Patriot Smith, page 3
part #1 of Patriots Series
Smiling, he waved and headed to his shack. The place wasn’t that far away, still being on the same property. It was larger than it absolutely needed to be, having a footprint that made it look nearly as big as a normal house would be inside of the city. The yard was even structured that way, so he had a stone path going up to the nice white front door and a well-manicured lawn that currently had a fake picket fence done in white on the front side. Inside, the place had a big but narrow, living room. In the other direction, toward the back, was the bathroom and kitchen, each of which was designed for the camera, more than to house a person. That meant everything had to be angled so that the camera shots would look right.
There was a real reason for that, since the construction rules for their zone, which was rural, meant they could build anything they wanted, without a permit, as long as it didn’t have a foot print that was over two hundred square feet. They’d used every scrap of that making the place look right but if you hit the right angles with the camera, it seemed like a rather nice, and large, home. It was strange inside though, only being about six feet wide. That meant his bed, which was just a pad on the ground, had to face due east. Or, naturally, west. If he did that, he got to wake up each morning with the sun in his eyes, through the rather decorative window on that side of the place.
It had cladding on the outside that would let them change the look of the Coldwater pretty easily. It came up, given all the different shows. Yes, it was a pain to shoot inside but they had the studio behind the main house for most of the work. That was a half-converted pole barn about five hundred feet back, on the other side of the mixed fruit orchard. He was just on the edge of cherry, himself. They stored fruit in the big barn as well, making it an honest agricultural building. That meant they hadn’t needed a permit for it, since there were no limits on that kind of thing. The structure itself was vast, which was nice. Even with the food storage happening there they had two main studio spaces.
Except that they couldn’t afford to do anything really nice yet, as far as sets went.
The water in the bathroom was cold but he managed to scrub up quickly anyway and changed into a nice red t-shirt, along with blue jeans, and an old pair of running shoes. They hadn’t been used for that purpose in a while, since he’d gotten so busy with the harvest and then canning preserves that his days had been filled from sun up to sun down for a while. Several weeks, really.
That and his other jobs meant that he pretty much just worked. It was less than thrilling for him but he was pretty happy anyway. Some people were good at getting things done. It was kind of like a super power, he decided. Even as he moved into the house for the puppet show. Why they did it in there, instead of the studio…
Well, he knew that one. It was because there had been an unused corner in the living room. So, he’d built a puppeteering station there. No one had told him it was stupid, even though it probably was.
They’d have more people, sooner or later, if only to change the talent up a bit. That would mean needing beds for them. A situation which would require a place to put the things. The stage probably needed to be tucked into the barn up the hill given that.
Which they could work on just as soon as he had time, or Mel decided that she wanted the living room back, so that she could lounge there and do her daily research, watching television. He smiled a bit as he went in, thinking about the situation, since the house wasn’t that huge, or that nice. Nothing there was really. His shack was the best-looking place but only from a certain direction. The main dwelling was a converted garage and seemed kind of poor, to be honest. The drywall was solid and clean on the bottom but the ceiling went up sixteen feet. Past the first eight, you could see the pink fiberglass insulation. The brown paper had writing on the back, which wasn’t decorative at all. It had been that way when he’d bought the place, about three years before.
Melissa, actually dressed for the day, finally, in slacks and a button up shirt, snapped her fingers at people as they came in to set up.
“Hurry. I want to watch my programs this evening, if you’re all in here all day… Grrr.” The only saving grace to the tirade was that she went playful at the end. She could act, after all. They all managed that one pretty well.
They’d had to, just to get in.
At first, he’d just taken people if they wanted to come, figuring that most would be able to come around to something near talent that way, if given a chance. It hadn’t worked at all, so he’d eventually instated an acting interview just to get in the door. The only one there that hadn’t really made the cut that way was Paul. The man was so good at editing and music that Sebastian had decided to work with him on learning to act, just to get at his other skills. The kid had really come around, too. In the last four months he’d gone from being wooden and stilted at best, to being natural and actually decent on camera, when the need arose. Sure, he wasn’t their best actor, or that great looking but he was decent at it and did the voice of one of the puppets for them.
Mel stood there, her hands on her broad hips, looking bossy and a bit more wrinkled around the eyes than was normal. That seemed off, since she hadn’t been like that a few days before, that he recalled. Part of that probably had to do with her constant and never-ending drinking. She wasn’t the only one there that did that kind of thing but the woman drank every night and good parts of the day. It was going to take a toll, eventually.
Not that Sebastian was perfect that way. He didn’t even pretend to be. It was simply that drinking or doing drugs wasn’t exactly his big issue. No, his deal was food. If he hadn’t managed to stay as active as he had most of his life, he would have been rather large at the moment. It took an act of will not to obsess over edibles all the time, too. Good food was, he knew, just about his favorite subject in the world. A thing that he hadn’t had much of lately. Not the right kind. Every part of him screamed for sugar just about then. That and fat. Which he wasn’t going to get. They’d needed to get hundreds of pounds of the white stuff in for the jam and preserves that had been made out of about half the fruit they’d collected. There was still more coming, the late harvest not having happened yet. It was nearly October, so that was about done, given their region.
