Chapter 26 - Gage
The man who steps down off the bus has the bearing of someone used to being listened to.
He's older, silver-haired, broad through the shoulders, and he takes in our whole convoy in one slow sweep before his eyes settle on Anders and stay there.
A woman follows him down, somewhere in her sixties, with a cardigan buttoned to the throat and both hands clasping a bible in front of her.
Behind them the bus keeps emptying, one tired face after another, until maybe twenty people are standing on the pavement beside the road crew.
Nobody over there is armed that I can see, but nobody over here has relaxed either.
Whatever mood Gigi managed to break with that threesome comment stays broken for about four seconds. Then Luna laughs somewhere behind me, and Jules's shoulders loosen a fraction. Being furious with him can wait until the newcomers are sorted out.
Gramps walks forward to meet the silver-haired man halfway, and I go with him. Stu and Gord stay a step back. The rest of the guys hold the line in front of the women and kids.
The older man puts out his hand. "Clayton Sorensen. I'm guessing you're not with the government."
Gramps shakes it. "I don’t think anybody's with the government anymore. I'm Anders. This is my grandson, Gage."
That gets a short, tired laugh out of Sorensen. "No. I don't suppose they are."
He introduces the woman as his sister, Marlene, who nods without unclasping her hands, then jerks a thumb toward the work trucks.
"That's Tanner and his crew over there. They were running a maintenance job on the road outside of town when everything happened.
The rest of us were on the right side of the line. "
"What line?" I ask.
Sorensen looks at me for a second, then at my grandfather, and something in his face breaks before going resolved.
"You ever heard of Delford?"
He nods slowly. "Small town west of Brooks? About a thousand people, right?"
"Twelve hundred." He corrects him and pauses to swallow roughly. "There's nothing there now. Not a foundation, not a fence post, not a piece of gravel. The whole town is prairie grass, like it was never built."
The rest of the story comes out in pieces, some from Sorensen and some from Tanner.
He walks over from the trucks with a cigarette behind his ear and doesn't offer to shake anyone's hand.
His crew had been ten kilometers east of the town filling potholes when the ground rippled under them hard enough to knock his men off their feet.
When they drove back into town to check on things, there was no town.
Sorensen had been on the road from Red Deer with his sister after a doctor's appointment, and he came over the last rise with the grain elevator gone from the skyline.
"We spent three days out there," he tells us. "Walking the grid, looking for anything…anybody. We found a handful of people." He shakes his head. "Everybody else is just gone. Wives, kids, families just gone."
Sorensen keeps going with a weary sigh. "We thought about going to Calgary, but the radio was still working then, and every station we could pick up was talking about fires and looting and riots in the cities, so we figured that was out. South seemed like the best bet. Lethbridge maybe."
"You can't go south." Gramps tells him in a grave tone. "Not now."
"Well, we can't stay here." Clayton throws up his hands.
"No. But the whole reason we're on this road is what's coming up out of the south." He looks over the group in front of him, the tired faces and the kids holding onto sleeves, and I can see he doesn’t want to give these people even worse news than they’ve already faced.
"You hear anything about Yellowstone on the radio before it died? "
Sorensen's face goes still. Marlene's hands tighten around her bible.
"Some," Tanner says cautiously. "A lot of it sounded like a rumor and hysteria."
"It wasn’t. Yellowstone erupted, and another super volcano in New Zealand followed it. There's an ash cloud coming this way that's going to cover everything on this continent, and when it gets here everything will be choked by it. You go south, you're driving straight into it."
I watch it hit them. Clayton doesn't argue, which tells me he'd already been afraid of exactly this.
The kid in the baseball cap, who's been hanging at the edge of the road crew with his hands shoved in the pocket of his hoodie, looks like he wants to cry.
Behind them a woman with a toddler on her hip turns and walks back toward the bus without a word.
"How long?" Sorensen asks.
"A day? Maybe less. It depends on the wind."
Sorensen finally shakes his head, and everything that made him the mayor goes out of his shoulders at once. "Then I don't know what we're going to do. I honestly don't. I don't know how any of us are supposed to survive this."
Marlene puts a hand on his arm. "The Lord didn't spare us on that highway to let us choke to death on ash, Clayton."
