The Dead Town

Chapter 43

In the interest of efficiency, a Communitarian needed to adapt to setbacks whenever they occurred. With the urgent need to finish bringing more order to the disordered barn and thus do her part to destroy humankind, Nancy Potter used the push broom as a crutch and hobbled into the tack room at the back of the barn.

At the end of that narrow space stood a small desk where the real Mayor Erskine Potter had sat to maintain records of expenses related to the horses and to keep notes about vet visits and recommendations. At the desk was an old wooden office chair on wheels.

Nancy broke the back off the chair, turning it into a wheeled stool. Using a large roll of Vetrap hoof tape, she bound the cauterized stump of her left leg to the stool, which wasn’t an easy task, but she persisted for the Community. Walking on her right foot, rolling on her footless left leg stump, she maneuvered out of the tack room, into the main part of the barn.

She stood over the remains of Ariel, wondering if there was anything she ought to do. This didn’t look like a Builder anymore. It was like a large, mostly smooth formation of limestone in which someone had been carving faces. There were three faces at different places, all sort of resembling Ariel but distorted. She turned the broom around in her hands and rapped the end of the handle against what had once been Ariel, and it sounded like stone, too. She could not see anything she needed to do more urgently than sweep and sweep the barn floor until all the bristle marks in the dirt were aligned rather than chaotic.

As she set to work, she realized that sprinkles of snowflakes were coming through the two holes that Ariel, in her swarm mode, had made in the roof. Because the building was heated, most of the flakes melted and evaporated as they fell. Those few that survived all the way to floor became dots of dampness that would soon dry.

The broom swished and swished, the wheels of the chair squeaked, the seat creaked. A light wind soughed in the eaves of the barn and snuffled at the holes in the roof.

The horses were calm again. Commander had not managed to kick out any portion of his stall at the height of his terror. Now and then, Queenie and Valentine nickered. A couple of times, the stallion snorted.

Entirely committed to precisely aligning the bristle marks in the dirt, replicant Nancy seldom looked up from the difficult task before her. But every time she raised her eyes, the horses had their heads beyond the tops of their stall doors, watching her, sometimes while they chewed a bit of hay, other times just staring.

They were so stupid. Like everything in nature, they were really stupid, poorly designed, requiring too much in the way of resources, crapping all the time, urinating all the time, so stupid that they would just stand and watch, hour after hour, as she swept, just stand and watch, too stupid to understand that she was working for the total destruction of them and of the natural world that sustained them.

The horses were so stupid, Nancy wanted to laugh at them, but she couldn’t. In theory, she quite understood the psychological and emotional causes of laughter, but laughter was for human beings, one more indication of their lack of seriousness, of how easily they were distracted. Communitarians could pretend laughter to pass for the people they replaced, but laughter never distracted them from their duties, from their lethal crusade. Laughing or not laughing, humans were inattentive, heedless, preoccupied, oblivious fools, no better than horses.

For a while, she pretended laughter, practiced it diligently, so that if at some point she needed to masquerade as an amused and distracted human, she would sound convincing. The swish of the broom, the squeak of the wheels, the creak of the chair seat, the sough and snuffle of the wind, and her laughter, and the snow fluttering down and vanishing in midair, and the horses watching, the stupid horses, so easily entertained.