She nodded at Ziv. “This one was luckier. His elbow is fractured but we put a smaller cast on it so he can use the arm. That shouldn’t keep you guys here more than a couple of weeks. He won’t say, but I think they beat him with a metal pipe. No lacerated organs or internal bleeding, but his spleen is enlarged and there may be some damage to his liver. No vodka for you, Soldat.”
Ziv scowled at her. “Vojnik. I am Serbian, not Russian.”
The Sergeant Major’s expression did not change, but I sensed some disdain in her tone when she replied. “Perhaps I should have guessed. I knew that accent reeked from someplace familiar.”
“What is that supposed to mean, Woman?” Ziv started up from his bed, reaching for the big knife strapped to his pack.
Before it broke out into violence, Brundage leaned back and smiled at us. “None of you are infected,” he said. “Although I’m sure you knew that. I can say that you all could use a few good meals and some rest.” I nodded. MREs did not a fat man make, and we were all on the edge of malnutrition. I was secretly hoping some of the vegetables in her garden would be ripe enough to eat, because I was sick of MRE #11, the Sammich. Man cannot live on Spam alone.
The Sergeant Major tapped my arm. “Hamilton and the other one can rest here for a while. I doubt they’re up for dancing. But if you would like, I can show you the rest of Isle La Motte.”
Chapter 22
Sure enough, we got a tour of the island, although from horseback. The only one of us who could ride competently was Ahmed, and even he was intimidated by the horses when the two young men from last night brought them out. “They’re Shire horses,” she told us as she easily swung up into the saddle. “About the same size as Clydesdales, those big horses you used to see in the beer commercials. They eat everything they can reach, but they don’t balk at the sight of zombies and I’ve trained them to fight. Their height means the rider is more protected from attack, although a horde would bring horse and rider down easily enough.”
Uncomfortable though it turned out to be, I did bask in the luxury of riding instead of walking. My prosthesis wouldn’t fit in the stirrup, but I found I could ride a half-assed sort of sidesaddle when the jolting got too rough, and I didn’t mind Brit’s teasing too much after she fell off twice. “You could sell these to the Army,” I pointed out when we stopped for lunch at the home of another farmer on the north side of the island. “It would be the difference between life and death for scouts.”
The farmer, a big bear of a man with the proverbial farmer’s tan, guffawed loudly as he left the table for his plowing. The farmer’s wife, a lady who looked older than she probably was, shook her head and followed her husband out. “These horses are bred for war, that’s true,” the Sergeant Major explained. “They might do you good when it comes to scout work, but they aren’t easy to care for. You’d spend half your time just searching for grazing, and frankly we don’t have enough to lose. If it wasn’t for the fact that Burlington was mostly empty when the infection reached it, we wouldn’t have enough gas to run our tractors. Eventually we’ll run out, even if we can resupply from South Hero, which I doubt. In two years, we’ll be out of fuel. These horses don’t breed every year, and we need them for the plow and for clearing fields. We won’t sell them, and we’ll fight to keep them.”
I shrugged. “Oh well. It was worth asking.”
She grinned. “It was sheer luck that we have them. If my husband hadn’t retired before me, we wouldn’t have had time to build up the farm and bring in the horses before the plague hit. He spent the last five years of my career up here.”
“Is he that man, Pierre?”
She shook her head, her smile fading. “He died of cancer three years ago. He was halfway through chemo when the plague hit.”
“I’m sorry.” Brit spoke up, the first words she’d said all morning. Her sympathy was real enough, but it was so rare for her to express genuine emotion that even I glanced at her askance.
The Sergeant Major shrugged. “The last months were easier without the drugs and radiation. He said there wasn’t too much pain, but he was tired all the time. I do miss him, but I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to realize how bad things would get.”
“What were the first couple of years like here?” Hart asked as we remounted and carefully turned the horses back south.
“We didn’t starve, I can tell you.” She was at ease on the back of the big gelding, a red roan whose size dwarfed her as a rider on his back. She swayed with the horse’s gait, comfortable on what was essentially a half-ton of solid muscle. “Most of the island had been farmland in the past, and once the community realized what was happening, and what would happen if we got overrun by refugees, it was easy to organize everyone. Bryan — my husband — we didn’t have much trouble with that. It was lean, the first winter, but between foraging expeditions in what was left of Burlington and Champlain in New York, we made it through. Eating badly for six months convinced everyone else to clear their own land, get together to clear marginal land and acreage that belonged to people off-island. The next fall, we had a surplus, and no one has starved. Even with that third handed over to General Asshole, we’ve done fine.”
She wasn’t kidding. What had struck me from the first person I saw that morning was that everyone here was healthy. It wasn’t the stick-thin-barely-surviving that my team and I looked like on a diet of MREs, and it wasn’t the almost-obesity you saw among cannibals surviving on an exclusively meat diet. Everyone here had real muscle, the strength that came from eating well and working hard. As we trotted past well-tended fields and over the one bridge, spanning a wide creek whose sides were carefully brick-lined, I was impressed again at the strength of will it took to organize an entire community in the face of overwhelming odds and succeed, especially in a world where the normal rules had gone out the window when the Undead started hunting the living. I suspected, looking at her upright back, it cost her more than she would admit to keep six hundred people working together, particularly with zombies not more than two or three miles offshore, the last military presence gone. Whatever her feelings about the General, I knew in my gut that he had still supplied them with security, even if it cost more food than they had wanted to give.
But she wasn’t a dictator either. Anyone could see that. The men and women working in the fields waved and called out when they saw her astride the horse, and she waved back. More than once she enlisted us to help a farmer pull a stuck machine out of the mud. Kids chased after us as we trotted down the road, and when she checked on the guards along the wall in the late afternoon, they spoke to her with real respect. Everywhere you looked, her hand was on the community, and it was a hand they evidently welcomed. Brit pushed her horse up next to mine as we waited while the Sergeant Major spoke with those guards, perched on the wood scaffolding that placed them just high enough they could sprawl out in the prone, their bodies protected by the wall, and snipe anything they could see with minimal danger. “We should stay here,” she said softly, her knee touching mine. “We could live here, Nick. No more fighting, no more starving, no more nothing. This place is paradise compared to what we’ve been through.”