All Fall Down: The Chronicles of Altor, page 2
The fact that most of the people who lived there were in their fifties or older meant that many of those large houses only had two people who lived in them, or perhaps three if they had a live-in housekeeper.
The denizens of Tucker’s Landing were friendly enough with the townspeople of Covington, though there was always a bit of a divide between those who worked the land or earned less than fifty thousand dollars a year and those who relied mostly on their stock portfolios.
When the Rage Wars first struck, there was some rumblings in town about The rich folk up in the canyon, but it had never really gone anywhere.
Until, that is, a small committee from Tucker’s Landing came down to Covington to see if they could, perhaps, hire a goodly number of the youngest, strongest, and best-armed citizens of the town to form a defense against any possible intrusion. A paid security force, if you will.
There were those who quickly volunteered, but there were more who advised them against it. That offer—flashing a little money for protection—did not settle well with the local citizenry.
In the end, no one accepted the offer from the committee. Instead, a vigilante group quietly formed in the back rooms of the cafés and taverns of the tiny town. Many of those who had been offered the smallest taste of the wealth of the enclave of Tucker’s Landing decided they would like a bigger piece of that pie. In fact, the entire pie and the plate.
Four days after the Tucker’s Landing committee had made their offer, many of the people they had approached made the trip up the single two-lane road that led to the development.
The Eat the Rich movement had arrived in Covington.
Within twenty-four hours, Tucker’s Landing had essentially ceased to exist, as had the people who had once lived there.
A few months earlier, the idea that people from the neighboring town might form a vigilante mob and march up to the front doors of the houses in Tucker’s Landing with ill intentions was impossible to even contemplate.
And then it happened.
And things got even crazier in the world.
The infrastructure of the country collapsed, and those roaming bands of people who thought might made right were everywhere. Including Covington, California.
The mayor of Covington was a woman named June Trello. Her actual first name was Juniper, but when she went into politics, she changed it to something that she thought made her look a little more serious. That was, perhaps, necessary to her election since she was only thirty years old.
She was the youngest person to ever be elected mayor of Covington, but her age did not hold her back from seeing the future and choosing a good path for her town.
When the first militia arrived at the Covington city limits, it was not much more than a group of families looking for a place to settle and willing to make their case with weapons.
June saw that although the first group had been inefficient and relatively easy to deal with, that would not always be the case. She called a meeting in the town square and everyone who was healthy enough to be upright crammed into the place where they had once held summer concerts. June stood on the bandstand and made her pitch.
“There are three roads that lead into Covington, and there are other routes, if you know where to look. Our town is impossible to defend. We were lucky once, but it’s certain that we won’t continue to be that lucky forever. The next roving band that sets their sights on us may not be idiots.”
“So what do we do, Juniper?” A voice from the middle of the crowd—a middle-aged man who had taught history to June only ten years earlier.
“We need to move into Tucker’s Landing,” she said simply.
It was not the first time the idea had been proposed, but it was the first time someone said it publicly. A murmur ran through the crowd as everyone instantly debated the idea, both pros and cons.
“It’s too small,” and “A lot of those houses are burned out.”
Those sentiments mixed with, “It would be easier to protect,” and “Those houses that are left are nice.”
June let that chatter go on for a minute, then raised a bull horn and squawked the siren for a moment to quiet everyone down.
“This isn’t something that everyone needs to agree on.” June’s husband Kane and son Ric climbed up to stand beside her. “But it’s something we’re going to do.” She put her arms around her own small family. “It will be much better if we’re not alone. It will be a lot easier to defend ourselves up there, but we’ll still need to do a lot of work to make us safe.” She paused and took her husband’s hand. “Kane and I are going up there right after the meeting to start laying out plans for what needs to be done. Anyone that wants to join us should come up.”
The crowd saw Kane’s involvement as a good thing. He was an engineer and had a reputation for having a good head on his shoulders.
“First come, first choose?” someone shouted from the back.
“Well, let’s not go that far. Whoever said it’s too small to fit the whole town in there is mostly right. We’re not going to be living in luxury up there. That’s the wrong way to look at this. Those houses are big, and most of them have four or five bedrooms plus studies and bonus rooms. We’re going to have to fit at least a few families into each one of them. This isn’t about living how the other half used to live. It’s about finding a place where we can all be safe.”
More murmuring through the crowd.
“So instead of first come, first choose, it would be better if friends and families who know and like each other make plans to share a house. I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing here, though. If we’re bickering over who gets to live in the nicest house while another group of raiders shows up here, it will all be over. We need to focus on what we can do to make that place safe, then figure out how we can make it sustainable. It has a lot of advantages, though. There are tall granite walls that block entrance on three sides. They put in an expensive new community well a few years ago. The lots are big, so we will be able to grow our food and tend to our cows and chickens.”
