The day after: An apocalyptic morning (40 page)

              When he was relieved at 6:00 AM by Christine and her partner de jur, Laura Fletcher, he walked listlessly back to the community center building to grab some breakfast. The official breakfast service took place at 8:00 but the kitchen staff always served some early meals to those going on and coming off watch. Jack preferred the low-key atmosphere of the pre-meal service as compared to the rowdy chaos that accompanied the official service. When he entered the gym the smell of hash browns and pancakes filled the air and his stomach immediately began to gurgle in anticipation.

              "You look extra-hungry this morning," said Stacy Keagan, the pregnant twenty-year-old who always seemed to be on kitchen duty. Stacy was somewhat of an outcast in the town, just like Jack. She was not a town woman. Like all of the men, her job had been what had brought her to Garden Hill on that fateful day. She had been one of two employees on duty at the Starbucks franchise in the strip mall. Though she was not the only woman who had been pregnant at the time of impact she was by far the most advanced in the process - her belly bulged outward with six-months of swelling - and she was the only one whose "condition" had been outside of the bounds of legal matrimony. These two facts combined with her decidedly un-Garden Hill-like appearance - she had short, died-black hair and a nose piercing with a gold stud - had guaranteed her second-class citizen status in the hierarchy of the town.

              "It's been a long night," Jack told her, watching as she shoveled a double helping of hash browns and an extra pancake onto his plate. "Is all of that for me?"

              She offered him a smile, the first he had ever seen her offer anyone. "You work twice as hard as anyone else around here," she told him. "Why shouldn't you get a little extra chow at mealtime? Just don't rat me out, okay? That bitch Jessica would have a shitfit about it."

              "Mum's the word," he told her, returning the smile. He was surprised that she was talking to him. Stacy was usually one of the quietest people in town. She was also one of the most talked about in gossip circles. The women loved speculating upon just who the father of her illegitimate child was. Jack had heard Jessica and several of her cronies advance the firm conviction that it must be "a nigger" that had knocked her up. Why else wouldn't she tell people who he was?

              "Do you mind if I join you?" she asked him, grabbing a plate of her own once she handed him his. "You're the last of the guard detail to stagger in and I just have enough time to get a little down myself before I gear up for the main breakfast.

              "Uh... sure," Jack said shyly. "Be my guest."

              She gave him another smile and began to fill her plate with food. When she was finished she waddled her way along next to him to one of the tables. They sat down next to each other and began to tear into their food.

              "I hate the morning service," she said as she cut up her pancake with a fork. "The little alien doesn't like me to be up this early."

              "The little alien?"

              "That's what I call the baby," she said, patting her large stomach affectionately. "Remember that movie? That's what it feels like to have something growing inside of you. It's weird."

              "I bet," he said doubtfully, unable to think of anything else.

              They continued to chat idly about various subjects, mostly their work schedules and their respective jobs. Jack was unsure at first of just what her motivation was for engaging him in conversation. Usually when the town women talked to him in a friendly manner it was because they were either trying to ingratiate themselves with one of Skip's "kids" or were trying to hit him up for personal information about Skip. But Stacy did not seem to fit this category. As they talked and as the words began to flow more easily from their mouths, Skip's name did not come up at all. It occurred to him that maybe Stacy just craved human company and that he was the only one who would provide it for her without making snide remarks or being condescending. If that was so he was glad to be the one to give it to her since, necessarily, it meant that she had no snide remarks or condescending tones of her own to offer him.

              He told her an abbreviated version of how he had come to be in the mountains on that particular Thursday afternoon.

              "Your mom was a wildlife photographer?" she said. "That's like, so cool. What magazines was she in?"

              "Oh... National Geographic a few times, Life Magazine once, and a couple times a year the Sierra Club magazine would publish her shots. Those were the ones she was really proud of. Most of her work was just for home display or for the UC Berkeley paper." He felt a pang of sadness wash over him as he thought of her emerging from her darkroom with the latest batch of shots from her outings. "You know, it's funny," he told Stacy. "Me and Christine used to hate it when she would force us to sit down and look at another stack of her stupid animal pictures. But now... now I'd give anything to be able to be annoyed by them just one more time."

              Stacy nodded, patting him on the shoulder companionably. "I know what you mean," she said. "My mom used to tell me I was too skinny, that I didn't eat enough, that I wasn't taking care of myself. After I started growing the little alien she got even worse. 'Stacy, you're not gaining enough weight for that baby, ' she would say. Or 'Stacy, are you taking your vitamins the way you're supposed to?' I swear, I wanted to kill her sometimes. But like you said..." she sniffed a little, a single tear running down her face, "if I could just hear her voice one more time." She looked over at him, embarrassed for herself. "I'm sorry. We hardly know each other and I'm crying in front of you. Us pregnant women don't have a lot of control over our emotions."

              "It's okay," he said. "Really. There's been a lot to cry about since that day and not a lot of time to do it in. I understand."

              She smiled again, wiping away the tear. "You're a sweetheart," she said. "Thanks for putting up with me. There are not a whole lot of people in this town that I can talk to. I'm not exactly one of the girls."

              "I know the feeling," he said. "Believe me, I do. And you can talk to me anytime you want to."

              "Thanks. I'll be taking you up on that. Count on it."

              Skip was somewhat disappointed in the number of people that signed up for his permanent guard force. Though he had not expected the numbers to be overwhelming by any means, he had expected that maybe ten or fifteen people would realize that security detail was a vital job. Not so. Of the nearly one hundred and fifty people in town that were old enough to sign up he got a grand total of six volunteers of which Christine and Jack were two of them. Though he and Christine were still not speaking to each other or sleeping together because of the Missy incident, Christine was not a vindictive person. Her name had topped the list followed by her brother's. Of the other four volunteers, personal interviews had shown Skip that two of them were women who thought that signing up for his detail would help win his favor. When told that it would not, one of them promptly withdrew her offer and the other had given him a look that seemed to say: we'll just see about that.

