After the Day- Red Tide

by Matthew Gilman

  By spring all three dogs were gone. The last one, Rags, was the most difficult. At fifty pounds he was the smallest and the youngest. Food was gone and at this point either they both died or Rags served his master one last time. Winter was full of tough choices, things he wouldn’t want to remember later. He made it through, finally recovered from the disease that kept him in bed for so long.

  It was a miserable time. He lost a lot of weight and never gained it back. He felt drained and weak for months. Then, when the sun finally came out and the snow started to melt, energy flowed through his body again. It was the longest winter he could ever remember. It was the first without a television.

  He wanted to make some more wine. He had nothing to use for flavor. He contemplated making moonshine but felt it was a waste of the sugar he had. A few weeks later the dandelions came up and he gathered up everything he could get his hands on. He boiled the flowers and waited three days like the recipe said. A few days later several gallons of dandelion wine were sitting on shelves bubbling away. It was the largest batch he had ever made. The depressing thing about it was that he had nobody to share it with.

  Once in a while he would play with his hand crank radio trying to find news of the world. The static always made him feel more alone. He continued his process of making wine. He brewed several batches at one time. He learned how to use the previous mash to continue the same strand of yeast. Before he didn’t have to worry about getting more yeast, now he had to learn how to use what he had since he couldn’t stop at the store anymore.

  It was late spring before he started to realize what was left in his pantry wouldn’t last forever. He was living off of whatever he could shoot and rummage from around the house. A few miles down the street was a greenhouse with a store in the front. He always thought the owners were a bunch of hippie oddballs. Now he was hoping they had enough seeds or plants to get a garden going. He wasn’t sure if anybody would be there.

  Early in the morning he had nothing to do. All of his equipment was being used while his wines fermented. He didn’t feel like sitting on the back porch waiting for a squirrel to wander in. He threw a hiking pack on and grabbed his 30.06 hunting rifle and started walking down the street. It was the most exercise he had since The Day. The empty pack and rifle weighed a ton on his small frame. The only thing that was saving him was the weight he lost when he was sick. He felt light, but his cardio was lacking. He hadn’t ran, really ran, as if his life depended on it since high school. That was decades ago.

  It took him an hour to reach the greenhouse. It didn’t look bad from the outside. He walked around the property, hollered out. He looked in windows and peeked in the sheds and garage. The home of the owners sat behind the store. He rang the doorbell and knocked on the door. He waited several minutes then pounded one last time. He peeked in the windows, saw no movement.

  “Alright, if you’re in there, don’t shoot, I’m coming in.” he yelled.

  Kevin pulled the screen door back and began kicking the door. When the door flew open his hiking pack became snagged on the screen door and he was stuck. He moved around and finally unhooked it. He looked around and was thankful nobody was inside. He didn’t see anything of very much importance. The house was untouched and looked like the family might have left. In the living room he found some magazines and books on the shelf. In the kitchen he noticed the cupboards were almost full. Dishes piled in the sink. Something was wrong.

  He went up the stairs. He paused in the hallway and dreaded looking in the room. The scent of death was in the air. He used the muzzle of the rifle to push the first door open. He didn’t see anything at first. He stepped in.

  The small frame of a person lay in the bed under the sheets. The body had broken down months ago. Frozen over the winter then thawed and dried out from the heat of the house sealed up and taking in all the sunlight.

  The people who owned the greenhouse had been mummified in their own personal greenhouse. He checked the next bedroom and found two bodies in the bed. They were in the same state. He figured they must have been the parents and owners of the greenhouse. The bathroom looked like the worst of the rest stops on an interstate highway. The flu he had caught the year before came to mind. Somehow he survived when they didn’t. He never understood things like that. They were oddballs, pushed organic food, didn’t eat meat, and didn’t use pesticides or fertilizers. Somehow the hippie oddballs still died.

