Super Pulse (Book 2): To The Barrens

by Dave Conifer

“Sure we have, genius,” Del snapped at him. “It’s a big lake, though. You just want to spend the day driving around it a few times, and then pick a random spot?” It was more than Nick would have said, but he was glad Del had put this guy in his place. He was pretty sure he heard Crystal and Sue snickering.

  “Lemme’ make sure I got this right,” Del continued. “We’re drawing water out of the lake, treating it, and holding it until we ship it out someplace, right?”

  “That’s the general idea,” Crystal answered.

  “You got pumps to do it with?” Del challenged. “And power to run the pumps with? I gotta’ know what I’m working with here.”

  “No,” Matt answered. “We were told to design a system that wouldn’t require power. Is that even possible?”

  “Sure it is,” Del replied. “Ever heard of gravity? When it comes to plumbing, that’s the ultimate power. It’s always there.”

  “Well, sure, but—“

  “I like the sound of this,” Crystal said, interrupting Matt. “But spell it out for us. Whatever you’re thinking of. With the gravity, I mean.”

  “Sure,” Del told her. “It isn’t rocket science. Gravity. Water don’t go up. It don’t even like going sideways. Not all the time. But it always goes down. So we set up the plumbing that way. We make it go down where we want it to.” He looked at Nick. “Gonna’ take a lot of digging, though. Good thing you talked them into bringing in all those Mexicans.”

  “So Del, if I’m understanding this, you’re saying that we find a spot near the lake and dig a big hole?” Nick asked. “And we build their lab in that hole?”

  “Yep. Why not?” Del asked. “It’ll work.”

  “How does the water get out of the lake and into this lab?” Crystal asked. “You can run pipes?”

  “Pipes, plastic hoses, whatever,” Del said. “It depends on what we have on hand in the Warehouse. But these guys looted every Lowes and Home Depot in the state. You know that better than I do, I bet. You’re Grover’s wife, right? Anyway, I think we got everything we need to do this.”

  “Dumb question,” Robby said. “But we’ll be able to, you know, turn this water on and off when we need to after it runs from the lake into our little building?” Again, he looked over at Crystal and Sue as he said it.

  “My dad always told me there ain’t no such thing as a dumb question,” Del said. “Only dumb people.”

  “Please humor us,” Sue said sarcastically. “Yes or no?”

  “Yes, assuming we have valves on hand,” Del said after a sigh of disgust, “or that we can get them. Sure. Of course. It wouldn’t do us no good, otherwise. We’d just be building an indoor swimming pool.”

  “How big does this lab have to be?” Nick asked. “Like Del was saying, I’m more worried about the digging than the construction.”

  “Whatever we decided yesterday,” Crystal said to Sue and Robby, “let’s make it double. We’ll play it safe. I’ll see to it that we have all the manpower we need. This is top priority. Our current water supplies will run dry in eight or nine days. We need to start this now.”

  “That’s all well and good about the manpower,” Nick answered. “But at the end of the day, all that manpower is gonna’ come from this subcommittee. Construction. I know you have Grover’s ear, but, trust me, everybody comes out here and tells us that they’re the top priority. But we can’t be in two places at once. Or ten.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Crystal said firmly. “That part you don’t need to worry about.”

  Discussion over, Nick thought. And in this case, that wasn’t a bad thing at all.

  Seventeen

  Not surprisingly, Kelly and her friends had been in the lake for hours that weekend day when the EMP hit. That didn’t surprise Sarah. If they hadn’t had the bike ride in Philadelphia, they’d have done the same thing. Like everybody everywhere, the EMP wasn’t understood or taken seriously until the further-reaching effects were discovered. As they realized that their cars, their electronic gadgets, their wells and pumps no longer worked, they came to understand that they were in a lot of trouble.

