EPILOGUE
As each year passes,pre-Impact drinks have become rarer and more valuable.
The Pub still sends crews out to scavenge the wreckage of old bars, convenience stores, and breweries, but everything except the most isolated and obscure has already been looted and then looted again.
In the middle of Year Two we partnered with a local family who’d been brewing moonshine for decades, so our regular drink options now consist of a range of beers and ales made in their still.
But some customers have the resources to spend on the more expensive items, so we keep trying to stock as many drinks from the old world as we can.
One of our crews lucked out last week and dug out the warehouse of a regional food distributor, which had been buried in a landslide caused by the flooding farther east. All the food was deteriorated or inedible, but there was a large collection of surviving hard liquor, plus beer and wine in good condition.
So much beer and wine.
There’s an enormous amount piled in the back of the crews’ trucks, ready for unloading, and we’re having to reorganize our main storage building to make room for it all.
We’ve got several men coming this afternoon for the heavy lifting, but I was tasked with the plan for reorganization.
I rounded up Breanna to help.
Breanna and her sister moved to Monument last year, escorted by Cole of all people. He hadn’t been by this way since before we kicked out the militia, and he wasn’t expecting the town to have survived this long—much less thrived the way it’s done.
Breanna and Del had been barely making it out on the coast, so Cole brought them this far inland before leaving again, still committed to the search for his brother.
I thought I picked up some sparks between him and Del, so I wasn’t surprised when he returned after a few months.
But he only stayed a couple of days and hasn’t been seen since.
I like both women, but I’ve gotten to know Breanna better. She’s smart and strong and funny and gorgeous with vivid red hair.
She’s also a lot bitterer than I ever was.
“This should work,” Breanna says after we’ve sketched out a rough plan for the large storage space. “If we move that big shelving unit to the opposite wall, we can stack up all the crates on the long wall and make sure to put them in order so y’all can open new ones as needed. And with all the junk cleared out, there’s plenty of empty shelf space.”
“I know. They used to be all filled.” It’s not difficult for me to summon a mental picture of this room back in Year One. It’s been five years, but it feels like it was only yesterday when Cade started coming into the Pub and sitting silently at his table in my section, his eyes following me everywhere I went.
“Good ole days?” Breanna asks with a questioning arch of her eyebrows. She’s wearing jeans and a tank top, and I’m wearing a loose dress and hiking boots.
“No. Well, they weren’t completely terrible, but these days are a lot better than those.”
“That’s for sure.” She shakes her head, staring at an empty spot in the air. “Let’s pray we never have to go back.”
Breanna has never shared her history with me, but my guess is she had to do difficult things to survive. Similar to me, and maybe even worse.
I reach over to put a light hand on her shoulder, a barely-there gesture of empathy. Understanding.
She shoots me a quick smile and shakes it off. “Let’s go ahead and move that shelf.”
“I thought we’d wait for the guys to do that.”
“Why should we? Aren’t we capable of doing it ourselves?”
I look at Breanna, look at the large, solid-wood shelving unit, and then back to her.
Her eyes are sparking with amused challenge.
“Okay,” I say at last. “Let’s do it ourselves.”
Breanna is strong and fit, and I’m relatively so, since I started jogging regularly to regain muscle strength after I was on bedrest for months when I was pregnant with Cassie. The shelves are built well enough that they’re not wobbly or unstable. So after we unbolt it from the wall, we scoot the large unit inch by inch until it’s in place and secure against the opposite wall.
