Maya showed me her gun. It was an over/under .22 rifle/.410 shotgun break-action with a sling on it, just her size. She was very proud of that. Her dad had two long guns in there; a black pump shotgun and a fancy looking assault rifle. They were both obviously too big for her. We just put those in the fourth bedroom upstairs for safe keeping, along with their binoculars, digital cameras and her tablet with a dead battery.
She had two fishing poles with push button reels. One was light-weight and the other stiffer than any I had ever seen at home, and longer too. Her dad had both light and heavy-weight rods with open-faced reels. I didn’t like those at home. They got tangled up too easily. He also had a cool looking fly rod. Maya said she never learned to use that. The fishing stuff, we put on the front porch facing the river for a bit.
I helped her hand wash her clothes that had mildewed a little, and her dad’s that had been thrown around in the sink in the kitchen, and then we hung them out in the sun on the old clothes line to dry. It needed new line I noticed. We ate pop tarts from the van that day as we straightened up all of her stuff. Donald came down and sat with us for a bit and ate some too. Then he started crying again and went back up to his room. We both felt terrible for him, but we didn’t know what to say or do, so we just kept at it. We took a bucket of the wash water down to her boat and washed out the blood stains from the bodies.
The next morning, we started emptying out the back of the van. We left any tools in there for the time being, but carried clothes upstairs, kitchen stuff to the kitchen, and bathroom stuff to the bathroom. Fishing supplies went next to Maya’s on the front porch. Dave and Donald’s guns were all in cases, so we just carried them up to that fourth bedroom, unopened along with the extra bedding and cushions from the bed fort we’d made. Maya teased me a little about that.
We decided to put the kitchen into shape, to see what we had. The two men that had been here had been pigs, and everything was nasty. We didn’t want to just put Donald’s dishes in with the ones they had been using, so we washed everything, cupboards and all. The water well was a hand-pump out on the back porch, through a door right next to the sink. I thought that was weird at first, but once we started using it, I understood why it was done like it was. To have running water in the kitchen sink, we had to go outside and pump water up into a plastic holding tank once in a while. I remember Dave telling us boys how it used to be a wooden barrel when he was a kid, during our drive down. It had a pipe that went from the bottom of the tank, through the wall, and into the faucet. There was only one temperature of water though; air temperature. To get hot water, there was a percolator coffee pot to boil some in. All drinking water needed to be boiled too. There was no such thing as cold water. On the other side of the door from the tank, on the edge of the porch away from the house, was a wood-fired smoker grill. It had two chambers to it. There was the big barrel shaped one where the indirect grilling or smoking was done and a smaller one, lower down on the right for a fire-box, and direct flame grilling. We opened the lid, removed the grate and made a tiny fire in in the lower one, so we didn’t catch the porch roof on fire. Maya had done this before, so I learned from her. Adding small, dried sticks a little at a time made a good bed of embers quite quickly. Then all she did was put the grate back on and set the coffee pot on it. There was also a wood fired stove in the kitchen, plus the propane stove-top built into the counter top, but this way didn’t heat the whole house up inside. I learned already just how much warmer and more humid it is in Florida compared to Michigan. Up there it was beginning to get cool at night. Not so much here. We still had to work at trying to stay cool. I realized that I had a lot to learn, but all I have to do is see something once, and I never forget.
Back inside, the hot water is poured into the stoppered sink first along with some soap, then enough air temperature water was added from the gravity fed tank until we could put our hands in it to wash dishes. The drain pipe leads out through the wall and into the top of another plastic tank below the first one, where graywater is saved up for flushing the toilet and watering plants outside. There was even a regular garden hose that could be attached to take the gravity fed graywater quite a distance. Clever! There was also a plain, old-fashioned outhouse across the barnyard. I could see that off-grid living would be more work than I was used to, but there were definitely ways to work smarter, instead of harder.
As we worked, we talked. A lot. I noticed that Maya was more like Donald conversationally. She was the oldest of us, being nine, but she acted nine. She was surprised that I was not yet seven for a few weeks, since I was so big and ‘talked more like an adult’, as she put it. Once again, as it had always been with kids my age, I felt like ‘the adult’ of the group here too.
