Silencer, p.40
Silencer, page 40
The days flowed into one and other for about a week. Jake got up, worked before breakfast, ate, then tried to learn to use the forge to make basic tools. Hammers, tongs and chisels came first. Then in the afternoon he worked at sawing wood rounds from logs.
It was hard, and he failed at making tools every other day at first. By the end of the week the most complex thing he'd made was a metal tong that could be used to take things out of the fire better than the much-abused oversized pliers he'd been using.
The next week, his leg still healing up but feeling a lot better already, probably thanks to Sammi and her magic saliva, as gross as the idea was, Jake made a saw. A real one, hammered and folded high carbon steel. Not too much, just enough to strengthen the metal. After all it still had to be springy and flex under pressure or it would just snap when used. It took three days and then he had to learn how to sharpen it using files and stones but it gave them a second two person cutting saw for rounds. When Justine saw it she smiled at him and pointed at the windmill she had ready and waiting.
“Power conversion gears next, please.”
Her eyes actually lit up at the idea, so Jake decided to try it. Plus she’d sounded cute when she said it, like gears were a special treat, just for her. If he could make even one person happy, he’d take it.
Those were actually a lot harder than a mere saw and took a week each, since he had to make them fit each other just right and the metal was a lot thicker. Nearly two inches in places. They didn't work the first time either, and it took another week to fix his mistakes. In the end they had an electric generator though, which meant they could run a couple of lights and charge some batteries most of the time.
As long as the wind blew.
People felt cheated by it, if only a little.
They’d clearly thought that having electricity was going to return the world to what it once had been. That, he thought, would probably never happen. Yes, they would have a world again. One free of zombies. What it looked like, who led it and if they had technology was all up in the air.
For the moment, they had power. If in small amounts.
If things were better there at the house than anywhere else that didn't start out prepared, then even if they got things back eventually, it really couldn't be the world they started with. There were too many dead, and too much massive trauma and fear, for far too long.
He felt caught up on his tasks for a minute though, nearly at least. Two saws worked in the yard and six people split wood constantly, as fast as the rounds came off. Faster really. Splitting was the easier task until they got to the green wood. Then it slowed way down and they had to use the hammers and awls to break the things apart. The sawing went just as fast though, possibly faster than before since Jake could actually sharpen the blades now and did that every other day or so. Samuel was learning to do it too, so they could take turns.
That meant that it was time for another road trip, he decided, before it got too hard to drive. There was solid frost on the ground each morning now, and in a few weeks it would freeze hard for sure.
He went to Nate after dinner and just shrugged. Grinning.
“Going into town?” The man asked lightly, obviously getting what some of Jake's looks meant by now. That or as Sammi had suggested, reading his mind. Either way worked for him. Though, mind reading just then had to be nearly as sucky of a power as imagining that you could feel evil intentions. Possibly worse.
“I want to go into Clyde. There was a gunsmith there, I guess and the place is tiny, barely a town. We haven't cleared it but if the shop hasn't been burnt or stripped, well, we might get something useful. I want to take the police van and the small wooden cart. I checked, the one Burt made will fit in the back.”
The other man had a nice beard now, salt and pepper and fuller than Jake could manage, he thought. The look that came from his eyes, brown, to match the hair of his youth, was considering. They all knew they needed bullets and that meant making them or finding a stash. Possibly both. They also knew that odds were good that the gunsmith in Clyde had been about the fourth thing the police of Westwood had raided. The same rationale applied for them after all and Clyde was only about twenty-five miles past their compound with very little but farmland between one point and the other.
They were getting desperate though, mainly because of Heather and her annoying habit of being right. Especially her dreams. It was pretty freaking amazing as far as Jake was concerned. Also, rather clearly, driving the girl mad.
She'd saved Justine just two days before from a structural collapse by going out with Randy and setting up a single pole in the middle of the new woodworking shop that was going up. When the half-constructed roof fell in, the off-center and slender pole held it up until the large boned woman had managed to crawl out.
