Silencer, p.3
Silencer, page 3
Normally that wouldn't have been such a huge deal but Holsom had three things wrong with him for the current situation. He was popular with the women and had slept with most of them already. He was a former authority figure, which meant the others, especially the younger women, still looked to him for guidance. The worst thing though, was that he was stupid. Terminally so. If the man had ever produced a good idea Jake had been gone at the time, and no one had bothered to inform him of that red-letter day.
To him the situation fairly screamed what was going on most of the time. Holsom thought he was the best one to lead but if he ever did, they'd all be screwed. The man couldn't even be bothered to do his share of the work and relied on bullying others to get by.
He had his people too, the squad. They were all men, all large and all at least as stupid and lazy as Holsom was. Jake hadn't even bothered to learn their names. As soon as he had a reason, he planned to kill them all if they didn't shape up. Before winter set in at the latest. Even if he had to cheat and make up an excuse that everyone else would buy. They were a burden at the moment, when things were, if not easy, then not brutal compared to how they had been even a few months before. When the cold hit and food got scarce again, having them could mean death. He'd need a real reason, of course, or the women would lynch him, for taking away their favorite boy toy.
Shallow bitches that they were.
Oh, it wasn't fair of him to think that about them, he knew, and tried to get himself to stop doing it. Still, there were plenty of other reasons to dislike Holsom, not just him getting all the girls. Even if that part was strange. The man was all right looking, and decently tall, but there were a half dozen other men there who were better looking, bigger and stronger. They got women, but not all of them, like Derrick seemed to manage. Almost all of them. Certainly a different one every night.
The house had white siding on it, so it gleamed in the bright sun, the green in the field stark and wonderful to see. It had a rust red trim, done in the same style of vinyl siding, which was also kind of pretty really. The people that had lived there before had really invested in the future. Unfortunately, they hadn’t understood what that had really meant at the time and wasted their money on home improvements which didn't mean much now. Siding and a very high-end electric range in the kitchen, a really nice matching washer and dryer combo and a deep freezer off in the barn. A huge thing for storing meat. None of that worked of course, except the vinyl. They should have put in another cellar, that would have actually helped.
In the back of the house Burt, gray haired and wearing a bright blue Hawaiian shirt and some tan colored shorts which looked ready to fall off if he wasn't careful, worked to prop up the edge of a windmill blade, trying to set it in place. Jake jogged over, and helped get it upright, then held it as the older man tamped the base down and set brace supports for it.
The man grinned at him, as if happy to see him.
“We really should have a concrete base but the store was out last I checked. I don't think they've gotten a new order in yet. We should go look again soon. Check construction sites and garages? Not that I'd want to be the one doing it.” The tone sounded relaxed, pleasant even. Burt always did. Almost.
When he didn't, there was a real problem.
Jake looked at the windmill, trying to make sense of how it transferred power. It had a belt of heavy cloth, nylon webbing, instead of gears. Behind the blades, large wooden paddles, there was a circle, a wheel that the heavy strap wrapped halfway around, then it rested snugly over a similar but much smaller circle on the bottom. It was all wood. It had to be, until they got enough power to run an arc welder. Burt said he knew how to use one and even had a few such tools sitting in the shed he used as a workshop about fifty feet away toward the fields.
The old man started laughing as Jake checked the whole thing out.
“I know, far from ideal but it's a start. With this we can pump water from the well to fill a cistern, a big water tank on a platform. That will get us water for the house year-round. If we manage a wood fired water heater or two and some wood stoves, then we may not even freeze to death in four months. I'll just put you in charge of that. We need something like twenty cord of wood and six wood stoves. Really, we could do it with three stoves, except we'll need to replace the little one in the kitchen with something bigger. It's not a proper stove right now and more of a fire hazard waiting for someone to get lazy. That basically means welding, which means electricity, so a generator first and a better wind tower. We need the wood regardless though, so you can do that first.”
The man didn't laugh at him but the tone was playful. Almost as if he were joking about the idea. It was clear to anyone listening that Burt didn't really expect Jake to see to it at all. Except that not doing it would be silly of him. It had to be done and while he wasn't the person for the task that he'd have picked either, no one would care who did it, as long as it got finished in time.
Jake thought about it for a second and realized that wood shouldn't be too hard to get. They had a decent wood lot not a half mile away and could use the human powered wagon Burt had built for that. They could grab dead fall and even new logs if they had to and bring them back for splitting and all that stuff. He'd never done anything like that before but pioneers used to do it. They weren't wimps, those people from way back but a lot of them had come from the city and had started with less to work with than they did now. If those people could figure it out, chances were that modern people could too. Just with more bitching and complaints.
The modern American totally owned that part.
Jake nodded at the man, noticing the bright and cheery blue shirt again. Nothing Jake owned had color. Most of it was kind of a drab off gray.
Still, he smiled, not trying to look like a sullen asshole.
“I guess I can try to put a team together for it. Um... what's a cord of wood?” Jake felt stupid asking but Burt didn't make fun of him over it, he just answered. The man was good that way.
