Ground Zero (17 page)

“Plenty of water around these parts, and we have a rain barrel. A block away there’s a bunch of ponds if I need them, though I haven’t yet. No electricity, but farmers got on without it for hundreds of years. We’ll do the same.”

“Okay. Just so you know, though, we do have electricity on our farm. And we have a whole bunch of people with different kinds of food. We’re up in Canada. If you want, you can come with us,” Mac offered. Neil smiled beside her. He must have known she was going to make the offer, but then it wouldn’t have been difficult to guess. If she hadn’t, he probably would have.

“Oh, no. We’re fine here. We have a couple of neighbours here still, who had no hand in what happened to my Lloyd. Those people ain’t around no more. This small area has a couple people who have gardens and such, so we share what we have.” Sharon smiled at them sadly, and Vigo and Denny sat quietly beside her on the sofa, both still crying from the loss of Vigo’s dad. Sharon had had time to deal with it. For them it was a fresh wound.

“Alright then. So long as you’ll be okay after we’re gone. I don’t want to leave you if you’re in any danger here,” Mac said, still reluctant to take the woman at her word. Neil rolled his eyes at her.

“See? You like to worry and fret,” Neil teased her, making Sharon smile even though she didn’t know the story behind the teasing.

“You two are welcome to stay and get some rest, and something to eat if you’re hungry. I don’t want you going off empty-handed after the gift you’ve given me,” Sharon offered.

“I’m sorry to say we really have to go, though it’s not easy to say goodbye to those two boys. We haven’t known them long, but we’re going to miss them,” Mac said, making Vigo and Denny look up at her, both with small smiles despite their grief.

“Yes, I’m afraid our kids are going to be anxious that they haven’t been able to talk to us on the radio. They probably tried to reach us on the boat last night. Mac’s friend, Ian, will have told them what’s happening, but we weren’t planning to walk through a major city on this trip, so they’re bound to be concerned about our safety,” Neil said, making Mac cringe at the thought of her daughter’s reaction when they finally spoke again.

Neither of them mentioned that the walk through the city had probably ruined their appetites for a while anyway.

They said goodbye to Vigo, Denny, and Sharon a few minutes later. There was no way for them to ever communicate with them again to see how things were going, so it truly was goodbye. Mac felt her eyes burning when they closed the door behind them, but the need to pay attention to their surroundings kept her from focusing too much on her sadness. The fact that the boys were back where they belonged made a huge difference in how she felt about it, too.

It began to rain about half an hour into their trip back, and it wasn’t a soft rain either. Mac was actually relieved to see it, though.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve actually seen rain this spring,” she said.

“Not me. It rained for a couple of days after you conked yourself on the head. You just didn’t see it.”

The rain soon stopped, and they were dry by the time they made it back to the river. Once they were settled in the dinghy, however, Mac remembered her irritation with her husband.

“Now, cowboy, would you mind telling me why the hell you decided to be such a jerk about Ian all of a sudden? I’d like to get this straightened out while we have some privacy and don’t have to worry about being overheard by the city of Detroit,” she said with a snippy tone.

“He had a look on his face when he hugged you. I didn’t like it,” he responded with a sigh.

“What? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Nope.”

“What the
fuck
kind of look could he have possibly had on his face, that would have you of all people acting like an asshole all of a sudden? You aren’t the jealous type,” she added.

“Who says? You’re my wife. He’s a good looking guy, and there was a time you had a thing for him. The look he had on his face made me think he had a thing for you, too, so I wasn’t too pleased about it. You went to some pretty extraordinary lengths to make sure he was okay, and for a while there I wondered if he was going to take that as a sign there was another reason you had come to get him,” he said with a huff.

“A good looking guy, huh? Maybe I’m the one who should be jealous,” she retorted. His mouth dropped open, and then he rolled his eyes at her.

“Oh, absolutely! I’m just going to forget all about my forty-five years of heterosexuality and jump on some guy.”

“It could happen. How do I know you don’t have any latent bisexual tendencies? Maybe you’ve been hiding them from me,” she said, laughing at his expression.

“Well, if I had, I’d hardly be willing to admit it to you now. You’d just make fun of me,” he said, making her smile.

