Gust Front

Harry regarded the clear liquid carefully. «Well, it's a little early,» he said, then took a swig. He grimaced and coughed. «Oh! Smooth!» he gasped. «Jesus, what is that?»

«Georgia Mountain Dew,» Mike answered with a laugh. «Only the finest. Now what the hell is going on around here?»

* * *

Mike had never had a conch omelet before. He had to admit it wasn't bad, but the thought would take a little getting used to. He scraped up the last of the grits and wiped his mouth with the provided hand towel. The Key did indeed have coffee, and Mike had to admit that wherever it came from it was better than the issue can he had with him. He took another sip of the excellent brew and cleared his throat.

«So let me get this straight. All fuel is rationed. Okay, got that; it's that way all over. Fuel for the boats is rationed on the basis of their production. High-producing boats get more fuel.»

«Right-on so far,» said Harry, taking a sip of the java as well.

«And power to the islands has been out for months. So you have to have a generator to distill the water and make the ice. And the fuel for the icehouse has to come out of the pool of fuel for the boats?»

«Right.»

«And every month the price of the fish has gone down along with the fuel ration.»

«Yep,» said Harry. «Next month there won't possibly be enough fuel for all the boats and to make ice. If we can't store the fish until the trucks arrive, we might as well give up.»

«What about the stuff you've been holding back?» asked Mike, carefully.

Harry was cool. «What stuff?» he said, blandly.

Mike laughed and held up his wrist to reveal the AID. «My AID analyzed satellite imagery of this place for the last year. It says you're holding back about twenty percent of your production.»

Harry grimaced and nodded. «Yeah. But that goes to a lot of places. It's not really . . . available.»

«Maybe you'd better make it available,» said Mike, quietly. Hoarding was becoming a real problem as more and more people reacted to the coming invasion with a panic mentality.

Harry sighed. «If we did that it would take away the only things that make working here worth living.» He paused and thought about it for a moment. «The spare isn't just in fish. It's in stuff that's more transportable. It's in dried conch and lobster tails. Shells. Stuff like that.»

«What the hell do you use that for?» asked Mike.

«Trade goods, partly,» Harry answered, holding up the cup of coffee. «There are small traders who move stuff around the islands and up to the mainland. Conch keeps for a long time. There's a market for it in Florida. The traders get stuff in Miami you can't get in places like Cuba and bring back rum and coffee.»

«Oh,» said Mike, nodding his head. He was aware that the shortages had created a thriving black market, but this was almost like pioneer days. It sounded like a triangle trade.

«Some of it goes to the dolphins,» Harry pointed out. «They do a lot of their own foraging, but we still eke out their feed. And we do a little dealing on the side with the general goods trader that comes through.» He grimaced again. «The damn thief.»

«That bad?» asked Mike.

«Half the stuff he carries he'll only sell at black market prices. He'll have two cases of corn flour, but officially it's only one case. Once the first case is sold the rest sells at whatever the market will bear.»

«Damn,» said Mike with a stronger than habitual frown. «That's not the way it's supposed to work.»

«There's not enough fuel for us to go up to Miami every week or even every month. So we have to depend on the one 'official' trader or the free traders. But the free traders are totally black market and there's no way to be sure what they're going to be carrying.»

«And every month the price of the stuff is going up and the price of the fish is going down,» said Mike sourly.

«Right,» Harry said with the same tone. He looked like he'd bitten a Key lime.

Mike nodded in thought. He had had a thought the night before but it was firming up now. «Let me ask you this, Harry. What happens if you take the icehouse out of the equation?»

«What do you mean?» asked Harry. «We have to run the generator to keep the fish iced. Besides that, the distiller is our only consistent source of fresh water. We can't take it out of the equation.»

«But what if you could not use the fuel for the generator?» Mike asked. «What then?»

«Well, that puts off a reckoning,» Harry admitted. «We've thought about a windmill or something. We'd be pretty okay then. Hell, I've got an electric car stashed. We could load up on spare batteries and make it to Miami and back with at least some of the stuff we need.» He shook his head in despair. «But we don't have a windmill and they're impossible to buy these days. Even if we had the cash. And it wouldn't produce enough electricity to matter. And the first good storm would tear it up.»

«Ay-aaaah-ah,» Mike whispered and whistled a scrap of melody.

Harry smiled. «It's not quite that bad. We haven't had a Viking raid. Yet.»

Mike smiled. «It's an old memory. Who's your electrician?»

Harry wrinkled his brow in question. «Why the twenty questions?»

«I'm getting to that,» Mike said. «Is it you?»

«No,» admitted Harry. «It's one of the guys on Bob French's long-line boat.»

«Okay,» Mike said. «Well we'll have to wait for Bob to get back in to get it installed, but let me show you something I just happened to have brought along.»

* * *

Good day, thought Bob French as he navigated the cut up to No-Name-Key. The world might be going to hell in a handbasket, but the lack of tourists, fuel and markets had reduced fishing pressure to the point of recovery. Since the types of fishing that prevailed put more pressure on the upper end of the food chain, the stocks of feeder fish recovered in the first year of the emergency. Since then the increases in catch size across the board had been phenomenal. On ledges where he used to be lucky to get one legal-sized snapper he now was taking dozens a day. Lobster pots were coming in brimming with «keeper» langostino and occasionally had a real monster, the sort of lobster that hadn't been seen in the Keys since the '60s. And he had always thought that the tales the old-timers told of multi-square-mile shoals of herring and sardines were sea-stories until he saw one just this year.

This day he was coming in with a boat loaded to the gu

He suspected, hell, all the fishermen suspected, that it wasn't supposed to be that way. But without any way to communicate with the mainland except mail or driving, nothing seemed to be happening. He had finally used up his hoard of gas tickets and gone to Miami to complain. After two days of getting shuffled from one department to the next at the Marine Fisheries offices he had to get back. If he wasn't fishing he'd find himself on the shore.

And he was better off than most of the fishermen. His boat was free and clear and one of the larger ones still operating. Two of the guys working for him had lost their boats to the repo companies after they couldn't make the payments. He couldn't pay his crew much—hell most everybody got paid in fish or supplies—but it was something. The communities had pulled together so nobody starved and everybody had a little something extra. But nobody, not even he or Harry, had much.