Tipping Point (10 page)

“Well, thanks for the friendly offer, but I think I’ll skip the horse feed just the same.”

“Yeah, I know
I’m
going to. Sit. I’ll make you an omelet. You okay with onions in it?” His eyes lit up.

“You’re actually going to cook for me? Cool! I love onions. You’ll just have to suffer when I say goodbye, that’s all.”

“We both will. I’ll brush my teeth after you leave, just so you won’t feel left out. Normally I’d prefer mushrooms, but I haven’t bought them yet. I need to get some so I can have the spores. I’ve got what I need to grow them otherwise.” She looked around the cavernous area that would eventually house equipment rather than people.

“You’ll have to see it when it’s all done. A few weeks and you won’t recognize the place.”

“Hell, I’ll be lucky if I can even
find
this place again. You did a hell of a job concealing the entrance.” She nodded her acknowledgement of the compliment.

“Thanks. I tried. Okay, let me get some breakfast for us. A long day like today means I’ll need my protein. Toast?”

“I think I can handle the toast, honey.”

“Okay. How about you do the coffee, too. It’s over there, under the coffeemaker.”

Cameron walked in as they were finishing up their meal.

“Shut up Cameron. I can hear you looking at me.” Cameron gave a grunt, and grabbed an orange juice. She’d obviously just woken up, and she didn’t like to eat first thing. It usually upset her stomach.

“You got the plans ready for the chickens and goats yet?” Mac cringed. She didn’t, so she’d have to sketch something out really quick. She was holding everybody back from getting the work done.

“You’ve got your hands full today, I think. Give me a call when you can. Thanks for breakfast, honey.” He gave her a quick kiss, and left her to her daughter’s glare.

“Chicken,” Mac yelled after his retreating form.

“Sure am,” he called out as he opened the door.

As soon as he was gone, Cameron launched her offensive.

“‘Honey?’ Are you kidding me?”

“Well, yeah, so I’ve got something that looks vaguely like a boyfriend for the first time in years. Leave me alone.” Mac hunched her shoulders.

“You guys sure moved fast, but never mind that. You need to deal with more important issues than a boyfriend right now. I can’t believe you didn’t draw up the plans yet. Where are Leigh and Kirk?”

“No idea. They’re used to daytime hours, so they probably fell asleep long before we did, and got up earlier, too.”

“I sure hope so! I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a bit of an echo in here. It’s not even insulated yet. You were pretty quiet, but not enough to keep us all from hearing what was going on.” Mac cringed in embarrassment, but she still wasn’t putting up with a lecture on sex from her twenty-three-year-old daughter.

“Look, you. I’m a normal woman who has sex and enjoys it. I taught you better than that.”

“You also taught me to be cautious about safety.”

“That’s a good point. You’re not allowed to have good points. It’s too early,” Mac said grouchily. Cameron cracked a smile.

“Tough. You raised me.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll go draw up the plans and then show you around the stuff you’ll be working with. Please be careful today. I’ll go over the safety precautions when we start setting up. Be back in a few minutes.” She swallowed the rest of her coffee, and went to her room to get her notebook.

Mac managed to squeeze in a little play time with the ferrets before she got down to business with the plans. As she sketched, she pondered the best way to teach a couple of young adults how to use power tools in as short a time as possible, without them killing themselves.

As soon as she had a diagram that looked like they might understand what everything was supposed to be, Mac went outside to find Cameron talking to Kirk and Leigh. They had emptied the trailer, so she backed the truck up to it and hitched it on.

“You guys ready?” They all said they were, so she got down to it.

Once she’d stressed all the finer points of safety, she showed them how to move the portable table saw around. She told them the lengths they’d need to cut, and then had them set it up so the wall of the building could be used as a fence, when the built-in fence wouldn’t slide out far enough. The posts didn’t need to be perfect, just approximate.

She’d listed all the lengths, along with the number of pieces they would need of each size, in a sort of parts list, so they wouldn’t have to figure anything out from the sketch. Then she explained the mixing process for the cement, how to brace the posts they stuck into the wet cement in the holes, and marked out the areas where the holes would be dug.

