Out Of The Ashes (The Ending Series, #3) (37 page)

I raised my hand,
and when Lance looked at me, I said, “Can people come and go as they please?”
Because, regardless of being on my home turf and sounding so idyllic compared
to what lay on our side of the fence, not being able to leave New Bodega, being
a prisoner in all but name, would be a deal-breaker for me.

Lance nodded.
“You’re free to leave at any time. Nobody will force you to stay.” With a
shrug, he added, “Organized society isn’t for everyone.”

I gave him a closemouthed
smile and a no-further-questions nod.

Looking at the
armed guard, Lance said, “Clark, if you’ll let them in, please.”

The guard lifted
his rifle so the barrel rested on his shoulder and pointed up at the grayed-out
sky, then stuck his hand into his pocket, retrieving a key. He unlocked the
padlock securing the gate, rolling it to the side just enough for us lead our
horses through in single file.

As Lance led us
down the road, Jason and Grayson fell in step on either side of him, letting me
take over guiding their horses. Zoe and I followed close behind them, with the
others spreading out behind us.

“A lot’s changed
around here since I left in January,” Grayson said to our guide.

Lance nodded
slowly. “I can imagine. I’ve only been a part of the community since late
February, but I know the stories—the massacre…” He shook his head, heaving a
heavy sigh. “But at least something good came out of it.”

I scoffed and
gave Zoe a disbelieving look.
Something good?
More than thirty survivors
had been slaughtered, most of them people we
knew
.

But Lance
remained oblivious to my reaction. “It gave the rest of the survivors a reason
to pull together, something to work toward—the safety of the community. Which,
as of Monday, consists of four hundred and thirty-seven people.”

Grayson whistled
appreciatively. “How do you feed everyone?”

“We have a few
small garden-farms set up here, mostly in front and back yards.” He pointed to
a home coming up on the right side of the road.

A middle-aged
woman and a teenage boy were working in the front yard, pulling weeds. Over a
dozen rows of mounded dark, rich soil and a variety of plants, some barely
sprouted, some well on their way to producing harvestable food, filled the mini-farm.

The woman paused
with a snarly little weed in her hand and looked up as we passed. When her eyes
moved from Lance and Jason to Zoe and me, I offered her a tentative smile. She
returned it, nodding in silent greeting as well.
“Welcome,”
she said in
my head, and my smile widened.

“Uh, D…” Zoe
nudged my arm with her elbow. “What are you grinning at?”

“It’s nothing,
really.” I pointed to the woman with my chin. “She’s a telepath, and—” I was
quiet for a moment while my thoughts floundered. “She just spoke to me
telepathically.” I met Zoe’s eyes, biting my lip as I tried to explain why the
brief telepathic greeting seemed like such a good sign to me. “She wasn’t
afraid to show me—a perfect stranger—her Ability. She feels safe here, safe
enough to let her true self shine, and…well, she’s a telepath, but she’s not
being forced to do telepathic things. She’s
gardening
, not locked up in
a room, forced to communicate with people, to lure them in.” I lifted my
shoulders. “It’s just nice to see something that proves this place is
different, better.”

Smiling, Zoe
nodded. “She felt content, too. Content, with a sense of purpose.”

“You’ll find a
lot of that around here,” Lance said, looking back at us. “Most of our people
choose their assigned duty based not only on their skills, but also on what
they enjoy.” He pointed back at the woman, who’d returned to her weeding and
was speaking quietly to the teenage boy. “Kathy and her nephew, Mikey, came
here shortly after me. She was a teacher before, but gardening was her favorite
hobby. The Council let her choose between taking up a teaching post at the New
Bodega schoolhouse and running a home garden, taking on a couple apprentices so
she could pass on her skills.”

“The soil here
isn’t great,” Grayson commented.

“It’s not,” Lance
agreed. “And the weather’s not ideal, the plots are too small, and it’s too
soon to have anything beyond the most minimal supplement to our main food
source, but every little bit helps.”

