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I’ve got to stop her from selling herself to another soldier in order to keep her kids alive. That’ll hurt her image, starting off her new life as a camp whore. Again.”

 

    Now Melissa was
marching
them to the door. Her bare feet struck the pavement like boots.

 

    Mike chuckled. “I can’t wait to find out how you’re planning to do that.”

 

    “What is Seneca Falls?” asked Rebecca. “And who was Harriet Tubman?”

 

    By the time they reached the door, Melissa had begun her explanation. She only had time to broach the topic, before the meeting started. But her words were enough to get Mike chewing on the problem, and Rebecca. And that was enough. The two finest political minds of the day—which they were, though they did not realize it yet—would take that germ and transform it into something mighty and powerful.

 

    So, in the time to come, Melissa Mailey would take great comfort in the memory of a pool of vomit. Out of that nausea would come something precious to her soul—and just as precious to the souls of thousands of others.

 

    The Inquisition, of course, would feel otherwise. So would a multitude of barons and bishops, and every witch-hunter in Europe.

 

    
 

 

    
 
Chapter 24

    Melissa’s concerns for Gretchen’s image proved to be moot. In the end, the solution to that quandary was provided by another.
    It was only a partial solution, of course, as solutions usually are, and addressed only one specific problem, as solutions usually do. But, as was often also true, it opened the door—if only a crack—for the multitude of solutions to follow.
    Melissa, in a way, played a role in that solution. Not directly, not immediately. But a genuine role nonetheless. The same role that teachers—good ones, anyway, and she was truly excellent—have always played. The same role, in a different way, that parents play. Parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents—even, when you get down to it, the guy at the corner grocery who, in an idle moment, tosses off his opinion of how the world oughta be to a youngster come in to buy a soda.
    Good boys, like bad ones, are shaped. The process is not perfect, and goes astray often enough. The mold is crooked, often warped, cracked—but it’s still a mold.
    Grantville, West Virginia was the mold that produced Jeff Higgins. All things said and done, it was as good a mold as any and a better one than most.

    Add to that the boy himself. Sitting alone, now, at the cafeteria table, staring at a window. There was nothing to see in the window. Night had fallen on the countryside beyond the glass.

 

    The others were all gone. Melissa had ushered Gretchen and her family into the classroom which was being used, temporarily, as a refugee quarter. The floor was covered with mattresses and blankets donated by the town’s inhabitants. She had shown Gretchen how to operate the toilets nearby, and then hurried to the council meeting.

 

    Jeff’s friends were gone too. They were not far away—not more than a few yards. They were in the school’s library. The library, like much of the school, was open twenty-fours a day now. Such a valuable resource could not be kept out of circulation for a moment. They were in there, heads hunched together, studying one of the school’s few copies of a German language textbook. They also had the school’s only copy of a German-English dictionary.

 

    Under any other circumstances, Jeff would have been there also. But tonight he had a much more pressing problem to deal with. A German herself, not the language. A decision was before him, and he knew that it had to be made quickly. Gretchen would wait, for a bit, to hear his decision. She would not wait long. She had people to care for, and nothing to care for them with. She did not have the luxury of waiting. So, at least, it would seem to her. In truth, she had entered a world in which old courses of action were not necessary—but Jeff knew that she would not believe it. Not yet. Not soon enough.

 

    Jeff Higgins was very far from stupid. He was innocent, more or less, but not really naive. Certainly not
that
naive.

 

    Like all teenage boys, he had his fantasies. Some of those he exorcised playing D&D, others with war games, others on computer screens, others living a vicarious life in books, others on his dirt bike. Still others—especially those involving the female sex—mostly in his mind. And a rich and sometimes feverish mind it was, too. Wildly imaginative, and ready at an instant to take flight from reality.

 

    But he could still, quite easily, separate truth from fiction. For all the fantasies about Gretchen which had raged through his hormone-saturated brain in the few short hours since he first met her—
today—
he understood the reality.

 

    Jeff was not a virgin. But his two brief encounters had not given him delusions of being irresistible. He knew perfectly well that no beautiful young woman was going to fall head over heels in love with him in an instant. If ever. True—here his fantasies tried to rise in rebellion—he had met her in quite a dramatic manner. Rescuing her, almost single-handedly, from the proverbial “fate worse than death.” A classic from fairy tales!

 

    But—

 

    He knew Gretchen. Well enough, at least. For her, that fate was not worse than death. She had already suffered it, and survived. And kept her family alive. He thought she appreciated—sincerely—what he had done. But he understand also that the woman he had watched murder a wounded man in cold blood in order to protect her sister—
her
, not her “virtue,” which would soon be gone anyway—was not going to be bowled over by another brave soldier.

 

    He paused over that, in his thinking. He
had
been brave, he realized. If he looked at it from the right angle, he could even say he had been heroic. He paused, there, and took deep satisfaction in the knowing.

