But the Children Survived (9 page)

"Okay, then today that's your assignment.  When I come back I better see half the field done.”  Simon walked away.  Pat was watching the railing again.  He could have sworn he saw a kid standing up there.

Chapter 11

Since Pat wasn’t going out with the crew that day, he got to eat his breakfast with the kids.  As the cafeteria emptied, he left his tray at the dishwasher and headed for the field.  He just happened to notice a little girl following him.  She was trying hard not to be noticed.  He got to the door and went through.  Then he waited on the other side.

When the little girl opened the door, she turned and found Pat looking down at her.  The first thing he noticed about her was her long, thick, wavy blond hair.  She had tried to pull it back in a ponytail, but it was so wild that it stuck out in different places all over her head. 

"I saw you at the railing this morning.”  Pat tried to look mean. 

She hesitated.  Her mouth was twisting as she tried to come up with a plausible reason for her being here. 

"I found this place one day and I just like to come in here because it feels like outside,” she said.  Pat smiled. 

"Yeah, I think I see what you mean.  But you know you're not supposed to come in here.”

She looked at him with big blue-gray eyes.

"Why?” she asked.

Pat pondered her question.  He didn’t rightly know why.  In fact, it had never been stated explicitly that the kids couldn’t come in here.  So, with that in mind, Pat asked her to help him check the hundreds of sprinklers in the field.

"What’s your name?” 

"Mindy.”  

"Well, Mindy, how would you like to spend the day in here checking these sprinklers with me?”

Mindy smiled.  Thinking of a whole day in this place made her feel happy. 

"I would.  I would like to help you.  Can I get my dog?”  Pat stared at her. 

"You’re the one with the dog!  I didn’t recognize you all cleaned up.  Well, you can’t let him pee in here.”

"It’s a she, and I'll watch her.”  Mind thought for a few seconds.  “Maybe I'll just bring her in after lunchtime for a little while.”

"That sounds very reasonable.” 

Pat led her down to the end of the field.  They met Calvin watering the rows of potatoes. 

"Morning, lady and gentleman,” Calvin said as he tipped his hat to them.

"Morning, Calvin.  This here is Mindy.  She's going to help me tighten the sprinklers.”

"Now you know how I feel about slave labor, Patrick.”  Calvin had one eyebrow raised as he looked at Pat.

"Well, I ah, I thought maybe I could, well, we don’t get paid!  How am I going to pay her?”  Pat looked genuinely perplexed.  What could he give her in return for her work? 

"I don’t want anything,” Mindy said.  “I just want to be in here.”  Pat smiled at Calvin.

"Okay Patrick, that’s fine, but the rules are she gets a break every hour and you make sure she eats.  And if she decides she's had enough, you let her go.  Understood?”

"No problem.  Now, Miss Mindy, let’s get started.” 

They left Calvin to water and went into the back were they kept the tools.  Mindy noticed that there was another set of doors here that must lead to the outside.  She made a mental note of that and followed Pat back out to the field.  Pat bent down and held a sprinkler.

"All you have to do is check the connection.  See, this little nut down here.  You have to make sure it's on good and tight so the water flies out the ends of the spokes.  If there's any play in the nut, you take this wrench and tighten it like this.”  He placed the wrench over the nut and moved it to tighten the nut.  “What do you think?”  Pat was watching Mindy.

"I think I can do this.” 

She started down one row and Pat went down the next.  While they worked Pat told Mindy his life story of growing up in Brooklyn and working in his mother’s beauty shop from the time he was eleven until he turned eighteen.  He would wash the ladies' hair, and they would pinch his cheek and give him a dollar.  He loved working in the shop, especially watching his mother cut hair.  She was a true artist. 

When he turned eighteen, his dad told him it was time to join the Plumber’s Union, and as soon as he graduated high school, he was apprenticed with his father’s employer.  He liked being a plumber.  The money was good and he could work alone. 

"How did you end up here?”  Mindy asked.