  He went back downstairs and continued to look around. The food in the kitchen would be going back with him. After he checked all the cupboards he found the door to the basement. He didn’t bring a flashlight. He looked around for the junk drawer that most people had in their house. After a few minutes he found a box of matches. Lighting the first he went down the stairs and smelled the musky air. The furnace was in front of him. Then, looking around, he saw the shelves lined with jars. Homemade canned goods. The hippies had canned all the produce they couldn’t sell. The match burned his fingers.

  He let his eyes adjust and kept looking around. The basement wasn’t as dark as he thought it was. The small windows were letting light in and he could comfortably move around. There were hundreds of jars. He could see green beans, beets, yams, potatoes, tomatoes, salsa, and the list went on and on. He wanted to somehow thank the hippies. He wondered if eating the food was thanks enough. It would be a shame to waste it with all the hours they put into it. He thought about how to get it back to the house. Then he wondered if he should move to the greenhouse. He went back and forth in his head. Move the wine, by now it was hundreds of pounds of alcohol, or move hundreds of pounds of food back to the house. In the end he decided to leave the food in the basement except what he needed. What he needed now was exercise. It wasn’t going to kill him to stop at the greenhouse and pick up a few jars every couple of days. If anything, it was what he needed. There was one last thing he needed to do. To only take the food was still ignoring the reason he had shown up at the greenhouse.

  He walked out of the house and closed the door the best he could. He walked to the store in the front and tried to find a way to break in and leave the building secure. Eventually, he found a window with a weak lock and forced it open. He threw his pack in and closed the window behind him. In the store he went shopping. He grabbed a cart and went up and down the aisles. He grabbed several garden tools, a few bags of top soil, peat moss, and manure compost. Then, he left the cart in the aisle and saw the rack of seeds. Several brands and varieties, mostly heirloom varieties, he grabbed handfuls and stuffed them in his bag. He took everything. The seeds were his insurance policy. After he found the seeds he wondered what was kept in the back, the stockroom. He pushed the door open for Employees Only and walked the rows of boxes. He found more seeds and then the jackpot, sealed cans of long term storage seeds. These sold for a hundred bucks a piece. Coffee cans filled with everything you would need for an acre size garden. He had more than enough for that but he wasn’t going to become master gardener overnight. The final thing he needed was in the front of the store.

  At the book rack he saw several books on gardening. He skipped the ones about flowers and went to the homesteading and vegetable gardens. He started to flip through them and then decided to throw them in the cart and take them back. By now he just wanted to go home.

  He felt weird walking down the street with a shopping cart full of stuff. He kept waiting for a car to drive by and honk their horn at him but it never happened. His journey back didn’t feel as long but it was by a few minutes. It was now late afternoon. He unloaded the bags and tools in the backyard and took the books and seeds inside.

  Opening a jar of pickled beets he picked up a book and started doing his homework on what would have to become his new hobby. The local wildlife was getting old and he knew if he was going to survive for much longer he would have to turn into the dead hippies down the street. Surviving the flu like he did was luck. No matter how he thought about it, it was pure luck. Somehow, he fought it off. He had lived through the
illness that had killed most of his neighbors if not all of them. Suddenly, the hippies weren’t so crazy. He thought about the food in their basement realized that if they had lived they would have been fine surviving down the street and he would be at their mercy. He could have played the role of the hard ass redneck but it would not have been in his favor.

  Whatever happened the year before had placed him in a new world where his old life could no longer continue the way it did.

  Flipping through one of the books he found a section that charted what to plant for the current time of year. He flipped through the seed packs and found several varieties of each kind. He picked a few of each and later that night learned that many were not an option because he had not sprouted them inside weeks ago. He put the tomatoes and peppers back in his bag and continued looking through the rest. He found a few packs of wormwood. The name sounded familiar.

