The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 53

  After three days, the bubbling ceased. Kristin plumbed it with the hydrometer. "5.7%."

  "Is that good?" Ness said.

  "We are approaching Natty Ice." Her eyes darted to him. "Hey. We should make beer. We're running out of the good stuff."

  "You guys have beer?"

  "The fact I haven't committed suicide indicates that yes. Yes, we do."

  They boiled away the ethanol, separating it from the water and condensing it via tube in another, smaller drum. They poured the purified fuel into a red jug and brought it to a tractor waiting in the yellow afternoon. It wasn't yet quitting time, but most of the farmhands had gathered to watch, grinning, joking about all the naps they'd be taking if the tractor turned over.

  Brandon planted his hands on his hips and rocked his heels. "Fill 'er up."

  Ness tipped the jug into the tractor tank, smelling the sharp tang of the fuel.

  Kristin pressed the keys into his hand. "Want to go for a ride?"

  He smiled uneasily and climbed into the high seat. He put the key in the ignition. An intense wave of heat washed over his body, prickling the scarring lash-lines on his back. A week ago, the stuff in the gas tank had been swaying in the wind. Brandon and Kristin, did they have the first idea what they were doing? Why did they think they could do this? What if it exploded, coating him in flaming fuel, crackling his skin, killing him in a final minute of shrieking agony?

  Kristin vaulted into the seat beside him. "What if this whole thing just blew up right now?"

  "Stop it," Ness smiled.

  "We'd look pretty stupid, wouldn't we? Boom!"

  "Maybe you should turn it on while I manage from a bunker."

  She reached for his hand at the ignition. "Will you turn the damn key already?"

  He nodded, took a deep breath, and turned the key. The engine coughed. Rattled. Roared. Outside the dust-streaked windshield, fifty men and women grinned and clapped.

  Brandon and Kristin returned with him to the college for more and bigger stills. Ness boiled a big new batch, then experimented with several smaller ones, varying the temperature at several points along the way. The old woman cleared space for his vats and drums at the warehouse, where the air conditioning was potent enough to keep the temperature in the yeast-friendly 80s even with the full might of the sun pounding the metal roof. With Brandon and Kristin busy at the power plant, Ness asked Larsen whether Nick could be spared to assist him. When Nick heard that he was going to be pulled from fieldwork, he bent at the knees and pumped his fist.

  In the warehouse, Ness pulled the lid from one of the smaller vats, releasing the sweetish smell of fermenting corn. Bubbles and chaff turned the surface. Ness dipped a pH stick into the fluid and shook it.

  Nick leaned forward, frowning at the sludge floating on top of the mash. "What's all this for, anyway?"

  Ness glanced up from the stick. "You don't even now what we're doing? Then why were you so happy to help me?"

  "Because I don't have to pick any more damn strawberries."

  "We're making ethanol. Gasoline, basically."

  Nick gave him a look. "Oh, is that what you used to start the tractor? Gasoline?"

  "I can bust you back to scything corn in no time flat."

  "What's it all for?"

  "You have to promise not to tell anyone."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't want everyone to be mad at me if it doesn't happen."

  Nick shrugged. "I promise."

  "I want to have enough to power all the machines for the harvest." Ness replaced the lid on the vat and wandered past a row of coiled hoses. "If I get them running, the harvest won't take weeks, it'll take days. I'm going to ask Daniel if we can use our free time to go into town and pick up a few things to make life here a little less cave mannish."

  "Like what?"

  "Real air conditioners. Something to eat besides pasta. More washers and dryers."

  "No joke," Nick laughed. "The lines on Sunday are so long I just take my stuff down to the river."

  Ness wiped off his hands, gave the stills one last check, and walked out into the afternoon. The heat wilted him, stole the breath from his lungs. "Anyway, that's my hope."

  Nick gazed across the river at the steam rising from the wasteland. "They got all kinds of gas already, don't they? How come they won't let us use that? Think they're huffing it?"

  "They don't want to spend more resources than they take in." Ness watched the plant with him. "They're being kind of stingy, aren't they?"

