Will to Survive (22 page)

“From what I can tell, she handles it all like a champion,” Herb said.

“She does. I think she is more in control than me.”

“That girl is definitely a keeper. You're lucky I'm not two hundred years younger or you'd have yourself some competition.”

“I still feel bad having to put her through all of that the other day.”

“You shouldn't still be feeling bad about being forced down by those Mustangs. It wasn't like you had any choice. I'm hoping we'll have a chance to drop in and talk to those people at the island when things calm down a bit.”

“Has the committee approved it?” I asked. There'd been a meeting the night before last that I hadn't been around for. I'd chosen to hang out with Todd and Lori. We went over to the basketball court by the school and played horse for hours, until we couldn't take any more of Lori embarrassing us with her varsity ball-shooting skills. It wasn't just a gun that she was better at aiming than we were.

“That's one other thing I wanted to mention. I'm going to request that you become a permanent member of the committee.”

“Me?”

“Well, you're there almost every meeting anyway, but I think it's just time for you to more formally take on the leadership you offer already.”

“We already have a lot of leaders.”

“We do, but only one who's going to be here in twenty years,” Herb said.

I was going to say something about Herb being here, but he was right—that wasn't realistic. Still, the judge wasn't as old as Herb was, and my parents were still relatively young. Then another thought hit me.

“Twenty years?”

“I'm optimistic we can make enough changes to provide stability—a new normal if you'd like—but I've seen nothing to indicate we're going to go back to where we were. There is a very long end game here,” Herb said.

“I can't even imagine what else could happen,” I said.

“It might be beyond anybody's imagining. The hardest part is being able to react to more destruction while still trying to figure out how to put the shattered pieces back together again.”

“Isn't that what we're doing today?”

“Yes … We're going to have to rebuild by making our world larger. This still has to be about survival, but it also has to be about more than just survival.”

I rounded the corner and the refinery came into sight. Herb rolled down the window and raised a white flag on a short stick. In the message Lori had dropped had been all the necessary information for this meet: time, type of vehicle, and even that we'd have the white flag. We had to hope that the people living at the refinery would honor our request—or at least ignore it, not open the gate, and not shoot at us.

At Herb's direction we'd also deliberately left our body armor behind, as well as our weapons. I felt next to naked.

As we closed in on the refinery, I could to make out guards behind the fence at scattered locations. I slowed down and was about to come to a stop right in front of the gate when it opened partway, allowing a gap wide enough for us to pass. Slowly, with both hands visible on the wheel, I inched us up to, and then through, the gap. My anxious feelings morphed into awful feelings. It was like my stomach was one gigantic knot. We were no more than halfway through the gate when two armed men appeared on both sides of the car.

“Keep your hands in plain view!” one of the men called through the open car windows. Herb brought the little flag into the car and placed his hands on the dashboard.

I saw in my rearview mirror the gate close behind me. That awful feeling got even worse.

“Can we get out of the car?” Herb requested.

“Slowly,” one of the men said.

“Son, at my age, slowly is the only way I can move,” Herb said.

He climbed out his door. I turned off the engine with one hand, while I placed the second on the dashboard. Very slowly, very deliberately, I opened the door and climbed out, too. I was frisked, as was Herb on the other side. If we had had any weapons they would have been discovered and taken.

“Do you treat all your visitors this way?” I asked.

“We don't have a lot of visitors.”

“Maybe you'd have more if you treated them more hospitably,” Herb suggested.

They finished patting us down and led us away from my car. We now had four guards, one leading and three behind.

I took a quick look back at the car. There were more armed men standing around it. I had the strangest thought that I should have rolled up the windows and locked the doors so they wouldn't go inside.

We went farther and farther into the guts of the refinery. It was a fascinating collection of metal pipes, tanks, and soaring superstructure. As a kid when we drove by, I'd always gawked at the eerie-looking place and wondered about it. Now I was seeing it closer than I probably wanted to. I just hoped I'd be able to see it from the outside again after this meeting.

All along the way we passed working men and women wearing hard hats. It looked like they were still processing something. Were they able to turn oil into gas even in the absence of electricity?

“Good afternoon,” a man called out from the scaffolding above our heads.

“Good afternoon,” Herb called back.

The man disappeared from view and reappeared a few seconds later at a ladder. He came down and extended his hand and there was a quick series of introductions and handshakes. His name was Payton Mondoux.

“Let's get down to business. You want to trade food for fuel,” Payton said.

“Yes, that's part of what we want,” Herb replied.

“Part?”

“We were also hoping to forge a more extensive partnership.”

“And what would this partnership involve?” Payton asked.

“A great deal of that depends on what you need,” Herb said. “Our community is about fifteen miles north of here. Our settlement has sixteen hundred people, and we're affiliated with other settlements who have become our allies. In total we are almost three thousand people strong. We have medical facilities, medicine, food, air support, security, and numerous people with engineering skills.”

“We have over a dozen engineers here,” Payton said. “Mainly those engineers are folks who worked at the refinery before this all happened. Medical care is an ongoing issue, although we've been able to trade for some medicine.”

“We can have one of our doctors come here, but it might be better to have anybody who's ill come to our clinic or even the hospital.”

I noticed how Herb offered the resources of the hospital we'd only just connected with, just like I'd heard that yesterday he'd offered the hospital a fuel supply from the refinery before we even had met with them.

“We have security and transportation to get your people safely to and from our medical facilities,” Herb continued.

