A Very Good Man (40 page)

  He wouldn't put it past her, after all, she had a lot of time to think of stuff like that if she wanted to. No TV or radio, no game stations or computers. Yeah, a clever kid could fool him if she worked at it. Still, it was more fun as a game than the ever popular “I don't like you that way” one. Jake decided to just go with it for now.

  Burt didn't wake up for hours more. Being injured really drained the energy from a body, Jake knew that from personal experience. Even little wounds added up. You didn't really notice it when you had plenty of food and a safe place to sleep, but when every day meant possibly running for your life, you got the idea pretty quick. The world now was far more dangerous than it was supposed to be. More than humans were built to withstand. At least the modern ones.

  On the shows, the documentaries that his Dad liked to watch and pretend were interesting, the pioneers always talked about how they were always tired. How there was always more to do and they never really felt rested. He got that now, but his world was a combination of that and war zone with a bad acid trip thrown in.

  How could a little girl be that old? You'd really think it would show more. Was Ken like her too? Should Jake ask? For now he decided not to. It wasn't his business as long as they weren't a threat. They were still the same people he knew, now he just had an idea that some of them might have been slacking off to keep their own secrets safe.

  And that stuff about Tipper and Vickie...

  They weren't even that tall. Amazons? Weren't they like all six-four and brawny in the legends? Black too. Or at least South American. Tipper looked like an in-shape college professor and Vickie looked... Pretty good actually. Like a cheerleader or pro-volleyball player. But her hair color was different from Tip's, blond. He hadn't compared their eye color, because who did that anymore? But they didn't look that much alike, did they? Tipper would have told him if she were special like that, right? Since it would have affected what she could do in a fight and they'd been teammates.

  Or even that she liked men too and not just women?

  OK.

  Maybe that would be too much to ask after all. She didn't seem overly close to Vickie though. If anything she seemed closest to him and Dave, then Nate and Carl. Then, did sisters and cousins have to be all that close? Being an only child, that kind of information was beyond him. The ideas filled his head and then emptied out a bit as he went to get the apples. Yeah, he had new and interesting information and things to think about, but winter wouldn't hold off just because of that. He took his cart, hoping to get enough for canning. He had a big pot and lots of pickle jars from the factory in town. The police had abandoned it as far as he could tell. That was too bad, since he really wanted to replenish his ammunition stash a bit more. He had about a hundred and sixty rounds for the nine millimeter left. He wasn't burning through it, but a couple of major attacks and he'd be trying to take zombies on with an axe.

  The apples were easy to get, it took hours, but there were seven trees in a pretty close space and he got a lot of bags of them, pillowcases mainly. Fifteen of them full. He had to go back and dump them before he got the black walnuts that had fallen in another little mini-grove. He didn't get as many of those, since they were still in their thick black husks, and those stained his hands and made them smell bitter. He didn't know if that was how to get them, but he did anyway. Just in case. If nothing else he could probably burn them once they dried. Nine full bags. Probably about four hundred pounds in all, he guessed? That meant what, a thousand plus pounds of apples? Not bad for a day's work. Now all he had to do was make sure they didn't go bad. Even he knew that the nuts were just pealed and dried or roasted. That would be the easy part really. The hard part was the apples. Those had to be saved somehow didn't they? Some could be canned, and maybe he could try drying some?

  When he got back to his house the interior had changed a little in the kitchen and main bedrooms. He walked in to find Burt sitting at the kitchen table sipping at something, a cup that smelled like broth with more garlic in it. Given what he had around, that made sense. On the flat part of the stove, in an old cast iron pan, meat was being fried, with thinly sliced apples. Sammi stood working at it with an intense look on her face. On the walls there were hangings. Just blankets nailed to the walls at the ceiling. Burt looked at him and grinned.

  “Insulation. We don't have the material to do it at the house, not yet, but if you create an inch or so of dead air along a wall it will keep the room a lot warmer. Our young friend here did it. Very capable young lady, don't you think?” He looked proud of her and winked at Jake conspiratorially. “Lois says she's indispensable in the kitchen you know. She could run the whole thing if she wanted.”

  The food was dumped out onto a large plate then transferred to smaller ones, large sprigs of some green on each. Something brown and crunchy looking was on the plates too, like slivered almonds, but that couldn't be. Picking one up with his fingers gently, the fat from the meat coating it, making it moist and too hot to hold really, Jake tasted it. He'd never had one before, but he got what it had to be anyway.

  “Pine nuts?”

  The little girl who wasn't young at all turned and nodded at him.

  “Tis the season for them. You should collect up the cones now, before all the nuts fall out. They don't burn very hot, but you can use the cones for heat in a pinch too, so you get double benefit for your labor. They taste like pine trees, but they have calories and you can pretend they're gourmet. These things used to cost about twenty dollars a pound in the city. I got that much today in about two hours.”

  Amazing. Not as cool as if a real little girl had thought of it, because experience made a big difference, but still a good idea. Sammi seemed different now, suddenly acting more confident and competent. That kind of seemed right, here she could be in charge after all, or at least do whatever she wanted, without pretending to be a real little girl. Jake knew her story, real or not and Burt didn't really work closely with her at all normally. He might just think this was normal.

