The Last Bastion

by K. W. Callahan

“At least they had neighbors and the occasional newspaper. They heard things through the grapevine when they went into town once or twice a year or when wayward travelers passed their homesteads. We don’t even get that!” Ms. Mary conceded.

  “Means making an informed decision no longer exists,” Caroline added. “All we can do is make a decision based on what we think is best…what the group thinks is best.”

  “Well then, let’s handle it like we’ve handled all the other major decisions we’ve made as a group since this whole mess began,” Ms. Mary said bluntly. “Let’s discuss it and then put it to a vote.”

  “Guess it’s all we can do,” Michael agreed.

  “We’ll hear what the others have to say, get their input on the situation, and we’ll go from there,” Caroline nodded steadfastly.

  * * *

  “Maaaan that is one big pot of soup, Ms. Mary!” Patrick drawled.

  “Gotta be,” Ms. Mary nodded as she stirred the massive, 4-gallon steel pot that was filled nearly to its top with a colorful array of veggies floating in a thick broth. “Have a lot of mouths to feed.”

  When the pot was not in use, Ms. Mary stored much of the camp’s other dishware and cooking accoutrements inside it. She was often heard to joke that if one of their boats sank while on the river, she could abandon ship and use the pot as her personal lifeboat.

  Currently, the pot was hanging from a hook over the campfire. Josh and Michael had erected a tripod out of three poles formed from freshly cut saplings, each pole being several inches in diameter. The ends of the poles had been whittled down to sharp ends that had been jammed into the ground at the edge of the campfire. They angled in and upward from the edge of the campfire to meet at a point about five feet over the fire’s center. There, the three poles had been bound together with some steel wire to keep them from pulling apart. A heavy steel hook that Charla had found on the island while fishing had been affixed to the steel wire holding the tripod together. From this hook, the Blenders cook pots – the ones with handles at least – could be affixed for boiling water, soup, oatmeal, or whatever else needed to be warmed, cooked or boiled.

  “What all is in there?” Patrick came over to inspect Ms. Mary’s concoction curiously. He bent over the pot to poke a large spoon down into the bubbling cauldron.

  “Get out of there!” Ms. Mary scolded, shooing him away. “You’ll find out what’s in there soon enough when I serve it…to everyone!” she clarified, giving Patrick and overplayed stink-eye.

  “Aww,” Patrick hung his head, skulking away.

  “Oh, I’m just playing with you,” Ms. Mary said to Patrick coyly. “Come here.”

  Patrick turned and eagerly returned – the happy-go-lucky dog. All he was missing was a wagging tail.

  “So,” Ms. Mary explained, “in the old days, when I had fresh vegetables to work with, I’d put in a little olive oil and sauté my harder veggies, things like carrots, rutabagas, or whatever to soften them up a little. Now that I’m working with mostly canned stuff, I don’t have to worry about that so much. So I put in a quart or two of water, add two cans of diced tomatoes, and then put in my uncooked beans. I bring that to a boil, let it simmer for a little while, then I put in a can of green beans, a can of corn, a can of potatoes, a can of carrots, four beef bullion cubes, a can of kidney beans, some salt, and some pepper. You can add pretty much anything that hits your fancy to a soup like this. Then I bring that to a boil and let it simmer again for a while. Toward the end of cooking, I add some pasta or rice. Today, I added pasta. But I don’t like adding the pasta too early because if you boil it too long, it kind of starts to disintegrate. I like elbow macaroni best because they’re small and fairly durable. In the old days I wouldn’t add so much filler, but we need as much filler as possible with our limited diet.”

  “How much pasta do you put in?” asked Patrick.

  “I use about half a box…that’d be about a half pound. With rice, I add a cup or two with a pot this size. Then, when everything is good and ready, I dice up a canned ham into small cubes and add that. It doesn’t really need to cook, but I let it simmer in the soup for a while just to add flavor. Then, I taste a spoonful and add more salt and pepper to taste if needed. I used to add more herbs in the old days, but pickings are slim, so I stick mainly to salt and pepper. There are some Italian seasonings in the diced tomatoes that add a little flavor as well.”

