Amit spent most of the morning learning their biomethane system, studying the procedure manual Josh and Snowbear’d created, and tracing the parts of the system as he read about them. The sheds where it was housed were cramped, damp, and disagreeable-smelling, and through the windows the snow gleamed blindingly in the wan sunshine, making him consider how fresh, dry snow squeaked sharply underfoot. Finally, he gave in to the urge and went out for a stroll, to clear the cabin fever that dulled his head. He came upon Josh, hunched over a mass of electronics mounted inside a bulky hinged box affixed to the side of the dwelling.
“You don’t look happy,” Amit observed. His breath wafted away in ethereal clouds of steam.
“No, I’m not,” Josh frowned. “Our solar array should be putting out 8,000 Watts at noon this time of year.” He pointed to an LCD which read 7,300. “Something’s degrading the output.”
“Hm. What could it be?” Asked Amit, stepping backwards and squinting up at the black solar panels. The panels were tent-like assemblies on pivoting aluminum frames, arrayed on the roof 30 feet overhead.
“I don’t know, but I’m about to find out. You came by just at the right moment. Help me get the ladders from the shed.”
Amit was glad to have something physical to do, and so the two men carried out several aluminum ladders. Josh, who’d plainly done this before, showed Amit how to construct a sturdy 10-foot base from the locking ladders and then extend the 20-foot extension ladder upwards from it. Josh swarmed up the ladders like a monkey, then transferred onto the roof as lithely as if he had no bones. Instantly, he was out of sight amongst the panels. Amit waited, stamping his boots to keep his feet warm and putting his aluminum-chilled hands in his armpits to warm up. He’d left his gloves in the methane shed and now wished he’d grabbed them.
Finally, he heard Josh sing out, “Heads up!” Amit watched as a strip of black plastic, trailing a cable, came gliding over the edge of the roof. He didn't move, as the panel was in no hazard of falling on him, and Josh skimmed down the ladder as easily as he’d ascended. His face was solemn as he picked up the solar panel he’d tossed. “See this?” He pointed out a bumpy, uneven patch on the panel. It had a tiny seed, like a choke-cherry pit, at its center. The pit looked at first glance like it’d fallen from a tremendous height, or been shot from a gun: the plastic surface of the panel was spider-webbed with cracks radiating a few inches around it. But when Amit looked more closely, he noticed that what appeared to be cracks were in fact channels, etched into the surface of the plastic, around the central depression, in a web-like pattern.
Josh said, “Crows.”
Amit followed his thinking quickly. “Crows will eat almost anything. Including small bits of plastic. The bacterium must be living in their crops. And their droppings are infecting the solar panels.”
Josh grinned at him. “Bingo.”
Amit pointed out the spider-web pattern. “The infections are spreading out in tendrils. It's a common pattern for biofilm formation.”
Josh looked thoughtful. “If this infection spreads exponentially, we won’t have power in a few weeks. If we can slow it down so it grows, say, arithmetically, the power production won't diminish so quickly. The lengthening days after the Solstice will also help us out. We might be able to continue to squeeze some electricity out of the panels into the Spring, or maybe even the Summer…I'd have to do some math to be sure.”
“Slow down the growth rate of bacteria, eh? Well,” said Amit, “too bad you don’t have a microbiologist around.”
“Yeah,” Josh beamed boyishly. “Too bad.”
That night after dinner, Amit and Josh stood in the kitchen while Snowbear and Akisni took their turn washing dishes.
“The problem,” said Amit, “is that I don’t have any antiseptics, which is what one would normally use to keep the infection under control. I brought less than a gallon of isopropyl with me.”
“We have maybe twice that in the first aid room,” said Akisni.
“Still nowhere near enough,” observed Josh. “And besides, if we use that up, what would happen if someone has a wound which needs to be disinfected? First aid has to be priority.”