It took more than an hour to explain everything, but it would still save her time if they did the work, rather than her doing it by herself when she got home. She showed them the sections to leave open for the gates. She’d build those herself when she got back. She wasn’t sure they were ready for that just yet. She knew if she gave them too many instructions, they might forget the more important stuff.

Mac filled a supply pack, adding the binoculars she’d missed having the day before, and tossed it in the truck. She and Kirk hit the road by three. There was plenty of daylight left for Cameron and Leigh to get some serious work done, and the worst of the sunlight was easing off.

Their first stop was the OPP station. Thankfully the building was pretty much empty, and an officer was able to take her statement right away. Even better, he was an old friend of hers, though it took her a second to realize who it was.

“Chuckles? Is that you?” He looked up from the blank report he’d been trying to get started, and when he finally placed her he stood right up.

“Holy shit. Mac? Is that you? You haven’t been around here for years, and
this
is how we have to meet up again? That sucks.” He gave her a giant bear hug. Chuck Forrest had to duck to get through doorways, so she knew he was well over six-four, but he was one of those guys you couldn’t help thinking of as a teddy bear. She’d almost had a thing with him once, but it had just sort of slipped away and passed into obscurity.

“When the hell did you get on with the OPP? Last I heard you were still bouncing at the bar.” He filled her in a little bit on his life. He was married with three kids, and had been a full-fledged constable for about a year. She introduced Kirk and explained who he was.

“I was going to look you up once I was settled again. We just got up here two days ago, and we’ve got so much work to do. And then this shit happened.” They finally got down to filing the report. She sent the picture and video from her phone directly to his e-mail so he could have the kid’s plate number, and gave him all the information she had on him.

“It’s in the Parry Sound district, but I’ll get things rolling. If nothing else we can knock on his door and scare the crap out of him. We’ll talk to his boss and stuff. It’s not like we’re swamped with serious crime here, so whoever does work on this will be interested at least.”

Mac was pretty sure he wouldn’t be saying that to most people who filed a complaint, but he was one of the few friends she had that would give her the shirt off his back if needed.

“The guy who owns the knife shop in Rosseau thinks he knows the kid’s dad and was going to mention something to him about what his son was doing.”

“That’s not a bad idea. Normally we would tell people to let us handle it, but you know what some of the big families can be like in this area. Some are good, and tend to handle their own, while others can be worthless but loyal to one another. If he thinks the father will be willing to do something about the problem, you may not have to worry about it again. Let’s hope so anyway.” Mac told him a bit about Neil, and he laughed when she said everyone called him Mac, too.

“That’s just like you to end up with someone so similar they even have the same name,” he teased.

“Ha ha. You saying I’m in love with myself?” They both laughed and chatted for a few more minutes before Mac felt she had to get going.

“It’s so good to be back here, Chuck, even with that little shit dogging me. I’ve missed you guys, and I’ve missed this place. Hard to breathe in a city full of steel plants.” She had to stop and think about it, but then realized Chuck needed to know what was happening. Maybe he could convince his fellow cops to keep an eye out.

“There’s a reason we left the city, Chuck. Maybe you know more about it than I do at this point, if you’ve got information coming in from other detachments. The big cities are experiencing major power outages, people are getting out of hand, and it’s spreading.

“You guys used to tell me I was paranoid for planning to go off the grid, so hopefully you don’t think I’m nuts now and brush me off. It’s going to get bad. Now it’s too late to do anything about it, other than ride out the storm.

“Take care of your family, Chuckles. Make sure you have plenty of non-perishable food and water, because the grocery stores will probably be running out in a couple of days. Check with the detachments in the GTA. They’ll fill you in. Better than they will the public, I’m sure.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find Gilles, would you? I’d like to at least touch base with him now that I’m back in this neck of the woods.”

“We haven’t talked in quite a while. Basically since he was at my wedding, I think. Just sort of lost track, but I did hear he was over in Humphrey, almost all the way to Parry Sound. Not sure what he’s doing now.” Chuck shrugged his big shoulders, and then gave her a quick hug as she was leaving.