“You would deserve it. In fact, I still have to get you back for telling him about the whole Mac-Mac thing. I will never live that down. He’s going to be calling me that until one of us keels over dead.”

“He’s older than you, so you might have a few years’ peace and quiet before you die,” Neil offered.

“You say that, but you don’t know his family. Not that I ever met them, obviously, but they all lived well into their nineties. He’s probably got another forty years left in him. I’ll be lucky if I get anywhere near that. Anyway, all kidding aside, are we okay now? Are you going to stop acting like you’re hopped up on testosterone, and behave like a rational human being, or am I gonna have to start smacking you around?”

“I suppose. I’d fight him for you, but then he’d beat the crap out of me. He’d get to demonstrate how truly manly he is, and I’d be left to limp off into the sunset. Alone.”

“Idiot,” she muttered. “Row the damn boat. I want to get some freakin’ sleep before I start hallucinating.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned cheekily at her and rowed the damn boat.


   
 
   
 


Ian took the first day at the helm to give them both some rest. They were at anchor when Mac dragged herself out of bed, and she could hear the two men talking out in the galley area. She smelled something amazing, and for the first time since she had set foot in Detroit, her stomach gave a happy leap. Bella was already inhaling her own plateful.

Gathering up some clean clothes, Mac headed for the tiny bathroom. She wanted a shower. Her scalp hadn’t opened up at all, so she felt safe giving her hair a light shampoo. She couldn’t scrub too hard, but it was better than nothing. When she stepped out and toweled off she felt almost human again. She had to struggle into her clothes, what with the humidity in the bathroom making them stick to her skin, but eventually she managed to make herself decent. Everything felt crooked on her still, but it would all straighten out once her skin was properly dry.

Neil put a plate on the table, and shoved it in front of her when she sat down in the cramped dining area.

“Eat, honey. You’ve been losing weight,” he criticized.

“What the hell? Jerk! You don’t get to tell me I’m too skinny. Or too fat. You’re supposed to think I’m perfect. It’s your job,” she instructed.

“It’s my job to worry about my wife, who hasn’t been eating,” he said through gritted teeth. “I had to watch you at death’s door just a few days ago, so shut up and eat. Get your strength back.”

“Oh, fine. Jerk,” she muttered again for good measure. Ian just laughed at her. She hunched her shoulders, and dug into her eggs. They were from their farm, and were a couple of weeks old, though they were probably still a lot fresher than what people used to buy at the grocery store. She dipped her toast into the runny yolk and groaned at the first taste.

“Okay, you’re forgiven,” she finally said, when she pushed away her plate.

“I don’t recall asking for it, oh cantankerous one,” Neil intoned solemnly, so she stuck her tongue out at him.

“So, how far did we get today, Ian? Do you know?”

“You keep forgetting I can kick your ass now. Of course I know. We were passing Sarnia just when it started getting dark, since we only had about eight hours’ of daylight by the time you two got back today.”

“Oh, good. It’ll be nice to be able to tell Cam and Billy we should be home in three days, if we can get twelve or thirteen good hours’ travel in each day,” she said.

“Shouldn’t be a problem, so long as the weather cooperates, though I did forget to tell you that Cam radioed last night,” Ian said.

“Yeah, Neil said something to Sharon when we were about to leave, which made me realize one of them would probably try to get in touch. I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it. She’s going to be pissed that we went through Detroit like that. We weren’t supposed to go into any of the cities. She was already worried about us going to Cleveland. We had plenty of oil from the restaurants back home, so there was no need to risk it, or so we thought. Best laid plans, though,” she said, waving her hand airily.

“I’m sure she’ll forgive you,” Ian said with a shrug. “How did all that go anyway? You mentioned a woman’s name. Was that Vigo’s mother?”

Mac filled him in on everything while Neil put the plates into the tiny dishwasher. If there hadn’t been one on board, they probably would have left the dirty dishes until they got home to throw in the dishwasher there, and then brought them back to the boat. Neither of them could stand washing dishes.

“It was the same walking through Cleveland,” he said, when she finished describing the remains on the streets.

“I’m guessing there are plenty more inside the buildings, too, since the number on the street wouldn’t coincide with the original population.”

“Probably,” Ian agreed.

“It’s just such a hard concept to wrap my head around, and maybe part of me didn’t think it was real. It’s not until you see that there are really that many dead people, that it sinks in,” she said.

