The Power of Ten

The conveyor she’d built rumbled to life with speed, and corn seed began to spew into the back of the farm’s main truck, with two others borrowed from neighbors waiting to take up the rest of the load.

The owner of the granary wasn’t too pleased to see them pumping in seed to their trucks at the same time as he was filling his silos for the farmers in the area to buy, but he couldn’t do anything about it. They were using their own equipment and trucks on the service road, just keeping pace with the train as it dumped its load for him.

It took about an hour to fill all three trucks, and Sama broke down her conveyor quickly, hopped on the last truck being driven by Josiah, and they trundled on home, having saved over three dollars a bushel in seed costs after everything was calculated.

------

The corn was waist-high by the Fourth, even though the weather was as cool and dreary as ever, and the rain was typical on and off. The stalks still grew like gangbusters, and with the blessing from the Church of Flora they’d managed to gain with the money they saved, there were no problems with bugs across the fields.

Sama had them plant half the fields as sweet corn, and when it came near harvest time, spread word around that the best sweet corn crop in two decades had come in, and they were selling it for fifty cents a cob, come pick it!

The first few people were skeptical, until they ripped open the cobs and saw the bulging yellow kernels, like something out of an old cartoon. Mom was boiling it in a cooker there for people to eat and try it out, and pretty soon word was spreading, and people wanting that incredible corn they’d seen photos of on the internet were pounding on the door wanting to buy as much as they had.

They had five hundred acres of sweet corn to harvest, but their labor force basically took care of most of it themselves. The people eating it hadn’t tasted corn like that outside a greenhouse or Floran field, and were happy to pay the inflated prices for The Sunny Corn of the Piotrowski family.

Even the Florans and Aruans were amazed at the harvest, and weren’t shy about buying up lots of it for their own use. What couldn’t be cooked now could be canned or frozen, after all.

All in all, it was the best year farming they’d ever had, cleared their debts out completely, and allowed them to invest in some money for the future.

None of them talked about the Pattern in the back of the property, now staked out with more plants on it, catching more sunlight for next year’s harvest.

They were gonna be the best batch of beans the county had ever seen...

-------

More years pass...

“Sama! Sama! Look! Look! It’s a Walker!”

Sama was tossing manure into the old pickup. She’d started boarding and training horses on the side for extra money, and even established equestrians marveled at her skill with them.

Good manure, properly Energized, also made a pure fertilizer additive that worked above and beyond Catching Sunlight. When you can talk to the horses and cows, they generally didn’t mind dumping most of their loads in one location, keeping the place cleaner for themselves.

They were a lot easier to take care of, too. She might only have a few free points of ki, but Whiskers of the Wild was a fine thing to Invest them into.

Jill was running towards her, pointing at the figure lurching towards the back fence from the treeline there, moving awkwardly and stiffly... and definitely coming after her. Her baby sister, like all of them, had grown up on a steady diet of undead-killing news, movies, games, and videos, and recognizing a Walker wasn’t hard at all.

By their clothes, it looked like some guy had gone out hunting and got himself killed somehow, and naturally risen up at midnight. Sama touched the tags at her throat that she wore, that everyone wore, so they could be identified if they were killed and ended up Animated.

“William! Grab the axe!” Sama shouted, pointing at her younger brother, then the woodpile with said item stuck into the splitting stump. Knowing better than to challenge his older sister when she talked like that, the eight-year-old sprinted for it quickly.

“Jill! Go into the barn and grab the lasso by the door.” Already breathing hard, Jill didn’t stop as she swept by, and Sama narrowed her eyes and went down to meet the poor bastard, pitchfork in hand.

He was definitely in hunting garb, and given the season, likely poaching out of season, not all that uncommon in someplace as wild as this. His clothing was ragged and torn, and by the way he was lurching, he’d broken his leg and probably his hip somehow.

Zombies only had minimal intelligence, so it kind of fell over the back fence of the yard, clambered back to its feet, one leg bending impossibly as it did so, and continued towards her as the closest prey.

Dead three or four days, she judged, and given the color, it had taken him a while to die, probably from internal injuries.

Given she didn’t weigh much, it was probably a good idea to get some velocity behind this. It wasn’t like this lump of dead meat was going to dodge.

She slammed into him with a hundred pounds of sinew and long prongs, driving the steel in deep and leaving it there to control him as he flailed at her and the steady wood, sending it stumbling this way and that as it flailed at her and the tines in its chest.

Jill and William came running up together, the former with the lasso, the latter with the axe. “Drop the axe. William, take the other end of the rope; drag it low between you and hook this dead thing’s feet.”

