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Post by accountant on Oct 16, 2018 13:56:41 GMT -6
garethn, COB stated what I was thinking, beautifully. I fully concur. The story is easy to read with believable characters and flows quite well. I can't wait for what happens next.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Sincerely, A.
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Post by texican on Oct 16, 2018 19:34:39 GMT -6
G,
Thanks for the chapters....
Life will be hard once TSHTF, but is survivable if all work together....
Texican....
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Post by hamrad on Oct 17, 2018 1:46:52 GMT -6
Thanks for t'story lad, its nice to see a UK based one and it is well written and believable.
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Post by texican on Oct 17, 2018 10:11:36 GMT -6
ydderf said 'Remember Politicians are like babies diapers they both need changing often for the very same reason'
Is this not so true....
Texican...
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Post by garethn on Oct 18, 2018 7:42:18 GMT -6
Chapter 5 - The King
It was a beautiful early summer afternoon with larks doing their ascending thing over the fragrant heather and the first few bilberries appearing. I was supposed to be out on a three man patrol with Mike and the older of the two Drummond lads - one of these days I really must learn their names - but I was having difficulty keeping my mind on business.
My attention was suddenly dragged back to the present as I sensed Mike flipping into combat mode. Without any conscious intervention from my brain, I hunched down, gripped my weapon tighter and my senses jumped to red alert.
I could hear it too. There was a major firefight taking place over towards the New Road.
“We need to know what’s going on over there,” Mike said. “I can hear grenades and at least one GIMPY, by the sound of things.”
“GIMPY?” I replied, giving him a puzzled look.
“General-purpose machine gun,” he explained. “It’s not the sort of weapon you find just lying around.”
He sent the Drummond lad back to report then Mike and I made our way, rapidly but cautiously, along the track round the side of the moor to a shoulder of land from which we could look down onto the scene below.
I’d seen plenty of firefights now - been involved in plenty - but the scale of slaughter here was far beyond anything I had ever been involved with.
Three armoured land rovers were parked in a triangle at the top of a small rise - just on the other side of the New Road. Defensive ditches had been hastily thrown up around them to give a temporary fort… and then a human wave had tried to overwhelm it.
From the look of things, it had almost succeeded.
Bodies surrounded the fort from several hundred yards away to within only feet of the Land Rovers. From our vantage point we could see straggling groups of the survivors making their way back up the New Road towards Barnfort.
“Rorkes Drift!” Mike muttered. “Rorkes Bloody Drift! Textbook improvised defensive structure. Looks like some gang from Barnfort tried to take on a military formation with real weaponry and got their arses handed to them. Pity I’ve no binoculars.”
“Hang on,” I said fishing around in the bottom of my rucksack. I hauled out the toy set that James had retrieved from our car - it seemed like years ago. Mike gave them a look of contempt but then gave a shrug and put them to his eyes.
“Looks like some strange sort of composite military formation,” he reported. “They have at least a couple of survivors. We need to move in.”
“What?”
“They survived, so they’re not out of ammunition,” he told me. “We need to see if we can get our hands on any of it.”
I nodded and he led us down the hillside, coming out onto the New Road not far from the lorry we had stripped. By staying behind dry-stone walls, we managed to move within a hundred yards without being seen though, in one place, where the wall had collapsed we had to practice our low crawl.
“Hello there!” Mike called out. The barrel of the gun swung around in our direction and it was not the most comfortable sensation I had ever had. “Sergeant Mike Jenkins here,” he went on. “I can see you’re sitting on a Gimp but we’ve got a couple of SA80s here and could have taken you by now if we’d felt the urge.”
“What do you want?” came a voice from behind the gun.
“We’re after ammunition,” Mike answered. “And any weapons we can find, too. In exchange we can offer, food, medical care and a place to stay for the two of you.”
“Three,” the man replied.
Mike looked at me and I nodded.
“OK, you can come in,” the man said, “It’s not like we’ve got a whole bunch of options here!” He eased back, returning his attention to the field of dead and dying while Mike and I stood up and shouldered our rifles and walked slowly into the camp.
As we approached the hastily assembled fort, we found ourselves picking our way through mutilated corpses and scattered body parts - some of the closest had been torn to pieces by explosives and some, incredible as it seemed, had been cut down by bayonets. None of them were moving but I don’t suppose I would be moving much if that machine gun had been pointing at me!
