H10N1 (32 page)

Farther down, two women were dumping buckets of water from a trough into the pot they had heating over a fire. The trough had been John’s idea. When they first arrived in Laurel Valley, the women were washing their clothes in the creek. But no matter how hard they tried not to stir up the bottom, they still got silt in everything.

John suggested they filter the water first. So they rigged a hand-cranked paddle wheel to get the water out of the creek. And they built a sluice for the water to run through. Once they spread a few tee shirts in the bottom of the trough to catch the silt, clean water drizzled out the far end.

Evidently, Katie was doing a cold-water wash for her fine delicates. Sure enough, when she hauled her basket to the drying lines, the first thing she hung was a leopard-print thong.

Rick nodded at one of the sentries guarding the laundry area as he strolled over to Kat.

“Hey, kid,” he said. “What time did Eric and his team leave this morning?”

“How should I know?” Kat gave him her usual eye roll. “I was still asleep.”

He hoped the men had gotten an early start. They had quite a list of supplies to look for, especially for the hospital. Taeya was in need of gauze for bandages, antibiotics, and most importantly, a new defibrillator.

Plus, whenever a team went foraging, they took a list of standard items to look for, like canning jars, batteries, ammunition, flashlights and candles, any kind of medications.

Trouping passed Kat, Rick came to his own wash and squeezed the pant leg on a pair of his jeans. They felt dry. He was just folding them into his laundry basket when he heard gunshots.

The north outpost. Rick dropped his jeans and ran for his bicycle. Another man who was helping a woman with a broken arm dropped the basket he was holding and sprinted to his own bike.

It would take them seven minutes to ride up to County Line Road. Rick’s legs pumped. The man behind him puffed as he tried to keep up. Six more men on bikes wheeled out in front of Rick at Thompson Street. Devin was in the gaggle. They must have been at the football field. A woman joined their ranks at Deckard Boulevard.

Once he hit Laurel Valley Parkway, Rick opened it up, standing to get the maximum speed. The others did the same, racing to get to the outpost as fast as they could.

Anyone who’d been around more than four months knew about the south outpost attack. Rick thought about it every time he answered a call.

Devin had just gotten some of the men organized. He had two sentries posted with walkies at each intersection leading to town. But the sentries at the south outpost were attacked before they even got a call off. Rick had been at the high school when he heard the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. By the time he got to the intersection, the two sentries were dead. They’d been sitting ducks.

After the attack, guard towers were erected on stilts at all four posts to give the sentries more advanced warning, and some protection from hostile fire.

Ahead, Rick spotted the familiar tower. Volunteers were already swarming around a horse-drawn cart. It was one of those green John Deere hay wagons. The two men in the tower had their rifles trained on the action.

The sound of wailing cut through the quiet morning, and as Rick rode closer, he saw a woman in the back of the wagon hunched over a man, her shoulders jerking as she sobbed. Blood has splattered across her face and down her arms.

The man she was crying over looked like he’d taken several hits. His shirt was soaked with blood. Taeya was going to have her hands full with this one; if he was still alive.

Up front, a man and a teenage boy sat on a makeshift bench. The boy’s hands shook as he held the reins to a single horse. The man next to him had a hand over his bicep, blood oozing between his fingers and down his tattered shirt.

The horse wheezed and stomped as though it had run a great distance. His haunches glistened with sweat, and foam drooled from his mouth.

A woman in camouflage shorts trotted up to Devin. “We got a Winchester, a hunting bow, couple of handguns. Some knives.” She nodded at the cache on ground.

“You look under the wagon?” Devin asked.

“Yes sir. Nothing. Got a wounded man in the bed. He looks pretty shot up. Another dead. The driver took a hit but it’s superficial.”

Devin pulled a walkie-talkie off his belt. “Hey, Doc.”

Taeya came back a few seconds later. “What’s up?”

“A gunshot wound up on County Line Road.”

“We’ll be ready.”

Devin and Rick rode their bikes alongside the wagon as the kid drove into town.

“What can you tell me about the folks who attacked you?” Devin asked.

“They jumped us as we came through Altamont Pass,” the kid said. “Must have been six or seven of them.”