"My dad died.  I just kind of got sad, you know?  My mom told me to take a vacation.  I came down here and liked it.  Then I saw an ad for plumbers at Wilmer and March, and I applied.  They hired me.”  That was all he would say. 

At noon, Mindy and Pat went to the cafeteria for lunch.  The girls asked Mindy where she had been and she said she was helping Pat.  Pat had joined them for lunch.  They all stopped talking when Mark walked in and actually sat down to eat at a table - by himself of course.

"What’s up?” asked Pat.

"That’s Mark,” Katie said.  “He's a snob.”

"He’s mean,” Mindy elaborated.

"He’s just quiet,” Maria Elena said.

Alyssa, as usual, said nothing, and just gazed dreamily in Mark’s direction.

"So, we have a handsome, quiet snob with mean tendencies who has the power to stop a conversation in mid-sentence,” said Pat.  “He wasn't happy when we picked him up either.”

"Where did you find him?”  Mindy looked at Pat expectantly. 

"Down by the beach near St. Pete.  He had a really nice house.  Ang, I mean Andrew, wanted to leave him there, but you never know.  I mean, we really don’t know how long you kids can survive out there all alone.  So in the end, Andrew gave in and we took him.  But the kid wasn't happy.  He fought us all the way.” 

Mindy pondered what Pat had said.  If she hadn't been knocked out, she would have fought too.

"Why didn’t you just knock him out?”  Mindy had a hard look on her face.

"We ran out of chloroform.”  Pat looked at his food and wouldn’t look at Mindy.  He remembered the day they picked her up and a wave of guilt washed over him.  But it was his idea to take Baby Girl, so the guilt passed quickly. 

When they finished, Pat and Mindy stopped by her house to get Baby Girl.  After the little dog did her business by the side of the house and ate her jerky, they all headed for the field.  Before they got there, Mindy looked up at Pat.

"I know how you can pay me,” she said. 

"Oh yeah, and how is that?”

"You can cut my hair.” 

Chapter 12

Andrew and Simon got into the truck.  It would be strange leaving Pat and George, but there would be more room for supplies.  They drove down the dirt road that led to Highway 19, turned left onto 19 and drove south towards St. Petersburg. 

Along the way they passed the piles and piles of bodies that the crew had stacked in the weeks preceding this morning.  The bodies were decaying fast in the Florida sun, leaving bones and rotting clothing.  One good hurricane would finish the job by scattering the bones to the wind. 

Andrew and Simon tried to keep their eyes ahead.  They’d had their fill of death and decay.  All they wanted to do today was fill the truck and get back to the biosphere.  They knew they would have to do it several times, but at least it was clean work.  Even Pat could do this without heaving up his guts. 

They passed a shopping center where they had parked most of the abandoned cars found on 19.  Some of the cars had bodies in them that had to be removed.  Now the cars were neatly lined up in the mall parking lot.  Andrew and Simon would stop there twice today to fill the truck with gas from their tanks. 

They turned into a strip mall with two restaurants and a convenience store.  There was also a bowling alley.  The convenience store had canned goods and sodas, beer, etc.  It also had candy, snacks, and cigarettes.  The little girl with the dog had asked Andrew to get some dog food.  He found ten cans and put them in a bag. 

Old man Wilmer strictly forbade smoking in the facility and having a hazmat suit on made it impossible to smoke on the road.  Residents of the Wilmer Biosphere who wanted to had to smoke behind the last door near the field.  That way they could hide the smell as well as the actual smoke.  So Simon filled a bag with cigarettes. 

The bowling alley had snacks and canned drinks.  The two restaurants, one Italian and one Chinese, had big cans of tomato sauce, sacks of flour, big cans of chicken broth, corn starch, and lots of packaged fried noodles.  Simon also grabbed the little packets of duck sauce and soy sauce, anything to make the food more interesting.  Everything else was rotted.

They went back to the facility to drop off their booty, and Christie beckoned Andrew to come to the window.  She told him that Pat had a request.  She took out a slip of paper.   He wanted them to go to a beauty store and pick up a pair of hair cutting scissors, a hair cutting razor, a skinny comb and good quality brush.  He also wanted a hand-held mirror.  As he heard each item read, Andrew’s frown deepened. 

