“Gimme those,” May said.
Winston handed her the jugs (all three now only half-filled and missing their caps), provisions, and gun, and she carried all of it into the apartment before he was inside the barn. He twirled his hand around at May, concerned about the mess he made climbing through the window, systematically removed all of his clothes, and wrung them outside the window as best he could. May found a large towel inside the apartment and sopped up the water from where Winston stood naked, holding his wet clothes in his arms. She nudged him into the apartment while she finished mopping the floor, praying the residual wetness would evaporate before the next time someone checked on the weapons. Winston, damp and shivering, hung his wet clothes and cap over the shower curtain and unpacked his hoodie, setting the provisions out for May’s inspection. He slipped on the clean I’m a Brad Paisley Girl t-shirt and submerged under the covers. She finished up and closed the door behind her, the rain beating down loudly on the barn’s roof.
“That’s about as good as I’m gonna get it,” she said, seeing Winston’s frame shivering under the blanket. She frowned and slid under the blanket and pulled him into her warm embrace.
“You’re so cold,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
“And what you do to your face and head?”
“Sh-sh-sh-shaved.”
“It looks good,” May complimented while she rubbed her cheek across the scruff of his cheek, “it feels good, too.”
“I found some food.”
“I see,” May said, looking over her shoulder at the cans he had lined up, “but dog food?”
“I also found a dog. Her name’s Muffin. She followed me here from McDonough. Left her…” Winston nearly divulged his secret about Ben and the other captives. “At the apple orchard, she run off… so the dog food’s yours if you’d like.”
“Funny. Did you happen to see…?” she almost couldn’t say his name.
“Amadeus? Hell, he havin’ a blast out there. Saw ’im just now with a chipmunk in his mouth and he run off.”
“Good. That makes me feel better. Now, how about I warm you up?”
“Oh? By the way, how do you feel about Brad Paisley?”
“Shut up.”
May climbed on top of Winston. They were both ready for their overdue reunion, and they made slow, quiet love listening to the rain pour down outside until their bodies gave in to love’s enduring fatigue.
Wet
Rain fell for two straight days. But May and Winston didn’t mind — the racket of the deluge allowed them to speak in more than just a whisper. They devoured Winston’s newly found provisions, put on fresh underwear, and May wore the Love t-shirt. They played board and card games, read books, looked through old photo albums they hadn’t in years, and made love several times a day — the way newlyweds made love when their passion for each other was new and intoxicating. The apartment felt less like the prison cell it had come to symbolize.
Winston admitted to her what he had discovered in McDonough, and she told him everything she heard about the nuclear bombs and drones stored in the barn. They were both perplexed as to how and why the war had gone this far — that the American military establishment hadn’t yet intervened here in Georgia, and that the war had gone nuclear — on American soil no less. Winston didn’t know much about nuclear weapons, but he did know that together the United States and Russia possessed enough large, high-yield thermonuclear warheads to cause irreparable damage to the earth, should they engage in that type of warfare. The smaller warheads the PLA developed were just that — small — but if produced in the numbers May told Winston about, well, that’s a worldwide game-changer for policing and tactical offensives. Whoever controlled these low-yield nukes and automated drone technologies controlled the world.
Before dawn on his third day back, Winston awoke with a screaming bladder. The sun was rising and it looked like it was going to be a good day for Georgia to dry out. He relieved himself into the pipe, but it didn’t make the usual burbling noise of the urine flowing down into the makeshift septic. Suddenly, urine spilled out from the top of the pipe. “Oh dear,” he said loudly, waking May.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Pipe is clogged,” he painfully strained to quell his urine flow and grabbed an empty water bottle to finish.
“What?”
“I think I can fix it from inside.”
Winston found the dirty, wet towel May used to clean the mess in the barn days earlier when he came in from the rain. It was still damp. He slowly pushed a length of the towel into the pipe, letting it sop up the contents, and left if hanging there a moment. He found the bucket they used to defecate and liquefy their waste in, and squeezed the towel’s wetness into it. Though the task was quick, it was sickening because the contents of the pipe were not merely liquid, but slurry-like in consistency. He repeated the process, bringing the slurry to about six inches from the top of the pipe.
“What happened to it?” May asked.
“Dunno. Probably the rain. Maybe it’s just full.”
He wiggled the pipe around, and tugged upwards on it, hoping that introducing air into the pipe would cause it to drain, but it wouldn’t budge. He inspected it closely with his flashlight, where it passed through the floor and to the outside.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, “looks like the whole barn shifted an inch or two when the tank backed into it. Pipe is bent ta holy hell.”
“Can you fix it?”
“No. I gotta get up underneath there and see if I can shift the rocks ‘round the pipe, maybe free it up so you can pull it up a few inches, and outta the sludge that must be down there.”
“Now? Can it wait? How do you propose to go outside an’ get under this here barn what with the soldiers out there?”
“There’s a foot a crawl space unnerneath there.”
“We should wait ‘til later, when it’s dark.”
“Now stay with me, Mother, if I can get out there now, while they at breakfast and it still kinda dark, I can be back inside in ten minutes.”
May pondered his suggestion and huffed.
“Okay, go, but be quick about it.”
“I’ll rap my knuckle on the pipe twice when I want you ta pull up. Jes’ a few inches now.”
May nodded and Winston disappeared out the door. He brought the stepstool with him as he closed the window behind him and quickly disappeared under the barn, next to the old pallets and cinder blocks that hid the septic system. May heard him as he scooted underneath.
Winston, on his back, pulled his body forward through the barn’s saturated and muddy underbelly using his heels and the floor joists. The ground was steeped with nauseating human waste, and the darkness was a frustrating hurdle, but he could make out the silhouette of the pipe only three or four feet from his hands. He scooted across the sharp crushed stones, which caused severe pain to shoot through his back, but he soon found his hands wrapped around the pipe’s greasy shaft. He rapped twice, and she knocked twice back. He positioned the pipe just to the top of his left shoulder and pushed, tugged, pulled, and jerked on it, but it didn’t budge.
May did the same from above with matching results.
Irritated, Winston knew what he had to do — shift enough crushed stones to relieve the pressure on the pipe, and so, one handful at a time, he moved perhaps fifty pounds of the stones, often checking the pipe’s hold by pushing up on it. Again, he rapped twice, and again, they attempted to move the pipe. He could feel it loosening and shifting upwards, and in one short motion, the pipe lifted several inches and emptied its disgusting contents into the crushed stone — and onto Winston. He gagged at the odor and scooted back out from under the barn, but immediately dove back under when the entire camp began to buzz with excitement. He crawled on his belly this time, through the spider webs and detritus, to just below the apartment, closer to the house than to the septic system. He rapped twice on the floor where he imagined May would be. She knocked back. She was observing the camp’s activities through the slits, and understood that he was probably stuck underneath the barn until darkness came tonight, some twelve hours away.