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Right after vespers, the community gathered in the monastery’s dining hall. There were five long wooden tables set up across the room, and the big pass-through window into the kitchen was set up buffet-style with trays, pitchers, and platters. DD was amazed that her drug- and injury-addled brain recalled the names of all the women she’d met so far: Sisters Greta, Margaret, and Barbara were sitting together at one table with Greta at the head, and they indicated an empty seat.
That put DD back to back with Sister Cynthia, who was sitting at the next table with the two women who’d picked DD up, the equestrian and the stockier, grey-haired woman. Catherine and Veronica were sitting at a third table. The rest of the seats in the room were occupied by a collection of women ranging in age from late-teens and early-twenties to one wilted lady who might be anywhere between seventy-five and a hundred. Greta was still the only one wearing a nun’s habit. Makes it difficult to figure out which ones are the nuns and which ones are the lay women.
DD observed each of them serving herself and sitting down to eat, so she got up to do likewise.
Cindy got up at the same moment and stood next to her at the counter. Cindy poured herself a glass from one of the pitchers and asked DD, “Sweet tea?”
DD used to take unsweet, when she had to watch her sugar intake and calories. Not an issue anymore. She nodded. “Sure.”
Cindy poured for her while DD helped herself to cooked greens, tortillas, and some sort of shredded meat in a brownish sauce, which she poked curiously with her fork. “Curried goat. Selene’s specialty.” Cindy jerked her chin at the lithe equestrian.
“Come sit with us,” said Cindy. DD glanced at Sister Greta’s table and saw the three hospital Sisters engrossed in conversation, which DD guessed would not involve or interest her.
“Thank you, Sister Cynthia.” Cindy sat on D.D.’s other side as she sat down next to Selene and stuck out her hand.
Selene shook it. “Don’t call her that. She hates it. My name’s Selene.”
“D.D.”
“Short for?”
“Deirdre Davis. I’ve been D.D. since elementary school. When I got my PhD, it became Doctor Deirdre Davis, but D.D.D. was just too much.”
“I get that.” Selene’s charming smile lit up her eyes. D.D. felt herself spontaneously returning a broad grin.
Selene introduced the stocky, grey-haired woman as Maddy. Maddy had coarse pores and the broken blood vessels on her red nose from heavy drinking. She spoke in monosyllables, but she had an amiable air.
“Are you two nuns?”
Maddy snickered. Selene gave her a quick side-eye. “No, we live in the guest quarters. My horse ranch adjoins the monastery grounds. After the machine sickness hit, I lost all my help, and I moved in with the nuns. Safety in numbers; they help me keep the horses, and they have transportation. But how’d you end up half-dead at the crossroads?”
“Yes,” said D.D. “I haven’t thanked you properly for saving me there. I was in a bad way.”
“That’s putting it mildly. But I think any woman who’d just killed six men and left one crippled might show just a tetch of weakness, yeah?”
Cindy horned in. “So tell us! Tell us the story.” She jostled D.D.’s thigh with her own soft hip—aggressively enough that D.D. felt her collarbone and various other sprains, strains, and bruises kick up.
D.D. scooted away imperceptibly and began her story. She related her trip down from Indiana, the towns she’d been through, how she’d split up with Jeremy (she left it implied that they’d had a fight and broken up), and the dysentery village.
“That reminds me. There was a dog…”
“Oh, he’s here!” Selene laughed.
“Cindy’s fuckin hardly let him out of her sight,” snorted Maddy.
“You didn’t think I’d neglect your baby, did you?” Cindy patted D.D.’s hand.
D.D. saw sister Greta notice the pat, catch Cindy’s eye, and frown. D.D. got up abruptly. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced. “Where is it?”
When she came back, she slid her chair over to give a few more inches between herself and Cindy.
“So, what’s his name?” Asked Cindy.
“His name?” D.D. looked stupid for a moment, then remembered. “Oh, the dog. Well, I haven’t really given him a name. He just started following me a few days ago, er, a few days before you found me.”
