The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 54

  It was amazing how fast she fell apart. Her legs weakened, going noodly. Her feet landed in strange ways, straining her ankles. Not that she felt it. Her eyelids stuck to her eyes when she blinked. When she stopped to rest, it took her several minutes to remember which way she'd been going. At one point, she stopped and turned back, convinced she'd passed a farmhouse, but the vacant desert stretched from hill to hill.

  Past another slope, a town baked in the heat. Trailers and single-story homes with yellow yards. Her right knee went out. Tristan sat down hard, right hand resting on the boiling asphalt. She could smell the tar. Her chest rose and fell. Her breath felt like a drug. She just needed a moment. She lowered herself to her elbow. Something hard and hot rested beneath her head. Was it the road? How odd. She hoped her brother would have a happy life.

  21

  Ness ran across the bridge, cool air wafting from the river. Water trickled over itself and lapped against the broken rocks of the far shore. The idling U-Haul kicked into gear, headlights swooping behind the plant. It passed through the gates and headed south. Its engine was a low murmur by the time Ness reached the chain link fence.

  He scaled it and dropped to the other side. Floodlights illuminated the lot where the men had made their exchange. Men pulled machine guns from the wooden crates and examined them in the hard white light. One of the troops whirled on Ness with a shout.

  Ness stopped cold, heart threatening to batter its way from his ribs. "I want to see Larsen!"

  "On your knees!" The man stutter-stepped forward, pistol pointed at Ness' face. "Hands behind your head!"

  Ness obeyed. They handcuffed him, yanked him to his feet, marched him to the same room where they'd imprisoned him and Shawn when they first arrived. He had several minutes to feel very stupid.

  Larsen entered, his flat eyes bloodshot and puffy. "You're lucky you weren't shot."

  "Why did you do that?" Ness said.

  "Specifics."

  "You took my fuel. You took what I made and you sold it for guns."

  Larsen pulled his chin to the side. "No, I didn't."

  "Well, somebody did. I just watched them do it. I needed that ethanol for the harvest. Do you guys even care what it's like over there?"

  "Get calm. I'll be back."

  Larsen left for a long time. Ness' head beat with a dull and useless anger. On Larsen's return, he beckoned Ness into the hall. "If you want answers, ask questions."

  "Why—"

  "We're asking Daniel." He brought Ness upstairs to a conference room. Daniel faced a black window, hands clasped behind his back. Larsen shut the door and stared at Daniel, his thick hands hanging by his sides. "Did you trade our ethanol for guns?"

  Daniel turned, frowning in distaste. "No. I did not."

  Larsen didn't move. "Then we have a thank-you note to write whoever donated those crates."

  "I traded our fuel for safety."

  "From what?" Ness said. "Dust devils?"

  Daniel removed his glasses and scowled at a recalcitrant speck on the lens. "The aliens, for one."

  "Funny you start caring about them now. Have you even started on the bombs?"

  "Of course. But this exchange isn't just about the aliens. Those men represent a group settled beyond what used to be the Oregon border. Most are ex-soldiers. They control the Umatilla chemical weapons depot."

  "Appeasement," Larsen said.

  Daniel nodded sharply, a small smile on his mouth. "The power lines through the hills are dead. I had to find another way to convince these men we're reasonable. Friendly. Meanwhile, they have armed us, making us even less attractive as a future target. I thought it quite an elegant solution."

  Ness' shoulders sank. "But we needed that fuel for the harvest."

  "You can make more, can't you? I thought that was the whole point of this enterprise."

  "Yeah, with all that extra corn I don't have. It will go perfect with all the time I don't have, either."

  Daniel ran the nail of his index finger through his beard. "I'm sorry, but fuel was the only thing they wanted. Perhaps we could divert you some of the gasoline stores for the harvest instead. Would that work?"

  "I guess," Ness said.

  "Why didn't I know about this?" Larsen said.

  Daniel's brows flickered. "Do you know how fast this came together? Anyway, if I'd known you were going to raise such a fuss, I would have made sure to consult you."

