Chapter 21

“You gonna let us in, or what?” Staff Sgt. Pollard asked Linda from the other side of her partially open front door.

Pollard wasn’t the only one darkening Linda’s doorway at barely seven in the morning. Behind her stood one of the other young soldiers, Sgt. Chapman, along with that simpering slut, Theresa, and the pushy pharmacist, Kali. Hovering in the back, she spotted Mike Messina with them.

What the fuck was he doing there? she wondered. He’d only been to her house one other time. The night of his welcome party. That damned, fucking party. Now he’d brought his entourage of twits to her door. For what purpose?

Thankfully, they’d come to the front door, and not around the back, where they might have seen Kristin’s car still parked at the bottom of her driveway. She rested upstairs, still asleep. Linda’s ministrations were finally paying off. Kristin’s health seemed to have marginally improved, though she was far from out of the woods just yet. Linda wasn’t proud about stealing medications from the nurse’s office, but she had as much a claim to them as anyone else.

It was the first bit of good news she’d had since this whole nightmare began. The last few days had been especially trying. First Mike’s inflammatory presentation, riling up the students. What the hell was she thinking letting him address the school like that? She must have been out of her fucking mind. She’d also lost another three students, bringing the total number of Scirewood dead to twelve. And now that psychopath, Endora Hardin, was back roaming the campus, terrorizing and assaulting students.

She didn’t need this shit right now.

“What do you want?” Linda snapped, blocking the gap in the door with her body. She looked pointedly at Kali. “I’m trying to get some sleep before my next shift. Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be there right now?”

“It’s my job to set the shift schedules,” Kali reminded her, “not yours. Renata’s covering.”

Linda ignored her and addressed Pollard. “Well?”

“I’m not gonna talk to you through the door, so are you gonna come out here, or are you gonna invite us in?”

Linda looked at Mike. “Why is he here?”

“He needs to talk to you about something,” Pollard said.

“Then why are the rest of you here?”

“Because I insisted,” she said, losing her patience. “What’s your problem?”

“Well, I don’t have anything to say to him.”

“You don’t have to. He’s gonna do all the talking. All you gotta do is listen.”

“I’m not interested in anything he has to say.”

“For Christ’s sake, Linda!” Theresa said. “Will you please just listen to him?”

After considerable deliberation, Linda walked out onto the porch, shutting the door behind her. She pulled her housecoat tight around her body. “Fine. Speak.”

Pollard stepped aside so that Mike could move forward.

“However you might feel about me personally, Linda, you need to understand that we’re all in grave danger. We’re running out of food, and there’s no one coming to rescue us. We need to stop fighting and work together to find food, while we still can, before those girls in there begin to starve.”

Linda stared at him, stone faced. When it didn’t seem like he had anything more to say, she asked, “Is that it?”

Mike threw up his hands in a tantrum. “Is that it? We’re in a fucking crisis, Linda! We should’ve started collecting food days ago, but you wouldn’t listen to me! Just like you’re not listening now! And thanks to you, all the food we could’ve easily gathered is gone, because everyone else in the world seems to have already figured out what you stubbornly refuse to accept! The world we knew is over!”

Linda looked past him to the others. “Am I to assume that the rest of you have bought into this man’s rantings as well then? Is that it?”

Chapman moved forward. “Ma’am, I was right there with you at first, but we’ve been able to independently verify that everything he’s told us so far is correct.”

Linda smirked. “Really? Did he also tell you that we caught him molesting several of our students?”

Theresa gasped. “Linda!”

Everyone else turned to look at Mike, who narrowed his eyes at her.

“You fucking bitch,” he growled.

“Is that true?” Chapman asked him.

“No!” Theresa shouted, jumping to his defense, the way she always did. “Those girls drugged him and sexually assaulted him! He’s the one who was raped!”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Linda asked her. “Can you hear how insane that sounds? I was there! I saw what he did to them with my own eyes! He was getting a blowjob from a half-naked fifteen year old girl, while all of her friends were forced to watch. I have it on video! He’s a pedophile, and a sick pervert, and I’m done pretending otherwise!”