              On the plus side of the equation, two of the volunteers - one a man, one a woman - genuinely did seem to realize the importance of the position and, at least in the interviews, seemed to have signed up in that spirit.

              The male was Mick Engle, a thirty-three year old that had been one of the teachers at the town's small elementary school - a colleague of Janet. Though he had no military experience of any kind, he did hold a master's degree in history and did seem to realize just what kind of atrocities the human race was capable of when pushed to the edge as it had been. "I think the formation of a protective force - an army if you will - is vital to the continuation of this society here," he told Skip. "It shames me greatly that no one seems to be taking the very real threat of invasion seriously. I don't know a lot about how to protect us from it, but I'm willing and even anxious to learn."

              "Good enough for me," Skip had said upon hearing this. He held out his hand for a shake. "Welcome to the Garden Hill security force. Training will start tomorrow morning."

              The female was Paula Westover who, at thirty years old, was the third oldest woman in town. Skip, who was suspicious of the motivations of every female that crossed his path, spent a good deal of time interviewing her. She had been a town woman before the comet and she was attractive in a plain-Jane sort of way, but at the same time she was not quite cut from the same mold as the other Garden Hill women. In the first place it had been she, and not her husband, who had been the primary breadwinner for the family prior to the comet. She had been a free-lance writer whose talents had been much sought after by various women's magazines. A regular contributor of articles to Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Vogue, she had pulled in more than eighty thousand dollars the previous year by telling the nation's women how best to please their man in the bedroom and how to get the most out of their cosmetic and fashion dollars. Her husband, who she had genuinely loved and who she genuinely missed, had been a cameraman for a Sacramento news station who had happened to be on assignment in Modesto at the time of the impact. "It is just incredible to me," she had told him, almost angrily, "how locked up in the gossip and relationship war everyone in town is. Three days after the comet I was still grieving for Stan, still crying myself to sleep over everything that was gone, even debating suicide because I didn't think I could go on. And the rest of the town, what were they doing? They were fighting each other over who was going to pair up with whom, who is officially attached to someone and who is trying to move in. It's obscene. It's absolutely obscene."

              "So why do you wish to be a part of the guard force?" he asked her.

              "Because I've decided to live," she said Micker-of-factly. "I want to see the sun again, I want to be one of the people whose grandchildren rebuild everything that's been smashed. I know that the only way that is going to happen is if people make the effort to keep us alive. I'm scared to death of guns and I don't know the first thing about guarding a town but I want to learn. Most of these women here are the types that expect things to just be taken care of for them. They want to just live in their houses and do what everyone else is doing and be important without having to work for it. That's why you're having so much trouble with them now. They need someone to tell them how to live and how to act and what to wear. They were the women I wrote those stupid articles for. But I am not one of them. I'm a fighter, Mr. Adams, willing to claw my way upward to achieve a goal. That's how I went from editing term papers at Sac State to being able to name my own price for an article in a magazine. I proved myself. I'm willing to prove myself now and help defend this town so the rest of these idiots can go on pretending like they're in high society."

              "I see," Skip said, impressed with her statement. "There is one other thing that I think I should add. Forgive me if it portrays me as somewhat arrogant."

              "Of course," she said, her eyes telling him that she already knew what he was going to say.

              "You must realize that joining my detail will not assist in any endeavor you might have towards acquiring me as a male companion. That is not why I'm asking for volunteers."

              She laughed, her intelligent eyes amused. "That is rather arrogant," she told him. "But it is understandable considering the current socio-sexual climate. I understand, Mr. Adams and you can rest assured that I have no interest in you in that way. Stan was the only man for me. He was my soulmate and I will grieve for him for the rest of my life. As for sexual outlets, well, I've written more than one article on how a woman can take care of that Micker for herself and believe me, I have a lot of those research devices still in my house and I know how to use them."

              Skip was not the easiest person in the world to make blush, but this declaration by Paula was more than enough. "I see," he said slowly, extending his hand. "In that case... uh... welcome to the detail. Training starts tomorrow after breakfast."

              "See you then," Paula told him with a smile.

              Skip and Paul had to fight and argue with Jessica and Dale over each aspect of the training program that Skip wanted his new guards to go through. They did not want to release the volunteers from the other duties that they had been assigned to, they did not want to have Paul assign other people to guard detail during the training time, they did not want to allow the release of four hundred rounds of ammunition for firearms training.

              "They're security guards!" Jessica had yelled, quite exasperated. "What kind of training do night watchmen need?"

              Fortunately the issue was not one that required a vote by the committee since the establishment and training of the guard force had already been voted in. Their arguments were more for form's sake than anything else. The personnel roster was adjusted, the ammunition was released from the supply room and the training went forth as planned.

              Skip led his troops just outside of the subdivision wall on the north side, within easy view of the guard post there. He then ran them through a complete course of firearms training that included all of the various types of weapons in the Garden Hill inventory. They qualified on the pistols, the shotguns, the hunting rifles, both scoped and un-scoped, and the assault weapons, both the semi-automatics like the AK-47s and the AR-15s as well as the fully automatic M-16s. Skip had them learn the assembly, cleaning, and relative advantages and disadvantages of each type of weapon. He then had them shoot at fixed targets like cans and human shaped silhouettes he had constructed from black paper scavenged from the elementary school.