The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 50

  "Call it what you will," Roan said. "It's smart fighting."

  Daniel tipped back his chin, combing his fingers through his beard. "It is, isn't it? Are we reasonably convinced these men aren't spies or seditionists?"

  Larsen stuck out his lower lip. "Reasonably."

  "Then let me ask you this," Daniel said, swinging to face them. "We have a society of sorts in this place. Certainly not enough for a state. More along the lines of a tribe. As we struggle to resurrect the necessities of life, to say nothing of the luxuries, we find ourselves with more work than we have hands. May I ask your plans for the future?"

  "Well," Shawn said, "I imagine I'll be killing some aliens."

  "And you, Ness?"

  "I'd like to try to help get the internet back."

  "That's the most pathetic thing I ever heard," Shawn said. "We got real goddamn aliens pouring out of the sky and you want to hop online and pretend to be an elf chick."

  Ness scowled. "To communicate, dumbass. To figure out where the enemy is going and what they're doing. What's the alternative, irradiating the whole planet and hoping they blunder into the hot spots? Sweet idea. If we can't have Earth, no one can!"

  "This is moving past the point," Larsen said.

  Daniel patted the air. "Agreed. We have a foundation to lay before we begin to hope of active resistance. Do you two have any special talents? Skills?"

  "I'm an electrician," Shawn said.

  Ness rolled his eyes. "And you were so good at it you lost your house."

  "I'm certified."

  Daniel's gray brows rose. "We could certainly use one of those. Right here at the site, in fact. How about your brother?"

  "He was too lazy to ever do a damn thing," Shawn said. Ness opened his mouth to protest, but Shawn drowned him out. "But he's smart. Plenty smart. A problem-solver. You put a knot in front of him, he'll pick it loose before you know it."

  Ness was too stunned to speak. Shawn winked.

  "I'm sure we'll have a use for that, too," Daniel said. "Larsen?"

  Larsen finally smiled. "I can think of something right now."

  * * *

  Ness stared at the hoe in his hands. The sun beat down from the sky, whaling his neck and his face, its rays as heavy as a wet canvas.

  "What're you waiting for?" Larsen gestured at the hoe. "Never seen a screwdriver before?"

  Tidy green rows stretched out before him. Ness was close enough to smell the river. "Sure. Just not one this large."

  "There are weeds in the rows. Apply as necessary."

  The large man stepped away. Ness almost let him go, too afraid to speak up, but he could imagine Shawn shaking his head. "I have a question."

  Larsen turned. "Then question."

  "This is farming."

  "Not a question."

  Ness' blood ran hotter. "I was hoping to help reconnect your internet. Start talking to people."

  Larsen nodded. The flat sheets of his freckled cheeks looked designed to absorb the sunlight. "Do you have a degree?"

  "No."

  "Work experience?"

  "I've spent my whole life online. With a little bit of time—"

  Larsen nodded at the housing at the far end of the farm. "Do you know how many people we have at this settlement?"

  "If I did, wouldn't that be highly suspicious?"

  "237. And counting. Do you know how many of those people need to eat every day?"

  Ness sighed through his nose. "That depends on whether you like them."

  Larsen gazed blankly, as if his lips and lids were too heavy to move. "Most of the men and women who knew how to manage the nuclear reaction going on across the river have died. The few who are left don't have time to pull weeds. You want power? Weed the garden."

  As the man watched, Ness turned to the endless rows of green sprouting from the brown furrows. Sweat trickled down his neck. He bent and hacked at the cheatgrass and dandelions hiding between the crops. He looked up a minute later. Larsen was gone.

  Ness worked hard for five minutes. Dust clods burst, gray clouds sifting on his shoes. The rhythm of his chops grew sparse. He needed to conserve his strength in the heat. Anyway, they had a whole city to scavenge from. A couple hundred people could survive for years on all that had been left behind. It would be more productive for him to be going door to door, sacking up bags of linguini and cans of tomato paste.

  And if there were really 237 survivors here, few of them appeared compelled to join him in this oh-so-crucial business. A handful of others hunched over the rows, hoeing and spraying pesticides from big green jugs. The remainder must have been back in the longhouses at the far end of the farm. Enjoying the air conditioning. Ness stopped to drink from his water bottle. There was no shade for hundreds of feet in any direction.

