She turned to face him, raised an eyebrow.
The boy said. “I was just wondering about the bonus…”
“Not until you’re eighteen,” Rhonda said. “Until then, no bonus. You just sit here and call me when he starts producing. Oh, and hon? If I see that game thing in your hand again while you’re on the clock, I’ll have Everett break it over your big chub head.”
She threw the mask in the garbage and stalked back to the lobby. More of her employees had arrived. They were all looking at her, eyes like hungry orphans. “All right,” she said. “Line up.”
They queued up outside her office. She sat at her desk, signing and tearing out the checks one by one. Everett stood beside her, handing out the bonus, the small black plastic baggies from the cooler.
Clete tucked his check into his back pocket without looking at it, but he opened his bag right there and took out the little plastic vial. The frozen vintage occupied only the bottom two centimeters of the container. “Is that it?” he said.
Rhonda’s hand froze in midsignature. “Excuse me?”
Clete said, “This is less than last time. At least tell me it’s from Harlan. I saw what that stuff did to Paxton.”
“Watch your mouth,” Rhonda said. “That’s the Reverend Martin to you.”
“Come on, Aunt Rhonda.” He looked at Everett. “You were there. Am I right?”
Everett said nothing.
“I’m just saying,” Clete said. “If this is all we’re getting, at least share the good stuff while it’s fresh. Another few drops of Elwyn or Old Bob ain’t going to do me much good.”
Everett placed a hand on Clete’s shoulder. “Say one more word,” Everett said quietly. “Go ahead. One more.”
Clete pushed his hand away and backed up. “I was just asking, Everett. Jesus, relax already.”
“Take your bonus and get out of here,” Rhonda said. She looked around at the other men. “This ain’t Hardee’s drive-thru. There are no choices, no specials, no family value packs, and nobody gets more than their fair share. Any of you have a problem with that?”
Clete looked sour but didn’t speak. The others behind him in the line studied their hands or looked away.
When the last of the men had taken his check and bag and made his way out to the parking lot, Everett shook his head, smiling, and said, “Hardee’s. Heh.”
“Can you believe that?” Rhonda said, but she was smiling too, now. She pushed back in her chair and stood. “All righty. After you get the cooler away, let’s go see the Reverend Hooke. Maybe we’ll be able to settle our bet.”
“You think so?” Everett asked.
“You never know,” Rhonda said.
Everett asked her if she wanted to take the long way through town. Rhonda said that sounded like a good idea and rolled down her window. He always knew when she was in a mood to greet her people.
He drove like a skilled accompanist. Without her saying a word he knew when to slow down so she could wave and say hello, when to roll past the people she wanted to avoid, and when to pull over. They saw the Robinson twins-one sister an argo and the other a charlie, walking down the sidewalk in matching yellow dresses like two sides of a funhouse mirror-and rolled on by. (You didn’t start a conversation with the twins unless you had nowhere to go and packed a lunch.) A few charlie teenagers were hanging around the Icee Freeze, and Rhonda called them by name, letting them know that she was watching them even if nobody else was. She couldn’t do the same for the beta children, though; when she passed a covey of young blank girls coming out of the Bugler’s she just said, “How you doing, girls?” and moved on. Blanks all looked alike to her, but the young ones had even started dressing alike with those long skirts and white scarves.
At the north end of town Everett circled back south by going down Main, gliding past the old wooden houses that used to be at the center of town before the highway went through in the fifties. She exchanged greetings with half a dozen people, the car moving slower than a parade float.
Rhonda looked over at Everett and said, “What are you grinning at?”
“This always cheers you up,” he said.
“It’s just part of the job,” she said. But it was true; she got a lift from being with her people. And she had a knack for working with folks, a gift she hadn’t fully employed until after the Changes. “Now pull over at Mr. Sparks’. We need to chat.”
Mr. Sparks, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and dress pants despite the heat, slowly pushed a wheelbarrow heaped with mulch across his lawn. Everett stopped the car and the old man came over, smiling. The Changes had skipped him, and at eighty-two he looked as fit as ever. “Goodness gracious, Mr. Sparks,” Rhonda said. “You make me tired the way you work.”
“Oh, it’s not working that makes me tired.”
“Well, you better keep your shirt on, or you’ll have young girls swooning around you.”
He laughed, a dry chuckle. The talk turned to clips of Roy Downer’s press conference that had been shown on the local news last night. “It’s a relief to hear that there was no evidence of foul play,” he said. “Not to say suicide isn’t a terrible thing…”
“I know just what you mean,” Rhonda said. “You don’t have to explain to me.” They talked for a few more minutes, Mr. Sparks trying repeatedly to get them to come inside for some coffee cake, but Rhonda begged off. “I better not keep you. I’ll see you at the next council meeting, all right?”
“I’ve already drawn up the agenda,” he said. “We’ve got to take care of the sewer issue first thing. I don’t see why we need brand-new sewers. We need
“Thoughtful progress,” Rhonda said, nodding. “I agree one hundred percent, Mr. Sparks. Let’s get all that straightened out, and I’ve got a couple other things to bring up, too.”
He frowned. “I’ve already printed up the agenda.”
“Oh, it’s nothing big! Just brainstorming. Not agenda-worthy at all. I’ll see you next week then?”
Everett eased the car away from the curb. “I thought we needed the new sewers for the school,” he said.
“We do,” Rhonda said. “So I’ll give up on digging up Main Street, which I never wanted anyway.”
Everett laughed. “That’s thoughtful, all right.”
“Come on now. Let’s go see the Reverend Hooke.”
So many details, Rhonda thought. Nobody would believe how much work it was just to keep everything in this town running. But
It would all have been different if the quarantine had still been on when Jo Lynn had her girls and the other clades started to breed. With the birth of those children-natural-borns who so clearly were healthy and more purely of their clade-the people of Switchcreek were transformed from mere victims to competitors. They could make their own kind. They could multiply. The quarantine might still be in place.
Rhonda knew that the government was still watching them, and the scientists were still trying to figure out if TDS was a danger. As for the rest of the world, the multitude of unchanged civilians, their apathy about Switchcreek could turn the moment they felt threatened.
It took only a few minutes to get to the Co-op. As they drove through the gates of the old Whitmer farm, beta children scattered out of their way like chickens. “Good Lord, there’s more of ’em every time we visit,” Rhonda said, and Everett grunted in agreement. Two hundred or so betas lived in the Co-op. Half of them were under the age of thirteen, and the other half were pregnant-at least that’s what it seemed like.
The white nursery building sat at the center of the field with almost twenty mobile homes huddled around it. The trailers had been bought used, and looked it. The oldest ones were peeling paint, but even the newer, vinyl- covered homes were dented and scuffed with red clay, like shoes that had been worn hard.
Rhonda got out of the car and frowned as the muggy air enveloped her. She said to a group of girls, “Anybody seen Pastor Elsa?”
A pair of them-twins, probably, since so many beta kids came in sets, but who could tell?-ran off toward the nursery. Rhonda told Everett to wait at the car and started walking in that direction. Slowly. She wore a Talbot’s
