She clenched her teeth and walked past Piers’s covered body, up the stairs, past the smashed front door, gave the tarp covering whatever poor Rasty had become a wide berth and went into the study to unlock the feelgood cabinet. She pulled out one of her father’s favorites, glanced at the glasses and shrugged. Swigging straight from the bottle, she marched outside again to tackle her unpleasant tasks.
First she activated all the security lights and rigged up a couple of work lamps besides. Then she got the small backhoe and dug a deep pit in the soft earth next to the family’s graveyard out beyond the gardens. All her forebears lay there peacefully, all the way through time to the original First Ship family who’d claimed this land.
That was the easy part.
Next she got a couple of the small antigrav pads they used to move the gigantic round hay bales and dealt with moving the bodies, wrapped in the tarps. She threw up more than once and continued to dry heave but kept drinking the feelgood to numb herself. Every little night noise made her heart race and she kept touching the blaster at her hip to remind herself she wasn’t helpless.
Somewhere close to dawn she’d finished taking care of her two dead friends and said words over them as the sun peeked over the far-off mountains.
She stayed beside the graves for a while, finishing the bottle and watching the sun rise. The world was still a beautiful place even with the current horrors going on. With a sigh she rose shakily and zigzagged her way to the house, where she spent the next several hours cleaning away all the evidence of Rasty’s death.
The final thing she did was board up the open front door, using force nails to put rough boards from the lumber pile in the barn into the door frame. The wood had been meant for one of the many projects around the ranch that wouldn’t be done now. When she was satisfied she trudged to the kitchen door and let herself in.
A long shower was next and that was when she cried, for her dead friends, for her town, for herself, for the fact she’d never found a good man to love and partner with and now most likely never would, for the uncertain future…eventually the water ran so cold she had to shut it off and crawl out. She stumbled to her bedroom, shut the door, set the blaster on the nightstand and passed out, not even putting on a nightgown. She was beyond caring.
* * *
For the next two days she laid in bed, wearing her oldest, most comfortable nightgown and did nothing. She didn’t allow herself to have any more feelgood and she did force herself to go out and tend to the animals in the barn. They shouldn’t be made to suffer because she was having a breakdown. She ate cold cereal from the container and an apple and slept for hours.
On the third day she rose at her usual time, got washed up and properly dressed, cooked herself breakfast and tended to the livestock. The world might be going to hell but she didn’t have to wallow in it. She skimmed the list of projects and tasks she’d posted when things were normal and rubbed her forehead to ease a looming headache. “No use to tackle any of this shit now—what would be the point?”
She wandered back into the house, fixed a cup of synthcaff and strolled to the office. She swept the piles of data discs and paperwork onto the floor and sat in her big chair, feet up on the desk. The collection of Piers’s miniature wood carvings caught her eye and she gulped a sob. No more breaking down, she told herself sternly. She’d decided to be strong and to fight to live in this awful new reality.
On a whim she turned on the coms receiver and tuned to the channel the sheriff had told her about. The air was full of crackling chatter between military groups, mostly in code, but she got the idea there was a huge fight going on between the uninfected and the infected, in many locations and the tide of battle wasn’t going in a good direction. Occasionally she heard calls in the clear, desperate for reinforcements or somewhere safe to send refugees.
Closing her eyes, Tamsyn tried to imagine the future, her future specifically. Making the ranch a huge success by raising cattle and selling beef offplanet was clearly out of the question. She’d be doing well to keep herself alive from the sounds of it.
She walked out of the office and out of the house, going to the stable and saddling Blaze. She thought a long ride and a picnic lunch at the lake in the foothills would do her some good and help her get perspective on what was happening but even though the horse was ready to run and the day was beautiful, Tamsyn’s unease grew the farther she rode. Finally she pulled Blaze to a halt and sat, scanning the horizon. The emptiness pressed in on her and anxiety made her heart beat faster. She couldn’t catch her breath and was afraid she’d topple from the saddle so she yanked the reins, turning Blaze around and rode home again as fast as the stallion would go.
Once she’d taken care of him and let him loose in the pasture, she retreated to the house and sat in the office, mulling over her choices, which basically boiled down to staying at the ranch as the sheriff had told her to do or moving into town. The latter choice didn’t appeal to her and she quickly decided it was impossible anyway as she couldn’t desert her animals. The infected had no reason to come all the way out here. She’d manage as best she could, as long as she could and hope the epidemic would end.
Accordingly, she started on her to do list, working off the items she could do on her own.
On a whim one evening she tried the ‘call all’ function on the holo deck, using the list of contacts from her ranch council days. Most of the coms didn’t even send and others were dumped in voicemail in boxes. To her total astonishment Perry answered. His holo wavered and the sound was poor but seeing him was a powerful jolt to her mood, sending her spirits soaring.
“Tamsyn, girl, how you doing over there in your corner of the world?” he asked, peering at her. “Never thought I’d hear from you again. Your little town doing okay?”
“No, we’re not. My foreman and all my hands died of the damn flu. I think we’ve lost a lot of people in Rosewater too. The military was here for a while but one morning they drove away, according to the sheriff. How are things with you?”
“My boys and me are holding on. We’re in a pretty good location to keep those things out and we’re not close to any towns. Lost a few people before we closed all access. We’ll make it,” he said with confidence Tamsyn envied.
The holo sparked and winked out but reconstituted itself a few seconds later.
“Refugee camp,” Perry was saying.
“I didn’t get that, can you repeat it?”
“I said the government set up a big refugee camp to the north, near Glastine. You could try to make it there if things go completely bad where you are. Haven’t heard anything from them in a while though. But coms are in and out these days?—”
The broadcast cut off and nothing Tamsyn did would bring it back online. She wasn’t remotely tempted by the idea of getting herself to Glastine, hundreds of miles away and entering a camp with presumably thousands of people she didn’t know. She’d do fine staying on the Double Comets by herself. She was glad to hear so many people had survived and gotten out of the cities in time though.
Each day she listened to the military channel and each day there were fewer and fewer transmissions, all of them sounding even more desperate than before. The news channels had all shut down or were simply broadcasting recorded instructions for what to do if a person or their family member had flu symptoms.
And one day there were no more transmissions at all.
Chapter Six
Her handheld chimed with an incoming com, startling her so much she nearly fell out of the hayloft where she was pitchforking quantities of the dried grasses onto the floor below, to be used as bedding in the stalls.
