The day after: An apocalyptic morning (52 page)

              "Of course," she said. "That would be the punishment for statutory rape."

              "Paul?" Skip asked, "Would you vote to expel Stacy for that?"

              "No," he said. "I am in agreement that what goes on between those two is none of our business."

              "The vote to exile someone has to be unanimous. Paul will vote no. So she cannot be expelled from the town for this," Skip said. "We know that going in, don't we? So what the hell is the point of interrogating them if nothing can come of it?"

              "If we can't agree to exile her," Jessica said, "we can at least order her to stay away from him."

              "And what if she doesn't?" Paul asked, picking up the thread of where he was going. "What are you going to do then? Assign her to kitchen duty? You can't, she's already on it permanently. Are you going to confine her to her house? That will just give her more time to meet with him, not to mention that the kitchen won't run very well without her. Don't you see what Skip is saying, Jess? There is nothing that can be done about this! Whether you agree with it or not, you cannot stop it!"

              This seemed to get through to her a little bit. For the first time her face showed doubt. Since she was in doubt, she returned to a track that was very much loved by her. "Well if Paul would just vote to exile her, we wouldn't be in the quandary that we're in now. The same goes for the other fornicators in town!"

              "I'm not going to resume that argument," Paul said tiredly. "I will not vote to exile someone for sexual impropriety. Period! That includes Stacy for allegedly having relations with Jack, which, I would like to state one more time for the record, I do not believe is something we should concern ourselves with in the first place."

              "Nevertheless," Jessica insisted, "a vote has been taken and a resolution has been passed. The committee has ruled that they will be brought in for interrogation and that needs to be done. We will discuss what action to take after."

              "Yeah," Dale said, nodding strenuously. "So bring them in, Skip."

              "Jesus fucking Christ," Skip exclaimed. "What are you two doing here?"

              "We are conducting town business," Jessica told him. "Now will you carry out the resolution of the committee and go get them or should we relieve you of your duties for insubordination?"

              "Jessica, Dale," he asked, fighting to keep his voice reasonable. "How much food do we have in this town?"

              "I don't see what..."

              "How much?"

              Jessica clucked a little bit. "You know as well as I do that we have about two months worth."

              "And what are you and your committee doing about this problem? How much discussion time have you dedicated to solving this impending shortage?"

              "What?"

              "I'll tell you how much," he said. "I listen to these meetings every goddamn day and you have dedicated less than twenty minutes since I've been here discussing the food shortages. Less than twenty minutes! And have you found a solution to this problem? No, you have not. Every time it comes up you vote to shelf the discussion after a preliminary review of it and then you move on to some aspect of the townspeople's personal lives. You sit in here and argue about fornication and bath rations and clothing distribution and who deserves to be placed on wood gathering detail because they've offended you and a hundred other things that are completely inconsequential to our survival. Do you realize that we're all going to starve to death if we don't find food pretty soon? Do you fucking realize that?"

              "You are out of line," Dale said, leaning forward threateningly.

              "I agree," Jessica said, pointing her finger again. "It is not your place to tell us what to discuss in the committee meeting. You are only here as a courtesy. Now I'll ask you once again to go get Stacy and Jack and bring them here. Do it now or you will be relieved of your duties."

              "Christ," he muttered, standing up. "All right," he said. "Let's get this shit over with."

              They were brought in one by one and sat down in chairs before the committee. Jack was first. Skip told him on the way over to tell the truth and answer all of their questions. He did this, speaking nervously and avoiding any graphic detail but telling the basics of what had transpired the night before. Jessica tried to pry at him a few times to elicit more detail but Jack balked when things got too personal, telling her that it wasn't her business. Strangely enough, she seemed to respect this.

              With Stacy she was much less restrained. Her questions were biting, bordering on outright abuse. Several times Skip and Paul had to gang up on her to get her to tone it down a little. The interrogation almost reduced poor Stacy to tears but she answered the questions as truthfully as Jack had, confirming completely that, yes, sexual relations has occurred, and that yes, they had every intention of continuing to make them occur.

              "Did you realize that you were committing statutory rape?" Jessica asked her, glaring at her like a veteran cop questioning a murderer.

              "Did you realize you're violating child labor laws by having him work as guard?" Stacy shot right back, increasing her respect level with Skip and Paul considerably, but infuriating Jessica.

              "You are not the one asking the questions here, little missy," she told her.

              The interrogation of Stacy was followed by a committee vote on her fate in her presence. Jessica moved that they exile her from the community but this was defeated by Paul's nay vote failing to make it unanimous. Jessica then moved that they order her to cease and desist all contact with Jack on threat of banishment. This was voted in successfully since majority ruled but Stacy defiantly told them that she would not abide by it and that furthermore, Jack was going to be moving into her house.

              "He will do no such thing," Jessica told her angrily. "If you caught in the presence of that boy one more time, you will be banished!"

              "No she won't," Paul reminded her. "Because I still will not vote for it."

              "You won't have to," Jessica said. "We won't need a vote since we have already voted that the punishment for violating the order is banishment."

              This led to a lengthy and often angry discussion on whether or not Jessica and Dale were allowed to circumvent the system in that manner. It was an argument that Paul eventually won when he threatened to enlist the aid of the rest of the township.

