Reapers (3 page)

So she had learned, bit by bit, to cook. Starting with boiled pasta and rice, with chicken and veggies stir-fried in a pan atop the wood stove. And after a few months, when she hadn't yet burned down the house, and learned that as long as you were paying attention, it was hard to utterly
destroy
food, she discovered cooking wasn't all that hard. In fact, the power of deduction told her that people had probably been doing it for thousands of years.

After an enthusiastic couple years of experiments and kitchen enhancements, she'd settled down, favoring methods that produced the most food for the least effort. With the exception of harvest season, for the last four years, she'd spent every Wednesday baking bread in the brick oven in the yard. And she thought nothing of it. In fact, she looked forward to it.

The end of the world was a hell of a thing.

She set down the pin and dusted flour from her palms and took a deep breath. "If you're happy, I'm happy."

Dee glanced over her shoulder, as if sharing a look with someone who wasn't there, and laughed. "No you're not."

"If you're happy, then I will make minimal criticism of your rash and foolish decisions involving people of questionable character."

"You think Quinn is questionable?"

"I haven't decided. His dad sure is."

"Well, we're getting married in the spring." Dee lifted the lid from the block of white cheese Ellie kept on the counter and inspected it for mold. "So you've got plenty of time to decide whether you like the people who will soon be part of your life forever."

"The spring?" Ellie said. "Why so long?"

Her nonbiological child gaped in affront. "Invitations? The food? The
dress
? We'll be lucky to be ready by
next
fall."

She knifed a wedge of cheese from the block and walked outside, shaking her head. The screen door banged. Beyond the window, Dee wandered to the dock and stood at the edge, munching the cheese, watching the yellow mountain light shimmer on the waves of the lake.

Ellie closed her eyes. Sometimes she didn't understand her daughter at all.

She didn't see much of Dee for the next week. Not that there was anything wrong between them. As far as she knew, anyway, although she'd grown old enough to recognize her habit of assuming everything was fine unless someone explicitly said otherwise. Which, in practice, proved to be one more example of a rational stance spoiled by irrational humans.

But in this case, she felt reasonably confident Dee's physical distance had less to do with ill will toward Ellie and more to do with her love for the Tolbert kid—or her love for their looming nuptials. With sudden horror, Ellie knew Dee would ask her to bake the cake.

It was October, however, and this new doomsday was slated for April. Or possibly May. In fact, all the details remained scant. Instead, their talk seemed to be geared toward preparing for the preparations themselves.

Ellie didn't understand it in the slightest. Weddings were one of the few things the Panhandler virus had made better. If Dee and Quinn wanted, they could row out to the island and be married this afternoon. Dee could throw a bouquet picked from the shore. Do you love each other? Then quit worrying about the color of the napkins and go start your lives together.

She punched her dough and flipped it on the floured counter. As it thumped, someone knocked at the front door. Ellie's shoulders jumped. She sighed and rinsed her hands in the bucket of lake water, thumbing clumps of flour off her fingers. Out front, George Tolbert stood on the porch, a smile slanting his lips, backlit by the yellow October light.

"Mizz Colson," he said.

She didn't bother to inform him that she was technically a miss. "Hello, George."

"May I step inside the abode?"

A sudden imp tempted her to say no. George Tolbert smiled too much. He paid more attention to the cleanliness of his clothes than his fields. And that drawl of his. It added up to a charming and not uneducated Southern man of the land, a fellow who could get along with Appalachian dirt farmers just as readily as Upper West Side professors.

And that was exactly why Ellie disliked him.

"Yeah," she said. "Kitchen's a mess."

"Mess is nothing more than a welcome sign of honest labor." He stepped over the threshold. His aphorisms sounded as old as the colonies, maybe even the Greeks, but as far as Ellie knew, they were original. Drove her batty.

She offered him a seat in the shade of the back porch. "Care for some tea?"

His elegant little eyebrows crawled up his forehead. "You have tea?"

"Brewed from the finest weeds I can find."

If he was disappointed, he hid it well. "Splendid."

