“We were having a LAN party at Wes’s place, and we were planning on being there until Monday afternoon.” Brenna said, stepping back in as Max started to draw breath to retort. “We had our computers there, and a lot of other gear too. When we decided this thing was for real, we jumped on the internet and stored a lot of data before most of the power and networks began dropping out.
“And when we left, when things got too screwed up in Brandon, we didn’t mess around very much with grocery stores and places like that. We focused on the kind of gear that’s turned out to be in really short supply two months after the fact.”
“Oh man, cool.” Smith said, a grin starting to spread across his face.
“Like what?” Peter asked.
“Everyone else was bum rushing Sam’s Club, we were cleaning out Best Buy. While people were fighting over what was left in the Hy-Vee, we were stripping hobby stores and tech shops and Radio Shack.” Justin answered.
“Between leaving Brandon and ending up here in Canton, we laid our hands on as many laptops, tablets, battery packs, solar chargers, and stuff like that as we could find.” Brenna explained. “External hard drives. Thumb drives. SD cards. Printers.”
“Oh yeah, I keep forgetting about the Office Max we cleaned out.” Doug said.
“When Canton started turning into more than just us Geeks, it came out that a lot of the time when someone had a question about how something was supposed to work or what to do about a problem that was developing, we still had reference material to explain it.” Brenna said. “And between the ten of us, we have a lot of hands-on skills in useful things like the drones and fixing radios and so on.”
“So you’re, what, super geeks?” Crawford asked, sounding skeptical.
“That’s so cool.” Smith said again. “Wes must have had a great fucking connection at his place.”
“Yeah, gigabit.” Justin said.
“Really?” Smith said in surprise. “Full gig?”
“Well, not always.” Doug said.
“You know how the companies lied. But one time we clocked it at 812 on a torrent download.” Justin grinned.
“Nice.” Smith said, sounding impressed.
“You—” Crawford started, but Whitley cut in abruptly before the other Guardswoman could finish her inevitable insult or snide comment.
“Yeah, I get it; it was fast. Wonderful. So, your group is a tech resource?”
“More or less.” Brenna said, straightening up from righting her chair. “What we don’t already know, we can usually look up in our data somewhere.”
“So you’re running the power in here off solar?” Whitley asked, sounding skeptical.
“Solar, wind, even a bit of hydro.” Brenna said. “And one hell of a battery bank. It all started with the portable stuff we had with us, and has expanded as the group’s grown.”
“It’s being built up daily.” Justin said.
“Hydro?” Crawford said.
“Yeah, hydrodynamic generators. Well, homemade ones.”
“You need waterhead for that don’t you?” Whitley said.
“No, you just need flowing water.” Brenna said. “It doesn’t have to necessarily be dammed up.”
“Where are you getting the water.”
The locals stared at her. “You know we’re right next to the Big Sioux, right?” Brenna said carefully.
“What’s that?”
“River.” Brenna said.
“Yeah, over there.” Max said, pointing east.
“It’s dark outside.” Smith pointed out.
“And we usually look for zombies and stuff first.” Crawford added.
“Well, it runs directly past us here; it’s one of the reasons we picked this spot.” Brenna said.
“And there’s a processing plant.”
“What kind of processing.” Peter asked.
“Water plant.” Craig said, pointing in the same direction as Max was. “Right across the street. Canton Public Works.”
“You still have running water?”
“Yeah.” Max shrugged. “We had to close off all the pipes that lead out of our little piece of the city, and it needs pumps to keep pressure on the pipes since we don’t have a water tower on site, but . . . yeah, water just like normal.”
“Safe water?”
“Yeah, until we run out of treatment supplies.” the bearded man said.
“We’re careful about usage.” Brenna explained.
“I still say if we just made everyone boil what they use for consumption, we could stop treating and open up most of the taps again.” Justin complained.
“Yeah, and stop having to use that stupid yellow-brown rule for the toilets.” Doug said.
“It’d be nice to be able to shower more than once a week.”
“One thing at a time.” Brenna said with an air of having heard all this before. “It’s not killing anyone to take mostly sponge baths.”
“Let’s get back to your power.” Whitley asked. “How are you supplying this place with just a battery bank? For that matter, where are you getting good batteries?”
“We’re refurbing them from cars and trucks.”
“How?” Peter asked, picking up on where Whitley was going. “Car batteries aren’t designed for the kind of use they’re seeing if you’re powering lights and heaters and everything else around here.”
“Yeah, but we’re turning them into deep cycle batteries.” Justin said smugly. “And those
are
good for mass power storage.”
Whitley glanced at Peter as he furrowed his brow. “How are you managing that?” he asked after a moment. “I mean, I’ve always been told vehicle cells and deep cycle ones are entirely different.”
Justin shrugged modestly, but the aura of triumph was still all over his expression. “We’re stripping down the batteries we collect and rebuilding them as deep cycles.”
“How?” Peter pressed.
“It’s a long explanation.” Doug said, stepping in. “We’ve got a lot of documents in our database that discuss batteries for home power banks, things that off-grid types put out. And we’ve got a bunch of other stuff that details batteries in depth.”
“And one of the other people here is a chemistry teacher.” Max said.
“Yeah, but Gil’s the one who knows how to remelt the lead into the right kind of plates for deep cycles.” Justin shot back.
“The
point
,” Brenna said hurriedly, “is that between
all
of us, we figured out a way to take resources that weren’t going to be all that helpful and turn them into something that is.”
“You realize that if a big bank like you’re talking about short circuits it could set a lot of what it’s connected to on fire, right?” Whitley said.