The name’s Robbo,” the man said as we walked up. There were five more bodies on the ground. Four were past help but one was still alive, though he was in a great deal of pain.
Robbo had a gunshot wound in his leg that had been roughly bandaged but, when Mike went to look at it, he said, “I’ll be fine. Go and see about his nibs.” Mike gave him a look but went over to the other survivor.
A boy dressed in camouflage fatigues climbed out from under one of the Land Rovers. He was a couple of years younger than James and I was struck by the thought that he looked familiar. When he looked over and saw the man on the ground he started to cry gently and I instinctively moved to put an arm round his shoulders. “What’s your name, son?” I asked him.
He looked at me as if I was mad.
Mike went over to the other wounded man who was lying inside the triangle of Land Rovers. He opened his eyes and said, “my boy?”
Mike and I both froze. We recognised the voice and when we recognised the voice, we recognised the two figures.
“He’s here, sir. He’s fine.”Robbo answered. Though he remained prone, somehow he managed to stand to attention when he spoke.
Mike and I just stood, frozen in place. “Holy crap!” Mike muttered at last.
“That’s, ‘Holy crap, Your Highness’!” I managed to respond.
“In fact it’s, ‘Holy crap, Your Majesty’!” Robbo corrected with a grim smile. “We had limited communications for a short time after things went south and these two are the last of the immediate royal family.”
Mike started to investigate the king’s stomach wound but after only a couple of seconds, he sadly shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do, sir,” he said.
The little figure next to me, buried his face in my chest and collapsed in a wave of sobs. I held him and patted his shoulder gently. It was a familiar routine. James had been about the same age when his mother had died.
“My boy,” the king managed to repeat.
I slowly loosened the lads arms and squatted down in front of him. “Son,” I said, “your father is dying and he would like to see you for one last time. I know it will be hard but, if you manage it, you’ll be glad you did it for the rest of your life. Come on, I’ll hold your hand.”
One step at a time, as if heading towards his execution, the young prince walked towards his father. As he knelt on the ground next to him, I put my hand on the young lad’s shoulder. “Daddy,” he said.
The king opened his eyes and smiled through his pain. “My boy,” he managed to say, “I’m sorry... pass on this burden... so soon… but the nation…. will need you… to recover.”
Then he looked up to me. “You sir… have the knack… boys… dying...”
“I buried my wife a few years back when my son was about this age, sir.”
“Look after…”
“I will look after him as if he were one of my own, sir. I give you my word.”
He smiled his thanks and lay back.
The young prince and I stayed like that until I realised that his father wasn’t breathing any more. “It’s over, son,” I said.
The new king nodded mutely and allowed himself to be helped to his feet. I closed the old king’s eyes and laid his hands on his chest. I noticed that he was wearing a large signet ring so I removed it. “Should I keep hold of this for you?” I asked.
He nodded mutely. I removed it and put it in an inside pocket.
“OK,” Mike said as he came over with a blanket and covered the corpse. “We need to get moving before anyone else comes to investigate the place. Robbo, do these Landies run?
“I think that one’s OK,” he said nodding to one of them, “but it’s not got much diesel.”
“It’s only about five miles - cross country.”
“It’ll be fine then.”
Mike started to transfer all the contents of two of the Land Rovers into the third.
“Will you be OK for a minute?” I asked the young king.
He sniffed, wiped his eyes on a sleeve and nodded. I was pleased when he came to help - and was particularly pleased when Mike took over the gruesome task of stripping the military dead of weapons and ammunition.
“I think the less people who know who you are the better,” I said to the king after a while. I looked across to the other two and they nodded their agreement. “Have you got a name you’d like to be called?”
He thought about this as he carried another box across to me and I loaded it into the back of the Land Rover. “How about Ron?” he asked.
“Like in the books?” I asked and he smiled. “Then Ronald King you are!”
“Not Ronald, Ron!”
“You were christened Ronald but you want people to call you Ron!” I teased him. “And you’ll be Ronald when you’re in trouble!”
“And whilst we’re on the subject, it wouldn’t do any harm to take the edge off your accent.”
“You mean tawk laak this?” he asked in a passable imitation of ghastly Estuary English.
