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since I had a shower, Jim thought with amused irony...  Those new folk he's met in Concord had dragooned him into helping them set up some amenities for the settlement.

Seems their genius handyman wasn't up to knocking together some bed the same way he wasn't that adept at cracking into computers either... He seemed amazed when he set up some barrels on the roof and filled them with water after plumbing them  into the house with some scrap pipe and industrial shower hardware he'd found in one of his late neighbor's storage sheds in their back yard...

Leave the water to heat in the sun, and voila, hours later one hot shower. Guess being raised by mostly off grid parents finally paid off. Winter would wind up being a bitch though... He's learned in his time here with Mai, that New England winters were just as bad as the ones back home in Wyoming...

Mai... why did he have to think about his wife just now. He leaned his head into the bathroom tiles and wept.  He knew why... She would have happily joined him in this shower if she was still alive. She's been all business when her met her on Formosa when his unit went in to help the Kuomintang resistance.  She's been the Dragon Lady back then... once they got evacuated back to the USSA, she'd become much more kittenish towards him.

Two mutants that found each other in a time of war. Both of them surprised when they conceived a child together. He'd been told the treatments he went through would render him sterile, and the life Mai had been forced to lead left her thinking she was happily barren...

Then came Shawn...

Now they were both gone.