South, so it was warmer in the winter. A nearby lake for fresh water fishing, and the small town with all of about two dozen homes, was at the foot of a mountain range, perfect for hunting.
We would always have fresh meat.
These guys were outdoors-men and marksmen like you wouldn’t believe.
They taught me how to shoot, which would be necessary if I was going to be going out and finding survivors.
There was one thing I had a hard time finding.
Women.
For some reason there weren’t many.
We all believed that the virus favored the male gender.
Several of us had a family member who survived.
The community was run by Captain Thomas Gray, who from day one was just known as Gray. He was a no nonsense man who had spent his life in the service.
He was a true survivalist who was always thinking ahead.
When I first arrived at the camp I didn’t know what to make of him. He was quiet and seemed to observe a lot. He carried a pistol on him at all times and stayed in uniform.
I didn’t understand that.
At first.
After my day of rest, he spoke to me telling me how cool, yes, he used the word cool, how cool it was that I found people. I told him of my intentions to find more, and he welcomed that idea.
“Then before you go out there, let me or my men train you,” he said.
I didn’t understand why and he explained that the first couple of weeks everything was going to be fine, but the longer people were out there starving, the worse it would get. He cited some post apocalyptic movie they showed him in the service.
In fact, he wanted to train every able-bodied man, woman and child to fend for themselves. He had a bad feeling about what would become of our world and those who weren’t resourceful enough to survive without violence.
I had a quick two day training, with a promise that I’d do more when I returned.
Having more faith in the human race, I still had to put stock into what he said.
I was always aware.
Before Bentley and I left, Gray called me to his little office slash home and asked if Bentley and I could scavenge up bottled water.
“There’s a stream,” he said, “We can boil that water for drinking, but it’s not plentiful or sufficient in the long run if we pick up more survivors.”
I rather chuckled at that notion, mentioning the huge fresh water lake.
He chuckled in return. “That would be great to pipe the water from, in fact I'm pretty sure they were already piping it from there. But until we figure out how to get a good filtering system, we need bottled water.”
“I have no problem picking up water. But …if you think the water from the lake is piped through, what’s wrong with the filtering system it has?” I asked.
“Danny, it needs electricity to run. Haven’t you noticed, there’s no electricity?”
Of course, I noticed. I nodded. “Turn it on.”
“If we could, don’t you think we would have?”
I didn’t. I laughed at myself and the thoughts I had. “Gray, I honestly didn’t think you guys wanted electricity. I thought it was a rustic thing. Back to basics.”
“Back to basics is great, but electricity would be better. For the water. For heat. For keeping the meat cool.”
“So basically, if you had electricity, it would solve some problems.”
“Yes.”
“That’s it?” I shrugged. “Piece of cake.”
“Excuse me?”
“Gray, I’m your man. I’m an electrical engineer. Though I like to say I’m a fix it guy. Ask my dad, he’ll tell you there’s nothing I can’t fix. If I can’t, I just build another.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“You can put the electricity on?”
“Just need to locate the main power grid, get that up and running again, and shut off everything but to this area. It may not be marked well, or in a way I’d understand, but I can do it. It’ll be easy. Gray, the only reason there’s no power is because everyone manning the station got sick or left. No one was there to monitor it. If it’s not updated, it shuts down. It’s a matter of getting it back up.”
“How long will it take?” he asked. “Days? Weeks?”
I bobbed my head. “Once I locate the main power source, understand the grids, and see where the power pipes to here …. Eight to ten hours steady working. There may be some problems, but nothing I can’t fix. Dude, I know electricity well. I’ve wired half the new buildings in downtown Los Angeles.”
You would have thought Gray was a kid with a new toy. He clapped his hands together, chuckled, and then squealed a scream of delight.
I laughed. “It’s only electricity.”
“It’s water. It’s meat that won’t go bad. It’s so fucking cool that you can do this.”
I shrugged. “When do you want me to do it?”
“Whenever is convenient for you.”
“I really want to get out there and look for people.” I paused to think. “Tell you what, Bentley and I have Los Angeles and San Diego slated for this trip. We’ll be back in one week. How about you find the power station, and I’ll do it when I get back?”
We sealed the deal with a handshake.
I left the next morning with Bentley for a survivor search.
Let me tell you, when I said I’d be back in a week, I truly underestimated how big Los Angeles was. It took us a week just to get through the city.
But I promised Gray I’d be back and I was. San Diego would have to wait for the next trip.
Back to L.A.
It was bad.
I often thought as we went through the city, that I could only imagine New York. I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near New York, especially since that was the starting place of it all.
If it was anything like Los Angeles, it was a nightmare.
It was obvious panic had hit the street and the citizens. Storefronts were smashed, numerous buildings burned. Every police car I saw was over turned or vandalized.
