After The Virus (Book 2): Homesteading

by Archer, Simon

  “Like what?”

  “We can’t manufacture some of the parts,” I replied. “Some of the things we have will last forever, so long as we take care of them, but electronics like what goes into regulating power from the solar panels, or even some of the generators, are beyond our capabilities. What we need to do is gather all the replacement parts we can, store them carefully, then hope we never need them.”

  “What about just going back to nature?” she suggested. “Hunting, gathering, farming, whatever.”

  “I don’t know about you,” I said with a faint smirk on my face, “but I kind of like my creature comforts. That ain’t to say that I can’t survive the old-fashioned way, just that so long as I can try to hold that inevitability back, I mean to do so.”

  “At least we don’t have to worry about turning the place into a fort,” she folded her arms behind her head and leaned back in the bucket seat.

  “Well,” I muttered. “About that…”

  Angie side-eyed me.

  “Do you really think it’s necessary? We haven’t even seen twenty people in going on six months now,” she complained. “I think that if the Reverend Price meant to send anyone this way to make trouble, it would have happened already.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “There’s also our mystery neighbor.”

  “Who you’ve heard, but not seen,” Angie said. “We’ve got signs up, and we’ve rolled out the welcome mat. If they want to stop in for a beer or something, I’m sure they will.”

  “You think I worry too much, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Did I say that?” she countered.

  “Not in so many words,” I replied.

  “I think you take too much on yourself,” she said deliberately. “And I think that somewhere deep down, you think you can fix things.”

  “Maybe I can,” I said, only half-joking. “I’ve got the know-how to keep most of our stuff running and even make old things into new things. With the right tools, I can make raw materials into new things.”

  “And you really need to start passing that knowledge on,” She told me. “Get me and Jackie involved. Estelle needs to do the same thing. If we lost either one of you, we’d be kind of screwed.”

  “You’d be fine,” I objected with a shake of my head. “Seriously, you and Jackie could-”

  “No,” Angie cut me off. “We couldn’t do what you can. We might be able to survive, but we wouldn’t have solar power, air conditioning, or… well, we’d probably have livestock with Jackie around.”

  “I wouldn’t sell yourselves short,” I said. “I suspect you both could do most of this stuff.”

  “You’re really being too nice, Henry,” Angie said, her tone suggesting that I had said enough. “All of us have our own places to shine. Yours happens to be mechanical things and building.”

  “Okay, okay,” I waved a hand placatingly. “I’ll stop.”

  “Good,” she said, then grinned and looked out the windows. “Where are we going now?”

  “Shed and storage place between Auburn and Opelika,” I told her. “They have build on-site steel prefabs, along with cement. I hope Bruce knows how to lay a slab.”

  “Whatever that means,” she said with a shrug.

  “A foundation,” I explained. “Concrete slab.”

  “Do you know how to do it?” Angie asked.

  “I know a lot about building,” I admitted. “Foundations, plumbing, wiring…”

  “So we girls just lucked into the best man to have in an apocalypse,” Angie stated.

  I glanced over to see her grinning and sighed. It was times like this that I had to remind myself that both of these women were pretty and great in bed, which was at least two of many reasons why I put up with them.

  Filbert’s Rent to Own Storage and Building Solutions sat on a fairly sizable bit of acreage off of the beaten track on one of the many main thoroughfares that connected the twin cities of Auburn and Opelika.

  The gate to the lot was still closed and secured with a wound chain and large padlock. I pulled the truck up and stopped, then retrieved a set of bolt cutters from my storage boxes before cutting the chain and unwinding it. The lock might be useful, and there was probably a copy of the key in Filbert’s office.

  Once the gate was open, I drove on through and parked in front of the large steel warehouse that squatted behind the double-wide that served as the place’s office and also where the proprietor, Phil Cooper, or Filbert, lived.

  Perhaps, unfortunately, his old El Camino sat, rusting away, in front of the trailer. I let out a sigh. We’d have to deal with another corpse.

  As I suspected, the roll-up doors to the warehouse were locked. I told Angie I’d be right back and headed for the trailer after getting my crowbar. Behind me, she just leaned on the truck’s fender and waited.

  The door was locked, too, but I was able to pop it out of track with the crowbar and pull it open. A dank, musty smell washed over me from the dark interior. I clicked on my headlamp and scanned the office in the dim light of that and the stray sunlight from behind me.

  The room was what you’d expect. There was a desk with an old computer, scattered papers, a couch with a coffee table and a rack of old magazines. One thing missing, though, was a television. Behind the desk was another low shelf and a small filing cabinet.

  I rifled through the desk first and quickly found a ring of keys, along with a nickel-plated Smith and Wesson .357 complete with a box of ammo. Old Filbert hadn’t been one to play, I reckoned.

  Taking the gun and the keys, I hurried back outside to the warehouse.

  “That was quick,” Angie observed.

  “Everything was right where it should have been,” I said, then held out the big revolver. “Tuck this away somewhere, please?”

  “Sure thing,” her eyebrow shot up as she took the pistol and box of ammo. “Nice find.”

