“Don’t thank me. I just told him what he already knew.” Tate said with a grim smile.
“Well, maybe... I’m sure I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“The way I see it, my dad had given up hope until ya’ll came down the road. We were starving in that valley. The only thing I did was let him know we knew it too. We were tired of doing nothing, trying nothing, you know?” Tate looked from Terry to Seth and back again.
“Yeah. You can meet my parents sometime.” Terry said with his head nodding. “In town, it was pretty much the same, except there were enough people that we could trade with for food, and there’re rich families who had an interest in keeping us alive - to do their dirty work.”
“There was plenty of times we’d be happy to do dirty work. Everybody was the same. We all hunted and fished until there wasn’t anything left. Lots of good farmland and nothing to plant. We had some killing fights over dead squirrels.” Tate said with his hands showing his frustration.
“Yeah... Well, Bill said he’d work something out after this is all over. He will.” Terry reached over and clapped Tate on the shoulder.
Tate didn’t know what to say. The idea that anyone would help was a lost idea for his family. He saved himself by grabbing an arm as it passed by. The arm was attached to a small young woman, maybe five foot three with long dark hair. Terry saw a woman that would be pretty once she recovered from the effects of long term hunger. Her eyes were brown, darker than the brown of her hair. Her cheeks were sunken slightly, and her chin was a little too sharp. She had a small mouth with permanently pouting lips and a cute, rounded nose that blended smoothly into her face. She looked at Terry and smiled timidly.
“Terry, this is my cousin, Susanna. We just call her Suze.” Tate said.
“Hi, Susanna. It’s pleasure to meet you,” Terry said, smiling bigger in return. This is my friend, Seth.”
“Hi, Terry. Hello, Seth,” she said in a tiny voice that promised to be rich and full once she got past the shyness.
Seth, on the other hand, had just laid eyes on the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He stood there, just gazing at her until Terry shot an elbow into his side. “Oh, sorry. Hi, Susanna. I’m glad to meet you.” He grinned in a way that made Terry think Seth had lost all three of his marbles, but his smile opened Susanna right up. She dropped the bashful upturning of her lips and returned a full and dazzling smile of her own.
Terry watched them staring stupidly at each other for about eight seconds before he said, “Well, I think I’ll let you two get acquainted. Me and Tate are going to grab some food.” He gave Tate a sideways jerk of his head, and got a sly grin in return. They walked away and left Seth and Susanna locked in an awkward trance.
“Nice job,” Terry said when they had gained some distance.
Tate laughed and said, “I just grabbed her to change the subject. Didn’t see that coming.”
The two men joined the growing line for food. They were content to watch the people coming and going, talking and laughing, looking like anything but a war in the making. A rare cool breeze swept over the grass, and the entire community sighed with pleasure.
The food came in woven grass baskets lined with heavy cloth napkins. Sam never asked what anyone wanted. He simply looked at the person bearing the basket and chose for them. He seemed to take pride in his selections, adjusting by types of food and portion size on the fly. In Terry’s case, he walked away with a mound of beef ribs, dripping in red sauce. At the next station, he received some chunky fried potatoes and a scoop of coleslaw, dumped right on top of the ribs.
Terry selected a place at one of the long tables with the benefit of being in the shade of one of the canopy tents. Tate sat down across from him with a basket full of blackened chicken. Without a word, they began to munch happily on their food. From his location, Terry could see that Seth was sitting with Susanna against a fat oak tree on the edge of the woods. They were talking with animated gestures and frequent smiles. The sight triggered a smile on Terry’s face as well. Seth was many things in Terry’s short experience with the man. Giant mass of strength, dangerous fighter, good companion, but starry-eyed lover was not on the list until the last five minutes.
The next thought would have been of Sally, but she beat him to the punch when she slid onto the bench beside him and said. “Did you save some for me?”
Terry dug a dripping rib out of his basket and held it up for her. Grease and red sauce dripped down his hand. She grimaced and said, “Oh, nice. Such a gentleman.”
“Me get food. Me share food with woman. Woman no like?” Terry said it with an exaggerated frown.
Tate laughed so hard that coleslaw sprayed from his mouth. Sally looked at them both with disgust and said, “Boys!”