“Well, things were pretty quiet in Huntsville, too, honey. And don’t forget the cannibals,” Neil reminded her.

“You know, I don’t think, even if I live as long as Methuselah, that I will ever forget the cannibals, but thanks so much for the reminder,” she said sarcastically.

Ian was tired, and heading off to bed with Bella trailing behind him, so Mac and Neil went into the cabin to radio the farm. Nobody answered at first, but then they were calling a little earlier than usual. They waited another half hour before trying again. This time Cam picked up.

“I’ll have to talk to you later, mom. Something has come up that I have to deal with. I’ll explain when you get home. Over.”

“Well, put Billy on so he can tell us what’s going on. Over.”

“He’s busy. We’re all busy. I have to go. Over and out.” Mac stared at the silent radio for a full minute.

“Huh,” was all she could come up with.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself. Looks like those kids have got some explaining to do,” he said.

“Sadly, they’re not the only ones. Great. I was just starting to relax a bit, and was looking forward to getting home soon. Now I’m probably gonna worry until we get there. Damn it.”

“Could be she’s just pissed at you,” Neil suggested.

“I’m pretty sure she would have started giving me shit if that was the case. Though maybe it’s part of why she didn’t feel the least bit inclined to explain what was going on there. Makes me wonder what else might have been happening there.”

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to find out tonight, so why don’t we go up on deck and look at the stars for a while. Maybe if we get tired enough we can get a bit of sleep so Ian doesn’t have to take the wheel for the whole day tomorrow.”

“I
hate
not knowing what’s happening at home, though,” she whined.

“Yes, I know. Worry and fret all you like. I know I will be. I’ll just be doing it up on deck. You coming?”

“Fine. Might as well do it there as anywhere else,” she muttered.

16 ~ A Developing Courtship

Cam couldn’t even derive any satisfaction from cutting off her mother and not filling her in. She had too much to do. She wasn’t particularly worried or anything, but she couldn’t sit up here chatting when they had a fugitive to find.

Gilles and Chuck had only been gone about twenty minutes when Mike decided to jump out of the moving truck. Neither of them knew how he had managed to free his hands, let alone remove his blindfold and see well enough to do it, but until they caught him it didn’t do any good to speculate. They would figure that part out later.

As it was, she had enough trouble dealing with two men whose egos had been stomped. Both of them were ashamed, but still trying to justify the escape.

“Stop it, would you? I’m trying to deal with the larger issue here. We need to find him first, and then you can debate the matter all you want. We don’t know if he’s going to try to come back here, but it’s a good possibility, and I do not want him getting through our security again. We’ve taken steps to keep that from happening, but no security is perfect, so let’s catch him before it’s a problem.”

She organized the same sorts of patrols to cover the perimeter, but realized they would have to cover the whole thing now, instead of that one area. If he was coming back, he would pick a different spot. This time, however, the women would be involved no matter who liked it and who didn’t. One person would be on the radio, and six people on patrol. They would switch off at three in the morning. They could cover a lot more area with more people, so she was involving everyone she could.

The exceptions would be Lisa and Kayla, who had young kids to look after, and Kelly and Annette, along with Mitch who would be given chore duty until their security issues had been dealt with. She might not trust him with security, but he could damn well milk a few goats. She’d still be checking to make sure the work was done, but that would only take a few minutes a couple of times a day.

Everyone except Mitch would be armed, but they usually were anyway. Chuck and Kayla’s youngest was only seven, so they really hated having guns around her, but Cam solved the problem by loaning them the small biometric safe she used to store her own gun in. She’d had to add Kayla’s fingerprints to it temporarily, but it was better than having little Amelia get her hands on a loaded gun. Their son, Chris, was ten, so he could be made to understand the danger, but nobody wanted a ten-year-old boy around a loaded gun either.

Katherine was becoming sort of the opposite problem. She’d been pouting and whining about how they had been so mean to the nice man who told her she was pretty, and Cam wanted to slap her. Chuck was not happy with her behaviour, and had already threatened to make some kind of a latch to lock her in her room if she didn’t shut up.