  With Nick's help, he boiled a new batch of mash each day. With limited corn at hand, they walked a wagon to the untended orchard up north where apples browned in the grass. Ness collected a truckload of big blue jugs and filled them one by one. He didn't know how much they'd need—hundreds of gallons, most likely—but the main harvest wouldn't come until late October. He thought they might make it.

  Brandon came twice more to check on his process, then ceased making off-hour visits across the river. Kristin still visited regularly, delving into the nitty-gritty of the chemical process, interrupting herself with wistful comments about making beer and loading up an old copy of Doom on the Hanford computers. Ness made a note to track down some hops. Shawn dropped by now and then, too. He seemed genuinely impressed with the mounting collection of blue jugs.

  Weeks passed. The days cooled. Ness' back scarred. He gathered unwanted vegetation, boiled it, fermented it, purified it. On a trip into town for more yeast, he found some old hops and attempted to put together a batch of beer.

  One day in early October, with a morning rain drying in the dust, Larsen came to the warehouse and said he needed to take the jugs back to the plant.

  "All of it?" Ness said. "Why?"

  Larsen shrugged. "Daniel wants to do some tests. And doesn't like the idea of incendiary matter sitting under the same roof as our farming supplies."

  "So we'll build a shack for it."

  "It'll be right across the river," Larsen said. "Stop worrying."

  Ness watched in stony silence as the big man loaded the truck with his fuel. He found himself on the verge of tears. He'd worked toward this for weeks. He knew it wasn't gone—it would still be waiting for them come harvest time—but the river made the nuclear plant feel much further away than the mile of road separating it from the farm.

  Volt didn't come home that night. Ness couldn't sleep. While the others snored, he went to the fields to find her, bringing the same things he always took when he walked in the night alone: some water, a snack, a knife, his walking stick, binoculars, a flashlight. He stalked down the rows, calling Volt's name, pausing to listen for her querulous mews.

  An engine hummed to the south. Ness wandered through the tall, dark corn until he emerged into the thin strip of green grass between the field and the river. Russian olives rose from the shore, smelling of a sick and artificial sweetness. Headlights headed up the road to the plant. Ness had never heard a truck out this late. He lifted his binoculars. A large truck pulled to the gate where he and Shawn had first been stopped. After a moment, the truck pulled through. It disappeared behind an outbuilding, then drove into the floodlights surrounding the white-capped control center. Ness couldn't make out the truck's lettering, but he recognized the orange stripe across its side. It was a U-Haul. And it appeared to have a machine gun mounted to its roof.

  It stopped a stone's throw from the control center. Men debarked into the pool of light. Others emerged from the command building. The two groups faced each other, gesturing. The Hanford men returned to the building and emerged a minute later, great blue jugs dangling from their hands, and delivered them to the back of the U-Haul, where the arrivals were busy offloading bulky wooden crates.

  Ness made sure his knife was still on his belt, then ran straight for the bridge across the river.

  20

  Lights whirled miles away across the desert. Tristan's bare feet pounded the pavement, her soles scraped and stinging. The other prisoners dogged her heels. We
eds lined the road. She saw nothing in either direction along the highway—no houses, no stores, no cars, nowhere to get lost. If they left the road, their feet would be destroyed in minutes. Their only hope was to find somewhere to hide before the aliens tracked them down.

  Engines keened. Searchlights slashed from light and low-flying craft, scouring the desert floor. Tristan headed up a gentle rise. The other captives strung out behind her, breathing hard in the cool night. Lights splashed from wheeled vehicles fanning across the flatland toward the road. Tristan crested the hill. A half mile down the road, a small cluster of buildings rested in the starlight.

  A craft whined nearer and nearer. Its searchlight swooped forward, gushing over the pack of prisoners. Some stopped, pinned in place, deerlike. Others ran harder. The light followed the runners down the road, leaving the ones who'd stopped in darkness; the jet banked, taking its spotlight with it, and circled around for another pass.

  "There are buildings down the road!" Tristan shouted. "I think I see cars!"