  After a while, he set to work again, slashing the grass and dragging it away from the crops. He didn't know if the uprooted weeds needed to be segregated in this fashion, but dragging a fallen one away was less work than whacking a new one out of the ground. Anyway, no one was watching.

  He worked halfheartedly for an hour, then quarterheartedly for a couple hours after that. By the end, he was hardly advancing at all, bashing listlessly at long-uprooted weeds until they were reduced to an oozing green mulch. His clothes were soaked with sweat. It wasn't that he was exhausted. Not physically, anyway; his time in the mountains had trained his muscles to accept hours of low-level manual labor in exchange for little more than occasional breaks and plenty of water. It was a mental thing. A fundamental lack of motivation he remained unable to do anything about. Experimenting with meat-smoking? That was interesting. That was something he'd happily dedicate hours to. Whole days. Working the fields of strangers he'd just met that morning? That was another story. A much duller one.

  Why couldn't he be like everyone else? Working away for hour on hour without complaint? It was like they could block those hours out. Forget about them like last week's garbage. He just got depressed. His depression, his lack of motivation, that just made it worse, eroding his ability to keep going like icicles melting in the sun, destroyed not only by the sunlight, but by their own meltwater as it slipped to the ground.

  A man in a baseball hat hollered the workers in from the field for dinner. Men and women sat at dozens of picnic tables under a canvas roof with open sides. They were fed plates of spaghetti with a spoonful of grated cheese and a single strip of bacon apiece, which Ness watched the others crumble over their pasta. It was the first bacon he'd tasted in months and the meat was so salty and the fat so sweet that it hurt him to have to swallow.

  "Hey."

  Ness glanced up and met inquisitive eyes. The kid was a couple years younger than him and wore a mustache that looked like it needed to be erased. He spoke with a soft Spanish accent. Ness shrank into his chair. Had the kid been watching him in the fields? Seen him slow down, working the same spot over and over to kill time until the day was done?

  "What do they look like?"

  "I don't know what you mean," Ness said.

  "Man, you know. The aliens."

  Ness looked down at his plate, the sparse parmesan clumped around his remaining noodles. "Like you'll never eat crab legs again."

  The kid snorted. "Never knew why anyone ate those to begin with. Big, nasty water-spiders. My name's Nick. You just got here today, huh?"

  "Yeah."

  "I been here a while. Hard to say, really."

  Ness frowned. "Do you have amnesia?"

  "No, man." Nick twirled a finger at the fields. "Like, how long I been at this farm? A few months. This life? Since always."

  "You were a..?"

  "My parents moved here when I was just a little kid. We followed the harvest. When strawberries were ripe, we picked strawberries. When cherries were ripe, we picked cherries. Apples, apples. This place right here, it's like my life's no different at all."

  "Do you like it?"

  "Who likes picking fruit?" Nick laughed. "So you ever like fight one of them
?"

  "Dude, they're like seven feet tall," Ness said. "They got all these little pincers. I heard them blow up a truck once. That was right before we decided to run."

  "That's crazy." Nick tore off a piece of bread that hadn't been soft in days. "Well, better here than out there with them, I guess."

  They slept six to a room, multiple rooms to a house, each room accessible from the outside only, motel-like. Each person had a bed and an end table and a dresser. The lights switched off at nine o'clock that night. The sun had barely set. Ness unpacked in the darkness. They'd let him keep Volt. He went outside and called softly, not wanting to wake the others, but she was too far off in the fields to hear.

  In the morning, Nick followed him into the fields to give him some pointers on how to speed up his work. Ness hadn't asked—Nick just wanted to help, and, in the way of all experts, to demonstrate his expertise—but despite Nick's intentions, Ness couldn't help resenting it. Having someone with him meant he had to work hard.

  He was too embarrassed to take his shirt off like the other men. His hands blistered. He went to the barn where they stored the workers' gear and got a pair of yellow leather gloves, signing them out from the older woman whose entire duties consisted of sitting at a card table and making sure no one stole tools and equipment. Truly irreplaceable gear, that. Why, to get a new pair of leather gloves, you'd have to drive ten whole minutes to the city to the south.