"What the hell does he want that stuff for?”

Christie just shrugged and asked him to do his best.  Andrew shook his head, ran his hand up and down his face, and shook his head again.  Then he nodded at Christie and put his head gear back on. 

Andrew and Simon had developed an easy friendship.  Though they had little in common with regard to their work at the Facility – Andrew was a computer expert and Simon a plumber, they got along famously and would rather spend their time together talking football and women than anything else. 

They worked well together too, with little friction.  Simon didn't mind letting Andrew decide where they would go.  Simon would close his eyes and put his head back while Andrew drove the gruesome miles to the next “shopping” location. 

When Gerald gave them orders to pick up a child he had located, it was Andrew who took the lead.  Children liked Andrew, and he was easy to trust.  Lately though, especially with Mark, Andrew was becoming less inclined to do Gerald’s bidding.  The kids weren't in danger.  There were no people that they knew of who would hurt them.  Why not just leave them were they were and check up on them once a week, maybe put a few together in a house and see how they fared?

  Kids should be outside, and these kids were special.  If they hadn't died in the first wave, why did Gerald think they would die now?  Andrew would rant on and on while Simon would grunt now and then in response.  Their partnership worked well.

They were halfway on their run when Andrew saw a sign for Maureen’s Beauty Barn.  They pulled into the lot and got out of the truck.  The store was locked, so they broke the window out and climbed in.  There was no electricity, so no alarm sounded.  Andrew turned on his flashlight.  Fortunately, there were no bodies in the store.  He found the scissors and combs, and those things girls liked to use to hold their hair back. 

The razors were behind a locked glass door.  He broke the door and grabbed three razors.  Simon managed to find a mirror, and he also grabbed all the shampoo and conditioners he could bag.  For good measure, they threw in some tweezers, nail polish, and lipstick.  They thought Christie might like that.  There were also some plastic safety razors that they grabbed for the men.

When they left the store, Simon asked Andrew how he knew what scissors to take when there were so many different kinds.  Andrew told him that when he was a kid, his mother had rehabilitated used Barbie dolls.  She would fix their hair, give them a “boil perm,” and cut the hair when necessary. 

"And you used to watch this?”  Simon said. 

"Only the part where she would stick their heads in the boiling hot water.” 

"And why would she do that?”  Simon asked.

"Because dolls' hair is plastic and the boiled water would curl it.  It had to be put on a thing, you know, wrapped around this plastic and stuck in really hot water to bend the hair.” 

"Jeez, who the hell thought of that?”  Simon said just before he dozed off. 

The rest of the afternoon went by quickly.  They found a Granger's, which was full of food.  They could come back tomorrow to fill up again.  It was getting dark, and they didn't like being out in the dark.  Dark these days meant pitch black dark, no street lights or lights from businesses.  They felt very lonely out there in the dark. 

When Pat saw all the goodies they had brought him, he almost wept.  It reminded him of his mom’s shop and the idea of his mom made Pat ache inside.  The last time he had heard her voice was just before the biosphere sealed.  He missed her so much.

That evening, after all the everyone had finished eating, Pat found a wooden box in the back room behind the field and put it in the cafeteria.  He then placed a chair on the box.  He told Mindy to go wash her hair at home and come back with it wrapped in a towel.  When she arrived in the cafeteria dripping wet, he put her on the chair on the box and worked his magic on her unruly locks. 

Pat had never actually cut anyone’s hair, but he had watched his mother do it hundreds of times.  So when he lifted the comb to Mindy’s hair and started to carefully disentangle the waves, he felt a surge of energy rush through him.  The scissors took on a life of their own as he cut strand after strand of hair. 

Pat asked Mindy how short she wanted to go.  She took her fingers and went from the back of her head around to the front pointing to just under her ears.  So Pat followed the line her fingers had drawn, and for good measure he thinned out the thick hair to a manageable fullness.