“Really?” said Maddy. “That mutt’s been sitting outside the hospital windows every night, glued to them like he can’t wait to catch a glimpse of you! Fuckin’ nuns don’t let dogs inside.”
Serious case of potty mouth.
“So, are you going to move into the guest quarters?” Selene cleanly changed the subject.
“Not sure. Sister Greta hasn’t said if I’m released yet.”
“Well, come on over after supper and we’ll show you around. Bring your bathing suit. We have a hot tub.”
D.D.’s achey body screamed, Yes! Her mouth said, “That sounds great!” before her mind could quite wonder if maybe that wasn’t the greatest idea.
Startup
Three weeks later, Jeremy and Ryan whoa-ed the mule truck in the town square of Cleveland, Texas. They pulled back the cover on the truck bed and hung out a hand-painted tarp sign saying “SEA BUTTER.” The square was lined with other vendors with carts and wagons; some kludged from motor vehicles like theirs was, others, antiques designed to be pulled by animals. A few people had ethanol-converted small vehicles, like scooters or Jeremy’s little ethanol offroader. The economics of fermenting and distilling alcohol for fuel, plus the frequent changes of vegetable oil used for lubrication, meant few people ran larger, heavier vehicles on it, especially with food getting scarce.
Jeremy strolled around the square to see what people had available. He noticed pecans, knew Mrs. Smith would appreciate that. He saw wagonloads of bags and bins of dried corn and wheat. He saw spun cotton and virgin and reclaimed wool yarns and thread, woven cloths of varying designs, and baskets plaited from reeds and vines and pine needles. Vendors had bottles of beer and liquor for drinking, and larger jugs of alcohol for fuel.
He stopped by a display labeled BIODIESEL and asked the owners for more information. “Yep,” they said, “we make it from any type of vegetable oil, using lye and methanol. You can burn it in a regular diesel engine—for a while. Eats the engine up, but at least the machine sickness won’t dissolve it.”
He walked by one of the wheat vendors, his flatbed horse-drawn wagon loaded high with burlap bags. He saw a man come up to the vehicle holding a stack of slips of paper, half a standard 8 ½ by 11-sheet in size. The slips had a picture stamped on them; Jeremy couldn’t tell what it was. They also had what looked like a signature across one end. The wheat vendor took the slips of paper and scrutinized each one carefully, counted ten of them, then nodded and helped the man unload ten bags of wheat onto his own wagon nearby.
Jeremy figured he couldn’t just issue slips of paper for future shipments of seabutter. He judged by the easy chat among the people at this market that their daddies and great-granddaddies had known each other. No one here knew him at all.
He made his way around to the mule truck, where Ryan was handing a small jar of the seabutter to a woman with three small children in tow. “Try it at home. You can pan-fry in it, but don’t forget to scrape up the browning in the pan when you’re done. Crunchy and delicious!” Each child was nibbling at their samples, small biscuits made with the oily delicacy.
They made no sales that day, nor had they expected to, but all their samples were gone by nightfall. They ate a simple meal of seabutter-and-goat sandwiches on cornbread, pitched small tents in the dirt of the old town square, and bedded down for the night.
Roosters crowing woke them with the first glimmering of dawn the next morning. Ryan shoved his head deeper under the folded blanket he was using for a pillow, but Jeremy squirmed out of his tent.
The roosters had sounded loud, he saw, becaus
e they were right next to the camp. The woman who’d taken the samples home the night before was standing there, her children holding the handles of a rectangular lidded basket bigger than they were, the sounds of chickens coming from inside.
“That seabutter is amazing! I’ll trade you a chicken for two quarts of it. I have ten chickens.”
“Hmm. Well, I don’t need any chickens. I came here looking for nuts and grains. But ma’am, I just woke up; you’ll have to excuse me a moment.” He kicked Ryan’s foot through the end of his tent, and when Ryan groaned, “What?” Jeremy kicked him again.
Jeremy reeled his way to the row of privies in the vacant lot a block away, gradually coming fully awake. He walked back to find Ryan scratching his head and looking around.
