“You do? Let’s have it.”
Lila hurled the basketball from the bleachers. It missed the basket by a couple of car lengths and bounced into the second row of the opposite set of bleachers.
“That was pathetic,” Tiffany said.
“You’re one to talk.”
“I’ll admit that.”
“We’ve got a couple of doctors and a few nurses. We’ve got a veterinarian. We’ve got a bunch of teachers. Kayleigh knew her way around a circuit, and although she’s gone, Magda isn’t bad. We’ve got a carpenter. We’ve got a couple of musicians. We’ve got a sociologist who’s already writing a book about the new society.”
“Yeah, and when it’s done, Molly can print it with her berry-juice ink.” Tiffany snickered.
“We’ve got that retired engineering professor from the university. We’ve got seamstresses and gardeners and cooks out the ying-yang. The book club ladies are running an encounter group so women can talk about the stuff they miss, and get out some of the sadness and grief. We’ve even got a horse whisperer. See?”
Tiffany retrieved the basketball. “See what?”
“We’re all we need,” Lila said. She had descended from the bleachers and stood with her arms crossed at the baseline of the court. “That’s why we were chosen. Every basic skill we need to survive is here.”
“Okay. Maybe. Could be. Sounds about right to me.” Tiffany took off her cowboy hat and fanned herself with it. She was plainly amused. “You are such a cop. Solving the mysteries.”
Lila wasn’t done, though. “So how do we keep things going? We’ve already got our first baby. And how many pregnant women are there? A dozen? Eight?”
“Could be as many as ten. That enough to jump-start a new world, you think, when half of em’s apt to be girls?”
“I don’t know.” Lila was riffing now, her face feeling hot as ideas came to her, “But it’s a start, and I bet you there’s cold storage facilities with generators that were programmed to run and run and are still running. You’d have to go to a city to find one, I’d guess, but I bet you could. And there would be frozen sperm samples there. And that would be enough to get a world—a new world—going.”
Tiffany stuck her hat on the back of her head and thumped the basketball off the floor a couple of times. “New world, huh?”
“She could have planned it this way. The woman. Eve. So we could start over again without men, at least at the beginning,” Lila said.
“Garden of Eden with no Adam, huh? Okay, Sheriff, let me ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
“Is it a good plan? What that woman’s set up for us?”
A fair question, Lila thought. The inhabitants of Our Place had discussed Eve Black endlessly; the rumors that had started in the old world had been carried into the new world; it was a rare Meeting when her name (if it was her name) did not come up. She was an extension, and a possible answer to the original questions, the great How and Why of their situation. They discussed the likelihood that she was something more than a woman—more than human—and there was increasing unity in the belief that she was the source of everything that had happened.
On the one hand, Lila mourned the lives that had been lost—Millie, Nell, Kayleigh, Jessica Elway before them, and how many others—as well as the histories and existences from which those that still lived had been separated. Their men and boys were gone. Yet most—Lila definitely among them—could not deny the renewal before them: Tiffany Jones with full cheeks and clean hair and a second heartbeat. In the old world, there were men who had hurt Tiff, and badly. In the old world, there were men who burned women, thus incinerating them in both realities. Blowtorch Brigades, Mary said they were being called. There were bad women and there were bad men; if anyone could claim the right to make that statement, Lila, who had arrested plenty of both, felt that she could. But men fought more; they killed more. That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous.
So, yes, Lila thought it was probably a good plan. Merciless, but very good. A world re-started by women had a chance to be safer and fairer. And yet . . .
“I don’t know.” Lila couldn’t say that an existence without her son was better. She could conceptualize the idea, but she couldn’t articulate it without feeling like a traitor to both Jared and to her old life.
Tiffany nodded. “How about this, then: can you shoot backwards?” She turned away from the basket, bent her knees low, and flipped the ball over her head. It went up, caromed off the corner of the square, caught the rim—and fell off, bounce, bounce, bounce, so close.
3
An ocher gush belched from the tap. A pipe clanked loudly against another pipe. The brownish flow sputtered, stopped, and then, hallelujah, clean water began to pour into the sink.
“Well,” said Magda Dubcek to the small assembly around the work-sink set against the wall of the water treatment plant. “Dere it is.”
“Incredible,” said Janice Coates.
“Nah. Pressure, gravity, not so complex. We be careful, turn on one neighborhood each at a time. Slow but steady win the race.”
Lila, thinking of the ancient note from Magda’s son Anton, undoubtedly a dope and a cocksman, but pretty damn sharp about the ways of water in his own right, abruptly hugged the old lady.
“Oh,” said Magda, “all right. Thanks.”
The water echoed in the long room of the Dooling County Water District plant, hushing them all. In silence, the women took turns passing their hands though the fresh stream.
4
One of the things everyone missed was the ability to just jump in a car and drive somewhere, instead of walking and getting blisters. The cars were still there, some in pretty good shape from being parked in garages, and at least some of the batteries they found in storage still held juice. The real problem was gasoline. Every drop had oxidized during the in-between period.
“We’ll have to refine some,” the retired engineering professor explained at a committee meeting. Not more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, in Kentucky, there were storage wells and refineries that might be re-started with work and luck. They immediately began to plan another journey; they assigned tasks and selected volunteers. Lila scanned the women in the room for signs of misgivings. There were none. Among the faces, she took special note of Celia Frode, the only survivor of the exploration party. Celia nodded along with the rest of them. “Put me on that list,” Celia said. “I’ll go. Feel a need to put on my rambling shoes.”
It would be risky, but they would be more careful this time. And they would not flinch.
5
When they got to the second floor of the demo house, Tiffany announced that she wasn’t climbing the ladder to the attic. “I’ll wait here.”