Winter's Edge: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (Outzone Drifter Series Book 1) (19 page)

Tall chestnut trees made up the thick canopy overhead, along with cold hardy pecan, hazelnut, and persimmon trees. Lower down in the canopy were pawpaws growing custard apples. Beside one, Poulter pointed out a kiwi tree, which he told them was laden with fruit every summer.

At the next level, lower to the ground, were a whole assembly of different fruit-bearing shrubs and bushes. They passed so many different species that Brogan’s mind could no longer keep up. He could only imagine how the place must look at the height of summer.

Poulter continued to hammer home certain fundamentals like how, once the food forest had been correctly set up using the correct mix of companion plants, it required almost no maintenance.

The three men walked out of the forest and into a clearing, then along a path that took them onto a wide sloping terrace facing out over the valley. Built along the valley’s contours, trench lines that Poulter called “swales” had been dug. He explained that it was a water harvesting technique that prevented heavy rains from destroying the hillside, and also allowed the farm to grow food all the way down the slopes.

Walking down to the ridge line of one of the swales, Poulter pointed out the area of the valley floor that belonged to Sunbright Farm, and explained how certain parts of the overall farm property were communally owned and other plots were individually owned. Everything was done based on practical needs. It made more sense for crops such as grains to be planted and harvested by the community, while on individual land farmers could make their own decisions about what vegetables to grow, what animals to rear.

“So what do you grow down in the valley?” Brogan asked.

“All sorts of things,” Poulter said. “Right now, winter crops: cabbage, lettuce, beets, carrots…stuff like that. The main planting season will begin in spring.”

As they continued walking along the ridge line, Brogan noticed pits had been dug into the ground about every fifty feet or so, with burlap sandbags stacked about eighteen inches high in front of them.

“What are these used for?” he asked.

Poulter grinned. “That’s for our .50 caliber machine guns…to defend the hill.” He indicated the berm they had been walking parallel to, where the earth dug out from a swale had been formed into a compact mound. “And these make for excellent rifle positions.”

He raised his hand and swept it across the valley. “This is a large community. All our neighbors have defensive positions just like these. We’re not hippy dippy farmers, you know. We fight to protect our land. Everyone who works here is trained and regularly drilled, both men and women. They all know what to do. No one is going to take this away from us.”

Brogan gazed at Poulter, noting the determination in his voice, the steel glint in his eyes. He believed the man.

“Have you had to fight before?” Staunton asked him.

“Many times. In the early days, we had marauders come in from the south. Not so much now since we’ve improved our defenses, but we still get slavers down from the north, after the women and children.”

Brogan raised an eyebrow “I can see why they would take women, but why the children?”

“Some of the tribes like to take boys around thirteen or fourteen years old,” Poulter explained. “Young enough to indoctrinate, old enough to fight. We have to be careful out on the fringes of the valley, or when we go hunting in the mountains. A family had their boy taken away six months ago. Never been seen since.”

The thought seemed to take the shine off Poulter’s mood, and the three men walked along the terrace in silence.

“Must have been a lot of hard work preparing all this land.” Staunton said after a while.

“Building the terraces and swales was hard work,” Poulter replied. “That’s a lot of shoveling. Fortunately, we have plenty of strong and able people here. You’d be surprised how much gets done when a whole community is involved.”

“How about clearing the land, turning the soil? That must have been even harder, I imagine,” Brogan said. “There’s so much of it.”

Poulter laughed. “That was the easy part. We got our fat friends to do most of that for us.”

“What do you mean?” Brogan said, a puzzled look on his face.

Poulter grabbed him by the shoulder. “How about I show you? That’s always the best way to explain something, I find.”

He took the men to the far side of the terrace, to an area that was lightly forested. Behind the tree line, a strip of land was cordoned off with wire fencing. Amongst the trees were about half a dozen pigs of varying sizes. Some were huge, overweight animals, others smaller.