“The main food
source being the ocean,” Jason clarified.

Lance nodded.
“Fish, crab, abalone, mussels, seaweed—we certainly don’t lack adequate
sustenance.”

“We noticed that
some of the houses around town still haven’t been scavenged,” Jason said, and I
knew he was thinking of our family homes. “You aren’t scavenging?”

“We are,” Lance
said, “but we focus on targets that promise a larger haul—wholesale stores,
supermarkets, hardware stores, that kind of thing.”

Jason glanced
over his shoulder at the horses. “I’m assuming you have some better way to move
what you find…?”

I patted Wings’s
heavily muscled shoulder.
“Don’t pay any attention to him—you do a fabulous
job of hauling our stuff around.”

Lance looked back
as well. “We don’t rely on horses for those trips, no, though we do have a herd
of several dozen we keep on the Peninsula for shorter trips outside, and
Colonel Marshall and the town guard use them when they head out on security
sweeps.” Shaking his head, Lance laughed softly. “We rely on something else
entirely for the big trips.”

Jason focused on
Lance, giving me a good view of his profile. His expression was, as I would
have expected, carefully blank. “Which is…?”

“We’ve, uh,
requisitioned a few tanker trucks, as well as a few semis. Fuel wasn’t hard to
find at first—we even used it in the boats—but we burned through it so quickly
that we’ve pretty much tapped every source of diesel in the area.” He shook his
head. “And regular gasoline is so touch-and-go now—half of what we come across
is bad…” He shrugged. “We won’t be able to rely on the trucks for much longer,
but hopefully by the time they’re no longer useful, we won’t need them.”

Zoe and I
exchanged identical expressions—eyebrows raised and lips pressed together in
little frowns.

We passed several
more houses on the right side of the road, most with two or three people
tending burgeoning gardens in the compact front and side yards, until we
approached what had been, and still appeared to be, the boatyard. Dozens of
people were hustling around, passing between and slipping under the hulls of at
least ten sailboats sitting on boat stands.

“Keeping the
boatyard stocked with competent workers…” Lance shot a sharp glance at Jason,
then looked over his shoulder at the rest of us. “I don’t suppose any of you
happen to be sailboat mechanics…?” When he didn’t receive any affirmatives, he
sighed. “Well, you can’t blame me for hoping.” He returned his attention to the
people cleaning and working on boats on either side of the road. “Since we rely
on the ocean for most of our food, keeping the marine vessels in tip-top shape
is a high priority, right up there with patrolling the wall and running sweeps
through the area outside.”

We spent several
minutes just walking and taking in the hustle and bustle of such a well-oiled
machine. As I looked around, I was struck by an odd observation—while there
were a ton of sailboats, both on stands in the boatyard and in the marina up
ahead
, there were absolutely no cars, trucks, or SUVs. At first it
seemed odd, but the more I considered it, the more I realized how logical it
was. Driving land vehicles around the peninsula would be excessive and
wasteful. It made much more sense to stockpile their fuel to use only for their
big scavenging excursions.

As we neared the
end of the boatyard, Lance stopped and turned around. The rest of us stopped as
well, and most returned their attention to him. Jason, however, continued
studying the way ahead, and I couldn’t help but do the same. Small buildings lined
the road on the right, and most of the slips in the marina on the left were
occupied by sailboats or clusters of smaller, rowable vessels.

“This is the New
Bodega town center,” Lance said. He pointed his thumb over his right shoulder,
indicating the marina’s large boathouse; it was where we’d met with the Town Council
and most of the townspeople back in January. “That’s Town Hall, where the Council
meeting will take place. There will be a reception with food and refreshments
in the banquet room upstairs, where you’ll have a chance to get to know us
better in a more informal setting.”