  Several of the families had elderly relatives living with them. That was a trend that had started with two families who brought their aging parents to live with them rather than check them into a health care facility. Then another set of parents were invited by another family of residents. Then a widowed mother arrived. It was a good place for them. There were lots of people around, and all the medical care facilities they’d need were close by

  Eventually these relatives came to enjoy their time living on the lake with their children and grandchildren, as well as with each other. Friendships bloomed. An informal club was formed, filling their schedules with activities and events. The rest of their time was filled with enjoying their families, and just being there.

  Many of the relatives arrived with urgent health issues to deal with. Until the EMP, of course, they were all easily managed. But within two weeks of the event, when there were no more visits to doctors, no more prescriptions and no more pharmacies or drug stores. Medications like insulin, blood thinners, penicillin and even aspirin began to run out. The machines that some of the relatives needed to keep them healthy, none of which Kelly knew much about, were of course no longer working. Suddenly, bringing elderly people to live at the lake didn’t seem anymore like it had been a great idea. Even so, they all thought they could ride it out until the power came back on. That changed the morning when one of them was found dead in her bed. A few days later one more was lost, and the health of another was failing fast.

  It wasn’t just medicine that they needed. And it wasn’t just the infirm residents that were increasingly at risk. Everybody was. It was obvious that before long they’d all be running out of fuel, food and everything else that they’d taken for granted. Fish from the lake quickly became a staple of their diet, but they knew even that couldn’t be sustained for long on the manmade, artificially stocked lake.

  Beneath the worry about all the overt shortages was the nagging uncertainty about what had happened, how long it would last, and what could be done about it. Most of the families in the neighborhood got together and decided it was time to go out in the world to gather supplies, medicine, and information, all to be brought back to the lake. The idea started as an expedition by four or five of the healthiest men. After a few days of discussion it had turned into a mass exodus, leaving a skeleton of the village behind to care for those who weren’t healthy enough to leave. All of a sudden, nobody wanted to be there anymore. The healthiest residents were the ones most anxious to leave.

  In the end, not many stayed behind with the elderly residents, who had no choice about where to be. Four fathers from up and down the street volunteered to stay. So did some kids. In all there were six teenagers who stayed behind, Kelly among them, and four younger kids. One of the younger ones was Sarah’s sister. Everybody who stayed behind moved in to the four houses in the cove. When Dewey expressed surprise that anybody would leave their kids back at the lake, Sarah pointed out that it would have been even more dangerous to bring them along out into the unknown.

  From that point, after everybody else was gone, all they could do was tend to the grandparents as best they could and, of course, take care of themselves. They fished the lake, but found they had to go further from the cove and dedicate more time for fishing in order to keep reeling the fish in. Some of the lake residents had water purification kits; these were adequate to supply drinking water for a few weeks. Eventually, though, they ran out of the needed chemicals, so they turned to boiling lake water to have clean water to drink.

  Except for the obvious cases of failed machines or the lack of medicine, nobody was sure why the grandparents started dying. Kelly suspected there were germs in the fish and water that their systems were too weak to deal with. It didn’t help that they were going without vital medical appointments and treatment. By late August, all but one had passed.

  Even before the last of them
had died, however, there was trouble. One day, at the height of the summer heat, a rowdy and well-armed band of unkempt men stumbled into the lakeside community, liked what they saw, and immediately decided to make themselves at home.

  There was a brief, one-sided battle with the residents who wanted no part of that. The fathers in the cove had two guns between them, but none were particularly skillful with them. Unfortunately for them, the invaders were far more proficient with their own weapons. Not only did they win the day, they also made sure to hunt down and kill all four of the fathers for good measure. After that they chose whichever lake houses they preferred and moved in.

  “Who were these guys?” Dewey asked. “Like, how many of them were there?”

  “We knew they were prisoners from some place,” Kelly explained. “Fifteen or twenty of them. They were on a prison transport bus somewhere around here when the EMP happened. When the bus broke down, they got away. At least that’s what one of them told my dad. I guess that was before they decided to kill him.”

