Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume VII

Then Buster asked for a bit of privacy. They gave it to him, so they didn't know just what he'd said to Everett when he called the video store. But he came back and said not to bother digging graves in the frozen ground; if they left the house and barn standing, his Uncle Ken would rent it out the minute that Fred took the guards off it, or some refugees would just move in. No telling how long the germs for whatever it was would hang around.

He put the torch to it himself. Laughed and said, "This way, if Ken sues, at least it will be all in the family."

They'd quarantined everybody who had been out there. He, Buster and Fred got pretty sick, but they got over it, with fluids and more of the town's precious antibiotics than they had probably deserved and stuff to bring the fever down. Hell, tell the truth. He'd never been so sick in his life. If that, whatever it was, had reached Grantville without any advance warning, half of the town would have been gone in a month.

Over at the party table, Buster Beasley laughed uproariously at something Minnie had said. His gruff voice filled the whole cafe, "Oh, no, Minnie, girl, there damn well is something you don't know."

Minnie looked defiant. "What? Nothing that I need to know."

"Something I betcha' that you want to know. That would make the rest of it worth your while. You may not believe it right now, but it's important to know how to keep your paperwork in order. I had a time believing that, too, at first, but it's true."

"What?" Minnie persisted.

"You don't know how to ride a 'hog.' If you'll settle down and learn the grade school stuff as fast as you can, I'll teach you to ride, along with Princess Baby."

Minnie and Denise squealed with delight.

Benny Pierce beamed.

"And if you go on and learn the middle school stuff, there's something interesting in one of those triple locked sheds on the lot."

Three wide eyes and a piratical black patch stared at him-Doc Adams hadn't inserted Jim Dreeson's glass eye for Minnie yet.

"Two brand new 'hogs.' Never uncrated. For the day the two of you get your diplomas."

Jeff Adams and H.M. McDonnell flinched.

Von Grantville

By Russ Rittgers

Chad sat on the front porch swing staring blankly ahead. He held a tumbler of Kentucky's smoothest bourbon and water. It was like a cruel joke. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, those thirty-five new cars you have on your lot? You won't have to pay for them. The bad news? They're going to sit there and rot until you take them apart and sell them piece by piece. Or, you can sell them to the government for pennies on the dollar because nobody's got gasoline or money for cars except the government. Funny, yeah, Mr. Big Time Auto Dealer.

He'd never intended to live out his life in Grantville. When he studied marketing at West Virginia University, Chad wanted to go into international business. Then Dad had his stroke the day after Thanksgiving in Chad's senior year. He lived, but with the left side of his body partially paralyzed. Mom couldn't handle it mentally or physically at that time. Wes, his older brother, had a full-time job in Charleston working for the government. So rather than taking a few easy courses his final semester to pump up his GPA, Chad petitioned to graduate early because he had all his required courses completed. He received his diploma through the mail. Didn't even go to commencement. Three years later he bought the car dealership for a pittance. Lou Prickett had grown too fond of booze and was about to lose the franchise anyway.

Now, here he was. A businessman without a business. In Germany. Strange world we live in.

Debbie came over to the porch swing and sat next to him. "Penny for your thoughts, dear."

Chad smiled wryly and put his arm around his wife's small shoulders. "Just thinking. Never thought, heck, never imagined I'd ever get to Europe after I came back to Grantville. Much less live in Germany with you and the kids."

Debbie pulled his arm a bit tighter by tugging his hand. "Have you thought about what you're going to do? Some of the Methodist Women have set up an assistance committee for those German people who've been wandering into town."

"Don't know." Chad took another sip of bourbon. "All the cars and trucks I don't sell to the government, I'm going to have to disassemble for parts. I'll get Bob Szymanski and my other mechanics to do it. Added to my current parts inventory, it'll be worth a fair amount eventually. Trouble is, in the short run, we're going to be hurting for money because I'll have all the costs of tearing those apart but damn little income. We'll probably have to sell some land just to buy groceries."

Debbie pulled away from him. "Don't you dare!" she snapped. "Don't you even think about selling a single lot!"

Chad stared wide-eyed at his wife. She never…

"I had an interesting talk with that nice Scottish cavalry captain after he brought over one of his troopers to interpret for us today. He asked who was the laird who owned the land outside town. When I told him that most of it was owned by individuals and coal companies, he looked at me like I was crazy. Then I told him Dad owned 160 acres and you had, here and there, over seventeen hundred acres with houses on some of them. He said you must be a laird to own so much and live in a huge mansion in town. After that, he started treating me as if I was some kind of nobility. He must have said something to his trooper because the next thing I knew, the Germans we'd taken in started bowing their heads to me when I approached them."

Chad grunted a laugh. "Oh, yeah, that's me, Charles Hudson Jenkins von Grantville. Senior."

"I'm not kidding, Chad. In that captain's mind, we're nobility."

Chad still laughed. "Oh, yeah. I suppose I'll have to fight duels to protect the honor of our noble family name, too. Uh-huh, right."

This time Debbie joined him in laughter and leaned back against him again. "Okay, okay it's silly but… Do you know how many houses and trailers we have dotted around the countryside?"

"What… forty? You're the one taking care of those books. Do we really have that much land?"

Debbie's smile was smug. "Forty-one rentals according to our last tax return. Got back a nice depreciation-based refund a month ago. Deposited it in the bank here in Grantville. Seventeen hundred acres, sure. Some of it is just hillside, of course, since you and your dad bought anything that came on the market cheap enough. We've got the creeks flowing through some of them but it's ours. We may have lost three parcels outside the Ring of Fire but we didn't lose any rentals.

"But what I'm thinking is that we don't have a mortgage on a single one of them any more. We always went through the Bank of Grantville but last year I refinanced them through a New York bank. Our trailer loans were all run through the Farmington bank. Do you realize we have absolutely no debt? None! Honey, we've got rent money coming in from thirty-one active rentals. Ten are empty right now, but that won't last long. Yeah, we've got taxes and maintenance expense. Some of those places are pretty old. But with Chip and Missy not going off to college, we could finance our own construction."

Chad considered for a moment. "Well, that's almost right. Most of our tenants were working in Fairmont, Morgantown or somewhere other than Grantville. In other words, where are they going to get the money to pay their rent?" He sipped his whiskey.

Debbie snorted. "That's a temporary situation and you know it, Chad. They'll have to buy their own food, too. They'll pay their rent or they can move."

Chad knew his smile was a bit twisted. Debbie might have gotten her degree in Elementary Education and taught until Missy was born, but running their rentals for the past several years had given her the same set of hard-headed business rules he had.