Aurora(45)

Phil squinted at her. “Is that necessary? You really think the power’s gonna be out for a year?”

“I think we’re fucked,” Aubrey said. “Degrees of fuckage, I don’t know. Do you really want to wait around to find out?”

Phil turned and looked at the strip of exposed soil, thinking about it. “Well, space is a premium, so you want anything that’s got good bulk. Tomatoes, obviously, you can make just about anything with them, or eat ’em cold. I’d grow a bunch of tomatoes and can the shit out of those, if I could find enough salt and vinegar.”

“Now you’re talking,” she said. “What else?”

Phil kept thinking, warming to the challenge. He looked around his front yard and gestured at the locations of imaginary crops. “Zucchini, that’s good and chunky, doesn’t rot, keeps you for a while. Carrots, obviously, if I could scare up enough chicken wire to keep the critters out. Spinach, eggplant, pumpkins, squash. Don’t have room for any more than that.”

“What if you did? What if we opened up all the yards?”

“Well, then, yeah. Sky’s the limit. First off, any kind of bean we can possibly get in the ground, we should do it. It’s protein.”

“Corn?” Aubrey offered.

Phil laughed out loud, then realized she wasn’t joking. “No. Not corn. Takes up too much space and has, like, zero nutritional value. Don’t get me started on the corn lobby.”

Aubrey made a mental note to never, ever get him started on the corn lobby.

“We’re not looking for cash crops here,” he said. He looked around the neighborhood, expanding his thinking. “If I had that half-shaded plot down there, by Janelle and Derek? I might just put some orange watermelon in. Wouldn’t that be a treat? You ever had orange watermelon?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, you don’t know. Come August, I can eat a whole one of those in a day. Man, it’s sweet.”

She looked at him, coming to life in front of her. Four days ago, they both would have sounded like nutters, some kind of crazy survivalists, tearing up their front yards to plant seeds for the apocalypse, but today, standing here on the strangely quiet block, under a sky empty of airplanes, it sounded to her like the most rational conversation she’d ever had in her life.

She looked down at the sod lifter he held between his dirty hands. “Is that hard to use?” she asked.

“Not at all. Here.” He held it out to her, and she wrapped her hands around it. “Hold it straight up and down, like that, at the end of the row I just started.” She did, putting the rounded end of the blade upright on the grass. “Now turn your hands, like this.”

He came around behind her and reached up, not physically adjusting her grip but gesturing at her with his hands in the air, twisting them just so. Aubrey had an innate creepiness detector that kicked into gear when a man was about to put his body too close to hers, but Phil kept a good two feet between them. That was nice.

“Now hold it tight and just hop up a little bit, enough to get the soles of your feet up onto the flat edge. It’ll drop right into the sod.”

Aubrey did as he instructed and jumped up onto the flat back of the blade. Sure enough, the curved edge sliced into the soil with a satisfying crunch.

“Good. Now step back, lever the handle over flat to the ground, and shove it under. You’re gonna slice all the roots in one go.”

Aubrey did, and with minimal resistance, the chunk of sod in front of her separated itself from the dirt below. She lifted it. “Do you have a wheelbarrow or something?”

“We don’t throw it out. We use it. Fertilizer. Just flip it over.”

She did. The chunk of sod plopped neatly back into the dirt upside-down, revealing the rich, dark soil underneath it.

Phil looked pleased. “There you go, sodbuster. We could break the rest of this stuff today, water the hell out of it while the hose still works, and if we get a little rain we can plant by the end of the week.”

“What about seeds?” she asked.

“Yeah, we need good ones. High-quality organic stuff. Not Monsanto Frankenseeds. That’s our biggest challenge. Farm supply stores. Gotta get on that fast, before everybody else.”

The sound of a car engine came from up the street, and they both turned. It was Aubrey’s car, Scott behind the wheel. Aubrey watched, frowning, as the car pulled into her driveway, too fast.

She handed the sod lifter back to Phil. “Thank you. Let’s talk later today.”

“You got it, Aunt Beru.”

She was already crossing the street and looked back, confused. “Who?”

“Aunt Beru? Famous moisture farmer?”

“A famous what?”

“The Lars family moisture farm? Where Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru raised Luke?” He waved her off, wishing he’d never gone down that particular path. “It’s a Star Wars thing. You have a good day.”

Yes, Phil was a data analyst, all right. Aubrey smiled, gave him a little wave, and turned back, heading home to deal with Scott. As she drew closer to the driveway, she saw that he wasn’t alone in the car.

There was a teenage girl in the front seat.





17.





Outside Jericho

A hundred feet underground, Ann-Sophie knocked on the door of unit 9A. She waited, holding a bouquet of wildflowers, a cloth grocery bag slung over her right arm. She knocked again, still got no answer, then tried the doorbell, a small, hard-to-see button nestled in the wood paneling of the landing. A few seconds later, Marques opened the door, in jeans and a T-shirt. He smiled, surprised.