“I don’t think it has to be that extreme!” I said hurriedly, as I moved over to help him with a heavy ammunition case he was carrying. There were still a pleasing number of cases in the back of the Landies. “It might be tricky for you to keep it up for any length of time besides… I might be forced to strangle you.”
He giggled briefly but then caught sight of the blanket covered corpse and his face dropped. “Come on,” I said, giving him a brief hug, “there’s no point in dwelling on things. So, in your story, who was your father?”
“He was some sort of high up in the army,” Robbo suggested from where he was lying a couple of yards away. “You were on base with him when everything blew up and we were trying to get to a safe place up north, somewhere, you don’t know where. Has the advantage of all being pretty much true… and works with your school and things.”
“And my mother…” there was a slight hitch in his voice, “stayed at home but did a lot of charity work…” Ron suggested.
I nodded. Again, it was true - not honest but true.
“And any more questions about your family… you don’t want to talk about it… much easier than lying,” Mike suggested. “Probably true, as well.”
By now, we had almost finished clearing the site. “We will come back and bury your father and the others,” Mike promised the new Ron. “But, for now, we need to get this stuff back to the farm. It’s just too valuable.”
“Do we need to search that lot first?” I asked, nodding to the field of dead leading up to the road.
“They’ll have nothing worth taking on them,” Mike answered. “When we come back, we’ll have a quick look to reduce the number of guns to be used against us but, for now, it’s not worth risking this stuff.” He nodded to the back of the Land Rover which was now gratifyingly full of guns, ammunition and rations.
To give us a place to look after Robbo, we had to throw James out of the tiny box room at the back of the far that he had been using as a bedroom. He moved down to the bungalow which was now serving as a barracks and command post for the military. It felt strange for me to have my oldest boy leaving home at the age of fifteen but nothing about the situation was normal.
We moved Robbo in there and, at first, he seemed to be making a reasonable recovery under Susan’s careful ministration. The newly named Ron King spent a lot of time with him - Robbo had been part of his standing security team and they knew each other well before ‘the day’. Gradually, Ron took over some of the basic nursing functions. Occasionally the sight of the king carrying bed pans about would strike me as incongruous but I consciously tried to suppress that thought; I just let him merge into our family.
But, as the days past, the wound never really healed and gradually infection took over. Susan helped him as much as she could with the low level antibiotics that we had recovered from the surgery but I could tell that she was gradually becoming more frantic. It was after the third night that she had spent without sleep that I felt I had to get involved.
“We’re going to lose him, aren’t we?” I asked.
“But it’s only a small flesh wound,” she answered. She was almost in tears. “I should be able to deal with it. He shouldn’t be dying because of a stupid thing like that.”
“There are people dying all over the place for reasons that would have been unthinkable only a couple of months ago,” I said, taking her in my arms. “You’ve done all you can for him and now we need to help him… and, more importantly, help Ron… prepare for the inevitable.”
“Would you like me to talk to him?” she asked.
“No, I’ll deal with him,” I told her. I looked around to check that we were completely alone then quietly said, “You’ll have to trust me on this, and I can’t tell you any more, but there is more to this than meets the eye.”
She gave me a slightly puzzled look then gave a shrug of acceptance. I kissed her on the cheek to show her my thanks.
Though I’ve had practice, telling a young lad that someone he loves is going to die doesn’t get any easier.
By this time, Robbo was running quite a high fever but he still had lucid periods and I was not greatly surprised when, a couple of hours later, he asked to see Ron and me. I was surprised when he wanted to see Mike too. With my arm round the little lad’s shoulders, the three of us went upstairs and crowded into the tiny room. I was shocked at how he looked, forehead glistening with sweat and obviously in pain.
“Shut the door,” he said.
I did as he asked.
“Phil,” he began, struggling through his illness to remain alert, “we all witnessed his nibs appointing you as his son’s personal guardian. You accepted that responsibility.”
He looked around the room and we all nodded.
“There’s a letter here that says that I witnessed it, too,” he said, nodding to a letter on the bedside table.
“Now, if and when anybody comes to find this young man, he’s going to become a political football. I know it’s not the first thing on your mind, right now, but it’s important that you understand that your guardianship is not going to end when the first bunch of semi-official people turn up looking for him. Is that clear?”
Again we nodded.
“OK, then…” he gave a brief shudder, “son, come and give me a hug then get lost. That nurse says she has something that will take the edge off things.”
