Breckinridge Valley: Surviving the Black--Book 1 of a Post-Apocalyptical series Page 22

  “We are a long way away from leaving refrigeration behind,” she said. “I’m encouraging George to find people interested in preserving meat and making cheese. We’ll need this over the long term. It isn’t an immediate need, but long term it will allow us to rely less on refrigeration. We’ve identified several nearby caves for cool storage. We’ll need these for roots and other produce.”

  “I understand the long-term plans,” I said. “That doesn’t explain why we can’t help our neighbors this year when the need is greatest.”

  “It will just put a bullseye on our valley,” my mom said. “There is a reason we’ve kept our preparations secret.”

  “Those at the middle school aren’t a threat to us,” I said.

  “But the deputies and the town of Oneida could be,” she said. “I want our neighbors to live through this disaster, but not enough to put our valley at risk. Your dad, grandad, and I discussed this for hours nearly every week for 30 years. It was your grandad who helped me understand. We will never have enough extra to save everyone. Left alone we have the land and resources to thrive in our valley. I know I’m always pulling my hair out trying to optimize food production, so everyone gets a balanced meal, and we build for the future. In reality, even if I quit working on it, we have enough supplies tucked away to survive for many years, even if nothing grows. Our biggest threat is the external one.”

  “I understand,” I started to say.

  “No, I don’t think you do,” my mom interrupted. “Do you think a few guns or even a blown bridge will keep us safe if someone in power realizes what we have in this valley? It is why we have always been secretive. We have the kernel needed to restart our civilization. I’m hoping those we helped in town think we are just farmers with a few extra eggs. That would be bad enough.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “City people think food comes from the grocery store,” she said. “They don’t understand saving seed or animals for next year’s growing season. All that matters is that we have a cow and their family goes hungry. It doesn’t count that we spent our money preparing while they were buying the latest 70-inch TV. There were so few farmers when the grid went down that I expect some vestige of the government to come around expecting to confiscate any food we produce next fall, for the good of the masses.”

  I started to argue but thought of the deputy now running the Mecklin County sheriff’s department. Who knew what he would do?

  “I wasn’t thrilled when our allies proposed bringing in their neighbors,” said mom. “Having more people actually helps ensure our survival, so it wasn’t adding people that was the problem. The problem was adding people not committed to our goals. We are going to have trouble with some of them by spring. Right now, they are grateful and are just going along. As time passes the crowded conditions, limited meals and hard work will weigh on them. I expect some will think life is better outside the valley and will want to leave. Unfortunately, they will know way too much about us by then, and we can’t afford to let them go. The allies who vouched for them know what they will have to do, but I expect that to cause serious stresses on our community.”

  I missed that aspect of adding the 100-extra people into the valley.

  “I hope to recruit about 50 more people, but they would ideally be adults under the age of 30. We have enough old folks and youngsters,” she said. “That is why we didn’t encourage you to bring in the seniors staying at the middle school, the demographics were wrong. Nor were we interested in those young men and women who got involved in that Militia for obvious reasons.”

  “Some of those might have been okay,” I started.

  “No, we need builders and doers, not takers,” my mom interrupted. “You find someone making a living from a trap line, fishing, and hunting, that is the type of person we want. Even if the hunter doesn't join the valley, we can always trade with him or her. We don’t need anyone content with staying in a hut living off handouts.”

  I kissed my mom goodbye and left her trying to optimize the valley’s efforts. I was glad she was doing it. I went into the radio hut to see how the new tech was working. I also asked what we were learning about happenings in town. Sally confirmed that most everyone checked in at noon each day. She listed 15 or so contacts with most just indicating they were still there. The middle school group usually shared messages that people dropped off, usually about someone leaving town or looking for someone else. They were serving as the community hub.

  Sally’s two new helpers and a young runner were in the radio hut now, learning the ropes. The two helpers were senior citizens. Everyone seemed happy with their new assignments. The ladies showed me the new camera feeds, and alarm circuits, including what needed to be done should a threat be spotted. They made sure to include the runner in their discussions.

  I was happy Sally was getting reinforced, and it seemed a good fit for the seniors, who were also crocheting scarves from yarn while standing watch.

  We’d discontinue FOB Echo, tomorrow after installing the gate. I was tempted to install the gate tonight but decided to tackle it in the morning. That would give the concrete a few more hours to set.

  It was getting dark, and I headed to my house, aiming to stoke the fire and get ready for my girls to come home.

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 15

  Things were quiet at my house. Everyone seemed a little subdued. Billie and Joe challenged my girls to a game of Sorry, and a cutthroat game ensued.

  Steve joined us in the living room, but Mandy and Ellie were absent. No one said anything. All of my Rangers were missing. I suspected they were hanging out at the cafeteria.

