Lady Grace & the War for a New World (Earth's End Book 2) (11 page)

“You’ve
broken
horses?” Jeremy was wide-eyed.

“More mules than horses, and they broke me more often than not. I’ve been tossed so many times I can’t count. My grandpa did most of the work, but yeah, I helped break horses about a million years ago. I haven’t been on one since I left for the city.”

“Well, Veronica,” Henry said, “I think this situation calls for us to expand our job descriptions. Lena is the horse trainer and you and I are the assistants. Is that what they call them? Wranglers? We could be cowpokes, if we had cows.”

Henry walked over to the edge of the cliff and studied the topography below. Then he looked back at the ancient adobe dwellings. “This looks like the Wild West. All we need is Indians.” He put the palm of his hand to his mouth and made a few war whoops.

“Fat chance of that, Henry,” Jeremy smirked.

14

Sam listened to the lady and Jeremy bickering. At first, he didn’t understand what Jeremy was doing, but then it became horribly clear.

“Dear, you don’t have to do all that work. I’ve got fire starters,” Veronica said.

“I want to, Mom. This is fun. We’ll have a bonfire tonight.” The adobe dwellings’ ceilings had fallen in. Jeremy had pulled some of the old beams out on the ledge and piled them up. He focused a lens he’d found in the junk heap on one of them.

A thin white stream arose. Sam stiffened. He smelled something acrid. Was that smoke? More of it rose. Its color changed from pale gray to black as Jeremy kept adding fuel. “We’ve got a fire!” Jeremy shouted as shoots of orange and yellow burst from the wood.

Sam restrained a gasp and pulled away. Jeremy kept at it until the flames danced and popped. Sam stared, transfixed. Fire was absolutely forbidden in the world underground. In all 105 generations that the village had occupied the shelter, no one had built a fire. It would consume the air supply.

Sam moved away from the dancing tongues of light. The day had been a nightmare. He couldn’t imagine a space as vast as that around them. He couldn’t comprehend the brilliant sunlight and overwhelming colors of the sky and trees. The river and its gurgling sound. The wind beating on him. The sun burning his face. And now Jeremy had made fire, the deadliest menace.

“Campfire tonight! Bring your marshmallows and hot dogs,” Jeremy yelled. “Get your chow and sit around the fire!”

Dinner consisted of the usual army rations, colored glops of stuff in a segmented tray with a peel-off top. Ellie looked at her meal with something close to horror.

“Everybody, Ellie’s a vegetarian,” Jeremy called. “I think the green stuff in the trays is supposed to be vegetables. Do you think some of you could trade her for her meat stuff?” When they’d traded, he asked, “Is that OK, babe?”

She nodded, but ate almost nothing.

The others gathered around the fire with their packets. Sam tried to escape toward the back of the cave and greater darkness, but Henry called for him.

“Come on, Sam. We need to get to know each other,” Henry said. So he joined them sitting around the bonfire. Everyone talked, except him.

Jeremy scowled and spoke loudly to the other men. “Before we talk about
anything
, I’ve got to find out about what Ellie said. She told me that Belarian …”

“We’ll talk about that in a while, Jeremy,” Henry nodded at Ellie. Her eyes were impossibly wide and she was practically sitting in Jeremy’s lap. She’d been that way since they landed. “We’ll talk to you about that later.”

“But is it true?”

“Oh, yes. It got us off our butts. No way we’d go along with that. We got mad enough to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.” Henry grinned.

“We got here by giving them extremely generous amounts of our genetic material,” Henry explained their escape from the golden planet. “They have enough essence de Henry to populate their planet twice.”

“Not to mention
our
input,” Mel said. He had his arm around James, who hadn’t made the trip too well. “We’re good for a few more planets.”

“They told me they left me enough eggs for me to raise another family. I hope so.” Lena rubbed her tummy. “The whole thing was so degrading. And then sending us off on a garbage heap. We failed to adapt to their ways, but a garbage heap …”

Sam listened. He understood what the goldies had planned for Ellie, but didn’t know what the others were talking about. Maybe he’d figure it out if he listened carefully.

“At least they didn’t dump you next to a shelter full of maniacs with
nothing
,” Jeremy said. “If I hadn’t found Flossie that night, the wolves would have gotten me.”

