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NICK WASN’T SURE WHY Angus had put him in charge of the miscellaneous evacuees. His only conclusion was the lack of better candidates. It was a volatile situation with a good possibility of violence. Nick chose to go armed but put the gun under his shirt and hoped he wouldn’t need it.
He posted an announcement that there would be an update on all non-farm holdings in the small auditorium. People crowded in way before the appointed time. There were more here than Nick had expected. All that apparently empty forest had hidden a lot of people before it burned down.
“When do we get to go home?” A man yelled.
Angus had created a system to sort out people by area and get better numbers at the same time. “Here’s the deal,” Nick started. He was hoarse from the days of breathing smoke. He pointed to the color coded map on the wall. “Figure out what color you are by where your home is on the map. Get a ribbon over there and sit in the section with that color.” Claude the tailor and some of Ted’s kids had worked on the ribbons all morning. Then they’d tied big pieces of colored fabric to the chairs in different sections of the auditorium. Now the kids happily handed out their ribbons like prizes. Nick didn’t want to tell the crowd that the different colors were just different levels of destruction.
There was a lot of grumbling and mumbling as people stared at the map then went to collect their ribbons and took their seats. It wasn’t going to be easy. Lance arrived with members of his Divvy Committee to help. Each color group would go to a different room to hear how the rebuilding for their section would be done. A few areas that had had houses but no farms were not going to be rebuilt. Angus had decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to house a few people in far-flung areas. Nick expected trouble.
“I don’t want to play these games. I want to go home.” The same man as before shouted from the back of the room.
“Then go,” Nick said simply. “Nobody said you had to stay here. All of these areas were damaged by the fire. If you want to stay to hear how we’re going to rebuild, then get a ribbon and sit in your section.”
That started a firestorm of questions. Lance glared at Nick. “You could have handled that better.”
“The whole world just burned down, what do they expect?” he snapped back. He was tired. His lungs ached from a persistent cough but he couldn’t rest while there was so much to be done.
Nick took his place at the front of the room, clipboard in hand, until the room quieted down. “Each section will go with the person I assign to you. They will take you to a separate room to explain what’s going to happen next. They will answer any of your questions.” The rumble of voices increased until Nick whistled. “If you want to go off on your own, go. We are volunteers. We are trying to help you. If you don’t like it, come up with a different plan.”
“Who’s going to compensate me for my losses?”
Nick laughed. “What does that even mean?”
“This could have been prevented.”
Nick tensed. He had heard that phrase bandied about repeatedly. The people in this room were on edge and many looked ready to riot. He didn’t like the possibilities. “How?” he asked. There was no response. “It’s easy to point fingers and lay blame. This fire could have started by a lightning strike or a careless campfire, and the result would be the same. We are too few people without the kind of equipment we had before Zero Year. If anyone had a brilliant idea on how to fight the fire, I promise you we would have listened.” Nick paused a moment. “We would have listened,” he repeated firmly. “A few people came forward and offered suggestions. We tried every one.”
“Jackson said it shouldn’t have happened.”
“Zero Year shouldn’t have happened,” Nick responded sourly. “Lots of things shouldn’t have happened. Doesn’t stop them. Wildfire took out Clarkeston in the spring. Raiders killed almost every man, woman and child in Riverbank. The train food factories shut down.” He shrugged. “Can’t stop them. We just have to go forward. If you don’t want our help, that’s fine. If you do, you have to do it our way. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
“If I don’t want your help, how do I rebuild?”
“Barter with the lumber mill? Get a bunch of friends to help?” Nick offered.
“Jackson says you’ve got secret funds.”
Nick chuckled again. “What the heck is that? A pile of cash? What am I going to do with money? Can you eat it? Will it keep you safe when a storm comes?”
“So why should I let you take my crops?”
Nick was ready for this one. “Are you a farmer?”
There was no reply and the room grew restless with people craning their necks to see who had spoken. Nick doubted the man was a farmer because Angus had taken all of them to a meeting elsewhere.
“We don’t take anything. We barter. And if you’re a farmer, you’re in the wrong room.”
“I’m not a farmer,” an older woman stood up. Her hair was white, but her back was straight. Lines on her face showed a hard life lived. “What do I have to barter?”
“We aren’t unreasonable,” Nick said gently. “We’ve got kids and animals that need tending. There’s food to prep and clothes to sew and paperwork to file. If you have a skill that you can teach, that’s great too.”
“I was a dancer,” the woman announced defiantly.
“Can you teach? We’ve got some musicians at the school, but I don’t think anybody is teaching dance,” Nick asked.
“That’s not funny,” she snapped.
“I’m being serious,” Nick said. “We need our arts. We need songs and paintings and plays to remind us that there’s more to life than just survival. When we started the school, we were worried about losing the sciences. But there’s a lot more than that to life. The kids put on a play, and it ran for a month straight because it was the first entertainment any of us had seen in a decade.” Nick had to swallow against the emotion rising in his throat. “We need you. Please talk to Elsa and Dieter, they coordinate the curriculum.”
Something about that discussion quieted people down. Nick called off the colors, and who was in charge of that section, sending people off to other rooms to find out their fate. He didn’t look forward to the next step when some of the folks were told their areas wouldn’t be rebuilt. The room was almost empty when his radio buzzed.
“Shots fired at the warehouse. Who’s in the vicinity?”
The phrase sounded so familiar from his days in law enforcement that it disoriented him for a second. Then it hit him. Jean was at the warehouse.