I grasped the man’s hand briefly then he hugged the young king. When he nodded to me, I led the lad away, his whole body wracked with sobs. I didn’t know how many more of these deaths he would be able to take.
I don’t know how many more of these deaths any of us will be able to take.
[Author’s Note, for those not immediately familiar with the correct form of address for members of the British Royal Family: ‘Your Highness’ is used for a member of the extended royal family - the princes and princesses; ‘Your Majesty’ is only used for the reigning monarch.
Neither title is generally used in conjunction with the phrase ‘Holy crap’!]
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Post by garethn on Oct 18, 2018 7:43:14 GMT -6
Chapter 6 - Can’t
As spring turned to summer, the number of starving refugees roaming the countryside started to increase. At first we talked to some of them. We learnt, for example, that the red-sleeves - they called themselves ‘The Axis’ - had completed their takeover of Amberford and that some former members of the town council were running Barnfort with the support of what remained of the local police.
We were fortunate that the river provided a first line of defence, conveniently funneling anyone trying to attack us across the bridge. Though, earlier on, a few had tried either to ford the river or use the bridge much lower down to come round the back of us, by this time, almost everyone trying to attack us was too weak and desperate for such sophisticated maneuvers.
Another day, another double shift. The number of vagrants meant we had to keep more guards on duty. The farm was suffering as a result but security had to come first. It was late morning and I was on observation in the main bunker with Mike. It had been hot and sunny for days and I was starting to worry that the river level might drop so much that it ceased to provide an effective barrier when they arrived: a young couple, they couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. They were thin, bedraggled and utterly hopeless.
The two paused at the sign at the end of the bridge and talked quietly to each other for a short time.
“Please,” the girl said, “we need help. You’ve got to help us?”
“There’s nothing for you here,” Mike said gruffly. “We haven’t got enough to feed ourselves. You have to go on.”
“We can’t go on,” she said, clearly beyond tears. “We’ve nowhere to go.”
“You can’t come in,’ Mike repeated automatically. “This conversation is now closed.”
He took my shotgun and gave me the rifle. He racked it; the loud noise frequently had the effect of discouraging our unwanted visitors.
“You have the male,” he said tersely.
“I have the male,” I confirmed.
The two spoke briefly again and then the boy took a couple of paces onto the bridge. Without a thought, I took the shot - centre mass. He collapsed, unmoving.
The girl stumbled back a few paces.
“I have the female,” I said automatically. I had the rifle - the superior weapon.
“You have the female,” Mike confirmed.
As I looked at the girl through the rifle scope, I could see her face and body were splattered with blood and worse. In her emaciated state, it was easy to see that she was pregnant.
With a courage borne of desperation, she started to walk towards her friend’s corpse. I prepared to take the shot.
But a couple of yards before she reached the bridge, she collapsed. She lay there, unmoving, for the rest of our watch.
+++
That afternoon, I was almost glad that I had assigned myself the dull monotony of firewood duty. The piles of logs that we had chopped down in the spring and left to dry had to be split into sections that could be used in the fire and stove.
It was a straightforward task that required only a little brain activity. As I swung the heavy, two handed axe, it gave me the chance to think about what was happening and what it meant. The image of that young, blood-splattered girl kept running through my mind.
As I continued to swing the axe, the sky darkened and there was a threat of thunder in the air. I was still stripped to the waist and chopping when Alice sent my girls to tell me that it would soon be time for tea.
As the three of us tidied up together - stacking the split firewood against the barn wall then cleaning and re-sharpening the axe - I realised that I had to talk to Susan.
+++
It was quite late that evening when I eventually managed to find some quiet time with her. “I can’t do this,” I told her. “I just can’t. It’s tearing me up inside and I’m turning into a monster. Today I had a pregnant, eighteen year old girl in my sights. I was going to take the shot.”
Susan thought about this for a long time. There were tears in her eyes.
“I know it’s tearing you up,” she said at last. “I don’t think I could love you if it wasn’t. But you know the numbers better than I do; we just cannot feed anyone else. If we let more people in, more of us are going to die.”
She led me upstairs and quietly opened the door to Mam’s old room which was now a nest for all the younger girls; even Rachel had taken to sleeping there when she wasn’t on duty. We looked down together at our sleeping angels on their mattress on the floor. “I hate myself for having to do this to you but I have to remind you of three promises you made,” she said gently. “Your wedding vow to Mary, your promise to look after Emily and your wedding vow to me. You didn’t know it at the time but, in each of those, you promised that you would stand on that bridge and keep the rest of the world out.”
