New Title 1 (6 page)

“
It might not come to that,” Fes replied. “Things could be back to more or less normal by next year at this time.”

I bit my tongue. Denial was clearly Fes’s drug of choice. Who was I to take it away from him. But I exchanged a look with Brian in which we both silently acknowledged that things would never be anything close to the old “normal” again.

We drove about a half mile out of town before pulling up in the yard of a farmhouse that looked like it had stood there since pioneer times. The siding was weathered gray wood and the shingles were a patchwork of colors. There were about a half dozen coops and barns, silos and storage sheds and more rusty vehicles than should be seen anyplace outside of a junkyard. The only thing that looked new and shiny about the whole place was a bright green machine parked near a pole barn. I guessed it was a harvester and that Farmer Wilkins polished the machine daily and maybe even slept with it on occasion.

“
How does that thing work?” I asked after we climbed out of the truck.

“
The combine blades mow the stalks. The corn gets separated from the cob, goes up the conveyor and comes out that chute into a wagon or truck,” Brian explained.

“
God bless technology.” I looked beyond the farmyard to the field that stretched out forever. I wasn’t looking forward to this back-to-our-roots experience.

A chunky, bald man wearing stereotypical overalls and a cap with a feed store logo on it came out of the house. He was followed by a couple of young men who looked pretty much just like him and some women who must be the sons’ wives. The family shook hands with us all around.

“
How are you doing? I’m George Wilkins. Thanks for working today. Sorry I can’t pay you—not that money means anything these days, but my wife, Ann will have a good lunch ready at noon.”

One of the women passed out burlap sacks with a strap to hang from one shoulder. “Sewed these myself so I hope they hold. We’ve never harvested by hand before.”

The elder of the two Wilkins boys explained how to pluck the ears of corn efficiently. He told us to fill our bags then empty them into the wagon at the end of the row. I began to think the entire harvest was a pointless exercise. It would take hours and a lot more people to fill the enormous wagon. We were lost, helpless babies without our machines, fuel and electricity.

“
I’m running the harvester on the next field over,” Old Man Wilkins informed us. “Tank’s almost full so I’m gonna run it dry and get some acres covered. Myers and her crew can go fuck themselves.”

“
No argument here,” Fes said. “We’re not her police force.”

I put the bag’s strap over my head and onto the opposite shoulder so it cut across my chest then pulled on the pair of work gloves I’d been given. Wilkins powered up the harvester while the crew of hand-pickers headed toward the field behind the house. I noticed that there were no townspeople other than Brian and Fes to help out. Fine. We’d slave for food and shelter then be on our way.

Walking into the tall corn stalks was like entering a dry, dead jungle or maybe the set of a horror movie with eerie little children. All that was missing to complete the mood was an evil-eyed scarecrow. A breeze rustled through the leaves making an eerie sound like rattling bones. I tripped over a clod of dirt and grabbed for a stalk to keep my balance. I was surprised by how crispy and brown the leaves were.

“
What happened? You have a drought here?” I asked Brian who was walking a couple of rows over.

“
Seed corn isn’t harvested until late in fall. You don’t pick it when it’s green like sweet corn.”

I snapped off my first ear of corn the way I’d been shown and stuffed it into my bag.
One.
I reached and pulled again.
Two.
Three.
We were ants moving a mountain grain by grain.
Four.

This was the first hands-on hard labor I’d ever done, except for bussing tables. Trays could get pretty heavy. Dancing around a pole, showing off my tits and shaking my ass couldn’t count as hard labor although it more physically demanding than people thought.
Five.

I scanned the rows on either side and couldn’t see anyone. Was I moving too slow? Falling behind? No. Through the leaves I caught a glimpse of Brian not too far ahead.

“
Hey,” I called out. “Should’ve brought my mp3 player. What’s on your playlist right now?”

His voice floated back to me. “Preacher’s Kin, Life Fail, and some other bands you’ve probably never heard of.”

“
What’s that? Like Christian rock or something?” I guessed.

“
No. Alternative.”

I recalled the high of standing under stage lights with Jeremy setting the beat behind me, Ry and Paul sandwiching me between solid bass and whining guitar. There I was, in the middle, screaming till my vocal cords were shredded, whispering seduction or nearly weeping, letting everything inside me flow out.

“
The band I used to sing with was called Never a Dull Day,” I told Brian. “We weren’t bad, just not good enough to keep it together and make the right moves. Maybe if we’d had a real agent.”

“
Sing something. I’d like to hear you.”

I glanced around. There were other people within earshot. I could hear snatches of conversations floating through the air. I’d never been shy to perform before yet suddenly my cheeks burned at the thought of singing out loud. It had been a long time since I’d sung anyplace besides the shower.

“
Okay. Here’s a ballad one of my band mates wrote. Most of our songs wouldn’t sound too good without a band backing the vocals, but this one’s slow and kinda pretty.”

I began to sing Ry’s ode to his girlfriend Shelly. The girl had been a bitch and broken his heart, but at least he’d produced this great song. The melody reminded me of some old-time Appalachian tune. The words were pretty good, nothing too cliché, just raw pain from Ry’s gut.

I searched for the second verse in my mind, found it and spilled it out while continuing to mindlessly pull corn. “
And if you ever make a plan, and if you ever see your way clear, and if you ever find your road at last, you know I’ll be… I’ll be someplace else.”