  “I thought so,” I said, then focused my attention on the door. It took a few tries to find the right key while the brunette tucked the revolver away in the truck’s cab. By the time she walked back over, I had it unlocked. After that, it was just grabbing onto the handles and heaving.

  Racks and racks of sheet steel and other components greeted our eyes.

  “I hope you know what we need from here,” she said dryly.

  I stared for a bit, then walked in and began to pace the edge of the building. I found a desk with a three-ring binder as well as receipts and other paperwork. The binder, fortunately, contained schematics and lists of parts. Thankfully, all the parts were numbered, and a lot of them were already bound together into packages for easy loading and shipping.

  “Thank God for the organized,” I said to Angie as I held up the binder.

  “That does make life easier,” she said. “Can we do this without a forklift or anything?”

  “We can try,” I replied. “If not, the forklift is over there.”

  She looked where I indicated and nodded. “Looks like there are several canisters of LP gas with it, too.”

  “Even better,” I said. “Let’s see about loading up. Are you checked out on a forklift?”

  Angie shook her head.

  “I never had a need,” she replied. “But I guess you are?”

  “We used forklifts and forklift adjacent work vehicles a good bit at my posting,” I answered. “Though if you want to run it, I can probably teach you in about fifteen minutes.”

  “No,” she said. “You do it. Let’s finish this up and go home.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I replied, returning to the desk. None of Filbert’s keys looked like what I’d need for the forklift, so I suspected they’d be in the warehouse desk.

  Thankfully, they were.

  14

  It took a minute for the muscle memory to kick in, but it did, and I rolled the forklift from its parking slot with practiced ease. During my time in the Army, we’d had to use these things, and similar small, specialized vehicles. Humvees didn’t tow themselves, and heave
n forbid some new driver just out of boot camp ground the frame halfway up a sand dune. That was a whole special kind of annoying.

  “That doesn’t look hard,” Angie said from a safe distance away. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I left the binder open on the desk,” I said, pointing to the little office area. “That page lists by number the items required for that particular prefab. Once we have all the parts loaded, we take the binder with us. It’s got the schematics and building manuals tucked into the back half.”

  “Nice,” she remarked, then winked at me and sauntered over to do what I told her. When she came back, she held the binder open and gazed up at the shelves.

  “Okay,” she said after a minute. “Go pick up a pallet. The first thing on this list is braces.”

  So it went. Angie and I spent the better part of two hours loading the trailer carefully with the list of necessary parts. We checked and double-checked the list, then went over the schematics and the boxes of fasteners to make sure we forgot nothing.

  Once again, I found myself glad that Filbert was extremely detail oriented. He even had packs made up of the most commonly lost and broken fasteners, as well as other redundancies.

  We finally shut the tailgate on the trailer, strapped everything down securely, and she double-checked the stability of it while I put the forklift back and closed up the warehouse.

  I stood there for a moment, looking things over. Rust had started growing along and under the steel eaves, and the doublewide office/residence sagged a little on its braces. I’d have to make sure, but all the unattended structures we’d visited today showed unusual levels of wear. When they were in use, people paid attention to the little things, painting, repairing, and cleaning up as entropy took its toll.

  That was definitely a project for another day, although there was a certain appeal to putting up barns and warehouses of our own and building an inventory of goods to carry us into the future. The idea went along with my thoughts of turning the homestead into something of a fortress.

  Angie stared at me when I finally slid in behind the wheel and started the truck.

  “So?” she asked. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Not much,” I replied.

  “You stood out there, staring around the lot, for about five minutes,” She said. “That’s a bit more than ‘not much.’”

  “Fine,” I admitted with a sigh. “I’ve been thinking about how we can consolidate things at the farm. There’s plenty of land, and we should be able to build some of these prefabs, maybe even drag some single and doublewide trailers over. We can get solar panels, inverters, and batteries from Atlanta, then build the place up to almost total self-sufficiency.”

  “That’s ambitious,” Angie said as I put the truck in gear and eased it out onto the road. We had over a ton of material packed in the trailer, and I liked to take it easy starting out. “I like it.”

  “You do?”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied. “Maybe some of these people Bruce found will have useful skills.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping for,” I said. “I know my way around a wood shop, but I’m not much of a carpenter when you get down to it.”

  “There’s a lot that we all need to learn,” Angie observed. “I wonder if Jackie can teach that animal whispering thing she does.”

  “Who knows,” I said thoughtfully. “That would be amazingly useful if she could.”

  Our next stop was one of the big box hardware stores. This time, I had some personal projects in mind. Everything we did, everything I did, only served to remind me of just how much more we had to do.

  Once again, Angie hopped out first and scanned the empty parking lot. This time, though, she left the combat rifle in the back seat. I joined her a moment or so later.

  “So what’s on the list from here?” she asked.

  “Indoor/outdoor plumbing supplies, battery-powered tools and accessories, and LED light bulbs,” I replied. “I mean to convert the well pumps for manual operation as well as electric, but that’ll take some work. Ultimately, I might even design a water tower.”

  “Seriously?” she demanded, falling behind me as I strode towards the side of the building to find an employee or a loading entrance.