  He went to the kitchen and pulled out stacks of wine recipes that he had collected over the years. Then he found one with wormwood in it. Absinthe, the illegal herb based drink favored during the early 1900’s. It was legal again in France after rumors of hallucinations subsided but America fell behind on keeping up with abandoning myth based laws. Wormwood was the base herb used in absinthe along with a few others depending on the recipe.

  He picked up the pack of seeds and placed them with the rest of the seeds he would be planting the next day. He was excited. Soon he would be reviving an old recipe that had not been seen in his area in almost a hundred years. Tomorrow would be hell. He would work harder than he had ever worked before.

  The next morning he woke up early. He placed stakes in the ground to outline his garden. From there he broke the soil with his shovel and began pulling up clumps of sod and placing it in the wheelbarrow. He stacked the sod into walls and created a box shaped compost pile. His work was doing two things at once. He knew he was pressed for time and tried to think of ways to save time, doing several things at once instead of a series of lengthy jobs. He worked constantly for three days and created three compost piles and had the large bed for the garden turned. On the fourth day he added the manure compost, peat moss, and top soil. He raked everything through the garden and tried to spread it evenly. That afternoon he placed stakes in the garden and brought the seed packets out. He planted summer and winter squash, melons, and some rows of grains. With a few hours of daylight left he picked a corner of the garden to plant various herbs. He planted the wormwood first and then added onions, basil, cilantro, and several other herbs.

  After two weeks the garden had come to life. Plants were growing out of the soil and starting to cover the bare earth. Some of the plants did not do well, some melon vines had root rot and the grains didn’t appear to like the hot summer days. Watering was an issue. Without running water he was at the mercy of nature to feed his garden and give it what it needed. At the end of the season he ended up with several winter squash and pumpkins to store over the winter. The grains he was able to harvest and he used five gallon buckets to collect the grains, using his hands to separate the seed from the chaff. It was a long process, but time was something he had an over-abundance of.

  The herbs he dried and stored away. Onions were tied together and hung in the basement to keep for later. The wormwood he collected and set aside. The house and basement were filled with bottles of liquor and wine. He was able to salvage dozens of bottles over the summer months traveling around his area and bringing things back to the house. Cleaning the equipment, he readied the stainless steel pot and poured in cups of sugar and gallons of water. Once they were mixed and heated up he checked and rechecked the recipe he was using. Throwing in the wormwood, mint, anise, and fennel he started his batch of absinthe. The wormwood tasted bitter and he wondered how long he would be able to find sugar cubes that had not been eaten by roaming ants. When the mix was at a slow boil he took it off the stove and let it cool. When the batch reached room temperature he tossed in the yeast and mixed it, aerating the liquid feeding oxygen to the yeast. He closed the lid and let the absinthe do the rest of the work.

  Weeks later, snow was on the ground. He didn’t leave the house much except to hunt or gather wood for the stove. He would check the absinthe daily at this point until it no longer bubbled from the fermentation process. Using some copper coil and a lid that fit on top of the steel pot he was able to distill the absinthe instead of trying to filter the mash from the alcohol. The end result was a green liquid that he added some water to for the right alcohol percentage and a final product that was illegal, until there was no longer a government to enforce their old laws. He worked that evening at bottling the green liquid and storing it away in his basement. The last bit that didn’t fill a bottle he took into the kitchen and pulled out a small wine glass. He improvised a few of the tools he would need, placing a sugar cube on top of a butter knife and dripping cold water onto the cube dissolving it into the absinthe. He watched the white cloud form in the drink, the fairy that was famous for turning men mad. When the cube was gone he removed the butter knife and carried the glass into the living room. Sitting in his chair he drank the absinthe slowly, taking in all the taste. He didn’t know if he had done everything right. He wasn’t sure if this was what absinthe was supposed to taste like. He knew that it was good and he was happy with the result. It was the first drink he had cultivated completely from beginning to end. He grew the plants, created the mash, fermented it, distilled it, and finally bottled it. The only thing he missed was the company of others. Drinking alone was something that he did often. He didn’t care for it much. Sharing in his success was half the fun of what he did. There was no one else to enjoy his drink with. He finished the glass and went to bed.