When asked why she hadn't just told people of danger, the girl had shrugged and told them that hadn't worked. Not that she dreamed it wouldn't work but that it hadn't. It was just weird. Consistent as well. At least as long as Jake wasn’t involved. With him she kept being wrong, for some reason. As if she expected him to be a dark and gloomy person constantly.
As if someone was infecting him that way. He’d felt it a few times, mainly after dinner, lying in bed. Each time, so far, he’d battled it back by morning, but it had been hard to pull off.
The issue with her being right all the time was that she kept waking up screaming about the cannibals. Coming out of the snow. That, naturally, meant they needed ammo. A wall, she assured them, would do nothing. Again all she said about that was that it hadn't worked. Then on top of all these deep insights and foreknowledge she'd turn around and pester Jake about why they couldn't still be friends and berate him for being selfish and cruel.
Even as he kept saying they were. Hugging her and reminding her to bathe. She could forget if no one pointed that out to her. Then she’d storm off, no matter how kind he was. As if she was working off of a script that didn’t have his lines in it at all.
Tipper and Carley both kept acting odd with him as well. He was, slowly, warming up to most of the people there. It wasn’t a vast thing, but he was trying and while they hadn’t had the big talk yet, for some reason, about people using their powers, the two women kept after him. Even suggesting that he was being mean to them.
Finally, with both of them coming for him, after dinner, he snorted. Needing to get to the kitchen to help with the dishes.
Carley went first.
“You’re not even trying to be our friend. You need to do better, Jake!” She didn’t scream the words, but several people looked at them, as if they were fighting. Tipper, her hair having grown out from her buzz cut, nodded.
“It’s bad for morale. That includes us, you know. You’re getting along with everyone else suddenly, and barely even look at either of us.”
Jake didn’t think that was true. After a bit, he nodded.
“You both get the thing with Holsom, right? How he was mind controlling a lot of the women, using pheromones? Something like that. Only, Tip, you can’t be affected that way can you? I don’t know about you, Carley...”
The words had Sammi out of the Kitchen, almost instantly. Seeming ready too... Jake didn’t know, but winked at her, hoping a fight wasn’t going to break out.
Instead, Carley looked at the far wall, seemed pissed for a moment, then blew her cheeks out playfully, and finally nodded.
“I was hit with that too. Hard. The effect is honestly incredible. I would have done anything for him, for a while there. Me. That... There’s no way that should have worked if it was something normal. I threw it off, after a while. Even then, I still loved him. That... I can’t go into why I can do that, beat that kind of thing, I mean but it’s real. Why would Tip be immune?”
Sammi fixed Carley with a hard look.
“She’s a Valkyrie. A hereditary super warrior. So is Vickie. We need to keep this quiet, for now. We’ll have a meeting soon. I think I get the idea, however. If you weren’t impacted by Derrick and kept treating Jake the way the man wanted anyway, that means you were both just kind of being bitches. You don’t really have an excuse, like the others do.” The girl seemed ready to argue the point.
Oddly, Carley just coughed.
“Fuck. Yeah, I can actually see that. Now, I mean. It was... Even after I realized I was being impacted by a chemical, I was still kind of going along with what Holsom wanted. I...He really hated you. I mean, it wasn’t like with Nate, where he was just kind of in the way. Derrick was obsessed with tearing you down, for some reason. Sorry, Jake. Still, you can be nicer now, can’t you?”
Tipper seemed upset by something, but glared at Sammi, and interrupted him, before he could speak.
“Freaking hell. You’re a Bawdri?” That was for the girl, but she turned to look at Jake as well. “And you... Denari?”
Carley looked back and forth, then wrinkled her nose. It was cute on the very pretty blonde woman.
“Okay, I recognize some of those names. This is... We need to talk. Somewhere else.”
Jake shook his head.
