Apocalypsis 04 - Haven

jackass.” I turned my frown on Jackson. “You’re making that up. Not cool.”
    “No, I swear to God, I ain’t. I can’t teach you the code ‘cause, you know, you’re a hot target and if anyone catches you they’re gonna torture the secrets outta ya, but you can believe it. That’s what that message says.”
    “Who sent it?”
    He flipped the paper over. “This one here came from the Amazons.”
    My jaw dropped open. “You know the Amazon bi … wenches? Over there by the ocean?”
    “Yeah. Everyone does.”
    “But that’s almost a hundred miles from here!”
    “So? Our birds can go that far. They’re champions.” He frowned at Bodo and took his bird back. “Only thing that ever gets in the way of our operation are them birds of prey.”
    “I can train dem to leaf your birds alone,” said Bodo, speaking in a rush. “I can do dat! Dey can live togedder and dat will be okay. It’s not a problem.”
    “You serious?” asked Jackson.
    “Yes, I am completely serious.” Bodo held out his hand for a shake. “I can’t train all da wild birdts, but I can train da ones I work with.”
    “How many you got?” Jackson shook his hand.
    “Only one now. And she’s kindt of lost. But I will have more later.”
    “Good. You go on then and train that pigeon killin’ out of ‘em. These birds are critical to our EWS.”
    “How does it work?”
    Jackson stared at me for while, long enough that it made me uncomfortable. I battled with myself but forced my hand to stay still, even though it wanted to check my nose for stray boogs.
    “Okay, fine. I’ll tell ya. But you gotta swear on your life and your boyfriend’s life that you ain’t never gonna tell none-a them kid-eaters what I’m gonna say.”
    I crossed my heart with my finger. “I swear on all that is holy. I swear on the cattle you’re going to give me and the people of Haven.”
    “Well, we ain’t come to an agreement on that yet, but I get your meanin’.” He turned around and walked with the bird back to her cage, putting her inside. Once it was closed again, he came back to us. “All our birds have leg bands. We put ‘em on when they’re just babies. They grow up and the band is permanent. They’re foot’s too big for it to come off. We can put messages like that one you saw inside the band.”
    “But how does the bird know where to go?”
    “Before all the world went to crap, we taught ‘em. And we’re fixin’ to teach some more, too. It’s dangerous, going out there, but we gotta do it. The birds ain’t gonna live forever.”
    “How do you teach them?” asked Bodo, staring at Jackson intently.
    “They teach themselves, basically. They’re amazing creatures. We put them in a small portable cage and bring them about a mile away the first time. We let ‘em go and they fly home. They always fly home. Every day we do it again, only farther and farther away each time. Eventually they can go from really far and always come right home.”
    “But how do they know where home is if you have them in a cage while you transport them?” I asked.
    “They use the magnetic fields in the earth and smell and sight. I’m tellin’ ya. They’re like magic creatures, these birds. Without them, we’d be in the dark all the time. I can’t tell you how many times they’ve saved our bacon.”
    “But how do you send them somewhere else?”
    “Well, that’s the tricky part. See, we have to get new birds trained all the time, because we can only get them to go two places: home and to their food stop.”
    “Food stop?”
    “Yeah. This is kinda recent in the evolution of carrier pigeons, actually.”
    He looked so serious and sounded so academic, I was picturing him lecturing a university class, even though he definitely sounded like a redneck more than a professor.
    “Used to be they only went one way. But somebody smarter-n me figured out they’d go where their food is too, and that they didn’t need to roost where their food is necessarily. So we rigged it up for them to have food at one stop and their home at the other. They can go back and forth between those two places, regular as clockwork, couple times a day.”
    “So that explains you getting messages to and from the Amazons. But how do you get other info? Or don’t you get other info?”
    “Sure, like I said … we get info from all over the state. You can imagine it like a connect-the-dots kinda map. I have links to the Amazons and Cracker Barrel and a few other