“This is a quarter acre paddock we cordoned off, using electric fencing to keep the pigs in,” Poulter told them. “First they devoured all the overgrowth, eating pretty much everything except the trees. Once they got through all that, they began rooting, getting at food under the ground. You can see what they’ve managed to do in only ten days. They’ve completely prepared the land for us.”

“Hey, you got chickens in there too!” Staunton exclaimed, pointing to a hen that had come up to the fence, dipping its beak into the ground as it walked. “Will the hogs not eat them?”

“Not at all. Hogs and chickens work together as a team,” Poulter said, laughing. “The hogs dig up the land, and the chickens eat the seeds from all the exposed weeds. In the next day or two, we’ll just pick up and move the fence along to a new area, and plant clover in this field to fertilize the ground.”

“You say the fence is electric,” Brogan said. “How do you manage that? You got a wind turbine or something?”

Poulter nodded. “And a water turbine from the stream that runs into the valley. It gives us all the power we need. Come on, keep up with me—there’s plenty more to show you.”

Poulter next took them up a steep track that led back into the mountains. He was anxious to show them the view into the next valley. Along the way, he took a detour and brought them to what he called a “passive-solar cold-climate glasshouse.” It was heated by a thermal-mass rocket-stove that heated the glasshouse using only small amounts of coppiced wood, allowing the farm to grow summer vegetables much earlier in the year and well into autumn. Brogan and Staunton marveled at the simple ingenuity of its design.

“Boy, this is a lot for a couple of Metro city slickers to take in,” Staunton said, shaking his head in amazement.

Poulter chuckled. “Sure, it takes time to learn how to build these ecosystems, but we’ve plenty of good people here to teach you.”

“But you’re the head honcho around here, right?” Brogan asked.

“Of the actual farm, yes, I guess, you could call me that. However, of the overall project, I’m merely one of several trustees who started Sunbright. There are many more skills required here to run something like this other than just farming. Especially in the Outzone.”

“Such as?”

“Such as community organizational skills, for example.” Poulter smiled. “I’ll be the first to admit, that’s something I’m not very good at. Also security. I certainly had no idea how to set up our defenses when I first got here. I have a far better idea now, of course.”

“So Max, what did you do back in the State?” Brogan asked the farmer. “How did you get to learn all this…this permaculture stuff?”

“Before the war, I was a professor of botany and genetics at a large university,” Poulter replied, a serious look on his face. “I was involved in agricultural biotechnological research. Stuff that the biotech giants I’ve just talked about are interested in. They funded a lot of our projects. For that, of course, they got ongoing access to our research findings. Stuff of interest to the genetically-engineered seed divisions of these companies.”

“Shit, and after all you’ve said about them too,” Staunton said.

“Yes indeed. See, I thought what I was doing was helping to fight food poverty around the world, developing better strains of seeds. Seeds that were drought-resistant, flood-resistant, saline-resistant, whatever. But in fact all I was doing was helping to enslave farmers, forcing them to buy their seeds from the corporations.”

Poulter paused a moment. “Big business and the Strata State are all about imposing their systems of indoctrination. Take a look at the history of the pharmaceutical industry, and how Rockefeller singlehandedly started it, as a good example. It always starts with education. Mine included. If it wasn’t for the war, I’d probably still be there at the university. A frightening thought. The war woke a lot of people up.”

“Sure did,” Brogan said. “The ones it didn’t kill.”

They had reached the top of the hill, all three of them a little out of breath. Poulter led them down to a rocky terrace that overlooked a steep-sided valley below.

“In traditional farming, this would be considered marginal land. No use to anyone, because it’s not cost-beneficial to cultivate it. In permaculture, we think of this as some of the most valuable land a farmer can own.”

Brogan took out his binoculars once more. On both sides of the valley below, zig-zagging across the slopes, was a bewildering series of terraces and raised beds that had been carved into the hillside. Along the terraces, following gently sloping gradients, a myriad of interconnected ponds and waterways snaked their way down to the valley floor. He spotted duck and geese, and remembered what Carter had told them; that the cascade pond system bred aquatic plants, freshwater crayfish, water fowl, and many other species.