She looked out at the crowd and smiled. She had saved something for the end.
“And most of those houses have solar panels.”
There were only three homes in Covington that had solar power, and those were already getting a few funny looks from their powerless neighbors. There were mutterings from those who wondered why it was fair that those few people had lights and freezers while no one else did.
On the spot, June resigned her position as mayor of Covington and threw her hat in the ring for the job of leader of the new unnamed city.
Hundreds of people followed her, Kane, and their son up the road to the development. That left thousands behind, which was what June had hoped would happen. If everyone in Covington decided to relocate up the hill, it would not be sustainable.
A quarter mile before they reached Tucker’s Landing, as they crossed the bridge that ran over a sixty-foot-wide stream, Kane stopped on the far end and said, “We’ll need to blow this bridge down.”
“Then how will we get to town?”
“I can rig up another, smaller passenger bridge downstream that will allow us to go back and forth. The important thing is to make it hard for large groups to attack us. Even if they find that footbridge, they’ll have to come over it double file at most. We can set a guard to watch it and traps to take it down if that happens.”
As the people walked, they had to admit they were impressed by the amount of thought and planning that June and Kane had already done. They seemed to have answers to all the questions people had, and even to those that hadn’t been thought of yet.
The road that led into what had been Tucker’s Landing rose sharply as it came to the gated community.
Kane hopped up on a stump and pointed to the entrance. The fence that had once stood around the community had been badly damaged in the attacks and was not a serious deterrent to anyone. It did serve as the ghost of a reminder of past guilt, however. There had once been people living here. People they knew. It had never been revealed precisely who had led the mobs that had attacked the development, but it wasn’t impossible to tell who had participated. People who lived in the smaller houses and apartments suddenly had newer, nicer things than they had before.
Kane paused and pointed up toward Tucker’s Landing. “It’s going to be hard for anyone to get much momentum charging uphill against a fortified community.”
“Pickett’s charge!” a history buff yelled.
“Exactly so, and we know how that turned out for the Confederate forces,” Kane answered. He swept his arm from the southern wall of the canyon to the north. “That’s five hundred and seventy-five feet from one side to the other. That’s the area we need to focus on building a wall to keep people out. Those granite walls will do the rest for us. I’ve already drawn up the plans for the wall.” He pointed to the forest they had just walked through. “We’ve got plenty of timber, but we’ll need thousands of man hours to put the wall up as quickly as possible.”
“If I come, what about my parents? They’re old and can’t do much.”
“First,” June said, jumping up on the stump and putting her arm around Kane, “everyone from Covington is welcome here. If that swells our population too much, we’ll figure it out. No one who wants to join us will be turned away.” She glanced up at Kane and said, “For now. That won’t be the case once we do all the hard work to secure everything.” June looked down at the woman who had spoken. ”And, Annie, everyone can do something. Your dad whittles like no one I’ve ever seen, and your mom can knit and sew, even with her arthritis. We will feed everyone who is within our walls, and we will all work together.”
They walked on through what had once been Tucker’s Landing. There was a large, wooden sign with the name of the development on it, but someone had crossed out the T in Tucker’s and replaced it with an F.
June pointed to the sign and made her pitch. “I think we need to tear that sign down. That was the old way. We need something new.”
Kane jumped down and wrapped chains around the sign. He pointed to strong men in the front row. They stepped forward and grabbed a chain. When they gave a pull, the sign toppled over easily. Almost as though it had already been mostly pulled down in advance and waited for only the smallest tug to bring it down.
“Let’s go in and make our plans,” June said, as though she and Kane hadn’t already made many plans. “And,” with a dramatic sweep of her arm, June said, “Welcome to New City.”
Chapter Three
New City Redux
New City had numerous natural advantages—granite walls that provided protection on three sides, already-built shelters, solar power, room to grow food, and even enough fenced land for cows, chickens, sheep, goats, and horses.
That didn’t mean as they headed into the winter of 2033 that things would be easy.
The first thing to be done, once the living quarters were assigned, was to bring everything they needed from their old homes in Covington.
That was a little trickier than it might have been. The town of Covington was, for a few weeks, divided into those who would stay, and those who were leaving. Those who were leaving might have looked at the people who were staying behind as unadventurous and stuck in their ways, not taking advantage of the golden opportunity that had been presented to them. Those who stayed looked at their friends and soon-to-be-former neighbors as sudden strangers they no longer knew.
Every truckload of stuff that moved up the road to New City belonged to the people who took it, but the residents of Covington treated it like it was a personal loss.
There were advantages for at least a few of those who stayed behind. Some of those who lived in apartments over restaurants or in tiny houses immediately claimed the bigger residences of those who left.
