Page 22 of Haven

My head jerks back involuntarily. “You’d really use force to try to get your way against me?”

“No!” The one word isn’t loud, but it’s edged with something like desperation. “You’re the one who’s threatening to vote me out of leadership because you can’t give up this suicide mission you’ve latched onto for no good reason.”

“I’m not going to vote you out!” My eyes are burning, so I can barely see. “And it’s not a suicide mission. All our trips and supply runs have gone smoothly for the past six months. We know what we’re doing. It’s not as dangerous out there as it used to be. We can stay off the roads. We can do this. There might be some way to save her. Jackson, please.”

He stares down at me, breathing as heavily as if he’d just run the perimeter of the farm. Finally he murmurs, “Can we just wait a couple more days? Aren’t they supposed to be ten-day courses of the antibiotics? We can know for sure if they’re working or not. Then we can have this conversation again.”

I know the antibiotics aren’t working. A couple more days aren’t going to make a difference. But I also can’t argue anymore with Jackson right now. “Okay,” I mumble, turning back toward the dishes I still need to finish washing. “But that’s going to be the last time.”

I’m not sure why I let the topic go so easily. I just don’t have the energy to fight anymore right now.

***

THE DECISION IS MADEfor us the next day when the fuel pump on the tractor breaks.

Jackson spends the entire day trying to rebuild it. He’s a decent mechanic, but he’s never been trained in this and has mostly learned from practice. He can’t reconstruct a complicated piece of machinery without working parts.

By the evening, it’s clear he’s not going to be able to fix it, and without the tractor, we’ll never be able to sustain the way of life we’ve established here.

We need a working tractor, and the only way we’re going to have one is if we find a new one or find a working pump we can replace ours with. We’ve scoured all the surrounding areas. There’s nothing like that around here. We’ll have to go somewhere else to look.

Jackson is still fiddling with the tractor after dinner, and I go out to the garage to find him.

“Damn it,” I hear him mutter, bent over the engine. “Damn it all to hell.”

He doesn’t know I’m approaching as he curses, but I can tell the moment he senses my presence. His hands grow still. His shoulders stiffen.

“No luck?” I ask lightly. It’s a polite transition, as I already know the answer.

“No.” He straightens up to face me. Then lets out a frustrated breath. “Fuck.”

“We need a tractor, and we’re not going to find a working pump we can use around here.”

“I know that.”

“So can we return to the conversation we started yesterday?”

He looks angry and exhausted and as resigned as I felt yesterday. “You really think there’s going to be the exact part we need just lying around?”

“I think it’s a rural area, and this is a John Deere, and there were likely a lot of tractors in that area that wouldn’t have been taken with them when people migrated. There’s a better chance of finding one there than there is sitting around here and hoping one falls in our lap.”

“And you want to look for antibiotics.”

“Yes.”

He stares at me for a long time, and I can see the exact second when he stops fighting internally.

So I say, “Who do you want to send with me?” He starts to object, but I continue before he can. “I have to go. We’ve been over this. No one else will be able to recognize the antibiotics that might work.”

He makes a guttural sound, but then his shoulders and jaw relax. “Fine. You’ll go. There’s only about a fifty-fifty chance that whoever I choose to go with you is going to make it back alive. Whose life do you think we should risk like that?”

I narrow my eyes, holding his gaze. “So it’s you and me then?”

He inclines his head in a quick half nod. “It’s you and me.”

“Okay. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

***

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