The day after: An apocalyptic morning (32 page)

              "You are a slut! Just because you don't have a man you're always trying to take someone else's!"

              "Enough of this shit!" Paul yelled. "Do you hear me? Enough!"

              They both looked at him sheepishly, refusing to meet each other's eyes.

              "What have I told you about fighting?" he asked. "About scratching and breaking the skin? For Christ sake, what if you get blood poisoning? Do you see any doctors around here? Do you want to die or cause someone else to die? We don't have enough antibiotics to be wasting them on people beating each other's ass!"

              They both turned their eyes downward, looking at the floor.

              "Kitchen detail for both of you," he said. "Three days worth, breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

              "Paul!" both of them protested at once.

              "That's my decision!" he said. "If you don't like it, file an appeal with the freakin' judge. You can start with dishes after breakfast today and if there are any more fights between you two, I swear to God I'll put you on house arrest! Do you understand?"

              "Yes," they both muttered.

              "Good," he said. "Now finish your breakfast and get to work."

              "And who is this?" the second woman, the one who had been pushed down asked, her eyes locking onto Skip. Immediately her face went from pouting to keen interest. "Do we have a visitor?"

              "You know damn well who this is," Paul said. "Don't try to pretend this entire room wasn't just talking about him. This is Skip. He's kind of applying for citizenship with us."

              "Hi," she said, stepping forward and holding out her hand to him. She smoothed back her mussed hair and then put a big, almost seductive smile on her face. "I'm Lisa. I heard you used to be a cop."

              "Nice to meet you," Skip said, taking her hand and giving it a quick shake. It was soft and dainty, the kind of hand that was not used to doing much work. "Yes, I was a cop not too long ago."

              Before Lisa had a chance to make another reply there was suddenly a swarm of women surrounding her, jostling each other to try to get close to him. Multitudes of names were thrown at him as they all tried to introduce themselves at once. A multitude of smiles was thrown at him as they all tried to attract his attention.

              "Ladies, ladies!" Paul said. "Please. Give the man a little room. Why don't you all go back to your seats and Skip here will come around and talk to each table, okay? I'll introduce him and explain what he wants from us and what he can do for us."

              "I know what he can do for me," one voice proclaimed boldly. Skip was unable to see whom it had belonged to.

              "Please," Paul reiterated. "To your seats. Everyone will get a chance to meet him."

              Reluctantly they retreated, shuffling back to their tables. Skip noticed that the men were all looking at him as well, although not with hostility, as he would have thought. They seemed to be more amused than anything else. A few of them even winked at him before going back to their breakfasts.

              "Well," Paul said. "Shall we begin?"

              "I guess so."

              It took almost an hour but he managed to meet and say a few words to every single person in the room. Names were thrown at him and he promptly forgot them. Faces smiled and flirted at him and he smiled back. His hand was shaken by soft hand after soft hand, only occasionally with a rough, male hand thrown in for variety. He found that Paul had not been exaggerating when he'd described the town as being full of beautiful women. Though not all of them would qualify as centerfold material, a portion of them did. And of those who didn't, it was not by much of a margin. There was not a single woman among them that a reasonable, average male would consider to be grossly unattractive. If effect, it was kind of an exercise in sensory overload. Especially with the flirtations thrown in. These flirtations ranged from the barely subtle to the outright bawdy. One woman, a petite brunette of about twenty-five, actually invited him to come to her house for "a proper introduction" after he was done with the tour. Several others made no bones about telling him that they were unattached at the moment and looking for a man. The only ones that did not openly flirt in some way were the ones that were sitting next to one of the males, usually in a protective stance. And even they were not unfriendly. On the contrary, they seemed just as happy to have him among them, probably to help occupy some of the unattached women.

              One remarkable thing that Skip noticed as he moved from woman to woman, table to table, was the fact that they were all freshly made-up. Though their clothing was mostly jeans and sweaters or flannel shirts, their faces all had carefully applied layers of cosmetics and their hair was all neatly and fashionably styled. Most had hair ribbons or clips that matched their clothing and all had nail polish on their fingernails. Jewelry was also quite prominently displayed; earrings, necklaces, bracelets, diamond rings; everything except wedding rings, although many of them still had the fading tan lines on their left ring fingers. He also smelled many different varieties of perfume wafting upward, some quite strong and nauseating, some soft and arousing. It was quite a culture shock to see and smell all of this self-pampering less than twenty-four hours after he had been living and eating and sleeping mud and filth.

              As they moved from group to group, after the initial chitchat and introductions were made, Paul, and, to a lesser extent, Jessica, would explain what Skip's proposed place in the community was. During the first stop Jessica tried to seize the initiative by declaring: "This is the man who snuck in here with a gun last night and scared us half to death. He's traveling with two small children that he left alone all night out there so he could do that. Now he wants to know if he can stay here."

              Paul immediately took her aside after this statement and a heated, though quiet discussion took place between them, ending with Jessica frowning and pouting. After that it was Paul who did most of the talking. "Skip is a former cop and a former army pilot," he would say. "He knows a lot about security and military Mickers and is offering to help us defend this place against outsiders in exchange for citizenship for himself and the two teenagers he's traveling with." From there, a brief discussion would usually ensue, although it was fairly obvious by the third stop that most of the women didn't give a rat's ass WHO he was, just that he was an available man. Jessica did manage to put in at least one snide comment per stop, usually related to the fact that he had left Jack and Christine to fend for themselves all night, but the sting of these words was usually muted by the obvious fact that no one really liked her that much. Not one person, male or female, raised any objections to his staying and it became apparent before they were halfway through the process that the community vote on the Micker that was scheduled for dinner that night would be little more than a formality.