Just hearing about the attack made the woman in the back of the wagon wail again. “Can’t you go any faster?” she cried.

Rick asked if the woman and the kid were related.

“No, sir,” the kid replied. “They joined us yesterday when they heard we were coming to Laurel Valley.”

The wagon pulled up to the elementary school, now the hospital and recovery center. Taeya had moved from her small clinic the same day John and his crew rerouted power from the windmill farm to the town’s central grid. The school was one of the few buildings with power twenty-four hours a day.

Taeya was waiting with a gurney. She had her groupies with her, two men and a woman—interns on her medical staff. They followed her around all day while she fixed breaks, stitched up cuts, tended to folks’ aches and complaints.

Once Taeya made an initial assessment, the two men got the injured man onto the gurney and wheeled him into the front door. The woman intern helped the wounded driver down. Rick escorted the crying woman and the teen as far as the double doors to the school cafeteria. Through the glass windows, Rick saw the white curtains that hung in two circles: Taeya’s surgical bays. One was lit.

Backing out of the swinging kitchen door, Taeya held her gloved hands up. She backed into the curtains, and as they parted, Rick saw the gunshot victim already on the surgical table. Two of Taeya’s assistants were hard at work cleaning away blood, prepping him for surgery. The curtain flap closed.

The driver of the wagon sat on a second gurney while an intern swabbed the wound on his arm.

“Not much you can do now but wait,” Rick told the distraught woman. He nodded at the girls’ bathroom across the hall. “We’ll wait if you want to get cleaned up.”

The woman numbly pushed open the door and went in. When she came back out, she looked like she’d been crying again, but at least the blood had been rinsed off her face and arms.

“Why don’t I show you the rest of our facility,” Rick said. Usually, he offered encouragement and bragged on Taeya’s abilities, but he figured that guy in surgery was a long shot at best. No reason for the woman to get her hopes up.

Down the hallway, he opened the door to the school’s media center. Some of Taeya’s recovering patients sat in wheelchairs, or lounged on gurneys. John sat perched on a bar stool, reading a poem.

He stopped when he saw Rick and the two others.

“Good morning, professor,” Rick said.

“Good morning, Richard.”

“What are we studying today?” Rick asked.

“George Eliot. I just finished
Count That Day Lost
.”

“Ah,” Rick nodded like he knew the poem. Maybe one day he would.

The teen cocked his head to the side as he stared at John.

“You recognize his voice?” Rick asked.

“Yeah.”

“John’s on the shortwave radio a lot. You must have heard him.”

Every morning John spent a good hour calling around to get information. His last bit of good news was about some men up in Washington that were trying to get the power up at the Grand Coulee Dam.

He chatted with folks in a community similar to theirs up in Eugene, Oregon—hard workers who just wanted to be left alone. Another colony was thriving down by the San Luis Reservoir, and John had just made contact with a man who was settling with a group of twelve near the lakes east of Modesto.

The distraught woman eased down onto the chair to listen to John read. For the first time, Rick noticed the loose bags of skin hanging from her upper arms, the extra flesh bunched at her knees. What had once been a double chin now sagged like a turkey wattle. She looked like one of those dogs with all their skin in wrinkles. Then it dawned on him. She must have been huge at one time.

He took a second to think back. When was the last time he’d seen anyone that was even overweight, much less obese? He shivered. Korean flu. The new weight loss miracle.

The wagon driver was waiting for Rick outside the cafeteria. His arm had been bandaged, and he’d been given a clean shirt.

“Everyone works in this community,” Rick told the driver and the teen. “If you’re staying, you’ll start today.” He gave them a choice of farming, security, or maintenance.

The kid wanted security. Didn’t they all? The driver picked farming.

As they drifted to the front doors, Rick explained the housing situation.

“There are plenty of empty houses. Most of us have put a sign in the yard, like ‘Rick and Taeya’, so you know when a house is occupied. But some of our newcomers just put an X on the driveway, so others know the house is taken.”