  "No way the batteries aren't dead," said the blond man she'd punched on the way to the prison camp.

  "They'll grab us any minute," she said. "What other chance do we have?"

  The red-haired woman sprinted forward. Like schooling fish, the others followed her lead, racing downhill toward the dark buildings. Tristan fell back. Once she was a few yards behind the bald man, who panted heavily, grasping his gut, Tristan cut off the road and flattened herself among the weeds.

  The searchlight caught up to the prisoners just before they reached the cluster of buildings. The alien cars reached the road and sped downhill. Tristan ran through the dust, putting a hundred yards between herself and the highway, then hid behind a wall of sage. Headlights blared past. She got up and ran again. The jet circled, painting the rooftops with light. The ground vehicles converged on the site. Screams joined the moans of the circling craft.

  Tristan was a mile across the desert by the time the cars pulled away from the houses and returned to the city of blue cones. The jet made three wide circles, searchlight zooming through the yellow grass.

  After a few minutes, all Tristan heard was the crickets.

  She took stock while she waited. Her feet bled from a dozen different cuts. Dust clung to the bloody lines of her soles. She needed to find disinfectant cream. Antibiotics. Then again, she was buck naked in the night. She needed to find a lot of things.

  She supposed she was better off than the others.

  She laughed, startling herself, then sunk under a wave of horrified guilt. She'd tricked them. Wielded their own willingness to follow against them. She'd known there wouldn't be any working trucks at the farmhouse. No way to run or place to hide. A couple of them might have been smart enough to hide in the weeds like she had, but most had been returned to the pen.

  It was their own fault. They should have listened to her when she told them to split up. When they refused, they left her with no choice but to look out for herself. Being recaptured with them would have served nothing. She did not regret what she had done. She would do it again right now if the universe called a do-over and reset to the moment the searchlight had first hit them. She wouldn't hesitate.

  And that was exactly what scared her.

  She sat on her feet and thought things through. She'd probably die if she spent a full day naked in the sun. Her mouth was already dry, her tongue pebbly. Who knew how far she'd have to walk to the west before she found any place with food and water. Her best option was to go to the farmhouse where the others had been captured. If she wanted to get any further than that, she'd better take the road to get there, too. Another mile shoeless through the desert night could leave her feet too shredded to use.

  She waited another hour, watching the black plain, listening for the whine and whuff of foreign engines. The alien settlement had once more gone silent, a handful of white lights gleaming from its cones. She rose and rejoined the road. Asphalt yanked at the cuts on her feet. She slowed to a dawdle; she had hours before daylight. She paused a couple hundred yards from the farmhouse. Crickets chirped innocently. No sign of life, human or alien.

  An analog gas pump stood from the gravel and dust. Paint peeled from the house's wooden walls. A truck sat on blocks, its windshield opaque with dirt. Her heart grew grim—the site might have been abandoned decades before the Panhandler—but the home's windows were intact, and inside, the dust on the floor looked months old, not years. It was incredibly dark. She eased the door closed and shuffled to the kitchen. With no real hope, she tried the faucet. Dead. She opened the fridge and wished she hadn't. The stink of rot overwhelmed her, cloying and diarrheal. Too dark to see if there were any untainted bottles or cans. She closed the door, unwilling to reach inside blind.

  She took the hand towel from the oven handle and swabbed the dust from her feet, cleaning it from her cuts with what little spit she had to spare. Upstairs, three bodies lay tangled in the master bedroom bed, starlight exposing the skin dried to their skulls. Tristan checked their drawers. The wife's panties were hopelessly large, but the man's Wranglers fit when belted. So did his plaid button-up shirts. His socks, too, but her toes waggled inside his shoes. She'd blister. Have a hard time running. She went to another bedroom, hoping the third body in the bed was a teenage daughter with normal feet, and immediately rammed her little toe into a dresser corner. Pain sparked across her eyes. She collapsed, holding her foot tight.

  It was too dark and she was too tired. She made sure the bed was empty, then undressed, climbed beneath the covers, and slept.

