days 7 and 8 and end :D
Nov. 29th, 2007 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smackenzie"You wanna learn how to fill shotgun shells?" she asked Oscar. He was preparing to lie down. "Oh no, you're not taking a nap here. If Martha's going to feed us and let us stay here tonight, we're going to do something to help out. I just - oh, there it is." She'd probably been looking right at the little dot on the map that marked Columbus this whole time. She pushed the pin into the map and the wall behind it, tugged on Oscar's leash, and went into the kitchen.
The twins were setting things up on the trestle table - a jumbo size canister of salt, a couple open boxes of shotgun shells, an empty aluminum can. As Marya came in, Harrow twisted one of the shells open and dumped out the gunpowder inside, emptying it into the bowl before pouring salt into the shell.
"This isn't going to do it," Harrow said, squinting critically at the shotgun shell. "We need better salt."
"Priest said to add a little dirt," Highgate told her. He opened the fridge and took out a big glass jar of what looked like iced tea. Marya gasped involuntarily, surprised that the fridge was apparently still cold. Highgate turned and grinned at her. "Generator," he said. "Daryl and Hector and Leeann went out to find more oil for it." Marya guessed those were the kids from Dallas, the couple and their friend. She wondered if Leeann was half of the couple or if she was the friend.
"Dirt," Harrow snorted. "I don't think so."
"That's what he said." Highgate put the glass jar on the table and poked around in the cabinets, probably looking for glasses. Marya retrieved hers out of the sink.
"Dining room," Harrow said without looking up. She was methodically opening up and emptying out each of the shotgun shells, refilling them with salt, and screwing the caps back on.
"What are you going to do with the gunpowder?" Marya asked her.
"Nothing," she muttered. "Not my idea."
"We'll find a use for it," Highgate told her. He went into the dining room and came back with a couple of glasses and the canister of salt that had been sitting on the dining room table. It looked small next to the ginormous container on the kitchen table. "Maybe if we mixed it with the salt. Look." He took the shotgun shells she'd already filled, unscrewed the tops, and dumped them all into the bowl with the powder. Harrow rolled her eyes. "Shut up. We'll try it, maybe it will work. Hey, Marya, come here and give us a hand."
"We need rock salt, not table salt," Harrow said.
"Where are we gonna get rock salt?"
"I don't know. Gourmet grocery, hardware store, army/navy surplus.... We should've taken the car and gone to look."
"We need wood. The other guys are more focused." Harrow raised a blonde eyebrow. Highgate shrugged. By now he'd emptied all the shotgun shells that she'd filled with salt and was mixing the salt and gunpowder with his hands. "Ok, Marya, this is what you do. You fill the shell like this" - he scooped an empty shell through the salt-and-powder mixture in the bowl - "and screw the cap back on. It's easy. When you've filled all these, make a mix with the rest of the shells - dump out the gunpowder and measure a shell's worth of salt each time so it's half and half. Got it?"
"It's not rocket science," Marya said. "Oscar, sit." He seemed very interested in the stuff on the table, and the last thing Marya needed was for him to decide one of the shotgun shells looked tasty. She had no idea how gunpowder would affect a dog, but she didn't think it would be pretty. She reached over and pushed on his butt to get him to sit. Sometimes he took the hint and sometimes he didn't. This time he did. Maybe gunpowder didn't smell so great to him after all.
"Yeah, but you still gotta pay attention," Harrow said, taking an empty shell and filling it. "And they might not work."
"Killjoy," Highgate said, grinning. He washed his hands twice and then poured some iced tea into the two glasses before putting the jar back in the fridge. "You know how to shoot a gun?" he asked Marya.
"Don't even," Harrow muttered.
"No," Marya said. "Don't even what? I'm not helpless."
"Didn't say you were. Are you sticking around?"
"No."
"Do you have a gun of your own?"
"No."
"Then you don't need to know how to shoot ours." But Harrow was looking at her brother, who just shrugged again.
"Couldn't hurt," he told her.
"I'm taking off tomorrow," Marya said to both of them. "I need to find my dad. He's in California."
"Don't go to LA."
"Yeah, I saw the pin. He lives in Santa Barbara. It's far enough north, it should be safe."
"Safer, anyway. We'll give you some hints before you go. You should know what to look out for."
"Monsters? Things?"
"You've been talking to Jason," Harrow said. "Him and his things."
