John Barnes - Directive 51

Mensche left her in her room, with the outside lock thrown; Larsen had put bars on the windows, but Mensche’d never seen anyone who was less of an escape risk. He found Bambi and Quattro sitting in the kitchen, drinking some of “the possibly last stash of coffee for a hundred miles,” as Quattro called it, and going over a map, trying to figure out whether the best way east would be to sail to Tehuantepec and try to cross Mexico there; walk on I-70; or wait for one of the steam trains that the railroad nuts were working on getting running.

“Of all the precious resources,” Bambi said, “who’d’ve thought our railroad nuts would be so invaluable? If we can just get the coal to them, we have at least a hundred good, operable steam locomotives, if we can believe KP-1.”

“Now that the mainstream media is basically one radio station,” Quattro said. “and we don’t have any way to check up on them, everyone believes them again.”

Mensche sliced three thick pieces of Quattro’s whole-grain concrete, which he privately thought of as “political-extremist bread”—only right-wing survivalists and left-wing granolas could possibly pretend it tasted good. He smeared it with veggie butter, more political-extremist food. “Roth’s pretty wiped. The questions that Arnie Yang has been sending all seem to hit her like electric shocks, but after she comes out of the seizure, she spills her guts. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s some kind of genius.”

“At DoF, we called him the House Genius,” Bambi Castro said. “Need someone to watch your back while you set it down for her?”

“I’m more likely to be attacked by a dishrag. This little chick is beaten .”

He lunged for the bolt, dropping the tray, and flung the door open before he was even conscious of hearing the strange, throttled noise. She had tied one corner of her sheet around the motor of the ceiling fan; she held the other end over her head, fighting the loop she had tied as if it were trying to fasten itself around her neck. Though her eyes bulged from her deep red face, only her own straining muscles constricted her throat; she held the sheet back from herself as if it were an anaconda trying to put a loop around her neck.

Mensche couldn’t break her grip, but he could hold the loop away from her head. What the hell can it be like inside her head? He remembered something Arnie had suggested. “Ysabel, your parents love you very much, and they want to see you again someday.”

Her face seemed to fall into itself like a ball of burning newspaper, she let go of the sheet and fell to the floor; a great gasp of air howled painfully into her throat. Mensche sat down next to her on the floor and pulled her over so that she could hang on to him; Bambi burst in, but Mensche just shook his head and gestured shhh .

Bambi whispered, “Hey, your daughter?”

“Yeah?”

“She had a great dad, you know.”

“Thanks.” Mensche didn’t see any reason to explain about the endless fights and screaming when Deb was a teenager, about being played against Deb’s mother into hapless veering between excessive bribes and excessive punishment, about believing Deb when she lied and doubting her when she needed his belief, about any of those awful years of too much hope mixed with too little a decade ago. Any damn idiot can look like a good dad if he only has to deal with one kind of trouble and his whole life isn’t at stake.

Thanksgiving Day was unseasonably warm. Jason got a day’s work from the town on the north approach crew, taking a long walk up US 285 to help bring refugees in; whenever the weather lifted enough, desperate refugees from the Front Range would leave their improvised shelter and start trickling into Antonito along 285 again, some thrown out, some because walking south had become a habit after they’d escaped the linear deathtrap of the I-25 corridor from the Springs to Fort Collins.

They had ridden out in Doc Bashore’s wagon and set up base six miles north of town at dawn. After that it had been a long day of taking his turn walking out, sometimes as much as two miles, to meet the little clusters of refugees, figuring out their immediate needs, and then flagging for a nurse, or for Doc and the wagon, or just walking them back in.

“It was great of Doc to come all the way out on 17 and give us all a ride in. That wagon’s no faster than walking, but if we stay here, I want to get one, and the horse to pull it,” Jason said. “I love the part where the horse does all the work.”

“Till you get home. Doc’s prolly still rubbing that horse down. He says you gotta always take care of the horse before you take care of yourself. How come you had to end up way over on 17?”

“Bobby Kronstadt ran into some hostiles, and we all ran like mad to back him up—now that’s exercise. Four big angry men, and one very shrill woman, looking for a town that’d want them to run it, and mad as all shit that it wasn’t us. Told ’em we didn’t care where they went, but they weren’t getting any closer to our town. Bobby and I tracked them all the way cross-country till they headed west on 17. Cap figured we were the youngest and healthiest, with the best shoes. That’ll teach me to let you make moccasins.”

“Aw, bullshit, baby. The other guys prolly think you’re lucky ’cause I’m hot, but they know you’re lucky about them shoes.”

He grinned at her. “You know I think about how nice it is to have the mocs every day on the trail.” He stepped closer to her. “All day long I think, can’t wait to get home to that gal o’mine, and see if there are any new shoes…” His fingers traced delicately down the sides of her neck, stroking the dragon tattoo.

“The soup’s pretty hot, now, but I think them potatoes’ll prolly need to cook some more.”

“Then let ’em. Our first Thanksgiving here should be a good one.”

When they were happy and satisfied and just cuddling on the bed, she asked, “So is this Thanksgiving being good so far?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m about as thankful as I can get.”

“Let me get dressed and see about the soup, and maybe I can get you thankfuller.”

Beth’s fringe benefit for helping with the mass dressing-out of mule deer and pronghorns at the community kitchen had been a generous pail of trimmings. For their Thanksgiving soup, she had boiled that with some potatoes, a share of leftover cooked rice from the community kitchen, a can of tomatoes, a handful of thawed-but-probably-not-yet-spoiled frozen brussels sprouts, and a couple of old, stringy carrots. They promised themselves that by next Thanksgiving they’d have turkey, or at least chicken.

For now, compared to Thanksgiving with his family or at the commune, this was, hands down, the best he’d had: no football, no tofu, no sermons about making something of himself, no dark little hints about Beth having grown up in a doublewide, no sermons about not oppressing people.

“For two refugees, this place is a palace,” Jason said. “You’re right, I really am even more thankful.”

“Yeah, baby, we’re so lucky. And I listen to that wind and I just think, the place is warm and toasty and all ours.” She pulled out a potato on a long-handled fork, cut it in half, and tried a bite. “That’s about as done as it’s getting.”

Later on, when the warmth, safety, privacy, and full bellies pulled them toward bed, they banked the fire, put the soup-pot into the cold corner of the room to keep it fresh longer, and washed with warm water from the iron bucket that Beth kept by the stove. Holding Beth, on a box spring and mattress with real sheets, up on a platform Jason had made from some old crates and boards, he thought, This is living .