Apocalypse Wow, Pt. 18

"Oh... ah... yes... hi," she said, taking his hand, "it's... it's an honour Mr Sullivan, really, thank you so much for agreeing to meet me and... I love dogs actually, he's so beautiful" she went on, leaning down to stroke Indy, much to the dog's satisfaction.

"Well first thing's first Penny," Jim said with a grin and a nod in Dani's direction, "you call me Mr Sullivan one more time, I might change my mind about this whole thing. It's Jim, OK?"

"Sure, of course," Penny said and did her best not to look like she was fawning.

"Good. You staying for breakfast D?"

"Can't, seems school's short a teacher today so I gotta..."

"That some kind of crack about me taking the day off?" Jim asked, though his grin hadn't faded.

"Not everything is a crack at your expense dad," Dani replied, "besides, I was all for this, remember? You... you be nice to Penny, you hear me?"

"Get the hell out of here," Jim said, moving an arm around Penny's shoulder, "when am I not nice?"

"Right," Dani said with a wry smile, "I'll see you later Pen, you'll find your way back OK?"

"Course she will D," Jim answered for her, "she's a Scout for god's sake!"

"Right," Dani said, throwing her eyes up, "good luck!"

"So Penny," Jim said, guiding her towards the steps as Dani's bike made it's way back along the drive, "this your first time in Simonia?"

"Yeah, I, ah, I mean I've been out a lot, you know, with training and all, and I've been to H-town a few times but..."

"Well that's great. How do you like the place? Dani show you around?" Jim asked, leading her into the house, along a short corridor with a door to the left and right, a staircase running up the right side, and through to a large, open room, the kitchen to the right, a large dining area to the left.

"Uh-huh, yeah, she gave me the grand tour yesterday. It's... ah... it's a really beautiful place... it... kind of reminds me a lot of home actually."

"You know I've had that thought myself quite a bit, Simonia and Haven are really very similar places in a lot of ways. So, ah... well, we'll do the tour later. This is the kitchen I guess," Jim said, moving towards the stove and Penny lingered at the edge of a large island in the middle of the floor. "I was just about finished up here... any objection to eggs benedict?"

"Oh my god no," Penny said with a chuckle, "I love eggs benedict."

"Great, well, have a seat," Jim said, pointing at one of the stools around the island.

Penny took off her bag and rested it on the ground and took a deep breath, trying to tell herself that everything about where she was and what she was doing was perfectly normal, and real, that she wasn't in one of her dreams. When Jim turned around with two plates in his hand, he saw her looking out the back window.

"So you can still see the footprint of what we used to call the North Terrace," Jim said with a grin as he sat down. "So, I guess you know that... that the whole community here used to be..."

"Yeah, yeah... like, it's seems amazing, I mean, when Dani was showing me through the community last night, I was thinking how incredible it was that... that it all used to be... well, here, in this house I mean."

"You don't have to tell me Penny," Jim agreed. "By the time we eventually called it, even with all the additions we'd made to the house, we were really packed in here like sardines. The additions we'd made over the years had increased the size of the original by something like nine times. Victims of our own success I guess. When... when the big move happened, we dismantled a lot of it, you know, to recycle it for the new community. The town was called Old Salickery before the First Day and we hadn't... I mean, we'd picked it clean, but it needed a lot of work to turn it in to what we have today. So the North Terrace is gone but I've still got the West Wing," he said, nodding in the direction behind Penny, "I'll show you when we're done with breakfast. It was the first addition we made actually."

"And..." Penny started, trying not be too obvious that she wanted to devour her breakfast, "you... you live here...?"

"Alone?" he said, and Penny thought his smile had changed a little. "Most of the time, yeah. Lot of space for one person, I know. I get my fair share of visitors though. When you've lived as long as I have Penny, you tend to gather a lot of people who expect to be entertained. And Dani and... you know... the kids come out to stay sometimes. We do field trips with the kids from school, it's nice to give them a change sometimes, you know? Gives the folks in the houses a break too. And then," he went on, turning and pointing out the back window, "we still grow a decent amount here. I mean once upon a time, those fields you can see grew every scrap of food for the whole community but, most of the fields are back closer to town these days. Still, we have a nice party out here every Harvest."