“I think I have your solution, gentlemen,” said Akisni. “Let me show you.” She picked up a hurricane lantern and opened the door which led down to the root cellar. Standing at the top of the steps, she picked up a candle lighter that sat on a shelf. She paused, looking at the lighter. It was an ordinary, long-necked lighter with a plastic case and trigger, such as any householder might use to light a candle or a barbecue grill. It was a brief pause, but it was one all the residents of Sutokata were familiar with, seeing it and making it many times each day. It accompanied the thought: When…not if…the bacterium makes it here, into our sanctuary, this item will not work any more.
She ignited the lamp and the men followed her downstairs. Shelves and bins of turnips, cabbage, and carrots lined the walls. Their breath steamed lightly in the cool cellar as they ducked strings of onions hanging from the ceiling “It’s back here in the herb corner.” Hanging from a series of slender chains with alligator clips, amongst aromatic clusters of flowers and dried leafy flora hanging from the joists, were chunks of a yellowish, woody root.
“Turmeric?” Asked Amit skeptically.
“No: goldenseal,” corrected Akisni. “Hydrastis Canadensis, one of the most potent natural antibiotics there is.” She took the nearest chunk down, holding it by one of its fibrous rootlets, and regarded it almost reverently. “It’s been shown to kill MRSA, h. pylori, and tuberculosis. You boil the root to make a decoction.” She gestured at the collection hanging next to her. “We have enough here to make perhaps 500 gallons. When we put in the new pig shed, the spot we picked out was literally overgrown with it, so I harvested it and dried it.”
“I don’t know about using some root…” began Amit.
“Do you have another option?” Demanded Akisni, her eyes showing a brief flare of uncharacteristic annoyance. “Just because it's a natural herb doesn't mean it's not pharmacologically active.”
“Don’t get mad, now!” Amit quickly interjected. “Even if it does kill those three you named, we don’t know if it will work on this. I'm willing to give it a try. Can you make me a small batch? Maybe one gallon?” He turned to Josh, “We can test it on the infected panel first. It’s still out under that fir tree, right?”
“Yes, I figured it was best to keep it away from the other panels, and the house, until we decided what to do about it.”
“Good thinking. Is there an undisturbed, sheltered space somewhere I can use as a lab?”
“There’s the summer retreat cottage. It’s not heated and has no electric, but it’s got a roof and four walls and a small fireplace. The windows are boarded up for the winter.”
“Perfect! It will take me a while to make it usable, I'm sure, but I’ll feel like myself again with something to do with my skills.”
“I’ll show you where it is,” said Josh, shrugging into his parka and grabbing the shotgun next to the door.
“I wonder what to use for culture medium,” mused Amit. “Kerosene? Plastic sludge? Do we have any acetone to dissolve acrylics and polystyrene?”
He and Josh commenced jointly free-associating. The two men struck off into the woods unhurriedly, indifferent to the way they were lurching about in the deep snow, until they reached the cover of the trees. They set off towards the little hut, still deep in colloquy.
XLVII.
Ozarkified
It turned out that Gabriela, who was a descendant of Tejanos and Quapaw Indians who’d intermarried with south Arkansas hillbillies, had moonshiners in her family as well, and not in the distant past. One day, she took them to a barn near her home to meet her cousin Ed, an aged man with a tanned face, networked like a road map with wrinkles gleaned during years of working in the sun. Ed had given up the craft, but still owned the equipment. They explained that Jessica was modifying engines to run on ethanol and that their p
lan was to distill the stuff for use and sale.
“How do I know you’re not ATF?” He asked, peering at her through crowsfeet from under his straw fedora.
“There is no more ATF, Cousin Ed.” Gabriela spoke gently to the elder. “No more phones, no more computers, no more cars.”
“There were revenuers before there were computers, phones and cars,” observed Ed skeptically.
“Yes,” interjected DD, “but they had paper systems for keeping track of things. They also had ways of getting from place to place, and ways of communicating with each other. Those are all gone now, and it’ll take time to rebuild them from scratch.”
“Hm. No authorities, eh?” Ed snorted disdainfully. “Never had much use for them anyway.
“So, is that why the sheriff has been asking the young men to meet at the crossroads twice a week?”