  “How long will this feed us?” Patrick asked. “It looks like so much.”

  “It does look like a lot,” Ms. Mary agreed. “But with this many people, it will probably only get us through two days worth of lunches and dinners.”

  “Wow,” Patrick breathed.

  What Ms. Mary didn’t tell Patrick was that after their first night of soup, once there was room in the pot, she’d add more water, salt, and pepper to the mix. She did this for several reasons. First, a lot of the initial broth got absorbed into things like the pasta or the rice, especially when it sat overnight. This left the soup as more of a veggie mush. Second, adding water, yet at the same time continuing to add flavor through more salt and pepper, helped to extend the soup without the rest of the group getting wise. Everyone continued to enjoy the soup, not realizing there were fewer calories in it. It was a sort of mental game that Ms. Mary had grown accustomed to playing with her cooking for the group in a world where supplies weren’t easily replaceable.

  “Next time I’ll use some of Charla and Wendell’s fish to try a fish stew,” Ms. Mary said. “But tonight, I think we’ll use their catch to have some breaded fish with our soup.”

  “Mmm,” Patrick rolled his eyes in delight while holding his belly. “Can’t wait,” he groaned.

  “Well, you’ll have to,” Ms. Mary smiled, liking the fact that not only was someone taking an interest in her cooking but was excited about it as well. “At least for another twenty minutes. That’s about all it’ll take for the fish to be done,” she nodded to a large frying pan pre-laden with Charla and Wendell’s catch of the day.

  * * *

  “What about the kids?” Julia asked. “They might have schools in St. Louis.”

  “They might,” Michael conceded. “I have no idea. They didn’t mention anything about schools in the recorded message we heard on the radio, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have them.

  Christine Franko broke into the conversation as the Blenders sat around the campfire after finishing their fish and soup dinner. “For as much as I might want my own boys to continue their education, they’re getting a different sort of education right now. They’re getting an education on life, living, and how to survive. Math and science have been replaced by shelter building and biter avoidance…at least temporarily.”

  “So our options are to try for St. Louis or stay put and make a go of it here,” Josh put it simply. “And if we stay here, what? We hunt, we fish, we farm?”

  “That’s the general gist of it,” Ms. Mary nodded. “Doesn’t seem like there is much more to life…at least at this point.”

  “How much longer would it take us to get there if we try to make it to St. Louis?” Wendell asked.

  “Not really sure,” Michael shrugged. “I wouldn’t think that it would be much more than a week on the river. But that’s a very general estimate. There are all sorts of things that could lengthen that duration, including things like that dam we encountered back in Joliet.”

  “So what if we decide to stay and it doesn’t work out?” Charla asked. “What then?”

  “Then we go later,” Wendell shrugged. “Right?” he looked around at the rest of the group. “If they have things set up like it sounds like they do from the message they’re sending out, I doubt they’re going anywhere soon.”

  “Who knows,” Michael shrugged. “Hard to predict what will happen tomorrow these days, let alone what things will look like in two or three months.”

  “What if we go and it doesn’t work out?” Patrick asked. “I mean, what if they’re gone or what if they
change their mind in the meantime and decide they have enough residents in their community by the time we get there? Where would that leave us?”

  “I guess it will leave us pretty much where we’re at right now,” Michael considered.

  “Not exactly,” Caroline interjected. “We’re giving up a situation that we know here. We don’t know how things will be there. Here, we have a relatively safe, secure environment. We have the ability to fish. There seems to be good ground to grow crops just across the river from us. And while we haven’t done much investigating of the forest, there might be some good hunting over there. We go to St. Louis, and it doesn’t work out, and we would have to start all over. And we might not find a place as suitable around there as we have here.”

  “Well that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence,” Wendell said. “What do you think, Michael?”