“Here will do, really. We can hold a meeting and...”
A small hand grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him around in a half circle. Roughly enough that even making himself feel peaceful, the woman nearly died before he could stop his right hand from moving. Heather stood there. In newish clothing and with washed hair. Scented a bit like pine, mixed with flowers, instead of rank body odor.
“Nope. You keep screwing with the time stream, Jake. I don’t know how, but you don’t do that, have that talk with us, until later. Right before you leave again. You have to, by the way. I just don’t know how to make that happen. Anyway, you need to go into Clyde. Don’t take either of these two.” The girl didn’t stomp away, but she did turn and leave again, as rapidly as she’d appeared.
Jake, slowly, nodded.
“I guess that answers that. So, I need a team for the trip into town. Not you two. Which is good. I’ve been being sweet and you two are still acting as if the real answer isn’t just to have sex with me. It’s that tension between us that’s making you both so edgy, I bet.” He didn’t, and was teasing, but Tipper just rolled her eyes, and grinned.
“Oh, right, like your virgin ass could handle the two of us. You’d pass out in the first ten minutes. Maybe twenty, given you’re Jake, but still...”
Carley did something different, making a face. It wasn’t evil seeming, even if it looked kind of pissed off. When she spoke her words were...
Playful.
“Fine. No anal, though. That’s why I had to say no to Holsom. If we do that, I might be forced into a viral and bacterial release that would kill everyone here. From the pain of it. That’s a reflexive action, but if anyone tries to rape one of us, they die. My people are hereditary assassins. It’s a thing. We can do other stuff, though. That will be safe enough.” She looked as if she actually meant it.
Which was nice. Probably not real, of course. He got that when Lois came out of the kitchen, clearly having heard them talking, since they were far away. It was odd, but she moved over and touched Jake on the arm.
“We should see to the dishes?”
“Right! Okay, later, I guess?” The offer, even if playful, was a nice one. Even if he were going to be alone forever, doing that with friends who would at least offer some kind of hope was better than wanting to kill himself.
That night he slept alone, of course, and had to listen to everyone else cooing and chuckling in the dark. Almost everyone. It came at him harder than it had been, and he wanted to die more than ever before. It was severe and didn’t make sense. Carley had at least pretended to be polite and playful with him. That was a good thing. Only, deep inside he knew it wasn’t real. It wasn’t enough. He was a loser who the world would be better off without.
Only, of course, Jake wasn’t that at all. He was a good person, who worked hard and sacrificed for others. Constantly. The world could use him, even if he weren’t actually needed. He held to that, repeating it over and over, until he slept.
Once again, he managed to fight the depression off. Barely. In the morning, after breakfast, he waved some people over. Tipper, Carley, Heather, Nate, Carl and Vickie.
When they got to him, he moved out front, even if the world was cold outside. He didn’t whisper but did manage a smile.
“Heather, you said I have to leave again soon? Because of the depression?”
The girl, her hair a bit matted from sleep and not grooming enough, gave an abstract nod.
“Right. You were supposed to have a big blow up though. Go on about how no one wants you and all that. It isn’t true, but I’ve been setting that up for a while now. Still, it has to happen. If you stay here, you won’t make it past the end of the month. Not right now. Then you can come back, later, to save us all again.”
Nate winced.
“Is this... Real?”
Oddly, Tipper snorted, but nodded.
“We know that Heather is decent at seeing the future. So, yeah, probably real. How do we manage this?”
The pregnant girl shrugged. She had a warm jacket on, but her nose was turning red in the cold.
“Go into Clyde. There will be an ambush. You need to kill the Chief of police and his men. Then... There are a lot of people there. They’ll be here, for the winter, which... That has to happen, but almost never really works. You can’t take Tipper or Carley. Dave can go with you. Others too, but not them.”
Carley seemed fine with not driving into an ambush, but Tipper acted like she’d been personally insulted and was ready to make something of an issue of it.
