Chapter Nineteen #4
longer an option, unless Sela was there with him. The compassion that was a part of her, the care she showed for others, had
become something he wouldn’t willingly do without.
“I’m thinking hundreds of braziers,” she admitted, rubbing her eyes as if overwhelmed.
“A lot of people have grills,” Olivia piped up. “I know there has to be good ventilation and all that, but they could be used
and if people are too stupid to open a window a little bit, that only improves the gene pool, right?”
“While I might agree with you in theory, in practice we don’t want to kill anyone,” Sela pointed out, though she smiled a
little. “The same precaution goes for the braziers, because like you said, they’re basically grills.”
She brought out a notebook and began ticking off things she’d thought about. Evidently they were in the process of getting
some sort of schooling organized for the kids. Everyone—literally everyone—would need to plant vegetable gardens in the spring—and
she had a list of who would need help plowing up a plot and sowing the seed. She had a list that made his head hurt, people
who had medical conditions that the herbalists or medic needed to see, places where herbs could be gathered and squads of
gatherers organized. A bigger drying shed would be needed. They needed a place to cure meat. They needed springhouses to keep
butter and milk cold.
This was going to kill him. There was no way she’d give up trying to make her world livable, trying to get her friends and
neighbors through the crisis. He was in up to his neck.
“We still have to deal with security problems.” He was very aware of the word we. “The people who tried to kill you have to be found and dealt with, because they’re an ongoing problem until then. The community
patrol is looking at vehicles as they patrol, asking if anyone has been hurt. Until they’re found, everyone in the valley
is in danger.”
“But they failed. The gasoline is out of the tanks now.”
“So they start attacking and stealing from individuals. That’s the next step.”
He saw her flinch at the realization that by fighting off the thieves at the store, she had inadvertently made individuals
the next targets. He wanted to tell her that it didn’t matter, that after the asshole punks had used the gasoline they’d have
moved on to smaller targets anyway, but the conversation had already skipped to another topic.
Eating had slowed and then stopped. Sela and Barb got to their feet and began cleaning off the table, while Carol looked pleased
to be sitting where she could talk to them while they worked. Ben figured he was more in the way than anything else, so he
went to put another log on the fireplace and stand with his back to the fire, enjoying the warmth.
After a little while, Olivia hesitantly approached, and stood beside him in an unconscious mirror of his posture. She was
silent for a minute, then asked, “Were you in the army?”
“Marines.”
“Oh.” Another silence. “My brother’s in the army. He’s at Fort Stewart.”
“Close to Savannah.”
She nodded.
“He’ll be okay, then. The military bases will have power, and they’re secure.”
She shifted uneasily. “Do you think he’s ever shot at anybody?”
Shooting someone was bothering her. Ben wondered how in the hell he was supposed to reassure a teenage girl about doing something
violent. The last time he’d interacted with a teenage girl for anything longer than ordering fast food, he’d been a teenager
himself. Now they were like an alien species to him.
“Unless he’s been deployed to a combat zone, no.”
“He hasn’t.” She paused again. “Have you?”
“Been deployed? Yes.”
“To a combat zone?”
“More than once.”
“So you’ve shot at people.”
“Yes.”
“And hit them?”
“I was good at my job.” Let her infer from that what she would. She was a kid, so he wasn’t going to spell things out in detail
for her. He glanced over at Sela, wondering when it would occur to her to rescue him. Even normal people had problems dealing
with teenagers, and he hadn’t been normal for a while now.
“I think I shot someone,” she confided.
“I hope so. A bullet wound would make it easier to identify the gang.”
“You don’t think I killed him?”
“With a .22? Not likely. Possible, but not likely.”
Then she went off on a tangent he hadn’t anticipated. “So you think I should get a bigger gun?”
He sent another look at Sela, and a mental message: Rescue me! Now!
He sucked at mental messages, because she kept chatting with the other two as they washed and dried the dishes. “What I think
is that I wish I’d been there instead of you two. Whether or not you’re armed and how you’re armed is a personal decision
for you and your grandmother.” And in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be war, and a teenage girl wouldn’t be asking him about
weapons. The world wasn’t perfect and never would be, but knowing that didn’t make him less uncomfortable.
“I wish you’d been there, too,” she said, and thank God that seemed to end the conversation because she had nothing else to
offer, and neither did he.
Sela looked over at him and smiled, a soft smile that went all the way through him.