under one of the huts when it happened.”
When Tim had left, there had been seventeen admins supervising about two hundred protectee peacekeepers, overseeing about three thousand protectees. “How’d the two of you beat the admins?”
“Ain’t hard to beat guys who’re sleeping and don’t know you’re there.” snickered Cholo.
The other man walked over to unlock the interior gate. “I’m Tad, by the way.”
Tim waited patiently as Tad shut the first gate behind him, walked up to the second gate, and opened it to let Tim in. “Assume the position,” he commanded, then frisked him quickly, taking the kitchen knife Tim had used to slash Brownie’s throat in Indiana.
Tad locked the outer gate and walked beside Tim to the inner one. Tim eyeballed him and saw a grizzled, sun-distressed face, deeply creased into more smile than frown lines. His eyes were blue under bushy white eyebrows. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, an
d the age spots on his arms told of many years in the sun. Everyone’s hands had gotten tough after a year growing cotton in the camps, but this man’s thickened knuckles and profusion of calluses bespoke years of doing the kind of manual farm labor they’d all been forced to do. Those hands undid the inner gate lock and ushered Tim inside.
Tim faced Cholo with a wry grin, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Well,” he said. A massive shock spewed stars inside his head. Pain came a moment later, with the awareness that he was seated on the ground. “What…” he began. Cholo’s kick right under his ribs interrupted him, knocking the breath out of him and making him heave.
“Not enough for us, and you think we’ll just invite you in for tea?” Tad.
Another kick, this one in the face, laid him flat on his back and spitting teeth. The foot that landed on his testicles next sent vomit chasing the tooth fragments. Tim curled on his side as the two men rained kicks and blows on him. Finally, mercifully, he lost consciousness.
Cholo lifted one great booted foot above Tim’s head. “Prick!” He roared, ending Tim’s life with a final stomp.
Sorority
Suzanne squeezed Jo to her belly as the Jeep bounced over the sandy landscape. The devastation of the beautiful Djibouti City had astounded her. First, the deserted airport with the burned scar of the transport jet which had crashed that first day—then the new asphalt roads, melted to expose their underlying gravel. The signage: melted, like everything plastic. The vehicles, abandoned and later stripped and looted. Skeletons and bundles of rags which might have been humans, or not. No dogs, of course, but vultures everywhere. Then, when they’d entered the countryside, there was simply no one and nothing for miles and miles. Only the constant jarring of the vehicles on the ravaged roadbeds kept her from falling asleep.
Now they were on a dirt track, headed in the direction of the sea. Five Jeeps followed theirs, laden with the ammunition and weapons Musa had bought from the base. It wasn’t until just now that Suzanne wondered why they hadn’t bought any of the dwindling supply of MREs in the base’s emergency stock.
They crested a ridge and slowly bumped onto a barely-visible track overlooking the beach. Djibouti’s beaches were famous, and the town they were approaching was famous for snorkeling and swimming. Or had been, she corrected herself. She remembered an outing here with her unit in one of the skiffs, a morale-building R & R thing. It seemed like ages ago.
Things were completely different now. No more boys running alongside to lure them onto tourist boats. The beaches were littered with aluminum skeletons of fiberglass boats, little flakes of undissolved fiberglass clinging here and there, the fittings and furnishings of the boats scavenged away. To Suzanne’s surprise, though, there were wooden boats out in the water, over the reefs which she remembered as colorful paradises full of marine life. And there were also people strung out along the shoreline; women in traditional outfits with huge flat baskets on their heads or lying in the sand next to them. The women scooped something out from the shoreline. Seaweed?
But as they got closer, Suzanne saw that it was white. It looked like they were collecting big baskets of seafoam, but the way they scooped it and their effort when lifting it made it plain that it was thick, heavy, and substantial.
Suzanne also couldn’t stop staring at the women’s bodies, and not just because they were bare-breasted. They actually had breasts! And hips! And the children had cherubic cheeks, and the toddlers’ plump arms and thighs bounced as they frolicked together in the tiny waves breaking on the beach.
The Jeep caravan came to a stop before one of the lovely white houses which faced the strand. This one had a crescent moon mounted above it, which she supposed had some sort of Islamic significance.
Musa gave the driver some instructions in the Afar language and beckoned Suzanne. “Come,” he said, and she followed him through the blue-painted door. Inside, the tiled floors were lined with folded textiles of every color and texture, some quite intricately worked, and cushions were set against the walls.
“Koyna,” called Sheik Muse. “Come here.”
A young girl, not even ten, came running up barefoot. She kissed Sheik Muse’s hand and stood for him to pat her hair kindly. He gave her some directions in Afar. She disappeared, returning a few moments later with a tray covered with some sort of hard, crispy, round flatbread, thickly spread with some sort of grayish paste that was flecked with green herbs, and a ceramic flask of what proved to be clear, pure water.
