Of his three daughters Curtis Wells had only known one before the war, and none of them came from his body. Lucila had been the child of one of his old war buddies. Not the war that ended it all, the two decade series of wars that had preceded that. She was called “Sila” sometimes. Lucila’s old man was a fellow Marine who had come to stay with Wells at his farm before the real shit had started to go down. He had only known the girl barely two weeks before her father and so many others were suddenly dead. Now, even after a mere seven years, it felt like everyone was long dead.

She was also his eldest, a spunky girl whose parents had been Puerto Rican. Out here, in the former town of Bushkill Falls, that would have been a problem before the war. But now anybody, anywhere, was needed and valued. 

There wouldn’t be anyone driving Wells and his family off of his land, anyhow. Lucila helped him out the most. At eight years old she already knew her way around a weapon and a horse. His oldest could tend a fire, bind a wound, cook a meal. He took great pride in that.

His other two girls had wandered in off the road, so to speak. There was Kendra, who as best Wells could tell was roundabout five. Kendra was a quirky child and hadn’t ever spoken. She was slow to learn and grow. Before the war she would have been called mute or autistic. Probably both. She had cornsilk blonde hair, cornflower blue eyes. Lucila and he had found her in the forest one day, half starved, miserable and utterly alone. No one had ever showed up to claim her or apparently cared if she lived or died until they had taken her in. Kendra took a while to get a chore down pat, but once she did she performed with the infinite care, patience and love of a wise old mother. She could understand everything that was said to her but couldn’t reply, only smile and nod or shake her head. Wells and the other girls had worked out a system of communication with her, no words or even gestures needed. Kendra did all of her talking with her unusually expressive eyes. Despite all the challenges she was facing at five years old, which were more than he ever had at 41, Kendra was a hard worker and loved easily. Wells hadn’t ever known a person more guileless and innocent than his middle child. But she also had a sad, forlorn sense of wisdom, almost a jadedness, an air of someone much older than even Wells himself. Fatherhood, he thought, only brings mysteries. 

And Anya was his child of the wastelands, born of a woman who had passed through Bushkill Falls and stayed a week to give birth. Her mother was running from some trouble up north, where things were far more wild, populated and dangerous. She was black and so was her newborn, and mentioned that she had been born in Jamaica and recently immigrated to New York before the war had laid all those places low. The mother had begged someone in town to take her baby, and promised to be back to either collect or visit very soon. Wells had accepted the baby girl and the mother had departed. That had been two years ago. There had been no sign of whatever trouble Anya’s mom had been fleeing or from the woman herself. The way he saw it, Anya was his now. 

Even in a town that hadn’t been hit very hard by the war a man, even a strong man like Wells who had training, needed someone to watch his back and guard him while he slept. When Charlie Zeek had been found tapping into the family water and refused to give it up, Wells had been obliged to fight him. They could have laid their conflict before the mayor, but both of them preferred the old fashioned way.

So did the entire town, as it turned out. Most of them showed up to watch. Wells was one of the most powerful in town, with a lot of land that was still workable, his own well water, generators, gas, horses and bullets. A man to envy and try to take out. Maybe that was why old Charlie Zeek wanted to fight.

They stripped down to their waists and did it in the ancient gnarled copse of trees just outside of town. The sunlight filtered down through the treetops and off of Charlie’s cut physique. He was gray by then, but showed no stiffness of age and had done some modeling in Pittsburgh before the war. He still looked it. 

In contrast, Wells’s body was all symmetrical fat over blocks of hard won farm muscle. He wasn’t going to win any bodybuilding competitions because a man worked up an appetite toiling outdoors. He tended to be stocky and carry more flab than usual, anyway. No one remarked upon his everyman form, however. They only had eyes for his scars, the way his entire back looked like a twisted and gruesome canvas of pain. There was a story behind them, of course, but he wasn’t one for sharing it. They were horrendous and gut churning, enough to make the whole town gasp. They bespoke of his determination to survive, no matter what. 

Charlie Zeek had determination or he wouldn’t have survived the war. It wasn’t the easiest fight that Wells had ever won, but he did get his hand raised at the end. His face was cut up a little under his left eye and his side ached where Charlie had landed a good one, but that was it. 

In contrast, his opponent had only survived the encounter because it would have been bad form and likely a death sentence to kill another townie. Wells had no desire to take any more lives than he already had, anyway, and there were plenty of things trying to kill them all lurking right outside of Bushkill Falls’s earthen and rubble berms. No reason to go dealing death inside of them. The water was returned and for a while Charlie Zeek was resentful, but even that faded and he soon became just another neighbor.