Gabriela nodded. “Juan was talking about that. He said the county sheriffs aren’t getting any more payments from the State, or equipment from the Feds. He was saying it’s every man for himself now and we need to be prepared to fight together if big gangs come through. There's been a lot of shooting over where those crazy prepper militia guys are wedged right in between the prison and the military base.”
Ed commented with a long declining whistle. “Sounds like a good area to stay away from.”
DD nodded. At least until those testosterone-addled idiots finish running around the woods shooting each other up and run low on ammunition. But what she said was, “I heard the first guy to go over the prison wall was a midget.”
“Really?” Said Ed.
“Yes. But I thought that was a little condescending.”
Ed blinked. “Well, if there are no more ATF guys to interfere with moonshining, I count it all to the good. But why should I let you use my set-up?” Ed, true to his Scots-Irish roots, was a canny bargainer.
Negotiations began in earnest, and they came to an agreement whereby Ed received 20% of the product and the trio were allowed to spend the winter in his drafty but safe barn with four cows, a donkey, and a handful of sheep.
Ed helped them get started with their first batch, instructing them on how to make sure their clear shine didn’t burn with a yellow flame, denoting toxic methanol, before beginning to collect it. After that, he’d occasionally stop by, sometimes to offer helpful tips, but mostly to shake his head in amazed delight that the still didn’t need to be hidden any longer. As the winter wore on, their feet wore a path leading to the outbuilding where the distilling machinery was constructed.
Finding mash ingredients was hit-and-miss at first. In the absence of trucks to receive their crops, quite a few farmers who’d planted in the Spring with full confidence of selling their corn, potatoes, wheat, and sorghum to food conglomerates were stuck with a surplus. Faced with stores of perishable foodstuffs, most were willing to supply them with corn or potatoes in exchange for a portion of the end product. Over the long winter, word spread that the strangers in Ed’s barn were buying crops that might otherwise decay, and farmers began showing up on their own to make a deal: for an average 20% of the product, they kept the still supplied.
DD reflected with anxiety: Next Winter may be different. Seeds will be hard to come by; hybrid seeds, impossible, and the hybrid crops won’t breed true, bringing yields down. Pesticides, irrigation equipment, so many things depend on petroleum.
Jessica spent some time adapting two abandoned 4-wheelers to run on ethanol over the winter. She’d experimented with unusual gasket materials, but she ultimately settled on felted wool, soaked in milk that had been boiled down to a thick, gluey condensate. One afternoon, Jessica went to the trading post to trade some moonshine for some milk and food, but then sent Gabriela’s son home alone with her purchases. She'd instructed the boy to tell DD she was spending the night at a neighboring farm.
“What else did she say? Why is she staying there?” The boy shrugged.
“That’s where my cousin Juan lives,” said Gabriela with an arched eyebrow. “He’s about Jessica’s age. Single.” Gabriela looked like she wanted to say more, but was holding back.
Jessica didn’t return to sleep in the barn for two weeks; DD was about to go searching for her, and then one night she showed up just before dinner, with scrapes like road rash all along her right arm and shoulder, and puffy eyes from crying. DD put an arm around her and tried to comfort her, and eventually Jessica spilled the story.
“Once I told him I had PCOS and couldn’t get pregnant, the way he treated me changed completely!”
DD took a small jar of alcohol and dipped a clean cloth into it to clean Jessica’s abrasions. Jessica winced when DD hit a few of the deeper gouges. Tears began to flow anew. After she was done, Jessica raised the jar, tinged ever so faintly red now with her own blood, and tossed it back in one draught.
DD recoiled in disgust, and at the same time she felt an emotional cold deep inside. God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” She asked her daughter, nodding at the empty jar of ethanol.
“It’s okay mom. Just this one time. For the pain.”
DD bit her tongue. She knew from experience, with Jessica and with DD's own father before her, that pursuing the topic now would only spawn conflict.
