Free Defective by Sharon Boddy

he was, with light gray
eyes. She looked strong. Still, she was just a woman, Rank thought,
never mind what Gaines said. How bad could she be? Even if she is a
defective, it's only for a few days.
    He brought her
back to the house and locked her in a wire storage locker in the
cellar where Hap slept. He left her a bucket and two wormy
apples.
    ___
    PC Pierre had left
the children the day after Bull and Jones had gotten the stag.
Porkchop insisted that he take some of the meat with him; Jones had
sliced off a hunk and Santa had wrapped it up in a cloth bag.
    He spent a week at
the summer cabin, readying it for the season. He cleaned and aired
it out, oiled and set his traps, and chopped a month's worth of
firewood to add to the months of fuel he had stacked against one
wall of the cabin. He smoked the hunk of deer meat the children had
given him. Mostly, he revelled in the sounds of the woods. He got
reacquainted with his favourite spots and spotted familiar animals.
He ate and slept well.
    From his library
at Baker's Yard, he had brought some of his great-grandfather's
reference books with him and spent his evenings reading. One was a
binder of essays written by his great aunt on his mother's side. He
had the police diaries of his father, grandfather and Pappy, but
the essays were the only link he had to his mother's family. At the
top of each page was her name, Adelaide Mars and, in red pen, a
letter. Most often the letter was a B but there were a few As and
one C.
    One essay was
called The Three Theories of the Upheaval. The first theory was
that an explosion at a nuclear plant — PC Pierre still wasn't
completely sure what that was — caused a massive energy wave that
levelled half the planet. The second theory blamed the damage on an
earthquake, or a series of earthquakes. The third was that a meteor
hit set off a chain of explosions and upheavals across the whole
world.
    "No matter what
the cause," she had written, "mountains collapsed, rivers caught
fire and more than half of the world's population died."
    How could rivers
catch fire? None of his references explained this or provided
enough evidence to determine the exact cause. Everything he had was
anecdotal. So much human and natural history had been lost during
that period and so much more had been destroyed since. In the
absence of any detailed scientific records, certainty was
impossible. All he could surmise is that what was now Deloran
County must not have been in the direct path of the destruction. It
had suffered some — Spoon Valley attested to that — but roads and
tunnels and the remains of some bridges remained. In some places,
closer to New Key, he'd also seen metal tracks that had probably
been used for transport at one time.
    In another essay,
Adelaide wrote about the infection. "The infection came after the
Great Upheaval and killed a lot more people. It came from the west
and it killed a lot of adults but not as many children. Some babies
were born with defects, like knowing how to talk and read. Others
could read minds or move things without touching them. It wasn't
just humans. The Pecant Roster reported that, in East Dullinge dogs
ran an inch above the ground and chickens laid fully cooked
eggs."
    PC Pierre through
it might be nice to have a chicken that could do that. It would
certainly be a time saver.
    Over the years,
the Constable had tried to assemble his library in chronological
order but other than the police records, which were always dated
many of his resources were not. His best guess was that whatever
had occurred happened six or seven hundred years ago; the infection
that followed had been virulent and almost always fatal for at
least three hundred years. If the police records, which included
all known registered deaths, were accurate, and he had no reason to
suspect they weren't, fatalities had already begun to decline
during his great-grandfather's generation.
    Other texts
suggested that the infection could lay dormant for decades