They were probably going to have to start giving that girl birth control pills with her breakfast if any single males showed up. Fourteen sucked at any time, but in a world with no potential boyfriends, it was probably a teenager’s worst nightmare. What Cam really wanted to know, though, was how the hell Katherine had gotten close enough to Mike to hear him call her pretty. He’d been under armed guard the whole time he’d been in the yard, and every one of those men would have told Chuck if his daughter had gotten that close.

“Chuck,” she said suddenly, coming to a decision.

“Yeah?”

“I think we need to talk to Katherine about Mike,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I think she knows something. Has anyone mentioned to you that Katherine was near enough to Mike to hear him call her pretty?”

“No,” he said slowly, working it out in his head. “Hmm. I’ll go get her.” He was back in ten minutes, Katherine’s arm firmly in his grip. Then he turned to Cam.

“You were right. She knows something alright. And she has no fucking clue the kind of damage she’s done, either,” he said, disgusted. “Feel free to explain it to her, because I’m too angry with her right now.”

“You’ve been talking to Mike for a while now, haven’t you?” Cam directed her question at the sulking teenager.

“So what?”

“So, you could have gotten yourself raped and killed. Not to mention any of the rest of the people on this farm. This isn’t playtime, or find-Katherine-a-boyfriend time. This is end-of-the-world time where the grown-ups have to make decisions, and the children have to listen. Otherwise people get killed. Most of the world is already dead, and there is nothing out there to protect us from harm, so we have to rely on ourselves.

“And here’s this other little thing you might have forgotten while you were flirting with a man at least twice your age. You’re here because I allow you to be. You have food to eat because of me, Billy, Neil, and my mother. And if you want to continue eating that food, you will obey the rules we put in place. There aren’t many of them, but they’re not negotiable.

“This is no longer a world with juvenile detention halls. This is a world where people who break the rules go without a place to live and food to eat. Your dad could have been killed when that guy escaped. And if that had happened you would have had to live with that for the rest of your life. It’s entirely possible someone might still get hurt because this guy got away. He was run off at gunpoint from the last place he was staying, because he couldn’t keep his hands off his own niece.

“Now, what did you hide in the truck?” Both Katherine and Chuck looked at her in surprise. Chuck had been listening, but apparently he hadn’t quite understood where she was going with it until she asked that question.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Katherine said, and her petulance was the final straw for Chuck.

“Cam asked you a question. You’re going to answer it, and you’re going to tell her the truth, or so help me God I’m going to spank your naked ass in front of every single person on this farm!”

Katherine looked at her usually mild-mannered father in shock and horror. Cam wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that no one had ever threatened to spank her before. Chuck was a very gentle person, normally, and Katherine acted like a spoiled, ungrateful little snot.

“I just put my little penknife on the back seat.” She answered so quietly they could barely hear her.

“What else?” Cam glared at her until she squirmed.

“Just a note! That’s all. I swear.”

“What was in this note? Did you ask him to meet you somewhere?” Chuck looked at her in shock this time. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that his daughter would step that far out of bounds, but Cam knew better. Chuck could blind himself to his daughter’s behaviour all he liked, but Cameron couldn’t afford to stick her head in the sand.

“Yes,” Katherine whispered.

“Did you promise to bring him anything? Things like food or blankets?”

“Yes,” she responded again.

“Where are you supposed to meet him, and when?”

“Same place we always meet. I just use one of the canoes to get there, so it only takes me about five minutes. He’s got a van parked near the river bank on the other side of the bridge. I said I’d be there every day at three, just in case it took him a while to get back here.”

“The same place you
always
meet him? Well, that’s great. How many times has he raped you, Katherine?” Father and daughter both gasped, but for completely different reasons.

“Never! It’s not rape when it’s love. He makes
love
to me.”

“You’re fourteen. He raped you. You’re not old enough to give consent.” Cam felt terrible for Chuck, who had collapsed into a chair at his daughter’s answer.

“I’m sorry Chuck. If it turns out she’s
not
pregnant, you might want to get her on the pill. We have a whole bunch in storage. She’ll be a grown-up long before we run out or they expire. You might as well take her home for now, though. I don’t think there’s anything else she can tell us that will help us catch him.”

Chuck looked like he’d aged twenty years in the last ten minutes. He ran a shaky hand over his face and hair, stood up, and finally led his daughter down the stairs. Nobody said a word until they heard the door downstairs open and close again.

