She’d thanked God that Granpa had decided that speed was more important than profit and had put off taking the heads and hauling them on the truck to the first bounty outpost at Spartanburg. They were repulsive enough lying dead on the pavement leaking yellow ichor into the ground. Having that stinking mess in the truck right next to her would really have been too much, wrapped in a tarp or not. He’d sprung for the rental fee for a really big truck for that one, bringing down most of the parts of the house. Most of the parts of Granpa and Shari’s house were, of course, Galactic materials. Extruded and formed to spec, they could laugh off a direct hit by a hurricane. And over the next couple of centuries, they probably would.
Sensors and scanners for civilians hadn’t even been a dream in some bright boy’s head that soon after the war. Making do with the Mark I Eyeball when a Postie just might have picked up a railgun from somewhere wasn’t quite as terrifying as being in a bunker too damned near ground zero of a nuclear explosion, but it had been close. The worst part of the ride had been whenever they crossed a Postie bridge. She’d known they were structurally sound, of course, but the reminder of organized and technological Posleen had rubbed salt in memories that were all too fresh.
The first month on the island had been a hot and muggy hell, especially to a girl who’d recently acclimated to the Idaho mountain air. Sister Gabriella had really believed in PT, so at least she hadn’t been out of shape. Standing her watch at night, stalking Posties from one end of the island to the other, bit by bit, in the day had been tiring and tedious. It wasn’t that there were a whole lot of ferals. There weren’t. Fleet and Fleet Strike and all the rest had done their job, and, once the God Kings were gone, the ravenous hunger of the feral Posleen normals had done even more. It was just that Posties, even single isolated feral normals, were so terribly nasty. At least she’d gotten to vent her frustration at the heat and the mosquitos and the sand in everything whenever they’d actually found a Posleen. Granpa didn’t care, he’d just let her vent, as long as she didn’t give him cause to scold her for wasting ammo. She didn’t. Well, not more than once. And she’d had a really bad morning that day.
Shari’s kids had stayed at a Bane Sidhe safehouse back in Knoxville that summer. Cally hadn’t blamed her one bit for keeping them out of it. They hadn’t been trained for any of this. She had. Well, she’d lived with Granpa during the war, which had amounted to the same thing. By the time they’d finished clearing the island, putting up the cinderblock and earth-berm-reinforced guardshack had been nothing. Guarding the bridge for the three days it had taken Granpa and Shari to bring back the big truck of building materials from Knoxville had been interesting. Before they left, she had helped Granpa and Shari load up the rotting but still identifiable Postie heads in the back of the pickup. Another nasty job.
Granpa had helped her run the line of tripwires connected to alarms back and forth across the bridge. It was still a day and a half before she could convince herself to take the time to sleep. In the end, only one of the moronic, leaderless feral normals had happened along and actually tried to cross the bridge. Then had come the icky task of chopping it into pieces she could carry and dropping them over the side of the bridge and down into the water. She pitied the aquatic scavengers that had to dine on the thing, but she could hardly leave it on the bridge to rot and attract more. And then she’d had to wrap the head and keep it so they could take it in for the bounty later. She’d made sure it was downwind.
After Shari and Granpa got back, having brought Billy to ride high sentry and help out, they’d reviewed the island looking for the best place to build. On a plot on the landward side, next to a big bay, Shari had found an old bit of street sign that had somehow survived the scavenging. It had said “Jungl” on the only bit that was left. Granpa had laughed and said that was home for him. The name had stuck, and even all these years later everybody still called it Papa’s Jungle House. When they didn’t call it Mama’s house. Cally still couldn’t figure out quite how it had happened, but over the decades Shari had somehow become honorary mother or grandmother to the whole island, whether the kids or grandkids or — hell, the relationships were all too confusing — were hers, or not.
When she was out and about, Cally could still see what she regarded as the O’Neal touch in the layout of the island. Everything was downplayed to any potential observer on land, sea or overhead. Trees and brush and dunes broke up vertical outlines and while planted fields were impossible to hide, a whole lot could be done with roofs and netting. Between irregular overhangs and creative use of vegetation, most roofs couldn’t be distinguished from the air. Hiding, of course, wasn’t the point. Obfuscation was enough. With so many people moving into the Lost Zones, the purpose was to make the O’Neal compound seem just one more group of poor but independent bounty-hunters.
The houses of O’Neals and Sundays were not showplace houses, designed to be artistic, designed to be seen. Rather, they were designed to fade into the background. Shrubbery and vegetation around the houses wasn’t planted to artistically enhance, but to blur straight lines and obscure. A prewar Green would have loved it. All so artistic. All so earthy. All so… deadly.
Cally savored the smell of the salt on the brisk fall air as she walked across the road from the parking lot to pick up the kids. The olive drab pack on her back, brought along for the groceries, helped block the wind. She’d worn her shooting glasses to keep the fine, blowing sand out of her eyes. The school was only about a klick from the house, and right across from the small building that served as a local barter market and grocery store. She wouldn’t even have driven if there hadn’t been the trash to haul. Ashley Privett, Wendy and Tommy’s oldest, had made a good business out of selling baked goods when she’d first arrived on the island some years ago, and over time had evolved into a sort of barter grocer, keeping track of what came in from whom and selling on consignment.
After the BS split, Cally had figured out a way to stretch her shrunken salary by using half her personal baggage allowance on each trip between home and base carrying something abundant one place and scarce in the other. Consequently, her pack was about half full with jars of soy sauce, corn syrup, four quart jars of moonshine, and some bagged popcorn. Bringing corn to the low country would have been like bringing sand to the beach except for the relative difference in price, and that the Indiana popcorn popped a lot better. She’d gone out with two pounds each of roasted coffee beans, baking chocolate, cane sugar, homemade cigars, a pack of vanilla beans, three bottles of rum, and a bolt’s worth each of indigo denim and unbleached shirt-weight oxford cloth. Her market for stone-ground hominy grits had gone out in the first year, after one of the women on the cleaning crew on Base had figured out how to make it herself. It had been a niche market, anyway. Besides, cloth was better. There was always a market for blue jeans. She supposed she was technically a smuggler, among other things. Not like it mattered. Assassin, smuggler, thief, but not a drunk — it’s kind of hard to become an alcoholic when your blood nannites break it down before you ever feel the effects. Not a brawler — well, mostly. Not a rapist — she’d heard it was technically possible, but it wasn’t to her tastes or her needs, even if she had been celibate for months now. Dammit.