"What are they?" Marya filled the last empty shell, screwed the cap on, and dug into a box of fresh ones. "The things. Monsters. Whatever."
"Just that," Highgate said. " They don't look like anything you've ever seen before, or if they do, they look a little off." Marya thought about the cat-thing she'd seen in her back yard, and the bird as big as a couch that the guy who'd warned her about Columbus said he'd seen carry off a bear. "Some of them die from ordinary bullets and shells. Some of them don't. Salt repels them, though. That's what Priest's doing outside. Laying salt lines."
That sounded like a fairy tale to Marya, like some story from the old country that her grandma might have told her, like the way rowan repels evil spirits or any number of things can ward off the evil eye. She tried not to snicker - whatever its actual usefulness, these folks seemed to think salt would protect them somehow, and who was she to argue with them? Maybe they were right.
So she emptied and refilled shotgun shells and asked the twins a lot of questions about the monsters and things, and when Jason came back inside she asked him too. They told her about creatures she could half picture in her mind's eye and the few tricks they'd tried so far to kill the things, and Highgate spent twenty minutes trying to explain the experiment with the gunpowder, finally ending with "And after all that it didn't even work."
"We didn't have anything good to test it on," Harrow corrected him. "We need an actual living creature or we won't know."
"Patience, grasshopper," Jason said. "They'll come."
"I know. We're ready."
Eventually Martha came back, followed by a guy dressed all in black with a priest's collar on his shirt, who Marya figured was the elusive Priest. He sat down at the far end of the trestle table and made her tell him everything she'd seen and done in the past week, and while she was doing that Harrow and Highgate finished refilling the shotgun shells and Jason sat on the floor to keep Oscar company. Martha wandered around the kitchen and in and out of the dining room and when Marya was finished telling her story she asked Priest to tell his. But all he said was that when the world broke, he and Martha came to Haven because he knew people would need a safe place to gather. He wasn't very forthcoming about his life prior to everything going to hell, but then, neither was anyone else, and to be fair, they didn't ask Marya about her life either, other than what she'd been doing for the past week.
The kids from Dallas appeared eventually with some cordwood but no oil for the generator, and Marya learned that Daryl and Leeann were the couple and Hector was the friend. They all looked to be in their mid or late twenties and were varying degrees of friendly. Marya and Hector helped make dinner, which was scrambled eggs with canned black beans and tomatoes, and Leeann and Highgate helped clean up, and afterwards the twins and Priest went outside and Martha built a fire in the fireplace in the living room and the rest of them sat around and talked in the firelight. They talked about a lot of things besides what they might have done or seen the past week - maybe because they'd all been grilled by Priest already and were tired of talking about it - and it felt weirdly cozy and sleepover-like to Marya. Not that she was going to complain, because surreal or not, she got to be with people for the first time in a week and she really liked how it felt.
Eventually she went upstairs to go to sleep, dragging Oscar with her, and for once she slept deeply and well. The floor was hard but at least it wasn't the back seat of her van. In the morning Martha wrote out directions on how to get back to the highway and made her breakfast and Harrow brewed some really horrible coffee, and as Marya was putting her sleeping bag and what was now Oscar's blanket in the back of the van, Jason came over and asked if he could go with her.
"I thought you wanted to go to Vegas," she said. "Find your mom."
"It isn't safe. I'll look for her somewhere else. She might be trying to find me, and then she'll come here. I'll tell Martha and Priest to send her to California."
"Santa Barbara. Tell them Santa Barbara. You don't have a lot of stuff, do you?"
"I have a rucksack. I thought I might have to hike and I didn't want to bring too much."
"Ok, cool. Uh... Oscar might not want to sit in the back. He might whine."
Jason shrugged. "That's not a problem. I'm good with dogs."
"You wouldn't happen to have any food to contribute, would you?" It wasn't that far to California but she wasn't looking forward to sharing her provisions with someone else who wasn't Oscar.
"A bag of apples." He held it up. Marya took it and peered inside. That was some nice-looking fruit.
"Ok," she said. "I could use the company and I really don't mind sharing the driving. Throw your stuff in the back of the van. I need to walk Oscar and then I'm ready to go."
She said goodbye to Martha and Priest and the kids from Dallas, and as she was putting Oscar in the car the twins came around the house from the orchard sid, both of them carrying shotguns and looking a little scary. They wished her safe travel. She said thank you. And then Jason got in the passenger side and she got in the driver's side and she pulled away from the house and turned down the drive and followed Martha's directions to the highway and headed west.