The town was like that. This was no time for lingering quarrels or feuds, because Bushkill Falls could have been swallowed up by the war borne chaos just outside of its walls.

**

Curtis Wells had never been able to sleep in. Years ago, in a hot and dusty golden brown place, he had forgotten how. He had also nearly forgotten how to love and be tender, a gentle person. Without his little girls he wouldn’t ever have relearned.

Lucila was getting better at fixing breakfast. Bushkill Falls wasn’t quite so rich that they could eat fresh pork all the time, but they could at least manage good bacon. The family used a cast iron skillet because it lasted. She cooked the bacon first because it made the rest of breakfast that much more worth eating. Coffee smells and lively chatter from Lucila filled the farmhouse kitchen. Little Anya replied when and where she could, a bright eyed child who was a damn sight smarter than any two year old had a right to be. But the oldest daughter was a chatterbox, and no audience was required when Sila started up:

“This is the pig we traded Mister Dix for, daddy,” Lucila said as she pushed around the irregular, thick slices of bacon around the pan. “Mister Dix said that this pig was named Percy, and that Percy was a bad pig. Percy almost stepped on its own piglets or tried to eat them, I forget which. Daddy, if we eat a bad pig, does that mean--”

“Mind the grease, honey,” Wells said with a great deal of trepidation in his voice. War, more war, fights, the terrible, fanged Bearers, twisted denizens of the nuclear hellscape, outside beating on the walls...none of it scared Wells so much as the haphazard way his girls seemed to cheat death, each and every one of them. Boot camp was easier than having people you loved in your life, he thought ruefully.

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She gave the pan a shake so the hisses and pops slowed. “If we eat a bad pig does that make us bad people?”

“Certainly not, what nonsense.”

“Nonsense,” Little Anya agreed, sitting on her chair, eagerly trying to crawl towards the butter dish. She had to be reminded how to sit on her bottom.

Kendra was following the conversation, no smile on her face. Her eyes and face weren’t vacant or simple. She could only listen, that was all. She saw her father looking and gave him a pregnant look, as if she had a great deal to say but decided not to. She understood but could not contribute. His heart went out to her. It always did, no matter how many times he thought he had made peace with himself regarding her nature. 

“Lucila,” Wells said after they had eaten. “I need you to feed our pigs, give ‘em some water.”

“I will, daddy.” His eldest said. The eight year old smiled brightly. “Don’t want them going bad!”

“Kendra,” He said, turning his pursed smile onto his middle child. “Can you let the chickens out, feed ‘em the kitchen scraps, and gather up the eggs?”

The blonde girl nodded in her solemn way, cleared her plate and then began to gather up the bits of food left over.

“And once you get done with the pigs, make your way over to the old stone well,” Wells told Lucila. “Anya and I will be there repairing it, that last storm broke off a few of its blocks. Its about time you learned some basic masonry. You can ride Mickey Mouse.”

“What about Hawthorne?” Sila was horse crazy. Wells often thought that his eldest should have been born a half century ago, when horses were all folk had. Well, he conceded, it was mostly all they had now.

Hawthorne was a spirited young Welsh Cob, and Lucila was almost too good at riding, so good that it gave her father a great deal to worry about. As responsible as she was overall, a great kid who made him proud, when Lucila got ahorse she was a demon rider, reckless and too fast. In a few years she would be outriding him, and that wasn’t any kind of fatherly exaggeration. No amount of war or night terrors were half so frightening as watching Lucila thunder around the farm on Mickey Mouse, who she had already outgrown, when it came to horsemanship, anyway. Hawthorne was simply too strong for her, or perhaps Curtis Wells wasn’t ready for his biggest little girl to be that grown up yet. What father is?

“You can ride Hawthorne after your ninth birthday,” He told her. She and Anya were lucky to have birthdays, Wells often told them. Kendra’s is unknown and we had to pick it for her. 

It was on Lucila’s lips to speak up, in her nature to fight back, to resist. Probably in another time and place he would have had a lot more problems with her, with all of his daughters. But they all knew that their survival depended on obeying him. The knowledge that their father was all that stood between them and being homeless at best, hurt or dead at worst, went bone deep in each of them, even Anya, the baby. But all his eldest did was say nothing, pursing her lips and turning away.

Work began for the day.

