by Dave Conifer
“Remember, we’re building a centralized system,” Sue told him, building on what Crystal had just said. “As a matter of fact, nobody is to use any water that doesn’t come through that system. It’s going to be forbidden. We can’t risk people getting sick drinking dirty water. So we need to be thinking big, and it has to be up and running soon.”
“Well, we have these family-sized filter machines, too,” Robby said. “They can do a larger amount at once, and you can drink it right away. I think it uses coffee filters.” His face fell. “But I see what you mean. It’s not enough.”
Matt couldn’t believe it. A grown man, nothing else to do, time running out, plenty of information available in the library, but he hadn’t done his homework. He had some thoughts of his own about filtering, but he didn’t know if bringing them up would take the pressure off Robby or make him look even worse. On the other hand, there was too much at stake to worry about bruised egos. Either way, Robby would have to live with it.
“I was looking at filtering in a different way,” he said. “I like Robby’s idea about filtering and purifying in one step, but I think we might need to work our way up to that. What I was working on back in the neighborhood was a separate filtering step, probably the first step, just to clear out the physical stuff. Like, since we’re using lake water, we’d want to get rid of sticks, dirt, mud, feathers. Maybe even some fish. You know, anything you can see.”
Crystal was nodding. “How would you go about this? In a large scale system?”
“What I did was build large frames that held bed sheets,” he answered. “Those were my filters. It worked pretty well to get that stuff out, even though I had to clean them frequently. They blocked out the kind of stuff I just described.”
“Okay,” Sue said. “So we somehow draw water out of the lake and run it through these filters. Then what?”
“Well, back in the neighborhood I had planned two more steps in the process,” Matt said. “First, I’d boil it. Then I’d use chemicals to purify it. I never got past the boiling, though. I didn’t have all the equipment I needed, and everything I did have got stolen anyway.”
“So, to summarize,” Crystal said. “Step one is filtering. Step two is boiling. And step three is purifying with chemicals.”
“Yes, basically,” Matt agreed. “Although I think we should consider two passes on the filtering. But I did a lot of reading in the past couple of days. To make a long story short, I think we don’t need to do both the boil and the chemicals. They both accomplish the same thing if we do it right.”
“That’s surprising,” Crystal said. “But let’s go with it for now. Which one do we eliminate?”
“Well, assuming we use open fires to heat the water,” Matt said, “boiling is going to be really difficult. Keeping a fire going is labor intensive. It’ll take an army to gather the firewood, for one thing. And that’ll get harder to find as time goes on. Fire can be a danger in itself, too. It’ll take extra effort to manage it safely.”
“And constant smoke in the sky’s going to advertise Camp Tabernacle to the world,” Sue said. “They’ll be able to see the smoke for miles. We don’t want anybody to know we’re here if we can help it.”
Matt stole a glance at Robby. Suddenly he had nothing to contribute, and he was taking it hard. “Everything I read,” Matt continued, “says that we can do everything with chemicals that we can do with boiling. And more, really.”
“What chemicals are we talking about?” Sue asked. “Some are harder to get than others right now, I’d imagine.”
“We have two choices,” Matt said. Now he was working from his notes. “Iodine or chlorine. Both are effective. A lot more people are allergic to iodine than chorine, if that matters.”
“I can tell you right now that chlorine would be easier to get,” Sue said. “All we’d have to do is hit up the pool supply stores. Those are all over the place. Large quantities of iodine will be harder to find.”
“Let’s take this ten years into the future,” Crystal said. If Matt needed a reminder that she was married to the boss, he had it now. “When there aren’t any current stocks of chemicals for us to raid. Can we learn how to make these chemicals? Which would be easier?”
“Chlorine is an element,” Sue said. “We don’t make it, we find it. It’s not quite that simple, of course. Iodine, I’m not sure how we’d go about synthesizing that. That’s a really big question. Honestly, I’d rather focus on the next ten days for now.”
“Yes, agreed,” Crystal said. “So, Sue, are you buying everything Matt’s selling here? We’ll double-check it, of course.”
“Yes. It all sounds right to me,” Sue said, nodding.
“Okay, we have two decisions to make, then,” Crystal said as she scoured her notes. “Let’s make them now.” Matt was beginning to wonder who was actually the leader of this subcommittee. Until now he’d thought it had been Sue. “One,” Crystal continued, “Boiling, chemicals or both.”
“Matt makes a good point about keeping the fires burning,” Sue said. “That won’t be easy. I’ll go with chemicals.”
“Show of hands?” Crystal asked. Four hands went up.
“Next up,” Crystal said. “Iodine or chlorine? Sue says chlorine will be easier to get, if I understood correctly.”
“Chlorine,” Matt said as he raised his hand. The others quickly followed suit.
“We’ll need to nail down the amount of chlorine we need,” Sue said. “And the retention time.”
“I jotted down a lot of numbers,” Matt said. “We can firm that up. What was that other thing? Retention time?”
“How long the water needs to be exposed to the chlorine before it’s clean,” Sue explained. “And we can finagle that by stirring and mixing it, to maximize the exposure and surface area.” She winked at Matt. “That’s for later. You did good work here, Matt. Anything else?”
