Day 7 – Chapter 8 – Marin – 02

            I sank down next to Thom fifteen minutes later, near the cheerfully crackling fire that he was still poking every so often with a stick.  I stretched my hands out toward the flames, letting warmth bleed into them from the ambient heat of the fire.  My fingers were cold and stiff from rigging up the tent walls we’d taken down the day before, when the weather had been more pleasant.  We’d thought to get some fresh air into the tent while we could, while the weather permitted.  I was already shuddering to think what winter would be like.  Of course, hopefully we’d have something other than a tent to huddle in before that came, but no one was placing any bets on that being possible yet.
            “Matt’s waking the others?”  Thom asked, setting aside the stick and rocking up on one knee to check the kettle.
            I nodded, flexing my fingers as the feeling returned to them, an uncomfortable pins-and-needles sensation.  “Yeah.  After they’re up and over here, we can get started.  Stasia went down to the other tent?”
            “And took Brandon with her.  Did you tell Jack to grab some sleep?”
            “Yeah.”  Thom sat back again, watching me for a minute.  “Cold?”
            I snorted.  “Y’think?”  He took one of my hands and closed my fingers between both of his hands, the heat from his flesh bleeding into mine.  I sighed and leaned against his shoulder.
            “At least the walls are up,” he said.  “Don’t have to worry about that when the weather hits.”
            I nodded.
            Somewhere in the distance, thunder growled.  I tried not to shiver, tasting rain on the wind.  Thom squeezed my fingers, then took my other hand and repeated the warming process.  J.T. joined us as he was in the midst of that, yawning and rubbing at his eyes, shadows deep beneath them.
            “Early morning,” he mumbled as he checked the kettle and then grabbed the coffee press.  “What’s wrong now?”
            “Storm rolling in,” I said.  “Bright red sky.  Something told both of us that was probably bad and probably worth waking up some of you a little earlier than anticipated.”
            “Probably right.”  J.T. rubbed his eyes again and started loading the coffee press.  The rest slowly filtered toward the fire as he got the coffee going—Kellin, my brother, Rory, Drew, Davon, Carolyn, Jacqueline, and Tala.  Greg Doyle was the last to join us, shuffling over and yawning mightily.
            “Pressure’s shifting,” he said quietly as he slowly sat down near the fire, adjusting the blanket he had wrapped around his shoulders.  “I can feel it in the break.”
            If Thom had a similar feeling, he kept it to himself.  He accepted a mug of coffee from J.T., then passed it to me.  I took a sip from the mug and nodded at Greg.  “There’s some nasty rolling in, we think.  That’s why we’re battening down the hatches, though that’s not the whole reason Matt woke all of you.”
            Kellin joined J.T. in handing out the hot drinks.  “You want to get the logistics powwow started early.”
            I nodded.  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.  Especially if the storm starts waking people.”  I still wasn’t sure how I felt about excluding so many people from the planning, but as Kellin had pointed out—and Greg agreed—any community needed some sort of leadership, and we’d all kind of risen to the top of the heap in the past few days.  There wasn’t really any grumbling yet, but that was probably because everyone was dry and fed at the end of the day.  With any luck, that trend would continue.
            “Could I start, then?”  Greg asked, taking the mug of coffee that Kellin offered him.  When no one spoke up, he edged a little closer to the fire and started.  “A couple of us have talked about needing greenhouses to grow food, but we can’t really expect to hike out to the big one when the weather’s bad, assuming the way stays stable enough to get there in the winter.  We can probably put together a few up here with some wood framing and the broken glass here on campus.  We got all that silicon seal from the hardware store.  If we do it right, we can use that with the glass to make the panes we’ll need for the greenhouses.”
            “You think it’s possible?”  Davon asked after a few moments of silence.
            “Won’t know until we try it.  I think it should work.  Probably do it in pots and raised beds to protect the plants from the ground freezing.  Might even be able to get enough large sections of glass that we won’t have to silicon many of the pieces together.”
            “How much time do you think we’ve got before the ground freezes?”  I asked quietly.
            “Too early to know,” he said, glancing over his shoulder toward one of the gaps in the tent’s walls we left so the fire’s smoke could escape.  “Could be months.  Could be weeks.  We can hope to get lucky.”
            Lucky would mean months instead of weeks.  I nodded a little.  Carolyn was taking notes in a tattered notebook that she balanced against her knee.  Thom looked at Greg.
            “Have you done any plans or figuring?  If you haven’t we should probably talk.”
            Greg nodded.  “We should probably do that.”


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One Response to Day 7 – Chapter 8 – Marin – 02

  1. Erin M. Klitzke says:

    I’m definitely trying to figure out why I’m getting wacky spacing here and there pasting Word > WordPress in IE (I do it in IE because when I do it in Chrome, I lose paragraph markers, and that’s just not cool). Mercifully, there was only one error in this one that I caught this morning on the read-through before the comments.

    In hindsight, I probably should have combined it with the next segment, but that would have made for an extremely long update (which some folks might have liked, others not so much).

    Marin chapters are always hard, and I think in the future they may be a bit shorter than the ensemble chapters in the future, in part because there’s a lot of story that happens that Marin’s not necessarily privy to at all times (then again, there’s stuff that she’s privy to before anyone else–and I’m not talking about things she learns through Visions, either).

    I’ve had some feedback that folks are a little frustrated by Thom and Marin at this point–please share your thoughts on the subject if you’ve got them!

    There’s also a poll up about the gender of the first child born to this set of survivors. You can find it up in the page sidebar. Please take a moment to weigh in! There’s still quite a bit of time to decide the outcome.

    Monday will bring us…the storm. Happy reading!

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