 

    For himself, however, not for Gretchen—or what she thought of him. It was good to know that courage lay within him. Very good. Courage, in this new world even more than in the old, was something he was going to need.

 

    But he knew, without knowing any of the details, that the man who had formerly “possessed” her was brave as well, whatever his other characteristics had been. Jeff was not one of those foolish sentimentalists who thinks that courage is a monopoly of the virtuous. Like many boys his age, he was an aficionado of military history. The Waffen SS had compiled a criminal record almost unparalleled in modern history. Yet no one in their right mind had ever called them cowards. Certainly not more than once.

 

    Gretchen did not care about his courage on the battlefield. He knew that for a certainty. She was no fairy-tale maiden, to swoon over her rescuer. She was what many people would call a camp whore, who had done whatever she found necessary to keep herself and her family alive. And, he knew, was doing it still. His fantasies could rage and bellow at every glimpse of her flashing eyes, gleaming promise at him. His hormones could rush like Niagara, knowing that her luscious body was his for the taking. But it was all a lie.

 

    Jeff knew the truth. As much as the sight of her exposed breast had fired his imagination, his reason had seen what was real. The breast was real enough, of course. Far more real had been the baby suckling at it. A camp whore’s bastard, that the whore would trade her body to keep alive, just as she had butchered a man to do the same for her sister.

 

    He faced the truth, squarely, and came to his decision. Peace poured through his soul.

 

    He was surprised, at first, to see that the decision had already been made. Surprised, and then, obscurely pleased.

 

    He had been pondering nothing, he realized. Simply rationalizing an argument that could not be argued at all. It was not rational in the first place. He was quite certain that everyone he knew would be explaining that to him within the next few hours.

 

    He did not care. It was the only decision, under the circumstances, that
he
could make. Others could think what they wanted, say what they would. He was who he was. Accidentally, in that moment, without knowing he had even done so, Jeff adopted for his own an ancient motto.
Here I stand. I can do no other.

 

    Anymore than he could have stepped aside, on the first battlefield of his young life, and let the choosers of the slain pass by, flapping their carrion-eater wings.

 

    Jeff Higgins, too, would be a chooser of the living.

 

    The decision made, it remained to carry it out. That would be difficult, but not impossible. Not by any means. He would have help. He knew that just as certainly as he knew the rest. Gretchen would help him.

 

    He rose and marched into the library. Well, padded in. His big feet, flapping nakedly, were no more romantic than the rest of his heavy, awkward, intellectual’s body. No one would ever confuse Jeff Higgins for a figure of martial glamour.

 

    When he reached the cluster of his friends, he asked for the dictionary. They handed it over. Their eyes were full of question, but he gave no explanation. They did not press him, for which he was thankful. They would be pressing him soon enough, crushing him under ridicule.

 

    With the dictionary in hand, he walked down the long corridor to the room where Gretchen and her family were preparing to sleep. At the door, he raised his hand. Hesitated, but only for a second, before knocking. Gently, so as not to wake whomever might be asleep, but firmly.

 

    He was relieved when Gretchen herself answered the door. He was even more relieved to see that the room beyond her shoulder was quiet and dark. Everyone in the crowded room must already be asleep. That was not surprising, of course, given all that those people had been through that day. But he was still vastly relieved. He had been afraid he would have to wait while Gretchen went about the task of caring for her folk. The wait would have been very hard.

 

    From the look of her face, he thought he had probably awakened Gretchen herself. But, if so, she recovered at once. Again, her eyes and lips were shining with promise.

 

    At his gesture, she stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her. Jeff looked up and down the corridor, before deciding that this was as good a place as any.

 

    He sat down on the floor, legs sprawled out before him. Gretchen immediately took the same position, by his side, and nestled against him sinuously. Feeling her body so close, nothing between them but two bathrobes, and seeing the long stretch of bare legs exposed under the robe—
long
stretch; she had seen to that deliberately, he knew—Jeff felt giddy for a moment. The passion raging in him was almost overwhelming.

 

    But not quite. He took a deep breath, smiled awkwardly at her, and opened the dictionary. Moving from one page to the next, he began spelling out his purpose.

 

    When she realized what he was doing, Gretchen gave a little gasp. Her eyes, startled from the word in the dictionary, came to his. Her mouth opened, shaping a denial. Her head began to shake.

 

    Jeff, seeing that reaction, beamed from ear to ear. He was smiling like a cherub. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

 

    She stared back at the dictionary. She seemed paralyzed. Jeff twisted, rising to his knees, and took her face between his hands. Brought her eyes up to meet his own. Light brown; light green. “Yes, I do,” he repeated.
“Ja, ich muss.”