  Steve was reading a solar technical manual. He asked me how we’d decided to configure the wifi, and I told him his tech had installed it on the utility poles. We were only using it for sensors and trail cameras. He said they were looking at a similar plan to link the whole valley together.

  I left him to his reading and decided I should start bringing some homework home to help my mom and dad. We also needed to hold a few drills.

  I hadn’t heard how Scott was doing today. He’d been groggy or unconscious the other times I checked on him. I knew someone would have found me if it had been bad news, but still, I was uneasy going to bed without checking on him.

  I let my girls and Steve know I was headed out for a bit and hiked to the hospital.

  The nurse told me Scott was sleeping and remained in stable condition. I peeked through the window at him. He was still attached to monitors and had IVs.

  Dissatisfied I walked to the cafeteria, hoping to see Tom. My whole crew and about one-third of the valley were in the cafeteria. Apparently having a place to go after work was a good idea. Someone had moved a lot of chairs and couches suitable for family rooms into the cafeteria. There was a large group viewing a wide-screen TV with some old moving playing on it. There were a few chess sets and even checkers. Someone had started a jigsaw puzzle.

  Tom spotted me and came over to see me right away. “Scott is doing well,” he said. “Dr. Jerrod is satisfied with his progress, there is no sign of infection, which is her main worry. She had to remove part of his lung but expects him to make a full recovery, barring complications. He is breathing on his own. She got him up for a while this morning. She hopes to have him up and walking for a little while tomorrow.”

  “Thanks for looking after him, keep me posted on his condition,” I said, feeling awkward, I glanced around and added, “It looks like turning this into a rec hall has a lot of support.”

  “Yes, I’m a little surprised how fast everything happened,” Tom said. “The guys and I scrounged some chairs and equipment, by the time we brought them back here there was a crowd. Your grandmother furnished the TV and the first batch of DVDs.”

  “I’m glad you guys pitched in, the place is starting to look homey,” I said. “I’ll head back to my girls.” I waved to my guys and headed home. The night was crisp and cold, perfect to set the hog meat. The
re was a reason my ancestors butchered hogs at this time of year.

  It was amazing how bright the stars were. The moon would be up soon, but I stood marveling at my view of the Milky Way. I suspected this was what the valley sky looked like when the first Breckenridge settled here.

  The next morning the Rangers got up before dawn for a quick round of calisthenics before breakfast. Which was blood sausage, as expected. Zeke and I headed out to finish the FOB Echo gate and to check on all the newly installed cameras.

  Once I was satisfied with the new equipment, I let Roger know. The rest of the day I spent shifting supplies out of the second floors of the newer homes in the valley. My house had a lot of cement sacks stored upstairs. I offloaded them onto a pallet on a forklift. It saved my knees and sped up the operation. I was told that it was the same way they delivered the cement when the house was built.

  The easiest stuff to move were bundles of insulation. The material stored in the second story was chosen to reduce the amount of radiation reaching the first floor of the house. The basement was built as the initial nuclear hideout and the extra materials stored in the second story would have allowed us to move out of the shelter sooner. The second story was designed for use as long-term auxiliary housing. I was surprised we waited so long to open it up, although I understood the need the benefit of the dorms also. The dorms allowed groups to stay together and settle in.

  Until now I ignored the second story. We had plenty of room in the main living areas, and I chalked it up to my dad’s typical paranoia. Since the valley paid for the building, I didn’t really care. In many ways, it was no different than having the hideout room in the basement.

  The materials stored in the second story needed to be non-flammable and basically inert. This limited the storage to sheetrock, cement, rolls of insulation and spiders.

  Moving the insulation made me itch, the spiders made me itch, and the dust and cement made me sneeze.

  The plumbing connections were in place for a shower, toilet, and sink. There was also a tile covered section for a wood stove. The rooms were fully wired, with lights in most rooms. It had an interior stair connecting to the downstairs hallway and an exterior balcony with a set of stairs which I used to move the sacks of cement to the forklift.

  All the windows had shutters which were now latched from the outside. I doubted the windows had ever been opened. We’d want the shutters opened to provide light to finish the space. A good vacuuming, finishing the bathroom, installing a wood stove, and people could move in. The linoleum floor and white walls weren’t as pleasant as downstairs, but it was upscale compared to the concrete floor in the steel dorm buildings.

  I wasn’t sure who was moving to these quarters, but a few days of work and they’d be ready. Steve was running the construction crews and expected to wrap our house up in the first group.

  After I moved the cement to the appropriate storage container, I drove the forklift and pallets to the next house to be emptied. The pink rolls of insulation were easy to toss to the ground. I piled these high in the little trailer behind the golf cart. It took a lot more trips than if I used a pickup truck, but the golf cart could be recharged.

  The work to empty and prepare the second stories continued the next day, but I had a series of new assignments.