  Sunlight snuck through the window. Her feet hurt. Her eyes were gritty. She didn't have to pee. Not a good sign.

  The house had already been looted. Possibly more than once. The fridge was a mess of sludge in plastic bags. It held no bottles of water or cans of soda. No drinkable liquid of any kind. The pantry contained one can of garbanzo beans, one six ounce can of tomato paste, a box of Kraft macaroni, a bottle of A1, a half-empty bottle of sherry, assorted spices, packets of dry gravy, and powdered Gatorade. She couldn't find a can opener. She took the garbanzos and tomato paste to the garage, laid their rims against the concrete step, and hammered open the garbanzos. Gooey fluid spurted the dust. She yanked the can straight and drank the bean syrup inside. It was salty and sweet and ran out far too fast.

  She smashed open the tomato paste, scooped it out with her fingers, and mixed it in with the cold garbanzos, eating it all. No sense rationing. Food wasn't her worry now. What she needed was water. Her plan was simple. Find a town, enough food and water to rest and recover, then find Alden.

  She got a backpack from the daughter's room and spent the daylight gathering gear. Extra clothes and socks and shoes. Cutlery. The hammer. A bar of soap and a roll of toilet paper. A couple of sheets. A thick-bladed kitchen knife. Scissors. A roll of string from the garage. An empty plastic bottle in case she found water.

  That filled the backpack. The day's heat cooked the house. Miles across the plain, vehicles stirred the dust at the alien settlement. Tristan descended to the cellar to wait out the heat. A tall white water heater took up the corner. She found a crescent wrench in the garage and cranked open the valve, but nothing came out. Her tongue was dry again, bumping over the rough ridges of her mouth. She went upstairs and gazed out the eastern window. The road rolled on for miles, its shoulders blank, a useless expanse of killing desert.

  She was going to have to do it, wasn't she.

  She got a bowl from downstairs and, for reasons she couldn't quite explain, went to the bathroom, where she squatted over the bowl. Her urine was yellow and odorous. She waited for the metal bowl to leech her body heat from the fluid. She wanted very deeply to open the window and fling the bowl into the dust and sun.

  But those were the old instincts. The old prejudices. Vestigial revulsion left over from a time when water just poured out of taps. She didn't know how far away the next water would be nor how to coax it from the mummified soil. If she was going to find Alden
, she'd likely have to do far worse along the way.

  It tasted brackish and foul, a salty poison. She gagged, but held it between her teeth and lips, refusing to spit or spill. She swallowed, breathed hard, and chugged the rest, trying to get it down before the taste could taint her brain. After, she wiped her tongue on a towel. Her eyes tried to water but couldn't.

  Much later, she might tell Alden this story, as much to gross him out as to make him laugh. For now, she was glad no one else had seen.

  She slept in the cellar until twilight. Her mouth was completely dry. Her head ached and her stomach twisted. She made another pass of the grounds to make sure she hadn't missed a gun, then grabbed a pitchfork from the barn, hoisted her backpack, and set off down the road.

  Bugs sang in the night. She thought about trying to catch some, but it wouldn't be worth the bother. She needed water. Badly. And treatment for her feet, which were so sore she couldn't manage more than a plodding walk. The road unspooled through the empty hills. A sliver of moon crawled up the sky. Tristan stopped to rest. She took three shells of macaroni from the box and tucked them into her cheek, hoping to remind her saliva glands how to work.

  Dawn came far too soon. She watched the eastern hills with tired anger, wishing she could push back the sun with the strength of her gaze. She'd put several miles and hills between herself and the aliens, but there would be no escape from the daylight. Blue-gray dawn drew the weeds from the darkness. The sun climbed above the mountains, its itchy heat needling her skin. She stopped sweating after an hour.

  She laid one of the bedsheets in the dust, draped another between two clumps of sagebrush, and did her best to sleep, dreaming of featureless faces and gleaming tentacles creeping from the cracks in the desert floor to drag her through the thorns. When it grew too hot to sleep, she gathered up her sheets and continued east.