“I remember the first day,” Ryan said. “I was at the auto parts store with Lori’s mom. Some lady came in, hysterical that the cash machine was down at the bank next door. I went outside. The bank was closed, and there was people shouting and screaming. One guy was beating at the ATM with a baseball bat. He tried to shatter the teller window, but it was bulletproof glass.”
“Right. There was a lot of bad stuff happening then. Dark times.” They were all quiet a moment, remembering the trauma and confusion of those times.
Zinnia put her hand on Lori’s shoulder. “I’m sorry about your mama.”
Lori brushed her tear away. “She wasn’t the only diabetic who died. We lost a lot of people in those days.”
In the silence, Scott said, “People still need something real. And we have something real to show them. The Bolivar Partnership has proven we have the ability to produce wealth—more wealth than we can realistically use or consume. It’s time to share it.
“I propose that we issue share coins. Each one could be worth one-thousandth of our net profit for the year. We all know how many shares we each own in the partnership, based on what we contributed, right?” Everyone nodded. “And we’ve all been working as hard as we can, because we all want the partnership to succeed. But what about someone who just wants to do a little for the partnership? If they get one of these coins,” he had a stack of silver quarters from Before, which he and Jeremy had pounded into a mold, stamping them with a picture of a brown pelican, “these Bolivar Pelicans,” he continued, holding one up, “they’re entitled to one one-thousandth of what we make.”
Everyone was quiet. Brows beetled in confusion. “So…” started Ryan, “we sold a thousand jars of seabutter in December…”
“And did we collect and render all that seabutter?”
“No, of course not.” Lori said. “Anybody with extra seabutter comes to one of the four families in the partnership and bargains for what we might have to trade for it.”
Scott patiently drew the next idea out of the group. “And in order to have something to trade for it, you have to have gotten your share of what we get each trip, right?”
“Yeah, and let me tell you…figuring out those shares is not easy!” Jeremy jumped in.
“Would it be harder if it was a thousand shares?”
“A little…but not a thousand times harder.” Jeremy said.
“Because the problem is figuring out the relative value of each item, not the actual dividing, right?”
“Yes…”
“So, what if we put all the goods we brought from every trip in a warehouse? We could let anyone who has a Pelican take one one-thousandth of the value of what’s in the warehouse. People could also pay for each load of seabutter in Pelicans.”
Everyone’s mind was ticking over. “But…what about the work we partners put into it? Most of us put in ten or twelve-hour days!”
“What about my truck and mules?” asked Ryan. “It cost me to buy ‘em. It costs me to feed ‘em. And it costs me to fix ‘em when they break down or get sick!”
Scott smiled. “Exactly. So why shouldn’t we get paid for our work and reimbursed for our expenses? In Pelicans.”
“It sounds like you’ve invented the corporation.” Lori said.
“In a sense,” Scott said. “Corporations are created by charters from governments. People in corporations weren’t held responsible for what they did if they were acting in the corporation’s interests. We’re creating this Partnership by ourselves, and nobody’s got any special privilege from it.”
“And why should people accept Pelicans for money?” Jed asked.
“Good question, young man! After all, governments can keep people from using any money but the money they issue, and they did: they charged you with ‘counterfeiting.’ We’re issuing the Pelicans just as a convenient way to keep track of the added value our enterprise creates. If someone else wants to issue another currency, they certainly can. But everyone on the Peninsula knows that we’re generating value. They can see that value coming down the peninsula in the backs of trucks and wagons every time one of us returns from a trading trip. They know a Pelican will give them one thousandth of whatever comes down that road.”
“Mm. I guess that gives them an incentive to make sure the road is in good shape, too,” mused Ryan.
“Exactly… You see where this is going?”
The light started to come on in people’s eyes. They began to toss out new examples of the way the new system might make life easier. Someone pointed out that every time someone exchanged a Pelican for another good or service they’d made or performed, it made the currency worth more.
“Yes!” Scott practically shouted. “The Pelican will be the opposite of debt-backed currency, whose value is slowly bled off by interest paid on it. The value of the Pelican will increase as long as we keep adding value.”
