by Geo Dell
“Where were you thinking of to do it?” David asked.
Bob nodded as though he had expected the question, “I'm looking at a huge area of what was forever wild lands. Encompasses quite a lot of the middle of the old country, stretches south, north, east and west. Several million acres, mountains, valleys, and a lot of it is the same as it was when this country was settled, untouched. There have been expeditions back into it a few times, but no one has lived there since natives lived there.”
He borrowed the map that Mike had shown Jeff earlier, pulled a black grease pencil from his pocket and circled the area.
“Take us a few weeks of steady travel to get close to it. Then there's a lot of preparations to make. And, well, we don't know what to expect on the way. Who we may meet, who might want to come,” Bob said.
Susan looked at Sandy, then whispered something in her ear. She nodded. “We want to go,” Susan said and Sandy nodded again.
“So do we,” Tim said. He was holding Annie's hands.
“We really do,” Annie said.
“Then you will,” Bob said looking at Mike.
“It's your call, Tim,” Patty said.
“But what about you,” Tim asked Patty.
“I... I want to talk it over with Ronnie. It sounds good,” she looked from Ronnie to Candace to Mike, tears threatening in her eyes.
“I asked Bob,” Mike said, “not to force anyone to decide - we have lots of time for that - but to see what it is. I... I for one am impressed. But this isn't something I can decide alone. Candace comes first on my list of things that make up my world. We'll talk it over, same as all of us will, I guess,” Mike finished. Patty looked grateful.
“If you don't mind, we'd like to think about it as well. I guess that's taking for granted you'd let us in if we decided we wanted to come,” Jeff said.
“And we would. You're welcome,” Janet Dove said.
“I know we've been thinking along the same lines,” Sharon said. “I know we've kind of crashed in on you. You've been so kind to us. It's appreciated.”
Bob nodded.
The light was rapidly bleeding from the sky as the conversations broke up and people began to drift away.
“Did you get a room at the motel?” Mike asked Jeff.
“Jessica and... Lilly?” He asked looking at Lilly where she sat with Tom.
Mike nodded, as did Lilly and Tom. Lilly smiled.
“She took care of that today, so we will be sleeping on real beds tonight, I guess.”
“Oh, you'll love it,” Mike said. “After the ground? Absolutely recommended. The best night's sleep I've had... Well, I was just thinking of another night, but it's the best night in a while, that's for sure.”
“What?” Candace asked.
“Well, the night I was first with you. Everything had happened, things looked so bad, and there you were. It was my first good night's sleep since it all happened,” Mike finished quietly.
“Oh,” she said, “that's so nice. It was like that for me as well. Just to know someone cared... about me.”
“It was like that for all of us, I think,” Jeff said.
“It was for me,” Ronnie agreed.
“Yeah,” Patty agreed, her eyes on Candace.
“This is such a changed world,” Bob said. “Since when have you sat around and had a conversation that was this true or personal?”
“I can't recall,” Arlene said, “Probably, if I'm honest, never.”
“Me either,” Tom said. He sat with one arm around Lilly's shoulders.
“I do now, with Tom, with others, but I never did, not even with my close girlfriends,” Lilly said.
“That's what I mean. It's a changed world, and I for one am glad for it.”
A few minutes later Tom and Lilly and Candace and Mike got up to leave for the night's first post. They made their goodbyes and left the others.
“...Now, what about crops, and what about domesticated animals? I mean, why can't we have our own herds?” Jeff asked Bob as Mike and Candace were walking away.
“Well, I thought about that too,” Bob began.
~Candace's journal~
I am in an actual room with privacy and a candle for light. It's almost like the world is normal.
Mike and I did early posts and then came back here and spent some alone time.
It was nice, and it was needed. Bob spoke more in depth about his ideas than I've ever heard him speak before. I almost said yes on the spot, but I want to talk it over with Mike, and we still haven't done that either.
I've also grown really close to Patty, I wouldn't like to be without her. But it's really Mike. I won't even kid myself. He helps me to be me, a real part of me, that is the only way I know to explain it. I love him. Maybe we made our child tonight. Just maybe. I hope so.
We met some good people today. I don't know if they will join up, so to speak, but I hope so, and I hope there will be others.
Things we know: The days are about 26 hours now, give or take a few minutes. That means the Earth is turning slower, so we weigh more than we used to. I can't tell any difference. But Tim, who pointed it out, swears that he can.
Most animals survived, whereas most people did not. The stupidity factor, Mike calls it, and I agree. C.B. radios are being used by a lot of people. We can hear more than we can talk to. But Bob says with a bigger antenna we can both hear more and talk more. I know there are still good people in the world worth talking to, so maybe once we're settled, it will be worth the bigger antenna.
~
I clicked on my MP3 player, chose the play list I wanted, clicked it down to the bottom of my screen and then clicked up Gimp and loaded the graphic I wanted to work on. My mind wasn't on it though. I stared at the screen for something like ten minutes before I gave up and closed down the graphic, pushed away from the desk and listened to the song that was currently playing - Solution Six, by somebody new that I had never heard of - while I decided what it was I really wanted to be doing.
