A Very Good Man (50 page)

  “I'm using a cloth, so just relax. I know the licking freaked you out, though it really does work better, releases more healing factors. Let me get the bandage back on...” Which she did quickly, working his jeans enough that anyone watching would have thought some very bad things were going on. Then she touched his neck and he suddenly dropped to sleep, wondering if it had really happened at all.

  In the morning Jake ate breakfast then set to work on making the huge water heater. It wouldn't make itself and the charcoal was still warming the ground, so it hadn't gone out yet. For once, without asking, everyone else, almost everyone, came out and worked too. The ground was cold now, not frozen. Winter would be upon them all soon, and even the lazy people were starting to feel a bit of panic set in.

  They had less than six weeks before they could expect snow and that was just on average, it could come even sooner, as little as a month. Jake thought about it for a second, remembered the stove for the greenhouse too and worked faster.

  There really always was more to do.

Chapter Ten

  The hunters didn't come back on day four. Or day five. For a while Jake wondered if they were coming back at all. There was just so much that could stop that now, zombies, other groups or even fighting amongst themselves. Just because he'd come back, that didn't mean no one had a grudge or two saved up. Everyone started getting a little tense, worried about it. Waiting and wondering.

  Well, not Jake, but the others. The hunters were mainly men and a lot of the women had selected partners once given the idea, not just the pregnant ones. They had more women than men too, so eight guys being gone all at once made a big mental difference around the place.

  They came back on the eighth day, loaded down with meat that had been smoked and cut into large roasts, hunches and chunks. They carried all this on two man litters and had four of them full. The smoking had taken longer than Carl had thought, since they had to build the little smoke house too. The hunters used part of the wood from the barn at the place Jake had started working on for that, just pulling the boards off the side.

  They had actually taken a lot of animals, but lowered the carrying weight by getting rid of most of the bones. A good enough idea, but Jake still lamented the loss of the barn. He'd have to go and fix it if he ever got a chance before it let too much rain and snow in and fell apart. Not that he had animals to go in it, but it had been his. Kind of. Was still his.

  It was set up for him to live there.

  Everyone seemed very glad to have the team back, which he got. It was a fifth of their people now, nearly, and Carl along with Barry and Spence from Vickie's team were a good part of the cleaners. If they lost them it would make a difference. For one thing Jake would have to stand extra night watch duties.

   They had real, honest and official bath houses now, with an insulated outdoor hot water heater. It held five hundred gallons of water at a time and was high enough to fill up tubs inside each house. They had two in each but several sinks too, so people could wash up that way if they didn't want to wait. The floors had crude drain pipes that carried the water away, but they'd freeze if they weren't deep, which meant that someone had to dig the three foot deep trenches to the underground wash out plain that Burt designated. It was about fifty feet of pipe, which they had, but meant a lot of work if they wanted to take a bath anytime soon. They cleared the charcoal first, finally, and then Jake started digging while the pregnant women chipped large pieces of burnt wood into smaller bits. By taking turns digging and being careful they got the pipe in the ground at an angle, so that the water would always be flowing downhill and set up broken rock shards in a large pit so it would always soak in.

  The days flowed into one and other for about a week, Jake got up, worked before breakfast, ate, tried to learn to use the forge to make basic tools, hammers, tongs and chisels first, then in the afternoon he worked at sawing wood rounds from logs. It was hard and he failed at making tools every other day at first. By the end of the week the most complex thing he'd made was a metal tong that could be used to take things out of the fire better than the much abused oversized pliers he'd been using.

  The next week, his leg still healing up, but feeling a lot better already, probably thanks to Sammi and her magic saliva, as gross as the idea was, Jake made a saw. A real one, with hammered and folded high carbon steel. Not too much, just enough to strengthen the metal, it still had to be springy and flex under pressure or it would just snap. It took three days and then he had to learn how to sharpen it using files and stones, but it gave them a second two person cutting saw for rounds. When Justine saw it she smiled at him and pointed at the windmill she had ready and waiting.

  “Power conversion gears next please.” Her eyes actually lit up at the idea, so Jake decided to give it a try. Plus she sounded cute when she said it, like gears were a special treat, just for her.

  Those were actually a lot harder than a mere saw and took a week each, since he had to make them fit each other just right and the metal was a lot thicker. Nearly two inches in places. They didn't work the first time either, and it took another week to fix. In the end they had an electric generator though, which meant they could run a couple of lights and charge some batteries most of the time.

  As long as the wind blew.

  People felt cheated by it, if only a little. Jake wondered if they thought that having a generator meant they'd be able to live like they used to? Hot water inside, light on demand and toasty electric heat? If they did, they were fools. The old world, Jake had come to understand, was gone.