Koyna squatted and motioned for Suzanne to do the same, which she did, with far less grace than the girl. She placed the tray of food on the floor between them, said something in Afar, then sprung up and left before Suzanne could even wonder how to thank her.
Suzanne didn’t know what the food was, but her stomach knew it was food. She took one of the crackers and bit a small exploratory piece off. The bread itself was bland and gritty, but the paste was garlicky and delicious, with a buttery texture and bits of some sort of crunchy vegetable in it. She made herself chew it well and swallow carefully, then took a sip of water. No off tastes. Her stomach called for more, and so she dived into the tray with gusto, throwing her self-restraint to the wind, and killed the whole meal in minutes.
She looked up to see a teenaged girl standing and looking at her calmly. The girl wore a gorgeous dress of tie-dyed material and a headband of beads, with her hair elaborately braided and coming to a point in the center of her forehead. Small beads hung from the headband across her forehead like the retro beaded curtains some people hung in doorways back home.
The girl was looking down at her from below the beads, and her gleaming eyes were calm and happy. “You like food?” the girl asked in accented English. “My name is Meala. You want more water?”
Suzanne nodded. The girl bent fluidly and picked up the tray, then came in with the flask full again. Suzanne drank deeply. “Your English is very good. My name is Suzanne.”
“Thank you. I have learning English at school. Musa has girls school in village. Bigger school here.”
“Musa treats his slaves well.”
“No slaves.”
“No?” Suzanne asked skeptically.
“No, we are the future. Sheik Musa says we are the future. Inshallah. Let me take the little one. She needs clean.”
Suzanne did recognize that the rag diaper Jo was bundled in was filthy and reeking. But she wasn’t ready to put her baby in the arms of a stranger—even one as charming as Meala. She stood up. “I’ll come with you. We will take care of Jo together.” She smiled.
It’s an Ill Wind
Jeremy felt more at home than he had in a long time. Working all day in the salty Gulf breezes, falling asleep at night to the sound of the waves on the seashore close by, talking with neighbors with a musical Texas twang in their voices: it all felt right.
Not that the folks in Indiana and Arkansas weren’t nice and all; they were. But he was a Texas Gulf Coast boy born and bred, even if his mom, rest her soul, had been a Kiwi. Even if she’d never lost that God-awful Yankee accent, Joanne had been in Bolivar long enough that she was an honorary Texan, but more important, she was family.
Jeremy wondered about his father and sister, but they’d never been real close. His sister Evie spoke Spanish, an essential skill now that the border was wide open and people flowed across the Rio Grande as they pleased. His dad never spoke anything but English, and Jeremy hoped he was making out alright. He would get down there to check on them—probably in the spring.
But in the meantime, Jeremy had an idea germinating in the back of his head. Before, he’d had his own landscaping business. His daddy had owned a ranch, until ranching got too hard for a small outfit to compete in. Jeremy knew how to run an honest business, supplying people with things they wanted.
And he thought of all the unsown fields across the US’s bread basket this past summer—farmers who’d planted hybrid seed or GMO Terminator crops which wouldn’t breed true and had no good seed the past spri
ng. He thought of all the uneasy whispers or nervous laughter he’d heard as people dipped way into the bottom of their corn cribs or flour bins.
The price of alcohol fuel for his ATV had gone up. Last year this time, unsold crops were sitting on loading docks, in trucks or in silos, or rotting in the fields for lack of distribution. The entire rural US had become a diffusely distributed factory: ten million kitchens canning and pickling and smoking and salting; a thousand gristmills revived from their limbo as tourist curiosities and reopened for business; ten thousand hastily built smaller mills operating on mule or horse or human power, the raw produce available for the price of a share of the finished product.
That included the finished product of the still, a craft handed down through the generations since the first Irish immigrants had taught their sons the art of making uisce. But it had gone from twenty gallons of ethanol for an ounce of silver to one, and now two silver coins got you just one gallon. This winter would predictably deplete the stored grain from last year. If the few farms still growing heirloom grain and vegetables had a good year, there might be a slim supply of seed available next spring. From what Jeremy had heard, it would take three or four good years, or six to ten bad ones, to get the seed stock up from the level of scarcity.
For a modern American, the notion of famine was something inconceivable. But Jeremy’s great-grandpa had lived through the Dust Bowl, and he knew America could easily go through the same thing again, but worse. There were going to be a lot of hungry people in the country’s heartland.
But there was a lot of seabutter going uncollected every low tide. It washed out to sea when the high tide returned for it like an absentminded matron who’d forgotten her reading glasses.
Jeremy took over Joanne’s desk when he got the chance. He was of the last generation that had learned to do arithmetic in school, and he took up pencils and paper. Over weeks, he slowly and laboriously made up a plan that would have taken him a day or two Before.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 37