“The Geeks say they’ve covered that.” Max said, gesturing at Justin and Doug.
“We’re not idiots.” Doug said, frowning at Max. “We’ve got fuses rigged up between the bank and the grid in here.”
“Those must seriously serious fuses.” Whitley said unhappily.
“We’ve been good so far. It’s actually not one single battery bank, we divide it up into manageable sections.”
“But—”
“Let’s not drift too far into shop talk.” Peter said firmly. Whitley traded looks with him, then nodded slightly. Peter cleared his throat. “So that sounds like Canton, more or less. What about Ellsworth?”
The locals’ faces clouded up immediately. Brenna rolled her head around on her shoulders for a moment, then shrugged. “We’ve received the same radio broadcasts you obviously did; probably more of them since we’re closer.”
“Yeah, our comms guy had to jump through some hoops to—” Smith started, only to trail off when Peter fixed him with a ‘shut up’ gaze.
“We’ve talked with them.” Peter said, returning his attention to Brenna. “They say they’re all that’s left of the government.”
“That’s what they say.”
“You don’t believe them?”
Brenna shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “They may be, they might not; but some of the things they’ve done — are
trying
to do — sort of make it questionable as far as we’re concerned.”
Peter blinked, then spoke slowly. “What are they doing?”
“We first ran into them a little over a month ago, on one of our scavenging runs into Sioux Falls. It was sort of how we encountered you; we were poking around in the outskirts and noticed some other vehicles further out that seemed to be watching us.
“So we extracted ourselves from the city and went out to meet them. We assumed they were . . . look, over two-thirds of the people here have come from straggler groups who show up or get found somewhere and get integrated into our community. It’s not like we rolled into Canton with a full roster.”
“How many are here?” Whitley wanted to know.
“About five hundred.”
“You don’t have an exact count?”
“I do, but why do you care?” Brenna answered sharply.
Whitley shrugged. “Just curious. The camp we were attached to back in Georgia was run by a FEMA coordinator, and she itemized everything down to the smallest detail.”
“We keep records.” Doug said.
“This group, the one from Ellsworth, turned out to be what they said was a survey and contact platoon. Three Humvees and a military truck, sweeping around taking stock of conditions. We talked with them a while, but their questions started getting uncomfortable.”
“Like, how?” Crawford asked.
“They wanted details about our encampment, about how many people we had and our supply situation. They wanted to know about our vehicles and resources.”
“Nothing terribly out of the ordinary about that.” Peter said mildly.
“I knew it.” Max exclaimed, smacking his fist into the table. “He’s just like them. We’re wasting our time.”
“Hang on.” Brenna said quickly.
“Calm down.” Peter said, holding out both hands a placating gesture. “All I meant was I’ve pulled duty with relief operations a number of times.”
“What’s that mean?” Craig asked, sounding vaguely receptive but still disgruntled.
“Like after a natural disaster or something, when you’d see military units rendering aid to a region?” Peter explained. “Marines units are often near those kinds of things because so much of the Corps is . . . was . . . usually forward deployed in overseas bases or cruising around in Navy task groups.”
“Okay, so?” Max demanded angrily.
“So, one of the first priorities is to triage the situation, the circumstances, so you know where and how to allocate what you’ve got to work with. So you know where to send what you’ve got, and where to send teams to leverage what’s already available. Like, an area might flood; but one town could be leveled and need everything, but another might just need a generator to get their water treatment plant working again, and a third might have a lot of unskilled but willing labor if they get some cadre leaders in to direct them appropriately.”
“Yeah, well, they weren’t suggesting anything like that.” Brenna said quickly before Max could speak again. “They were already excited to see Big Foot, and—”
“Wait, Big Foot?” Smith said.
“The truck.” Brenna explained. “You know, the huge dump truck you followed in here?” she added after a moment where the blank looks from Peter and the soldiers didn’t turn to comprehension.
“Oh.”
“Anyway, it was obvious they kind of liked Big Foot. And when they saw we were stockpiling supplies, starting to seriously fortify Canton, and had more than a few dozen people working on all of it, they said someone from the base would be out to talk to us the next day.”
Peter waited expectantly. Brenna’s face took on an even more unhappy cast as she drew a breath. “The scouts left. But the group that replaced them showed up with a list of demands as long as your arm.”
“Demands?” Crawford said, her voice taking that subtle flat tone Peter remembered from just after they’d all secured the FEMA camp in Cumming. The same tone she’d had after Swanson had died.
“Yeah, demands. Only they didn’t call them that; they used words like emergency requisition and drafting for the duration.”
“Like, what did they say, more exactly?” Peter said, still calm, still keeping his body language mild and unthreatening. There were too many guns in the room to risk letting things get too tense.
“They wanted nine of ten of our able bodied adults—” Max began hotly, but Craig interrupted him. The other man had to speak loudly to override Brenna, who was also striving to get words in.
“Teenagers too.” Craig said.
“Let me—” Brenna tried.
“Shut up!” Max said, his voice rising to the loudest level yet. “They wanted our people to report to Ellsworth for assignment to duties in the ‘National Relief Force’. Plus all our best vehicles and gear, including most of the ammunition, all the trucks and construction gear we’ve assembled, and a big chunk of our food and other supplies.”
“That’s—” Brenna said before been overridden again.
“Plus they expected whoever was left to still keep scavenging,” Craig continued as Max took a breath, “and they were going to come by every week or two to pick up an ongoing share of what got pulled out of wherever.”