She closed the door gently. “I will understand if you fail, really I will. But I ask one thing of you. If the time comes when you can’t do it anymore - you can’t face shooting one more vagrant or we’re simply overrun - then I want you to keep three bullets.”
I stared at her in disbelief.
“I know you’re all in hell down there… keeping the rest of the world out… but it’s nothing like the hell of being outside and trying to get in.”
She took both my hands and looked me in the face. “And that, my love, is the only alternative... the only alternative.”
Then she took me by the hand and led me across to our own room.
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Post by texican on Oct 18, 2018 17:52:02 GMT -6
she said gently. “Your wedding vow to Mary, your promise to look after Emily and your wedding vow to me. You didn’t know it at the time but, in each of those, you promised that you would stand on that bridge and keep the rest of the world out.”
She closed the door gently. “I will understand if you fail, really I will. But I ask one thing of you. If the time comes when you can’t do it anymore - you can’t face shooting one more vagrant or we’re simply overrun - then I want you to keep three bullets.”
G,
Most do not realize the horror that will be created when the SHTF....
It will be a win and live or loose and die battle day after day for survival....
How many can really take the shots when required to survive?.?.?.? Many think they can, but until the time comes, you really do not know....
Hesitation will get you and yours and those that depend on you dead if male and worse if female....
Remember to save the lasts shots....
Thanks G for the chapters.... Now King Ron is with the group.... What does this portend?.?.?.?
Texican....
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Post by papaof2 on Oct 18, 2018 19:07:05 GMT -6
What does it portend? I'm expecting more good reading ;-)
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Post by garethn on Oct 19, 2018 6:43:33 GMT -6
It will be a win and live or loose and die battle day after day for survival.... I’d say win and you lose too - you lose something of your humanity. I’ve never been in the position, thank goodness, but I guess that killing evil people is not that hard - hence the wartime practice of portraying the enemy as baby-bayoneting monsters. But in a PAW, most of the people you will be obliged to kill are no more evil than you or me. They are the sort of people you would normally not hesitate to help. They are simply on the wrong side of the bridge. G
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Post by garethn on Oct 19, 2018 7:54:58 GMT -6
Chapter 7 - Greg arrives
A couple of weeks later, I was asleep in the guard cottage. As the level and scale of attacks had continued to rise, Mike had decided that we needed to hold a ‘ready reserve’ of troops close to the bridge. This meant that the next watch squad had to be available in the cottage. We could do some work there - there was a small vegetable patch out the back that needed constant weeding - but it made a sizeable dent in the labour available on the farms.
But, as ever, security came first.
I was dragged from my happy dreams by the ringing of the alarm bell. This was a new innovation - from Greg, of course. A long piece of string stretching from the bridge overview trench to a bell in the cottage; pull the string to ring the bell and the reserves magically appear.
As the regulations required, we were out of the door within two minutes - still tightening straps and adjusting clothing but moving. We set off down the lane at a rapid jog - it was a clear, moonlit night and we had no difficulty making our way though by now we all knew the lane so well that we could follow it in the dark. We could clearly hear occasional gunshots though they didn’t seem to be coming from the bridge. They were away to our left, somewhere down the main valley from the junction.
“That sounds like an AK,” Mike said as we approached.
At the bridge, the atmosphere seemed calm, though tense. “Mike,” he announced as he joined the on-duty guard in the trench. “What’s up?” There wasn’t room for the rest of us in the main trench so we took cover in various shooting positions slightly further back.
“We’ve got somebody on the bridge, claims they’re related to the Drummonds,” Laura reported.
When I heard this I realised that there was a figure crouching against the wall at the far end of the bridge, trying to stay in cover in case any stray bullets made it this far.
The younger Drummond lad, who was with us in the reserve party, was summoned forward and Mike gave the command ‘light’. A switch was flicked and the bridge area was illuminated.
I can claim this development as one of my own. After some experimentation, I had determined that some of the heavier duty electronics - including batteries, wires and lightbulbs - had survived ‘the day’, particularly if they weren’t in use at the time. By tapping power off the Land Rover’s alternator, I had set up a rig to charge batteries which we could then use to light a pair of car headlights.