  He hated the work. It was as simple as that. He didn't see why he had to weed corn and harvest cabbage when it had been his idea to dirty-bomb the aliens. And he was producing far more food than he could eat. There were scores of workers here at this farm. Scores more left every morning in trucks bound for more farms down the road, dust devils spinning from their wheels. Just how much food did their little tribe need?

  In exchange for this labor, Ness and the others got an hour of electric light before bedtime, which he spent reading books from the makeshift library in the lodge's common room. He supposed they had running water, too, although there was never enough hot water to go around. Anyway, the showers were communal. Mortifying. He'd almost worn his underwear into the grimy, tiled bathhouse, but he decided that would be even more embarrassing than the other men seeing his genitals. Instead, he showered sparingly, late at night or very early in the morning. He asked Nick about going into town—they had Sundays off—but gasoline was reserved for farm business and emergencies.

  An old man with weather-beaten brows woke them every morning. Breakfast began at six o'clock. They were expected in the fields by eight. They worked unsupervised until noon, then were given a two-hour break for lunch and personal business, after which they returned to the rows until evening. Now and then a pair of men with guns drove down the dirt roads enclosing the fields, cigarettes rolled into the sleeves of their flannel shirts, but they were mostly watching the wastelands, the gray dirt and the yellow grass. Nick ate most meals with Ness. They complained about the weather, exchanged stories of their lives before the plague.

  The fourth day in the fields, Ness worked quickly until he reached the very end of the furrows. The others were back toward the middle, bent over their hoes. He dropped down to the irrigation canal and followed the sluggish water back to the river, where he skipped stones and poked at bugs until dinner.

  On Sunday, a pickup thrummed over the bridge to the south and turned for the farm. Ness sat in the shade at the picnic tables. The truck pulled into the gravel drive, dust breathing from its tires. A half dozen people hopped out. Shawn saw Ness and grinned.

  "How's it going, baby brother?"

  "Okay."

  "Just okay? Taken any farmer's daughters up to the hayloft? Hey, you guys got any beer?"

  "There's water in the coolers," Ness said. "Sometimes we get Kool-Aid."

  "Ritzy," Shawn said. "You get nap-time, too? Where are the graham crackers?"

  "Overseen by a surly old woman with a ledger and trust issues."

  "Well, it sounds like you guys are doing great out here," Shawn said. "Daniel and Larsen are shipping all kinds of stuff up north."

  "They are?"

  "Sure. Colony up in Spokane."

  "They're trading?"

  Shawn nodded, sipping his grape Kool-Aid. "Gasoline. Hogs and chickens—haul 'em here live, butcher them in one of the old labs. Some clothes, they got a real tailor up there or some shit."

  Ness stared at the blisters on his palms and fingers. He'd popped a few of them and the skin had whitened and died. "What about the bombs?"

  "Hell if I know. I'm just a grunt. A wire-monkey. They got me stringing stuff up for miles."

  "If they're not going to fight back, maybe we should go find our own place."

  "I dunno, man. I'm getting addicted to showers." Shawn crumpled his cup and tossed it at a trash can. "You bored? Why don't you come into town with me and find some Playboys?"

  Ness blinked. "They let you go into town?"

  "What, they got you cooped up here all day? No wonder you're going stir-crazy."

  They made plans for the next Sunday. Nick showed Ness how to soak his blisters to cool the pain, how to wrap them in bandages small enough so he could still wear his gloves. He worked the fields at his own pace, jabbing idly at the never-ending grass and weeds hiding close to the roots of the corn and the wheat. For a few days, the temperature dropped to the 80s before climbing back to low triple digits. Volt came back for a couple of nights, chewing his earlobes in the morning, then went back out to the wasteland. Across the river, the steam of the plant clouded the sky.

  "Hey." Nick plunked down across from him at the picnic table. A few bits of tomato dotted their plain spaghetti.

  "Hey," Ness said.

  "What's up?"

  "Not much."

