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“You lost your mom and your dad and Brad and Ricky and Greta and Danielle and Monica and Steven and at least twenty other of our people here. But now you’re willing to go to irrational lengths to save one?”
I’m trembling. Visibly. I know he’ll see it, but I can’t seem to help it. “Yes. I don’t care if it’s irrational. I have to do it.”
“Then tell me why.”
I stare at his tense, damp face.
“Tell me,” he says thickly. “Tell me now.”
I open my mouth in response to his deep urgency, but the truth is I have no idea what to say. No idea how to explain the compulsion that keeps pushing me into this, when I’ve never acted so rashly before.
So instead, I take a long, shuddering breath and say, “Despite what you think, you’re not the final say here. If I think we need to do this, you can’t stop me.”
“Can’t I?” There’s something almost dangerous in his voice.
“You really think you’d win if we held a vote of confidence among the residents here?”
“No. You’d get more votes. But the best fighters would nearly all side with me.”
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?”
