“We are in business,” he said. “Camping Supplies R Us. Should be enough tents and sleeping bags in there for most of the population.”
“Good,” Cathy said. “I don’t want to have to squeeze into those two sheds with close to three hundred other people again, like last time it rained.”
Gerry pulled out the radio and prepared to deliver his report.
***
“Woo hoo! Would you look at all this stuff?” Charlie exclaimed.
They’d been given a general mandate to find any construction or lumberyards with significant stock. This business in the industrial area certainly fit the bill. The downside was that a lot of it was open-air, so the unprotected stacks of product were partly buried by ash.
“Wow, this’ll take forever to load across,” Ken said.
“Yeah, and it looks like a lot of it will have to be carried through the gate lengthwise. No way that I can think of to use a forklift for that.”
“Well, not our problem, unless we end up on the chain gangs.”
Charlie lifted his walkie-talkie to report.
Refugees
Phil and Pete were walking back to the rendezvous. As they came around a corner, they almost ran head-on into a man and a boy who had been coming the other way. The man jumped back in surprise and fear. Pete and Phil were still somewhat medicated, so had a more laid-back reaction.
The man’s eyes widened as he examined the two and saw the shotguns slung over their shoulders. He fumbled for a pistol in his waistband. However, he was obviously nowhere near an expert, and it took several seconds before he had the weapon out and the safety off. At that point he seemed to realize that Pete and Phil hadn’t moved. He stood there awkwardly for a few seconds, with the pistol half raised, then sighed and lowered the pistol.
Pete and Phil smiled. Pete said, “Dude, not to worry, okay?”
The man half-smiled, still looking embarrassed. The boy with him looked apprehensive, but took his lead from the adult.
“I guess you’re looking for food, too,” the man said.
“Er, no,” Pete replied. “Food we’ve got. We were looking for fuel.”
The man’s eyes lit up. “Can you spare some? I haven’t been able to find enough to feed my family in days. Uh, I’m Nick by the way. This is my son, Enso.”
“Pete,” Pete said, pointing to himself, “and Phil. Listen, where’s your family? You don’t need to hang around here. We’ve got way better digs.”
Nick was instantly suspicious. “And where would that be?”
“You wouldn’t believe me. We’ll have to show you. Then you can decide.”
***
Pete and Phil grinned, watching Nick try to take it in. His eyes bugged out at the Pleistocene landscape and inhabitants. Enso hopped from foot to foot, pointing things out to his father with a running stream of excited commentary.
Joseph Leung walked up to stand beside Nick. “So Nick, what do you do for a living?”
Nick, with obvious effort, focused on the man speaking to him. “Um, construction. Residential, industrial, whatever. Foreman and subcontractor. Kind of a Jack of all trades, to be honest.”
Joseph smiled. “Excellent. I think you’ll find yourself very busy over here. Now, shall we see about the rest of your family?”
Still looking somewhat boggled, Nick nodded slowly. “Wife and two more kids. I hope you don’t have a limit or something.”
Joseph laughed. “Not likely. Food we have. Space we have. People, we’re kind of short on. Your kids will have to do chores…”
“Damn right they will,” Nick answered.
Results
“Well, we’re not doing badly at all,” Richard said. He looked around at the others. “We’ve got a Home Depot that we can plunder; Pete and Phil managed to keep it together long enough to find a huge cache of fuel—” Pete and Phil were rapidly attaining legendary status for their stoner ways. “—and they even brought back Nick, here, who has some construction experience.” At this last comment, Richard motioned to Nick McCormack, who had been invited to the meeting.
“And we’ve also located a local construction supply yard with ridiculous amounts of inventory.”
“We may have gotten a break with the Walgreens. Our guys think a lot of the contents are still intact, but we’ll have to gate in from this side. Same with the rental office at the Home Depot.” Even with the ten-pound sledgehammer, Josh had done nothing more than dent the door.
“We’ve got a number of buildings at the university that we’ll want to hit, but we need to clean out the local stuff first. Setting up safe enclosures for the livestock is first priority; getting our infrastructure together is next.”
Richard paused for a moment, and looked around. These people, only days before, had been students— whose most pressing concern was passing the next exam or getting the assignments done. Now they were in effect the government of what could end up being the last bastion of civilization. Richard sighed. Like Bill says, shit happens. Speaking of which…
“Bill, can we have your report?”
Bill looked up from his notes. “Right. Our main concerns right now are a potable water supply and a long-term plan for an electrical supply. For the first one, it would have been great to find a well-drilling rig, but no luck so far. Failing that, we’ll use an auger from the Home Depot. With that and some sections of steel pipe, I can rig up a system for ‘jet’ drilling. It’s not capable of drilling a really deep well, but we don’t need a deep one. The water table is pretty close to the surface around here.
“For the electrical, I’m thinking of putting together a wind turbine using an Archimedes Screw. There’s a company in Europe that’s been selling something along those lines, and they claim it can generate power even in low wind speeds.”
Bill put down his notes and sat back.
Richard turned to the next person around the circle, which was Dick Thompson.
“Dick? Animals?”
