When we parted, Renata turned and climbed into the RV. “C’mon, Twist.” She shut the passenger-side door and leaned out the window. “We traveled enough for this lifetime.” She nodded her head toward the houses on the west side of the lake. “It’s time for you to take me home.”
I smiled at her and turned back to the lake. It was beautiful there. The flat prairie stretched for miles. There were plenty of homes we could scavenge for supplies and wood until we could turn the land into a working, sustainable farm. There were animals we could capture and domesticate. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be worth it. We wouldn’t be stuck in a weird, half-life existence, struggling to live out of a library or a cramped RV on odds and ends we found lying in the wreckage of the world. We would have a home. A real home. I looked to the woman I loved. The smile on her face lit my entire world.
I think this is what Doug had been trying to tell me. He wanted me to live. To feel like life was not an inconvenience, but rather a gift. He wanted me to not worry so much about living day-to-day, and to start worrying about doing something more than merely existing in a state of desperation. He wanted me to have joy. To have love. To have a bit of something beyond being in the moment. I stood on the shore a moment more. I hoped my parents were proud of me, wherever they were. I hoped Doug could see where I was, and what I would accomplish. I hoped he was proud of me, too.
I limped back to the RV and climbed into the driver’s seat. I started the engine. I looked at Ren, and she looked at me. She placed her hand on my shoulder. I shifted into drive and let the Greyhawk roll slowly back to the road. The future stood before us like the lake, bright, wide, and shining.
It’s Thursday, I think. I’m not sure.
Honestly, it doesn’t even matter. The apocalypse wasn’t a cruel dream. The Flu was real. Almost everyone I have ever known or loved is still dead.
However, the world looks less vacant and barren than it did. I am no longer alone. I found a woman in New York and she came to the South with me. We sought many long, empty roads for possible survivors of a catastrophic viral apocalypse who might have wanted to help us rebuild civilization, but found no one, so far.
We know there are people out there, though. We hope they will find us. If not, she and I are prepared to carve out a good life together.
We will succeed.
This is the continued journal of my daily life.
My name is Twist. I’m nineteen, and heading toward twenty. I still miss Big Macs, television, indoor plumbing, and going to the movies.
And I am still alive.
And I am actually living.
All We Have
The Survivor Journals, Book Three
To Hope
It’s Thursday, I think. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.
It’s amazing how little I think about the calendar now. Once, it ruled my life: Was it Sunday night? Did I have my homework done? Did I have a three-day weekend this week? How many more days until Christmas? How many more days until Summer Break?
Now, it’s just an archaic thing, a remnant of the old days, an arbitrary way of marking the passage of time. I haven’t known what day of the week it was for more than a year and a half, not since the Flu killed nearly everyone on the planet.
I survived the first year in Wisconsin, weathering a rough winter by scavenging supplies from stores and homes, burning wood for heat. I left Wisconsin for the South, traveling to New York, Washington D.C., and down the eastern seaboard looking for other survivors. I found Renata Lameda in New York. She came south with me, and we have settled outside of Houston, Texas.
Now it’s not about surviving; it’s about building a future, come what may.
This is the continued journal of my life.
My name is Twist. I’m almost twenty. I’ve never been a wilderness guy, nor have I gardened, farmed, or raised animals. All that is going to have to change if I want to live in this world devoid of civilization.
The only important thing is that Renata and I are still alive.
Part One
Spring
CHAPTER ONE
The Mighty Nimrod
I have always believed that most people either did something, or they didn’t do something. It doesn’t matter what that thing is, pick a thing at random: Skiing, for example. You either ski, or you don’t ski. And if you do ski, then you likely didn’t just wake up one day and think, Hey! I should ski! Usually, if you do something, it’s because you were somehow indoctrinated into it, sometimes it’s by your friends, or a TV show, but it’s usually done by your family. If your mom and dad ski, then you likely had sticks on your feet shortly after you learned to walk. If your mom and dad were bowlers, then you probably played video games in the game room of the lanes on Friday nights when they bowled league, and you probably started bowling in kids’ leagues, too. You either do a thing, or you don’t, and if you don’t do something, it can be really hard to start doing it.
I bring this up because I am not a hunter. Not in the least. My parents were not outdoorsy. My mom’s idea of roughing it was a hotel without room service. The closest my dad got to nature was mowing the lawn once a week in the summers. We didn’t fish. We didn’t hunt. I don’t even remember going to the zoo. (I know we went, because there were photos of it, but it precedes my memory by a few years. I was still in diapers when we went.) Two years ago, my only knowledge of hunting came from flipping channels on cable TV on Saturday mornings and pausing briefly on the Outdoor Network as two bearded dudes in blaze orange took down a buck with rifles. And Wisconsin is a hunting paradise! People treat the opening day of Deer Season like a religious holiday. I remember opening days where half my classmates were missing because they were out at deer camp. The only reason I was able to remain so deficient in hunting knowledge and skills was because my parents did not do it.