"And this... this is the original house, where we are now?" For a moment, Penny felt like it might have been a silly question, but Jim didn't seem to think so, at least that was her judgement based on his answer. She thought about the notes in her bag and it occurred to her that she better get them ready. They'd barely started talking and she already had a million questions jumping to her mind, although none of them seemed that focussed on her topic.

"Yeah, this is the original. Still going strong," Jim said proudly.

"So you... you grew up here?"

"No, not actually. I, ah, I grew up in some, nondescript suburb. When I left for college, on the other side of the country, my parents decided they wanted a quieter life and... they moved out here with my sister. I mean, of course I spent a lot of time here, you know, I visited and everything but, actually I never lived in this house until the First Day."

"Huh," Penny noted, wishing she'd taken more time with her eggs.

"You weren't kidding," Jim said with a smirk, nodding at Penny's empty plate.

"Wha-"

"You really like your eggs."

"Oh... yeah," Penny said with a sheepish grin, "they were amazing, thank you. Rosa... Rosa Gonzalez, she's... she's one of my team mates, she's a really awesome cook. She makes eggs benny for us sometimes, like as a treat."

"Oh yeah? So how do I compare?"

Penny could see a glint in Jim's eye and wondered if he was testing her.

"Honestly Jim, Rosa's eggs are great but yours are... oh my god, they're amazing."

"Now you're just blowin' smoke up my ass."

"I'm not the smoke blowin' type Jim, just... telling it like it is."

"I see. Duly noted," he replied with a grin. "Gimme a hand here?"

"Sure," Penny said, moving to join him at the sink.

"So how many on your team?" he asked, handing her a plate to dry.

"Four... well, five I guess, including me. They're... they're really great, I'm really lucky."

"Everybody make it?" he asked, handing her another plate and Penny noticed his expression had become more serious.

"Yes sir," she said firmly, "we made sure of that."

"Oh yeah?"

"We have this kind of... motto, I guess. Anh, she's one of the... she's on the team... she saw it in a movie one time and made us all watch it. The... Three Musketeers?"

"All for one, and one for all," Jim said with a knowing smile, "I like it. Fun movie too."

"Yeah," Penny agreed, "anyway we... whenever anybody was... you know, struggling, we'd all make sure they pulled through, whatever it took," she went on, smiling to herself as she was reminded of Anh's motivational regime for Danny.

"Well that's awesome Penny," Jim said, taking the towel Penny offered to dry his hands, "good for you. That sounds like a helluva team."

"We are," Penny replied, smiling, and she noticed the first pause in their conversation developed.

"Well," Jim said finally, "come on. I'll give you the dime tour."

As he showed her the house, Penny felt herself settle. That star struck feeling was gone. She remembered something Luke had said about Jim, about how down to earth he was, and remembered her conversation with Dani the night before too. It surprised her just how quickly she came to feel that it wasn't some famous person's house she was in, who she was getting to know, it was just a pretty regular guy. He was interesting and funny, telling her stories as they moved through the house and, she noticed, interested in her as well, and he asked as many questions as he answered.

So when they returned to the kitchen and Jim bade her sit at the large dining table while he put on a pot of coffee, she admitted to herself that, surprising though it was, she felt completely at ease.

Dani had offered her the use of a recording device belonging to the History Team but Penny decided against it. She had so many notes and different ideas, she really wasn't sure where the conversation would go and was worried that thinking about the device would only be a distraction to her.

"So," Jim said with a wide smile as he sat down, placing a steaming cup of black coffee in front of Penny, "I guess we should get started."

"Right," Penny said. "Listen, before we... I just wanted to say Jim, again, thank you for doing this..."

"We have a tradition in this house Penny," Jim said, "you're allowed one thank you and that's it. And you've had yours already. From what Dani and Lou tell me about you, and from what I've learned about you this morning, you have a big future ahead of you as a Scout Penny and... well, if spending some time with me can help you along that road in some way then I'm very happy to be able to contribute."

"Right," Penny said with a warm smile, "thanks," and then, as Jim affected a wide eyed look, "sorry."

"Don't worry about it," he said with a chuckle, "so tell me about your project."