They hauled ass through Oklahoma and across the top of Texas and through New Mexico and Arizona and did not stop unless they absolutely had to, especially after glimpsing a pack of antelope-like creatures running alongside the van - pronghorns, some biologically-inclined part of her brain supplied - but they didn't look like any pronghorns or antelope she'd ever seen and they should not have been able to keep pace with a vehicle zipping along at niney miles an hour. Things, Jason said, and Marya couldn't argue.
They bypassed LA to get to Santa Barbara and Marya made Jason drive so she could read the map, but they still got lost twice and she was a ball of panic when they found her dad's house, more so when he didn't respond to her knock. But he was just in the back yard trying to plant some seeds he'd taken from a garden supply store and he was alive and not all that surprised to see her - I knew you'd come looking for me, he said - and Marya hadn't driven across the country in vain.
She unpacked the van and settled into her dad's house and then helped Jason find a nice empty apartment to move into. It wasn't hard - there were a lot of empty apartments, and all you needed to get into them was a way with lockpicks. The plumbing worked sporadically but so did the electricity, and because the mayor and deputy chief of police had survived all the disappearances, Santa Barbara actually had something resembling law and order and governance. It was a good town to start over in.
Sometimes Marya went down to the wharf to fish and hang out with all the other people who had the same idea. She walked Oscar on the beach and played her drums with the windows open and tried to learn how to cook over a camp stove and then an open fire. She liberated a bicycle from a bike shop and re-learned how to bike. She met a couple of guys who'd come down from Portland - one of them was as tall as Jason but built a little more solid - she never saw them apart, and one of them, the slightly less tall redhaired one, admitted he never let the other guy out of his sight. Oscar tried to jump all over both of them and Marya figured they were either very devoted or very neurotic, or both, but in any case she liked them.
She never stopped being grateful she'd found her dad alive and well and trying to grow vegetables in his back yard, and while Santa Barbara was as eerily quiet as the rest of the country, and a lot of it was terrifyingly empty, and sometimes the twins' monsters and Jason's things came down from the hills and freaked people out, and the stars never did realign into constellations she knew, and sometimes she missed Cassandra and her grandma and the people she used to know - she thought about what Martha had told her in the kitchen at Haven, that they couldn't explain what had happened but all they could do was live in the world that was left, and then she'd think Ok. I can make this work. I can live in this.
End
words: 2327
total words: 51,192
The twins were setting things up on the trestle table - a jumbo size canister of salt, a couple open boxes of shotgun shells, an empty aluminum can. As Marya came in, Harrow twisted one of the shells open and dumped out the gunpowder inside, emptying it into the bowl before pouring salt into the shell.
"This isn't going to do it," Harrow said, squinting critically at the shotgun shell. "We need better salt."
"Priest said to add a little dirt," Highgate told her. He opened the fridge and took out a big glass jar of what looked like iced tea. Marya gasped involuntarily, surprised that the fridge was apparently still cold. Highgate turned and grinned at her. "Generator," he said. "Daryl and Hector and Leeann went out to find more oil for it." Marya guessed those were the kids from Dallas, the couple and their friend. She wondered if Leeann was half of the couple or if she was the friend.
"Dirt," Harrow snorted. "I don't think so."
"That's what he said." Highgate put the glass jar on the table and poked around in the cabinets, probably looking for glasses. Marya retrieved hers out of the sink.
"Dining room," Harrow said without looking up. She was methodically opening up and emptying out each of the shotgun shells, refilling them with salt, and screwing the caps back on.
"What are you going to do with the gunpowder?" Marya asked her.
"Nothing," she muttered. "Not my idea."
"We'll find a use for it," Highgate told her. He went into the dining room and came back with a couple of glasses and the canister of salt that had been sitting on the dining room table. It looked small next to the ginormous container on the kitchen table. "Maybe if we mixed it with the salt. Look." He took the shotgun shells she'd already filled, unscrewed the tops, and dumped them all into the bowl with the powder. Harrow rolled her eyes. "Shut up. We'll try it, maybe it will work. Hey, Marya, come here and give us a hand."
"We need rock salt, not table salt," Harrow said.
"Where are we gonna get rock salt?"
"I don't know. Gourmet grocery, hardware store, army/navy surplus.... We should've taken the car and gone to look."