  Sarah reached out and touched Kelly’s hand after understanding what must have happened. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Thank you,” Kelly said. “He tried his best to save me. The first day they came he heard them yelling ‘Where are the women?’ He made me cut my hair and dress like a boy. So there aren’t any women here now, as far as they know. Now that I’ve watched The Men, I know that saved me.”

  The men enjoyed shooting their guns off, Kelly continued, mostly at ducks in the lake or even straight up into the air. It wasn’t long before the ammunition was gone and the guns went quiet. From then on, they enforced their will with knives, clubs and baseball bats. Not that anybody was resisting by then.

  The Men were rough around the edges, and didn’t know much about surviving out in the wild, but they were street smart. They knew they couldn’t survive by their own hand out there on the lake, but they quickly came up with a plan. The last remaining grandparent and the four youngest kids, all under the age of nine, were moved into the lakefront bungalow that became known as “The Jailhouse.” One of them was Kelly’s younger sister, Katie. The five teenagers were told that the hostages would be kept alive so long as a steady supply of food and water continued to be made available to them. The last grandparent died of natural causes within a week. But the four young children, all of whom was a sibling of one of the teenagers, were still very much alive. Kelly and her cohorts worked dawn to dusk meeting the demands in order to keep them that way. In fact that’s what they were busy doing when they saw two new faces hurrying across the bridge earlier that day. As soon as they could, they sent Kelly over to the bridge to find out if the unexpected visitors were there to save them.

  Eighteen

  Nick hadn’t been involved in the discussions, of course, but it was clear to him and everybody else that the timeline for moving everybody to Tabernacle had been moved up. There was nothing sinister about it. It was just a rational response to the increasing frequency of attacks on Southampton Middle School. They were easily repulsed by the security forces, but they were becoming a nuisance to deal with. The attacks were usually waged by bands of desperate men looking for ways to feed themselves and their families.

  Once the fighting was over, it was hard not to feel sorry for any survivors, or at least their kin. But one of these days the attackers would have enough men and weapons to pose a serious threat. They’d all be better off at the camp, with its rising fortifications and limited avenues for attack, and the sooner the better.

  Tremendous strides were made at Tabernacle over the next week and a half. Now that many of the subcommittee members were bunking in the village at Tabernacle several nights a week, twelve-hour work days were becoming the norm. Knowing how urgent the water situation was, Matt and the leaders of Water Supply moved out there permanently so they could be closer to the Water Plant during construction. A site for the plant at the edge of the lake had quickly been chosen. A cross-section of laborers from every subcommittee were then dispatched to the camp to dig out the site of the plant, which ended up taking less than a day to finish. By the end of the next day the earth walls had been shored up with treated lumber and a floor had been installed, all courtesy of the Construction subcommittee.

  Meanwhile, Del had found all the plumbing supplies he’d needed in the Warehouse. He and Dwayne had teamed up and installed a set of four-inch lines that brought water from the lake into what would become the Water Plant, complete with ball-valve shutoffs. They then backed off for three days while the plant walls and roof were erected.

  One end of the building was comprised entirely of a set of huge doors, which would facilitate the coming and going of water barrels, the size of which had not been determined. After Nick shingled the roof, it was time to build the innards of the plant, handled by subcommittee members themselves.

  Matt dreamed up a system of rails installed on the floor, by which water barrels could be easily moved up the incline and out the doors, where they would be loaded on trucks and shipped. Nick liked the idea, and thought they could devise a winch mechanism to move the barrels without a need for external power. That was phase two, or maybe even phase ten, Matt knew. For now, the mission was simply to get the plant running.

  “I don’t think we should store the chlorine right here in the plant,” Matt said during the first walk-through. “No matter how much room we have. Eventually it’ll crowd us too much. We should ask Construction to build a separate storehouse, either next door or nearby.”

  “I agree,” Crystal said. “This building is for production, not storage.”

  “But I don’t think they’re going to build it for us now,” Sue warned. “They’re already grumbling about lost time.”