“It means a stack of split wood four foot high, four foot wide and eight foot long. The real answer here is that we're going to need a lot more of it than we think seems reasonable. Maybe more than we can get. We should have been doing this already but no one wants to risk going into the woods.” The man shrugged and looked down at his own feet.
Burt didn't leave the grounds of the house at all now. Not if he could help it. A lot of people didn't, so he wasn't alone. The cleaners all had to, so that was twelve people right there but they slept in shifts, since they also did most of the guard duty. That left about thirty people that might be willing to risk it to be warm in the winter. Well, more if he could get some of the others to break through their personal terror. Or at least face it. He nodded at the older fellow.
“Okay. I'll get on that. Um, do we have any saws or anything like that? I guess axes would work and we could blow some of the wood into chunks with small explosives but...”
Burt laughed and patted him on the arm firmly.
“A man after my own heart, if you don't have a chainsaw, find a different way to do it! Explosives... That could work but I have axes and even some brand-new chainsaws set aside. Even a few old manual rip saws, the two-person kind,” He blinked at the blank look Jake gave him.
“Ah... right, that means nothing to you, does it? Here, I'll show you.”
That got them both headed to the shed out back. The others all went in the house, Molly first, without even paying attention to the fact that he'd stopped to talk to the older man. Tipper listened for a few minutes and walked off too. Dave had just disappeared, probably to go kill something.
In the little metal shed, a white colored aluminum thing with a metal roof in shining silver, Burt showed him the saws, starting with the funny looking two handled ones he'd stolen from a historical reenactment in town at the Fort Jessup monument.
“I also stole all their blacksmithing gear. If we can work that out, smithing, we'll have a lot of things faster. We can work on that in the winter, though. Right now we need even more basic stuff.” He pointed to the saws and described the pit set up they'd want for making planks and even parting out firewood rounds.
The chainsaws all worked, and Burt showed him how to start and use one, then had him do it, getting that Jake learned best by doing things himself. It had taken a long time for that to sink in for him, as a kid, that he learned by doing but Burt had picked up on it in weeks.
The action of pulling the cord felt a lot easier than he thought it would. Too easy almost. The loud roar of the yellow and green saw made him feel uneasy at first but that wouldn't stop him from using it. The days of balking because you weren't perfectly comfortable with something had left a long time before. It felt like forever. A lifetime at least.
Eight months. Maybe even the full nine, for some of the people there.
The old man didn't make mention of it but fuel would be the big issue. Hence the human powered saws being needed. No one would love the additional effort, both not wanting the extra work even at the best of times, and because everything was harder on short rations like they'd been. Jake was already dreading the idea and they hadn't even gotten the first log in.
They did have axes, nearly a dozen in different sizes, wood awls, which Jake thought looked a bit like giant Hershey's kisses, all silver and pointed on one end, and a lot of sledgehammers to hit them with. With all this and the big metal cart, they should be able to do something toward making certain they didn’t freeze to death the next winter.
Jake gave a slow nod to the brightly clad older fellow.
“Okay, I'll start working up people tonight. We'll try for the first load tomorrow, unless we get word that someplace needs to be cleaned out. My team's up for everything that comes in this week.” Not that anything would.
After the initial rush and the freakishly scary first two months, the dead had died back a lot. The weak had already been turned and the people left knew how to avoid zombies. If there was anything of a dead nature suspected, the other groups tended to send word over to their place but really, no one had even come by for nearly three weeks. Everyone protected themselves and set watches but theirs was the main group that actively took out threats in town.
They had to, because of the burners.
If they left any zombies for too long, the wacky end-times Christians would set the houses around them on fire. Regardless of there being living people in them or not.
The older man sighed and gave Jake a funny look. It was, it seemed, slightly bemused.
“You know Jake I should have mentioned this to you a month ago. I keep bringing it up with Nate, and he keeps putting me off. I think it's the fear. Well, I can't fault him there, I don't want to go and do it either but we have to. Either we do it now, or in December after the kids and small women have died from the cold.”
Thinking about it for a second Jake just shrugged.
No one really ever asked the cleaners to do anything but guard and kill. That was considered their job after all. An important one, too. Still, he didn't particularly feel like freezing or eating uncooked food all the time. Warmth meant life. So did water, and even an old video game freak like him knew that being clean did, too. That meant warm water, if not hot. Right now it was all he could do to make himself wash in the cold ground water each morning and it was toasty out still, being August. The warmest part of the year. Some of the people kind of smelled already, skipping out on being clean for comfort's sake. That or laziness. So stoves and water heaters. Along with rules requiring them to be used.
Jake, thinking that, nodded.
“Can we get a list of materials we’re going to need? I can’t go shopping but we can give the cleaners to look for things when they go into town. Maybe we can make a special trip or two, and scout things out.”
Burt made a low, soft, grunting noise in his throat.
“I can do better than just that, I have a book inside that has plans. You should read it as soon as possible. That way we can work out all that will be needed. You might have to make substitutions, so knowing what is actually required is a lot better than a list.”