Bodies of the shot and beaten lined the streets, but no plague victims.
It wasn’t as if the plague hit you and you dropped dead. People eventually got too sick to leave their homes.
But those that felt well enough decided to go out with a vengeance.
Traffic jams were everywhere as if people were trying to flee the city. To go where?
People died in the cars at military check points. Check points were abandoned.
One would think an earthquake had hit the city. It was destroyed.
Destroyed but quiet.
Occasionally a slight breeze would pick up, carrying a horrendous stench and a fluttering paper cup or rattling a can.
No... wait. There was one other sound. One that was underlying and so consistent, it faded in our ears to the point we no longer paid attention nor heard it.
Flies.
There was a constant hum of flies.
My father told me that for at least a month the smell would be unbearable. Until the bodies finished the putrefaction stage. In the heat of California the bodies baked and rotted.
Eventually nature would disintegrate them to the point of bones, then dust. The dust would take a while.
Then again, the cats were helping that process along nicely. Several times we saw cats gnawing on and eating flesh from the bodies of the dead. It was as if the smell of the putrid flesh was nothing but a dinner bell chiming for a feline gourmet meal.
I really didn’t think we’d find anyone alive in Los Angeles, despite how big it was. I figured people either died of the plague, were killed in violence or left.
But that was not the case. We found two people in the city and another forty-five in the outlying suburbs.
We had water and food for people, but medical attention would have to wait until we got them back to camp.
San Diego would have to wait anyhow. We had a full load.
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We did well.
5.
Life on the Hill
I was one of the fortunate few. I had something to do. I know that sounds strange, but think about it. Imagine life with no television and nothing to do. Imagine how slowly time would pass and how quickly you could go out of your mind.
The ‘searching’ for survivors kept me busy for the first six months. My father was kept busy serving as the town doctor. Others people worked on seedlings, hunting, cooking and sewing. But for the most part, folks really just sat around.
We went back to basics.
We had our storytellers. Those who would read aloud from books and some that told their own stories. We had a guitar player who entertained us.
When the first spring came we all tended to our own gardens. We built what we could and were something like the pilgrims.
Pilgrims with electricity.
Times were tough though.
The first year was the worst.
We weeded through what we knew and didn’t know about medicine. A simple medical procedure, such as an appendectomy, was a death sentence. My father could treat, he couldn’t operate. The steadiest of hands were given a textbook. But we had infections.
We lost twenty percent of our population that first year due to illness.
Then came year two.
Over three hundred people and only thirty-seven were women.
Thirty-seven women.
It wasn’t until the end of the first year when we had our first rape. Then our second … despite how we tried to protect our women, they were victimized. None of them wanted to live under lock and guard, but it seemed to be the only way to protect them.
Even then, we had rapes.
Rape and thievery were immediate grounds for execution.
That was no secret either. Yet, the men did it. Soon, when a rape was committed, the culprit fled. We never saw him again.
Our inner citizens weren’t our only threat. Within two years savagery started. There were people who banned together like us, but didn’t start a civilization. They roamed. Like locusts, they took what they could and moved on.
The fights, violence and injuries, cost us even more.
What had this world come to?
Doing our best wasn’t good enough. We lived under constant threats.
Being a designer and electrical engineer, I was called upon to try to come up with a solution. An alarm system.
I was able to make a tracking system. Because of our locale, an encompassing one was difficult, so I designed handheld ones made from old game units.
We had four men perched as lookouts. North, south, east and west.
Each had a tracking device when they were on duty.
The tracker picked up everything over fifty pounds, animals included, which was annoying at times, but a necessary safeguard.
We were alerted of anything that moved within a hundred feet.
That prepared us for attacks.
A pilgrimage to another location was discussed, but a community vote determined we’d stay put.
Where else would we go? Wouldn’t it be the same everywhere and we’d just have to start over?
“What about Utopia?”
I remember the day a newer guy said that.
Utopia. This was about the tenth time we’d heard of it.
Utopia had become an urban legend.
This great place, somewhere hidden, where they had secure living, medical attention, plenty of food and society had started all over again.
A perfect world.
Rumors of Utopia began about year three.
We dismissed them as hearsay, but nonetheless we enjoyed hearing the tales.
Two years after we stopped looking for people, Bentley and I decided to go on a search.
It was the last one we did.
Packs of savages now ran rampant and it was no longer safe. They hit you by surprise.
We happened upon this man named Kirk. He was running from this new breed of self inflicted mental mutants.
He was the most adamant about Utopia. He claimed he’d been there, lived there and was kicked out because he didn’t belong.
The location of Utopia wasn’t known. Those taken there never saw where it was and when they took you out; they knocked you out and dropped you somewhere.
You had to fit in, look a certain way, go through some sort of training, and if you failed you were tossed out.
I thought that was ridiculous.
