There was a lull in our settlement for a while: housing was being completed, children were being resettled, weapons were being dismantled and counted, the protective fields around the settlement were being increased little by little, and so on.
We took out exactly a hundred children. Babies from two to seven years old. With them were five adults - four women and a man, a watchman. The women are nannies, a cook, and a deputy director. One of the nannies, Lillian Barrett , turned out to be an almost better acquisition than the entire stock of weapons.
The young woman, just the one who came first out of the kindergarten in the crowd of children and opened the gate, like me, Eduard and Lucas, turned out to be a mage. A druid. Those very vines were the work of her hands. The mutant plants, at her will, protected the building from shadows and mutants. The pollen worked on the mutants, drugging and disabling them, and the tough, thick stems choked and bound and sprouted into bodies, feeding on flesh and blood in the process. Moreover, shadows could not slip through the whips of these plants, which was much more important.
Food was simple enough: the kitchen was stocked with potatoes, carrots, and cabbage and radishes. There were also a few greenhouses on the grounds of the garden, very tiny ones, not so much for food but to keep the older kids busy. Several varieties of cucumbers and tomatoes grew in the greenhouses. After Lillian worked with them, the vegetables not only grew larger, but also bore fruit within a week. Life span and micronutrient requirements changed accordingly. To ensure that the new varieties do not turn the soil into almost useless sand, it is constantly fertilized. What - a separate conversation, which definitely should not be started in a decent society and at the table. Rapid-ripening vegetables were mainly used to save it. She also got water with the help of plants: the druid made aloes and cacti growing on the windows in her studies into water-collecting plants by exerting herself. The plants grew to more than two meters in size, and the juice in their flesh became useful and a thirst-quenching delight. In addition, the huge sharp thorns and tree-like skin, which acted as an external skeleton, so that the plants did not sprawl under their own weight on the ground into mush, became an additional line of defense in the way of mutants and the rare zombies, which were lucky to get over the bars of the fence. We couldn't see this plantation, as it was blocking the building.
Lillian was now engaged in our fields, increasing the growth of cultivated plants, the size and ripening rate of their fruit. This girl was of far more use to the Enclave than either I or the flamethrower. Except that the healer was on a par with her.
After the fields, the druid promised to work on fruit trees and bushes - pears, apples, currants and so on. According to her words, already in six months the village will be able to enjoy the taste of their fruits. Of course, genetically modified, but, as they say, hunger is not a bitch.
It would be more accurate to say magomodified.