  If things were better here than anywhere else that didn't start out prepared, then even if they got things back eventually, it really wouldn't be the world they started with. Too many dead, too much trauma and fear for too long.

  He felt caught up for a minute though, nearly at least, two saws worked in the yard and six people split wood constantly, as fast as the rounds came off. Faster really. Splitting was the easier task until they got to the green wood. Then it slowed way down and they had to use the hammers and awls to break the things apart. The sawing went as fast though, possibly faster than before, since Jake could actually sharpen the blades now and did that every other day or so. Samuel was learning to do it too, so they could take turns.

  That meant that it was time for another road trip, he decided, before it got too hard to drive. There was solid frost on the ground each morning now, and in a few weeks it would freeze hard for sure. He went to Nate after diner and just shrugged.

  “Going into town?” The man asked lightly, obviously getting what some of Jake's looks meant by now. Or reading his mind. Either way worked for him.

  “I want to go into Clyde. There was a gun-smith there and the place is tiny, barely a town, we haven't cleared it, but if the shop hasn't been burnt or stripped, well, we might get something useful. I want to take the police van and the small wooden cart. I checked, the one Burt made will fit in the back.”

  The other man had a nice beard now, salt and pepper and fuller than Jake could manage, he thought. The look that came from his eyes, brown, to match the hair of his youth, was considering. They all knew they needed bullets and that meant making them or finding a stash. Possibly both. They also knew that odds were good that the gun-smith in Clyde had been about the fourth thing the police of Westwood had raided. The same rationale applied for them after all and Clyde was only about twenty-five miles past their compound with very little but farm land between one point and the other.

  They were getting desperate though, mainly because of Heather and her annoying habit of being right. Especially her dreams. It was pretty freaking annoying as far as Jake was concerned.

  She'd saved Justine just two days before from a structural collapse by going out with Randy and setting up a single pole in the middle of the new wood working shop that was going up. When the half constructed roof fell in, the off-center and slender pole held it up until the large boned woman had managed to crawl out. When asked why she hadn't just told people of danger the girl had shrugged and told them that hadn't worked. Not that she dreamed it wouldn't work, but that it hadn't. It was just weird.

  The thing with her being right all the time was that she kept waking up screaming about the cannibals. Coming out of the snow. That meant they needed ammo. A wall, she assured them, would do nothing. Again all she said there was that it hadn't worked. Then on top of all these deep insights and foreknowledge she'd turn around and pester Jake about why they couldn't still be friends and berate him for being selfish and cruel.

  Because obviously it was all his fault.

  Certainly, that made total sense. What with the way he... Nope, no sense at all.

  Just to spice things up Tipper and Carley had both decided he was being too standoffish and mean as well and told him so without preamble one day about a week before, hitting him from two sides at once. He hadn't said anything, choosing to take the high road and just leave the room. If they were too stupid to get it by now, or too selfish, they probably never would.

  Each night he slept alone and had to listen to everyone else cooing and chuckling in the dark, almost everyone. Each night he wanted to die just a little harder than before. A few of the women didn't sleep with anyone, but even Nate found a guy that liked both sexes and worked out an arrangement. That was Chris, the man kind of got shared between Rita and Nate. So every time Jake went to bed he woke up feeling just a bit worse. To make things rosier, no one else even noticed it was happening. That or they didn't care. It was dark, so Jake went with the first option, no one noticed. It didn't help much, but left him with some small belief that not everyone was an asshole.

  He tried to cling to that.

  He'd had about enough at any rate, and seriously considered just going back to the second house again. It was too late he knew. If he'd stayed there it would have been fine, but now he just couldn't get things done fast enough. Not without a lot of extra supplies. The snows would come soon, and he needed to be ready for Heather's cannibals. That would be tough enough with food, water and heat taken care of. Without... He might make it, if he could hide well enough, but it wasn't likely.

  So he decided to get out, away from everyone, as he could. Nate may have been able to read minds or emotions or something, but the man didn't seem to understand what Jake was really getting at when he finally explained it. He was going. The leader thought that meant a whole team should go with him. It made great practical sense on the group level. It didn't on the personal one. Kind of a dilemma. Jake got that. It just wasn't his problem.

  “It's an unsecured location. Bad enough you keep going into town alone, but Clyde is forty miles away. What if you get stuck? You need people with you. Or if you have to clean the town. Let me get some volunteers. I'll... we'll talk in the morning.” Then the guy just turned and left. Like that was going to stop Jake from doing what he wanted? Just cutting the conversation short?

  It was true a team would help. The lone wolf bull that worked in Westwood now wouldn't cut it anywhere else. He just didn't want people around.

  Was it too much to ask?