“I guess the danger of that would be if the supply of seabutter dries up,” ventured Zinnia. “I hate to be a downer, but…”
“If the supply of seabutter dries up,” said Joanne in her dry and creaky voice, “we will have more serious things to worry about than the value of the Pelican.”
#
Jeremy headed up the coastline in a newly-built wagon, four times the size of Ryan’s truck but with a lighter unloaded weight. It was pulled by four mules, with six donkeys trailing behind. The resourceful, intelligent little donkeys could cope with side trips down pitted rural roads. Jed sat beside him on the bench seat of the wagon, a shotgun balanced across his lap. Jed would stay with the wagon in the bigger towns, while Jeremy took the donkeys on side trips into smaller settlements. The wagon held enough seabutter to feed a small town for a month. And this was just one of four Partnership wagons plying the roads headed north.
The spring sunshine was coaxing blossoms from the vegetation everywhere, and the balmy temperatures made them hum a little tune as they rode along. Jed set aside the shotgun, tilted his fine straw hat, pulled a harmonica out of his pocket, and began to blow a bluesy melody.
The entire coastline from the tip of the peninsula all the way to Port Arthur, a distance of almost seventy miles, was lined with people and baskets. Small donkey wagons and alcohol-fueled carts cruised up and down the road, light and empty going north up the Peninsula, fully loaded with raw seabutter headed south for processing in huge vats.
A dolphin jumped in the waves. Another one! A fishing boat was dragging heavy nets. The Gulf had died back the first year after the machine sickness happened, but humans weren’t the only critters who could live on seabutter. Almost invisibly tiny crustaceans, wiggling like kittens nuzzling a mother cat, always came up with the raw gritty butter in the baskets they scooped. They must have made food for bigger aquatic creatures, as the fisheries were producing, and the dolphins were calving.
This trip was to be longer than the others. Jeremy was intent on expanding their territory further north. The donkeys twitched their ears irritably and became stubborn from walking along behind the wagons day after day, because Jeremy took no side trips. They stopped at their regular towns of Jasper, Texas, and Texarkana, and then pushed on.
The day they pulled into Pine Bluff, Arkansas was that day each Southerner dreads every year: the day balmy, cool spring weather gives way to the sultry humidity which glues one’s shirt to one’s back and swells one’s fingers so that one’s rings won’t come off. The grass was still bright green, but the pink and purple profusion of azalea and wisteria blossoms crumpled into drooping globs of mauve and grey.
This town was not one with a square, but Jeremy knew well where the center of local business lay. An intersection where a gas station had once stood was now surrounded by shacks and tents. He noticed that a couple of real walls and roofs had gone up since he’d last been there, creating stalls. In addition, the gas-station building still stood, its pumps converted into uprights for hitching posts, its glass front broken completely since shortly after the machine sickness. The building had served as a t
rading post for a time, but now the business of trading had moved to the nearby structures. The station itself appeared to be a restaurant and community center.
Jeremy decided they should stop in an open area not far from the station, but on the opposite side from all the other small enterprises. He told young Jed, “Sit tight here while I check things out.”
Jed nodded, logy with the heat, and tilted his hat down a little further to protect his face from the searing late-morning sun.
Jeremy walked inside and inhaled the delicious aromas of cooking. He looked around, taking in the wooden chairs and tables over plywood flooring, which had replaced the convenience-store plastic seating and linoleum. The coolers and freezers stood empty, the shelves which once held snacks and sundries pulled out to make room for more seating. The fluorescent lights overhead were long gone, but some glass globes were suspended from the now-empty ceiling tile grid. That made Jeremy smile. He looked closely and saw that they were glowing brightly, the light they produced overwhelmed by the brightness of the sun shining in through the open windows.
