Fallback Read Free

he get up there?”
    I leaned on the rake. “I’m guessing the wood pile behind the coop needs to be moved. I had no idea goats were so…springy.”
    I hadn’t exactly planned to be a goat-keeper, but with the pending threat of marauders, we’d spent the last two days moving livestock from fenced pastures outside the Compound and inside the relative safety of our reinforced walls. While the whole subdivision was now enclosed, the only grassy, fenced areas inside were our training field and a few dozen individual yards. The training field was now subdivided and held horses and cows, and the goats had been parceled out among the homes with fenced back yards.
    “Huh.” Bethany dropped into a lawn chair, still studying the brown and white goat, which was contentedly chewing on a loose shingle. “Well, I’m guessing knocking him off the roof with a stick isn’t the way to go.”
    “Probably not.” Too bad. I had a lot to do, and I resented his interference in my plans.
    Bethany leaned back and folded her arms. “Maybe we could…”
    We were saved from whatever convoluted idea we would have devised when Melissa came out the door with a bucket.
    “Hey, guys, whatcha doing?” She looked at us, confused, shifting the bucket to her other hand. “You look sort of annoyed.”
    Bethany pointed. The goat raised his head, saw Melissa, and spit out the shingle.
    “Wilhelm,” Melissa scolded, “get down from there!”
    She stood, one fist on her hip, the bucket still clutched in the other, and I had to ask. “Wilhelm?”
    Melissa’s expression said I was totally missing the point. I probably was. “Yes, Wilhelm. People always call billy goats Billy, which is stupid. Anyway, I think he sounds German, so I named him Wilhelm.”
    Bethany squinted one eye as she tried to follow the logic. “The goat, Wilhelm…is German?”
    “Me-e-e-e-h.” Wilhelm apparently recognized his name. I detected no hint of a Teutonic accent, but what did I know?
    Melissa giggled. “What he is right now is hungry. He needs to come down from there.”
    “Um, yeah,” I said. “And how do we accomplish this?”
    Melissa just shook her head and started across the yard, rapping on the side of the bucket with the knuckles of her other hand. The nannies began dancing around, bleating about the glories of feeding time. The billy turned and trotted to the back of the roof, where he disappeared. There was the clattering of hooves and the sound of some logs bouncing off the wood pile, then he appeared around the side of the coop, shouldering the nannies out of the way in order to reach the bucket first. Melissa gently pushed him aside and poured the contents of the bucket into several metal pans under a stunted apple tree. The goats dug in, and Melissa sat on the edge of the patio, watching them.
    I gathered the eggs and went back inside to make lunch. Bethany sat at the table, stitching up a tear in the sleeve of a poplin jacket. I kept out the eggs I planned to use for our lunch and placed the rest in the mini refrigerator we were now able to operate.
    My favorite cast iron skillet clattered as I placed it on the propane camp stove, but before I could light the burner, I heard a voice calling in the street.
    Bethany and I hurried to the front door, just as Melissa came zipping around from the side yard. We saw eight-year-old Dustin Fowler pedaling down the middle of the road on his bicycle. “Meeting, meeting,” he shouted as he rode. “Everyone be in the pavilion in a half hour!”
    You didn’t really need phones or text messaging when you had a bunch of little boys on bicycles. They were pretty efficient. Dustin continued down the street and around the corner, still calling out his news.
    I felt as if my stomach filled with something hot and caustic. We’d been so busy bringing in early crops from the fields and greenhouses, shifting stockpiles, and moving the livestock, there hadn’t been a lot of time to worry about the council and what