  “Well, they’ll have to dedicate some of their precious Warehouse space for our chlorine, then,” Crystal said. “They won’t have a choice.”

  Crystal’s curt, defensive attitude was typical. All the subcommittees were feeling pressure from above to get their work done as soon as possible. It was inevitable that they would butt heads with each other. This created friction and competitiveness, but it also ensured that things got done. Grover and the Committee were likely gambling that any bruised feelings would be forgotten after they were settled into their new home.

  Discussion about where to store the chlorine was both pertinent and unavoidable. The scavengers, a subcommittee that still didn’t seem to have a name despite its importance, departed in trucks to find chlorine as soon as it was ordered. Within days, crates, bags and boxes of chlorine, in both liquid and powder form, began to arrive. With no place else to put it, Water Supply had indeed sent it to the Warehouse. Now it looked as though it was there to stay.

  As had been discussed at subcommittee meetings, the process in the Water Plant was going to be very simple, at least for the immediate future. Barrels would be filled with lake water via Del’s pipes. An adequate amount of chlorine would be added, and the mixture would be stirred occasionally. After an adequate period of exposure, the water would be tested for bacteria. When levels were low enough, the barrel would be deemed finished and was ready to be shipped out to distribution points, none of which had been designated yet. Barrels would be processed on a staggered schedule, ensuring a steady supply of clean water as well as a systematic flow of barrels to and from the plant.

  Matt knew from his research that although the water would be clean, it was going to taste bad. Adding salt would alleviate that, he’d learned, but he felt it was too much of a luxury even to bring it up. Maybe someday, he decided, after somebody else says something about it. Hopefully there’ll be a time when we dare to complain about how our clean water tastes.

  ~~~

  Food Production’s facilities at Tabernacle had progressed at an equally remarkable pace. The walls and tin roof of the Slaughterhouse, a simple structure set to be built at the edge of the forest not far from the Warehouse, went up the same day as the Water Plant. Deer were already being harvested in
the forest and brought to the Slaughterhouse to be butchered. Some meat was sliced and packed off to the kitchens to be served fresh. The rest was earmarked to be smoked, preserved and saved for the winter.

  The Cannery design was identical to that of the Slaughterhouse, although its mission had changed. After doing their research, the subcommittee had decided that the traditional canning process wasn’t efficient enough to support the needs of such a large group. Aside from that, the scavengers had informed the subcommittee the supplies needed would be hard to come by in volume. Instead, at least for this first season, all the fruit that wasn’t served fresh at harvest would be heat-dried and stored away.

  The Smokehouse, where fresh meat would be smoked and preserved for the winter, was a far more complicated structure, probably the most difficult construction project at Tabernacle. Plenty of members had experience with family-sized backyard smokers, but nobody knew what it would take to process the meat on a scale large enough to feed everybody. It took days of research and discussion before construction plans were agreed on. There was going to be a lot of brick to be laid, concrete to be mixed and poured, and tin vents to be folded, but in the end at least the blueprints were clear. Once the plans were in hand, Mark provided carpenters to build it.

  In the meantime, because there was an immediate need, John had set up a temporary outdoor meat-smoking operation. It had to be re-started every morning and shut down every night, but despite that, the team had already successfully produced hundreds of pounds of venison jerky that was being served there at Tabernacle and back at the school. Winter stockpiles of smoked meat were already being accumulated. Just like Water Supply, Food Production had been promised storage facilities, but for now would also use a section of the ever-crowding Warehouse.

  While the Smokehouse was going up, John Markle reluctantly diverted some of his Food Supply people to work on collecting firewood. Nobody knew how much they’d need for winter, not just for the Smokehouse but for the entire camp. The hope was that enough could be collected to get through Christmas at the earliest. To that end, the Hammonton refugees were also assigned to that task between their higher-priority digging assignments as soon as they were healthy enough to work. Within days, a huge stockpile of wood, ranging from tree-length logs to kindling, began to rise behind the Smokehouse construction site.