"We need wood. The other guys are more focused." Harrow raised a blonde eyebrow. Highgate shrugged. By now he'd emptied all the shotgun shells that she'd filled with salt and was mixing the salt and gunpowder with his hands. "Ok, Marya, this is what you do. You fill the shell like this" - he scooped an empty shell through the salt-and-powder mixture in the bowl - "and screw the cap back on. It's easy. When you've filled all these, make a mix with the rest of the shells - dump out the gunpowder and measure a shell's worth of salt each time so it's half and half. Got it?"
"It's not rocket science," Marya said. "Oscar, sit." He seemed very interested in the stuff on the table, and the last thing Marya needed was for him to decide one of the shotgun shells looked tasty. She had no idea how gunpowder would affect a dog, but she didn't think it would be pretty. She reached over and pushed on his butt to get him to sit. Sometimes he took the hint and sometimes he didn't. This time he did. Maybe gunpowder didn't smell so great to him after all.
"Yeah, but you still gotta pay attention," Harrow said, taking an empty shell and filling it. "And they might not work."
"Killjoy," Highgate said, grinning. He washed his hands twice and then poured some iced tea into the two glasses before putting the jar back in the fridge. "You know how to shoot a gun?" he asked Marya.
"Don't even," Harrow muttered.
"No," Marya said. "Don't even what? I'm not helpless."
"Didn't say you were. Are you sticking around?"
"No."
"Do you have a gun of your own?"
"No."
"Then you don't need to know how to shoot ours." But Harrow was looking at her brother, who just shrugged again.
"Couldn't hurt," he told her.
"I'm taking off tomorrow," Marya said to both of them. "I need to find my dad. He's in California."
"Don't go to LA."
"Yeah, I saw the pin. He lives in Santa Barbara. It's far enough north, it should be safe."
"Safer, anyway. We'll give you some hints before you go. You should know what to look out for."
"Monsters? Things?"
"You've been talking to Jason," Harrow said. "Him and his things."
"What are they?" Marya filled the last empty shell, screwed the cap on, and dug into a box of fresh ones. "The things. Monsters. Whatever."
"Just that," Highgate said. " They don't look like anything you've ever seen before, or if they do, they look a little off." Marya thought about the cat-thing she'd seen in her back yard, and the bird as big as a couch that the guy who'd warned her about Columbus said he'd seen carry off a bear. "Some of them die from ordinary bullets and shells. Some of them don't. Salt repels them, though. That's what Priest's doing outside. Laying salt lines."
That sounded like a fairy tale to Marya, like some story from the old country that her grandma might have told her, like the way rowan repels evil spirits or any number of things can ward off the evil eye. She tried not to snicker - whatever its actual usefulness, these folks seemed to think salt would protect them somehow, and who was she to argue with them? Maybe they were right.
So she emptied and refilled shotgun shells and asked the twins a lot of questions about the monsters and things, and when Jason came back inside she asked him too. They told her about creatures she could half picture in her mind's eye and the few tricks they'd tried so far to kill the things, and Highgate spent twenty minutes trying to explain the experiment with the gunpowder, finally ending with "And after all that it didn't even work."
"We didn't have anything good to test it on," Harrow corrected him. "We need an actual living creature or we won't know."
"Patience, grasshopper," Jason said. "They'll come."
"I know. We're ready."
Eventually Martha came back, followed by a guy dressed all in black with a priest's collar on his shirt, who Marya figured was the elusive Priest. He sat down at the far end of the trestle table and made her tell him everything she'd seen and done in the past week, and while she was doing that Harrow and Highgate finished refilling the shotgun shells and Jason sat on the floor to keep Oscar company. Martha wandered around the kitchen and in and out of the dining room and when Marya was finished telling her story she asked Priest to tell his. But all he said was that when the world broke, he and Martha came to Haven because he knew people would need a safe place to gather. He wasn't very forthcoming about his life prior to everything going to hell, but then, neither was anyone else, and to be fair, they didn't ask Marya about her life either, other than what she'd been doing for the past week.
The kids from Dallas appeared eventually with some cordwood but no oil for the generator, and Marya learned that Daryl and Leeann were the couple and Hector was the friend. They all looked to be in their mid or late twenties and were varying degrees of friendly. Marya and Hector helped make dinner, which was scrambled eggs with canned black beans and tomatoes, and Leeann and Highgate helped clean up, and afterwards the twins and Priest went outside and Martha built a fire in the fireplace in the living room and the rest of them sat around and talked in the firelight. They talked about a lot of things besides what they might have done or seen the past week - maybe because they'd all been grilled by Priest already and were tired of talking about it - and it felt weirdly cozy and sleepover-like to Marya. Not that she was going to complain, because surreal or not, she got to be with people for the first time in a week and she really liked how it felt.