Donald kind of snapped out of his depressed mood that evening, and we all sat on the front porch talking and eating some grilled Spam slices right off the smoker grill, and watched fish jumping in the river. Eventually, clouds of hungry mosquitos descended on us. Just like at home, they didn’t bite us, but we went indoors anyhow. They were annoying. Donald said that tomorrow he’d show us around the homestead. He said we’d really like the barn. Maya had never been out there yet. He said that we should put the van in there tomorrow too, to get it out of sight. Neither Maya nor I had ever driven, so we elected Donald to be the driver, since it was his van now and all.
Inside, Maya lit the oil lamp and sat it on the table. Having never seen one before, I watched how it was done. Seeing my interest, she explained; “We didn’t have these at our house. Those men taught me how to do things. After that, it was my job to do everything. Maya, bring me this, Maya go do that. They were lazy slugs. Anyways, you just take the globe off the top, turn the little crank to lower the wick down into the oil, then turn it the other way to raise it back up about half an inch above the slot, and light it. Then you put the globe back on and crank the wick up or down to adjust the flame. When you’re ready to turn it off, you just turn the crank to lower the wick, just until the fire goes out.”
“Cool,” I said. Another concept learned.
“So, where was your dad taking you?” Donald asked Maya. “Do you have family nearby or something?”
“No, there’s no one near. I have some cousins somewhere in Georgia. Dad was taking us upriver to a friend of his with a car. From there we were supposed to go to my cousins’ place. I don’t even know where his friend lives. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I don’t want to go back and work at The Island though.”
“What about your mom?” Donald asked.
“She died when I was born.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Donald said. “Mine did too.”
“What’s The Island?” I asked.
“It’s a huge floating casino nestled in between some of the Ten Thousand Islands beyond the mouth of the Turner River, and out past Chokoloskee where city people come to drink, gamble and all kinds things that they’re not allowed to do in ‘civilization’. It’s pretty lawless there. The Island has a riverboat shuttle service that hauls people to and from Chokoloskee and Everglades City. Daddy drove one of those shuttles. I helped him.
“The GG-Factor was changing him quickly. Most of his hair had fallen out already, so he’d been shaving his head. His skin was getting nearly as gray as mine. He had blood cancer that was out of control, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he had. The hospitals couldn’t treat him. They told him that the GG-Factor not only increased the speed of the aging process several times over, but did the same thing with diseases. Basically, when anyone with those genes gets any bad disease like that, it goes so fast that there’s no stopping it. Heirloom people around here are dying like crazy.
“Customers on the shuttle thought he was one of us, and weren’t very respectful to him. Leaving The Island, they were usually drunk and rowdy. They were awful to him and they grabbed at my butt and my boobs and said nasty things to me about me having a better body than the whores at the casino. They asked why I didn’t work there, because they�
��d like to ‘have’ me. Daddy was too weak to defend me much, and when he told his boss about it, his boss’s answer was that he couldn’t take me with him anymore if that was going to be a problem for me. His boss was only worried about the customers being upset.
“Daddy had that old boat that he’d bought for us to hunt and fish from on his days off. He finally decided to quit his job there and take me away. He was gonna give his friend the boat for driving us to the cousins,” Maya said.
“Maybe you should just stay here with us then,” I said.
“Oh, can I? Please?” she asked Donald.
“Sure, why not,” he answered. “We don’t have anywhere else to go either, and we don’t really know squat about the area outside of this homestead. We could use you.”
“This Chokoloskee,” I asked, “can we go there by boat to buy stuff, if we ever need to?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “It’s a long way, but yes.”
“See?” Donald grinned. “She knows her way around here!”
“We can be a team,” Maya said, smiling at him.
That made Donald smile.
“I read a lot about the history of the Indians that settled into this area to form the Seminole Tribe of Florida in my homeschooling studies,” I said. “We can live like they did, only with some modern stuff. We can live as a tribe. Hey, that’s what we should call ourselves; The Tribe.”
“And you can be the chief!” Donald said.
