Aurora(66)

He’d started, as was his way, by getting on his radio setup and asking questions. Connecting with a farmer in Sudan, he’d learned a number of valuable tips, and after two or three sessions with the goats, they started behaving exactly as he wanted them to. Throwing rocks to steer their course was a popular method of control, but in the opinion of the Sudanese goat farmer, it tended to make the goats skittish, and therefore slower at their jobs. Using a stick was fine, never to hit the animals—talk about making them jumpy—but instead to lightly tap the ground beside them, ushering them away from the things you didn’t want them to eat. By late June, the goats had become accustomed to seeing Norman as their leader, and he found that tapping the stick was no longer even necessary, just carrying a large one was enough to do the job. Norman loved his new profession and always met the return of the goats with joy and enthusiasm.

Scott had gone from avoiding Norman to joining him, helping the old man with the more arduous parts of the physical work and learning everything he could about Norman’s radio setup, which had become their only real source of information about the outside world. Aubrey could tell Scott was still leery of spending too much time with Norman, but at least she’d begun to understand why. Norman was going to die at some point, probably soon, and the boy didn’t want to suffer another loss. As a result, he wasn’t very communicative.

“Talk to me,” Norman would implore him. “You’ve got to talk to people.”

“Why?” Scott had asked.

“Because there is nothing more worth doing.”

Scott had shrugged and said he’d think about it, and for now he just took quiet pleasure in the work time with the old man. The fields, as a result, were beautifully maintained all around.

The cul-de-sac had been completely transformed. Rock gardens, perennial flowers, shrubs, and any other ornamental horticulture had been stripped out, yard by yard, during the second and third weeks of the blackout. After initially seeking and not finding consensus among the residents, Aubrey and Phil had simply turned their own yards and begun planting. Soon enough, curious neighbors wandered out to see what they were up to, and as food supplies diminished and visits to the government distribution events became more frightening and less productive, every house on the block had eventually signed on.

Now the real problem wasn’t animals—they’d fenced adequately—but thieves in the night. The most popular items to steal had been the tomatoes, which had come in first and most bountifully. It was Phil who’d suggested overplanting them and anticipating a certain amount of pilferage, and he’d been right. They were the easiest to spot for ripeness, he’d said, required the least amount of effort to pluck, and a person can only carry so many, especially if you’re trying to be sneaky about it. Let’s just plant more than we think we need and write the rest off. So they did.

In normal times, mid-August was the season when garden-minded people started pushing their excess produce at each other. By late summer, you usually couldn’t give away a cucumber. Not this year. Everything grown was harvested, and everything harvested was eaten, stored, or given to the hungry stragglers who were stopping by the neighborhood in growing numbers. There was not a shred of waste, there couldn’t be, and everyone knew perfectly well why without having to say it.

Winter was only three months away.

Aubrey came out of the house around 10 a.m. the morning of August 26th, already exhausted. It was day 137 of the black-sky event, for those who were still counting, but Aubrey had stopped a long time ago. Far more important than numbers was that today was a Thursday. Mondays and Thursdays were water days, when the City of Aurora would turn the pumps on just after sunup and let them run for about two hours. Aubrey typically spent the entirety of that time in motion, moving between her kitchen sink, the downstairs bathroom, and her basement.

In the kitchen and bathroom, she’d run short lengths of hose from the faucets, which she kept running as long as the water was on, making sure the ends of the hoses stayed in the five-gallon water jugs on the floor. The first few weeks of the drastically limited water schedule had been brutal for everyone on Cayuga. They improvised as best they could to catch the water with hundreds of empty jelly jars, mixing bowls, and full bathtubs, which invariably spilled, sloshed, and ran out too soon. But then Scott and Celeste, on one of their daily foraging trips around the area, had found an abandoned Arrowhead water truck filled with empty jugs. After their initial disappointment, they’d seen the real value—it wasn’t in the water they’d hoped would be in the jugs but in the containers themselves. Aubrey, who was water marshal for the block, now owned sixty-two plastic five-gallon jugs that, when full, managed to meet the water needs of the whole cul-de-sac for up to five days at a time.

Back in the kitchen, she topped off and capped a nearly filled bottle, switched the hose to the next empty one, and carried the full jug down to the basement storage area. She put it in its spot with the others along the cool exterior wall of the basement and went back upstairs to get the next one from the bathroom. By staggering their fill times, she could use just about the entire two-hour water supply without a pause or a spill. The killer thing was her arms.

Sixty-two jugs, at about forty pounds each, was over two thousand pounds of water to carry down the stairs, and Aubrey’s biceps burned every time she was on duty. Her arms were different, she could tell, but not in the way of the ripped, angry arms of Madonna or Michelle Obama, the kind of arms the world had been telling her she was supposed to want her whole life. These new arms had strength. Her whole body had changed in the past four months. It was a body built not so it would look good in a swimsuit but so that it could fulfill a purpose—getting things done. She’d lost weight, didn’t know how much, and didn’t particularly care. All that mattered was that she felt in the best mental and physical shape of her life.