“Where’d she go?” asked Jeremy.
“Dunno. But I gotta piss like a racehorse.” Ryan went off to the latrines. The eastern horizon was good and bright now, and in the imminent sunlight, Jeremy picked out the woman with the chickens and children. She stood by the pecan vendor, and when she came back, instead of the basket of chickens, each child staggered under the weight of a sack of pecans.
“Now, that’s more like it!” Jeremy said. “Those nuts will buy you ten quarts of seabutter.”
“Ten quarts for all these nuts!” She frowned. “How long does it keep?”
“Sealed up like this, if you keep it in a cool pantry? A year at least. It won’t spoil unless you leave it out in the hot sun or something.”
“Hm. Eighteen quarts.”
He felt each of the sacks in turn, feeling the same large, plump nuts he’d seen at the nut vendor’s wagon the day before.
“Twelve.”
“Fifteen, and that’s my final offer.”
“Sold! Fifteen quarts for the three sacks of pecans.” The woman loaded the seabutter into the basket she’d brought the chickens in, and the children hoisted it like little pallbearers and marched off. Jeremy loaded the pecans on his wagon and smiled.
The rest of the day went pretty much the same. The big load they’d brought with them was reduced by half by sunset. They’d sold the entire load by ten o’clock the next morning. Besides the pecans, they ended up with fifty sacks of wheat, fifty of dried corn, a box of dried peaches, fifteen gallons of sorghum syrup, giant spools of cotton thread, and a huge, soft bag of wool, like a giant’s pillow. Additionally, they’d loaded up on carrots and yams, several varieties of squash, and a small number of dried gourds, which looked like they might be useful for something.
Up shortly after sunrise the next day, they cracked the whip and headed to Bolivar.
Prior Constraint
Highfield Register, November 10
The changes that have swept over our world in the past few years have been serious and sobering. The struggles we have faced and our grief for those who are no longer with us hardly bears mentioning. But the change in our mental landscape and the destiny of humanity holds much positive promise for the future as well.
First, let me inform the readership of this humble newspaper what transpired yesterday afternoon. Several representatives of the presidency of the now-defunct political entity formerly known as the United States of America visited the offices of the Highfield Register and made us an offer. In exchange for exclusive rights to report on their activities, we would grant them exclusive rights to review our content before we released it. No doubt, these nefarious authorities imagined that they were making us an offer we couldn’t refuse. They were sadly mistaken.
Given the devastation wrought throughout this land and throughout the planet by the coercive power of states in general and of the USA as the state qua state, it is inconceivable that we should turn our budding press freedom over to those who cling to the illusion of government as order personified.
The bloodshed and mayhem which overtook the cities after their mechanisms of command and control crumbled speaks more clearly to the moral and economic bankruptcy created by the state than any rhetoric. With no way to extract the wealth of the countryside via the myriad hidden taps that drained us every day, the ultimate deceptiveness of their pretense to strength and power was exposed. They were unable to feed themselves or their hangers-on and sycophants. Death and destruction was the inevitable result.
As we have learned in the ensuing days, we’re able to produce a form of abundance for ourselves. Many of the luxuries we had come to view as necessities are no longer available, it is true. But at the same time, we’re not forced to buy expensive cars to drive on expensive roads to work at mind-deadening jobs to pay ever-increasing taxes. We’re no longer compelled to pay insurance corporations growing fractions of the wealth we produce for the privilege of living in our homes, moving about our towns, or asking our doctors to aid us in caring for our health.
It may be that now, when we want the news, we have to get ink on our fingers. But at least we don’t have to give our personal information to the likes of the NSA. It may be that now, if we want entertainment, we have to sing and dance and play music for ourselves, or for one another. But at least we aren’t spoon-fed addictive spectacles which weaken our minds and pander to all that is worst in human nature. Who among us wants to return to that?
The nature of government is to destroy and devour all that lies in its path. The sacred duty of a free press is to oppose that devastation with the weapon of freely-spoken truth.