The graphic was a small logo for one of my clients. It was done, but like everything else I did, I would play with it long past the time I needed to. It seemed like everything in my life was like that. I was constantly fussing with it. It was never really done, finished, complete. It wasn't life; it was me. I could tell myself it was because I wasn't satisfied with my life, that I felt it wasn't complete, but that did nothing at all to solve the problem.
I could know, and did know, that what I missed was a relationship. Sharing myself with more than just the girl in the electronics section at Walmart where I bought whatever computer supplies I needed. And what did that amount to? A smiled, Hello, how are you, a quick, reserved, superficial conversation, Oh, the blank CD sleeves are two aisles over. Another superficial smile. Those were the types of relationships I had.
Relationships? Did I really consider those to be relationships? I did. After all, I knew her name, Becky. Becky N. Sometimes I wondered what the N stood for. And sometimes I even thought about a conversation that had nothing to do with electronic needs.
Pathetic, I told myself. I must have had better relationships than that. Oh, the pizza kid. I almost knew his name... Johnny or Tommy something.
I needed relationships. I was missing life. It was going by, and I was stuck watching it pass by the glass like a lonely man riding the bus, watching the world slide by stop after stop, day upon day.
Anyway, I knew all of that. I knew what bothered me, drove me, and it was useless. It was useless because I wasn't willing to do anything about it. I remember thinking, in fact, that it would take something drastic to take me from the kind of life I had built for myself and into the kind of life I really wanted. And that was also part of the problem. I didn't know what kind of life I did want. And I didn't want to invest any actual thinking into it.
So there I was, staring at my monitor again, watching the little red sound graphic jump up and down to the music. A blues piece. Catchy, but not exactly uplifting. Still, it held my atten
tion with its murky lyrics, but was probably dragging me right into my own blues at the same time. Weren't blues supposed to take away the blues? It never worked that way for me. It only reinforced my own blues. I needed a real life, I remember thinking.
The furnace kicked on, and a few seconds later I felt the heat along with the slight metallic odor that the new furnace had come with. The furnace guy who put it in, call me Rocky, he'd said, had told me the smell would go away. So far it hadn't. Maybe by next spring, I thought. In any case, it decided me. I needed to get out of the house, go for a ride, do something, anything but sit around and stare at my monitor.
It was cold, but the roads were clear. I grabbed the keys to my car and headed out just that quickly. I opened the door, and the cold air slapped me in the face. And just that fast, that world was gone again, and I found myself sitting up on the mattress in the slightly musty smelling Motel room. Cold air slipped past my bare chest and I shivered involuntarily.
Candace finished closing the door and then turned, slowly making her way to the bed in the nearly absolute blackness, her night vision ruined by the bright moonlight and fires outside.
“A little to your left, Baby,” I whispered.
“I woke you up,” she whispered back as she readjusted her path and found the bed, slipping across the mattress on her hands and knees. I caught her and pulled her into my arms.
“Not you,” I answered.
“I was trying to be quiet,” she said as she snuggled down beside me, her cool flesh setting my own on fire. “What was it?”
“What?”
“That woke you, Baby.” Her cool hands slipped over my back and pulled me closer to her.
“The old world... You... Nothing at all,” I told her. My lips found hers and we stopped talking.
Chapter Three
All In
~ March 28~
Mike awoke before dawn. He lay quietly, feeling the heat from Candace's body where it pressed up against his, and thinking about what the future might be.
The first thing he had thought was that whatever had happened to the world would be made right. That somewhere there was someone still in charge, and eventually that person would get everything back on track. The world would be fun again. Television, phones, electricity, the Internet, the mortgage on his house, all of it. That turned out to be a pipe dream. The whole idea had dissipated quickly. Even so, when they had finally started out, he had held out some hope, and they hadn't come far, but Jeff and his people had, and it was the same everywhere. There was no man sitting in an office somewhere waiting to get everything back in shape, and if there was, he would have to be a complete idiot, because he'd be waiting an awfully long time.
The dead woman Jeff had told him about bothered him a great deal. He had remembered a day he had gone out, after things had fallen apart. He had heard airplanes in the night. In the morning, there was some sort of blue liquid they had sprayed all over the city. He had wondered about that. Why? What was it? And the bodies in the market... Had it been dogs? Had it been dogs that had been... eating them? There was no nice way to look at it, or put it.
If Jeff was crazy... But he wasn't. He seemed as sane as any of them did. No. He couldn't write it off to crazy or not crazy. He obviously believed what he saw. He had to mark it down to... To what? He asked himself. To...
Candace stirred and pressed closer to him, and then settled back down. Gray light began to creep into the room. He could see the outline of her body.
The movement, the light seeping into the room, sent his thoughts along an entirely different line.
For the last two days he had found himself thinking in an entirely new direction. All the old shit is gone, and that's okay. He didn't care at all if he never saw electricity again. In fact, he'd rather not have it, and even if there was a way to fix it all, he didn't want to go back. He was positive, in fact, that they couldn't go back, none of them, was positive he wouldn't be able to live that way again, when less than a month ago his entire life, his entire focus, was wrapped up in the old way. Hadn't he been watching the countdown show for the end of the world? Reality TV every night? The big party for the end of the world? And really, that had simply been a joke.
