Chapter 146: Hot Water

The well came in at half past four in the morning, and I was standing right beside it when the blue field dropped, and a steel wellhead the size of a fridge was suddenly sitting in the snow where the old hand pump had been, with a filtration plant beside it running quietly by itself and a storage tank behind that. The whole thing had cost me two hundred and fourteen thousand credits and had taken exactly four hours to exist.

I turned the tap on the side of the tank, and first the water came out brown, then less brown, then clear, and I stood there in the absolute crack of dawn with my hand under cold running water amidst the snow for longer than a sensible man would have.

[Long term... This is the best money I have ever spent... open bodies of water attract Infected... but this...]

The sanitation block was next, at half past six, and that was the one that broke the house. It dropped its field just as the sky was going grey over the east fence line, and what stood there afterward was a long, low building with a steel roof and six doors along the front, and a chimney on the end of it already leaking steam, and Bill was the first one out of the house, the same as always, walking across the yard in her socks to open the first door, put her hand inside, and stand there.

Then she turned around and said, in a voice I had not heard her use before, "It’s hot."

Nobody moved for about two seconds, and then the entire farmhouse emptied into the snow.

This was the biggest thing that happened all day, and it was a shower. Thirty-one women had not had hot water in eighteen days. They had been washing out of a basin heated on a wood stove, one kettle at a time, in a house with no heating upstairs, in early November, and I hadn’t thought about that once until I watched Vera stand in the doorway of the second stall with her forehead against the frame and her eyes shut, just breathing the steam, not even going in yet.

The girl with the braid went in the third door, and I heard the water start, and then I heard her start crying through the wall, crying from the chest, and nobody in the line outside said a word about it, since half of them were already doing the same.

I was embarrassed to be standing there, and happier than I’d been in weeks, and I had nowhere to put either of those, so I stood in the yard with my hands in my pockets and did not know where to look.

[Right. This is a private thing. I should go and stand somewhere else...]

Kara found me by the wellhead an hour later, her cheeks pink from the cold, and she looked at me for a second before she said anything.

"You should’ve done that shower first," she said.

"Ruth said water first."

"You’ve got thirty-one women in there who haven’t had a hot shower in nearly three weeks, Nikki, and you spent yesterday afternoon arguing with me about how many stalls to build."

"I gave you six."

"You gave me six because I made you."

"...Yeah."

She looked at me a while longer, then said "Okay," and went back inside, and I stood there next to my well, told off and thanked at the same time, and I liked both halves of it more than I should have.

The medical bay dropped at half past eight, by the house, where Ruth had said, and I went and got Mr. Norton myself.

He’d been up since six, had eaten, and had already put a fresh dressing on the kneecapped man in the small barn. He walked over to the new building with his bag in one hand and his glasses in the other, the same as he’d walk to any building, opened the door and went in, and I followed him.

It was exactly what he’d asked for, a surgical table in the middle under a light, two gurneys against the wall, a drug cabinet with a lock, a sterilizer, monitors on a cart, a sink with hot water, which I’d made sure of after the morning, and shelves of supplies in labeled boxes that he’d dictated one at a time the night before and I’d bought without looking.

Mr. Norton put his glasses on and walked around the room once, slowly, touching things, opening the drug cabinet and closing it again, running his hand along the edge of the table, and he did not say one single word for a full minute.

Then he said, "It will do," and that was the whole review, all three words of it.

He looked at me over his glasses, then turned around and started rearranging the supply shelves, since I’d stacked them in the order I’d bought them and he had his own, and I left him to it.

The range was at the back of the south field, and by ten in the morning it had a line. Eight lanes, a berm behind them, a rack of ten little twenty-two rifles that looked like the real thing and kicked like a sneeze, and Ruth had put a sign-up sheet on the kitchen door, since Ruth understood people, and every one of the thirty-one names was on it. We taught them in turns, and this was the part of the day I hadn’t planned for and ended up liking best.

Leo took the first hour sitting on an upturned crate with a rifle across his knees, teaching them stance and breathing and where to put your cheek, never once raising his voice, even when one of the women shut her eyes to pull the trigger and put a round into the sky.

"That’s alright," he told her. "Everybody does that the first time. Do it again, but keep your eyes open this time, and breathe out before you squeeze, not after... There you go. See? You hit it."

She’d hit the berm and missed the target by a meter, but she was grinning anyway, wider than anyone had all morning.

Kara took the second hour and taught the basics flat and exact and unforgiving, the same as she teaches everything, and nobody got to fire a shot with Kara until they could load, clear, and safe the rifle three times in a row without looking at it. By the end of her hour, four of them could, and one of them was surprisingly Marcy.

Nora had the drones and the radio, and she didn’t teach so much as hold court over them. She’d labeled all four drones by breakfast, I checked, and the labels said, in order, NORA’S, ALSO NORA’S, DO NOT TOUCH, and BACKUP (NORA’S), and she stood at the charging rack with a clipboard she’d found in the kitchen and gave a lecture on airspace management to six women who had never flown anything, and she loved every second of it.

Mr. Norton came out at noon and taught stopping bleeding, once, to all of them at the same time, on Bill, who volunteered, and it took him eleven minutes, and nobody asked a single question afterward, since he’d answered all of them before they could be asked.

