Drew Kessler spends the rest of the storm in the lockable concrete utility shed behind the HOA office.
Ren feeds him through a slot in the door.
The ridge realizes, for the first time, that chaos is not survival.
Ren posts a proposal to #general the next morning. Mutual aid for the duration. Locke provides limited meds and water through the delivery hatch at lot 6. Reyes provides perimeter and dispute resolution. I provide triage. Everyone else trades skills or hands for portion. List of resources and asks below. Reply with what you can offer.
A man in lot 21 posts back: @Tessa already has more than anyone. Why does she still get to set terms?
Maureen Kowalski, before I can answer: She rescues people. She does not rescue entitlement.
The man in lot 21 stops typing.
The Vosses are not on the list.
Diane spends the day on the cinderblock porch of the HOA office, switching every ninety minutes between cursing me — bitch, witch, murderer, hoarder, harlot — and weeping with her arms wrapped around herself and her makeup running into her chapped chin. Greg is sitting on the cinderblock with the lighter from his pocket, clicking it absently with no fuel left in it.
Mara has acquired, somehow, a single lipstick. She puts it on with a hand that shakes. She walks across the cleared path to Drew Kessler's old crew on the third floor of lot 16 — they are now what passes for organized crime on the ridge — and tries to trade for a bowl of chili. Brett comes down from his mother's perch and drags her back. They tear at each other in the snow until Ren breaks it up with a fire extinguisher to the ribs.
I watch the camera and don't say anything.
At dawn on Day 7, Brett is on his knees outside my snow-porch.
He has been there for two hours, by Cal's count. He has frost on his eyebrows. His mother is on the ground twenty feet behind him with her chest barely moving under the soaked mink.
He doesn't yell.
He just keeps his forehead on the steel.
"Tessa. Please. My mom's going. She — please. I don't care. Save her. Please."
Cal looks at me over a mug of black coffee.
"You want to."
I think about it.
Last time, Diane took the insulin pens I had been saving for Hank Doerr and locked them in the bathroom and laughed and said, "Honey, you'll be fine, you're young, your body bounces back."
Last time, I tried to take them back. Brett pinned my wrist. Mara watched.
I think about it, and then I think about what happens if Diane dies on my porch.
I open the hatch.
I drop in: one digital thermometer in a sealed wrap, one bottle of regular Tylenol, one and a half packets of glucose powder.
Cal watches me write the note that goes with it.
The note says: IOU on file. 10x reimbursement, post-disaster, enforceable by Locke Family Trust counsel. Counter-signature required.
He pushes the note through the hatch and waits for Brett to sign it on the porch.
Brett signs.
He claws the pouch out of the hatch.
He looks up at the camera, eyes wet, mouth red and torn.
"You're cold, Tess. You're so cold."
I lean toward the intercom.
"Learned it from you."
Diane lives.
The first thing she says when she comes around in the HOA office on a folding cot with a space blanket over her chest is — and Ren texts it to me in real time, half irritated and half marveling — Half a packet. She gave me half a packet. The cheap little bitch.
Brett doesn't come back to my porch.
He starts walking the cleared paths for Ren's mutual-aid group, shoveling snow off Hank Doerr's solar panels and carrying jerry cans from the HOA office well to the older lots. He does it badly and resentfully and he does it for a quarter portion of pinto chili at the end of the day.
Mara cannot stand him.
On Day 9 she steals Diane's gold bracelet — the heavy one Diane has been refusing to put up for trade — and tries to walk it down to lot 12 to a guy named Eric who has been quietly running a side trade in propane canisters. Brett catches her at the bottom of his lot's driveway and drags her back by her ruined cashmere wrap.
She slaps him hard enough that his nose bleeds.
Then, because she is Mara and her instinct under pressure is to perform, she screams at him in front of the lot 8 porch camera.
"Your mother was right. The minute you had the deed you were going to bail. You're worse than her. You spent Tessa's money on me. You bought me a Goyard tote with her card and made me tell her you loved her. You disgust me."
Brett's face splits.
The lot 8 camera, which I have access to because Hank Doerr gave me his Ring credentials two days ago, records all of it.
I save the clip.
I don't post it.
Cal is making chili at my stovetop. He has been simmering it for four hours with a jar of the San Marzano tomatoes I home-canned last summer and the last of the freeze-dried beef. The kitchen smells the way kitchens smell on the second Sunday of October, when a stew is in the air and the world is small.
"You're not pushing it to Slack?" he says.
I shake my head.
"Saving it for the rescue."
He nods once, like that is the answer he'd give too, and ladles chili into two bowls.
We eat at the kitchen island in the warm half-light. The wind hits the south window in long flat pulses.
I put my spoon down halfway through.
"Cal."
"Mm."
"In the version where you knew you were going to die — would you still have gone out to find that strawberry?"
He stops chewing.
I hear it the moment after I say it.
Last time — there is no other phrase in my head for it, and I have just used the wrong tense.
Cal sets his spoon down very carefully on the rim of his bowl.
He turns on the stool so he is facing me fully.
He says, "Tessa."
I don't say anything.
"You remember."
I am holding my own spoon so tightly I can feel the plating give under my thumb.
He gets up.
He comes around the kitchen island and crouches in front of my stool so we are level, and he puts both his hands palms-up on his knees so they are visible the whole time, the way you do for a horse that is going to bolt.
"I came back three days before you did."
I cannot speak for a moment.
Cal takes a folded newspaper out of the inside pocket of his utility jacket — the one that has been hanging on the hook by the front door for a week — and hands it to me.
It is the Missoulian from three days before the storm. There are red ballpoint circles around the weather-anomaly column on B6 and around the Bonneville Power notice on B11 and around an item in the police blotter about two men in a UTV scoping prepper properties on the ridge.
"I woke up in the ER in Kalispell," he says. "Doctor said I'd come in with a knife wound under my jacket and they didn't catch it for an hour. They said I lost a lot. They said I was lucky. They said I should rest for two weeks. I checked out the next morning."
He keeps his hands open on his knees.
"I drove back up the highway. I bought the satellite communicator. I bought the Medeco. I bought a second crossbow because I knew where the first one was going to end up. And then I sat in my house and I waited to see if you would remember. I didn't want to tell you. I didn't want you to think I was — that I was around you for the wrong reasons. That I had a reason. To be."
I am holding the Missoulian with two hands and I cannot feel my knees.
He reaches into his jacket pocket again.
He takes out a single strawberry hard candy in a wrinkled twist of cellophane. The wrapper is stained pink. It looks like it has been carried through a deployment. It probably has.
"I bought it at the Conoco at the bottom of the pass," he says. "Last time. After you said. I had three of them. Two melted. This one was in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing when I — when it happened."
He sets it on the kitchen island between us.
"I didn't get back to you with it. I'm sorry."
My eyes are hot.
He stands up. He moves slowly. He sits on the stool next to me at the island and he takes my left hand off the newspaper and he holds it in both of his and his thumb is on the inside of my wrist and his palms are very warm.
He says, "Not this time."
The Ring chimes at the same instant the snow-porch alarm goes red.
It is so loud in the half-quiet kitchen that I jump.
I look at the iPad.
Brett is on the snow-porch with a fire axe.
Diane is behind him with a butane camp lighter and her good leather purse. Mara is behind her with a half-gallon jug of denatured alcohol from somebody's camping bin, lid off.
Diane is screaming.
"If she will not let us live, she does not get to live either! BURN IT, BRETT! BURN IT!"
Mara, weeping, laughing, eyes huge, splashes alcohol on the porch mat.
"Tess-Tess. Your fancy bunker is scared of fire too."