**

He was no stonemason, not by a long shot. He could throw a few bricks together, of course, but anything more complicated than that had to be loaned out to someone in town and therefore paid for. He was no tightwad, but times were always lean on the farm, on every farm in America, if America could still be thought to even exist. 

Luckily, this job was very straightforward. The hardest thing about it was distracting Anya. Wells needed Lucila and Kendra to work every day that they could spare from their education. Twice a week or so, sometimes more but never less, both girls attended school in town. It didn’t matter that there were thirty, forty kids being taught by two people, they needed to go. So that meant there was no one to watch the baby but he.

Not that he minded. As grabby and mouthy as she was, Anya just liked to take part in any activity he or her sisters were doing. So Wells sacrificed an old trowel, some wet mortar, and a few of the storm broken stone blocks, small enough for her to pick up in her tiny hands, light enough so she wouldn’t hurt herself. Wells got up to asking her three times not to be so messy with the mortar before he gave it up and Anya settled in to enjoy her play.

The scrub scrunched with noise. It was a horse and rider, but it couldn’t have been Lucila on Mickey Mouse. The sound was of a full grown adult, moving too fast to be his daughter, and coming from the wrong direction, anyway. It was somebody from town...or worse, somebody from outside of it.

Wells always went armed, even on his own farm. He was lucky in that he had kept his old issued holster and sidearm. The 9mm pistol was coyote tan, with a well worn 21 round magazine. Before the war, Wells had had many firearms, but he pared it down to a small arsenal as the more exotic cartridges, the .40 Smith and Wesson, the .32 caliber, had run dry. Bushkill Falls had an armorer, Darry Barry Johnstone, and out of necessity he had focused on developing production lines for only a handful of every day calibers. 9mm was one of them, though, and as Curtis Wells loosened his pistol in its holster he was damn glad for it.

A sickly sweet tobacco smell preceded the rider, announcing his identity as loud and clear as if he had shouted it out. No one else in town liked or bothered to trade for tobacco.

“Hiya, Curt,” Sheriff Easterman smiled, the gesture shifting the hand rolled cheroot to the other side of his mouth. Beneath a wide brimmed hat his features were lined and weathered, a wrinkled face beaten down by the sun and a body beaten down by lots of riding, shooting and hard work. There was a reason Easterman was sheriff, though. There was an old Belgian bolt rifle sticking up over his shoulder, and he was deadly with it. 

“Sheriff,” Wells said. With one of the frequent, automatic glances a parent does to check on their child, he made sure Anya was occupied and not liable to kill herself and returned the sheriff’s wave, making his way over to him.

Horses didn’t like Wells, and he can’t say he was too fond of them either. He always said that they were a farm tool like any other, just larger, smellier, and ate more. The sheriff’s was an ornery one, as hoary and strong as its rider, a piebald old warrior of a mare named Cora. Cora eyed the approaching Wells with wary black eyes.

“Sorry to interrupt you at work,” Easterman said. “That storm wreck your well a little, eh?”

“Yeah, just a few stones. Got my oldest coming by to lend a hand in a bit.”

“How are the girls?”

“Fine, sheriff. What’s up?”

Easterman’s face was usually nigh inscrutable, but there was hesitancy written all over it now. “Do you remember during last month’s town hall meeting you volunteered to shelter the preacher that was passing through on their way down south?”

“I do. They’re here?”

“Yeah...she is, Curt.”

She. The word, the syllable, hung there like a thousand pound anchor. Wells glanced at his youngest, who was by now threatening to eat the mortar off of her fingers. He made a slashing gesture at her and asked her not to. 

“A female preacher.”

“Yeah, I know.” The sheriff said. “Unusual, that’s for sure. That going to be a problem?”

“Not at all.” Wells said. “In fact, its a lucky thing I volunteered for it.”

“Thought so too. I will send her through tonight. She’s a little unusual, but then again, I guess you’d have to be if you were a woman preacher.”

“Sure. I can go into town and pick her up, if you need.”

“No, no. I know how hard it is for you to get away, with three little ones. You’re doing me a favor, besides. I’ll send one of my deputies.” The sheriff turned Cora’s head to leave.

“Sheriff?” Wells called out after him. Anya was trying to crawl up his leg, getting her mortar stained fingers all over his trousers. He scooped her tiny weight smoothly up off the ground.

“Yeah?” Easterman yelled over his shoulder.

“What’s the preacher’s name?”

“Lilith. Miss Lilith Stone.”

**