There was going to be some left over, even after all the canning of whole fruits and veggies. They’d dried some but that was only going to be so useful to them. The root cellar was already full however, and the pantry room, which was a large addition built onto the house, outside of the kitchen door, was filled so tightly with other staple food items that they didn’t have space for much more there. That meant he needed to come up with something to do with the fruit that was left over. There was a lot of it.
They were set, food wise, so he let himself wonder if they might not be able to turn some of it into wine. They could juice things but if they did half of it as something else, no one would really mind, he didn’t think. Especially if it worked at all. Most of the others loved to get their drink on, so it probably wouldn’t be a fight to make that part happen. He was going to need some equipment for that, if he wanted to do it right. That part might be a problem.
They had the internet but getting deliveries was hit or miss, out where they were. Now. Before things had gone sideways on them thanks to the spoiled assholes who’d whined them into a police state, UPS would have brought things right to their front door. At least if he opened up all the gates. There were three of them but keeping them closed helped to keep the bears and moose out of the yard.
Nothing kept the deer out, as far as he could tell. Thankfully the fruit trees were tall enough the beasts couldn’t reach all of the leaves and fruit on them. It had been set up when he’d moved in but he’d worked on a few new starts. That required building a little protective cage for each new tree. At least if they wanted it to grow at all. Otherwise it would be munched before it was six months in the ground. So far it had taken two full growing years before they were big enough to handle what deer did to them.
Marc clapped his hands and waved to the talent for the show. Karen, Paul and Vina. They did the voices and also their own puppet work. They just didn’t have enough people otherwise. Even Mel was going to have to get busy and work sound for them. At least if she actually cared about her television viewing that night.
The director of the hour held his hands out. It was a dramatic and planned move, meant to get attention but also holding a showy aspect. The good-looking guy was probably the only person there that would have been able to really make it as a professional actor, if they weren’t doing their own little thing like they were.
“Okay! We have this scripted and practiced. Just like we did last night. Any questions?”
No one had any, for once. That was a rare and special thing. One that no one noticed in the moment.
“Get ready to roll then! Ten minutes to set up, then we start on scene one?”
That got people to move, chattering as they worked. A lot of it was kind of rote, since they worked a lot. They each did all the jobs, more or less, so the lighting was good to start with, as was the sound. That meant they were all on task as the puppets made their crude jokes, which was cute, in the high-pitched voices being used. The run time was actually twenty-five minutes, give or take a few seconds. They even had spaces for commercials, just in case they were going to be picked up for the big leagues at any point. It probably wouldn’t happen but it wasn’t like they had a lot of competition.
Since things had been locked down, about half of the people that used to put up material on YouTube had simply vanished. Not literally, they just didn’t put anything up anymore. Sebastian figured that they were simply being locked out, to keep their opinions quiet. Oddly enough, most of those people were the ones speaking out against the terrorists. At least the government had cracked down enough to have the Black Masks removed as well, eventually. That had actually taken actual legislation to make happen. The big internet sites were all in with the Marxists. As if that made any sense at all. If the Black Masks won, then they were all going to be shut down and the owners of the businesses would probably be murdered. Why no one got that point, Sebastian didn’t know.
Vagabond Studios had a private web-site but used YouTube as well, trying to get more viewers.
If you wanted that kind of thing, to be noticed in the world, you had to go where the people were.
Marc called it done for the moment just after Mr. Pickles’ last line. That was only for the first scene but they were inside the house, where the food was made. The noise of them eating would be distracting if it were captured for all time on video.
Marcus actually rubbed at his tummy. Not that he had one. Just flat abs that were hidden under a tight, long-sleeved shirt that day.
“That smells good! We should pack this up and do the next two scenes tomorrow? Then we have editing, so I’d love to get that all done if possible.”
Sebastian took a breath, then sighed.
“I’m going into Newton tomorrow, to work the farmer’s market? I could use some help with that but if someone can run the camera here…” He didn’t get to finish, before Rene waved at him.
“We have that handled. Hal can do the camera work. I can help you in town? If that’s not a problem for you, I mean?”
She had really short hair, a pierced nose and was at least ninety-percent lesbian, as far as he could tell. At least she pretended to that. She wasn’t highly flirtatious but from time to time she let her guard down and would touch the men a bit more than most total lesbians would have done in public. That wasn’t what she was asking about. No, that part, asking if he was all right with her, was about him. Not in a bedroom way, either. One of them had a problem with the terrorists, after all, and made no bones about it.
The other was a former progressive stooge. A social justice warrior on a level that would have had the girl arrested if she hadn’t been smart, or cowardly enough, to get away from her old crew, just in time. That part might have even been happenstance, as far as Sebastian could tell. She’d let enough drop to them all that they got her political beliefs, or at least her old ones, pretty firmly.