All that changed two years ago, though. The Flu happened. Humanity died. All across the globe, primates withered and died, drowning in fluids accumulating in their lungs. For whatever reason, I did not die. A rare immunity? Dumb luck? A curse? I do not know. All I know is that I waited to die, and I’m still here. I have a need to eat, and two years into the apocalypse, the wealth of prepackaged and canned food stores are starting to grow thin, what was produced before the Fall of Man is starting to spoil, and thus, to survive, I must learn to hunt.
It is little things like this where I wish I knew someone who could help me learn to hunt, indoctrinate me into it, teach me how to do it properly. I have read books and magazines on hunting. Mostly magazines. I acquired a stack of Outdoor Life and Field & Stream from a library, and I spent two solid weeks devouring every article in them. Between that and what scraps I’ve gleaned over the years from books like the “Little House” series and Where the Red Fern Grows, I hope I have learned enough to be a decent provider.
I’m not alone in the apocalypse; not anymore, at least. About nine months back, I found a petite spitfire of a Brooklyn girl in New York City, and she joined me on my journey south. Renata, or Ren as she prefers, has become my reason for living. Over the trip from New York to Houston, Texas, I guess you could say we fell in love. It’s the same old story, really:
-Boy Meets Girl
-Boy Falls for Girl
-Girl Thinks Boy is Gay
-Boy Gets Mauled By Tiger
-Girl Saves Boy’s Life
-Boy and Girl Realize They Love Each Other and Settle Down on a Burgeoning Farm in a Post-Apocalyptic Entropy-Ridden Wasteland.
You know—that old chestnut.
Late last fall, Ren and I made it to a little farm along the shore of Lake Houston, about twenty miles northeast of the city of Houston. We did it just in time, too. Gas reserves were starting to deplete and go sour. After a period of time, what gas was left in ground tanks evaporated enough that it began to turn gelatinous. Gelatinous gas was no good for powering internal combustion engines. It would still burn all right; it just wouldn’t get pumped through pistons to power a machine. My trus
ty, beloved Jayco Greyhawk RV now sits on the edge of our property on flattened tires, never to run again. It still works well as a writing refuge, though. I spend some time in there every day working on my journal, hacking and clacking at the typewriter until all these thoughts I have in my brain work their way out. I find it cleansing. Plus, should society ever rebuild itself, or should aliens ever find the wreckage of our once-proud civilization, maybe they will be able to learn something useful about how we few survivors lived after the Flu.
Maybe I’m just wasting my time. Who knows?
Ren and I spent our first winter in Texas fixing up the farm. Being a Wisconsin boy, the Texas winter was appreciated greatly. It rarely got below fifty. There was only one flurry all winter, and it melted within eight hours. I never wore anything heavier than a light jacket. At no point did I fear freezing to death. It was a welcome change to battling the cold of the Midwest. A friend of my dad’s moved to Phoenix years ago. When my dad asked why he was leaving Wisconsin, he said, Because you don’t have to shovel sunshine. I understand his thinking now. Winter has its good points, but in the thick of winter when you’re battling freezing temperature and thigh-deep snowdrifts, it is hard to remember them.
The house we found and chose as our home did not need a lot of work. It was a newer home, still in good condition. Luckily, no one died in the home, so it was free of that lingering smell of death that houses with corpses in them acquired. That was an imperative for our new home. Also imperative: enough space to grow a large garden and tend to crops, space and housing for animals we might return to domestication, and close enough proximity to the lake for me to figure out a way to get us fresh water. We found all of this in a little, modern house with a large barn behind it, some pasture land, and a view of the lake.
We cleared debris from the yard. I used a large hand-scythe to hack down the overgrown weeds and make a livable space. I found an old-fashion, push mower, the kind without an engine, and I used that to winnow down the yard to a livable length. We aired out the house, opening windows and letting the prairie winds blow through to make the house feel alive and vibrant again. We settled into the master bedroom together, and started amassing the things we would need to make a life for the next sixty years: Clothes, linens, and a stockpile of guns and ammunition. (Luckily, given that we were in Texas, these things were all plentiful.) We raided a library for books, both fiction and non-fiction. We would need things to read. We would need reference materials to help us do things we did not understand. I found a book about using solar panels to take your home off the grid. Given that the grid no longer existed, I figured it would be a useful book to have. That book gave us the possibility of having electric power again. That mean lights. That meant refrigeration. That meant a hot water heater. That meant we could power the well pump and have running water in the house again. That meant we could be civilized again. No more bathing in the yard with a washcloth and a cauldron of fire-heated water.
The RV got us back and forth to Houston several times during those first two or three months, more than enough for us to scavenge stores for everything we thought we would possibly need for the next sixty years.
We stored tools in the garage of the home, stacking them in piles. We also scavenged all the cordwood we could, making long, elegant rows along the edge of the yard, fuel for fires, fuel for cooking. I built a nice, stone-and-daub wood-fired oven from a kit, placing it near the back door. We had a fire pit in the yard, too. Between the two fires, our cooking needs were met.
Until I figured out how to hook up enough solar panels to give us some sort of electrical flow, we would have no heat in the house. We struggled through the winter by huddling together under heavy blankets on the coldest nights, but for two people from the northern states, we did not find the Texas winter all that intimidating. I came from a home where windows were opened at night as long as it was above fifty degrees. Good sleeping weather, my dad would have said. At its worst, the Texas winter was a little uncomfortable and sort of annoying. At its best, it was like comfortable spring weather in Wisconsin.