On their way back they carried a heavy metal pole once a flagpole from the local middle school but now it was going to serve as the base for their new wind tower. Strong but also a bitch to move. It must have weighed close to two hundred pounds.
That, trying to shift the metal pole around was what they were doing when Carley started laying into him.
She ran at him, which made him want to kill her by reflex but luckily his hands were full when he noticed her. She didn't deserve to die yet. Not for running.
Zombies didn't care if you ran at all, so in principle, Jake didn't either. It was her raised voice that really concerned him. True, they were probably safe enough, for the moment. This area was pretty clean as far as the dead went. Not totally though. At least he’d gotten a few zombies in the last month, just tending to the fields with Jose.
The words she used weren't that rough but sounded angry, and that would carry. For the moment Jake managed to ignore her and work with Burt to carefully take the metal pole off their shoulders. It dropped to the ground with a soft clang, landing on the dirt. The noise got Carley to pay attention though and stop talking for a few seconds as Jake turned to her.
Smiling. He tried to be cheery, after all. He always had. Even when he’d been a lazy waste of space, and was sulking constantly, he’d done it with a smile. A sad one. This, his face at the moment, was probably better than that.
He held up his left hand, the right instantly finding the weapon on his hip and drawing it. That, more than the pole dropping, helped silence the good-looking woman. She had shoulder length hair, a golden blonde color that should have been fake and managed to be a little curly, even without perms and hair goop. She also had devastating light blue eyes. Of the nearly forty odd women at the house she was easily the best looking. The kind that would have easily made the college cheerleading squad, if it hadn't been for the militant feminism keeping her out of such things. Her good looks were one of the only things that had kept her alive so far.
More than once he'd thought of killing her himself. It wasn't like he had a real use for the woman. She'd made a point of telling him he'd better not ask her for sex months before, without him even having thought to try it, so it wouldn't cost him anything personally to get rid of her. She ate food and didn’t do much work.
Probably not though.
Having a bad attitude didn't get you killed. Not by Jake. Raising your voice while you did it would, and Carley had seen him do exactly that three times in the last few months. It was a rule. His rule but everyone else followed it, or he shot them. In the head.
Still, he schooled his voice and managed to sound soft and nearly polite when he spoke.
“Carley, I don't care if you feel like you need to take me to task for something but would you be willing to not scream while you do it? If you make too much noise, I'll have to kill you.” His voice went lower than it had to, because loud people sometimes shut up once you pointed it out and worked harder if you whispered. Carley wasn't insane yet, just annoying.
“I can't believe you nearly let Molly be killed just because she won't sleep with you, you pig!” Carley whispered at least, so Jake put the handgun away. For now.
“Um, Sorry? I don't see how my saving her life today counts as nearly letting her be killed. She lost it and started screaming at the wrong time. Not my fault. Even if it were, why would her not sleeping with me be the problem? None of the women here sleep with me. That hasn't stopped me from trying to protect them all.” Jake felt baffled, more than a little. Molly was telling people that he nearly got her killed. Which was a flat out lie. Also that he’d done it because of sex, or a lack thereof. Which was reasonable to guess at, if you were going to be an idiot and not think about the first bit clearly.
“What the fudge?”
That thought distracted him but he made it stop. Fudge wouldn't be found for a long time, if ever again. He didn't even like it that much. Oh, sure, Jake would have killed a fairly decent person for a single square of it at the moment but that wasn't the point.
Carley wasn't convinced of his good will for some reason and kept after him. Then, she kept doing it, without slowing or stopping. It was a long-winded conversation and one sided, since he simply stood there, smiling a bit. Feeling awkward about the whole thing. Finally, after about five minutes of griping at him, Jake had to move to help Burt put the windmill on the pole, which turned out to be simple, just sliding it all into place through some metal brackets that would let it swivel a bit. Then they had to try and stand it up, that would be harder.
“Carley,” Jake said, trying to get her attention with a hoarse whisper.
“Don't you interrupt me!” She yelled at him, her voice going just high enough to make him glare at her and roll his eyes.
She fell silent then at least. She may hate the patriarchal machine and him for being part of it, meaning he had a penis but she respected the fact that there were rules, once reminded.
Jake pointed to the metal in front of them.
“Sorry, not trying to ruin your badly misplaced and unfairly abusive rant but could you help us set this up? It's kind of important. We can use this to pump water.”
Trying to do all the jobs, except cleaning out nests of undead, or going into town, was something Carley actually did. Not well, or with any real vigor, but she was better about it than most were there at the house. She apparently didn't want anyone to think women couldn't do their part. Jake didn't care, as long as they got help. Feminism was a stupid idea now, though. Moronic. Not because women weren't equals or anything ridiculous like that but because they were, obviously.
It was a simple fact in this new, badly insane, world. Complaining about not having the same rights as anyone else was close to insanity any longer. He let his judgment of her politics go, leaving his thoughts more or less, because whatever was going on in her head got the woman to work and she rarely complained about manual labor. That might look weak after all.