  The man at the table asked about Jake's plans, the tone not all that casual about it either. He didn't say anything for a while, but he did have some didn't he? Jake nodded, taking several bites before speaking.

  “Tomorrow I'm going to get into town for more brick and maybe see if I can find some hand tools. A forge. I'm planning to retrofit part of the barn for that, because I really don't have the ability to pull large timber alone yet. I can cut them down, but not load them onto the cart. I also need to work out an improved water pump. I drove a well, like we did by the cow pasture, and it actually works. But the hand pump I made leaves a bit to be desired. It takes about ten minutes to get a bucket of water, I think the well is better than that and it's really just a failure of how I made the pump, the seals not being tight enough and some air getting in maybe?”

  The man shook his head and looked down at the table for a minute, so did Sammi. If she was acting he couldn't tell, it seemed like they both wanted to ask something, but couldn't. Jake took a bite of slightly sour apple, sweeter for having been fried like this, he thought. It was a near thing that he wouldn't have noticed Back Before, used to refined sugar and being able to reject food if he didn't find it perfect. He hadn't even been a picky eater really, not compared to a lot of people. Things had just taught him not to be too prissy anymore. Back then if a fruit fly had gotten in his food, he'd have thrown the plate of it away and gotten more.

  Now he ate the fly, glad for the tiny bit of extra.

  The old man shook his head and looked up finally.

  “It's not fair to you Jake, after those fools voted you away like they did, but we need you back. Especially for the winter. Things started falling apart in days after you left. People stopped working, thinking that they had everything they needed for the winter, but they don't, not by half and they wouldn't listen to the rest of us. We're going to be locked up for months if it snows hard and we have babies on the way... Without someone keeping order it's going to be a disaster.”

  He looked around at the room and shrugged, it looked more ragged and humble now, the wall hangings weren't exactly fine tapestries or anything, were they? It was his though and he kind of had things set up, didn't he? It would be hard, being alone all the time for months on end, he could feel that already. But here no one gave him strained and fearful looks. And if there were no women to possibly have sex with, there was also no rejection. No love for Jake at either place, but this one didn't hold out any promise of it and then steal it away. This was better, he decided.

  Jake got what was being said, he was already the bogey-man there. If he went back, especially after having helped kill all those people the other day, it would help keep things going, give people something to fear. That didn't take a genius to figure out. Why no one else had stepped up he didn't get. He asked and Sammi answered, not caring that Burt might think deep insight strange from what appeared to be a little girl.

  “No one really could except the cleaners. Dave is fantastic at what he does, but if Nate hadn't managed him as closely as he had, he would have killed a lot of innocent people too. Some people are just that annoying. Carl... He's a good fellow, but he's too good natured when it comes down to it. Too nice. I think he must have been very sweet before, don't you? He acts hard, but he cries when people die. He hides it, but it takes away a bit of the air of authority you have.” She ticked the people off on her fingers as she listed them off.

  “Burt believes in non-violence, Lois is good at her job, but can barely bring herself to walk out to the fields, even with guards. Julio is needed where he is, no matter what else is going on and Nate would be suicidal in a week if he had to kill anyone not actively trying to kill him. Even then it would be close. No one respects Tipper or Vickie enough, mainly because they're women, which is foolish, and all the sleeping around Tipper does means that too many people wouldn't believe she'd kill them and I can keep listing, but you get the idea. We could, if we had time, force a group into play, the cleaning team leaders, Dave and Barry. They could do it, together, but not as well as you can alone. Groups move too slowly for what we need.”

  Jake stopped her and held up his right hand after putting his fork down. The light was fading and he didn't have a lot of candles so they'd opened the front of the wood stove for light. It worked, he just had to watch for sparks since it didn't have a grate on it.

  “Julio? Please god don't tell me we've all been calling him Jose all this time because we're a bunch of racist pricks, that's... We may have just as well called him “chico”. I also don't know who Barry is off the top of my head. I didn't make a point of getting to know anyone overly...”

  Sammi smiled into the dark and reached over to pat him on the arm.

  “Julio, not Jose. Yes, everyone has been tending to be a bit stereotypical there. Do you know he has a PhD in agricultural sciences? He was in the States attending a conference when everything happened. What, did you think he was an illegal farm worker that just happened to be around?”

  Since that was exactly what he'd thought Jake put a hand on his forehead and nodded. He felt guilty for a second. A Doctor? And the whole time he'd treated the man like... Honestly he'd treated him like everyone else, only more important. Food guy. Yeah, that kind of trumped Doctor of agriculture now, didn't it? Or at least meant basically the same thing. Plus the man had never bothered to correct the name, so maybe he didn't care. Jake wasn't fluent in Spanish by any means, but he could have gotten “My name's not Jose, asshole” easily enough.

  Burt gave him a considering look and filled in the rest for him.

  “Barry, he's the older man on Carl's team, the war vet? Steady guy. Not as agile as the others anymore. He's glad enough to be on the hunting team now, except that for the last month the cleaners have all been on guard duty the whole time. It was voted on. Fear winning the day. I get it, I mean I wouldn't have come here on my own, even with guards, not if I could have helped it. I guess I need to grow a pair?” He sounded a bit sour suddenly, as if this was an old issue with him. Like he expected Jake to call him a coward.