Chapter 133 - Homecoming

  Coming home felt good.

  It was nice to see our growing walls, even at a distance! They were proceeding well. The basic structure of the inner wall was already in place, with steady construction continuing there to bring them higher still. Those inner walls would be our final bastion. They surrounded all of the main buildings of the farm proper. We had a large farmhouse, a big collection of barns, and a growing number of wood cottages as well.

  The cottages were new, being build to support our fast growing population. In the time since I founded the Domain we’d had a steady stream of humans and ratkin coming to our doorstep, looking for help and refuge. We gave assistance to everyone we could, and more than a few ended up electing to remain with us.

  As we got closer, the long lines of stones which would eventually be our outer walls came into view. The farm was surrounded by a bunch of fields, and I wanted walls around those as well. We wouldn’t be able to wall in everything, obviously, but creating an outer perimeter seemed wise, given how hostile the world had become.

  For now, that wall was only represented by a single row of stones placed where the whole thing would eventually be. It was mostly a visual aid for planning purposes—we wanted to build all of our housing on the inside of the future wall, not outside it! But as soon as the inner wall was well underway, we’d break ground on the outer one as well.

  With five hundred zombie workers, progress was moving right along. If I’d wanted, they could have built up the walls night and day, but that would have kept me and every other living person nearby awake all night. We tried it once. Very unpopular.

  Instead, the zombies spent their nights working like ants to haul supplies and stone down from the mall. We were gutting the place. Everything useful was brought down to the farm to be stored somewhere in one of our barns. The zombies piles stone out by the road overnight. It was far enough that they didn’t wake anyone up, but near enough that the materials were easy to get the next day.

  Alfred came riding toward us on one of our handful of horses. We needed more, badly, but unfortunately a lot of them had either escaped or been killed during the chaos of the first post-Event days. It wasn’t going to shock me if there were wild herds of horses roaming the Vermont mountains before too long.

  He waved as he rode over, and Kara slid down from Sue’s back to race across the grassy field to meet him. Alfred saw her coming and leaned over as she ran up to him, then scooped her into his arms! It was a feat of strength nobody could have performed, in the old days. Alfred would have ripped his arm off trying, and he’d have broken Kara’s spine if he had managed it. But with the couple’s Strength and Stamina, those weren’t major worries anymore.

  Alfred slowed his mount as he cradled his fiancé in his arms. They shared a kiss while the horse shook his head, startled by the sudden appearance of a second passenger.

  I rolled my eyes a little, but even I was enjoying seeing the two of them together like this. The whole damned world can come to an end, leaving whoever is left to pick up the pieces, and people were still going to fall in love.

  They rode up alongside Sue, and I called out to Alfred. “How’ve things been while we were gone?”

  “Al quiet,” he replied. “The work on the walls continues, we’re bringing in all the supplies we can before it starts getting too cold, and we found a couple dozen chickens which are now new residents of the farm. Fresh eggs sounds like a win to me.”

  “Me, too,” I replied. We’d all been eating a lot of canned and dried food lately. Crops weren’t going to happen this year, but even a little bit of fresh food was a welcome thing.

  “We had two new families arrive, as well. Parents and two kids in each. I’ve assigned them temporary quarters in the bunk room, but we’re seriously going to need to build more housing if we keep picking up new refugees,” Alfred said.

  “Well, we want to help everyone we can,” I said.

  He nodded. “One hundred percent. We just need to keep up with the population growth with new housing, or we’re gonna have issues down the road.”

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  He was absolutely right, and it was something we were working hard at already. The problem was mostly materials. Building the walls was easier, since we could just shatter the miles of cinderblock walls over at the mall, bring the chunks down to the farm, and mortar them together. There just weren’t enough unused house construction supplies available nearby.

  That left us repurposing the materials from other houses, and fortunately there were a lot of those. Just like Carver had torn down all the houses nearby, turning a suburb into a flat, open killing ground, we were slowly doing the same. I just didn’t have as densely packed houses around my Domain, like he had. That meant further to transport the stuff, and more time. But it was happening.