  Michael shook his head and sighed heavily. “As usual, there’s no good answer…or at least not a definitive answer. I’m sorry, but I just can’t say. I’m as much in the dark on this as you all are. I’m not sure exactly what I want to do either. Part of me wants to return to some semblance of normalcy, and if that is what St. Louis is offering, then that’s what I’d like to do. At the same time, though, it’s kind of nice here. And this spot certainly seems safer than the big city. God only knows what lays along the route to St. Louis or awaits us once we get there. It’s a tough call…an impossible call. I guess if I had to pin myself down one way or the other, which is why we’re all here, I’d say I’m more of the mindset that we stay, but that we re-evaluate each week based on our progress, or lack thereof. If it seems like we’re thriving on our island home; that we’re hunting, fishing, farming, and surviving successfully, then maybe it’s a potentially longer term living location. But we’ll need more than a tent and a lean-to to make it through the winter. If it appears that we aren’t succeeding as we hoped, then I guess we could always make a run for St. Louis down the road.”

  “That’s going to be kind of hard with our supply situation the way it is, isn’t it?” Caroline asked. “I mean, if we stay here for another week or two, even with Charla and Wendell fishing, we’ll continue to burn through our remaining supplies relatively quickly, won’t we? And if we don’t kill any bigger animals, we probably won’t have enough fish to make up the difference. It’s not like we’re hunters. I’ve never killed anything larger than a mouse or maybe a squirrel that I accidentally ran over with the car.”

  “And if we’re successful with our farming efforts, most of the crops won’t be ready for months,” Ms. Mary added.

  Michael nodded, studying the faces of those sitting around him. He was searching for signs pointing him toward one decision or another, but he didn’t really see any. “Well,” he finally breathed heavily, “should we give it another week and see how things go? If we manage to kill something big like a deer, added to the fish we catch and our remaining supplies, it might give us time to make a clearer decision. By that point in our stay, we may have learned more about the island and our surrounding location that can help point us in one direction or another.”

  “I think that’s a reasonable idea,” Wendell agreed. “In a week, we shouldn’t have drained our remaining supplies so substantially that we couldn’t make it to St. Louis if we’ve decided that’s the right move, right?”

  “Right,” Michael nodded, liking that Wendell was taking a more positive approach to his participation in their group meetings. “Ms. Mary, based on the fish that Wendell and Charla are catching, and the steps you’re taking to extend our remaining inventory of goods, how long would you give us before we’re completely out of food?”

  Ms. Mary considered for a few seconds and then said, “We’ve been doing really well at stretching our meals…”

  “You’ve been doing really well stretching our meals,” Michael corrected.

  “Thank you,” Ms. Mary bowed her head with a smile. “Taking that into consideration, and based on our inventory count, I’d give us around two weeks, depending on Charla and Wendell’s daily catch, before we start encountering situations where we’re eating things as meals that we might not consider real meals.”

  “What is a real meal?” Patrick asked.

  “Meals where substitutes or additives include things like wood pulp or acorn mush or dandelion greens or parts of the fish you might not typically consider eating. Or we might include other more natural, and not necessarily bad ingredients, but ones that also don’t provide much in the way of caloric or nutritional value.”

  “Ugh,” Patrick made a face at the mention of some Ms. Mary’s the options. “As long as we don’t turn into the Donner Party here or anything,” he gave an inadvertent shiver.

  “God forbid,” his mother added.

  “What’s the Donner Party?” Justin leaned over to ask his father sitting beside him.

  “Don’t worry about it right now,” his father whispered back, waylaying the inopportune subject matter being raised.

  “Okay then,” Michael said, getting the meeting back on track. “Should we vote?”

  “What exactly are we voting on here?” Caroline asked. “Just stay or go? Or stay for a week or go? Or stay for a week or a month? Stay for a week and then vote again or go?”