A few people looked at him curiously. One or two recognized him from his time here more than a year earlier, and nodded, but none of them were people he had come to call by name. He just nodded and smiled, and they resumed their conversations. He stepped up to the counter and looked to where the cooking smell was coming from. There, he saw a woman with shining, waist-length, braided black hair. She was stirring something on top of a stove. A stove—as in a large, cubical, stainless-steel item with round elements on top of it, producing heat!
Next to the stove stood a giant, thick-walled version of the twin glass globes that hung from the ceiling, both globes almost full of fluid. Fused together on one side, the globes were connected by a glass tube that held what looked like a loosely-twisted wool or cotton rope. Leading out of the contraption was a thick wire wrapped in braided cloth fiber, which extended to the back of the stove.
“Excuse me, Miss?” he asked loudly. “Is that a microbial fuel cell?”
The woman turned around with a smile. She was all ready to brag about the technology, but when she saw his face, the lecture turned into a shriek instead. Jeremy met her joy with his own grin and put his arms out. She sprinted around the counter and jumped on him with both arms and both legs.
After hugging him and squealing a few times, she calmed down enough to say, “Jeremy! I thought I’d never see you again!”
“Gaby, you’re a sight for sore eyes! It sure feels like coming home.”
“Where’s DD?” Gaby looked over his shoulder, arming herself for another huge embrace.
“DD and I went our separate ways. Last I saw her, she was headed back to Florida.”
Did Gaby’s face illuminate a little at that? Or had her eyes always had that glow? Jeremy filed the thought away for further consideration.
“Well, gee!” Gaby said. “I saw you and her going by when y’all dropped off the first of the biobatteries.” She gestured at the power supply in the kitchen. “But I didn’t know when or if you’d be back.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” Jeremy noticed it was a little bit warm under the roof here.
“No, no, no, I understood right away.” She smiled. “When I heard the story about how you left the batteries to be picked up? Brilliant idea: nobody could take them and keep the tech for themselves! Now there are factories for the biobatteries popping up all over the South and Midwest.”
“Perfect. That’s just what we dreamed would happen.” Jeremy found he actually had a tear in the creased corner of one eye. He turned his head and brushed it away, pretending to be scratching his nose. “Hey, how’re the kids doing?”
Gaby smiled. “Oh, they’re doing great. Cristina is shooting up like a weed, starting to look like a young lady, and Ricardo is kicking balls around like a madman, playing some crazy version of soccer they’ve invented around here.”
“And little Martha?”
“She’s alright. She took it a little hard when we found out about her daddy.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah—his whole unit went over a bridge into the river when the brake lines got infected with the machine sickness. There were only two survivors. One of them passed through here in February.” She sighed. Jeremy noticed she was wearing her wedding ring on a chain around her neck. “It was good to finally know. So many people never did, never will.”
They were both silent for a moment. Then Gaby swung her sleek black braid around and hustled into the kitchen. “Got to keep stirring this or it’ll scorch. Taste it.” She took a spoon from a drawer and dipped him a bit.
The spicy richness of the meaty stew made him put the empty spoon back in his mouth to lick it. “This is good enough to make you slap your grandma! What is it?”
“It’s a cross between a gumbo recipe Charlene gave me and my mother-in-law’s cochinita pibil.”
“Well, I’ll have a bowl of that, and one for my assistant. Is our wagon safe outside?”
“Oh, yeah!” Gaby waved a hand. “Folks around here watch out for each other. No real problems with thieving or looting, and even if there were, no one wants to disturb the peace of the market center. They’d be run off the next time they tried to come back.”
Jeremy went out and retrieved Jed and a large jar of seabutter, along with five of the smaller sample-sized jars. He brought an array of small trade goods to pay for his meal: ammunition, screws and nails, a bag of flour, a bag of sugar.
The two men came in to find two generous bowls of Gaby’s creation and two spoons. While they relished their meal, Gaby busied herself setting up for the lunch rush and looking through their merchandise. She was most interested in the sugar they had for sale—“The good stuff!”—and accepted the bag in exchange for their meal.