“Clever,” Terry said.
With that, Sally stalked away. Terry watched her denim clad butt jerking aggressively from side to side as she disappeared into the crowd.
“You just had your first encounter with the Terror of Teeny Town,” Terry said as he turned back to his food. “Otherwise known as Miss Sally B. Carter.”
“She likes you,” Tate said, still grinning.
“She doesn’t know the word ‘like’,” Terry replied with a shrug.
“Oh, man. You like her too!”
“What’s not to like?” Terry asked, holding his hand up like cats’ claws and hissing for effect.
Ten minutes later, Terry and Tate were staring at the bottoms of their baskets, and unconsciously holding their bellies against the mountain of food they had just inhaled. Tate spotted Sally on her return trajectory before Terry did, and quickly excused himself from the table. Terry wondered why Tate was in such a hurry until he spotted Sally for himself and gave Tate credit for being a smart guy.
With Tate out of the way, Sally parked herself directly across from Terry and slapped her basket of chicken on the table.
“Well, hi there, Sally,” Terry said.
“Hello yourself, Terry Shelton.”
“I was wondering... Could you take your pants off?”
“I beg your pardon,” Sally half-shrieked, her cheeks turning bright pink.
“It just occurred to me that you are only mean to me when you are wearing pants. Maybe those jeans are cutting off the blood to your heart.”
“Oh, my God...”
“The good news is, they look really good even if they are killing you slowly.”
“Terry, shut up!”
“So, that’s a ‘no’ on the pants removal...”
Sally pulled a greasy chicken leg out of her basket and hurled it across the table. Terry ducked to the side and watched the leg fly by at high speed. A border collie mutt, lying in the shade of the buildings with about ten other dogs, broke from the group and snagged the chicken leg before it even stopped rolling. The lucky dog trotted south along the edge of town, having no intention of sharing his catch.
“I can help you, you know.” Terry added as he returned to his normal sitting position.
“You try, you die,” Sally said with real anger.
Terry sighed and gave in. “I’m just messing with you, Sally. What’s got you so bent out of shape?”
Sally spent the next few seconds trying to burn a hole in his face with her heat vision before she relaxed and said, “You’re on the mission tonight.”
“Yeah, I kinda figured. Why is that a problem? I’ve been on lots of missions lately.”
“Well, first of all, I’m not.”
“That makes me happy. I’d rather you stay safe.”
“Terry, nobody gets to stay safe now. I’m trained and capable, and I want to fight.”
“Well, I’ve learned a thing or two about your father. I’d say reason number one is that you’re his daughter, and reason number two is that if men go on the mission, the worst thing that happens is we get tortured and killed. If you go, pretty as you are, you could get captured, imprisoned, and used as a plaything for very bad men for the rest of your life.”
Sally winced at the thought. “Ok. I won’t take daughter as an excuse, but I’ll take rape.”
“Good, because that’s exactly the kind of people we’re up against.”
“Yeah, ok. You’re right,” Sally agreed.
“What the other reason?”
“What other reason?”
“You said ‘first of all’,” Terry answered. “That usually means there’s a second reason.”
“Well... You’re going. It’s dangerous as hell,” Sally said, her eyes large and wet.
“Yeah, that’s why I’m going to use my best skill.”
“You mean your Kirk trick?”
“No, I mean my incredible ability to crawl through bushes. That way, they can’t see me.”
She smiled, angry at herself for falling for the dumb joke. “No, seriously. It scares me.”
“You mean you actually worry about me?” Terry asked.
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“Sally Carter cares. No wonder you’re so pissed off,” Terry said with a smile. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”
Chapter 8 – 4
When I thought Dad knew how to work us hard, it was just because I hadn’t met Sally Bean yet. We were grateful to have a new place, especially one like Sally’s farm, which could keep us fed forever if we were smart. The cost was fourteen hours of nonstop work every day, starting at four in the morning, when the half dozen milk cows began to complain, and ending when we were too tired to swing a hammer on the endless afternoon construction projects.