He pulled open the door and nodded to the row of stores across the street. “That old Walgreens is our Exchange. They’ve got dry goods, housewares, batteries, socks, whatever you need. But you might as well find a house and see what’s already in it. You might get lucky and find that the previous resident wore the same size shoes, or pants.”

Any remaining corpses had long since been removed, but other than that, the homes had been left as is. New occupants could decide if they still wanted a collection of ceramic roosters, or if they wanted to turn them in to the Exchange.

At the end of the row of stores, a small nail salon displayed a rack of bicycles out on the sidewalk. “You can get your transportation there. He’s also got wheelbarrows, baby strollers, garden wagons. I’ll show you where you can stable your horse later.”

A man rolled a big oil drum-style barbeque grill onto the sidewalk in front of the café. “We get together once a month and eat like pigs,” Rick said. “Most of the homes still don’t have power, so we pull out all the stops now and then.” Rick patted his belly. “You guys got lucky. Tonight it’s steaks and ribs. We’ve had a few chili cook-offs, but folks have gotten real competitive lately, trying to see who can come up with the hottest version.”

Rick tilted his head toward the driver. “Personally, I can’t take the payback the next day.”

Next on the tour was the high school next door.

“We’ve got power here too, which is perfect.” Rick walked them inside. A big picture of an Indian wearing a headdress was painted on the wall, with ‘Chiefs’ stenciled underneath.

“We did a little canning after harvest, but jars are really scarce. So, mostly we freeze everything. Wait ‘til you see our huge walk-in freezer.” He pulled open a door to the school cafeteria. “We sent a team up to Washington last month to pick apples. We were working night and day to get all that fruit cut up and frozen. And we have a butcher who can dress out a side of beef, so we freeze meat, too.”

Instead of surgical bays, the large dining area had a few tables where people could gather. A marker board listed all kinds of produce and meat, along with how many credits each item cost. Next to the board, two women sat at a table; one woman was sewing a denim patch onto the knee of some overalls, the woman next to her was ripping the zipper out of a dress.

“These ladies will tally up your credits and get you whatever you want,” Rick explained. “You get your credits at the end of each day, from where ever you’re working.”

Rick and Taeya often talked about how long it would be before someone tried to make fake credits instead of earning the real thing. Knowing the history of humans, they figured it wouldn’t be much longer.

In the kitchen, Rick heard laughing. He pushed open the swinging door and peeked in. The air was filled with a sweet aroma. One of the residents was rolling out dough for biscuits. A man stirred something in a large steam kettle.

“They’re cooking for the barbeque this evening,” Rick told the driver and the teen. “Lots of folks will bring covered dishes, too, but we like to provide some basics.”

Heading down to the locker rooms, Rick explained the shower situation. “We turn the hot water heaters on from six to seven-thirty in the morning so folks can get a shower. And again from seven to nine at night. Bring your own towel and soap. There’s a schedule of when you can get in. It’s all according to your street address.”

He pushed open the door that led out to the football field. The three of them stood for a moment watching recruits scale a climbing wall with ropes. Others practiced hand-to-hand combat. Small groups of two and three ran laps.

At the end zone, two men sat in the cab of an old truck. Two more perched in the truck bed, with rifles on their shoulders.

An instructor paced beside the truck as he hollered instructions. “An empty truck is still a temptation, so never let your guard down. Once you’re loaded, you’re a target for any two-bit thug lurking on a rooftop.”

How many times had Rick thought about the goons who’d busted up the Biosphere, and wondered what made this community any different? It was an unfortunate fact of life that if they needed something, a team had to go foraging for it. But Rick liked to think their teams were different from those slugs in Tucson. Their top priority was getting in and out without a lot of bloodshed. And to insure everyone’s safety, the teams stuck to smaller towns and left the urban squalor for the gangs.

Once he turned the teen over to an instructor, Rick and the driver headed over to Phase Two. It was a section of Laurel Valley that had never been developed. The curbing had been poured, and a couple streets paved, but no houses had been built.

Rick explained how Judith planned to turn the whole section into a huge garden. She had seeds from every conceivable crop drying in the high school gym, and they would all be planted here next spring. In the far corner, a building crew was finishing up the town’s newest patrol tower.