He pats her hand without looking at her.
Tanner lifts his chin toward the trailers behind us. "Where are you headed?"
I don't want to say the mine. That isn't information I'm giving to strangers. Instead, I just say, "The Drumheller area."
Tanner shrugs one shoulder. "That's as good a direction as any. Mind if we tag along?"
"That's not really..." I start.
Gramps talks right over me. "What have you got for skills in this group? Any tradesmen?"
Sorensen sees the opening my grandfather is giving him and answers.
"Two carpenters. One of them framed half the houses in Delford.
Andrea over there is a nurse, worked emerg in Strathmore for six years.
Tanner's crew can run anything with an engine and fix most of it, and Lyle there's a mechanic.
Cody's the kid in the hat. He was Tanner's summer hire.
" He pauses. "I was an electrical engineer for twenty years in the oil patch before I got into politics.
Instrumentation and power systems, mostly.
The rest are just good people who lost everything they had and need somewhere safe to recover and start rebuilding. "
Gramps nods slowly, and I know that look. He's taking inventory.
I should be doing the same thing, but I keep getting pulled in two directions. Torrin has moved up on my left, and he's frowning. His eyes keep moving over the road crew, then the bus, then back to Tanner, and every time they come back the frown gets a little deeper.
The other thing I notice comes a beat later, and it takes me a second to understand what I'm not seeing.
Mars's shadows are gone. The kid in the ball cap has drifted a few feet closer to the trucks, and Marlene's eyes are on the same spot mine are, but Mars himself doesn't look worried.
He has the look of a man who decided the people in front of him aren't a threat and let his guard down accordingly.
I don't know Mars well enough anymore to be sure that's what happened, but I trust the instinct. He's been wound tighter than any of us for the last day, and he wouldn't let go of it for nothing.
Gramps goes to say something else, but I put a hand on his arm and pre-empt him.
"Give us a minute," I tell Clayton and the others. "We need to talk to our people. Then we'll see if we can come up with something that helps you."
Clayton nods, and his shoulders come down slightly.
He turns back to his group and says something too low to carry, and the newcomers start to scatter.
A lot of them head for the restrooms. Tanner's crew and a couple of the bus men walk around to the far side of the charter and light cigarettes.
The smoke drifts up over the roof while they talk.
Our group closes in around us before I can call anyone over.
"Well?" Gigi asks.
"Well, what?"
"Don't play dense, gorgeous. It doesn't suit you. Are we taking them?"
I look around the circle. Luna has ended up at my elbow, close enough that her shoulder brushes my arm when she shifts her weight.
Torrin is still frowning. Reid has his sunglasses pushed up and his eyes half closed, either listening to something none of us can hear or nursing the last of the chicken damage.
Kara stands with her arms folded, and Jules is already shaking his head.
"No."
"Nobody asked you yet," Kara says.
"I'm saving time."
Gramps ignores both of them with an impatient sigh. "I'll say what I said at the farm. We need more people. There's a mine to make livable, we have so much work ahead of us and an ash cloud on the way, and there aren't enough hands for any of it."
"There's also our people to keep safe," Jules says. "From strangers who we don't know."
Luna sighs at him. "Jules."
"I'm serious. Look at them." He waves a hand toward the smokers behind the charter. "I bet they're assholes."
"You can't possibly know that."
Jules lifts his head to the sky, cups a hand beside his mouth, and yells, "Hey, asshole!"
Reid facing in their direction holds up two fingers. "Two looked."
"Point proven."
"That proves nothing," Luna hisses. "That proves people look when someone yells."
"It proves two of them answer to it."
Gigi is chuckling as she reaches out and smacks him in the arm.
Kara is doing a poor job of pretending not to laugh with her.
Even Torrin's frown cracks for a second before he pulls it back into place.
I rub the bridge of my nose, because we are thirty feet from these people and the wind is blowing the wrong way for them not to hear this.
"Are you finished?" I ask him.
"For now."
"Then here's my vote. We take them." I keep my voice down. "They've got skilled people that will help. They've also got a man who spent twenty years keeping power systems running in the oil patch. That’s someone we want on our side to make sure the power stays on."
"We are also going to need to sleep," Jules spits. "Near them."