Sally had showed us her entire farm on that first day. She seemed to operate on the variety principle, basically ignoring all modern farming wisdom in favor of a balanced approach. She had a small number of pigs, goats, sheep, cattle in beef and milk varieties, two horses, and a mean old gray Welsh pony whose sole purpose in life was to try to knock me down. She also had a large flock of chickens, a barn full of feral cats, and a gentle mule named Jake. Inside her clearing, she worked over fifty garden beds, each with a special purpose in her elaborate scheme, and several larger plots of single crops. She called them truck gardens. The woods surrounding her home stretched from the main road we had driven to a point two hundred yards behind her house. From there, it was open pastureland to the edge of a steep valley containing a creek. The valley was wooded across to the top of a short ridge, almost a full mile from the main road.
In other words, she had more land than anyone could handle alone. She had more than all nine of us could manage. We spent our time focused on the clearing and the thin margins of the woods where we gathered endless firewood. The main problem with being caught in a nuclear winter was that, even at the height of summer, it was still too cold to grow anything that one would grow in Tennessee. We were effectively farming in central Canada that year.
After a long evening talking it over, Dad decided that even with Sally’s vast basement full of canned and traditionally stored food, we needed to grow something - anything we could grow, right then. The only answer was greenhouses. Sally was not a fan of greenhouses. Her ethic of being close to nature did not generally involve creating artificial climates, but in this case, she could definitely see the point. We did an inventory. Sally had a lifetime of materials stacked up in various sheds and barns. Framing would not be a problem. Glass was a possibility. There were bound to be hundreds of empty houses with windows that could be salvaged and re-tasked to greenhouse duty, but the amount of effort involved meant that we would miss the incredibly short growing season.
We had brought a dozen rolls of clear plastic from one of our salvage trips, and they would work well enough, but Dad was worried that they sheeting would freeze and crumble before we harvested the cool weather crops we had in mind. Back to the building supply they went, Arturo and Kirk and Dad. They came back two hours later with the station wagon grinding under a stack of ribbed polycarbonate panels lashed to the roof. They had seen several people, they reported, but no one had bothered them.
The greenhouse frame was built from well-seasoned lumber. Most of it had been drying for decades. Dad tried to select only softwoods to avoid the problem of driving nails into something like oak. They commandeered four of Sally’s raised garden beds and used them as the base for the structure. The logic was that the soil in the beds would warm from the sun faster than the soil in the ground, and then would serve to release heat for a while after the sun went down. When the frame was complete, we laboriously screwed the poly panels on the outside of the framework, and Dad found a staple gun to line the inside of the frame with the flexible plastic rolls. By using the double layers, he explained that we would generate two climate zones more heat inside than out in the open. When the first greenhouse passed Dad’s engineering standards, we did the whole thing again with the next four garden beds. Three days of work later, we had almost 2000 square feet under clear plastic.
Of course, Dad wasn’t done yet. He used a set of rusty eye hooks and steel reinforcing rod to rope both greenhouses to the ground. He was anticipating months of wind. Then, with some more rummaging, he found a bunch of the same kind of water barrels that Mr. Carroll had given us. Dad painted them black, filled them with water, and attached a maze of old PVC pipe to the fittings on the barrels. In a bizarre moment, he asked Kirk to suck water through the pipes until the whole system was charged with water. Kirk looked like his head would implode before the water finally trickled through. The final touch was to paint the PVC black to match the barrels. Dad seemed proud of his homemade heat exchanger and expected it to make a real difference when the weather turned cold.
The daytime highs were creeping up into the fifties in late July. Thanks to the raised beds and dark colors in Sally’s domain, the clearing was nearly free of winter snow by then, while out in the larger territory, the north slopes and heavy wooded areas still held masses of snow. Dad could be seen several times every day, watching the sky anxiously. We were approaching the time when, the year before, the weather had changed rapidly, freezing the great state of Tennessee solid for ten eternal months. Would it be just as bad again? We had no way to know, and no one to tell us.
Once the major upgrades were complete, Dad went into what he called mad chipmunk mode. He and Arturo went out every day in search of anything that could be helpful. The empty spaces in Sally’s numerous outbuildings rapidly filled with supplies and random junk. I’m not sure they had anything specific in mind. Maybe it was just a way to deal with the unknown.