  Two years later he was set in his routine of hunting, gardening, and brewing. The animals had become more plentiful, the garden he was still learning but with more success, and the brewing had left him with hundreds of bottles stored away in the house. At one point, he rode a four wheel all-terrain vehicle (ATV) he found at the greenhouse with an attached trailer to the nearest town miles away. He didn’t see anybody. It was depressing. Nothing was being kept up. Plants grew out of every crack and crevice. Many of the stores had been looted before or after the flu. He stopped at the local hardware store and was able to find some storage shelves still in the box. He stacked them in the trailer and drove to the next store, a trendy yuppie place with overpriced world items.

  Stepping through the broken glass he saw all the food and drinks were gone. Broken items sat on the floor. Some birds flew around the store, nests resting on shelves claiming the building as their new home. He went to the furniture and found a few cheap wooden wine racks that were perfect for what he needed. He carried them to the ATV and piled them on the back. He strapped everything down with elastic cords and rode back home. He had a few days’ worth of work ahead of him with the new supplies. His stomach was empty and he felt dizzy during the ride back. He hadn’t felt this way since he first started the garden. He reached the house by night fall and let the ATV coast into the yard. Then the unthinkable happened. A man stood at his doorway. Thin, late thirties, trimmed beard, he didn’t appear to be a threat.

  “Hi,” the man said walking off the porch.

  He didn’t say anything getting off the ATV. He wasn’t sure if this was really happening.

  “I’m sorry if I startled you, I saw the garden and knew that somebody was living here.” the man said. “My name is Bruce, what’s yours?”

  He thought for a minute. He was no longer the redneck that he was and didn’t feel his old name fit him anymore. He looked at the racks and shelves in the trailer, storage for the Nectar of the god’s.

  “Odin, my name is Odin.” he said. He wasn’t sure why he picked that but he did.

  “Odin, nice to meet you.” Bruce put his hand out.

  Odin grabbed it, shook it, the feeling made the experience real.

  “Bruce,” Odin said.

  “Yes,” Bruce replied.

 
“Would you care for a drink Bruce?”

  Chapter 2: St. Louis, Missouri

  After The Day, let’s face it, the world went to shit. He’s not one to sugar coat anything. Buck was not a person that put much faith in the world being handed a bad hand at birth. He was smarter and more capable than most that he came across but growing up in the center of the Midwest he was never given a chance to show his true potential.

  School had mocked him and he later found recognition with the writings of people like Albert Einstein when he talked about never being understood by the public school system. Einstein was flunked out of math because he always questioned the answers and how the system worked. Buck felt the same way. He later graduated with a high school diploma and was able to get a job at the local factory but he never felt like he was reaching his full potential. Many others at work felt like he wasn’t at his place, where he belonged, and some asked him why he was working at the factory.

  “I can’t afford college and this is the best job I can get without a college degree.” he would reply.

  While some took this as a good answer others asked why he didn’t get student loans.

  “Why would I go into debt for a degree that won’t pay itself off later?”

  The answer was obvious to him but they sometimes never understood it. The student loan had become a reasonable answer to going to college but Buck had done the math on how to get a degree in creative writing. He did take classes for a while as a favor to girlfriends he had over the years but never picked a major and only took classes he was interested in. He ended his college career with a 3.7 GPA.

  While he may earn millions after school if he wrote a best-selling novel, the odds were he would become a high school English teacher making thirty thousand a year. He didn’t like the odds and decided on playing it safe.

  Over the years he had become an expert bow hunter and would come home with several deer a year. Hunting was a matter of patience and skill and he had both. He would scout hunting areas weeks before the season and normally bagged a deer on opening day with several others during the season if the permits allowed and sometimes if they didn’t.