She nodded and excused herself. She kept a red cooler in the shallows under the dock where the mountain-fed waters of the Lower Saranac kept her tea a few degrees from chilly. She opened the cooler and fetched the metal jug out of the water inside. It dripped all the way back to the porch.

"Take sugar?" she said.

George smiled. "Any chance I get."

She was hoping he'd say no—she had a couple hundred pounds of the stuff tubbed in the cellar, but once it was gone, it was gone for good—but gave him two spoonfuls anyway. Resentment spiked through her gut. Based on her and Dee's usage, she knew exactly how long that sugar should last. Visits like this threw that figure off. Meanwhile, she had dough waiting on the counter.

George sipped his tea and smacked his lips, though she suspected that was to hide an involuntary wrinkle of his nose. "Reminds me of the old days. You do well for yourself, Ellie. Commendable blend of the old and the new. Or should that be the old and the medieval?"

"Thanks," she said, ignoring his philosophizing. She sprawled in a chair and drank her tea, which she'd intended to cool down with after a long afternoon working the oven. "What brings you across the lake?"

"Nothing less than the blessed union of our two children." He smiled wryly, eyes crinkling. "Though to speak in confidence, I cannot wait for the day it's over."

"Tell me about it."

"The list of wants they've compiled—why, we might have to hire help from town."

Ellie shrugged. "If they want bells and whistles, I better see less talking and more working. These fields won't harvest themselves."

George laughed. "Maybe they would if we had a few more kids."

Despite herself, she laughed too. "Why hire help when you can give birth to it?"

George grinned, rolling his glass of tea between his hands. Condensation slipped to the patio. He nodded for several seconds, smile fading. "Since we've broached the subject that brought me here, I'll dare to crash brazenly forward. Fact is, we are about to incur certain expenses. Not just in raw materials, but in time. Something I have precious little of this time of year."

Ellie glanced toward the yellow wheat swaying beside the lake. "I'm right there with you."

"Well, I face an additional wrinkle. I'm having problems with my tractor, Ellie."

She chuckled. "There are days it feels like I spend more time keeping them running than I save by using them."

"Indeed. I believe I have worked mine to death at the moment I need it most." He bit his lip and lowered his eyes. "I'm not too proud to confess I'm in trouble. Any other year, I'd muddle on through, but with those two kids at my house, eating up my larder when I ought to be filling it for winter, not to mention the coming celebration..."

"Yes?"

"I was searching for the right words to a delicate question. Having failed to find them, I will employ these instead. Forgive me for noticing you've got a spare machine."

She stopped herself from sighing. "With something this vital, I like to have insurance."

"Does it run?"

"What do you think?"

He worried his lip and gazed across the lake. "Then I wonder if, for the sake of our two families—which I suppose are about to become one—I could use it."

"Yeah, you can borrow it," she said, although she was stingy by nature and the very thought of watching him drive off on the backup she had spent so many hours maintaining caused her skin to constrict. "I shouldn't need it this harvest."

"I appreciate that. I'll have to come begging again for the spring planting, though. Given that we might soon have hungry new mouths to feed, I wonder if I might simply have it."

"Have it," Ellie repeated. "Hold on. Are you talking about a dowry?"

George Tolbert cocked his head, eyes snapping to hers. "I'm asking for help guaranteeing this family's future. I'm about to absorb considerable expense."

"I'm not?"

"I'll level with you. Quinn doesn't know it, but I'm struggling to put food on the table. These days my cellar stores more air than grain. As you stand more able to withstand the coming tax on our resources, and have a spare machine where I have none, I thought it made sense to ask."

"For a dowry." Ellie set down her tea with a clink of glass on glass. "Sooner or later my John Deere is going to wheeze its last, George. When that happens, I'll need a replacement. That's why I made sure to find the time to get one running. You can borrow it this fall. Then I suggest you spend the winter finding one for yourself."

His eyes went hooded. "Working machines are few and far between."

"George, why do I believe your conversion to communism was sudden and recent? Find one that's broken and fix it."