Mac gave a huff of breath when she was behind the wheel again. Chances were good she’d be able to find Gilles just through the rumour mills. It was certainly more likely than finding him in a phone book. As far back as she could remember, he’d always had a cell phone rather than a landline.

As for Chuck, she didn’t doubt that he already knew what was happening around Toronto and all that, but he was a Pollyanna.

They stopped at all the stores that carried the kinds of things they still needed, and Mac got her stock of mushrooms to collect spores from. They would cook up whatever wasn’t needed for the spores, and add them to tonight’s dinner. She was looking forward to a real meal for tonight, though the omelet was holding her for now.

The plastic cargo bin that took up a portion of the truck bed was filled to capacity now. There was nothing more they could get for human supplies without it potentially blowing out of the back, and they needed the rest of the space for the chickens and their feed.

The goats would have to wait for another day, as much as she hated putting it off. She’d need to build something like stalls in the back of the truck, or maybe in the trailer, to keep them from getting hurt during the drive home.

They went to the feed store and filled up the trailer with different types of hay and chicken feed, and drove straight to Bala from there.

Thankfully the chicken rancher had cardboard transport boxes similar to what pet stores used for puppies and kittens, so they managed to fit two roosters and ten hens into the truck box, with enough room around them for air to get into the boxes. The entire time they traveled through the area near Bala, she was on the lookout for Gerry’s green Civic, but there were no sightings, so they got home without incident.

They’d only been gone about three hours, but somehow Leigh and Cameron had really gotten on top of things, and from inside the truck it looked like they were both in one piece still. She was pretty sure all the posts had been put in already, so she got out to take a look at everything they had accomplished.

“Wow. You guys do good work! Come here for a second. I want to show you something,” she called. When they came over she pointed at the flat cement around the post and showed them how to round the cement so water wouldn’t pool and rot the wood.

While Cam and Leigh repeated the process with the other posts, Mac and Kirk laid out hardware cloth for the base of the chicken pen and covered it with dirt. They surrounded the enclosure with hardware cloth and then poured cement to join the bottom edges to the base.

To avoid waste, Mac made a shallow mould with a few slats of wood. Grabbing a trowel she scooped the hardening cement out of the mixer and pressed it into the mould. She’d judged the amount almost perfectly. When it dried they would have a stepping stone. Then she rinsed the mixer out and dumped the dirty water where they would eventually start the path from the animal pens. No point killing the grass anywhere else.

She got started on the gate for the chickens while Kirk helped Cameron and Leigh, putting together a corrugated plastic roof that would cover most of the enclosure, with hardware cloth covering the rest. They added more plastic to the back wall and half of two sides, while Mac installed the gate.

She had to keep the roosters separate, which meant dividing the enclosure into three sections before she’d be able to let them out of their boxes. Mac pounded some long stakes into the ground, and attached a section of hardware cloth. She divided the back area in two for the roosters.

When everything was built she put in the water troughs. She hated doing everything backwards, but at least they could release the chickens now.

Leigh took one look at a suddenly-freed chicken, and her opinion was made abundantly clear.

“Ewww! They’re disgusting. Is that shit all over it?”

“Yup. They’re not normally that bad, but it’s not exactly her fault. Where else was she going to shit? We should wipe them all down as we go, before we stick them in the pens. I don’t think they’ll take too kindly to a hosing, and that just seems mean to me after they’ve been in a box for so long.

“I know none of us really wants to touch them, but we can clean off our hands and use the hand sanitizer before we go in and shower. We’ll take turns there. You don’t have to worry about running out of hot water or anything, either. We’ve got a tankless water heater which heats on-demand, instantly.

“Make sure you do use the hand sanitizer, though. Salmonella is not our friend.”

Leigh looked like she was going to make a snotty remark, but one look from Mac was enough to keep her quiet. It was concerning, though. If she didn’t like hard work, or getting her hands dirty once in a while, they were going to have a problem.