Juan wasn’t a big man, while Jessica had inherited a solid frame from her father, and so DD wasn’t surprised at what she saw when she spotted Juan, a few days later. They were both in the valley at the old diner/convenience store which had become a de facto trading post, and the proprietor, whom DD’d asked about Jessica when she was missing, pointed him out to her. Juan was exhibiting an icteric black eye and a healing split lip. An array of bluish asymmetric tattoos, inked roughly by hand and difficult to make out, splayed across his collarbones, peeking out above his shirt.
DD had never figured this one thing out about her daughter: Though DD and Jessica’s dad had divorced when Jessica was 16, the parting was amicable. They’d never raised a hand to one another, and only rarely raised their voices. I made sure he wasn’t that kind of man before settling down with him and starting a family. I didn’t want any children we had to go through hearing Daddy asking Mommy why she’d “made” him hit her.
DD wondered about the role of epigenetics in human behavior; more and more, her contemporaries in the field of mammalian genetics were finding that different parts of the DNA code were methylated or demethylated, depending on the parents’ experiences, and those active or inactivated loci were passed down to children, and even grandchildren, and perhaps further. DD was not that familiar with it, because it didn’t appear to occur in bacteria, but she knew that experiments had shown that behaviors of fearfulness, and reactions to stress hormones, were different in the grandchildren of mice which had been subject to stressful experiences. Or maybe it’s just plain genetics, but recessive traits. Of course it’s not that simple, not single-allele inheritance. There’s no “I Like Getting Punched by Boyfriends” gene. Behavioral inheritance is complex. Still, I just don’t understand.
DD still didn’t understand the following week, when Juan came to visit Jessica at the barn and spent the night. She didn’t understand when Jessica brought him his dinner, setting the plate down in front of him where he sat before getting her own. She understood, all too well, when Jessica tried to stand up from that evening meal and staggered, and Juan put an arm around her waist and helped her climb the ladder to the hayloft.
The next morning, Jessica lay on her stomach with her face jammed into her pillow, sprawled naked, and snoring the gagging, moaning snores of the hung-over. Juan got up and went outside to water a tree. DD rose silently and followed him.
He turned, tightening the drawstring on his canvas pants, but was brought up short by the muzzle of DD’s Smith and Wesson in his face.
He put his palms up. “Calmaté, mamá. Calm down. I ain’t trying to hurt no one.�
�
“You won’t get another chance to.” DD said. “You go inside and get your shirt and leave. Don’t say anything. If I ever see you near my daughter again, I won’t ask questions.” She pulled the hammer back on the revolver for emphasis. “Do you understand me?”
Juan nodded. DD took her finger out of the trigger guard but lowered the gun to point at his crotch. “Go.”
Juan went. He did just as DD said. She holstered the gun and sat on a bale of hay next to her daughter, waiting for her to wake up. She was planning to have a talk, one she’d had with her before. I’ve fucked up everything in the entire world. Maybe I’m getting another chance to do this one thing right.
XLVIII.
Now You Tell Me
Amit and Josh were on patrol together as usual. They’d become almost inseparable, spending their free time together in the workshop or in Amit’s lab. The electrician had picked up the elements of microbiology quickly and become a great lab assistant; the microbiologist had learned the elements of electrical wiring and aided Josh in his projects. They were a mismatched pair: Josh tall, pale, and gangly, and Amit dark and compact.
“If you’d ever told me I’d be walking in snowy woods, with a gun in my hand, in the middle of Winter, I’d have told you you were crazy,” Amit said.
“Isn’t there a Robert Frost poem about that?” Josh asked.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening...” Amit recited the first seven lines of the famous poem. “I can’t remember the rest.”
“This isn’t the darkest evening of the year, though. The solstice was almost a month and a half ago.” Josh the realist.
“True. And we don’t have miles to go before we sleep.”
“How far do we walk on this patrol?”
“Let’s see...hard to say for sure...some of the paths are irregular curves...but the compound has 38 acres. The back 20 is that empty slope there,” he gestured towards the white expanse of an empty, fenced field, “so we only patrol 18 of them. An acre is about 200 by 200 feet...”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 19