And then, at the end of it, I opened the Misc. Chest onto the tailgate of the pickup and started handing out the real guns along with fourteen sets of plates and helmets, eleven carbines, seven DMRs, two shotguns, and every magazine I had. I gave the plates and the carbines to the fourteen who’d shot best on the range, Bill got a DMR since she’d asked for one before anyone else, and Vera got the other, since Vera had outshot the lot of them and hadn’t asked for anything.

"These are for when it matters," I told them. "The .22 LR rifles are for learning... These are for the day somebody comes up that road who isn’t here to talk... And that day’s is barely two days away..."

Nobody said anything, they just held them.

Meanwhile, the flirting had not stopped, it had gotten worse.

Nia was gone, everybody knew Nia was gone, and with Nia gone, the calculation changed for about a dozen of those women.

By the afternoon I had been brought lunch three times, had my sleeve touched for reasons nobody explained, been asked whether the magic felt like anything when I did it, and had a woman named Dana ask me straight out, at the range, with a rifle in her hands, whether I wanted to see her stance up close.

Nora intercepted that one with the clipboard.

"Name?" she said. "Purpose of visit? Denied. Next."

Kara intercepted the lunches, all three of them, and she didn’t say a word to the women who brought them, she just appeared at my elbow and took the plate out of their hands with a "Thank you, he’s eaten," and the woman apologized to her, every time, and went away.

I had a defensive line. It had two players. One of them had a clipboard, and one of them had a stare, and between them nobody was getting through.

[...Would it be so bad if somebody got through?... actually, yes. Nia would find out... she’s at least 9 kilometers away, and she would somehow still find out.]

The pond came in at half past ten, while Kara was still running her hour, already stocked, and four hundred blue tilapia swam in tight, confused circles in a body of heated water that hadn’t existed the night before, then found the food and calmed down.

The greenhouses dropped at half past twelve, where Bill’s barn had been, and Bill did cry, and then she walked into the first one and stood in the middle of two thousand seedling trays with the heat on her face and said "Oh," very softly.

And by two in the afternoon she’d planted a hundred of them and was refusing to come out for lunch.

The women voted Tikki chairman of the greenhouse site while he was asleep on the kitchen table, in absentia, unanimously.

The solar array came online around twelve, and after a while came the radio station. And Nora claimed it the moment it came online and gave it a callsign without consulting anyone.

Nia called once, around one, while I was watching Bill plant.

"One on a dirt bike," she said. "Dude’s alone... Heading this way with a scoped rifle on his back and a lot of confidence."

She let that sit for a second before-

"Not anymore~"

"And that’s three." I couldn’t help but chuckle.

The wall was still up, blue and silent, along the whole fence line, and Leo spent most of the afternoon walking the base of it slowly, stopping every few meters to look at where the concrete would meet the ground, and when he got to the gap where the gate would go, he stood there for a long time.

"The footing on this side..." he said when I came over. "... The old post’s rotted. If the wall sits on top of it, that’s the weak spot. That’s where I’d push if I was them."

"The System says it’s certified."

"The System hasn’t stood here in spring." He didn’t look at me. "Neither have I, frankly... Just watch that gate."

"I’ll watch the gate."

He nodded and moved on, slowly, and I watched him go.

Night came early, the same as it does in November, and by six it was dark, and by seven the yard was empty except for the blue and the snow and me. Kara came out at half past seven with two coffees and found me at the pond.

The pond’s field had dropped hours ago, so what was there now was the real pond, a black sheet of water, and under the surface, if you looked, the shapes of four hundred fish that had not existed yesterday.

She handed me a coffee, stood next to me, and looked at the water as she said, "Four hundred’s too many..."

"The System said four hundred."

"That’s two thousand square feet, that depth, that filtration, you want maybe three hundred, and you want to pull the biggest ones every week, or they’ll fight." She sipped her coffee. "They’re going to fight anyway... Tilapia are horrible."

I laughed, and she almost did, then looked at the water for a while before she said what she’d come out to say.

"You exploded a man’s head with a rock yesterday morning... And this afternoon you spent an hour arguing with Bill about what to plant tomatoes."

"Yeah."

"Both of those were you."

"Yeah."

She was quiet for a bit, and then she said, "Okay."

We stood by the pond and drank the coffee and talked about the fish, about whether the greenhouses would actually work in a real winter, about whether Nora would ever give back the drone labeled DO NOT TOUCH, and at one point she asked me what the river at Ferrow had looked like from the air, and I told her, and she listened to all of it.

She talked to me exactly as she had before the shit-show started, easy and long and unguarded, and I was so afraid of pointing that out that I didn’t say a word about it, in case saying it made it stop.

At twenty-five past eight, the wall dropped. The blue went out all along the fence line at once, silently, and where it had been there was concrete, three meters of it, grey and cold and solid, with a walkway behind it, a tower on the north corner and one on the south, and a gate at the bottom of the drive heavy enough to stop a truck.

And every woman in that house came out into the snow again and stood in front of it, and this time nobody touched it, since it wasn’t a mystery anymore, it was a wall.

Bill walked down to the gate, opened it, shut it, and opened it again just to feel its weight. Ruth climbed the steps to the walkway with her shotgun, stood on the corner, and looked south down the state road into the darkness of the night, and I climbed up the steps beside her.

-Kzzzt-!

"Big guy."

"Here."

"They’ve noticed." Nia’s voice was flat, and behind it I could hear wind in the trees. "About an hour ago... Hallam pulled every man inside the fence, the lights are on in the big RV, and there’s been a lot of shouting. Nobody’s coming up that road tonight."

"And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow," she said, "Maybe be a very different story~"