"OK, yeah... so, my focus is on early Scouting, especially First Contacts. I've done quite a lot of work already on the founders of Haven, taking the view of them as Haven's first Scouts, you know? Even just finding their way there? And I thought, I mean, having the opportunity to work with you, I thought it might be great to look at First Contact, you know between Simonia and Haven. I think it'd be really great to have a non-Haven perspective on it. I mean, I don't want my project to just be about Haven, I want to try to cover as much of the Network as I can."

"Sounds great Penny," Jim said and nodded, "well... I guess I'm at your disposal. Have at it."

"OK," Penny said, flicking over her notes again, before finally deciding to put them to one side. She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath, resting a blank pad on the table in front of her, a pencil in her hand. "So, I guess there's, you know, a distinction between what we call Scouting today, you know, Scouting with a capital S, and what people in the communities were doing at the very beginning."

"Oh absolutely," Jim agreed, "I mean, back then, at the start, we didn't know shit Penny, I mean, we were totally making it up as we went along. Almost none of us had any experience of Scouting, I mean, how could we? It was really a good year or more before we started to draw up serious protocols, anything even approaching what we have today."

"So do you remember, I mean, what would you say was your first Scouting mission, after the First Day?"

She saw Jim lean back in his chair, and he looked at her hard, his expression serious as he took a deep breath.

"Well, I guess there's a couple of candidates," he said finally, a gentle smile threatening to break out on his face. "So, well, I guess you know that... on the First Day, it was just me and... me and Simone, my... my wife, well... she... she wasn't my wife then... Anyway, it was just the two of us. I know you've learned about the First Day in school and all, and everyone's experience of it will be different. We were alone here, way out in the middle of nowhere. Not at all like the folks who founded Haven, like you said. They had to, fuck, they had to fight there way out of Durden, had to go through hell. Simone and I, we were totally safe and ended up almost walking our way into trouble.

"So the emergency broadcast system told us to shelter in place, you know, stay here I guess, but... neither of us wanted to do that, we wanted to get home, be with our families, our friends. I mean at that point, we really had no clear picture of what was going on, not really. We got about a mile up the road before we ran into a red-eye and high-tailed it back here.

"So I guess it's a decent example of being stupid. We both could have been killed. A lot of people who could, should have been able to survive the First Day were killed doing something like we did. And it took us two weeks to get over it, and only then because we were running low on supplies. So I guess our first real piece of Scouting was that first supply run. And you can tell how quickly we were learning. Like, we had a detailed plan on what we needed, and where we'd get it. We had weapons. I guess we were lucky there happened to be guns in the house, although Simone had never shot a gun in her life before. And it was pretty successful, we got all the supplies we were looking for, even more actually, and we got out safe... well... just about..."

"What..." Penny said, noticing for the first time since Jim had started talking just how rapt her attention was on him, "what do you mean?"

"You know Penny, it's a good fucking thing no one's seen a red-eye in a long time. They were some scary motherfuckers. And that day, that first supply run, we didn't even see the bastards, we only heard them. But we were fucking terrified. Fucking terrified. I'd never been so scared in my life."

"What do you mean... heard?"

"Honestly Penny, I don't know how I'd describe it to you. I've... you know... I've talked about with some folks over the years, who were around back then, who had similar experiences. Even just bringing it up would make them shiver."

So more or less by accident, the first couple of hours of their discussion was taken up with red-eyes. As no one had encountered one in decades, and the general scientific consensus within the Network was that they had simply died out, it had never really been an area that held huge interest for Penny but she had to admit as she sat in Jim's kitchen discussing his experiences in those first weeks and months that she couldn't imagine any story he had to tell not being utterly engaging.

For Jim, there was surprise at how much he enjoyed telling her those stories, about his encounters with red-eyes, at Chloe Murphy's house on his ill-advised trip to find some of her personal things, and at the hospital in Durden, the day he and Simone and Chloe had first found Dr Caroline Wong.

He'd talked about those events with Dani not all that long ago and ultimately decided he'd been glad that he'd done it, but talking with Penny felt very different. He wasn't just telling his story, it felt much more like a conversation with a contemporary, with someone who understood the things he was talking about. She was so obviously totally engaged in the conversation, so interested and eager, she asked all the right questions.

