025-913-013-011-404-925-036-712-036-824-824
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“Holy shit!” she said, her face splitting into a grin. “That’s it!”
She grabbed the papers and began to decipher them as rapidly as she could. Oblivious as the hours passed, she didn’t stop to come up for air.
“Melissa!” Forrest shouted from three stories below.
She looked at her watch and was surprised to see how much time had passed. “Up here!”
“It’s time to eat!”
“Not hungry!”
“Too bad. Get down here!”
“No!”
She heard his boots trotting up the four flights of steel stairs and sat grinning until his face emerged over the deck. Laddie came trotting over and licked her face.
“I know I misunderstood you,” he said, a wry grin on his face. “Because from way down there it sounded like you told me no.”
“I can’t stop right now,” she said.
“You’re back at that goddamn code, aren’t you?”
“Can I please skip dinner just this once? Please?”
“Melissa… that code is going to drive you insane.”
“Dad, will you please trust me this one time?”
He saw a new kind of determination in her eyes now, something that said to him she finally had a legitimate reason for wanting to skip dinner. “Okay. I’ll put a plate in the oven for you. I want you to eat when you come down. Understood?”
She gave him a little salute, making him laugh as he turned and went back down the stairs.
“Laddie, you comin’?”
The dog sat beside Melissa and watched him, cocking his head to one side.
“Communist,” he said with a chuckle, and trotted down the stairs.
“Hey, know what?” she called when he stepped onto the deck below her, looking down at him through the grating.
“What?” he said, looking up.
“I’m gonna be seventeen pretty soon.”
“I know that,” he said with a smile.
“What are you getting me?”
“What do you want?”
“A car.”
He laughed and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
When Forrest got back to the cafeteria he sat down beside Veronica, across from Karen and Michael. “She says she’s busy,” he said, lifting his fork from the steel tray.
The other three exchanged looks.
“You’ve never let her get away with that excuse before,” Karen said, grinning. “What’s different about today?”
Melissa was famous for trying to skip dinner a few times a week, and Forrest would never allow it.
“I’ve got a feeling she’s close to cracking that goddamn code,” he said quietly. “But don’t say anything to Wayne. She’ll want to tell him herself.”
“For real?” Michael asked, surprised.
Forrest shrugged, saying, “She didn’t actually say it, but I could tell by the light in her eyes.”
“Well, good for her,” Veronica said. “She’s sure lost enough sleep over that damn thing.”
After the children were put to bed that night, Forrest asked the women to join him, Ulrich, and Dr. West in the cafeteria for a meeting. Emory and the rest of the men stayed behind to watch over the sleeping children in the common rooms.
Melissa was still in the silo.
Formal meetings were rare events, so there was a lot of whispering as the women speculated over what it was about. The general consensus was that Forrest was going to announce a cut in the daily food allowance, a step that had not yet been taken and that most of them realized was probably long overdue.
“So,” Forrest said with a dubious kind of smile. “I suppose you’re all wondering why the three of us have gathered you here tonight.”
There were some chuckles.
“Okay, as I’m sure you’re all aware, we’ve consumed well over half of our original food stores. And I’m afraid that in order for us to stretch what we’ve got left through to the end of the summer, we’re going to have to take certain… certain measures.”
He glanced at the other two men sitting beside him to see if either of them wanted to jump in, but Ulrich only smiled at the women, and West maintained his usual passive demeanor.
“We know you’re going to reduce our rations,” Erin said, burping the baby over her shoulder, having only moments before gotten her back from Emory. “Just tell us by how much.”
“I’m afraid the measures are going to be a bit more radical than that, actually,” he replied. “At our present rate of consumption, we’ll be out of food around mid-May—which makes nearly two years. So we’ve done an excellent job of conserving while at the same time keeping everyone well nourished. But in order for us to stretch the food through the summer, we’re going to have to cut back to below what would be considered healthy by even minimal standards, which would put us all in jeopardy if we didn’t find a way to supplement our diet.”
“You’ve got plenty of vitamins stashed away,” Andie piped up from the back row.
“That’s right,” he said with a chuckle. “And you can believe we’ll finally be breaking them out, but I’m afraid vitamins alone aren’t going to do the trick.”
The women began to murmur, their mutual concern steadily rising.
“And as we all know,” Forrest continued, “the skies have not cleared enough to—Okay, everyone, cut the chatter and give me a second to finish. We do have a plan. But it’s going to sound somewhat repugnant to you when you first hear it, so I want you to brace yourselves.”
He was trying to make the plan sound a tad worse than what he hoped it actually was, in order to keep the truth from coming as too great a shock.
“We’ve been raising a certain kind of animal in the cargo bay. And we’re pretty sure we can breed them fast enough to provide us with a viable source of nutrition through the winter. So long as we start a full-fledged breeding program right now.”
Not one of the women made a sound. None of them wanted to even speak the word rat, but there was no other animal Forrest could possibly have been talking about in this postasteroidal world.
Erin got up from her seat and took the baby with her into the common area without even meeting her husband’s eyes, furious with him for keeping such a disgusting secret from her.
“Look, these animals aren’t the demons they have been stigmatized to be,” Forrest said quietly. “In fact, they’re actually rather affectionate if they’re handled from birth, and they’re as clean as their environment will allow.”
No one was speaking up yet, so he continued.
“The babies are called pups, and a female is capable of producing twelve litters a year with an average of ten or so to a litter. A female is able to begin breeding after just three months, and at the moment we have thirty-five breeding pairs and two extra females.”
“My God, that’s fifty-two of those… things!” Lynette said, standing up, half expecting to find one of them running under foot. “You can’t honestly expect us to eat them!”
“I’m afraid that starvation is our only other option at this point,” Forrest said, making brief eye contact with Price, who stood just inside the common room doorway.
The doctor looked embarrassed, and Forrest felt sorry for him, of course. But when a man marries a woman based largely upon her looks, he takes a calculated risk, and Forrest had warned him before he’d taken that final plunge.
“No!” Lynette said. “I’ll fucking starve! I’m sorry.”
“That will of course be your decision,” Forrest replied. “But I have seen starvation up close—in time of war—and you will be very surprised at what you can eat by the time your belly begins to swell from hunger. And I would like to remind everyone that these animals were eaten as part of the regular diet in many Asian cultures and treated with great respect, particularly in India, where they were actually worshipped, rather than eaten.”