  “I’ll shift half of the zombies from hauling rubble tonight, switch them out to dismantle a few more houses,” I said. “That ought to replenish our supplies some, make building a few more houses easy.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Anything good come from the meeting? Was Turner there?”

  “He was, and he was pretty polite, overall. I think he wants this alliance badly enough to work for it,” I replied. “We’ve been tasked with contacting the country club group south of us, though.”

  “The one Kara was scouting.” His tone went dark. Alfred hadn’t been thrilled about sending Kara into that place alone, but he knew better than to try telling her what to do. “I’ve got a bad feeling about them.”

  “So do I, but we ought to at least try. We already have thousands of orcs to our north causing issues. If they attack in force it’s going to be a major problem. The last thing we need is another enemy to the south.”

  “I’m not sure they’re going to give us an option on that score, Selena,” Kara added. “The way they’re doing things… It’s about as far apart from the way you run this place as they could be.”

  “I know. Still, fighting them would be even worse.” From Kara’s report, I shared all her worries about those people. They were nothing like us, in the way they ran things.

  My people all worked. There were no freeloaders at my farm. Everyone had tasks, and we all worked at them every day. This world was too hostile and hard for us to have folks who refused to work. Fortunately, there hadn’t been any need to remove someone yet. Every person who’d come to us and asked to remain was thrilled to contribute to the community.

  Sooner or later I needed to set up some manner of trade system. The one at the Guard base revolved around crystals. One crystal equalled a day’s room and board. You could either earn that by working a certain number of hours at a task, or by going out into the world and collecting more stones—which you then paid to the community. It had gotten their militia up to strength pretty fast, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go with the same system. Monetizing the crystals was inevitable. People were always going to buy and sell things of value, and I wasn’t interested in even trying to stop them. But for day to day wages and such, I figured we needed a better trade tool. Maybe we’d go back to minting gold and silver coins? I had a pile of jewelry from some of the local stores that we could melt down.

  “Come on, let’s head in for the night,” I said, urging Sue ahead. “I want to get some rest this evening and head south in the morning. There’s no sense putting it off any longer. The sooner we know precisely what we’re dealing with down there, the better.”

  The country club folks, like us, like everyone, mandated work if you wanted to stay. But they’d divided their people into haves and have-nots through their methods. Anyone who wanted to just work but not face any risk, entered their indentured servitude. Those people never got crystals. They remained as weak as any pre-Event person, and worked dawn to dusk in the fields, building walls, or doing whatever basic tasks the leaders demanded of them.

  Like Kara told the others at the meeting, it wasn’t quite as bad as the slavery the pirates were using, but it was close. These people could leave whenever they wanted—but they were only volunteering for servitude because they were afraid of risking themselves outside fighting monsters. Leaving meant being outside with the monsters, which didn’t leave them a lot of choices.

  People who were not afraid to risk themselves could pay for their stay instead by handing over two crystals a week. It wasn’t that different from the Guard, I supposed, except that the Guard never turned any refugees away if they didn’t have a crystal for admission—and the country club place definitely did. If Kara hadn’t handed over a crystal to get in the door, she wouldn’t have been allowed to enter at all.

  If I’d still been alone, a couple of crystals a week in exchange for a safe place to sleep would have been an easy win. I earned more crystals than that on a bad day, let alone a week. That meant the ‘adventurer types’ who represented almost a third of the place’s population was rapidly growing stronger.

  Also growing in strength was the third class of residents there. If you didn’t want to work in the dirt and didn’t want to go kill monsters outside the walls, you could volunteer as part of their army.

  “Kara, how big did you say their army was, down south?” I asked.

  “A lot,” she replied. “I couldn’t get an exact count. It probably would have been bad for a newcomer to be all like ‘how many troops do you have here, anyway?’ But I can say for sure that it’s more than five hundred. Maybe as many as a thousand. I think they’ve poured a lot of their crystal earnings into those people, too, because they’ve got strong ranks. I hope you’re right, and we can make peace with them.”

  “Me too. Two large armies, one on either side of us, both opposing us? That would suck,” I said.

  We rode the rest of the way on in silence, the looming threat waiting for us the next day at the center of my thoughts. A lot was riding on how well this mission went.