“I can drive a stick shift. You can’t, can you Jake?” She seemed a bit certain on that point. Probably from having talked to Rita.
“True.”
Carl could drive a stick shift and Vickie admitted she could too, if not very well. She'd had classes on it though. Drivers-Ed or something. She left that part a little vague. He got the gist though, the sub-text. It was secret military training of some kind. Probably a lot higher level than not, for all she claimed to have minimal skills.
Nate nodded at him. Reading his mind. Confirming what the woman had been thinking.
He let himself feel peaceful for a moment, and then let that sense radiate from him. After a second or two everyone was looking at him. Only Nate pointed a bit.
Jake winked.
“We really need to have a conversation about not hiding information here, soon. Now, let’s get on the road? Who else is going.”
They hit the road fast and hard, driving right toward the town of Clyde. Carl at the wheel with Vickie riding shotgun next to Barry. That left him and Dave in the back together, with no windows to watch from. It was a shame because Jake would have liked the distraction from his thoughts.
While the nightly depression could have been him, he had to wonder. Something had changed and then the darkness had tried to hit him, over and again. It wasn’t lasting, thankfully, like it had before, but there was something he couldn’t exactly put his finger on. It bugged him, but at the moment, he wasn’t getting it. He needed to start paying closer attention to the people around him, to see who might be impacting him each day, right before bed.
They had to hang on to the wooden wagon to keep it from rolling around on them. The wood brown looked much darker in the nearly black of the sheltered vehicle, only a bit of light being let in around a screen near the top of the side, a strong looking metal mesh of some kind, the holes too small to do anything of note with, which was the point. There had been places for shackles but a few had been ripped out, probably when they tried to transport super-zombies. The stupidest weapon ever. Possibly literally. They weren't called land sharks for nothing.
Even if Jake was the only one who ever called them that. It was a good name though. Descriptive.
“Nom, nom, tasty humans.” That about explained the whole thing right there. Jake sighed and rode in silence after Dave gave him a curious look.
The trip went fast, the roads clear for the most part, allowing them to just move at a comfortable driving speed.
Right until the explosion. That was out of the blue and while Heather had spoken of an ambush, it would have never occurred to him that it would happen on the road, while they drove. Or that it would be a land mine or whatever had just gone off.
Then everything went sideways fast. Literally sideways, to the right a good way. It was hard to tell without windows how far that was. Then there was some serious tilting when a second jolt nearly knocked the vehicle over. It fell back onto its wheels somehow but it had been close.
They were all fine, except for Dave who had an injured arm from flying across the rig and catching himself. His left wrist, it looked like, so he could still shoot just fine. He just had to cradle the rifle in his left arm and turn a bit sideways.
Jake didn't wait for everyone to report in. Carl seemed dazed up front and Vickie moved with him, faster than he did somehow, even as they went out the back door together fast and she had a lot greater distance to travel getting there, and a wagon in the way. They leaped out and rolled. Vickie doing it very well, like she’d practiced, Jake kind of roughly. He'd never really done that kind of move before, himself but the gunfire coming in dictated doing something other than just standing up and waving politely.
They both fired as they moved, not hitting anything, barely even waving, just trying to buy some space and not let themselves be pinned down. The blonde woman smiled sweetly. It was eerie. Jake was used to seeing her matter of fact, or occasionally angry but looking peaceful in the midst of battle...
“Rush them?” She said, as the shooting intensified.
“All right.” Jake grinned. It was as good an idea as anything else given their open and exposed position.
They did it, without pause or hesitation. A clearly suicidal move, except that the people shooting couldn't understand what they were doing at first. It actually got them to hesitate for a second.
The bad guys all wore police blues but didn't call out for them to stop. There was no screaming about how they were the authorities or trying to claim the legal high ground. The reason was obvious on that part, finally, they were the bad guys. Moreover, everyone in Westwood knew it. The cops did, too.