  "Yeah." Nick twirled his pasta. "Hey, it's like not really my business. But some of the guys have been talking."

  "People do that."

  "Well, you might want to put in more effort, is all."

  "More effort?" Ness said.

  "Yeah, you know." Nick chewed, eyes on his plate. "Out in the fields."

  "Or what?" Ness said. "They'll beat me with a sack of doorknobs?"

  "I mean, we've all got to work."

  "Where do you think all this food is going?"

  "We had salads for lunch."

  Ness laughed. He tossed the last of his dinner and wandered the fringe of the farm, calling softly for Volt. She didn't come. At work, he stuck to his own pace, chugging his water and returning often to the tarp-roofed tables for more, or heading to the lodge to pee. Most of the men went right there in the field. He could feel their eyes on him. He didn't care. He was doing enough.

  On Thursday, Ness hurried through his dinner and went back to his room to read. They had a swamp cooler in the room and it hummed loudly, fighting to bring the air down to a tolerable temperature. He'd just sat down in bed when Nick knocked on the door.

  "Hey, Larsen's here," he said. "He wants to see you."

  Ness' heart jolted. Outside, Larsen stood in the hot yellow light of evening, arms folded. He watched Ness with his hooded eyes. "Walk."

  Ness walked, dust clods crunching under his shoes. "What?"

  "What." Larsen made a noise that might have been a single chuckle. "Your weight is going unpulled."

  "I do plenty."

  "People have complained."

  "Sounds like they have too much free time."

  Larsen made his almost-chuckling noise again. "Do you know how hard it is to keep people motivated when there's no money? When they see someone else not working, do you know how fast their motivation decays?"

  Ness rolled his eyes. "None of us would have to work so hard if you weren't shipping everything we make to Spokane."

  "For necessary goods for the good of us all."

  "Tailored suits. Really fucking necessary."

  "Tailored suits?" Larsen stopped and stared Ness down, his face as flat and hard as the basalt slabs by the river. "I don't know what you've
heard. I do know what I've heard. Work. Or provide worth by becoming an example instead."

  Ness was too frustrated to argue. "Fine."

  "Good."

  Larsen left, taking his vague threats with him. How scary. Was the man lying about the tailor? Or was he too stupid to know where the food was going? Ness wasn't going to be bullied. Larsen didn't own him. The man wasn't President Larsen of the Most Worthless Pile of Dust in the Remnants of the Former United States. Ness wasn't a slave. He just looked bad because the others didn't care how hard they had to work so long as they had a roof and some air conditioning and three meals of starch and salt.

  The weather-beaten old man never came back to check beds after his nasal morning wake-up call, so Ness stayed in bed the next morning, stretching under his too-warm sheet. He finally got up in time to get to the fields for the noontime meal call, bending over his hoe like he'd been there all along. No one said anything, so he did the same thing the next day, too.

  The third day, Larsen grabbed his wrists and yanked him from bed while he was still in his underwear. His hip hit the floor. He cried out.

  "I warned you," Larsen said.

  "Let go of me!"

  "There are rules."

  "Really? I don't remember reading anything before you dropped me off over here."

  "We haven't had to write them down. Most people have sense to know for themselves."

  "Let me put my clothes on," Ness said. Larsen let go of his wrists. He hit the ground again, sharp tears springing to his eyes. He turned away and pawed through his dresser. "Where are we going, anyway?"

  Larsen was silent a moment. "To whip you."

  Ness rolled his eyes and followed Larsen outside. What a joke. A little scare before Larsen frogmarched him to the field to look over his shoulder at every stroke of the hoe.

  But the other workers weren't in the fields. They were crowded around the picnic tables. A post rose from the dust a few paces from the shade of the tarps. Ropes dangled from its top. Nick was in the crowd, too. His eyes were round with sorrow.

  "What's going on?" Ness said.

  "Take off your shirt," Larsen said flatly.

  A hot wind scattered dust into Ness' face. He obeyed, mechanically peeling his shirt from his sweating ribs. The men in the crowd stood as still as the post. Something stirred in their eyes: the hard hunger to see the wicked get what they deserved.