“Oh, my god, oh, my god!” Harriet cried as we jumped out of the hoppers. She bounded across the yard and practically tackled Sam. She grasped onto his face with her hands. “That’s blood! You’re bleeding!”
“It’s okay,” Sam said, peeling her hands off him. Harriet sat down in the middle of our yard, and she started to sob while Sam looked on, helpless. Rosita moved to her and kneeled down.
Roger floated out of the hive to meet us as an army of drones went to work unloading the hoppers. One of the scouts—Priscilla—stood at the very top of the hive like a lookout.
Dozens of people—not drones—scrambled around the edges of the property, digging holes. I blinked at the trampled remains of my fields. More people worked at the outer fence line while drones worked at constructing a taller interior fence line around the house and barn. An excavator rumbled from the back, right in the middle of my tobacco. I had no idea where the large machine had come from. It was scooping huge chunks of dirt from the ground.
In the middle of the front yard between the house and the barn and within the new interior fence, a new building had been erected in the hours we’d been gone. The thing looked like some sort ofsculpture made of discarded metal. If not for the twin cannon barrels sticking from it, I’d have thought it was a tall pile of junk.
I stared at the giant cannon-looking thing. The long, thin double barrels were, like, four meters long. As I watched, the weapon turned on its own, swinging back and forth. The thing swarmed with drones.
“Where did that come from?” I asked. They’d built it from the ground up. “What is it made of?”
“The barrels are the drainage conduits from the east field cistern,” Roger said. “We cut them in half. These will be utilized to fire flares while we manufacture more pressure-resistant barrels with the fabricators. They are not the correct gauge for the antiair batteries, which we will begin to manufacture shortly, and we hope to have nine more such batteries available soon as part of our point defense system. The swivel motion of the flare battery is using parts from the ranch’s combine harvester. Not ideal but it appears to be working.”
I blinked, not registering what he’d just said for several moments. “Mycombine. You tore up my combine? And the cistern?” I took a deep breath. It had taken me and Lulu almost two years to get the cistern system to work properly.
“All existing assets must be repurposed during perimeter defense, Oliver.”
“Don’t let Lulu see you tore up the cistern, or she’s going to lose her—”
“What the fuck!” Lulu cried. She hadn’t yet noticed the barrels on the flare gun, but she was looking at something else. The massive, now empty five-thousand-gallon poly tank sat on the side of the barn. They’d dug the whole thing up.
It was the one project Lulu had insisted we do on our own without the help of the honeybees. She was worried that once Roger finally broke down, we’d be completely helpless, so it had been our joint project. After all that work, they’d torn it all apart in a matter of hours.
Shing!The correction stinger appeared on Roger as he zoomed upto her. She and Roger started to go back and forth as I moved toward the house. I needed to clean my face off. I needed to sit down and just be alone for a minute.
Before I entered the house—the only house I’d ever known—I turned to look at the tableau.
The farm had been destroyed. The fields were trashed. Drones hurried in every direction. Multiple towers and other defenses were in various states of construction. My best friend, Sam, now sat in the dirt in the middle of the farm, hugging his still-crying fiancée, while Rosita also crouched down with them both. My sister was there, too, bent over, rubbing Harriet’s arm while the pregnant woman yelled at Roger. Axel and Tito sat off to the side, also on the ground and looking up at their grandmother. I was pretty sure all three were crying, and I didn’t want to stare too hard. Behind me, I could hear the chatter of at least a dozen people still inside my house.
I’d left the rifle and helmet in the truck, but I still wore the body armor. I reached down and fingered the pair of grenades looped to my jacket. Grenades. Just a few precious hours ago, I’d gone to my girlfriend’s house for a get-together because after this weekend, we’d all be knee-deep in work for several weeks.
“Do you remember,” a voice asked, “when I used to bring you and your sister Popsicles?”
I turned to see the old man with his giant cowboy hat with the turquoise band standing there. The man held a pear Popsicle in his hand, and he offered it to me. I smiled and took it from him.
“Hi, Mr.Gonzales,” I said. “Thank you.”
“How many times have I asked you to call me Beto?”
“Grandpa Lewis once told me that he’d tan my and Lulu’s hide if he ever caught us calling you that.”
This was a conversation we’d had so many times, I’d lost count. I sucked on the Popsicle for a moment. Even though Mr.Gonzales was the source of the Popsicles—he used to make them by the gross—the taste always made me think of my own grandfather.
“You’re a lot like him in some ways. You know that?” Mr.Gonzales said, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re stubborn like your grandfather. Like Cat, too.”
I stiffened slightly at the mention of my mom. Our neighbor talked about Grandpa Lewis all the time, speaking of him as if they’d been best friends. Theyhadbeen friends, which was saying something considering how prickly my grandfather was, but the real friendship had been between Mrs.Gonzales and Grandmother Yolanda.
My grandfather was much more of a loner than I was, and it always kind of irritated me when Mr.Gonzales compared me to him. Even though I loved my grandfather, I never really felt I had the same sort of abrasive personality he’d had.
But I was used to the comparison. What I wasn’t used to was Mr.Gonzales mentioning my mother. He rarely mentioned her.
It was almost a taboo subject amongst the older generation. Mr.and Mrs.Gonzales had had two sons of their own, both of whom died before they had children. I also knew that my mother had dated one of their two sons for a while before she’d fallen in love with a migrant field-worker—a field-worker under the employ of Mr.Gonzales,notGrandpa Lewis. It had been a minor scandal at the time because depending on who you asked, she was or wasn’t still dating Beto Junior at the time when she first got pregnant.
It didn’t matter. They were all dead now. I barely had memories of my mother, who died when I was five. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t remember my dad. From what I understood, he hadn’t exactly been a regular presence in my life even before they all got sick.
But Mr.and Mrs.Gonzales had never seemed to hold any of that against my mother, and they certainly didn’t do so against me and Lulu; they treated us like their own grandchildren.