She addressed Mike directly. “The only reason you’re even here right now is because I wasn’t able to call the police before we were attacked, and I’ve been forced to set aside my disgust for the evil things you’ve done, so I could focus all my attention on leading us through this crisis, but I refuse to continue doing that for one second longer.” She jabbed her finger over his shoulder. “I want you out of here, you sick fucking bastard! I want you to leave immediately, and I swear to fucking God, you better never return!”

Mike raged at her. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Linda?”

“Staff Sergeant Pollard!” Linda shouted over top of him. “I want you to forcibly remove this criminal from my property, immediately, and shoot him if he tries to resist!”

Theresa screamed and covered her mouth. Pollard, who appeared unimpressed by the whole exchange, shared a look with Chapman, and then turned back to Linda.

“I don’t take orders from you,” she said in a calm voice. “And frankly, right now, I don’t give a fuck if he did what you said or not, because we got bigger problems we need to deal with.”

Linda glared at the bull dyke hayseed and seethed. “Fine, if you won’t do your fucking job, then I’ll have to do it myself. I’m going to get my shotgun, you son of a bitch. If you’re still standing there when I get back, I’m going to blow you fucking head off!”

When she reached for the door handle, Pollard said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Excuse me?” Linda said, turning around slowly. “What did you just say to me?”

“You heard me.”

Linda studied the woman closely, judging her intentions. She appeared entirely serious.

“You can’t stop me from protecting my own property and those girls from that rapist,” she said in a tremulous voice.

“Well, see, that’s where you’d be wrong. Mike’s under my protection now, so if you was to do something dumb, like come out here with a shotgun, fixin’ to shoot him, then I’d have to put you down.”

Chapman jerked his head around to look at her. “Staff Sergeant?”

“Y-you would shoot me?” Linda asked incredulously, pointing to herself. “You’re going to protect that child rapist and threaten me?”

“I’m not threatening you. I’m just letting you know what’ll happen if you try to hurt him, is all.”

“You want to protect him?” she asked. “Fine. Then you can go too. If you’re not going to lift a finger to protect us from a confirmed rapist, caught on video mind you, then you’re even more useless than I thought. I want all of you to get the fuck out of my school, and take that piece of shit with you.”

“Have it your way,” Pollard said. “But you should know that the doctor, and all her meds, are coming with us. Your nurse too.”

Linda gaped. “You can’t do that!” Linda said to Kali in a shrill voice. “Those girls need you! They’ll die without you!”

Kali shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Mike. The only reason I volunteered was because I felt it was the right thing to do, but I refuse to kill myself, fighting to save their lives, just to watch them all starve to death. I can’t do that. I’d rather go where my training and medicine won’t be wasted.”

“I’m going with them,” Theresa said. “Marcus and Rachel too. It’s already been decided.”

Linda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How had Mike managed to turn every single person against her? How could they not see what a violent criminal he was?

There was literally nothing she could do. They had a gun to her head. Both figuratively, and literally. If she kicked him out, she’d be condemning those girls to death. She might as well go into that trauma ward and slit every last one of their throats herself, just to spare them the suffering.

Linda opened her door and went back inside, turning at the threshold to address them.

“You’re all a bunch of fucking cowards,” she said derisively, shaking with anger and indignation. “Either too stupid, or too weak between the legs to know what the fuck you’ve just done. If the price I have to pay to save the lives of those girls is to suffer his presence here, then so be it, but fuck every last one of you. You’ve allowed yourselves to be taken in by a charismatic sociopath. When he starts raping those poor little girls again, and it’s only a matter of time before he does, I hope you remember this fucking day, because it’s going to be on all of your heads. Bastards!”

She slammed the door in their faces.

Try as she might to convince the others about the truth of Mike’s sexual assault, Linda’s poison pill made Theresa’s explanation sound all the more fantastical. No one came right out and said it, of course, but Mike sensed their judgment anyway. Eventually, he pleaded with her to stop, because her strident insistence and vociferous denials only strengthened their suspicions.

