CHAPTER 3
Abe Finds Peggy
Early the following morning, Abe activated a melter to clear the exterior blast door of the seed repository. Poking his head out of the bunker-like facility, he saw an unfamiliar shape on the nearby hillside, covered in snow. Perhaps a hundred feet upslope at the edge of the forest, he made out a bump of icy whiteness with branches and fir boughs sticking out of the top. Had a tree fallen over?
As part of his normal security detail, he marched through the deep snow to investigate. Plodding up the slope, he came to the mysterious form, and catching his breath, he cleared snow away and broke into a makeshift enclosure. Inside, he saw a human figure in a dark blue parka, lying on a silver-colored thermal blanket. A woman. She wore insulated clothing, but had no sleeping bag.
She was facing toward him, her eyes closed, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing. Clearing away more branches, he crawled into the shelter. Removing one of his gloves as he knelt by her and touched the carotid artery on her neck. It pulsed.
“Miss!” he said in a loud voice, “Miss! Wake up!”
She did not respond. Concerned, Abe wondered what to do. He couldn’t leave her out there, and her prospects were not good if he took her inside the seed repository. Director Jackson did not like intruders, and had already ordered the execution of four men who had ventured into the surrounding clearing and nearby forest, citing security concerns and lack of resources to house and feed strangers. “We must protect the seeds at all costs,” he had said repeatedly, as he ordered Jimmy Hansik to dump the men in the woods and leave them for animals to tear to pieces. The security of the seeds was Benitar’s catchall excuse, justifying anything distasteful that he wanted to do.
Abe picked her up in his arms. She was not particularly heavy, but having lost so much of his own weight and strength, he struggled under the burden. With considerable difficulty, he carried her inside the seed repository, closing the heavy blast door behind him. Her face had turned a pale shade of blue. She seemed to be in a coma, and would have died outside anyway. Without a doubt, Jackson was going to say she should have been left outside, but Abe couldn’t do it.
Dreading the trouble he would be in, he made his way along a corridor. At this early hour, no one else was up in this section. After laying the woman gently on his own bed, he went back outside and destroyed the lean-to, scattering its parts so that no sign of it remained. Then, just as the snow began to fall again, he scooped up her backpack and other personal articles, and sought shelter in the bunker.
This time Benitar Jackson awaited him at the bed, having seen the activities on a security camera. Though Abe sympathized with the Director, at times the man seemed like a textbook case of paranoia, always on the lookout for traitors on his staff, and for mobs of people he feared would come and break into the repository, stealing the seeds that were more precious to him than anything. In a world of finite resources, Jackson said that “seeds” (a catchall word that included the tubers, roots, and bulbs he stored) had become the most rare and valuable items in existence, more dear than gold, platinum, or any other of the other articles that men had always valued, throughout history. With the terrible events that had occurred all over the world, he was right about this, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with the man, and work with him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Jackson demanded. His hands were inside the deep pockets of his stained smock, and Abe knew he always carried a gun in one of them.
“Showing a little human concern, something you should understand.”
“Our seeds are for all of humanity,” Jackson snapped. “Isn’t it human to preserve them?”
Ignoring him for the moment, Abe wiped melted snow off the woman and removed her jacket, gloves and boots. Everything was wet. “I’ll get Belinda in here to dress her in dry clothes,” he said.
“For what? Her execution?”
“You might want to rethink that,” Abe said, placing a hand on her protruding belly. “Looks to me like she’s pregnant.” At that very moment, as if emphasizing his point, he felt something kick against his palm, a tiny fetus speaking out in the only way it knew how.