Matt flipped through his notes. “Uh, I thought we should work with fifty-five gallon steel barrels. Fifty-five gallons is a lot, but it’s not so heavy that we can’t find a way to move them around reasonably easily. And if we’re forced to boil it, steel barrels will work there, too.”
“We need to get somebody from Construction in here next meeting,” Sue said. “They can help us streamline this. We’re going to build it down at Tabernacle, of course. We’ll use the tankers to truck it back up here until we move.”
After the meeting broke up, Matt tried to avoid Robby, but it was impossible. Then, he decided he wanted to apologize for showing him up, but not in front of the other members. In the end he hadn’t had a chance to say anything at all about it by the time they turned a corner near the cafeteria and went their separate ways.
~~~
There was bad news in the halls of the school the next day. It was very bad news, which was announced in the cafeteria during dinner. A van carrying several members of the Food Production subcommittee had been hijacked earlier in the day when it was halfway to Tabernacle. All five occupants, including Nick’s good friend Joe Garrison, had been pulled from the van and butchered by a gang of about two-dozen men. The van was never seen again.
When he learned what had happened, Grover sent men to the site to bury the dead, two men and two women. At the same time, an emergency meeting of the Committee was called. When they were done, there were two new rules, both of which were announced to the dinner crowd. First, no vehicles would leave the school or Camp Tabernacle without a security escort. Second, in order to draw attention away from their current and future homes, an indirect route was to be taken between them by all vehicles headed to either location.
Eleven
If nothing else, the cabin that Sarah and Dewey had stumbled across and holed up in had all the right furniture. Neither of them was comfortable, thanks to their injuries, but both slept soundly, Sarah on the mattress and Dewey on the tattered sofa. Sarah woke up once, at dawn, but didn’t see any reason not to go back to sleep. When she woke again, Dewey was quietly moving about
, probably looking for medical supplies.
As she watched him through one open eye, she thought about the past few months, starting with the day she’d met him on the Ben Franklin Bridge. He got disrespected a lot because he looked, talked, and sometimes acted like a clueless kid, but she’d learned that he was stronger and smarter than he appeared. For one thing, he was the first person in the neighborhood to understand what had caused the plunge into the Eighteenth Century. He always bounced back, regardless of what happened or who gave him a hard time. But most importantly, he’d had the guts to jump off the bus because he didn’t want her to be out here by herself. No matter what happened, she’d never forget that.
“I found some flour,” he said from across the room when he saw she was awake. “It seems okay. Can we, like, use it to make bread or something?”
“I’m not sure,” she answered. “Let me think about it. For one thing, we’d need something to mix it with. I wouldn’t want to waste the water have. We’re down to less than half a jug, I think.”
She got up slowly from the mattress. It felt like the bleeding had stopped. Maybe she could keep it that way by taking it slow. She eyed the curtains, thinking they might make decent bandages if they could find a way to clean them. She moved into the kitchen area and saw a cabinet next to the stove that had gone unnoticed in the darkness the night before. In it was a skillet and a pot, and a few cooking utensils.
“Whoa!” she heard Dewey shout from behind her. “Check this out! There’s water in here!”
She put down a spatula and carefully shuffled to the utility room. Dewey was on his knees at the water heater. The floor was wet. “Like, I just turned this spigot at the bottom and water came out! I guess it still has water in it. It’s just not hot. This is probably like ten or fifteen gallons if it’s full!” He twisted the knob again; a new stream appeared on the concrete. “Yes!”
“Well, that’ll help. Do you think it’s clean enough to drink?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know,” Dewey said. “Matt was boiling his water to purify it. We should at least do that. Can we make a fire?”
“Let’s look around some more,” Sarah suggested. “How about in that box?”
Dewey pulled it closer and rooted through it. Within seconds he held up a cardboard case of wooden stick matches, with a triumphant smile that was barely visible by his ever-growing beard.
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” Sarah said. “I think we can mix flour and water and cook up something. It won’t exactly be bread, since we have no yeast. It’ll probably be kind of flat and tasteless. But it’ll have some kind of nutritional value. Or at least it’ll fill our stomachs without poisoning us.”
“I think we made glue out of flour and water back in kindergarten,” Dewey said. “Maybe I’m thinking of something else.”
“Let’s hope so,” Sarah replied.
“Where do we make the fire? Inside or out?’ Dewey asked.
“Let’s think about this,” Sarah said. “A fire is risky. We noticed the venison factory because of the smell. At least I did. Are we giving ourselves away if we make a fire and start cooking?”
“Maybe,” Dewey answered. “But, like, if we want to stay here for a few days, which I think we do so you can heal, do we have a choice?”
“No,” Sarah agreed. “We don’t. So, inside or out?”
~~~
They ended up building a fire pit outside from stones and chunks of concrete that Dewey collected along with a sizable pile of wood. They weren’t sure whether a daytime fire, with visible smoke, or a nighttime fire, lighting up a dark forest, was less dangerous, so they decided not to worry about it. Neither of them were proficient at building a fire, but eventually they got a blaze going after Dewey learned on the job. Thank God for the matches, Sarah thought. They broke up the metal frame of some window screens and laid them across the fire, and then placed a pot of water on this impromptu grill to boil. Dewey spent the afternoon boiling water and transferring it to whatever pots and jugs he could find. In the meantime, Sarah set about mixing flour and water into a pasty dough.