 

    
 

 

    Then, of course, Gretchen began nodding. Nodding. Nodding and nodding. Nodding and nodding and nodding and now she was beginning to tremble and then the tears began to flow and then she was clutching Jeff so tightly he thought for a moment his ribs might crack. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t have breathed anyway, he was so relieved.

 

    The nodding meant nothing to him. It would later, but not now. That first little headshake gave him the world. He had been prepared to live without it, but his heart was singing knowing that he had it.

 

    Her first reaction, when she understood, was the key. That instant denial, that unthinking shake of the head.
You don’t have to do this!

 

    “Yes, I do,” he whispered into her hair, cradling her. “Ja, ich muss.” He could
feel
, now, the years of terror which caused the strong body in his arms to tremble like a leaf. Terror held under such tight control for so long that now, when it was finally breaking loose, the one who held it had no idea how to let it go. For all the tenderness of the moment, some part of Jeff wanted to shake her more violently still, just to hasten its departure.
It’s over. It’s over. I promise.

 

    An uncalculating denial, a little shake of the head. That was all he would need to keep him steady, in the hard years to come. It would not be easy for them. He was old enough to understand that much. But at least he could face those years without suspicion. A woman who had lived with no choices at all had still had the courage, at the end, to hold out one for him.

 

    He had been trapped, snared, caught. But not tricked. The lamb was fair and truly slaughtered. But he could never claim, thereafter, that his executioner had not shown him the blade before he came, willingly, to the altar.
Chapter 25

