Jeff Brackett - Half Past Midnight

Though others had told me these things in the past, I still felt embarrassed when a conversation took this turn. So of course, I did what I always did. I tried to lighten the mood with a joke. “So you’re saying I’m a know-it-all?”

Jim threw up his hands. “I give up. I try to get some help, and all I get are your lame-ass jokes!” He stood and headed for the front door. “Sorry for wasting your time.”

“Wait, Jim!” I jumped up and went after him. “I’m sorry, I just… I get uncomfortable… I mean…” I fumbled for a second. “Look, let’s just forget about what a wonderful person I am, okay? You stop telling me about it, and I’ll stop denying it. Meanwhile, I’m happy to help any way I can.”

Kelland stopped and turned around. Then, he nodded and stuck out his hand. “Deal.”

We shook on it.

As we returned to our seats, I asked, “Why me? Modesty aside, what makes you think I can help you with this one?”

“Cheryl suggested you. The first person a man talks to is his wife, least that’s how it is with me. But she told me I should come talk to you. That you had a way of makin’ folks see things they already knew, but didn’t know they knew, or some shit like that. Nowadays, I don’t even know what she’s talkin’ about half of the time. Ever since she started takin’ your classes.”

He beamed with pride. “Too late to stop her now, though. She’d probably beat the hell out of me if I tried.”

He was probably right. Cheryl was one of my better students, one of the few who truly understood that the system I taught was more than a method of self-defense, but also a way of looking at life and attacking its problems. She had shown a lot of faith in me, sending Jim like that. I didn’t want to let her down.

I thought for a moment. “Come take a walk with me.” I walked to the back door and waited.

Kelland stared at me for a minute, then grinned. “Oh hell, this is gonna be one of those school lessons she was tellin’ me about, ain’t it? One of those walks where you make me ’see the light.’ ” He waggled his fingers and rolled his eyes.

“You know, if you would come to the classes ever so often…”

He shook his head. “I got no time. Every time I turn around, somebody wants me to decide how we’re gonna do something, or when we’re gonna do something, or if we’re gonna do something. I barely got time to eat, sleep, and occasionally take a piss.”

“I get the picture.” He was nothing if not eloquent. “So take a break for a minute and walk with me. I want to show you something.”

He stood and smiled. “Lead on, O Great One.”

We walked out back, and I led him to the shelter in which we had lived for nearly two weeks. There, I began my “lesson.”

“I planned a long time before the bombs ever fell about what I would do when and if it ever happened.” I leaned over to open the blast door. “I learned all I could about the effects of radiation, how to build shelters, air filters, water filters, anything related to nuclear warfare. And I learned to prepare for the worst. The way I see it, if you’re ready for the worst that can happen, you can handle anything less with no problems.”

He looked down at the shelter. “Looks like a lot of work went into this.”

“Yeah, it did.” I descended to the fourth step and flipped a toggle switch just inside the entrance. Twelve-volt automobile bulbs came to life inside. “Come on in.”

Jim descended the rough wooden steps into the shelter, and his eyebrows arched. “This is pretty impressive.”

“Like I said, I tried to learn all I could.” I led him down the short corridor lined with simple wooden shelves and benches. “When we first built this, the lights ran off three car batteries that we kept charged with a hand-powered generator. Now we’ve wired in the waterwheel generator, and we’ve got enough power to run just about anything we want, either in here or in the house.”

As if on cue he asked the question I was waiting for. “So, if you’re so hot on always being prepared, why are the shelves all empty?”

“Because of you, Jim.”

“Me?”

I smiled at having so easily caught him off guard. “Remember when you questioned me on the night of the Kindley mess? You called me a selfish S.O.B. and said you suspected we had a stockpile of provisions that Rejas needed.”

“I never said any such thing!”

I stared at him silently until, finally, he amended, “Well, not in so many words.”

“If you recall, it was shortly afterward that we brought a van full of supplies to the town stockpile.” We reached the end of the tunnel and turned the corner into the tiny little alcove where we had put our five-gallon toilet during our confinement. At the end of the aisle were wooden stairs similar to the ones we had descended at the other entrance. I stopped just before them and continued my talk.

“It occurred to me that if I didn’t bring them in, and things got really bad, people would eventually come after them. And if things didn’t get bad, and the town prospered without any help from us, we could probably count on being known as ’the bums that sat there nice and cozy while the rest of the town had to struggle.’ Also, we figured it wouldn’t do much good for us to live through a nuclear war, if we just had to watch everyone else die. You convinced me that it was better to survive as a town than as a family.”

He was silent for a moment as he thought my analogy through to its logical conclusion. “So you’re tellin’ me that I need to give up all we worked so hard for, because it’s better to survive as a country than as a town?”

“Not exactly.” I reached down, grasped a latch under the bottom stair, and lifted. The stairs rose as a single unit, hinged and counterweighted at the top, to expose a hidden room. Our clan, in which we included Ken and Cindy, had worked long and hard to keep it secret. The mayor’s jaw dropped in astonishment when he saw the room lined with fully stocked shelves.

Given a choice between good will and selfishness, I usually tried to compromise. I briefly wondered if his mouth could possibly open any wider. I guessed I could find out if I really wanted by simply telling him about the other two stashes hidden nearby. Nonperishable food items, weapons, ammunition, and tools. “I never said you needed to give up everything,” I told him.

It took several minutes for him to stop laughing long enough for us to begin planning.

We still had eight tankers in town. The USR amp;D team confiscated half of our sixteen trucks, so the others had been busy for the last two days moving our gasoline and diesel supply back into some of the gas stations in nearby towns. Seventy-five percent of the food stockpile was now hidden in attics, buried in backyards, or otherwise stashed away. Many of our general supplies were cached as well. When our visitors arrived, no one would have any reason to suspect that we had any more than a modest surplus of anything.

So Thursday morning saw most of the people of Rejas lining Main Street as if in anticipation of a parade. I stood with several of the ad hoc committee heads in front of City Hall, all of us decked out in our Sunday best.

Of course, hard work and hard times had reshaped most of us so our Sunday best hung off of us in places where they had once been tight and fit snugly in places where they had previously been loose. The so-called honor guard for the visiting representatives of the reviving U.S. looked more like a group of cleaned-up hobos than official representatives.