“Well, we’re here now,” Veronica added. “Now we have to make a new world. That’s what we started out to do.”

“That’s what you and Jeremy started out to do,” said Henry. “Mother and I didn’t want to get fried by atomic bombs.

“Now, Sam,” Henry turned toward him, “I’m interested in how my old friend Sam Baahuhd made out after the conflagration. Do you have any stories about him?”

“Yes, sir,” Sam bowed his head as he would for one of the Bigs.

“Don’t you be calling me
sir
, Sam. I’ve done enough shuffling and jiving for a lifetime, and my people have done it way longer than that. I’m Henry. Henry Henderson, if you want to be formal. I don’t want anyone bowing to anyone here.”

Sam had never met so many new people. The new arrivals weren’t just people, they were legendary. Eliana, the golden Angel. Henry Who Could Drink the Leg Off an Ox. His wife, Lena, Who Got so Pissed at Him, He Almost Didn’t Get to Come Back to the Village. But Henry made talking easy.

“Well, young man, are you going to tell me about my friend, Sam Baahuhd?”

“Yes, Henry.” The word came thickly off his tongue. The wrong form of address down below could see a man flogged. That would mean death, because the rot would set in, or the flour disease would eat the skin.

“Sam Baahuhd lived to be a very old man and had many children,” Sam took up the rhythmic cadence used by the singers of songs when speaking of their history.

“I’m glad that he lived a long time,” Henry replied. “And of course he had many children. I’ve seldom seen a man who could attract the ladies like Sam.” He looked at the others and smiled knowingly. “What did his wives think of the underground? And how did he do with the hooch? The only thing he liked more than the ladies was that homemade whisky.”

Sam inhaled sharply and straightened up. “Sam Baahuhd lived by the Commands. ‘One man, one wife, fidelity.’ He was faithful to his only wife, Emily. He never touched the hooch from the moment he went underground.”

“He couldn’t have any of his old wives, anyway,” Jeremy cut in. “They were all his first cousins. I dissolved those marriages. Who was Emily? I don’t remember any Emily in the village.”

Sam’s eyes darted to the side before he spoke. “Emily was not of the village. Sam Baahuhd found her in the meadow and brought her to the shelter before the explosions. She was naked, except for boots made in Jamayuh. No one ever knew who Emily was.” Sam shut his mouth tightly, not intending to say a word more than the official explanation.

“Sam showed up in the underground with a naked stranger before the nukes went off? That doesn’t make any sense.” Jeremy scowled. “She had to be a fed. The only people in the Hamptons in those days were villagers and federal agents.” His mouth opened as he realized what had happened. “Sam dragged a federal agent into the shelter so he could have a wife who wasn’t his first cousin!” Jeremy grinned. “That’s right, isn’t it, Sam?”

Sam choked. No one of Emily’s lineage talked about their matriarch’s origins outside the family. The villagers would have killed Emily if they knew for sure what she had been. Sam didn’t like Jeremy’s knowing smile.

“Yeah. She was a fed. She loved Sam Baahuhd mor’n any ever had, an’ he loved her th’ same way.” Sam wanted to get up and leave. He wouldn’t let a stranger mock a love like Sam and Emily’s, even if the stranger was the Great Tek.

“Sam Baahuhd married a
fed
?” Jeremy sat back and guffawed. “That is
so
Sam!” The others tittered.

“I have to tell you guys something hysterical.” Jeremy pulled himself out of his laughing jag long enough to talk. “Remember the last night on Earth, when we were down in the underground and I threw out a bunch of ideas about how to run the shelter?” Jeremy looked around. “They made them into
Commands
, like they were in the Bible. And they
live
by them.”

“You’re kidding me!” “Those were bullshit!” “You were raving when you said all that.” “Nobody could keep those rules, they didn’t make sense.” The response was uproarious.

“Guess who’s
God
in this system?
Me
, the Great Tek!”

“They’ve never seen you have a screaming fit, Jeremy!”

“Maybe they have!”

Sam stiffened, flushing. They were laughing at what he held sacred.

“What are things like down there now, Sam?” It was Mel again.

“I took pictures inside the underground yesterday,” Jeremy said. “It’s worse than my worst-case scenario. The villagers have mutated into monsters.”

“Monsters?”

“Tell them about them, Sam.”