              Finally, as the breakfast dishes were being carried into the kitchen portion of the court and the groups began to disperse towards wherever it was that they went when they weren't eating, Paul and Jessica led him on a tour of the rest of the center.

              "Hopefully Jack and Christine are all cleaned up and dressed by now," Paul said as they walked through the hallway next to the bath area. "Baths start after breakfast for those who are scheduled today. A good way to get voted out of this joint is to put any kind of a kink in the bathing schedule."

              He said this with a mocking tone of sarcasm that was plainly evident to Skip but apparently not to Jessica. She nodded in solemn agreement to these words, as if that was the most serious offense that one person could inflict upon another.

              "Here's the nerve center of Garden Hill," Paul said, leading him into an upstairs office that had once housed the homeowner's association. Several desks full of paperwork and clipboards occupied its space. In a corner were the computer terminals and monitors that had once sat atop them. "In here is where we the committee and a few helpers keep track of inventories, work schedules, housing assignments, and just about everything else that goes on here. Jessica and Dale spend a lot of their day here doing the paperwork and I spend about half of my day here. The other half I'm out breaking up fights and fixing whatever's broke."

              "You have work schedules?" Skip asked.

              "Oh yes, there's a hundred things that need to be done around here on a daily basis. Food detail, water detail, hot water detail, wood gathering and drying, child care, and of course the guard detail. We can also monitor the guard posts with the two way radio set there." He pointed to a CB that was hooked up to a car battery. "It ain't much, but it serves its purpose."

              "How do you pick who is on what detail?"

              "We try to rotate people from one thing to another on a regular basis," Paul explained. "The people here tend to get kind of antsy if they're stuck with one job for too long. Everybody gets to try their hand at everything, with a few exceptions like guard detail. There are a few women here who can't or won't learn to shoot a gun. It's my feeling that it's best not to force such people."

              "Uh huh," Skip said. "How many such people do you have?"

              "I don't really see how that Mickers," Jessica said. "You have to remember that these are mostly women of breeding. They never thought they'd end up having to walk a guard post."

              "And the rest of the world never thought it would end up dead either," Skip replied. "So, how many?"

              "About twenty or them," Paul said before Jessica could object any more. "And a good portion of the rest of them don't take the job that seriously, as you've seen."

              "Oh yes," Skip said. "That's going to have to be the first thing to change. We cannot have people screwing each other on guard duty. It is completely unacceptable."

              "For once I find myself agreeing with you," Jessica said. "As Paul told you yesterday, we have a bit of a problem with... well... fornication here. All of the women who are unattached..." she said that word with a great deal of distaste in her voice, "... are constantly flaunting themselves in front of the men. That little fight you saw this morning is a perfect example. And the men are simply pigs about it, showing very little restraint. I am firmly of the opinion that the only way to counter this problem is to exile a few people."

              "Exile people for screwing?" Skip asked. "Don't you think that's a bit harsh?"

              "Not at all," she said. "We may not have the ability to perform marriages here but the sanctity of the couple is still very alive and well. This is a sanctity that must be protected at all costs, wouldn't you agree? It is what civilization is based upon."

              "There isn't any civilization any more," he told her. "And I've been out there, you haven't. I'm not sure you quite grasp what you would be sentencing people to if you booted them. It's truly a fate worse than death. Now as a punishment for murder or for rape or something along those lines, yes, that's probably a fitting response, but for 'fornication', as you put it, I don't think it's appropriate."

              She smirked a little. "So just how would you suggest punishing those who threaten the fabric of our society with their wanton behavior? I've been over this time and again with Paul and Dale both and what happens is that nothing is done and the problem continues. How would you handle it, Mr. Adams?"

              "I don't know," he said honestly.

              "You don't know," she said, shaking her head.

              "Obviously it is a problem," he said. "Any time you have high class women rolling around on the floor clawing each other's eyes out and guards boffing each other at their posts because that's the only place they can do it, you have something that needs to be addressed."

              "They need to be punished harshly," Jessica insisted.

              "You can't enforce a ban on sex," Skip told her. "That would be even more futile than prohibition or making marijuana illegal. People are going to do it no Micker what you say and with sex, they don't even have to distill anything or grow anything or buy anything to imbibe. All they have to do is find a place to be alone."

              "That's why we should exile them," she said, as if he were an idiot.

              "And pretty soon," Paul put in, "we wouldn't have anyone left here."

              "After you kick out the first one or two, the rest would fall in line. Trust me on this."

              "No," Skip said, shaking his head, "what you'd have would be an open revolt. Trust me on this. I'm very familiar with human nature."

              Jessica scoffed at his views. "Well, either way, the decision is not in your hands. We on the committee will find a way to deal with this problem."

              After the upstairs tour Skip checked on Jack and Christine finding them sound asleep in rollaway cots in the same storage room where he had spent the night. Both were cuddled tightly under warm blankets and snoring the snores of the nearly comatose.