  "Consult."

  "Yes, consult. What more do you want?"

  "I don't remember the vote that put you here."

  Daniel rolled his eyes. "Listen, get someone to drive him back to the farm, will you? If you must yell, let's do it in private."

  Larsen's eyelids drooped. He nodded and brought Ness outside. The plant's men had disappeared, taking the crates and guns with them. "What do you think?"

  "I don't know," Ness said.

  "Yes, you do."

  "No, I don't?"

  Larsen rubbed one eye. "Everyone has an opinion at every time. When they don't share, it's because they're polite or scared."

  "He should have asked first," Ness said. "I'm the one who made it. Everyone across the river helped grow the corn, too. Who made Daniel boss?"

  "No one." Larsen smiled. "Does that scare you?"

  Ness went back to work, but his enthusiasm had been lost somewhere across the river. He was starting over from scratch. With less than two weeks till the start of harvest, he'd be lucky to get in two good batches, and that itself depended on collecting enough fallen apples from the northern orchard to fill the stills with mash.

  "It's not that big a deal," Nick said. "You know this stuff grows right out of the ground, right?"

  "Wrong," Ness said. "It grows out of next year's ground."

  "So we spend one year picking by hand. Who cares?"

  "If I have to eat spaghetti one more time, there is a nonzero chance I will kill myself."

  Nick examined the thermometer in one of the vats of mash. "Can you shoot yourself in the head? If your body's intact, I can make some pretty good meatballs."

  Ness watched the skies for aliens, but saw nothing. If he hadn't seen them for himself, he'd suspect the whole thing were a lie, a boogeyman invented to keep people scared. To prevent them from protesting when Daniel allocated them just twenty percent of the gasoline they needed for the harvest, and declared there would be no fuel for any more trips into town.

  The old man woke them earlier than usual for the first day of harvest. Ness tried to take to the fields with them, but a hefty man named Erasmo shook his head and barred Ness' way. "Those bony little arms won't do no good. You want to help, you get those tractors running."

  Ness followed them out anyway, raking up any fallen or discarded cobs and lugging them back to be smashed and boiled. It was pointless, really. He'd be lucky to have twenty gallons ready before they finished up a few weeks from now. It would hardly be enough to run the tractors for an hour. The combines grumbled through the early part of the morning, but burned through their fuel rations before noon. Men and women pulled wagons through the fields, yellow corn piled so high it spilled with every bounce of the wheels, and rolled their loads to a warehouse to be binned and dried.

  "How goes the great chopdown?"

  Ness startled, dropping wormy cobs onto the warehouse floor. Kristin stood in the doorway in sweatpants and a tank top that showed no obvious stains, which was more than Ness could say about any of his own clothes. Her hair was combed and ponytailed. Ness had the urge to duck below the table. Their water heaters had been acting up and he hadn't showered or washed his shirt in days.

  "Laboriously," he said. "Someone had the bright idea to run the harvest with fleshy, people-shaped machines instead of those great big metal ones."

  "I heard about the ethanol. That's so weird. We've got guys with guns just standing around in the hallways."

  "I thought everyone on your side of the river was a nuclear scientist or something."

  She shrugged. "I do
n't recognize these guys. I think they're new."

  "Did they show up in a U-Haul?"

  "I didn't see. Just one day and wham, the whole plant looks like an airport on September 12." Her eyes locked on a stack of small green bottles in the corner. "Hang on a minute. What is that?"

  Ness followed her gaze. "Beer."

  "Beer?"

  "The hops were old. It's not very good."

  She walked forward slowly, as if in a dream. "You're talking to a girl who happily bought things with 'Lite' and 'Ice' in the name. Who thought Steel Reserve belonged on the middle shelf."

  Ness' pulse picked up. "Want to try some?"

  "With you?"

  "I guess I could just give you some."

  She rolled her lip between her teeth. "No. If there's something wrong with it, I'd like to be able to stab you before I go blind."