So as the hours ticked by and Jim finally decided it was long past time for more coffee, he found himself looking at Penny with an odd sort of satisfied smile on his face before he stood to return to the kitchen.

"What... what is it?" she asked, a little nervously. Through the first hours of their conversation Penny had felt her nervousness give way and was actually a little surprised about how comfortable and easy it was talking to Jim. But the way he was looking at her then gave her pause.

"Nothing," he said, his grin widening as he moved towards the kitchen, resting his hand on her shoulder for a moment as he passed, "just... well... I gotta tell you Penny, I really wasn't sure that this was... a good idea. I mean... talking to you. I wanted to do it and all, I just... I wasn't sure whether it would... whether I'd really be able to, you know? I guess it's just a little surprising how much fun this is," he went on with a chuckle.

"I know what you mean," Penny replied, her smile returning.

"So hey," Jim said as he returned with a fresh pot, "why don't we move on a little here, I mean, you did say you wanted to focus mostly on First Contacts right?"

"Right, sure, that'd be great."

"So, you know that, even though Haven and H-town had made contact with each other already, our first First Contact was with Haven?"

"Right, uh-huh."

"Right, but, actually I have to tell you about the convoy first. Sometimes I think that that... that really felt like our First Contact. I mean, I guess it was about a year after the First Day that we made First Contact with Haven. By then the... community here had grown to around twenty. After Lou and Lola and Fiona arrived, we really started to think about... the future, about how we'd make a life for ourselves here, real basic stuff, you know, food and water, power. We'd been focussing most of our supply runs on Old Sal and Durden, I mean apart from the fact they were both really close to us, Durden especially had so much for us. So like six months or so after the First Day, we started branching out, beyond Durden for the first time. The general idea was to source stuff we thought we'd need in the long term, you know, agricultural equipment, diesel fuel, more PV panels or even turbines for power, that kind of thing.

"We'd been learning from our experiences, I mean, you can see that right? We'd learned to be much more careful, and we were well armed. So our first forays beyond Durden were... well, let's say tentative, a few miles to the east, then a few miles to the south. And it was that second trip we met Maddy's group. We called them the convoy, seven people, doubled our population, can you imagine that? Connie and Jaz, Maddie's girls, they were the first kids here.

"They'd originally been a much larger group, travelling in several vehicles, that's why we called them the convoy. But they'd been... whittled down I guess, mostly through red-eye attacks so there was only seven when we found them, piled into this van. We were sticking to the road, checking out cars and stuff, Lou and Chloe were with me that day and Chloe heard it first, the sound. After, you know, after the red-eye sound we'd all heard we were pretty careful about anything out of the ordinary that we heard so, we stopped and took cover.

"Now, like we talked about, we'd already started coming up with plans, you know, procedures for what to do if and when we came across new people. We'd had lots of discussions about it actually. I mean, by then, if you start with me and Simone, we'd found Chloe, then Caroline, then Lou and Fiona and Lola and every time it had been... great, you know. They were all good people. But we knew... like, we knew we couldn't always count on that. But at the same time, we'd decided that... that what we had here, the... the beginnings of a community at least, it couldn't be for just us. We knew there had to be more people and that... that we had a responsibility to expand, to provide a safe place for people not just to... to survive, but to have a life.

"So the procedure basically boiled down to making ourselves known. We wanted anyone we met to know that we were armed, that we could defend ourselves, but that we weren't a threat, that... that we wanted to help. For that reason, we always carried extra food and water rations, on the assumption there was a decent chance anyone we met would have been, you know, living on the move.

"So when we saw the van come into view, we just looked at each other and kind of nodded, you know. I was really proud of that later, Caroline too, how we fell back on our training right away. She'd been really important in coming up with those plans, with her military experience and all. Anyway, we... we moved out of cover, just enough so we thought they'd be able to see us and, sure enough, it was only a few seconds before the van stopped, like really suddenly. As it turned out, the convoy hadn't met a single other survivor in the six months up to that point, so you can imagine what was going on inside the van! And like we'd planned, we made sure our weapons were visible. We each had a rifle, pistols too, but we wanted them to see the rifles.