George set his tea on the patio table, glaring at the bits of weeds floating in the bottom of the glass. "I hope it's that simple, Ellie, but lives are like words: the plainest ones are the hardest earned. I'll send Quinn around for the tractor. I appreciate its use."

She saw him to the door and watched him walk down the path through the trees. For now the path was clear, but in a few weeks it would lie under a crunching carpet of orange and yellow leaves. With Dee occupied at the Tolberts', Ellie would have to rake them for herself. There was always too much work and too few hands.

Resentment welled in her chest. She had brought Dee to the Saranacs for the specific purpose of getting away from every last human being. To avoid the plague, but also to avoid the chaos that would come after. At first, they'd been alone here, but in the intervening years, settlers had trickled in, drawn to the lakes' fresh water, fish, and isolation. Hardly five miles away, an actual village cropped up in Lake Placid. For the last couple years, Ellie had toyed with the idea of relocating, plunging deeper into the mountains, perhaps even to Canada, but it was too late. Dee was entangled. There would be no tearing her away from the bonds tying her to Quinn.

And thus to George. Who couldn't be bothered to find himself a new god damn tractor. This was the problem with planning ahead. Rarely did it benefit you. Instead, it benefited those who didn't, and who had no shame in asking you for what you'd worked to build for yourself. Same old ant and grasshopper bullshit.

George, at least, would go no further than wheedling to try to get his hands on what she'd built. High-end, utterly shameless wheedling, sure—if she hadn't agreed to lend him the tractor, she was certain he would have sent Quinn to ask again, banking that the boy's doe-like good nature and connection to Dee would do the trick—but that's where it would end.

She couldn't say the same for the people in Lake Placid. Especially those who lived just outside town. If their farms failed, and they had no one to turn to, they wouldn't throw up their hands and agreeably starve. They'd come for people like Ellie. She didn't know most of them. She'd be nothing more than an exploitable resource. A couple of the business-owners liked to call Lake Placid a "community," but it was no such thing. All they had in common was they knew where Ellie lived, and that she had food.

Wind gushed through the turning leaves. It was chilly and smelled like the clean water of the lake. A strange fear took her. She walked briskly toward the lake until she could see her fields along its shore. The heavy-headed wheat bobbed in the wind, yellow and ready. She'd put together a few acres. It saw her and Dee through the long winter and inconstant spring, with enough left over to barter grain and bread in Lake Placid.

When the wind had flowed through the leaves a moment ago, she had been momentarily convinced her fields had disappeared, stolen or dead overnight. The sight of the golden blanket calmed her heart. Made her feel foolish. It was something about George Tolbert. His life in this new world was so careless, so clearly precarious it made her fearful for her own.

Her crankiness returned. Typically, she had no interest in anyone's business but her own, but George was right. They were about to become family.

Time for some field work.

She went home to bake bread, smoke roiling from the outdoor brick oven and filtering through the slits she'd cut in the canopy. She worked in a sleeveless shirt but the heat of the bricks was relentless. Shuttling dough in and loaves out, she quickly sweated through her clothes. The sun died behind the mountains, casting the lake into shadow. Ellie shivered and brought the last of the loaves inside.

She lit candles and sat in the chair by the bay windows overlooking the lake and wished for the thousandth time for caffeine. She used to run on the stuff. Thick espresso, which cut back on bathroom breaks and allowed her to drink it in shots that jumpstarted her mornings. She hadn't tasted fresh beans in three years—June 14, to be precise—when a man with a Caribbean accent had rolled into Lake Placid with a sack full of the stuff. The streets filled with the caramel-soot smell of the roast. She bought two pounds at a dear price and prayed the man would return. Three years later, she was still waiting.

Meanwhile, forty pounds of freeze dried crystals sat in the cellar in their proud red tubs, but it wasn't the same. And unless she had a fire going, she'd have to bank the stove and boil water, all for a thin brownish liquid that just made her wish for the real thing.

But she was nodding off, sapped by the day of baking and dealing with George. And she had nothing better to do. She headed downstairs for a tub of instant coffee and built up the fire in the indoor hearth and boiled a kettle. Twenty minutes later, she had her brew, wincing at the weak and stale taste.