Unknown - The_Growing_589064

Dakota moves first, bounding over the snow bank and racing to the downed man as fast as she can plow through the two feet of snow under her boots. He lies in a bloody heap in the snow, limbs bent in ways human appendages weren’t meant to bend. There are two ragged holes in his heavy parka, each tinged with soot and coated in dark, viscuous blood. His eyes are, surprisingly, open. One is crazy-canted, filled with blood, and staring off to the side. The other, however, is very much aware, and filled with terror.

Discerning the reason for the terror, Koda immediately reaches up and loosens her collar, displaying her bare neck to the man. At her side yet again, Andrews does the same.

The man relaxes slightly. The fear leaches from his eyes, but horror remains. One hand, at the end of a terribly mangled arm, reaches up and grabs the leg of Koda’s pants, spasming into a shaking fist. “D-Daughter,” he rasps, coughing on the blood pooling around his lips. “My daughter. Help—Help my daughter.”

“Where is your daughter?” Andrews asks.

“P-Prison. They—they took her aw—away from me…sh—sh—shot me—tw—twice, couldn’t hold…on….help her….please.”

“We will. We will,” Andrews hastens to reassure. “We’ll help her, buddy. But we gotta help you too. You’re….”

The young lieutenant’s voice trails off as the light and awareness from the man’s good eye slowly fades to a blank, glassy stare.

“Damn. Goddamn.” He looks up as a hand descends on his shoulder, squeezes briefly, and lets go. “This blows, Ma’am.”

“You’re right. It does.” Koda looks down at the corpse lying at her feet. “Let’s cover him with snow. We’ll relay his position back to the base once we’ve gotten the women out, alright?”

After a moment, Andrews nods, his shoulders slumped in a posture of defeat and resignation. “He deserves better. Hell, we all do. But I guess you’re right. It’s the best we can do for now.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Went to a party in the county jail. Prison band was there and they began to wail.”

SUPPER IS DONE, the tables cleared and pushed to one side of the room. The benches have been dragged into a large circle in front of the hearth, where a fire is blazing behind a six-foot brass wire screen. Asimov and Her Majesty, the calico cat, have taken up wary positions opposite each other on the warm bricks by the poker stand and woodbin.

The community’s two dozen school-age children, almost as quiet, are bent over books and worksheets at a pair of tables near the window. One child with long black braids and coppery skin—boy or girl, Kirsten is not sure—jabs determinedly at the keys of a calculator with the eraser end of a pencil. Another, a pair of headphones bulging under her cotton-blonde hair, conjugates French verbs. Kirsten can just hear her soft murmur: je suis; tu es; vous etes; nous sommes.

In the wake of Armageddon, homework survives.

Only youngsters over sixteen are excused from the drudgery. They sit with their parents in the circle, where firelight and shadow flicker over quietly solemn faces: black, brown, red, white, golden and every shade in between, men and women gathered to debate and decide for their people. For they are a people, Kirsten realizes.

It is an unlikely tribe, held together not by blood or loyalty to any one patch of ground but by common purpose. Unobtrusively, her gaze slides around the circle, from features that would be at home in Iceland to others whose pattern arose below the Sahara. Isolated from the wreckage as they are, she finds some small comfort in the diversity that ensures genetic survival for this group. And if for them, perhaps for others.

She watches as each accepts or declines a chance to stand and speak as a finely carved beech rod passes from hand to hand around the circle. Kirsten is not a social scientist, but her fingers itch to take notes. Shiloh is, apparently, a functioning anarchy: they have no elections, no leader, no council except the entire adult community. There will be no vote. The hundred and eighty adult members will talk the question at hand to consensus, or the proposition will fail.

Now on its second circuit, the staff has made its way more than three quarters of the way around the council. Some have declined to speak; others have taken the floor simply to think out loud and in company; one or two have been frankly suspicious of Kirsten. To them she is The Outside, and her work and reputation ally her with The Government, non-existent though it now is.

A dozen places around the circle from her, a young man accepts the staff and rises to his feet. Long side curls frame a gentle face and dark eyes huge and soft as a deer’s. Micah, the cabinetmaker and Kabbalist. “I will go,” he says simply. “I will not fight or carry a weapon, but I will offer Kirsten whatever protection I can.” He sits down abruptly, almost as if he has found himself unexpectedly in strange territory.

But he has changed the tenor of the discussion. His own sense of purpose sparks determination in others, and the discussion becomes a matter of what the community will do, not what it should. The infirmarian proposes scavenging whatever medicines the party can find between the Farm and Minot. Toussaint volunteers to take the tanker truck in search of gasoline. Others will search abandoned feed stores and perhaps farms. The community needs grain for the livestock as well as seed for planting.

“It’s going to be a safari by the time they get through,” Dan murmurs.

“That’s fine,” Caitlin answers from Kirsten’s other side. Her pale brows furrow on either side of the triple moon—waxing, full and waning—tattooed between them. “We need to gather in what we can, while we can.”

She falls silent when the staff comes round to her husband. Counterpart to her triple moons, Aidan Cameron bears the image of a blazing sun on his brow. He looks, Kirsten thinks, like nothing so much as a Viking, with blond braids falling almost to his belt and bound in leather. When he speaks, though, his voice is pure Highlands. “I will gae likewise,” he says. “And if we find any of the mechanical de’ils, or any who make cause wi’ them—Chlanna nan con thighibha so’s gheib sibh feail—Sons of the hounds, come here and get flesh!” He brandishes the staff aloft as if it were a sword, and its polished surface takes the light like steel.

Laughter runs around the circle as Alan stands in his turn, the speaker’s staff reduced to the proportions of a matchstick in his huge paw. “But will the sons of bitches eat the damned indigestible things?” Then he turns serious as he faces the rest of the community. “As you all know by now, ‘Annie’ here is Dr. Kirsten Anne King, one of America’s foremost experts in artificial intelligence and cybertech. What used to be America, at any rate. Right now, she may be the only surviving person who has the knowledge to get into the droid factory at Minot Air Force Base. She is the only person we know of that has some chance of getting the droids under control.”

He pauses, and the fire paints his face in bronze, making great hollows of his eyes. Memory—a history lecture, a visit to a museum, a book, she is not sure—flares for half a second: a disk of beaten gold with human features, dug from the ancient earth of Mycenae. The mask of Agamemnon Wanax, the lord of men. Then it is gone, and Alan Stephanos is a plain man speaking plainly. “I will go, too,” he says. “We may never recover what we have known. We may not even want to have all of it back. But what we have now is intolerable.”

When Alan hands him the staff, Dan says only, “I will go,” and sits down again.

It is Kirsten’s turn. She hates speaking in public, has hated it ever since her second grade teacher’s attempt to cast her as Priscilla Mullins in the Thanksgiving play. She cannot simply pass the staff on, though, unless she is willing to be inexcusably rude. Rude to people who will risk their lives for her and for the goal she has pursued over half a continent.