“You have electricity at your house?”
“Generator.”
“I thought the whole point of living in this place was to go back to our roots. Off the grid.”
Steve chuckled. “You believe everything you hear?”
“Apparently so.”
“You’ll learn, kid.”
The golf cart hummed toward the entrance, where two soldiers rushed out of a booth to manually raise a large metal slab blocking their path. They drove past the gate, and Keo finally saw what was on the other side.
He wished he could have been surprised, but he had heard the stories and expected something like it. Even so, he was still stunned by the scope of what he saw as they drove up a road flanked by wide fields to both sides of them.
T18 had a thriving farming community, with acres and acres of crops spread out as far as he could see, hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes moving among them. There was only the tree lines to his right and the river to his left to stop the rows of wheat swaying in the slight breeze. They drove past more fields covered in stalks of corn, along with dozens upon dozens of rows of plants, fruits, and red and green and yellow things he didn’t even know the names for.
The closest Keo had ever been to a farm was in the outskirts of Colombia a few years back, when he’d had to sleep inside a sugarcane field while waiting to kill someone. He’d grown up in San Diego, and before that on military bases around the world. As an adult, he’d spent almost all of his life in cities, working in jungles made of concrete instead of dirt. He couldn’t have grown a tomato if someone put a gun to his head.
The cart was moving slow enough that Keo was able to get a good look at his surroundings, and he wondered how long they had been at this. He could only spot a few soldiers, most of them on horseback moving among the fields. They were less guards and more security, which made sense because he wasn’t looking at prisoners forced to garden under a warm sun; these people wanted to be here, just like the women at the riverbanks.
“What are you growing?” he asked Steve.
“Everything,” Steve said. “Wheat, corn, vegetables, fruits… When was the last time you had fresh corn?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Or tomatoes? Potatoes? What about fresh from-the-oven bread? This is just one of our agricultural fields. We have two more on the other side of the subdivisions.”
“It’s…impressive,” Keo said, and realized that he actually meant it.
“This is what Tobias was trying to save them from. Now do you understand why he’d never have won? But that was something he could never understand. I tried to explain to him. I really did, but he just couldn’t fathom why this is a better life than running around out there scavenging and hiding from the crawlers. That’s no way to live.”
“You’re right. That is no way to live.”
“I’m glad you agree,” Steve said, and reached over and slapped Keo on the shoulder. “My brother Jack’s a good second-in-command, but he’s a little gimpy right now.”
“You offering me a job?”
“Why, you interested?”
“I’m not opposed to it.”
“That’s what I wanna hear. But not just yet. You did me a favor removing Tobias, but let’s wait and see how you feel tomorrow. After all, it’s probably going to be the biggest decision of your life.”
They drove on past the fields, which seemed to keep going and going around him. And to think this was just one of three in T18. Keo didn’t even want to imagine how much bigger the other two were, or how much manpower was working them.
“Around 4,000,” Jack had told him when he asked about the population of T18.
Eventually they passed the fields, and Steve turned into a subdivision blocked by a tall rolling gate. It had a sign across the front that once read “Wilmont Heights” but had since been covered up with a banner now reading, “T18A1.”
Like the marina entrance, this one also had a guard booth. A soldier rushed out as they approached and pushed the gate open for them. Steve drove through.
“There are five subdivisions,” Steve said. “One’s for military personnel only, and the rest are for everyone else.”
“Jack told me you had 4,000. How do you control that many people?”
“Control?” Steve said, not even bothering to hide his amusement. “What makes you think we control them? They can leave whenever they want. But why would they? These houses are the only things standing between them and the crawlers at night. There’s nothing for them out there.”
Keo had gone through whole subdivisions during his trek across Louisiana, and the empty houses never failed to leave him utterly depressed. But he didn’t get that same abandoned vibe now as they cruised up T18A1. The streets were sparse but clean, and he found out why when they drove past the first of what turned out to be a dozen or so workers along the sidewalks picking up garbage and stuffing them into bags. They were all civilians, and he didn’t see a soldier in sight.
“What did these poor bastards do to get this job detail?” Keo asked.
“You ever heard the phrase, ‘People who can, do; those that can’t, teach’?” Steve asked.
“I may have run across it once or twice.”
“Well, these guys can’t even teach, so this is the price of staying in town. You get it now?”
“What’s that?”
“This is what they’ll do to stay here. That’s how valuable this place is compared to what’s out there, why Tobias would never have been able to ‘rescue’ them. Because they don’t want to be rescued.”
“Nothing wrong with picking up garbage for a living.”
“It’s not, but you don’t wanna know what the poor bastards who can’t even do this are doing to earn their keep.”
“Does it smell?”
Steve chuckled. “Boy, does it ever. But hey, someone’s gotta do the dirty work, right? That’s how the world runs. Everyone’s got a role to play. That includes you and me.”
There were row after row of homes around them. They looked almost identical, except for a few add-ons and color schemes. What caught him by surprise were the yards; they all looked as if they had been recently mowed, though they seemed to lack the uniform clean-cut look he was used to seeing in suburban neighborhoods before The Purge. Almost all of the windows were open, even if he couldn’t see any homeowners around. Keo guessed they didn’t have to worry about crime these days.
The golf cart was the only vehicle in the entire place, its mechanical hum drawing curious looks from the people along the sidewalks. Keo was used to seeing cars and trucks parked along curbsides in subdivisions, but there were none of those here. As a result, the streets looked wide and inviting and nothing at all like what a real neighborhood should look like. In fact, there was nothing “real” about T18A1, or T18 for that matter.
Steve finally slowed down and turned into the driveway of a house near the back of the street. It was a two-story building, but there was nothing extraordinary about it. At least, nothing that would indicate this was where a man of Steve’s position lived.
“Here we are,” Steve said, putting the cart in park. “Your stop.”
Keo climbed out. “Where are we?”
“Go knock on the front door and find out.” Steve put the golf cart in reverse and started backing down the driveway. “I’ll send someone to come get you later, but until then, I would refrain from wandering off.”
Keo watched Steve back into the street, spinning the steering wheel, then tipping a nonexistent cap to him before driving off.
One of the men picking up garbage across the street stopped what he was doing and waved at Keo for some reason. He was in his fifties, with a full white beard and looked like Santa Claus, if Saint Nick had lost a good hundred or so pounds. Keo wasn’t entirely sure what to do, so he waved back.
Then, he turned around and looked at the house. It had brick in the front but wood paneling along the sides and, he guessed, in the back as well. It had an attached garage like every other house up and down the street. There were no mailboxes, but there was evidence someone had attempted to grow flowers around the walking path.