    Ed Piazza underlined the last word on the blackboard, with all the flourish of a former teacher, and marched back to the table. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. Ten thousand people. Able-bodied and able to work.
Over and above
, you understand, the folks we’ve already got.”
    He clasped his hands on the table. “Some of them can include healthy old people and big enough kids. There’s a few thousand jobs that don’t require any kind of heavy labor. But most of it does. Especially the farming and construction work.”
    Mike leaned back in his chair and clasped his own hands behind his head. He studied the figures on the blackboard for a few seconds before speaking. “And if we don’t get them?”
    Quentin Underwood shrugged. The mine manager had been part of the team which, led by Piazza, had developed the production plan. “Then we have to change the equation the other way, Mike.
Subtraction.
”
    “Driving people off, in other words,” said Mike. “Push the extra mouths back into the furnace.” There was no heat in the words, just clarification.
    Quentin and Ed both looked uncomfortable. So did Willie Ray Hudson and Nat Davis, the other two members of the planning team.
    Nat cleared his throat. “Well, I don’t know as I’d put it that way.”
    “Cut it out, Nat,” growled Quentin. “Mike’s putting it bluntly, but that’s exactly what we’re talking about.”
    He sat up straight, half glaring. “I don’t like it any better than you do, Mike. But that’s the way it is. It’s just an estimate, of course, but I think it’s pretty damn close. We need ten thousand workers in order to build the infrastructure that’ll keep everybody in this area alive through the winter. Food production and shelter are the big jobs. Even if we meet this schedule, winter is going to be a pure bitch. Pardon my language.”
    Mike lifted his hands off his head and made a little waving motion. “I’m not criticizing anybody,” he said mildly. “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same wavelength.” He pursed his lips. “Does this include the labor force in Badenburg?”
    Piazza shook his head. “Badenburg’s not included on either side of the equation, Mike. We’re just figuring the people already in town and our best estimate of all the refugees camped out in the area. A fair number of them are drifting in, now. All the churches are already packed to the gills. So’s the community center next to the fairgrounds.”
    Dreeson, the town’s mayor, looked alarmed. “That fast? What’s that doing to our sanitation program?”
    “Straining the hell of it,” replied Ferrara bluntly. The science teacher leaned forward. “And that was true even
before
we got all these newcomers. The prisoners and the people from the soldiers’ camp.”
    Dreeson was looking very alarmed, now. Bill Porter interrupted before the explosion came. “Relax, Henry! The refugee center by the power plant will be operational in eighteen hours. We’ve got a sanitation system up there that has way more capacity than anything in the town itself. We can cycle hundreds of people an hour through it, easily.”
    Melissa snorted. “And how are you going to get them through it, Bill? With cattle prods? You
did
notice that I was wearing a bathrobe earlier, didn’t you? Is that the way you think I normally prance around in public?”
    Porter shrank a little from the same piercing stare that had abashed teenagers over the years. Melissa relented, after a few seconds. “Folks, I just learned from bitter experience that these people coming in are so—so
traumatized—
that the only way I got them through the showers was to lead the way personally. Even then—”
    She broke off, shuddering a little.
    Mike took his hands from his head and set them on the table, palms down. The gesture had an air of authority about it.
    “Okay, then. I’ve been trying to make a decision anyway, and it just got made. We’re going to lean on the soldiers. The prisoners, I mean. We don’t have any choice.”
    Ed cocked his head. “Lean on them?”
    “
Rely
on them. There are well over a thousand able-bodied men in that crowd. When the wounded recover—those of them who do—that’ll add maybe a couple of hundred more. That’s the start of our labor force. We’ll run them through the sanitation process at the power plant as soon as it’s open for business.”
    The squawks started immediately.
    “That’s forced labor!” protested Melissa. “How are you going to get them through the showers?” demanded Underwood. “What about resistance?” queried Ferrara.
    Mike scowled. “Melissa, give me a break! I’ve been a union man all my life, so I’d appreciate not getting any lectures about forced labor. Those guys aren’t downtrodden workers. They’re prisoners of war captured after launching an unprovoked attack on us. I’m not proposing to work them to death, for Christ’s sake. But they
will
work.”
    He turned to Underwood, still scowling. “How? Simple. ’Take a shower or a bullet. Delouse your hair or we’ll delouse your guts.’ How’s that for motivation?”
    Melissa started to screech, but Mike slammed his hand on the table. The flat palm sounded like a rocket. “Melissa—
cut it out
!” His scowl was purely ferocious. “These aren’t traumatized
women and children
, goddamit. These are the guys who did the traumatizing! Frankly, I don’t care if they drop dead from fear. They
will
be sanitized, and they
will
work.”
    The scowl moved on to Ferrara. “What was that? Something about resistance?”
    Ferrara smiled. “Ah—never mind. I think it’s a moot point.”
    Melissa’s mouth was still open, ready to speak. Her eyes were slits, her shoulders tense. She’d faced down bullies before, by God! Southern sheriffs and D.C. police and company goons.
If Mike Stearns thinks he can intimidate me
 . . . 
!
    Suddenly, she puffed out her cheeks. For a moment, she looked like a slender, elegant, sophisticated blowfish. Then, with a rush, blew out the air.
    “Okay,” she said.
    Mike eyed her with suspicion. “What is this? Since when do you give up so quick? I was expecting you to throw up a picket line next.”
    Melissa grinned. “Well . . . Don’t think I’m not tempted.” The grin faded. Her face grew a little weary. “I don’t like it, Mike. Not one bit. But I imagine you don’t either. And—well, you’re right, much as I hate to admit it. The alternative is just to drive them and their camp followers out.”
    Underwood cleared his throat. “Excuse me, folks, but I’ve got to say here that I think we
should
consider that alternative.” Hastily: “Well, the soldiers anyway.”
    Frank Jackson started to speak but there came a knock at the door. Ed got up and went to open it. When he saw who was standing there, his eyebrows lifted in surprise.
    Jeff Higgins. Flanked by his three friends, Larry Wild, Jimmy Anderson and Eddie Cantrell. All of their faces bore the same expressions. An equal mix of stubborn determination and deep apprehension.
    “What’s up, boys?” Ed asked. “We’re in a meeting, you know.”
    Jeff took a deep breath and spoke.
    “Yeah, Mr. Piazza, we know and I’m sorry to barge in like this but I thought—well, me and my buddies talked it over after I talked it over with them and”—a look of surprise and relief washed quickly across his face—“since they backed me up even though I thought they were gonna give me a hard time about it we talked it over and after we did we all agreed that I should come here first—they said they’d back me up—and tell you about it first on account of there’s probably going to be all hell to pay—pardon my language, Ms. Mailey—so we might as well get it over with right away. So there it is.”
    He braced himself, obviously expecting some sort of onslaught.
    Ed frowned, and turned his head to face the adults in the room. They responded with frowns of their own. In the doorway and the corridor beyond, four teenage boys braced themselves.
    Ed shook his head. “Jeff, uh—what’s this about, exactly?”
    Jeff’s eyes widened. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” He took another deep breath and launched. “Well, it’s like this and we’ve already agreed—both of us—and it’s over and settled and done with and nobody can do anything about it because I’m legal age and my parents aren’t around anyway and neither are hers either. So there it is.”
    The boys braced themselves.
    Silence. Frowns.
    Suddenly, Melissa started laughing.
    “Oh, Lord!” She bestowed a look of sheer approval upon Jeff. “Young man, I want you to know that I’ve never inflated a grade in my life, but you are
guaranteed
an A in any class of mine you ever take.”
    Jeff frowned. “I’m about to graduate, Ms. Mailey.”
    “Silly!
Adult
education. Instruction in German, if nothing else. I’ve already started learning the language so I can help teach it.”
    She beamed at Jeff. “Had to use a dictionary, didn’t you?”
    He looked sheepish. “Well. Yeah.”
    Ed exploded. “What’s this all about?” he demanded, throwing up his hands.
    “Isn’t it obvious?” Melissa pointed a finger at Jeff, wiggling it a bit. “He just proposed to Gretchen and she accepted.” Grinning: “So. When’s the wedding?”
    All hell broke loose.