Tom Ridley is out of town and traveling fast, fast being what you get from the buggy. The buggy is light and can travel deep off-road, but more importantly it sips its alcohol whereas the cruiser sucks juice through a drainpipe due to its weight and the equipment it hauls. The downside is the buggy is as quiet as a jet engine which it kinda is, the turbine powering a generator to make the juice for the motors. The result is Tom Ridley is shrieking across the flat farmlands of the Haven cooperative like a stabbed banshee, the slipstream whipping his hair back in a taught black flag, his goggles and scarf protecting his face from the bugs that could not move out of the way in time. Tom is way out where nobody comes unless they are loaded for bear, deep in the solar fields, the skeletal frames of the steel foundations flickering by, the shadows of the big canted panels casting slabs of shade, black, black, black, into his path.
Tom pulls up after a time and kills the turbine. He pulls off his goggles and unwraps his scarf and stands up a little stiff from the time in the saddle. With the racket gone all Tom can hear is the moan of the wind in the steel frames and the hiss of the grass. Ahead of the buggy lies open ground and then after a mile the first row of the tall wind turbines. They are white towers made by giants from which long thin blades rotate slow and steady. Hundreds of them in all. It is a sight Tom is used to all the way back to childhood.
He remembers a trip when he was real small which his Pa had arranged with a few others. They had camped out under the turbines and all night long he listened to the steady whump of the blades as they stole power from the wind. He couldn’t have been more than five or six and had been astonished by the star scraping height of the white blades, half expecting them to stir up the sky the way you can stir up water with your finger, leave a long track of ripples spreading out to reflect from the horizon.
‘That’s what the Bright do, son.’ his Pa had told him in reply, ‘They stir up the sky and everywhere else. That’s not for men like us.’
‘What do the Bright do, Pa?’ he had asked. It was an innocent question, but it seemed to make his Pa mad to think up an answer.
‘Anything they damn well please, son, we are best shot of them,’ and he had looked up at the sky with a darkness to his face that had nothing to do with the night.
Today, even from a mile away, the turbines still seem impossibly tall. Tom looks to both sides. The solar fields stretch away to the horizon. He never has known how far they reach. Even when he travels to Cottonhead cooperative out west, or south to Rayleigh to trade, he always keeps to the roads and the worn grass tracks and has never paid much attention to the solar fields or the turbines. They are just countryside, scenery you have known all your life. They were not something you would think about. Not until Coot had asked him to. Then he had to map it out for himself.
Before he tosses a coin on his turn, Tom takes out a flask, sips some water, checks the fuel gauge on the tank and makes sure the extra tank is still strapped on good and tight. The prairie looks flat and smooth as far as you can see, but there’s no accounting for small gullies or rocks hidden in the tall grass. The buggy will cope with just about anything, he had built it with long suspension arms and heavy shocks from an old truck behind Dino’s that was never going anywhere again; but an impact might just shake something loose and gallons of fuel alcohol is exactly the sort of thing you don’t want breaking free, not with your head in front of it.
Tom looks at the sky. It is a high one, clear from one horizon to the next if you ignore the curls of thin cloud way up high. If Tom has a plan at this point it is just to drive to the end of the solar field, keeping count of the frames as he goes. Tom replaces the flask in his pack, wraps the scarf back tight and replaces the goggles. Which way probably doesn’t matter a damn, so he fires up the turbine, makes a call.
It turns out to be an interesting one.
Why now, is all Tom can think. Why now, when everything was getting good. But if he is to be honest with himself isn't that always the way. Whenever life gets easy something turns up to kick over the can and sends it all rolling in the dust.
Life was getting good. In a way the buggy is part of that, the first faltering steps Tom made to get things right again. Sure the buggy is crude, it was his first attempt at building a vehicle way back when he was Sam’s age. But it had taught him how to weld, and taught him just how finicky turbines could be, and given him more than one jolt when he was trouble-shooting live. But it had worked.
And it had seemed like there was a path to a better future which the passing years had proven to be straight and true. Sure, there had been the Traumed to deal with every now and then. But even that had seemed to be a measure of the change. The roaming tribes had become smaller. Less deadly. Less deranged. Less in mourning for times lost and more needing help rather than the militia.
The last few years Tom had seen hope turn into beautiful shapes in his workshop. Works of art into which he had poured every thought, every minute, every ounce of skill as if skill can be weighed and measured. He could build anything for anyone, he knew that for a fact. But his heart was set on creating art that moved, and moved well. And just like Tom, all across the land similar hearts and souls were being poured into other passions and just maybe the darkness was receding.
And now this.
It was chance that made him turn. Or some slight dip in the prairie that he had not been entirely conscious of until after the turn. Perhaps it had been as simple as his subconscious breaking through the fugue caused by endless miles of tall grass flowing under the buggies wheels and the hypnosis of endless staccato shocks of sunlight and shade. Whatever the forgotten impulse was, he had had turned and almost before he could register it the landscape had changed.
There is a gap in the solar field. A large open space which the sun now floods with light, the endless rhythm of shade and light abates as he penetrates the empty space. And so he turns, following the slight decline. And finds it to be a depression. An engineered bowl in the ground. Grass covered and grown as wild as the prairie. The circumferential fence that had once guarded this place snapped through by corrosion, its razor blade fencing recoiled and rusting in casual bails, its concrete posts eroded.
And at the centre of the bowl is a ramp in shadow.
And at the end of that ramp is a door three times the height of a man and twice as wide as that. Big enough for large trucks to enter.
And on the door, still visible despite the pocks and blisters of corrosion, is a name.
Haven 7.