The next morning, Cooper Howard was woken by the loud yowls of a cat and the squeals of his daughter. Reflexes took over before his brain had completely woken up, and he had thrown on his duster and grabbed his gun automatically. Then he remembered he had slept in nothing but his underwear, as he packed light and his clothes were so dirty that disposing of them by fire would probably be more effective than washing them. The underwear, at least, was clean. He had the tan suit and shirt he wore to meet Janine, but not the time to dig them out and put them on, not when his girl might be in danger.
Buttoning the duster far enough so as not to appall anyone, he crossed the living room and threw open the door to Miz Hunter's—no, Lana's—bedroom, he beheld…
Zenda, crouched in a businesslike position, on Lana's bed, right next to Lana, straining to push out something dark apparently wrapped in a plastic sack.
"Is she pooping?" Janey asked. She was sitting up on a daybed to the side, tangled up in the covers.
"No," Cooper said, looking at the bewildered, half-asleep woman in the bed. One strap of her nightgown had fallen down, and her eyes were a little puffy but much less bloodshot. Tendrils of her hair had come out of its braid, and she looked like…
All right, she was an attractive woman.
The important thing now was that with another yowl, Zenda delivered a kitten, wrapped in its placental sac but already wiggling to be free.
"She's having babies." he said.
"Right here?" Lana asked, blinking her eyes. "Right now?"
"That's what's happening. Is this her first litter?" he asked.
"Yes," Lana replied.
Zenda turned around to sniff what had just come out of her. She nosed the kitten, but then looked at Lana and mewed as plaintively as a cat who was easily the size of Dogmeat could.
"Don't you know what to do?" Lana asked her. "Don't look at me, I don't know either."
"I do," Cooper offered. "Get a clean washcloth, please, Janey."
Janey threw back the covers, hopped up, and dashed through a door only to reappear immediately. "Here!"
"Thanks. Now, I'm gonna—." He reached for the kitten, and Zenda growled like a mountain lion. "Alright, you don't want me touching your baby. I can take a hint. Lana. She should tear off the sac and wash the kitten clean, then encourage it to nurse."
"So I…?" she asked, taking the washcloth.
"Use the washcloth, unless you want to wash it the way she would."
"Right. Zenda, I love you very much, but I am not about to tongue-bathe your babies for you. I have to draw the line somewhere." Picking up the kitten, which the mother cat did not object to, she ripped the membrane with her fingernails and peeled it off. Then she tousled the kitten in the towel. It made tiny cries of protest as she did so, little squeaks that made her chuckle.
"Oh, I know. Your mama wasn't much bigger than you are now when we found her. Eight little legs—you look so much like a wooly caterpillar right now! A bobbed tail, just like your mama. You're mostly black with some white, kind of the opposite of her…."
Lucy wandered in, yawning and scratching her head. "What's going on—eww!"
"What exactly prompted that response?" Cooper asked her sarcastically, aware that his calves and feet were currently on display and they weren't pretty.
"All the blood and, and, fluid—and eww, what is Zenda doing?" Lucy asked.
Zenda was eating the placental sac, with encouragement from Lana. The cat was also watching Lana's every move regarding the kitten. Seeing this, Lana held the kitten up and pretended to lick it.
"Like this, see? Here you go, cuddlewumpus, your very own baby." Lana put the kitten down in front of the tarantulynx's nose.
Everyone held their breath as Zenda sniffed the little creature. Then she extended a very long pink tongue and began to wash it herself. A deep purr rumbled out to follow, and the kitten squeaked some more.
Just as the kitten started to nuzzle's Zenda's belly, another contraction rippled through the mother cat.
"There's another kitten!" Janey gasped.
"It looks like," Lana observed. "I was going to get up and make breakfast, but—."
"You're gonna be busy for a while," Cooper finished her sentence. "I may not be the cook you are, but I can rustle up a bunkhouse breakfast as good as the next cowpoke."
"Oh, would you?" Lana's face relaxed.
"Of course! If only there was somebody who knew where everything is kept, somebody who lives here….Do you know of anybody like that, Janey?"
She rolled her eyes. "Daddy…. I don't think you're going to like frying bacon dressed like that. Bacon grease stings."
"I was not planning to. I will get dressed first. So should you, I think."
A few minutes later, they met back in the kitchen. He wore the shirt and the suit's pants, and felt nearly like the man he was before the war, ready to have breakfast with…with his family.
Lucy stayed with Lana, watching kittens being born.
Janey was opening the kitchen cabinets and taking things out. "Here's where we keep the coffee—except it's roasted ground razorgrain that Lana keeps in a coffee tin so it picks up some flavor. This is rolled razorgrain that cooks up like oatmeal. We keep tins of milk in this cupboard, but they have to go in the icebox once they're open."
"Thank you, Punkin. What about the rest?"
"Down in the cellar," she said. "Follow me." Janey beckoned to the stairs, and he followed. She turned on the lights, and the stairs stopped being spooky and started being homely.