After Kirk, we heard similar stories from others.
Utopia by definition means a perfect world, and if this place did exist they were trying to create it.
A perfect world in a plague ravished world?
That alone made me dismiss the existence of this Utopia. To me it was a place made up, like a goal in life, an aim for some.
Find Utopia.
I didn’t need to.
Civilization was hit with a plague and had gone mad.
For me, Utopia would be taking a bad situation and making it the best you could. Even if there was turmoil. That’s what we did.
To me the real Utopia was Gray’s mountain. Our community.
We had our violence, illness and crime, but it was the best place to be.
The only place to be.
And I was there for the duration of my life.
6.
The Hit
If nothing else, the one thing that could be said about the folks on Gray's Mountain was that we had great hair.
I was always a fanatic about my hair. Since my parents let me grow it out from the crew cut phase. I made sure I used the best products to keep my hair shiny, manageable and perfect.
As a hair fanatic, it would only figure that my best friend was a barber.
I remember early on bringing up the hair care product dilemma to Bentley. I kept telling him he had to invent new stuff. Shampoo. Conditioners. A hair spray product.
His response was, “I’m a barber, not a stylist.’
“What’s the difference?”
Then he explained that he never learned the ins and outs of hair and what worked or what didn’t.
But as time passed, Bentley learned.
He became ‘the man’. He was always learning, experimenting and creating.
The best time was the summer that everyone changed their hair color. Everyone but me, that is. Bentley was inventing new hair colors out of nature, even highlights.
Even my father volunteered to try. Of course, it was pretty funny when his hair turned pink.
He said, “I feel youthful, Daniel. Perhaps now is the time for me to learn a musical instrument.”
He kept that color until it faded and disappeared.
Everyone went to Bentley to get their hair done. As if we had any other places to go.
Once a month it was ‘up do’ day. That's w hen the women would wear their hair in ‘up’ styles.
Crazy.
But when there’s nothing much going on, that’s what you did.
Except for me. Even as crazy and concerned as I was about being in style in the old days, I wasn’t in the post apocalyptic world. In fact, I let my hair grow long.
Don’t get me wrong, it was still the shiniest, most manageable head of hair on Gray Mountain, but it was long.
I went to Bentley to get it cut only to bring it to my shoulder blades.
Hair grows quite a bit in five years.
My father would call me Daniel Dynasty, saying I looked like a Chinese warrior and since I had honed my martial arts skills in fighting the savages, the name fit.
Always asking me when I was going to cut my hair, I jokingly replied, “When I get to Utopia.”
In fact, that was a running joke for me.
I’d cut my hair when I knew I was going to Utopia. Then I built on that. I actually made a Utopia box. A gag, that people talked about. I’d add things as I thought about it, but it in was clothing tightly sealed in plastic. A white shirt, gray dress pants and a blac
k tie. A bottle of cologne, brush, hair care and hold products and a gold chain. Everything I needed to make myself look Utopian proper when I entered their gates.
It was funny.
An apocalyptic world and a utopian box to transform myself into GQ Danny.
Pause.
I guess you had to be there.
The day I deemed the last day on Gray Mountain, ironically started out with a rabbit’s foot.
“Got something for your Utopia box,” Bentley said, dangling the object by a string.
“A rabbit’s foot,” I said. “Why would I need a rabbit’s foot for my box?”
“Never know when you might need luck.”
I grasped the foot and laughed. “I’ll think about it.”
“I got that myself. Sucked out the blood so it wouldn’t stink …”
“Bent.” I shook my head.
“So speaking about rabbit’s feet.”
I knew it. I knew it.
He was in the mood.
There was a difference in rabbit hunting with Bentley. There was the ‘needful’ hunting, and then there was the ‘in the mood’ hunting.
Going out to rabbit hunt with Bentley was uneventful. Sometimes he invited me, sometimes not. But he needed me there for the “in the mood” kind.
Bentley made this concoction called pickled rabbit. Only it wasn’t pickled at all like you’d imagine. It was weird. It was cooked in garlic with the meat cut up in tiny pieces, and then he’d gel the garlic water. It looked gross. You know those gelatin molds with fruit? Well this was close, only with a murky white gel, and instead of fruit, there were bits of rabbit. Then he’d salt it.
Gag.
Don’t get me wrong, when it cooked it smelled good and everyone in the community knew he was cooking it. They’d salivate with desire, putting in their order for a piece of gelled pickled rabbit.
But to make it, Bentley needed a special type of rabbit. It had to look a special way and he said that was the secret.
The darker the rabbit, the more wild and bitter the meat. So we had to hunt for fair or light rabbits.
And they had to be fat.
Great.
I was lucky for him, I was able to spot those bad boys easily and they were hard to find. There weren’t many. We had to find them and trap them.
Not easy at all.
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