“Why?” I asked him. “It’s your place.”
“Because you’re the biggest, the strongest and the smartest Adrian. You’re always the leader,” Donald explained.
So there it was… The three of us decided to go it on our own, here on the Turner River, at the edge of the glades, as The Tribe. It was an exciting, but scary kind of a decision. We stayed up late talking about it, by the light of the oil lamp. It felt good to see Donald laughing again. That was what I always liked about him; Donald seemed to always be happy. These last few days of sadness was a side of him I’d never seen before.
6
The next morning I woke to Maya calling my name repeatedly and knocking on my bedroom door. I could tell by her voice that something was up. Donald and I exploded out of our rooms at the same time to see what was wrong.
“Y’all come see this,” she said, hurrying down the stairs two at a time. We were right behind her. She went right to the window facing the river and pointed. There were at least a dozen small alligators crawling across the yard, away from the river, in a hurry.
“Holy crap!” Donald said. “I’ve never seen them do that before.”
“It looks like they’re running away from something. Get that gun loaded and let’s go check on the boats Donald,” I said. I grabbed a large wooden club that we had found behind the door the night before. We stepped out onto the porch quietly, noting that the small alligators seemed to be heading away from the boats, and towards the bridge over the stream we had crossed coming in. They weren’t interested in us in the slightest, so we snuck quietly towards the boats. Neither of us were prepared for what we saw…
On the far side of the aluminum boat, headed back towards the water through the tall grass, was a huge snake. It had solid colored, grayer-than-green skin, the same exact color as Donald’s, and the same bright green, extra-large eyes that all of us hybrids have. Its head was much bigger than ours. It had a tapered bulge in its body, beginning just behind its head, that extending another five feet at least. ‘One of those alligators,’ I thought. Donald raised the shotgun, but I stopped him. “Don’t shoot,” I whispered.
It paused, swallowing again, and looked right at us, making eye contact. It didn’t seem to think of us as a threat. We watched as it slowly entered the river and swam leisurely back upstream, still working on swallowing whatever it had eaten. “What the hell is that?” Donald whispered.
“A snake,” I answered.
“Ya think?” Donald asked, sarcastically. “Look, it’s as long as both boats! Longer! It must be fifty feet long.”
“And over three feet thick,” I whispered. “Looks like we’re not the only hybrids in the ‘Glades. Judging by the color if its skin and its eyes, it’s like us. Look at its muscles rippling as it swims. It must be really strong. That’s why I didn’t want you to wound it and make it mad. Remember how fast you healed up when the cop shot you?”
“Yeah… You’re probably right. Except now we have to worry about if it’ll come back again,” Donald said.
“Oh, it will. I think it’s a green anaconda hybrid,” I told him. “It’ll live in the water to support all of that weight. Since an heirloom anaconda weighs over two hundred pounds as an adult, I’ll bet this one weighs twice that. This snake lives and hunts in this river. Heirloom green anacondas only eat three or four times a year, but I don’t know about this big girl. You can tell it’s a female because its body is thicker than its head. Males are smaller and thinner than their head.”
“How do you know all of this stuff Adrian?” asked Donald, shaking his head.
“I saw a video about them once. I never forget things, right? I could narrate that entire video for you, right now.”
“I hope it doesn’t have babies around here somewhere,” Donald muttered.
“No way,” I told him. It’s like us. That means it can’t have babies, but it will have brothers and sisters from the same litter it was from. Green anacondas have twenty to forty live babies about two feet long each. After that, that mom snake wouldn’t be able to have any more, just like our moms.”
“My mom died having me,” Donald said.
“I know, and that snake’s mom may have too, but it wasn’t your fault that your mom died dude. Remember that,” I said, hugging his shoulder with one arm. “My mom lived, but she transformed while she was pregnant with me. She told me over and over that it wasn’t my fault, but I don’t know how she could not resent me for doing that to her. I guess it had something to do with bodily fluids transferring the genes.”
The snake was out of sight now, so we walked back towards the house to tell Maya about what we’d seen. As we crossed the tall grass ‘lawn’, there was a loud hiss between us and the porch. One of those small alligators faced us, with its mouth open. Donald raised the shotgun, but waited to shoot.