Auld Lang Syne
By Christmas, Jeremy was making regular runs to Cleveland in Scott’s home-built wagon pulled by the Smith’s mules. He was going alone, because Ryan had taken the mule wagon on a weekly run to Sugarland, south of Houston. The old sugar refinery there had re-opened, using raw sugar harvested and milled in the coastal wetlands. The refinery’s machinery wouldn’t run without electricity, of course, and some stages of the process couldn’t be run at all, but the machinery could be run using human and animal power to produce a brownish, coarse crystal.
With all the sugar and grains to be mixed in with the seabutter, some of the plumper residents of Bolivar were starting to take on a little bit of the roundness they’d had Before, when Americans were bemoaning the obesity epidemic. Nothing like a worldwide global catastrophe to cure such an epidemic.
Ryan’s job was pretty straightforward: the sugar workers were paid in sugar, and they were happy to trade it for the fat- and protein-rich seabutter. No one else was hauling seabutter inland (yet), so the rate of exchange stayed more or less fixed.
Jeremy, on the other hand, was still confounded by the need to work out complex barters for the things he and his partners wanted and needed. Rather than simply setting a price with maybe a little haggling, any sale of any quantity might involve a complex deal involving five or six people and as many commodities—all of which had to be inspected carefully before the exchange took place, and subject to incorrect memory, misunderstandings, and miscountings. The accounting aspect of it was a nightmare without a computer, especially given that the sixteen people involved in the Bolivar Trade Partnership each had a claim on a certain share of the profits.
Yet despite the work involved, Jeremy couldn’t complain too much. Joanne’s kitchen and former laundry room (the washer and dryer were not much use anymore) were crammed with food and textiles, her shed and yard with building supplies and hardware. The other sixteen people all belonged to four families: the Smiths, the Beisers, Ryan and Lori Wilkerson, and Joanne Jebali and himself, who everyone treated like mother and son.
Those four families were doing really well for themselves; they all had well-stocked larders and yards. Their homesteads looked great, because they paid goods to people for help with repairs, renovations, gardening, and decorating. The same means afforded them more and newer clothing. It might not be wealth like they’d all taken for granted Before, but no one could deny they were better off than their neighbors.
One day, Scott came by and sat down by Jeremy’s side where he worked away at endless arithmetic on huge paper ledgers. Scott had taught Jeremy double-ent
ry bookkeeping, an art which had been almost lost in the computer age, and now he had a new idea. “Jeremy, you have any more room to store the stuff you got?”
Jeremy grinned sheepishly. “No, not really. You?”
“No, me neither. That’s why I have an idea…”
One January, around the time of year people started to really notice the sun coming up through the ever-present bubbling clouds of the Gulf a bit earlier, Scott and Jeremy stood together, facing the sixteen members of the Partnership.
“Okay, I’ve got a question. Let’s see who can answer it: what is money?”
“Money is paper or coins that the government puts out,” Zinnia Smith said.
“Wrong. Anyone else?”
“Money is a set medium of exchange?” offered Jed.
“Better. Let me help you out: money is a measure of value.
“The best measure of anything is a fixed value, like an inch or centimeter. Everybody knows what it is, and if something is six inches long here, it’ll be six inches long in California or Maine. The best money holds the same value, and if the prices of things change, it’s because they’re harder or easier to get or more or less in demand.”
“Well,” said Lori, “If that’s true, then why’d money keep losing its value to inflation Before? When I was a girl, you could buy a gallon of milk for a dollar. When the machine sickness hit, it was up to $4.39.”
“Ah, yes. That’s because the money we were all using Before wasn’t set in value. It was issued by a central bank, the Federal Reserve, based on debt. All money from across the world was. And it was all tracked on computers. When the machine sickness took down the computers, and took down the hope of ever even building new computers, all that debt-based money just vanished into thin air. People took cash money for a little while afterwards…what, a few weeks? But eventually, things got bad enough that they wanted something they could use—something real.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 39