“I’d rather bake this, but we don’t have an oven,” Sarah said after joining Dewey at the fire with the skillet. “I’ll just fry it and see what happens. Let me know when it’s a good time for me to commandeer the fire.”
Two hours later she was back inside with a heap of flour pancakes. They both tried one and found them to be bland and chewy, but their hunger drove them to consume three each anyway. After they finished they noticed that the uneaten ones were already turning hard.
“Can you help me wash out my wound?” Sarah asked. She’d already cut the lining from the curtains into strips, and soaked them in a pot of Dewey’s warm water and a touch of the Lysol cleaner she’d found in the utility room. They weren’t sterile by any means, but they were better than nothing. She settled back onto the mattress and pulled her shirt up. While Dewey washed the wound with the Lysol mixture, she could only grit her teeth and force her screams of pain back down. When it was all over, he spread the bandages across the gash and tied them into place.
By then it was nearing darkness. While Sarah rested, Dewey boiled and stored the rest of the water. When it was too dark for anybody nearby to see the smoke, he stamped out what was left of the fire and went back inside with Sarah. Already groggy, she asked him to keep the gun handy and then went to sleep. Not confident that he could last long on guard duty, he shoved the sofa up against the door and then collapsed with exhaustion just as she had.
~~~
“I wonder how my parents are doing,” Dewey remarked the next morning. “It’s like, they aren’t that far away, but I have no idea about them. I keep thinking I should call them. Does that happen to you?”
“All the time,” Sarah said. “It’s frustrating. We never knew how easy we had it. I’ve been wondering about my parents, too. They live up in Rutherford, by New York. It just makes me sad when I try to guess how it’s going for them. I doubt it’s good. So I just put it out of my head, because there’s no way I can help them.”
“Same,” Dewey said. “I just hope—“. He cut himself off, wiping his nose as he struggled with his thoughts. “Like, I don’t even want to say it.”
“You don’t need to, Dewey,” Sarah said. “I’m sure I’m hoping the same kind of thing.”
~~~
Neither of them had a plan for how long they’d stay. When they realized how safe and out of view they were, it was almost as though there was an unspoken agreement that they’d take advantage of it and remain in the cabin for however long they needed. It was an unexpected blessing; both knew it would be foolish to waste it.
They slept a lot, especially Sarah, who was trying her best to keep still in order to let her wounds heal. The last few months had been incredibly taxing, with little time to rest and take stock. Now that they had the luxury of time and safety, both relished it. They didn’t even talk much, partly because their sleep schedules began to deviate. There was nothing that needed to be said, anyway.
After a few days they were out of flour pancakes. Since there was still some flour in the bag, and there was plenty of water for the time being, they made another batch. This one was much larger than the first. It wasn’t gourmet cuisine, but for the first time in forever, they had more food than they could eat. Luckily, the flour pancakes looked like they would travel well.
It was at least a week, maybe longer, before they decided they’d had enough recovery time and were ready to move on. They’d long since lost count of the days. Obviously they couldn’t know what the immediate future held for them. They didn’t even know what they’d find once they’d made it to Sarah’s house. But rest time was over and it was time to get on with it.
Twelve
The reactions of the Construction subcommittee members were mixed when they saw Jesse coming their way, with Nick a few paces behind. Some jumped from their seats. The armed ones pulled out their weapons. The rest of them simply stared.
He’d been the leader of thirty men and their families from the Hammonton area, directly to the south of the Pine Barrens. They made their living outside. When it was warm they were busy growing and harvesting blueberries and cranberries. When it wasn’t, they stayed busy doing off-season work on the turf farms and cranberry bogs that dotted the area. The men were happy to work for Jesse because it was a way around the language barrier, and in some cases, a citizenship barrier. All of Jesse’s men were immigrants from Mexico and points south. Some were in the United States legally and some weren’t. Jesse made a point of not knowing or caring which were which. It never mattered to their employers, either. They all paid cash and asked no questions. Jesse was able to provide high quality work to those who hired them, and paid his employees fairly. It was good for everybody up until July, when the EMP hit.
Like every place else, life got ugly when that happened. With no money coming in, the group was forced to forage for food, but it was never enough. Soon enough they were forced out of their squalid homes near the fields by the same types of desperate mobs that were marauding every place else. Penniless, defenseless, and now homeless, they retreated into the southern end of the Pine Barrens looking for refuge from the violence. They found it there, but at a heavy cost.
Many work gang leaders in Jesse’s shoes wouldn’t have stuck it out with them, but Jesse did. He was thirty-six years old, single, and had no family of his own. This was his family. They’d always stayed together when times were good. He wouldn’t run out on them now.
Everybody carried a pack, but they depleted their supplies of food and water within a week of fleeing into the forest. After that they subsisted on whatever food and water they came across, whether it was clean or not. Unequipped for hunting, they gathered berries, roots and even leaves.