Dick looked around the table. “I think everyone is getting pretty tired of the livestock wandering around in the same area where we sleep. Leaving aside the unexpected gifts they leave lying around, a couple of people have been stepped on. No broken bones, but it couldn’t have been fun.
“We’re bringing across enough equipment and supplies to start building a fence line. We’re going to get work crews starting on it today or tomorrow. Once it’s all done, we’ll look at putting up some simple shelters for the animals. After that, we’re going to go pig-hunting.”
Richard smiled and looked over to Nick McCormack. “Nick?”
Nick looked around the table. “Happily you guys put the latrines downhill in the first place, so we’re going to expand that into a proper septic system. And once we can get the supplies across, we’re going to start building residences. Just big single-room communal lodges for the first cut. That’ll get us through the first winter. A lot of the fine detail design will have to wait until the water supply system is better defined, though.” Nick mimed throwing it back to Richard.
Richard turned to Joseph.
Joseph sighed. “Same as always. Ten times as many requests as I have people or gates or equipment for. I’ve adopted a fatalistic attitude; you tell me what the priority is, and we’ll do it. Anyone else starts yelling in my ear, I point them at you.
“I will however, take this opportunity to point out yet again that we could use more vehicles.”
Richard groaned. “I know, Joseph. But that’ll just change the bottleneck. We could probably find things a little faster, but we couldn’t retrieve them any faster, because we don’t have enough bodies or gates. If it isn’t one thing, it’s a dozen other, right?”
Richard waited for an argument from Joseph. Joseph shook his head.
Richard glanced over at Dick again, and said to the group, “Dick has brought up a potential problem. We’re a little light on agriculture expertise. Oh, we’ve got aggie students who can rattle off different breeds of wheat and stuff, but w
e don’t have much in the way of practical experience with running an agricultural operation. I’m going to talk to a couple of people about that later. We may have to go looking.”
Again, Richard looked around the table. No one showed an inclination to add anything, so after a moment Richard closed the meeting, saying, “Okay, people, thanks. As ever, if something concerns you, bring it up.”
Sunny Days
The sun was out again today in Rivendell. Suzie and Joy had decided to take a break. It wasn’t against the rules— there weren’t actually any rules at all. You pitched in when you could, and you were free otherwise.
The colony had adopted a routine of two meals a day— breakfast and dinner. A lot of people were having trouble with that. Suzie chuckled at the thought. A lot of people were having trouble with a lack of snacks. And truthfully, a lot of people would be better off without them. Meow. God, I’m a bitch.
The two girls had worked the breakfast shift, and wouldn’t be required to do anything until mid-afternoon when they’d start preparing for dinner. Hmm, I wonder what we’ll make, Suzie thought. Venison Chili stew? Or maybe Buffalo Chili stew? Or maybe Buffalo burgers, without the buns? Or buffalo steaks? Or Venison steaks?
One of the first things that the scavenging parties had gone looking for was food. And unfortunately, that was the one thing that every other resident of Lincoln had also gone looking for, whether they were holing up in the city or heading for somewhere else. Short of breaking into individual homes, there was very little food left to be found Earthside. That left the supplies that Bill had originally purchased, plus anything that could be acquired on this side. They were in no danger of starving to death, but there would be adjustments.
They’d managed to coax the chickens into an egg-laying routine, but a dozen eggs a day for a couple hundred people wouldn’t go very far. So instead, they were going to hatch as many of the eggs as they could to try to build up the inventory. In addition to their obvious duties, the two roosters had become the colony’s alarm clocks— and the most hated denizens of Rivendell.
Meanwhile, breakfast very much resembled dinner except for the location of the sun in the sky.
The aggie students had managed to locate wild herbs and onions and a couple of other vegetable-ish plants, so there was at least some variety to the meals. Someone said that they had recovered some seeds from a couple of businesses Earthside and would be trying to grow some late-summer crops. That would help as well.
Suzie sighed. Low carb diet. No problem, now.
She lay in the lawn chair, enjoying the feeling of warmth, refusing to let herself worry about the food situation. As on most days, the sky was not completely clear. Clouds were always scudding through, the fluffy kind of clouds that would block the sun for a few minutes at a time. She looked around. There were a couple of dozen people, sitting or lying down on the cheap folding Walmart beach chairs, including that Josh character who never seemed to be working.
Suzie laughed a bit. Joy opened her eyes and turned to her. “What’s funny?”
Suzie smiled. “Oh, I was just looking around. This place is such a weird mix of wild west pioneer and modern suburbia. We’re sitting in these chairs, sun-tanning, while people are riding around on horses, hunting, and other people race around on dirt-bikes. Meanwhile, there’s a crew digging latrines, another hauling water, while yet another crew uses an interdimensional portal to go raiding another universe for supplies. It’s bizarre.”
Joy chuckled. “I wonder if they’ll make a movie out of it. Or a TV series.” She sighed. “I guess that’s not very likely right now, is it?”
“Maybe not this month. But things might improve.”
Suzie looked up. A couple of other people were coming over, carrying folding chairs. She saw it was Pete and Phil.