Eventually she went upstairs to go to sleep, dragging Oscar with her, and for once she slept deeply and well. The floor was hard but at least it wasn't the back seat of her van. In the morning Martha wrote out directions on how to get back to the highway and made her breakfast and Harrow brewed some really horrible coffee, and as Marya was putting her sleeping bag and what was now Oscar's blanket in the back of the van, Jason came over and asked if he could go with her.
"I thought you wanted to go to Vegas," she said. "Find your mom."
"It isn't safe. I'll look for her somewhere else. She might be trying to find me, and then she'll come here. I'll tell Martha and Priest to send her to California."
"Santa Barbara. Tell them Santa Barbara. You don't have a lot of stuff, do you?"
"I have a rucksack. I thought I might have to hike and I didn't want to bring too much."
"Ok, cool. Uh... Oscar might not want to sit in the back. He might whine."
Jason shrugged. "That's not a problem. I'm good with dogs."
"You wouldn't happen to have any food to contribute, would you?" It wasn't that far to California but she wasn't looking forward to sharing her provisions with someone else who wasn't Oscar.
"A bag of apples." He held it up. Marya took it and peered inside. That was some nice-looking fruit.
"Ok," she said. "I could use the company and I really don't mind sharing the driving. Throw your stuff in the back of the van. I need to walk Oscar and then I'm ready to go."
She said goodbye to Martha and Priest and the kids from Dallas, and as she was putting Oscar in the car the twins came around the house from the orchard sid, both of them carrying shotguns and looking a little scary. They wished her safe travel. She said thank you. And then Jason got in the passenger side and she got in the driver's side and she pulled away from the house and turned down the drive and followed Martha's directions to the highway and headed west.
They hauled ass through Oklahoma and across the top of Texas and through New Mexico and Arizona and did not stop unless they absolutely had to, especially after glimpsing a pack of antelope-like creatures running alongside the van - pronghorns, some biologically-inclined part of her brain supplied - but they didn't look like any pronghorns or antelope she'd ever seen and they should not have been able to keep pace with a vehicle zipping along at niney miles an hour. Things, Jason said, and Marya couldn't argue.
They bypassed LA to get to Santa Barbara and Marya made Jason drive so she could read the map, but they still got lost twice and she was a ball of panic when they found her dad's house, more so when he didn't respond to her knock. But he was just in the back yard trying to plant some seeds he'd taken from a garden supply store and he was alive and not all that surprised to see her - I knew you'd come looking for me, he said - and Marya hadn't driven across the country in vain.
She unpacked the van and settled into her dad's house and then helped Jason find a nice empty apartment to move into. It wasn't hard - there were a lot of empty apartments, and all you needed to get into them was a way with lockpicks. The plumbing worked sporadically but so did the electricity, and because the mayor and deputy chief of police had survived all the disappearances, Santa Barbara actually had something resembling law and order and governance. It was a good town to start over in.
Sometimes Marya went down to the wharf to fish and hang out with all the other people who had the same idea. She walked Oscar on the beach and played her drums with the windows open and tried to learn how to cook over a camp stove and then an open fire. She liberated a bicycle from a bike shop and re-learned how to bike. She met a couple of guys who'd come down from Portland - one of them was as tall as Jason but built a little more solid - she never saw them apart, and one of them, the slightly less tall redhaired one, admitted he never let the other guy out of his sight. Oscar tried to jump all over both of them and Marya figured they were either very devoted or very neurotic, or both, but in any case she liked them.
She never stopped being grateful she'd found her dad alive and well and trying to grow vegetables in his back yard, and while Santa Barbara was as eerily quiet as the rest of the country, and a lot of it was terrifyingly empty, and sometimes the twins' monsters and Jason's things came down from the hills and freaked people out, and the stars never did realign into constellations she knew, and sometimes she missed Cassandra and her grandma and the people she used to know - she thought about what Martha had told her in the kitchen at Haven, that they couldn't explain what had happened but all they could do was live in the world that was left, and then she'd think Ok. I can make this work. I can live in this.
End
words: 2327
total words: 51,192
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Date: 2007-12-20 01:23 am (UTC)*squeaks with glee* And it's definitely "both."