Through his glasses, Brogan tracked the waterway all the way down the hillside. Near the bottom, nestled into the lower slopes, were several farmhouses. He counted five of them. They had strange, rounded walls, and green sod roofs whose grassy tops blended perfectly among the surrounding copses of trees and orchards. It was a magnificent sight.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life,” he said, handing Staunton the binoculars. “Karen and Megan will love it. So Max, how does someone go about buying land in this community? I think all of us would like to live here.”

Poulter looked pleased. “It’s lunchtime,” he said. “Come on, we’ll talk about it over food.”

The farmer took off and headed down the hill, skipping agilely along the rocky pathway.

“Frank, you serious about buying land here too?” Staunton asked Brogan as the two followed Poulter down the path.

“You betcha. Everybody needs a home. When I get back from my travels, this will be mine.”

Barrio T, Winter’s Edge, Outzone

Brogan leaned against the north wall of the Plaza Esperanza, sipping a black coffee he’d just bought from a nearby street seller. He watched idly as the old man poured another
tinto
from a large thermos flask and handed it to another customer stopping by his stall. The passerby dropped a coin into the vendor’s hand, swilled back the syrupy sweet liquid, then continued on his way.

For the third time since arriving at the small square at the bottom of 2
^nd
Street, Brogan checked his watch. It was ten-fifteen a.m. and the people he’d arranged to meet were running late. Impatiently, he glanced up at the dark-gray skies, where swollen rain clouds threatened to unload their contents over the city while a gust of wind sent both leaves and litter scuttling across the square like tiny little creatures. It appeared he had chosen a bad day to leave Winter’s Edge.

It had taken nearly a week for Brogan and his group to complete the purchase of their plots at Sunbright, involving several more visits to the farm. Since the Hallecks, Brogan, and Staunton each had varying amounts of money at their disposal, the negotiations had become a little complicated, but finally, after some tough bargaining on both sides, all involved had been happy with the outcome.

Most of their newly acquired land came from the purchase of a large holding bought from a family who were in the process of moving to a new farming community a couple hundred miles southwest of the city. They had split the plot into three, with the Hallecks and Brogan receiving similar sized parcels, and a smaller one for Dan Staunton. The rest of their allocation was made up of nearby unused land, which Poulter assured them was perfect for keeping pigs and goats on.

On their first visit to Sunbright, Karen and Megan had been excited to see what lay in store for them, as were the two Fletcher brothers. They weren’t disappointed, and Karen eyes glistened with emotion when she caught sight of the farmhouse they would live in.

Brogan had agreed that the Hallecks’ plot include the previous family’s farmhouse. In return, the Fletcher brothers promised to help him build his own house when he was ready to live there. In the meantime, they would help Dan Staunton construct a house on his parcel of land.

Brogan had been curious whether Poulter minded that the departing family were leaving Sunbright to start their own community after learning all they could from him.

The permaculturalist had gazed at him sternly. “Of course not. The very opposite, in fact. I encourage it. This is a system of living that must be propagated throughout the Outzone. I will be going out to the new community soon to give them advice. Knowledge is for sharing, not for secretly holding onto for profit.”

Once the plot sizes and prices had been agreed on, the group had gone back to Zhiglov’s and withdrawn the funds they needed, then traveled back to the West Valley the same day, where they’d signed the contracts.

The timing had worked out well. Three days ago, Brogan had received a message from John Cole informing him that the perps had finished their business up north and that he should get ready to leave the city. Then he’d received a more specific update the previous day: his quarry were heading toward the city of Two Jacks. Cole estimated the trio would arrive there in the next couple of days.

Two Jacks was a full day’s journey from Winter’s Edge, and Cole advised Brogan he should leave the following day. If the agent was wrong in his assumption as to where the perps were heading, Brogan would simply have to return to Winter’s Edge to get another update on their whereabouts. Two Jacks had no GPRS system, and Brogan would have no way of contacting Cole from there.