  Ness laughed. "Well, I share a room with five other guys."

  "Tempting. Why don't you just bring some over to the plant instead."

  "Tonight?"

  "Sure. We could all get hypernuked by Martians tomorrow. Better drink all the beer while we still can."

  He watched her go. Nick chuckled from the other side of the floor.

  Ness scowled. "How long have you been there?"

  "Long enough to know you need to hit that."

  "'Hit that'?" Ness said. "I was hoping the one good thing to come out of the apocalypse would be the death of that phrase."

  "Sorry."

  "Anyway, I don't even think she likes me."

  "Man, you're dumb."

  "What?"

  "No," Nick said. "You're hopeless."

  After dinner, Ness loaded twelve bottles of the label-less beer into a backpack and walked across the bridge, pack clanking. At the gate, two men with machine guns waited in the shadows of the guard station, smoking cigarettes.

  "Business?" one said.

  "I'm here to see Kristin," Ness said. "She's expecting me."

  "Kristin's last name?"

  "I don't know. Do you have a lot of other Kristins here? Did that particular name protect them from the plague?"

  The man gave him a long look, then muttered into his radio. A moment later, he buzzed Ness through, gates sliding back with the rattling of chain. Ness walked to the open space around the control center and drifted to a stop. He had no idea where Kristin lived. He turned in a circle, straps of his pack digging into his shoulders.

  "Ness!" In the last of the light, her face appeared from a third-floor window in a nearby outbuilding. "Stay there. I'll be right down."

  He adjusted his pack. In a field between her housing and a windowless metal structure, chain link fence lay in tightly stacked rolls. The October night was this side of chilly. Kristin emerged in a hooded sweatshirt, grinning at his backpack.

  He jangled it. "Where to?"

  Her eyes darted between his. "The river, obviously. That's the only proper place to drink moonshine."

  "What about in the back of a moving pickup?"

  "But one of us would have to drive. Illegal!"

  "That never stopped my brother." Ness started back east toward the river. The reactor thrummed under his feet. Cold air rolled from the water. Green grass lined the banks, overhung by thick trees with browning leaves.

  "Should have brought a blanket." Kristin popped down in the grass. "Oh well. Everything's a hardship these days."

  Ness unzipped his pack and handed her a beer. It was air temperature, cool but not truly cold. He'd fitted them with twist-off caps. Kristin palmed hers open with a hiss. She sniffed, gaze darting between him and the bottle, and drank.

  "Any good?" he said.

  "It's beer," she said.

  He opened his and had a drink. It was strongly bitter and lightly metallic. "I don't even like beer."

  "Then why did you make it?"

  "To see if I could."

  She grinned, teeth white in the moonlight. "I thought so."

  He drank, bubbles tickling his throat. "This is weird."

  "Tastes pretty much like beer to me. You did great."

  "Not the taste." He gestured the bottle at the river. "Like, if you're just sitting here, and here's the river, and there's a fission reaction rumbling behind us, and there's the lights of the farm on the water, and there's a beer in your hand—you can forget that any of it ever happened."

  "Would you want to go back?" She laughed, holding her bottle in front of her mouth. "Wow. Has there ever been a dumber question? Besides 'do you want another beer'?"

  "I'd only go back if I could know what I know now."

  "You weren't happy before?"

  "I didn't do anything. I didn't know what to do."

  "Don't tell me you lived in your mom's basement," Kristin laughed.

  "Ha ha," Ness said.

  "So what do you know now?"

  He shrugged. "That you can learn to do just about anything. Most things aren't that hard if you put in the time."

  She finished her beer. Ness passed her another bottle and chugged his to catch up. By the time he drank his second, he was half drunk. Kristin asked him about the harvest and floated the idea of grabbing up the computers at the campus and setting up an internet server.

  Ness tipped back his bottle. "Assuming anyone else has power."

  "Sure they do. We hear them on the radio sometimes. They've probably got solar or whatever."

  "I thought radios were a security risk."