Halfway down the stairs, a laser grid sprang to life, sensor beams red with alarm turned pale blue when the bioscanners recognized them. He saw machine gun turrets aimed at the stairs from three directions, watched as they went dormant again.
"This is some security you've got here." He observed.
"Um…Lana was kind of fibbing when she talked about bad people around here. I mean there aren't many, but when there are, she sends them to feed the pigs." Janey's voice went a little wavery and apologetic.
For a moment, he thought of hardened raiders hauling buckets of pig swill, but then he realized what she meant. "Are you afraid I'm going to think she's a bad person because she gets rid of people who want to rob and harm the two of you?"
"…Maybe?"
He laughed, thinking of the mountain of corpses he had left in his wake. "I would never do that. Not ever."
They reached the bottom of the stairs, and he saw the shelves. "This is…."
About a third of the shelves were full. He hadn't seen that much food in one place in two hundred years. No wonder the stairs, and he noticed, the storm cellar doors to the outside, had so much firepower aimed at them. If food was gold, this cellar might not be Fort Knox, but it was at least the kind of bank car on a train that the bad guys tried to rob in his movies.
It wasn't prewar processed goods, at least not that he could see from where he was standing. What he saw was all home produced—canned in mason jars, barrels, metal containers, hung from racks…
Most people considered themselves lucky to have enough food for a couple of days. People had killed each other over a matter of half a dozen packages of Instamash and a few Salisbury Steaks.
Hehad killed people over that amount of food.
This was enough for four people for a couple of months, easily.
"Do you normally have this much food on hand?" he asked, suddenly sobered.
"Um…at this time of year, yeah. It's spring now. You should see it in fall when the shelves are full. It's important to have enough to make it all the way through winter. Nobody is ever really prepared their first winter here. They think, oh, winter lasts three months, I'll make sure I'm stocked up for that long. But here, winter really is more like five or six months, and even when spring comes, you still need to eat until stuff grows."
"What about you and Lana? Were you ready your first year? I mean, you're still here, so you must have done alright." He asked as they threaded their way through the shelves.
"We were okay because Kirby is really good at tracking game and Lana's a really good hunter. She also knows about things like what evergreens have Vitamin C in their needles so you drink tea made out of them and don't get scurvy."
"That's important, but Janey," he said sternly, even verging on anger. "If the power core runs out, is this cellar left unprotected?"
"Uh—yes." She said in a very small voice, her eyes big and wet, like a puppy's.
"Then Lana was too easy on you last night. You may think that food is everywhere and easy to get, because you were born before the war and you've never gone hungry, but it's worth more than gold and diamonds now. You can't eat gold or drink diamonds. The power core should be changed promptly, before it gets below ten percent, and especially before you leave on a trip. I'm serious, Janey. Never neglect changing the power core again."
"I won't, Daddy. I swear. Cross my heart." She traced a cross over her heart with a finger as she said it.
"That's my girl. Now, tell me, do you and Lana grow and preserve all of this yourselves?"
"No, just about half of it. The rest we trade for with neighbors."
"Good to know. How does that work?" he asked.
"We trade meat and honey for stuff like grain and milk and cheese, things we don't grow or can't make. Or we trade for labor, if people don't have things we want. Like the transformer. In November of the year before, Lana and I went to the Kanadas house with a flitch of bacon and a big chunk of rendered lard and she said, 'In the spring when the ground's firm again, I want to hire you and your Brahmin to go to the lake and help us bring back a piece of equipment. I'm willing to pay you in advance, and here's what I'm offering.' It was a good idea, because it took all afternoon, even with their help. And it was their first winter here, so they were real happy to get the meat."
He was starting to get an idea of how it worked. "So you do a lot of those trades?"
"All the time." Janey said. "I mean, we don't just trade with people their first winter. That's just how it gets started. After that, we trade pretty much any season, and then we buy some stuff with caps when we go to New Vegas. Like baking soda and salt and vanilla, things you can't get here. We use a lot of salt. I don't know what we're gonna do now if we can't go to Vegas because of those men."
"Maybe somebody should start a store up here, so you don't have to go that far," he suggested, while privately wondering if he could possibly assassinate Ceasar. It might be quicker and easier than waiting for the heat to die down.
Janey led him to the bacon, which was when he learned that a flitch of radhog bacon was…as long as he was tall, and even bulkier. And that was after it was half used up. His daughter also chose a jar of preserved crab apples, and they went back upstairs, where he started making breakfast while his daughter went to check on the kitten situation.
When she returned, it was with the news that there were three so far, including the first one. The second was a darker grey than their mother, and the third was a red-orange one that Lana thought might be a boy.
What he was thinking, as he flipped the bacon in the pan, was how ironic it was that a woman who had been created to be a soulless hunter of her own kind, had a bigger heart than a woman born to human parents who was more than willing to burn down the world, as long as she got to ride it out in a good vault.
Because how else could he account for someone who was willing to give away a winter's worth of meat to a family in exchange for an afternoon's work? Unless, of course, she was just really sick of pork.