  Over the next weeks, my whole crew became experts in butchering pigs. We also ate blood sausage and everything but the squeal. My favorite part was the cracklins, left over from rendering the lard. What wasn’t to like about crispy fat pork bits.

  Pig brains and innards weren’t something I particularly liked, but I ate everything on my plate, happy to have enough food to eat. The girls were getting an education at school, learning the reasons for eating all the pork pieces they might have shunned before.

  The stinky boy goats were back out in the pasture and Melissa was convinced her goats were all pregnant. This meant she would have to stop milking them in March.

  Jennifer spent one day in hog butchering class. She described the process to both Melissa and I. It was odd to hear the details from her perspective. Jennifer seemed to take the whole process in stride, even while she was trying to freak out her sister about the buckets of blood.

  Melissa wasn’t bothered about it at all, informing me it would be disrespecting the animal if we didn’t eat the blood sausage.

  I was impressed with their maturity and attitude but realized they lived on the farm their whole lives. While I was raised on the same farm, at their age, I would have balked at eating blood sausage voluntarily. If I recalled, few in the family actually liked either the blood or the innards, so we usually skipped boiling the head and the blood harvest. But then a lot of things had changed since then, I was glad my daughters were adapting to the new ways.

  Just as I was finishing that thought, Jennifer whispered in my ear that Ellie fainted in class. A lightbulb went off in my head. My girls weren’t showing me how mature they were, they were strutting their superiority over Ellie. I decided the net result was positive and left it alone. If feeling superior to Ellie helped them eat blood pudding and pig brains, I was going to stay out of it.

  According to Jennifer, Ellie wasn’t the only one to either faint or throw up. Even a few adults keeled over when the hog was shot with the captive bolt. The gush of blood that followed caused a number of the new people to throw up.

  Most of the kids were assigned to clean and scrape the intestines for sausages. I remembered doing that myself many decades before.

  I knew this was part of the overall effort to integrate the new people into farm life, but the sounds, sights, and smells of butchering hogs was pretty hardcore.

  Melissa said she was supposed to help with the January hog butchering session but only if she had someone trained to mind her chickens and goats. She was hoping Kaylee was trained by then. This was the first I heard about Kaylee. I learned that Kaylee was slightly older than Melissa, was new to the valley, without any experience with animals.

  “She was afraid of the chickens at first,” confided Melissa. “But I showed her how to tell them who was boss. Now she can find their eggs almost as good as me. Chickens aren’t her thing though. She really likes the lady goats. I’m training her on milking them. We are both glad the he-goat is done. He was really pushy.”

  I hoped Kaylee would continue to be Melissa’s friend, she was the first new person either of my kids mentioned since the solar disaster, other than Steve’s kids.

  Roger picked 20 people out of our 60-person security force that he thought might benefit from advanced military training. They were longtime allies and already qualified as marksmen. This meant they carried an assault rifle at all times and were qualified to stand guard. As part of the security force, they were to report to the muster area during any valley emergency. While they had other assignments during the day, they were part of the rotating on-call group that manned the bridge defensive position night and day. Until we disbanded FOB Echo back, most served a stint there.

  None of those selected were ex-military, but most were hunters. Roger thought at least one potential sniper. Force Beta’s job was to evaluate the security force members and establish a training regimen for each person. They might not be Rangers, but we needed them to have sufficient skills to stay alive in a hostile environment. They would also serve as a backup to Force Beta. We designated them as Force Gamma.

  I was intrigued that five of those nominated were women. I knew that was really going to challenge my men. I couldn’t disagree with Roger’s evaluation. Eliminating half of the potential workforce arbitrarily made no sense in this new reality. I’m not even sure it made sense in the old world. Everyone needed to be trained to protect themselves and if necessary, to take the fight to an enemy.

  I was glad Jennifer was still considered too young to be nominated. I knew she was a marksman in the security force, but due to her age would only be issued a rifle if the valley was under direct attack.

  Taking 20 people out of the workforce for
a week was difficult, so I compromised and requested 20 for a day. Five Rangers including Zeke evaluated them and put them through their paces. By the end of the day, we knew what we were working with.

  The first thing we needed to address was their conditioning. For civilians, they weren’t in bad shape. They just weren’t in warrior shape. The Force Beta consensus was that if they couldn’t get into warrior shape, further training on weapons and tactics wasn’t worthwhile.

  We decided we all needed a tune-up. We established a pre-dawn time for mandatory calisthenics for both Force Beta and Gamma. When we started several members of the security force joined us, not just those nominated for Force Gamma but by the second week the others all dropped out. Force Gamma seemed to take pride in keeping us with us.

  It was now just Force Beta and the 20 security force volunteers. Even Scott joined us for abbreviated calisthenics as soon as Dr. Jerrod gave him the okay.