Chapel Orahamm

“Your armoury is crap, Corbin.” Fane regarded the minuscule stockpile in a make-do locker room near the medical ward.

Corbin leaned against a doorframe, watching the redhead meticulously clean guns, which apparently weren’t enough to keep the man happy. “Not like I own the military.”

“You could have.” Fane slid the mechanism back together on a Lasfair rifle.

“Figured dropping my money on preserving people, not killing them, was the better idea.”

“Let’s not poke at the fact you own Joiner Petroleum. Here I am, trying to preserve your people, asking you if you have any way of supplying me with equipment.”

“You’re in a mood,” Corbin drawled.

“About to deal with the giant slimy thing from hell, and I have maybe a hundred clips and a box of blades to work with when nukes weren’t taking this thing down. Tell me how I’m not supposed to be in a mood.”

“This is the piss end of Old America. Flor-fucking-gia. Where there were more guns than people just as bad as Old Wales’ problem with sheep. You want guns. Go take a looksee. Probably come away with enough to supply a platoon if you just look up and down the street.” Corbin folded his arms across his chest.

Fane drew in a deep breath and let out a sigh, his shoulders sagging as he stared up at the ceiling, “I didn’t want to do that.”

“Not like there’s that many people still here. You feel that humidity? No one without a working AC’ll live through that in summer. We’re the only ones with a generator-driven AC for miles around.”

“You saying the humidity’s gonna keep me from taking a popcap to the heart?” Fane put away the cleaning kit and closed the locker doors, rolling the combo locks as he went.

“Why am I more nervous for someone who encounters you than your worry about going and finding an abandoned house has residents?” Corbin offered a teasing smile.

Fane returned the smile, his sclera going black momentarily.

Corbin regarded that look with one of contemplation. “You keep doing that, Sophia’s going to conduct an opthomology exam to figure out exactly why it does that when you go all murdery.”

“Hey, if she can explain why my hair grows a meter and a half every time I chop it off after I go play around in my void, I’d love that answer first before the eye thing.” Fane led the way out of the armoury.

“Don’t care for the long locks look? Seems like your grandpa-in-law and husband like it.” Corbin followed Fane into the medical ward.

“Not that I don’t like the look on other guys. Just some bad memories I don’t like revisiting.”

“Ah. Need it off your neck for a bit, huh?” Corbin motioned over one of the machinists who was sitting with a foreman babying a hand in a sling.

“What can I do for you boss?” she asked.

“You mind helping Fane out with his hair problem? It’s not part of your machinist contract, but I know you owned your own salon-“

“Stop you right there, bossman. I’ve helped him outta his hair three times in three days, and he keeps commin’ back with enough to make a wigmaker cry.” Tiffa held out a stilling hand.

“It’s getting annoying.” Fane nodded along with Tiffa.

“You just need it off you, right? Come back to dealing with your psychology about the problem later, right?” Corbin ran a hand through his own locks. Picking at one braid, he cocked an eyebrow at Tiffa.

“Uh-uh. No way. Rows like yours would be terrible for his scalp health. He doesn’t have the right texture.” Tiffa crossed her arms.

“Could do looser braids?”

Tiffa sighed, exasperated. “Fine. I’ll see what I can do. Then I’m getting back to my bench.”

“Thank you, Tiffa.” Fane followed her back to her work bench where she pushed him down onto her wheeled stool and stared at him for a solid minute. He shifted uncomfortably.

“You are hopeless, aren’t you?” She hissed, before pulling out a tin full of rubber bands. “This is gonna cause so much breakage. But, you have to have it off your head. You’d make my momma jealous with that hair, and you want it lopped off?” She opened one of her tool drawers, extracted a rat-tail comb from the back, and started segmenting out his hair. “You put it up like a pro, so what did you used to do when it was long before you started cutting it?”

“Braids at the side, bun at the back I’d wrap it all into if I didn’t have it down. Sorta like a psuedo-mohawk. Just makes my shoulders burn right now cause I’m out of practice and it’s giving me a tension headache cause of the weight.”

“Well, now, that’s easy enough. Why didn’t you do that before you had me shave this down three times?”

“Because I just didn’t want it to begin with?” he offered.

“Well, looks like you’re stuck with it. Here, start on this side while I get the other, then we’ll be able to both get back to our regular jobs.”

“Sorry about this, Tiffa. Thanks again.”

She drew in loud breath. “I can’t get your rings done if I keep having to help you out of your hair.” Fane took segments of hair she handed him and worked on getting the curls tamed down. “What are you doing after this?”

“Apparently out to go restock the armoury.”