Nobody, at least most people, didn't believe the world was going anywhere. It was just another thing to occupy the head. Even the terminology, World Ending, was bullshit. The world did not end. We think so highly of ourselves that we believe that the end of society means the end of the world, and I guess it did for us... some of us. But the end of the world? No. The world will go on and on when we are nothing at all but dust upon the ground.
Now it really was gone, and not only didn't he miss it, he didn't want it to come back. He didn't want to chase across half of what had been the United States looking for some semblance of the old world. His mind was at rest; he was happy. He allowed one hand to stroke the length of Candace's body. Very happy, he decided. Candace stirred again. One of her own hands came down his side, across his abdomen, searching.
“Hello,” she said, finding what she wanted, “No fair, you're awake.”
“I was just admiring,” he said. He felt himself grow hard in her hand.
She turned towards him, planting little kisses on his chest and stomach as her head disappeared below the blankets.
~
Most of the camp was up and awake by the time Candace and Mike came out, got some coffee and set down at one of the tables.
“You two hungry?” Janet Dove asked.
“Starved,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Candace agreed.
“How would you like your eggs?” she asked.
“Oh, sunny side up,” Mike said.
“Uh, eggs?” Candace asked. “Where did you get eggs, Jan?”
“I must be slipping,” Mike said, “I didn't even realize what you said.”
Janet smiled. “Tim and Annie. They were running around yesterday, testing something on one of the new trucks, and found a barn up the road. Most of it is standing. I know, I went myself to look. There's a well, and deep I would guess, because it's still got water. A little wind mill pumps the well. The water runs down the troughs to the cows. No cows, but the chickens love it. They moved in. Eggs everywhere.” She took the lid off a cardboard storage box full of packed straw and eggs.
“Wow,” Candace said. “Sunny side up too. I'll dip one of those biscuits into the yolk. I love egg yolk,” she confessed to both of them.
“Best part of the egg,” Mike agreed. “Man, this is a good life right here.”
“It is,” Janet Dove said. She left them to their coffee as she left to prepare their eggs.
~
The morning passed quickly for Mike. He, Candace, Patty and Ronnie spent the morning searching the store room of the small mom-and-pop store Janet had spoken of, and another that was diagonally across the road from it. Between the two, they found all sorts of useful things, besides just the flour and Bisquick she had told them about.
Batteries, disposable lighters, key-chain can openers. Ronnie spent a few minutes with a small battery powered video game, and then set it aside.
“No need to start that shit again,” he said with a grin as he tossed it onto a stack of old newspapers.
There were bundles of the local newspaper near the front door, everyone looked at them twice, but in the end no one felt tempted to cut the string that held them together to read one of them. And back against one wall, the mother lode of seeds, apparently ordered for Spring and not yet put out. There were several large boxes, and a couple of boxes of books on gardening apparently meant to be put out of the same time.
They carried everything out onto the pavement where one of the Suburbans was parked. A small, black metal ladder lead from the heavy duty rear step bumper to the large metal rack that had been mounted to the roof. The rack had sides that stood about one foot from the deck of the rack. Designed to form a long metal box to pack things into.
Mike and Ronnie filled the rack as Can
dace and Patty filled the rear cargo area, and the two five gallon gas cans mounted on the rear tire carrier that also held a spare tire. The ladder to the top rack was incorporated into the swing out tire carrier. The whole unit worked well and was problem free, swinging easily out of the way to allow access to the rear double doors and the interior of the Suburban.
They were both surprised how much the rooftop rack could hold. They had lined the bottom of the rack with a blue waterproof tarp and then wrapped the whole load with more of the same when they had finished. Bungee cords pulled tight kept everything in place.
“I wouldn't have believed you guys could put that much stuff up there,” Patty said.
Mike grinned at her, “Believe me,” he said, “neither did we.”
“You know, you're right about the vehicles,” Ronnie said.
“How so?” Mike asked.
“Gives us more stuff to drag around, but I have to admit, stuff we will need,” Ronnie said and laughed.
“Wait until Bob and Janet hear about the seeds,” Patty said.
“Hell, there's everything we could need to grow right there,” Mike said.
“We should still look for hybrids,” Candace said.
“What kind?” Mike asked.
“Any kind. They have genetically developed corn, tomatoes, peppers, you name it. Grows faster, resistant to this and that, grows bigger, higher, more protein,” Candace elaborated.
“Where could we find it?” Mike asked.
“I don't know,” Ronnie said.
“I bet Janet or Bob would know,” Patty said.
Candace nodded. “Probably one of them, what do you call it, feed stores? I've seen them in farming communities, you know, on A&E,” she finished.
“Yeah, I've seen those shows too,” Patty said.
“Like small towns,” Candace agreed. She hesitated, “So... what did you two think about what Bob had a say?” She asked at last.