“Holy shit!” Gilles’ comment pretty much summed it up for all of them.

“I know. I wasn’t sure at first, but because her comment about him calling her pretty pissed me off so much, it sort of stuck in my head. After a while I realized there was no way he could have been that close to her without someone knowing about it. So, the only person to blame for Mike’s escape, aside from Mike himself, is the little girl who fancies herself in love with him. Ugh.”

“Chuck is going to want to cut his balls off when we catch him again. And if I’m honest I’d have to say I wouldn’t mind holding the sick fuck down to make it easier for him,” Gilles said. Billy nodded in agreement.

“I’m only nineteen, and it really freaked me out just to have her flirting with me. I can’t imagine doing anything with her, and not just because of Chuck. She’s basically still a little kid, and she acts like one, too.”

“That’s because she’s spoiled,” Cam put in. “Doesn’t matter, though. I don’t care what she did, or how she acted. What Mike did was rape, which is a whole different crime from stealing food. We all knew he was bad news, but now that he’s acted on it we’re going to have to do something about it. We can’t allow anyone to rape a fourteen-year-old.”

At least catching him should prove to be pretty easy, now that they had all the information about his van’s location. Cameron thought there was a very good chance Mike would show up where Katherine offered to meet him. After all, in his eyes Katherine was more than willing to be alone with him and let him do whatever he wanted. And even if he wasn’t a first-rate pervert, the food alone would probably be enough to convince him to show.

The real difficulty was now going to be finding a way to deal with a rapist. One that would satisfy Katherine’s dad. Of course, there were lots of things they would all
like
to do to him for it, but everything she could think of was on the extreme edge of violence and cruelty. What would they become if they went to those lengths to punish someone?

Cameron tried to compare their current situation with the laws that used to be in place for rapists, but couldn’t find a way to connect them. Rapists were supposed to go to jail, but there was really no such thing as a jail anymore. They couldn’t take him up to Parry Sound, or over to Huntsville. Either Chuck or Gilles could get access to the holding cells there, but someone would have to drive there every single day to make sure the prisoner was fed. The only other option for keeping him imprisoned was to build their own jail on the farm.

They had no court-like system set up to hear charges, or allow anyone to present evidence of a crime. The closest they had come to that was listening to Mike tell them what he’d been doing. They had no impartial judges, and no one to defend or try a case against an accused person. When they had been planning the farm, not once had she or her mother considered the possibility that they would have to punish anyone for a crime. The closest thing to that had been the agreement that they would run people off the property with their guns.

Cam dropped into the chair that Katherine had so recently vacated, propped her elbows on the desk, and put her head in her hands. She was in way over her head here, and she knew it. Now was the time to rely on people like Chuck and Gilles. They were the ones who had been trained in law and order, and right now they were the last people who could help her. Suddenly her head snapped up.

“Kelly!” Her sudden shout startled both Gilles and Billy. She was a little startled herself, since she had completely forgotten until then that Kelly was a Justice of the Peace. Cam had no idea what sort of training that involved, or how much she knew about the law, but it was something anyway. If she couldn’t let Chuck or Gilles handle this, she should at least talk to someone who had worked in the legal system.

“Okay, here’s where I’m going with this so far. We’ll do the patrols as planned, but there’s a good chance we’ll catch him if we surround his van. In the meantime we have to figure out what we’re going to do with him. I’m going to talk to Kelly about it because she was a JP. She’s the one who married Neil and my mother. She’s got some legal training, and was given the legal right to do certain things, though I don’t really understand what those were.

“I’m just going to get some advice from her, or maybe some suggestions, and we’ll see what we can come up with. The thing is, we’re all going to have to agree on how we’re going to deal with this sort of thing in the future. If we start going crazy, cutting off men’s balls, there’s no telling where we’ll end up with that kind of thing. Next thing you know someone is going to accuse someone of rape just because they hate them, and by the time we find out it’s a lie we have a eunuch on our hands.

“And saying that, it occurs to me that we have no idea whether or not Katherine is lying. Maybe he hasn’t touched her, but she knows he’ll get in trouble if she says he did. Maybe he hurt her feelings. Any number of things could have happened. Or the kid could be crazy, and she’s created a whole fantasy in her head that he’s proposed marriage to her. She’s fourteen after all.