Lance switched
hands, pointing over his left shoulder. “Here’s the general store, grocer, hardware
supply, and hunting and fishing supply shop. We operate on a simple barter
system here, so if you want something, you’ll have to trade for it. If you end
up staying in New Bodega, you’ll be provided daily rations, so you won’t have
to worry about bartering for food. And we have a steady supply of clean water,
courtesy of a few of our people whose mutation enables them to desalinate and
cleanse water of impurities.”

That
caused my eyebrows to raise. It sounded a
lot like Tavis’s Ability, though he’d never tried to do anything like remove
salt from water—or, likely, freshwater from saltwater—but I didn’t see any
reason why he couldn’t.

“Also,” Lance
said, once again raising his right hand to point over his shoulder at what lay
on the marina side of the road, “the parking lot beyond Town Hall has become
the marketplace, where people set up shop in a more temporary manner, selling
surplus food and other supplies. We usually have a few outside traders there as
well; currently there are two, one from another settlement down south, in the
Monterey area, the other a roving trader. And beyond the market, we’re in the
process of developing several industrial shops—blacksmithing and metallurgy,
woodworking, that sort of thing.”

I watched Jason
turn his full attention to Lance, a curious, considering expression on his
face.

Turning, Lance continued
down the road toward Town Hall. We passed the surprisingly crowded marketplace
on our right. With only several seconds’ examination, I noted that it looked
just like a small run-of-the-mill farmer’s market.

“You can tie up
your horses here,” Lance said, stopping by a bike rack partway up the cement
path to the Town Hall’s main entrance. “The Council will be ready for you at
five.” Lance peeked down at his watch. “That gives you a little over a half hour
to explore. Feel free to wander around, just please don’t keep the Council
waiting.”

We all nodded and
said our thanks, and Lance quickly disappeared into the Town Hall, leaving us
to tie our mounts to the bike rack. I felt giddy at the opportunity to explore
this so familiar, yet so foreign place, and at the same time, I was bummed that
I didn’t—nor did any of my companions—have anything to barter with on hand.

“Hey,” Zoe said,
apparently picking up on my emotions. She linked her arm with mine and led me
toward the jumble of folding tables and tents set up as mini-shops. “You could
always offer your services as an animal whisperer…”

~~~~~

The eight of us
gathered by the “hitching post” five minutes before the meeting was supposed to
start, having spent the past half hour broken off into pairs as we wandered
around the town center. I’d spent most of the time walking arm-in-arm with Zoe,
looking at the various wares offered at each booth—from pots, pans, and cooking
utensils to fabric and clothing to handmade net bags of fresh shellfish. With
only a few minutes to spare, we’d met up with Jason and Jake, who’d passed the
time walking around the far end of the parking lot, where the smithy and
workshop were being erected, and the four of us had made our way back to the
Town Hall together.

The Town Hall was
a fairly large two-story structure with, as was to be expected of a boathouse,
two indoor slips for small vessels on the harbor side. The rest of the ground
floor was divided into rooms, including several small offices and a larger
conference room. I was only familiar with the layout because one of my high
school boyfriends had worked for the marina part time, and he’d snuck me into
one of the lesser-used offices more than once for a clandestine rendezvous.

When we passed
through the glass double doors and into a comfortable waiting room that had
been redecorated in the months we’d been gone, Lance greeted us again. He led
us down a hallway, past the closed doors to all of the smaller offices, and
through the open doorway to the conference room at the end of the hall.

We shuffled
through the doorway in singles and in pairs, spreading out along the wall on
either side. Nine people were seated, facing us, at a long table that stretched
nearly the entire length of the room. With Lance and the eight of us filling the
other half of the room, the space was more than a little cramped.

The woman in the
middle of the line of seated Council Members stood, extending her hand toward
the chairs on our side of the table. “Please, sit.” She was tall and slender,
with brown hair streaked with gray, slightly lined features, and intelligent
eyes. Her name was Bethany James, a former high school principal. I didn’t know
her well, but I remembered her from the last time we’d met with the Council.
“Daniel, it’s so good to see you again,” she said to Grayson with a warm smile.
“I hope you’re well.”