“We were impressed with the airplane,” Payton said. “There aren't many of those in the sky.”

“We have two aircraft,” Herb said.

I guess calling the ultralight an aircraft was stretching the truth a little, even though it was technically one.

“You must be doing something right if you have that many people and you're able to produce so much food that you can trade,” Payton noted.

“And you yourselves must be doing something right to allow you to trade enough fuel to provide food for your people,” Herb said. “It isn't like you're growing much of anything here.”

Before he answered, Payton took his hard hat off and scratched his head. “I guess you'd know that from your flyovers.”

“We're aware of many things on a wider scale than it might seem,” Herb offered, saying something without really saying anything. “But you know this has to be about more than just survival. We've established a day-care center, a school, and a newspaper. We have movie nights, and I think we're providing our children with as normal a life as we can … given the circumstances.”

“It's hard to believe that those things are happening anywhere these days.”

“Seeing is believing, and I hope you'll have a chance to visit us. How many children call this place home?” Herb asked.

“We have fifty-six.”

“I can't decide whether this is hardest on the children or easiest, because we manage to protect them from some of the realities,” Herb said.

“It's hard to protect them from some things. I never thought my wife and kids would be living here at the refinery. It's not a place for children. I wish we could provide more for ours … the way it sounds like you've been able to for yours.”

There was a wistful quality in that last response. I knew Herb would follow up on it.

“I'm not sure exactly how this is all going to work, Payton, but I think we can help each other. We can offer some things that can make life better for your people, your children.” Herb placed a hand on the man's shoulder.

“I know there's no choice—we need to have our families here because there's really no place safer—but being here is like sitting on top of a bomb.” He stopped talking and I got the feeling that he knew he'd said something he shouldn't have.

“It sounds like you've had some difficulties,” Herb said. “I know you don't know me, you don't know us, but believe me, if we can help we will.”

“I don't know if there's anything you can do.”

“We won't know unless you tell us what the problem is,” Herb said.

Again more silence. Payton was thinking this through. I knew the smartest thing he could have done was to say nothing. He'd just met us and really shouldn't trust us at all.

He let out a big sigh. “We trade with a lot of people, like you said; we give fuel in exchange for food.”

“That fuel, does it include propane as well as gasoline?” Herb asked.

“We have fairly significant quantities of propane. Are you planning on using it for cooking?” he asked.

“We can cook with wood. We were thinking that we could utilize propane heaters to keep our greenhouses going to extend the growing season.”

“You have greenhouses?”

“We build them. We can show you how. You could even bring in soil from outside and grow more of your own food without needing to trade for it.”

“That would help us … but wouldn't that make your trading hand weaker?”

“This is about more than just us. It's about all of us. If you become our partner we want you to be stronger. Your strength can become our strength and our strength can become your strength. I've noticed you've also traded fuel for weapons.”

“That's how we've been able to provide the security we have.”

“That's smart—you've been playing to your existing strength,” Herb said.

“But that same strength is our weakness,” Payton said. “We're being blackmailed.”

“What!” Herb was incredulous.

“How are you being blackmailed?” I asked.

“We were approached by a group … Unless we give this group a certain amount of fuel, they've threatened to destroy the facility.”

“But you have a fairly solid defense,” I said.

“There's no defense against a grenade being launched at one of our fuel tanks.”

“They have RPGs?” Herb asked, and of course I knew what he was thinking.

“They gave us a demonstration,” Payton said. “They destroyed a building on the outside of our facility. If they had aimed their weapons at a storage tank, the whole place would have gone up.”

“Do you know much about these people?”

“There are a lot of them, and they're well armed and mobile. We know they can carry out their threat.”

“You're caught between a rock and a hard place. But maybe we will be able to help,” Herb said. “Why don't we sit down and work out some details about starting to do business?”

Looking relieved, Payton offered his hand. “Perhaps we can do even more than just business.”

The two men shook on it.

 

21

I lifted off, gained altitude, and then banked to put the Cessna on course for the city and the island airport. It had been just over two weeks since we'd been forced to land there. I wondered if Colonel Wayne thought he'd ever see us again.

Herb was sitting next to me, and Lori was in the seat behind him. She'd convinced him that she had had a good connection with the colonel and should be one of the people to return.

I didn't know how Herb could counter a couple of Mustangs and a large group of armed men on the ground, but having him along made me think that somehow we had them at a disadvantage.

“Okay, take us toward the city, but first could we go by the refinery?” Herb said as we finished our circle. “I want to just wave hello to them.”

I broke off the bank and aimed us south.

The partnership with the refinery had developed as quickly as the progress that was being made around the neighborhood. We'd done our first food-for-fuel trade, but so much more than that had happened as well.

Delegations had gone from one place to the other. Payton had sent people up for medical treatment. They'd inspected our school, and there was talk of two of our teachers going down to help them set up something similar for their children.

Most important, there had been preliminary talks about joint security. Next week there was a meeting scheduled in which the leaders of all seven communities—us, the four surrounding neighborhoods, the hospital community, and the refinery—would meet. They were going to be discussing the creation of a united defense force.

We flew in companionable silence all the way to the refinery. I circled around the grounds, and the guards looked up and waved their arms. I wiggled the wings in answer.

“It's good for them to know that we're here,” Lori said.

“Even if we can't do much to help them right now?” I asked. The refinery was awaiting the next extortion demand, and there was little we could do to stop that. Not yet.