“Can we have some pancakes with syrup, Dad?” Cole asked. Grant hadn’t seen him at all the day before. He missed the little guy, who wasn’t so little anymore at thirteen. His voice was changing.
“You bet, pal,” Grant said. “Let’s cook them up right now.” When Grant was cooking pancakes with Cole, he wasn’t a killer of looters, a POI, a SWAT team member, or a guerilla political organizer. He was a dad. It felt great.
Lisa came out of their bedroom. She looked well rested and a little disoriented. She was going to work this morning at a new job. “Morning,” she said. She seemed deep in thought.
Grant would try to find out later that day what was on her mind. She wasn’t a morning person, so, after over twenty years of marriage, he’d learned that deep conversations first thing off the bat were not wise.
Chip came over with his trademark, “Morning, sunshine” greeting to Grant. Everyone loved him.
Mary Anne followed. She explained that John was on guard duty last night and was sleeping. Grant thought that they needed a better guard arrangement. With the Team, Chip, and Grant about to do full time patrolling, it fell on Mary Anne, John, Paul, and Mark to guard, and that was on top of the gardening, fixing, driving the Team around, hunting and fishing each was doing. Drew was volunteering for guard duty, but he wasn’t a gunfighter. He could fire a first shot to alert all the armed people in the houses, but that was about it. Grant needed to get someone out there whose job would be night time guard duty.
You will have that person soon.
Who? Grant wondered who could possibly fill the role of a dedicated night guard. But he trusted the outside thought.
The screen door made its distinctive sound of being opened. It was Paul and Missy. Grant hadn’t seen much of Missy in the past few days. She mainly kept to the Colson house. She was only five and Paul kept a close eye on her.
“Hey, Paul,” Grant said, “Manda and Cole can hang out with Missy. Manda’s main job out here is watching Cole and she could easily watch Missy, too. I think Missy and Cole would get along great.”
Paul thought about it. “Missy, would you like to play with Manda and Cole?” he asked.
Missy was glad to get to play with the big kids. She was shy and said, “OK. What will we play?”
Manda lit up. “How about we play cooking? Then we can go to the beach and try to go find the duck family that lives down there. And there’s a secret waterfall down on the beach. Wanna go see it?”
Missy smiled. So did Cole. At age five, Missy had roughly the language skill Cole did at age thirteen. Cole always loved the younger kids. He felt at ease around them because they didn’t talk as much as big kids and grownups. He could communicate with them easily, which was such a relief for him.
“OK,” Manda said, “you can help me clean up after breakfast and then we’ll go down to the beach. Sound good, Missy and Cole?”
Both of them nodded.
Paul was happy. “Thanks. Great. I appreciate it. I don’t know what I’m doing today so it’s good to know that Missy is taken care of.”
Grant realized that he had been largely neglecting Paul. He wasn’t on the Team and was, well, way too heavy to do much. Paul had been taking lots of guard duty, but there was only so much night time guard duty a person could do and then try to do things during the day. Besides, Paul had metal fabrication skills that the community could probably use. Grant was determined to put every person to his or her best use.
“Hey, Paul,” Grant said, “come with us to the Grange today. I bet there is something that a metal fabricator could do for us.”
Paul smiled. He had been waiting to hear that for days. “You bet,” he said. “Drew and I worked yesterday on an inventory of the tools and equipment I have. We can bring that list to the Grange.”
Grant felt good. He always did when he could find a way to make a “loser” fit in. Paul was a great guy, a great father. He wasn’t a “loser” in reality, just in his mind. Paul was feeling left out because he was different (overweight) and that made him think of himself as a “loser.” Grant had been there. He knew exactly what it felt like. Like when “loser” Grant was asked onto Squadron 3. Grant’s experience as a “loser” allowed him to see hidden skills in “losers” like Paul so they could be fully integrated into the group. That was how he got the most out of everyone. Being a Forks loser was great training for his future role. As breakfast got rolling, the main topic became Lisa’s new job as the Pierce Point doctor. Drew was very proud of his daughter, so he started off the conversation by asking, “So, Lisa, are you going to be the doctor out here?”
“Yep, looks like it,” she said. She seemed to be neutral on the idea, not enthused but not regretting doing it. “I’m it,” she said. “I just wish I had a real ER out here. I’m not sure how effective we can be without all the stuff I had back at my ER.”
Grant wanted to change the subject a little, toward the positive. “We?” he asked. “Who else will be working with you?”
“Oh, two nurses and an EMT,” Lisa said. “I met them last night at the meeting. The nurses are Cindy and Rory, and the EMT is Tim. Cindy is—well, was I guess—a renal nurse at the Frederickson hospital. Rory was a general nurse there, too. Tim was a fire department EMT in California, but moved up here two months ago when his department folded down there. They ran out of money and laid him off. His sister-in-law lived here so Tim and his wife moved here. He was looking for a job when all this started.”
Well, for a community of a few hundred homes they had a decent medical team. Supplies would be the hard part.
Chip was thinking the same things and asked Lisa, “Do you have any medical supplies out here?”
“Nope. That’s the bad thing,” she said with a frown. This was a very big concern to her. “We have some first aid supplies, but they won’t last long.”
Grant would later privately tell her about the fish antibiotics he secretly got a few years earlier and stored out at the cabin. He wanted to save those for his family, the Team, and the Over Road people. Besides, all of his antibiotics would only last a week or two if all the people in Pierce Point were using them. Might as well give the people close to him the benefits of his planning, although that seemed a little selfish. Grant thought that if he were a perfect Christian, he would give all the antibiotics away. But, he was not a perfect Christian. Far from it.
Lisa, still frowning, continued. “But, we don’t have any extra prescription medications. Most people are running out of theirs and, I suspect, a few already have. We have no anesthesia. We have a little rubbing alcohol to sterilize instruments and wounds, but not much. I don’t have instruments, anyway. We don’t even have a place to do all this, although Rich the sheriff guy said we would probably use the Grange building for the clinic.” Lisa made a “yuck” face. “It’s not exactly the germ-free facility I’m used to.”
Lisa realized she needed everyone to have confidence in their medical care out there. She needed to encourage them. So she added, “But, hey, people have gotten by with much less for several thousand years. We’ll do OK. People just shouldn’t expect all the modern medical wizardry that we have—or had.”
Grant kicked into his role of encourager-in-chief. “Hey, we’re way better off than those people in Frederickson,” he said. “They have a hospital, but it has probably run out of supplies and the doctors and nurses have been working for a week non-stop. If they’re even able to come to work. I bet people have looted their medical supplies, especially the pain killers. So, while we may not have the usual supplies out here, I bet no place has the usual supplies, either.”