It was hard to predict what we would need from week to week, let alone what we would need from year to year or decade to decade. We only knew that we would need a lot of things because resupply would eventually be difficult, if not impossible.
We were not going to go hungry anytime soon, so that was one thing we did not have to worry about. Canned food was still plentiful. We were slowly scavenging as much as we could from the homes around the lake, and if necessary, there were always more homes. However, canned and boxed food, or the prepackaged, carb-heavy snacks and easy eats that had a seemingly limitless shelf life were getting boring and repetitive. The salt used to preserve. Fresh vegetables and fruits, those that we could harvest from the land around us, were very welcome. We found a few fruit trees and a grove of avocado trees nearby. Ren planted tomatoes when we first moved in, and we found garlic and onions growing in the woods. Ren has kept me hip-deep in fresh guacamole for weeks. I could live on guacamole.
We have also started building up sustainable methods of keeping ourselves in fresh food. We managed to coral a couple of chickens that had been living in the wild. While skittish at first, they now seemed grateful to given a safe place to sleep at night and a fenced-in run for daytime grazing. Those chickens have been providing us with eggs. When we get a cockerel, we will be able to increase the flock and someday soon, we might be frying our own chickens.
Ren had grand plans to capture and breed rabbits for meat, but so far, that had not happened. Wild rabbits were hard to catch and keep alive, but we could see strains of rabbits that were once domesticated who now roamed wild. She built a small hutch and a fenced-in yard with a grate across the bottom to keep the little devils from tunneling out. She had live snares in the woods nearby, but so far, she had only managed to capture squirrels, a couple of opossums, and a very perturbed raccoon—nothing that we really considered immediately necessary as cuisine, really.
I had managed to grab a pair of Holstein cows that were wandering the plains around the lake. Cows were never wild creatures. They were bred down from wild Aurochs and, over centuries, turned into the gentle-eyed, supremely chill beasts we know today. The two I caught weren’t starving, but they did look ill. They were thin, despite the ample grasslands for forage. I was able to wrangle them with minimal roping skill. Okay, no roping skill. One just let me walk up and put a rope around her neck without a fight. Once I lassoed the first one, the other just followed it back to the barn. A broad course of deworming paste I plundered from a vet’s office got the cows back to their old selves, and they quickly began putting on weight and acting far more spry. Well, as spry as cows get, I guess. It’s hard to tell with them. I like cows. They are mellow as hell. I’ve decided that people should be more like cows. Got a problem? Just stand there and chew your cud. It ain’t the end of the world.
Of course, once I had cows, I leaned the joy of mucking out stables. Frankly, after a week of that I briefly considered turning those two poop machines loose again. Ren wouldn’t hear of it, though. Their manure became part of our necessary compost for ploughing into land and keeping our farmland well fertilized. We named the cows Thing 1 and Thing 2. It was disappointing that they appeared to be still young, so they were not bred and producing milk, but if I could ever manage to find a bull, we might try to remedy that situation. We had initially considered eating them, but they were so sweet and gentle, they became more like pets. Ren and I resignedly decided they would not be meat unless we absolutely had no other choice but to eat them. Meat could come from elsewhere.
Which brings me back to hunting.
I spent most of the morning lying prone on top of a grassy hill, mostly hidden by knee-deep blades of grass. I had a long rifle with a scope tucked solidly into my shoulder. I have no idea if the scope is sighted properly, nor do I have any idea of how to do it. I should get a book about it, or find magazine articles about it. All I know of guns, really, is that
you point one end at your target, squeeze the trigger, and then hope the gun doesn’t snap back and smash you in the nose.
I was doing my best to hunt, though. I was hoping for a deer, or maybe a wild pig, or maybe even a cow, if necessary. Growing up in Wisconsin, I was around hunters a lot. I listened to talk of hunting. I heard hunting stories. I used to have to listen to my classmates debate different types of guns and ammunition. I should have paid more attention.
Most hunting stories started with So there I was… and ended with a poorly mimicked sound of gunfire, a vivid description of where the bullet hit the target, and then how long it took the hunter to track the target down if it ran after being hit. Then, weights of the beast and/or number of points of the antlers were tossed out to the listeners for comparison to their own legendary kills. Since I was not a hunter, nor did I ever believe I was going to be a hunter, I usually tuned out shortly after So there I was…
So there I was, atop the hill with a gun, and waiting for some poor, soon-to-be-dinner creature to happen into my field of view. I was choosing the sit-and-wait approach to hunting, rather than stalking my prey because, frankly, I’m lazy. The Texas sun was warm on my back and my legs, the dusty, dry smell of the prairie was welcoming, and the wind felt good on my face. Plus, hunting was a legitimate excuse to take a morning off of busting my tail on the farm. I did not mind the farm work, but it was definitely strenuous, and I’m a born-and-raised suburban soft-type whose hands had never known a callous until we settled on the ranch.
The Survivor Journals Omnibus Page 43