“Let me see if I can get it with this, and save the shells,” I said. “Go to his right, while I go to his left, but keep the gun on him. Just don’t shoot me!”
“Ok.”
As we surrounded the little alligator, it turned its head back and forth to face each of us. When it turned towards Donald the next time, I swung the club overhead and down on top of its head. Crunch. That was it for the alligator.
“Lunch!” Maya sang out.
“Lunch?” we both echoed.
“Yeah, they’re really good. The tail meat on the grill, the pieces and parts in soup. That’s one good thing that those two bastards that had me prisoner taught me,” she replied. “I know how to clean them too. Carry it to the first table on the dock,” she said.
Donald and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and followed directions. Maya came back out of the kitchen with a couple of knives and a large cooking pot. She proceeded to show us how to skin and butcher an alligator. She explained what every piece and part was good for. She tossed the guts into the river, but said; “If we had pigs, we’d give these to them instead.”
I had the thought that no doubt that as a tribe; we’d all be just fine, because we knew such different things. Were any of us alone out here, probably not so much.
One part of the skinning process that really caught my interest was that the skin with the fatty layer attached to it was supposed to work great as fishing bait, (cut bait) when cut into small pieces. We had no way of refrigerating anything, since the propane had all been used up and not replaced by those men. The odd looking chest refrigerator was worse than useless without it. Mental note; Think about whether or not it could work on any other kind of flame.
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In about an hour or so, Maya had the gator all processed. I was surprised at how little usable meat there was by percentage of the whole carcass. At home, one could expect about half of the live weight of a rabbit or a chicken in bone-in meat. About half that again when deboning, for about one quarter of the live weigh in boneless meat. This wasn’t even close to that amount in this little gator. There was white meat from the back straps, around the neck and jowls. The tail meat, legs, and the rest of the pieces she got off it were dark meat. She saved a big piece of the boney tail with little bits of meat all through it for the soup pot. Anything she had no immediate use for went into the river. We watched as fish of all sizes, and even birds and turtles made off with scraps of this, or that. ‘Very different than at home,’ I thought. The only part that nobody seemed interested in were the boney ‘scutes’ that armored the gator’s back. ‘Those might be useful for body armor’ I thought to myself.
“Donald!” I shouted. “Is that a damned shark?”
“Bull shark, yeah. They come upriver quite a ways sometimes. They live in salt water, but can do pretty well in brackish water. This is nearly all fresh water here, so they’re really pushing it to get this far up,” he said, “but that’s just one of the reasons that we can’t ever swim here.”
“No doubt!” I agreed.
It was all beginning to come together in my mind. We should have no shortage of meat and fish to eat here. We had well water, and endless miles of small branches from cypress trees and mangroves to dry and burn as fuel for cooking. “Maya, do you think that the fat from these alligators could be rendered into oil for the lamps?” I asked.
“I don’t know what that means Adrian,” she admitted.
“Well, at home in Michigan, we used to cut up the fat from a hog when we slaughtered one, into about one inch cubes and put them in a double boiler with enough water to cover them in the top pan. The idea was to melt the fat, without ever letting the water in the top pan boil. We dipped out any little pieces of meat or other junk and stirred the melting fat into the water constantly for about a half hour. Then we’d strain it into another pot the same size. After it cooled overnight, there would be a layer of whitish colored lard that had floated up to the top of the water in the pot and hardened into a crust. We’d save that layer of lard and toss the water and floaties in the bottom. Then we could melt the lard again and pour it into heated jars, filling them almost to the top. Then, we’d put the lid on. As the jar cooled, it would pop and seal just like when we canned meat or vegetables. That way it wouldn’t spoil and stink. We used that for cooking instead of store bought vegetable oil. It never spoiled that way. Mom said that the softer fat on the hog was oilier, the harder fat was better suited for lard. It would definitely burn too, because Adam and I have caught frying pans on fire before, goofing around and not paying attention to what we were doing.”
Adrian (Genetic Apocalypse Book 2) Page 3