Thankfully, or troublingly, he couldn’t decide which, Charmagne expressed no interest either way in Mike’s guilt or innocence. As far as she was concerned, it simply didn’t matter. Their reliance on his intellect for survival far outweighed any scandal about getting head from a teen. For Kali and Chapman, however, such moral details mattered, and their impression of him could not help but be altered by what they’d heard on Linda’s porch.

Unfortunately, the immediate peril they all faced required his full attention, which made defense of his honor a luxury that would need to wait for another day. Struggling with how to even begin planning for the next two years, Mike decided to employ a brainstorming technique he’d learned about, years earlier, during his days in Hollywood.

“It’s called a charette,” he told the assembly of students, faculty, and National Guardsmen, writing the unfamiliar term on the whiteboard. “A collaborative workshop, designed to quickly develop solutions to complex problems by leveraging everyone’s collective knowledge and expertise.

“The problem we currently face is so vast in its scale, however, that it defies our conceptions of what a problem even is. So vast, in fact, that we might not even be aware of its full impact on our lives until long after it happens, and by then, it could be too late.”

He wrote another new term on the board.

“The kind of problem we face is what I call a hyperproblem. Its solution, therefore, needs to be multidimensional, and consider every facet of human existence for generations to come.”

“What I’m trying to say here is that developing a solution to this hyperproblem is simply too massive an undertaking for a small handful of us to work on alone. It’s far too important, it impacts all of us equally, and the penalty for getting it wrong could very well mean death for all of us. It’s going to take our collective efforts - all of us here in this room working together - to solve this one.”

He held the pen at his side and stood for a moment to let the point sink in. Then he turned back to the whiteboard and started to write.

“Survive. This is our overarching goal. We need to figure out how to make it from today to two years from today, using only the resources that currently exist, because during this time, no more raw materials will ever be mined, no new products will ever be manufactured, store shelves will never be replenished, and the only functional utilities will be those we build ourselves

“Knowledge will be our most valuable resource. Everything we want to know about our new world is limited to what’s already in our heads, what we read about in the books we acquire, or what we hear about from other people. Anything we don’t already know, we’re going to have to go out into the real world and learn about it.

“We’re going to divide our hyperproblem into three time horizons. Immediate, which is the next thirty days; intermediate, which is the next six months; and long-term, which is the next two years. Today, we’re going to focus only on our immediate time horizon, which means those things we need to accomplish in the next thirty days. Within this limited window of time, we have four major problems to solve.

“First, we need to acquire a stock of shelf-stable food. That doesn’t just mean locating it, but also seizing it, transporting it, and then storing it for the long term. Second, we need to figure out a way to generate and distribute power using only renewable resources. Third, we need to develop a means of long distance communication, not just for use ourselves, but also to contact other survivors. And fourth, we need to plan a defensive strategy that protects us from anyone who might try to do us harm.

“We’re going to break up into four teams. One for each of these four problems. Each team will consist of one member of the faculty, one member of the National Guard, and six students.

“Team Food will be led by Ms. Stafford and Sergeant Chapman. Team Power will be led by myself and Specialist Draper. Mr. Bingham and Corporal Ibarra will head up Team Communications, and Team Defense will be led by Ms. Rosen and Staff Sergeant Pollard.

“Students have been assigned to teams at random, and will rotate to a different team every two hours, so that by the end of the day, each student will have had an opportunity to contribute to every team, and work with every other person. At four o’clock this afternoon, we’ll reconvene back here to present our solutions.

“This is the day all of you creative, out-of-the-box thinkers have been waiting for. No idea is too outlandish, too unthinkable, too dangerous, or too stupid to be considered. I don’t care what batshit crazy thing pops into your head. If your pet’s psychic told you about it, or if you got it from a goddamned fortune cookie, this is the one day we all need to hear about it, because our lives might depend on what you know.