Jeremy noticed she eyed the flour as well, and they’d not been offered any bread or tortillas with their lunch. DD’s guess must have been right: last year, all the farmers dependent on commercial seed, had been caught flat-footed without seed to plant grain crops. Adding that to the wide-scale loss of irrigation when PVC pipes failed, taking into account the fact that she’d taken a sack of sugar for two bowls of stew, and Jeremy could read the signs of food shortage across the breadbasket. Indeed, the sun was right overhead for dinnertime, and while a number of people sat in the chairs, no one but them had bartered for any food yet.
He wasn’t the most educated man, but he had run his own landscaping business for twenty years and made a good living from it. His father was a rancher, and they needed a head for business, inputs and outputs, odds and risks.
Where some might see only a quandary and a risk of famine, Jeremy saw an opportunity. He brought the empty bowls up to the counter with one of the jars of seabutter.
“What’s this?” Gaby asked.
“I’ll tell you what: take that skillet there, heat it up, and put this in it.”
Gaby complied, and the melting seabutter began to sizzle. “Stir it up a little,” Jeremy advised, “or the protein in it will burn. This is seabutter. This is what’s making us fat down on the Gulf of Mexico.” He patted his stomach and watched Gaby’s eyes follow his hand.
“Not fat by a long shot!” she said. “I could fatten you up a good bit, make you healthy.”
“I’m carrying enough extra already, darling. Don’t be shrinking my jeans!”
Gaby scrubbed her spatula through the pan of sizzling seabutter with interest, then set it aside to cool. “I’ve heard about this stuff. You here to do business?”
Jeremy found himself feeling atypically shy. “Maybe.”
“Hmm. Well, Mr. Robinson,” said Gaby, “Maybe I’d have an interest in discussing it with you. Later. You remember where my place is?”
Jeremy made the rounds of the market stalls and gave out all the remaining samples of seabutter he’d brought with him before the sun kissed the horizon. He and Jed set up camp, and Jeremy took one of the horses and bridled him. “Don’t wait up, now.” He rode down
the road towards Gaby’s house.
Once he got to the house, an old shotgun shack which had obviously been reconfigured with a pump-handle well out front, he tied the horse to the fence. The sun was down, the cloudless sky in the west shading from yellow into green, aqua, and vivid cerulean overhead, the first singular stars revealing themselves. The day had been warm, but there was an autumnal coolness on the breeze. It braced Jeremy’s pulse and rumpled his hair.
He mounted the steps with a creak that announced him, so that Gaby opened the door before he had a chance to knock. She was wearing a gauzy yellow dress which framed her shoulders and upper chest and reflected a warm, golden glow onto her warm-toned skin. She had loosened her braid and wore her luxuriant, thick black hair gently roped over her shoulder, where it trailed across one breast. The lanternlight was dim, and he didn’t want to stare, but…
She came closer to kiss his cheek in greeting. He smelled a piney, flowery fragrance from her skin, along with the faintest aroma of perspiration; the feminine musk of it was intoxicating. He put a hand to her waist, thinking only to hold her from pulling away. She paused and looked up at him. They stood that way for a moment, and then she smiled again. That smile did something to him beyond the physical desire developing in his body—he actually felt butterflies!
She grabbed the back of his head and kissed him firmly and deeply, opening her mouth like she was biting into a piece of fruit. He surged closer to her, pressing his erect penis through the denim of his jeans against the softness of her gauze-clad belly. She tasted of blackberries and garlic. He didn’t know when he’d felt so turned on. He pressed her body to his with both hands as he deepened the kiss.
It was with supreme effort that he forced himself to break the clinch. The home’s main room was living room, dining room, and kitchen combined. The next room was a bedroom, the corner of a neatly-quilted bed just visible. The third room was just a doorway, dark and obscure.
“The kids?” he nodded that way.
“At my mom’s.” She was panting lightly.
“Perfect.” He put his hands on her waist. “Let me just look at you for a moment.” He’d not been mistaken; the gauze of the dress was translucent, and her nipples were traceable beneath it. He’d already noted her lack of undergarments. “You are so beautiful.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 40