  “Damn skippy,” I answered. “I was thinking about this while I worked on the steam conversion for that generator. Once I do, the math, we can put up a tower, keep it pumped full of water, and have water pressure to spare, just from gravity. I will need to figure out the height requirements and how big the tank is. Most municipal towers are about a hundred to a hundred-and-thirty feet tall, with the storage tank about twenty feet or more in diameter, depending on estimates of demand.”

  I paused as Angie looked at me with blank eyes.

  “It seriously matters how high those things are, and how big?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I can teach you the why, too, if you want.”

  “You know what,” she said. “Sure. No guarantees it’ll make any sense to me, but I’m game to try to learn.”

  “Cool,” I said with a grin. It really made me happy to hear that from the brown-haired Marine. I was always glad to find anyone willing to learn something new, especially if it was outside of their usual comfort zone.

  We paused for a moment at the side door, and something finally occurred to me. I’d been using a crowbar all this time when there was a perfectly serviceable locksmith’s store about fifteen minutes from here. Angie must have caught my sudden change in expression as she asked, “What?”

  “I just realized we’ve been doing this the hard way all this time,” I replied.

  “How so?” she wanted to know.

  “This,” I answered, holding up the crowbar. “When, about fifteen minutes that way, is a locksmith’s.”

  Angie started laughing, and after a moment, I joined in. Fortunately, there was no one to see us standing outside the side entrance to the hardware store, guffawing our hearts out over a realization that we just hadn’t thought about for the months we’d been out scrounging for supplies and tools. A lock gun wouldn’t break every lock we ran into, but it, along with a full set of picks, and locksmith tools would give us a hell of a head start.

  Once we settled down to the occasional chuckle, she asked, “Want to go break into the locksmith’s, then?”

  We both laughed some more at that, and I nodded after checking the time. We had about three hours or more of daylight left, so we might as well make optimal use of it.

  So we piled back into the Silverado and took off for Barber & Son Locks, a little family business tucked into the back of a small strip mall, next to an adult video store and a hole-in-the-wall Asian market. I pulled to a stop in front of the barred and shuttered storefront, and we both got out.

  “Maybe this is why we didn’t think about it,” Angie suggested as we stared at the armored storefront.

  “Nah,” I said. “I got this.”

  I went back to the truck, restarted it, and aimed the nose towards the door, then left it running as I got out and attached the hook and cable from the winch to the lower handle of the roll-up door.

  “Oh,” Angie said as I tightened it up, then got back into the truck.

  It was a fair shake whether the handle would give before the locking mechanism, but all I needed was to pull it off-track enough to get the crowbar into the right place. I stuck the Silverado into reverse and slowly eased down on the accelerator.

  Metal creaked and groaned, and the tires slipped for a second. Angie darted around the corner of the building to safety. Then, with a shriek of anguish, the door popped free of its tracks and peeled halfway off the front of the store. I hit the brakes quickly before the whole mess flew off and maybe rebounded into my truck.

  As I got out to unhook and rewind the winch cable, Angie poked her head around the corner and called out, “Is it safe to come out yet?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I replied, waving her over.

  “Nice job,” was all she s
aid as we set to clearing the entry with the crowbar and muscle.

  The locksmith’s shop was a tidy little office, mostly, though there was a small display along the far wall, as well as a desk, a couple of chairs, and some metal shelves with organized bins containing all the tools of the locksmith trade. A steel toolbox sat open on the desk, along with several locks and other items in various states of repair and disassembly.

  Without really saying anything, we packed all the bins into the bed of the truck before moving to the desk. The toolbox had, as I’d hoped, three manual lockpick guns and an electric lockpick set along with a full assortment of other tools of the trade, manual picks, screwdrivers, and small prying and cutting tools. It was pretty much everything imaginable for opening anything that might be locked.

  “Now, we have keys to everything,” I said with a broad grin.

  “Cool,” Angie said, grinning back. “Now, let’s get our asses back in gear and wrap up today’s shopping.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, stretched, and rolled my neck. A satisfying series of pops rewarded my effort. “Let’s do this.”

  Back at the hardware store, it took me a few minutes to figure out how to work the automatic lockpick, but I did get the side door opened in short order. The place had a musty, dry smell that was almost a relief after the mildew and rot of earlier locales. Fifteen or so foot high shelves and racks loomed in the shadows outside the reach of the light of the glass front doors.

  We made our way by the light of our headlamps to the main doors, unlocked them, and forced them open.

  “And the world is our oyster,” Angie said, then looked over to me and smiled. “Mind if I grab a few things?”

  “Why would I mind?” I replied. “Go, have fun. I’m going to start loading toolsets and batteries.”

  She nodded and slipped off, her booted footfalls making very little noise on the concrete floor as she disappeared down one of the aisles. I wondered what she had in mind as I watched her go, then turned and headed towards the section of power tools.

  I carefully loaded box after box onto the low, flat-topped cart until it was full, then rolled it out to the Silverado, unloaded, and came back for more. Angie came back between loads, rolling along a cart full of painting and cleaning supplies.