Sam couldn’t refuse a command from the Great Tek. “The Bigs come from the line of Sam from his wife Mollie. I’m a Little.”

“
You’re
a little? How big are they?” Mel asked incredulously.

“A little Big is this much bigger than me.” He held his hands apart about six inches. “A big Big is this much.” His hands were two feet apart. The people stared at him.

“How many Bigs are there?” Mel asked.

“When I was allowed in the hall, I counted,” he signaled twenty-four with his hands, “Bigs. And,” he signaled ten, “Big Bigs. That was ten winters ago. They could have many more children today. Bigs grow very fast. A Big of this many years,” he signaled ten, “is as big as him.” Sam pointed at Jeremy. They gasped.

“
Kids
that big?” Mel asked. “How can people grow that fast?”

“Not everyone grows, just the Bigs. They run everything, because they are so strong. They grow big very fast.” Sam hunched over, the way he did when the Bigs were around. This talk was forbidden. He hoped the others didn’t notice him cringing.

“What’s it like down there, Sam?” Mel said, his brows knitted in concern as he peered at Sam sharply. “I saw the shelter before it was closed up. It seemed like it was set up to support a decent way of life. How did that change? I mean the Bigs can be big, but why should they be bad? What goes on down there?”

Sam struggled to explain life in the shelter. “I don’t know how it changed, just that it did. Everything is dark now, except where the Bigs allow light. We can’t count days and nights in the dark. Not knowing if it is day or night, or summer or winter, makes people more frightened. They don’t ask questions if the Bigs come. They don’t talk.

“Before the Bigs took over, we could look up at the windows in the ceiling when we were working in the fields. In winter, snow fell and we could see frost around the glass. The days were short. The crops didn’t grow as much. Winter to winter measured a year. I marked the years on a wall. When the Bigs took over and made things dark, I still got to go to the fields to work. I was the strongest one. So I could keep track of the years.

“The Bigs always ran the underground, but the others, like me, had some say. Two winters ago, the Bigs took over everything. Before that, men who were not Bigs could have children. Their babies lived in the nursery with their mothers for a time; after that, a mama stayed with them. The mothers worked or went to the pit.

“When the Bigs put all the women in the pit, they were supposed to have babies in the nursery, but they didn’t. They had them in the hall and raised them there. I know, because I became the mama in the nursery. I took care of the babies. Not many babies came to me after the Bigs took over.

“I kept the children safe.” Sam could hardly go on, but he needed to. They had to rescue his people, the ones he’d saved. “The Bigs take the ones with the disease and the Big babies. I kept the others safe.”

No one said anything. Sam didn’t know what that meant.

“You’re not the same bloodlines as the Bigs?” Mel asked.

“I am Sam and Emily, with some Arthur. I am straight from Sam Baahuhd’s son Chad from his second wife, Sally. That was from the old days before we went underground, when he had four wives. And I’m from Sam Baahuhd’s daughter Shira from Emily. I have no Mollie in me. I am the last like me.”

“Like you?”

Sam looked down. “The last who can stand and talk and think. Many of my people …” His face worked as he attempted to say it. “Many have no,” he indicated his arms and legs. “Some cannot see or talk.” He looked down.

“How many are like that, Sam? And how many of your people are there, aside from the Bigs?” Mel’s voice was gentle.

“I don’t know. The women are in the pit, but they die or disappear. Maybe this many, once.” He opened and closed his hands three times. “But t’was long ago.”

“The others, who can’t walk and so on?”

Sam opened and closed his hands again, indicating fourteen people.

Mel sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Thirty-four Bigs, maybe thirty women, fourteen handicapped people, and Sam. That’s seventy-nine people.”

Sam looked ragged, like every word had taken something from him. “I don’t know for sure.”

“Do you know how old you are?”

“I know how many years I have. My mama counted the years when I was little, then I counted after. I am,” he held his spread fingers up, opening and closing his hands twice and ending with nine fingers open. “I carved marks on the wall. One mark for every winter. I follow the Commands. I can read some. I was learning to do numbers, but they took away the lights.”

“You’re twenty-nine years old, son,” Henry said, “I’d be happy to teach you numbers as far as I go. And you’ve got a numbers expert here in Jeremy.”

“Sure, I’ll teach you what I know—and Mel was my history teacher. He knows everything.”