The Final Day (After, #3)(53)
“Paul Hawkins recommended them.”
John nodded slowly. “And what jobs did you take them from?”
“Here and there,” Ernie said with a bit of a grin.
“I would have liked to have known.”
“John, you know you are sounding a bit like a bureaucrat with that. Were we supposed to ask permission?”
“Ernie, you know how many mouths we have to feed between now and when food starts to get produced come late spring. Every hand counts.”
“And we’ve got hundreds working on making generators, retrofitting vehicles to burn alternate fuel, even some on your obsession with steam-powered tractors or some sort of mini locomotive.”
“We try to find a job everyone can do, but unless under attack, our first priority is food and more food.”
“And those tech nerds out there, how much food or whatever can they make versus what they are doing now?”
John nodded, finishing his drink and putting his hand over his glass in refusal while Ernie poured several ounces more for himself.
“Dare I quote someone we both disdain?” Ernie pressed. “‘From each according to his ability.’ You know the rest.”
“I’m not saying that, Ernie.”
“Well, in defense of what I am doing here, I’m saying it. Those kids are bloody geniuses when hunched over those old screens and damn near useless when it comes to canning beans, trapping rabbits, or toting a gun through the woods without accidentally shooting themselves or someone else. I’m maximizing their effectiveness, and their effectiveness might actually mean figuring what in hell is really going on out in the rest of the world and how it might hit us. Hell, you’re the historian; you tell me what role kids like that played in previous wars.”
John took that in and finally nodded. “You telling me you got a Bletchley Park out there in the next room?”
“Could be. Maybe one of them is the next Turing who will figure out how to crack the German Enigma code by building a machine to mimic how it works. Maybe not that dramatic, but if you are here on some kind of inspection tour and are about to order them back to whatever they were doing, I’m kicking you out of my house. The Franklin Clan will close up the gates and survive on our own again.”
“And those kids stay here!”
John looked up to see Linda standing in the doorway, most likely having listened to the entire conversation.
“You feeding them as I requested?” John asked.
“That’s right,” Linda replied with a smile.
“You have that kind of surplus?”
“Be prepared, as my husband said.”
John looked down at the freshly opened bottle of brandy stashed beneath Ernie’s desk, the cigar resting in the ashtray, and wondered how, after two and a half years, this family still seemed to have enough to keep going without ever asking for additional help. But as he had resolved back in the first days when the responsibility fell upon him to try to organize his community to survive and defend itself, when it came to those who had prepared before the Day, his policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” had to stand. He was not a commissar out to redistribute what was left or, as most likely happened in far too many places, point a finger at the 1 percent who’d had the foresight to be ready and shout for the other 99 percent to kill and loot them, just so all could fill their stomachs for a few extra days and then go back to starving.
“We’ll feed and house them,” Linda announced, pressing in on John’s musings. “That poor skinny rail Samantha was half-starved to death; most of her peers pitied her but saw her as not good for much of anything other than consuming a ration a day. Here she is back where she belongs, and the others view her as some sort of guru and definitely a leader they turn to for advice. John, in the vicious triage of the world you have to deal with—and God save you, I know what a hell it must be—that girl most likely would have died before spring and except for a few close friends been mourned by few.”
Linda’s words were a slap of reproach, and they stung. He lowered his head. “Point made, Linda. She stays.”
So many like her had indeed died, so ill-suited to be hunters—at times hunters of other men—or gatherers and sowers. Samantha was the luxury of an advanced technological age that so many like her had actually created. A world that all others once lived off of, even though they did not understand the hows or whys, but would curse if their sixty-inch flat screen hooked to a satellite dish went on the blink during a Super Bowl, or news of what some star had done that day to further titillate a society even as it headed to the brink of disaster and then fell.
The “nerds in the basement,” which too many once mocked—even while dependent upon them for their jobs, their entertainment, and indeed their very lives when it came to the infrastructure—had been held in mocking disdain by far too many. Little did anyone realize their importance until the moment everyone was brought to their knees in sharp flashes of nuclear light far above the atmosphere.
“All right, it stays as it is. Now tell me your goals,” John said.
Ernie, seeing that John’s hand was no longer covering his glass, poured him a few more ounces, and for once John did not resist. Linda and Ernie were running the show for the moment, and he realized it was time to just listen and perhaps relax a bit.