  “I’m in favor of the latter,” Josh spoke up, realizing that Michael often had more of the responsibility in these sorts of group decisions thrust on his shoulders than maybe there should be. “Stay for a week, see where we’re at then, and sit down for another one of these meetings at that point.”

  Michael nodded. “Sounds good to me. All those in favor of staying put for another week and reconvening to debate our situation again then, raise your hand.”

  Everyone in the group raised their hand.

  “Then it’s decided. Next week we’ll revisit the issue. Until then, I say we get together a scouting party to investigate the woods across from us to see how the hunting looks. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “And I’d like to offer my services,” Wendell announced. “In my former life as a school teacher, my particular area of focus was history, mainly American history. But I’m proficient in other subject matter as well. If you’d like, and when there is time,” he nodded to Josh and Julia Justak as well as Christine Franko, “I’d be more than happy to tutor the boys in their studies. We don’t have books or anything like that, but we can still do some history lessons, work on mathematics, handle a little grammar, and I think this island and surrounding woods could provide some excellent opportunities for science studies.”

  “Aww,” the Franko boys both groaned in unison, tilting their heads back in exaggerated despair at the thought of schoolwork.

  “That would be wonderful,” Julia Justak perked up excitedly. “I’d be more than willing to help you out with that, Wendell.”

  “Yes, Wendell,” Christine Franko agreed. “That’s very considerate of you. Contrary to what you might think from the boys’ reactions,” she shot them a look, “we would welcome the opportunity to get back to a little school learning.”

  A rumble of distant thunder drew eyes up toward a rapidly darkening sky. Gray, almost black in some instances, billowy clouds were rolling in from the west, consuming what little remained of an otherwise clear evening sky.

  “Looks like we might have to call it an early night,” Michael announced. “Better get started on dinner cleanup and putting things away around the camp before we get soaked.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The third day of heavy rain brought with it some real concerns from the Blenders.

  Huddled inside their tent after a lunch of tuna fish salad on crackers, the group waited impatiently. Their meal had done little to enhance the already pungent aroma lingering inside the tent after having a dozen people cooped up inside it for multiple days.

  Patrick was playing cards with Justin, Jack, and Andrew. It was one of the best ways the youngsters had found to pass the time during the tediously long days spent crammed inside the cramped tent.
The kids had upgraded to games like gin rummy, blackjack, and various versions of poker. And while their parents didn’t necessarily approve of these games at such young ages, the kids weren’t betting. And if it kept them from fighting and out of their parents’ hair, the adults were willing to forgo intervention. In fact, sometimes they even joined in playing the games just to kill an hour or two.

  A thoroughly soaked Josh ducked inside through the tent’s zippered opening. He did his best to shed his jacket without dousing any of the others or making a sopping wet mess on the tent floor. Keeping their sole sleeping space free from moisture was at this point fast becoming a lesson in futility.

  “So how’s it looking out there?” Michael asked as if he really didn’t want to know.

  “Not good,” Josh shook his head and then shot a wary look over to where Justin sat huddled beside Julia. He didn’t want to worry either of them, but considering their situation, there was little way to break the bad news without them overhearing. “River has come up probably another foot at least. I don’t know how much longer we can wait on this rain to stop. Another few feet, and the water will have made it to the camp. Beaches are long gone. I’d say that half the island is under, and the water is coming up faster than before.”

  “How fast would you estimate?” Michael asked.

  “Hard to give you an exact reading. It’s probably rising at a rate of a couple inches every hour.”

  “Mmm,” Michael nodded, his eyes drifting away from Josh, and away from the worried stares of the others to settle upon one side of the tent. A bead of water had seeped through the tent’s outer shell. It was trickling down the outside of its inner lining leaving a silvery trail in its wake.

  “Current is really moving out there,” Josh added after a moment. “A lot of debris coming down…big stuff…trash, limbs, I even saw a car float by while I was out there.”

  “So what’s our move here?” Wendell asked, praying that someone, anyone had an idea.