“
That’s beautiful,” Brian said when I finished. “You have a really good voice.”

“
Thanks.” My face heated more and I was glad he couldn’t see me blush. “What about you? It’s your turn to entertain me.”

“
I don’t sing.”

“
Then tell me something interesting, a story about yourself as a kid, or explain algorithms or something. It’s either that or we sing
Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall
.”

“
Algorithms, eh? Do you know what they are?”

“
Obviously not or I wouldn’t be asking.”

“
Basically an algorithm is a problem-solving method, a list of very precise instructions for completing a task. The computation proceeds through successive states resulting in a final ending state.”

“
Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer
,” I interrupted.

He laughed, a nice warm sound amidst the cool whisper of leaves. “You asked.”

“
Maybe steer away from the math stuff and tell me something about yourself instead.” I picked a little faster to catch up with Brian. It seemed he’d slowed down too, because now I could look through the leaves directly at him. “Tell me more about gummi dinosaur-eating Brian. I bet you loved
Jurassic Park
as a kid.”

“
It was one of my favorite movies and I read everything I could get my hands on about dinosaurs and paleontology. Name me any dinosaur and I could tell you what period it was from, the landscape it lived in and what it ate. The idea of mass extinction freaked me out though. I used to dwell on the idea of meteors or volcanoes causing solar winter. I was kind of morbid, fascinated by earthquakes, tidal waves and tornados.”

“
And now you’re living through a disaster. Maybe you were mentally preparing for it even then.”

“
I don’t think you can ever be prepared for something like this. You just survive it. Some better than others. It all depends on whether you’re willing to shift paradigms.”

“
Huh?” My fingers were going a little numb as I plucked and stuffed the ears into the bag bumping against my hip.

“
A paradigm is a concept or pattern. When presented with a new reality, some people are better at rolling with the punches and changing as needed. Others keep waiting for things to return to the pattern they recognize and are comfortable with. They’re stuck.”

“
Like your pal Fes and that council lady, both thinking the government’s going to ride into town and fix things. Seems like your whole town is waiting for someone to come rescue them.” I shifted the strap which was starting to dig into my shoulder from the weight of the corn.

“
While you and your group are moving toward something. Maybe it’ll be better or maybe not, but you’re accepting the change and being proactive.” We stopped picking and stood looking at each other through bands of tawny leaves.

“
I’ve always lived more in my head than in the world,” Brian said. “ Dealing hands-on with zombies forced me to be more…present than I’m used to, but that doesn’t mean I’ve accepted the new paradigm. I guess I’m still waiting along with the others, stuck in place.”

“
Huh,” I repeated. “You think a lot. It’s sexy.”

Light sparkled in his brown eyes before he looked away and resumed picking. “Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall,” he sang.

I smiled and joined him on the next verse. Soon other voices chimed in from across the field. I trudged toward the wagon to empty my first sack of corn, grunting as I lifted the heavy load and dumped it. But the group singing made my heart lift. This shared moment felt strangely significant as we worked together under a sky full of gathering clouds. Here we were, leftover remnants of humanity still singing, laughing, eating, drinking, fucking, loving and just keeping on. It was really pretty moving.

But by the time a few tired voices reached twenty-three bottles of beer on the wall, with my back aching and my hands sore from stripping corn, the happy feeling was long gone. I was exhausted, ready for a break and it wasn’t near lunch time yet.

An hour later, I stopped picking, let my bag drop to the ground and braced my hands on my hips to crack my back. Then I sat between the rows on the dirt. Let everyone leave me behind. Let them think I was a lazy slacker. I didn’t care. I rubbed my sore neck and gazed at the sky which had gone from partly sunny to lead gray over the course of the morning.

Another breeze rattled the corn and I shivered from chill and from the eerie emptiness of the sound. I didn’t like this wide open country, silent except for the constantly blowing wind. The sky stretched from one horizon to the other with no buildings or trees to interrupt it. I’d been a city girl all my life and I missed traffic noise. There was only one motor running nearby, Farmer Wilkins’s harvester droning along some distance away. I concentrated on that sound for a while and my eyes drifted almost closed.

“
Shit.” I jerked from my doze and climbed stiffly to my feet. It was one thing to slack off for a few minutes, another to curl up and snag z’s while everyone else worked. I listened for other voices or people moving through the corn, but heard only the wind and the harvester. I might have been dropped all alone on an alien planet. The stalks were too tall for me to see over and a sense of claustrophobia set in despite the sky overhead.

I snapped one ear of corn after another and thrust them into the bag, stripping the stalks as fast as I could so I could catch up with the others. Suddenly an explosion of sound and movement burst in front of me and my heart slammed into my mouth like a freight elevator rushing to the top of a building. Cawing and flapping wings signaled a few crows roused from their corn feast. But my blood was racing and my heart hammering in my chest.

I stopped picking and walked fast up the row, searching for Brian. There was nothing but whistling wind, the jungle of stalks and me. I imagined I was the last living person on Earth and that I’d be alone forever. Panic galloped through me with every beat of my heart and I reached beneath my coat for my handgun. The Wilkins family hadn’t sighted zombies in weeks, but a few people had been posted to watch the perimeter of the field and all of us were armed. A bullet from a handgun wouldn’t be enough to sever a zombie’s spinal cord but it would slow one down, giving me time to escape. Some of the others in our group carried big knives or hatchets, but I couldn’t imagine slicing through someone’s neck—even a dead person’s.