“Bernard and Benj left off to go see what they could scrounge. They’ve got walkies if you wanna meet up with them.” Tiffa made quick work of her side.

“Any requests for all the time I’ve wasted?” Fane offered.

“A bottle of perfume. What I wouldn’t give to not perpetually smell bearing grease. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a love I have for the bench, but every girl’s gotta have something nice to smell every once in a while.” Her fingers stilled as she started daydreaming.

“I would ask if you have a preference, but I’m not sure I’d know what I’m looking for outside of little glass bottles in bathrooms.” Fane wrapped a rubberband at the end of one braid.

“If I don’t like it, there’s enough women in this shop, and a couple guys, who’d probably trade me tools for it.”

Half an hour later and a full description on the finer points of perfume scents, Fane had his hair off his neck and was mentally ready to explore beyond the walls of the Subgalaxia compound, if only to not question what the difference was between bergamot and gardenia ever again.

“Benj, Bernard, respond, over.” Fane clicked across the walkie talkie frequencies until he got static and garbled words.

“Yes, Bern, it communicates across the air. Here, Fane. Over.”

“Which way am I headed to meet up with you?” Fane grabbed rope, knives, a hatchet, and a multipurpose wrench-screwdriver combo while Benj gave him directions.

“Heading out?” Ishan caught him before he left out the side entrance.

“Yeah, wanted to prepare for the tentacle god of death. Wanna come or were you still helping Sophia in the medical ward?”

“I was being a coffee go-for for the docs. Be careful out there.” Ishan kissed him on the forehead and waved him out the door.

He met up with Benj and Bernard two blocks over where they had a beat-up shopping cart half-filled with dry food, canned goods, gallons of water, and litres of soda. “Ya’ll have a nice stash going there. Anybody around to give you trouble?” he greeted.

Benj shook his head. “Haven’t seen anyone. Kinda spooky. We’d see some here and there when we made our way down from Oregonia. Dallas had quite a few, but even at that, people just tended to stay away from us. Save for a batch of doped up kids, but that was different.”

They led Fane into a section of the blocks of housing that contained a strip mall and bank. Most of the houses, most of the stores, anywhere that people would store things had been pilfered, but there was a point where the three men found that people had stopped breaking in to places. There had come a time when people had moved on from the town altogether.

The gun store in the strip mall was empty – the glass and bars were long since destroyed. Storage sheds another block over proved more fruitful. One shed had to have belonged to an apocalypse prepper. Fane ended up hunting down another two grocery carts that he lashed together and filled to the brim while he asked Benj and Bernard to look for a bottle of perfume in any of the other sheds, explaining his predicament with Tiffa.

As they tore apart the storage shed complex, Bern and Fane discussed the finer points of life beyond Bern’s knowledge of the 17th century and the Subgalaxia compound.

“Tell me about your husband and wife.” Fane tore open another cardboard box and dumped the contents to find it full of baby clothes. He tossed them into one of his carts.

Bern stalled, thinking as he watched Fane strategically work his way through a shed that contained plenty in the way of children’s goods. “What do you want to know of them?”

“Did they have powers like us?”

“No. None of them did. But they came from lines that did. My first wife’s aunt had the white hair like me. Rory’s void was like yours, but he slept in his. He didn’t have powers.” Bern held up a breast pump Fane handed him.

“Set it in the cart. One of the machinists might be able to get it to work. It’ll help if one of the women can’t get their baby to eat.”

“What an amazing invention.” Bern stared at it in awe.

“Were there many who could do what we do? I mean, I know I’m weird, but you?”

“When Corbin took me from, it was Naibh – my wife’s aunt, me, and Eoin.”

“Just three? For an entire clan?”

“We had forty-eight blood relations and seventy incorporated, but yes, it was just us three. All blood relations had lines we could trace to the White Horses.”

Fane let out a low whistle as he found a Christmas tree box containing three more rifles and skeet targets.

“Will those really do anything to that creature living in your void? The one Corbin says is out in the world, swimming across the ocean?” Bern took the stocks and set them in carts.

“I’m not sure. If a nuke couldn’t do anything against it, I don’t know what kind of ammo would get through it’s skin.”

“How has your powers been since tattooing your soul?”

Fane rolled his shoulders. “Not really sure. A bit less – I don’t know how to explain – less like the underside of my skin is perpetually buzzing. Does that make sense?”

Bern nodded. “The tattoos act like a channel, giving the power a direction to flow in, sort of like a pile of wool and a drop spindle. You can pull and twist it yourself, but having the tool helps you get a much thinner, stronger thread.”