The trick there was that he didn’t really know if she was honestly a former anything, or just bright enough to get that having people shoot at you wasn’t a brilliant life plan. Either way, he needed the help. Her annoying him by asking for a safe space or demanding equal pay for work that she wasn’t doing wouldn’t come up. Sebastian was nearly certain of it. For all he didn’t like her old lifestyle, she was a decent enough person not to cause problems that weren’t needed. Most days at least. They were all too dramatic at times. Including himself.
So, he smiled. After all, he was an actor too.
“Sounds great! We can leave at about eight? You love getting up early and then working all day, right?”
That seemed to be good for Rene, though the others were all acting strangely about it. As if he were going to be mean about things. That wasn’t really the truth. If anything, he tended to be too nice for his own good. It was, in the end, why he had nine people that were half useless living with him and making little shows for people that probably didn’t really care if they were any good or not.
Chapter two
Dinner that night was made for them by Chloe. She was a decently tall blonde woman, with shoulder length hair, who managed to be lean and a bit hard seeming in some ways. She was the one of them, other than Sebastian and Marcus, who bothered to work out at all. Her face wasn’t television ready, at the moment but she was probably the nicest of them there. At least once a day she bothered to make food for them all, taking that on as her personal extra task.
If he had to pick a favorite person that lived there, it would be her, without even a moment’s hesitation. Even saying she wasn’t television ready was probably him being a bit too hard on her. After all, she didn’t have makeup on at the moment, which was all he really meant by it. Sebastian didn’t either, and for both of them it would make a difference.
The room smelled good, he had to admit. Chloe was decent as far as cooking went. He was probably a good bit better, being trained for it but one of them took the time to actually do it, which counted for a lot in his book.
That meant everything they ate, day to day, tended to have a strong vegan theme to it. Sebastian didn’t really mind, since he could take or leave meat. Besides, they needed to ration things, which eating Chloe’s way was actually helping them with. She went heavy on the rice, oatmeal, bulgur wheat and vegetables. If she even liked treats or bread, it was an invisible thing.
Explaining nicely the white rice and stir fry they were having that night. There were some peanuts mixed into a savory sauce for it, which smelled heavenly, to him. Cutely enough, or possibly annoyingly, about half of the people started to complain about it. As if they’d expected a three-course meal with brandy after it to wash it all down. The discussion was mainly about not having dessert. A thing that he kind of missed himself, even if none of them could afford to get that kind of thing every day. Not if they wanted to be thin enough to play with the big kids in the acting world.
Sebastian grinned at the cute woman as they did that, making eye contact, his brown to her blue.
“Thanks, Chloe. This is really good.” The words were true, of course, since that was pretty much all he was going to bother with. The woman actually seemed to know that. Really, they all got that part. On some level people eventually started to pick that kind of thing up about you, if they were around long enough.
She smiled back at least. Her blue eyes looked lovely when she did that kind of thing. Her face lit, making it nearly seem to glow, it was so radiant.
“Thanks. I know that not everyone here is vegan…”
He shrugged then, taking a bite of veggies. They were from the garden and really did taste a lot better than the store-bought kind, even if they’d been frozen first. It was late enough in the year that they weren’t pulling as much fresh stuff from the ground or greenhouse each day. In a month they wouldn’t be getting even that, at a guess. Then it would be eating off of the stored food for a while. That and what they could get from the store in town. If anything.
It was all getting too expensive though, now. That meant keeping the number of some foods down while they ate more of other things. They had fruit coming out of their behinds, for instance. The store rooms in the studio, plural, were filled with mason jars. A lot of that was jam but not all of it by any means. Nearly wall to wall and filling the ten-foot-high racks that were several deep. They had a lot of potatoes as well. Most of them were canned, since they weren’t lasting past three or four months very well otherwise. They had nearly three thousand pounds of sugar and more than that in flour, both sealed in large plastic bins, in the pantry.
Part of that was down to the fact that Sebastian was being a paranoid asshat, if he were going to be honest about it. Things had been mainly stable for the last few months, even as the economy got harder for most people. That had been happening before the shutdowns due to the attacks, so most hadn’t really noticed when everything had gotten even worse. For some, things were probably even better than before.
After all, now the government was giving out food, at least in the larger cities and had put in rules saying that people couldn’t be removed from wherever they were living, unless they left on their own. That meant landlords were being screwed over, of course but the lowest level of society suddenly had food and some safety that they hadn’t as far as having a place to live.
Again, it meant that the Black Masks were getting their way. They’d pushed everyone around, using terror tactics, into being way more socialist. The only problem was that it couldn’t last forever. FEMA could only give away so much food, for so long. Landlords would fall on hard times and lose their rental properties to the banks. Who wouldn’t be able to sell them, because they had non-rent paying people living in them that couldn’t be removed. Then everything would keep getting worse, until even the banks had to shut their doors.