“Hello, ladies,” Pete said, as they unfolded the chairs. Suzie smiled at them in greeting. Some guys were relentless and had to be fended off constantly, but Pete and Phil were harmless. They just wanted to find a way to slack off.
“So what are you guys working on these days?” Suzie asked.
“Scouting,” Phil said. “We kind of used up all our talents on the scavenging end of things when we found the fuel at the gas station. They’ll probably call on us again, but meanwhile our job is to ride around on dirt bikes. It’s a hell…”
“So why aren’t you out there today?” Suzie asked.
“Al broke one of the dirt bikes,” Pete answered. “He’s fixing it right now, and Richard Nadeski told him he’s cut off for a week. Al is some pissed.”
“That dude is insane,” Phil added. “Dirt biking is his main thing in life. I think they’re planning on doing a scavenging expedition to his home at some point to pick up all his stuff, including all his bikes. Then he can break those instead of the colony’s bikes.”
“There’s so much stuff we need…” Pete mused. “It seems like every five minutes someone is asking Joseph Leung to arrange an expedition to get some other thing. He wants to go hit auto dealerships and scavenge some vehicles so they can grab more things at once. But he can’t get people to leave him alone long enough.”
They let the silence stretch for a few minutes. There was no feeling of awkwardness, nor need to fill the quiet with chatter. The warmth and slight breeze melted away any feeling of urgency. Suzie felt herself start to drift…
“You guys think we’ll ever get back to civilization?” Joy’s voice brought Suzie back from the brink. It was a measure of her level of relaxation that she didn’t even mind.
“Honestly,” Pete answered, “I couldn’t care less if we never do.”
This made Suzie open one eye and look at him. “Really?”
“Yeah. Mind you, ask me again in a month when we’ve gone through our stash, but I’m not sure we aren’t better off now. Earth was getting way too complicated, crowded, and stressed. I know we’re going to miss stuff eventually, but right now I feel like if I had a button in front of me to bring the old world back, I wouldn’t press it.”
“Maybe you should talk to the agro folks,” Joy said. “I’m sure your stash has some seeds in it.”
Pete and Phil both sat up straight and looked at each other. “Son of a bitch!” Pete said.
They leapt off their chairs and went charging off, with a, “Watch our stuff,” yelled back to the girls.
Joy and Suzie laughed at this turn of events. “You sure know how to clear a room,” Suzie said.
Joy took a bow from her chair.
In The News
Russia has completed annexation of all former soviet-bloc countries on its borders. There are reports that Russia is now attempting to gain control of some Chinese border provinces.
---
Today, Iran released a statement that they have successfully annexed Iraq and will be absorbing the former nation into their own borders. In an odd twist, Iraq later released a statement that they had successfully repelled the Iranian invasion force and are poised to advance on the Iranian capital.
---
India, Brazil, and China have announced in separate releases that they will be ending food exports to in order to provide for their own populations. Economists speculate that other net food exporting countries will soon follow suit.
Mealtime
“Wow, what a friggin’ day.” Bill lowered himself to the ground carefully and arranged his plate on his lap. Monica glanced at him for a moment, then returned her attention to her plate of something-chili stew.
Mealtimes had become routine, but there was a large flavor of camping in the process. Kitchen volunteers cooked the meals in some impressively large pots that had been rescued from a restaurant on Earthside in the first couple of days. Other kitchen staff served the food cafeteria-style. People lined up, then found a spot on the lawn, as the fenced-off area was now called, and sat down to eat.
There was no shortage of food, and the food was healthier than the average pre-eruption diet had been, but a vegetarian would have had a h
ard time. Animal protein figured prominently, and most people didn’t even ask any more. It was something stew again.
The G.O. had a favorite spot where they sat for every meal. As Bill looked around, he realized that other groups had developed similar routines. It always seemed to be the same people sitting near them.
And here came Pete and Phil. The stoners could be depended on to never miss a meal, and they sometimes made for some hilarious conversation. Monica in particular seemed to like them, probably because of their non-conformist attitude.
The two sat down, plates heaped as high as physically possible, nodded a greeting to everyone, and started to dig in.
And lastly, Richard arrived and settled down. Bill noticed once again that the blonde in the next group over seemed to always be very aware of Richard’s arrival. I wonder if I can encourage that, somehow.
“I miss bread,” Richard said out of nowhere.
“Eh?” Bill was surprised. Richard was usually all business, even at mealtimes.
“Bread,” Richard repeated. “Buns. Sandwiches. Amazing what trivial things you suddenly get a twinge about.”
Erin smiled. “I know. I never thought I’d find myself wishing for more vegetables. My mom would have a laughing fit if she heard me.”
At the mention of her mom, Erin’s face fell. There were several moments of silence as the rest of the group went through similar emotions.
After a few seconds, Erin asked Richard, “How are things in committee?”
Richard was quick to help with the change of subject. “Same old. Too many things to do, not enough time or resources. At least we haven’t had any power struggles. In TV shows and movies—” Richard looked at Bill with one eyebrow raised, “—there’s always some twit who wants to be in charge at any cost. But that doesn’t seem to be happening here, at least so far.”
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