Zombies weren’t people, and even though this was real life, her siblings got over it fast, boosted by the utter disdain she was showing towards it as she kept it away from them.

With a whoop, the two of them caught its ankles and yanked its feet out from under it. It fell heavily to the ground as Sama let go of the pitchfork, grabbed the rope, and hogtied its legs in seconds.

She kicked it in the chest as it struggled up, wrenched out the pitchfork, and turned it over, driving the pitchfork back in. “Jill, stand here,” she ordered, not even looking, and her little sister uncertainly came over to grab the pitchfork and stand on its back as Sama wrenched one arm, then the other over, and hogtied them both. “William, chop off its head.”

He looked a little queasy, but she didn’t even look at him. He nodded and grabbed the axe as the two girls held the struggling thing down. He hefted it up, and chopped it down.

He only got part of the neck. Sama snickered, he blushed, and chopped twice more before the zombie’s head rolled free, dark stuff that wasn’t blood anymore gushing out of it in a stinking mess, and it stopped moving.

“Ugh!” they all said together, holding their noses. “Right. Jill, go tell mom. Will, go call Dad and tell him. We’ll let them call the sheriff.”

Her younger siblings ran off, all full of excitement at killing their first zombie. They would have a great story to tell their friends!

Sama eyed the big tear on the unbroken leg, and without any squeamishness, pulled it open, to reveal a big bite mark at the back of the thigh, probably hamstringing him.

She pulled back his sleeves, seeing the deep gouges and gashes there that weren’t from stumbling through brush.

He hadn’t died, he’d been killed, and probably fallen off something as he was bleeding out.

Killed by something that hadn’t bothered to hunt him down and eat him.

Wolves were far more aggressive in a magical world than in a normal one, so all the old wives’ tales about them stealing in and being willing to attack humans were actually true now... which is why there were things like chain-link fences, dogs, and lots of guns and clubs around.

But if he’d been attacked by wolves, he should have been tracked down and eaten, even if he fell off something.

Sama looked at the tree line behind their property, and frowned... then smiled.

Karma waited for nobody, it seemed...

------

Sama left the zombie exactly like it was, patiently tolerating her mother rushing out and making a fuss. Her dad arrived about ten minutes later, rushing back from the store, and the sheriff pulled in about five minutes after he did.

This definitely wasn’t the first time he and his deputy had seen something like this, but it was the first time a bunch of kids had hogtied one and chopped off its head for them. They took his tags, and identified him as Chester Grolly, who’d been called in as missing two days ago. They’d found his campsite about ten miles away... somehow his corpse had wandered all the way over here.

Sama was watching closely, and the sheriff and the deputy didn’t say anything when they saw the bite marks. They took pictures, got the story, wrapped the corpse and its head up, threw it in the back of the pick-up truck, and headed back to town.

Sama pulled her dad over. “Papa, he didn’t fall on something and die. He got hamstrung by a wolf, and had bite marks all over his arms.”

Darren stared at his middle daughter, who had that serious look on her face again. He’d seen the marks, too, but thought nothing of them. “You sure about that?”

“Dead sure, Papa.”

“Why wouldn’t John say anything about that, then?” he asked, brow furrowing.

“Yeah. A wolf killing somebody is not a small thing, Papa. More to the point... how the fuck did a wolf kill a hunter who would have a rifle and a big sidearm in these woods, and even make him run? He’d just shoot a whole pack unless they tore out his throat... but he was running away, instead of putting his back to a tree and just shooting them as they came.”

“That...” He didn’t know what to say.

“I had Chomps and Cujo take a sniff at the Walker before the sheriff got here. There was something on him.” She pointed at the distance, where the two dogs were watching from near the barn, and whistled. Their ears perked up, and the big farm dogs trotted in our direction.

After the problems with the fey, Bowser had always been the house dog, but they had two others now, working around the farmhouse, keeping watch at night and over the cattle and horses. They helped her round stuff up at night, herd the livestock in, and ran with her when she was exercising and training the horses.

And, of course, she trained them in a lot of things, usually when nobody else was around.

She pointed around where the corpse had been. The two dogs went sniffing in the area obediently, and then lifted their heads as one, growling slightly, and looking in the direction the sheriff’s truck had departed in.

Her father was a bit taken aback, and also looked silently in that direction, his face hardening. “You think-?” he asked aloud.

“You still got those shotgun shells with the alchemical silver I made for you, Papa?” she asked calmly.

“Yes...”