  "Not if you don't transmit anything back. Sounds like the aliens have mostly stuck to the cities, anyway. I don't think they place a high priority on bombing a guy with a windmill and a CB."

  "What about a guy with a nuclear power plant?" Ness said.

  Kristin grinned. "I always knew working here would be the death of me. I don't know. I think Daniel's hoping to keep a low profile and wait for someone else to take care of our unwanted guests."

  "That sounds like a good way to wind up atomized, sucked into the upper atmosphere, and distributed over several thousand square miles of land."

  "Well, I've always wanted to travel."

  He laughed. She was easier to talk to than most girls, and not just because she would get his WOW references. He reached for another beer. Had she kept coming across the river because she was interested in him? Or was she just curious about his projects? He wished he could have met her before. Texting, instant messaging—with an electronic buffer between him and the girl he was talking to, it had been so much easier to be explicit, in all meanings of the term.

  But with a live person in front of him, he felt trapped in a block of ice, knowing what he wanted, but physically unable to take the steps to achieve it. If he leaned over and kissed her, what was the very worst thing that could happen? What was the worst she could do? Besides drowning him in the river, scattering bottles around the shore, and writing his suicide note. At worst, she would push him away, he would go back to the farm, and she could stop coming to see him. In many ways, that would be better than the confusion he'd grappled with for the last few weeks.

  One more beer. That would do it.

  Stars glinted on the river. Short waves lapped between the rocks. Kristin wedged her bottle into the grainy dirt, leaned over him to fetch another beer from the pack, and pressed her mouth to his.

  She withdrew a moment later. "Good?"

  "Good."

  "Thank God," she laughed. "You went so tense I thought I missed and was making out with a tree."

  He shifted to hide the bulge in his pants. "I was just kind of surprised."

  "You brew a girl homemade beer, take her and the beer down to the river at night, and you're surprised?"

  "By the moment."

  Her eyes darted between his, metronymic. "Do you want to stop?"

  "Hell no."

  She grinned and drank her beer and kissed him. She tasted like bitter hops and sweet skin. After a few minutes, he moved his hand over her shirt to her breast. She laughed and unzipped his pants. Ness hadn't had sex in more than
two years since responding to one of the Craigslist ads he used to peruse, but he lasted a good five minutes. She made him pull out. He wasn't sure she'd come and couldn't quite ask. He offered his socks for her to wipe off with.

  "How romantic," she said, still breathing hard. "Do you feel like cavemen?"

  "It wasn't too rough, was it?"

  "I'm talking about the grass under my butt. The wind in my everything."

  Ness smiled. "Next time I'll bring a club. I'd hate to be interrupted by a mammoth."

  She pulled her beer from its makeshift cupholder in the shore, muck slurping from its base. "We should do this again. Clubs optional."

  He agreed, then saw her to her room and went home, beer in hand. He stopped halfway across the bridge to piss into the river. His head felt very clear. He resolved to go see her again tomorrow after harvest wrapped up for the day. It had been fun. He liked her, and she liked him, too. Life could be so easy when you let it. All you had to do was decide Hey, this is what I want, and I'm going to take my shot. That's all it took. That was the entire secret right there. He grinned and chucked his empty beer into the river. The bottle spun end over end, catching the moonlight and taking it under the black water.

  When Ness woke, it was to the same shame as always. The vague yet pervasive sense he had done something wrong. He raked in corn and brought it back to the warehouse to boil. They were still in the throes of the harvest and he worked so hard he often forgot all about her. Four days went by. He doubted he would see her again. It was better this way. Easier. It was tough enough to work out your own life. Add another person to the mix, and it became downright impossible.

  She came across the river on the fifth day, finding him in the warehouse amid green husks and white-yellow silk. "This place is a mess."

  He stirred fresh-boiled mash, steam rising into the cool air. "It's been really busy."

  "Too busy to do any brewing?"

  "I bottled some new stuff last night. But I think it's even worse. It tastes like I filtered it through an old sock."