              "Do you really think they'll support this hussy for violating Jack?" Jessica asked when he first brought this up. "Do you really?"

              "Maybe not in this particular Micker," Paul said. "But when I explain to them that this same technique, once a precedent is set, could be used against anyone in town, they might have different ideas. Remember all of those women you threatened to banish for fornication? The ones that were saved by my one vote? How do you think they'll feel when I tell them that if they support you on this that they'll be next?"

              Again, Jessica's will was outmaneuvered. Stacy was released with a stern warning that her activities with Jack were expressly forbidden and that she was not to continue with them. But she had also been as much as told that there was nothing the committee could do about it if she elected to keep seeing him.

              As she went out the door Skip, unable to help himself, called to her. She turned to look and he asked: "Do you think Jack will need some help moving his things over to your house tomorrow?"

              She smiled, giving him a look that told him he had an ally for life. "He might," she said. "He's accumulated quite a bit from what I hear. We're planning on getting him moved in during my break between lunch and dinner."

              "I'll help him carry things then," Skip said. "See you then."

              "I'll help too," Paul replied.

              "Now wait just a minute!" screamed Jessica.

              "Bye, Stacy," Paul said, waving at her with his fingers. "Thank you for your cooperation."

              Over Jessica's continued protests, she walked out the door and disappeared.

              "What in the hell do you two think you're doing?" Jessica yelled, turning on them. "How dare you mock a ruling of this committee like that! Especially you, Paul. You're a member of it!"

              "I'm just doing what I think is right," Paul told her, lighting another cigarette. "That's what I always said I would do when I took this job."

              "How can you think encouraging rape is right?" she demanded. "Are you sick?"

              "We've already had this argument, Jess," he said, bored with the whole thing. "I'm not going to rehash it anymore."

              "Well we'll just see what the community has to say about all of this," she told him. "I'm going to talk to every person in town and tell them what happened between those two. My guess is that they'll demand her exile by the end of the night. You've used that very argument with me when it came to this man." She pointed at Skip. "Let's just see how you like having the same thing happen to you." She turned to Dale. "Come on," she told him. "Let's get started."

              They got up and headed for the door in a huff, slamming it behind them as they left.

              "So I guess the meeting is adjourned then?" Skip asked.

              "It would seem so," Paul answered, taking a particularly deep drag of his smoke.

              Skip looked at his watch, a trusty Timex that had managed to outlive the civilization of Earth. "Two hours we've been in here," he said wonderingly. "And what have we accomplished? Nothing. We have no plans to get more food or beef up defenses or make our overall operation more efficient. We've spent two hours making a worthless ruling that cannot be enforced."

              Paul smiled. "Welcome to Garden Hill," he said.

              "That's what we'll be telling the invaders when they come," Skip said, standing up. "I'm gonna go get some water and then I'm gonna go make my check on the guards. The one I should've done more than an hour ago."

              "Enjoy yourself," Paul said. "I'm gonna sit in here and smoke cigarettes and wait for the next fight to erupt."

              Skip, on the maps that he had made of the surrounding area, had named it Hill 1557. The number, in military mapping tradition, he had assigned based upon the altitude of its summit above sea level expressed in meters instead of feet, a figure he had discovered by using an altimeter accessory from one of the SUVs in town. It was the hill that he wanted to utilize to guard the north and east sections of town, the one that Jessica and Dale had voted down. As Skip walked from the community center to the current guard posts one by one, he was in plain view of the two observers that were atop the hill.

              They were hiding behind the very outcroppings of rock that Skip had wanted to dig a guard bunker next to, only they were on the opposite side, looking towards town instead of away from it. They were dressed in thick hunting clothes patterned with forest camouflage colors and they were armed with hunting rifles and pistols. Neither one of them was starving or even particularly hungry. They each had a pair of high power binoculars that they used to examine the Garden Hill suburb and the activity within it.

              "That's the guy that was with the bitch that shot Ken," one of the men said, his binoculars showing just enough of Skip's face to make the identification.

              "Yep," said the other man, who was also examining him. "Sure looks like him."

              "That's him. I wonder where he's going."

              They continued to watch as Skip walked through the streets of town towards the wall, making left turns and right turns, occasionally disappearing for a few moments behind one of the houses and then reemerging on the other side.

              "He looks like he's heading for that guard post on the east side," said the first man. "The one in that two-story."

              "Looks like it," the second agreed. "But he ain't got no rifle. Just a pistol and a radio."

              "I haven't seen that many rifles," the first said. "Maybe they ain't got that many."

              "They had a fuckin M-16 to kill Ken with, didn't they? And that guy was packing a goddamn AK."

              "True," the first said, concentrating deeply. "They must just keep them in the guard posts. If so, that'll make things real easy for us."

              "Yep."

              They watched.

              The first man was John Kramer. He was thirty-two years old and had made his living before the comet by being a hunting and fishing guide in the high Sierras. For a fee he would lead groups out into the woods and guarantee them a deer or a bear or whatever else it was that they were trying to bag (even if it meant straying a little bit into the National Forest area). His customers had mostly been city folks with more money than brains, people who would get lost if they were allowed to wander more than a hundred yards off the road without supervision. He had been leading such a group - seven men from Santa Rosa - when the impact occurred and had been more than twenty miles from the small cabin fifteen miles east of Garden Hill where he had lived.