In theory, the people who left still owned those properties, but in the new world that had been forged in fire, there was a real question as to what ownership was. For centuries, people had said that possession was nine-tenths of the law, but it was just an axiom. When there were courts and police and lawyers, a deed to the property overrode whatever rights a squatter might have.
With those aspects of society gone, a deed was as useful as a User’s Manual for a VCR. That is to say, not at all.
As the leavers departed, then, the stayers spread out, getting a little more elbow room.
Initially, there was talk that the two communities could become allies, trade partners. If one town had more eggs or a good crop of corn, they could trade with the other for a surplus of grapes or an extra horse.
That was the talk of a community that had been split in two but still had good memories of each other.
Once all the New City citizens had taken what they needed from their old homes, though, the talk turned to the bridge that connected the two communities.
June and Kane were strongly of the opinion that it needed to come down. Kane had the explosives and the structural knowledge that would do just that and he was ready to deploy them.
A large contingent opposed the idea, though. They still had friends and relatives in Covington and did not want to be cut off from them. Destroying the bridge felt like a permanent move that would isolate them.
That was exactly right, Kane and June argued, and that was the point. They promised Kane would build the temporary bridge to allow travel back and forth.
People complained that the temporary swinging bridge would be too hard to cross and that older people unable to navigate it would be cut off from people they knew and loved.
For weeks, the debate went on.
While it did, Kane focused all the manpower New City had on building the fence that would enclose the box canyon. A number of the citizens had worked in the woods, either as youngsters whose first jobs had been as choker setters or those who made a career of being long-term loggers. That crew consisted of a dozen men and two women who traveled the mile and a half to the nearest forest each day, identified the best trees, and took them down.
Another group worked with draft horses to haul the logs back, while a third team stripped the limbs and bark off and turned the trees into logs.
The work was done mostly in the fashion the woods had been logged a century before, though the sound of chainsaws did echo through the valley.
Kane had designed a fence that consisted of forty to forty-five foot logs jammed side by side into the ground. Once the ten foot holes were dug, he used block and tackle to lift the logs into place.
It was long, slow, heavy work, but they kept at it from first light until well after darkness descended. They weren’t racing against the winter so much as they were the unknown amount of time until the next invaders arrived.
It was a question of when, not if, that would happen.
By the first week of December, the wall was mostly in place. There were gaps that Kane didn’t like, so he dug a second line behind the first and brought more logs in to make a second blockade there.
Eventually, he planned to build a series of stairs, catwalks, and even small shelters where guards could look out over the approach.
When the last of the logs went in place, everyone in town breathed a little easier. More than most people in this new world, they felt somewhat secure.
June and Kane called a town meeting for that night. There had been no election held, but it was obvious they were in charge. They had the ideas and the momentum.
They had taken one of the burned-out houses and made it their town hall. The interior was damaged, but the roof and exterior walls were still standing. They had torn down and carried out all the fire-damaged walls and replaced the weight-bearing walls with poles, so that the rambler was essentially one big room.
Kane had built a riser at the far end of the house, where the kitchen had once been. He and June stood on it and waited for the crowd to settle. There was no heat in the building, so everyone wore their heavy winter coats, which made things even more crowded.
The building had been cleaned, but the heavy smell of burnt wood lingered.
“It’s time,” Kane said. “We’ve got to take the bridge down.”
It was hard to pick out any precise words, but there was a negative rumble of sound that spread quickly through the assembled people.
“It’s getting colder. We’ve been lucky that we haven’t received a real snowfall yet. We all know it’s coming, though.”
Knowing chuckles rippled. The people of the area took a certain pride in the amount of snowfall they got each winter.
“That’s both good news and bad,” Kane continued. “Good, because it will stop people from coming up here. Bad, because those who might already be on their way will become desperate for a safe place to hole up. While the weather is still decent, take the next two days and retrieve anything you might have left behind in town. Three days from now, I’m taking the bridge down.”
“Says who?” an unidentified voice came from the middle of the crowd.
“Well,” Kane said, looking for the source of the voice, “says me.” He jutted his chin out and stepped to the edge of the riser. He was a big man, 6’4” and two-hundred-twenty-five pounds. “If someone wants to step up here and tell us why we should leave the bridge up, to leave us open to attack, the floor is yours.”
He took a step back and swept the room with his eyes.
He waited thirty seconds, which seemed a very long time. When no one stepped forward, he said, “Anyone?”
From the back of the crowd, an anonymous voice said, “We should vote.”
“Go ahead,” Kane said, then stepped down off the riser and walked out of the house with June trailing him.
The new City Hall wasn’t big enough to hold everyone who wanted to hear, and the crowd spilled out onto the covered porch, the steps, and the muddy ground.
“Excuse me,” Kane said as he split the crowd and headed for the home they shared with two other families.