“Not entirely sure what a drop spindle is, but I’m assuming from the description your analogy is that my power is a giant pile of fluff that I’ve been trying to shape the hard way and you gave me the easy way by somehow introducing pain and getting my memories to work in the correct order.”

Bern blinked at Fane in confusion. “You don’t have drop spindles?”

“Uh….not that I know of?”

“Who weaves all your clothes?”

“Well, before the world ended, apparently, we had shops where people made them. So they probably did it. But most clothes are plastic anyways, so it’s not like most people can afford wool anymore.” Fane let out a whoop when he opened up another box, this time of a nauseating floral pungency that yielded hundreds of travel size bottles of perfume. “Now Tiffa will forgive me.”

“By the very Forest floor that’s strong,” Bern gasped and backed up a step.

“Yep. Gonna drown out all the shop smells.”

Fane stalled over his carts, fingering the crumpled edge on a box of ammo. “Nat and I, we’re related, aren’t we? Some how? Why isn’t he as powerful as me?”

Bern found an a stash of old electronics and motioned Benj over to look at them. “I don’t know. His void isn’t like yours. Isn’t like…” The Fyskar sighed. “Isn’t shaped like Rory’s. He didn’t have the talent, but you do. Sophia explained the genetics thing to me. I find it phenomenal, but also confusing. He had a child, though. Right? One without Fernella? You are related to him, and he never had anyone with her. Eoin took after me, and Ishan, from what Sohpia said, is a direct descendant from his line.”

“Sorry to bring up a sore spot.” Fane ducked.

“I’m not sure how to handle that information. To me, Eoin is only sixteen. It’s been not even ten years since Rory died of plague. And yet, here you stand, several hundered years later, the spitting image of him. You sound like him. Your void gives you away as one of his. I can’t just ignore that.” Confusion and dejection lingered on his features.

“You loved him a lot? Or was it one of those arranged marriages?”

“It was arranged, but I also deeply loved him and my first wife. I miss them every day. I remarried, but they also did not live very long. Talking to Sophia about them, my second husband had cancer. There was no feasible way I would have ever been able to save him, and in some way, knowing that his health was out of my control, does give me some comfort as an apothecary. Knowing that Berc’s mother – she was bed-ridden ever since giving birth to him – knowing that she probably had significant damage that I never would have been able to mend, not without Sophia’s technology, that too, I feel guilty for saying it, but that too, reassured me. But Rory and Fernella? Plague? Sophia showed me how streptomycin is made, and if I’d just known that, known about the other medicines? That in the right conditions, I could have given Eoin back his mother, kept Rory? What I wouldn’t give to go back and try. To have saved them.” Bern’s cheeks pinked, and his eyes rimmed red with that admission. “It’s hard, knowing that you’re his kid, grandkid, great. Knowing that he was unhappy enough in our relationship, whether it was me, or Fernella. That he went looking elsewhere and found what he was needing and I couldn’t be enough, or Fernella. It hurts immensely.”

Fane set a hand on the man’s arm. “You are not a failure here. Not in medicine, or as a spouse. You did what you could to the best of your ability. What he did was his decision, and it can hurt, but do not blame yourself for what he did.”

Bern drew in a hard breath and nodded once. Pulling himself to his full height, which was towering in Fane’s opinion, he returned to helping gut the inside of the storage units.

Four more lashed together shopping carts on the already existing ones, the three men made an ungainly trek back to the compound to offload materials. Tiffa and several other people from the shop floor distributed the box of perfume bottles and made the place reek, sending those not keen on the smell running for the commissary.

Fane roped Deck and Yeller in on bringing the boxes of baby supplies to the women who immediately pushed them back out the door and pointed them in the direction of the laundry room where they spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get the mildew out of too many baby socks. Benj had the breast pump taken apart, cleaned, and put back together in working order well before the other men had gotten through cleaning the mound of clothing and toys. Bern watched the gears in the pump work in fascination while Benj tested the tubing.

Taking a shift break from cleaning to go unload ammo, Fane found Bern following him to the lockers. “What’s up?” Fane slid his packs off his shoulder.

“I wanted to say that I’m glad I met you. Even if I’m upset with Rory at the moment, I wanted to say I see you in him. The man I cared for, and who cared for me. And that I’m proud that my grandchild, well, very great-grandchild, picked you, out of everyone he could have found, to handfast with.”

Fane, flustered at the praise, gave a lopsided smile in reply. “It’s funny, I never knew my grandparents, and really, I barely knew my parents, and you and I are the same age essentially, but I’m glad I got to know my in-law too and that he’s not a half-bad guy to boot.”

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