Bob Gunderson walked into the Hall, looking more fit and well fed than he had a few weeks ago when he'd brought his village into the shelter. He walked over to the table, grabbing a cup of coffee, and then came over to talk to Jim.
"Art, what the hell are you doin' here?" he asked, seeing his friend from the village north of his.
Art looked up, stunned. It was his old friend, surely... but looking healthier than he had in years.
"Bob! They told me you were here, but I wasn't sure I believed 'em! How are you?"
"I'm fine, old friend. Hell, better'n fine, now that I'm here. Are your people comin' to live here?"
"Well, there ain't but eleven of us here, now... it was all that fit in that truck. There's still twenty eight, back in town." He shot a look at Archer, wondering if he'd said too much.
Gunderson caught the look and smiled.
"You don't need to worry about Mister Archer. He's a good man. He's the one who brought us here, gave us homes, food, clothes, jobs to do. You can trust him."
Art shot a look at Jim, nodding. If Bob Gunderson trusted him, that was good enough.
Jim smiled. "We had to, Bob.... hell, I can't stand seeing Americans mistreated, like those punks did you."
He paused in thought for a moment.
"Mister Perry, do you think the rest of the people in your village would come here to live, given the chance?"
"If they don't, I'd have to guess they had something wrong up here." he replied, tapping his temple.
"Ok... will you go with a few of my people, up to your village? You can tell them they can relocate here, and my people can drive the trucks and offer some protection from the Chinese. I'll see to getting the apartments ready for you folks."
"Alright, but... what about our animals? We've got cows and chickens, and a few pigs. We can't just leave them to starve to death."
"Just leave the gates open... they'll go out and find places to graze, and they know where their home is. They'll come back."
He called his wife, asking her to come down.
Jan Archer listened as her husband explained what he wanted, then got on her phone with the housing office, learning that there were more apartments open than she'd originally thought... more than enough to take in an additional forty people.
She instructed them to see to it that they were all properly stocked with the essentials, and the keys for each of them brought down to the Hall.
Jim, Bob, and Art made plans to head up to the village that night, while the Chinese would, hopefully, be ensconced in their base. If they worked it right, they could have the entire village relocated to the Cave and the families set up in apartments by dawn.
He wondered, for a moment, what the soldiers would think of the population of the village disappearing overnight.... until he realized that he didn't much care what they thought.
Six trucks rolled out of the Cave, thirty minutes later; by sunrise, the last of them were rolling back in, and a clean up crew was at work, obliterating the tire tracks that led from the pathway to their door.
Within another two hours, everyone was situated in apartments and bedded down for the morning. By the midafternoon, the newcomers were awake and assembled in the Hall, and Jim, Art, and Bob were addressing them.
Jim looked them over for a moment before speaking.
"Welcome, folks. We're glad you're here. As some of you already know, I'm Jim Archer, and I kinda lead this city. We're a free society; the Chinese don't know we exist, though some of 'em have found out... just before they died."
The villagers were now looking back and forth at each other, the looks on their faces reflecting everything from amusement to alarm to fear and worry. People who killed soldiers were generally hunted down and killed.
"Now... you might have guessed this, but I'll tell you anyway-everybody, and I mean everybody, save for the very young and the very old- has some sort of job in here. You can work with the kitchen staff, you can help out the elderly, doing their grocery shopping, cooking, and whatnot, you can help out on the farms, taking care of the animals and the fields, whatever you're best at. We work on a basis of accounts here... what you do to help out earns you credits that can be spent on foods in the grocery warehouses, sporting goods and other things in the general store warehouse, at the bars and restaurants, of which we have several, and the dispensary. The apartments you moved into when you got here were stocked with about three months of food; when that runs out, you'll have to buy more with the credits you build up."
He paused a moment to let that sink in, taking the chance to take a sip of his coffee.
"For your first few months or so, you will have guides, to show you where things are at, what's what in the way of groceries--those things you haven't seen before, at any rate-- and to teach you how to use the things in those apartments that you don't understand right now."
He took another sip of coffee before continuing.
"We will also teach you how to read and write, and work with numbers, so you can manage how many credits you've built up and keep yourselves within your budgets."
A younger man, towards the back of the crowd, stood up and asked "Will you teach us to fight?"
Archer nodded. "If that's what you want, sure... but keep in mind--we're playing for keeps. These Chinese punks have taken our country, so they tell me. We're going to take it back, no matter how long it takes... and I expect it to take quite some time. I don't care. This is America, not Communist China part 2. If you join us in this, you'd best be prepared to live up to that. We will not give up, ever. We will fight until we're wiped out to the last man, or our country is ours again."
"Ok... count me in."
Archer peered closely at the kid. "Son, how old are you?"
"I'm 17, Sir."
"Well, you're a little old to start the training, but we'll take whoever we can get." he replied with a grin.
The session with the Chinese officer turned out to be a bit more fruitful than they had hoped for; morale at the Chinese bases was uniformly lousy, with soldiers constantly trying to either fake an illness of their own or claiming a relative was direly ill, anything to get sent home. Even with the fresh food taken from the numerous villages, the women in what the soldiers referred to as their 'private brothel', and the minimal resistance they faced, many were still dissatisfied; most were simply homesick. They had all left friends and family behind, and many had wives and children in China.
Much of their equipment was old and poorly maintained. The two "Hind" Helicopters at their base were barely flyable, and three of their five heavy tanks had not run in at least three years. The AK-47 rifles his soldiers carried were well over fifty years old, and he himself had discarded his Chinese made nine millimeter pistol in favor of an American made Colt .45 ACP as soon as he'd found one in the arsenal of an old police station.