The Drummond lad confirmed that it was his Uncle Greg who was invited across the bridge and quickly gave us an account of what was going on.
He and a small group of his friends were trying to make their way here with a wagon full of supplies. They had been attacked a couple of miles back and had since been making a fighting retreat towards Lintondale.
“Is that your AK?” Mike asked.
“My what?” Greg replied.
“The machine gun I can hear… is it yours?”
“No.”
“OK, Jimbo, Phil, Kat, on me,” Mike barked. We moved to join him though we stayed low. “You too, Greg. We’ll need you to tell us who’s who.”
Mike briefly laid out his plan. We would go down to the junction then up onto the hillside on the far side of the road. It was easier to move on that side than this because it was more open. We would make our way down the valley to flank the attackers and resolve the situation.
The first hint of dawn could be seen as we made our way down towards the bridge and, as we started to climb on the far side, we had usable dawn light. This was useful because the path we were looking for - little more than a sheep trail, really - would have been easy to miss in the dark.
Once on the path, we set off at a run. An occasional gunshot told us where the fighting was and we knew we were safe for a while.
“What are we…” Greg began.
“Quiet!” I whispered before Mike could even turn and give him a furious look.
As we approached a shoulder in the hillside, Mike signed for us to slow and, pulling Greg down next to me, we started to advance at a crouch. There was still an occasional shot but the rate of firing seemed to have slowed. Suddenly, Mike signaled for us to stop then, after a few seconds, we started to advance again, this time at a low crawl.
We reached a patch of scrubby gorse bushes, their rich scent striking in the early morning air, and, from its concealment, could rise to a kneeling position and look down at the scene below.
A group with a hand-pulled wagon - it looked as if it had been adapted from a vehicle trailer - had been trapped in the corner of a field. They were protected by two dry stone walls but couldn’t go anywhere. Gradually the attackers were encircling them. There were a couple of them on the hillside below us who were moving into a position from which they would be able to shoot down on the defenders.
Mike quietly confirmed with Greg that the group by the wagon were the friendlies.
As I studied the scene below, something struck me as incongruous and I soon realised what it was. The attackers all had gang colours on their arms. They were the red sleeves from back in Amberford.
I was considering the implications of this when my attention was dragged back to the current situation by a quiet word from Mike. Phil, Kat, you have the two below us then the three across the road. Jimbo, we have the cluster down there by those trees. It’s vital that we get everybody. Spread out and wait for my count.”
We did as instructed, lying down in the dew-damp grass, preparing our shots. “I have the right hand one of the two below us then the blue jacket in the group behind,” I said.
“I have the left below and the one a bit in advance of the others,” Kat responded.
I forced myself to keep breathing regularly as we waited for Mike’s command. At last it came: “Three... two... one….”
On the unspoken zero, we fired as one and the two immediately below us collapsed. One was still moving slightly but he was no longer a threat.
My second target was still standing, staring around stupidly, trying to understand what was happening. I quickly dispatched him with my second shot. Kat’s second target had at least tried to find cover. But he was covering himself from the direction of the wagon and Kat had no difficulty in hitting him.
The third, however, seemed to have some idea of what he was doing. He ran away from us, ducking and dodging. We both fired on him but with no success and he soon reached the safety of a dry stone wall.
“One’s got away,” I reported. “He’s behind the wall back there.”
“I have him,” Jimbo stated calmly.
It was a magnificent shot. As the fleeing red-sleeve made his way along the wall, Jimbo could track his progress by the occasional flashes of colour and, as he reached a gateway, Jimbo shot him…
But he was so far away that Jimbo had to have fired before his target was visible.
Again, I wasn’t given the chance to dwell on this. “Phil, Kat, go and make sure they’re all dead then help the others back to the bridge. Greg, go with them. Make sure you don’t get shot by our friends by mistake.”
“Confirm the five kills; help Greg’s friends back to the bridge; don’t get shot,” I confirmed.
We hurried down the hill to within shouting distance of the group by the wagon and, after establishing who we were, Greg and I moved in to help them while Kat went to deal with the first two targets.
There were multiple wounded and, as I’d been taught by Susan, I quickly triaged them.
Two dead or so close as made no difference on the wagon; ignore them.
One chest wound… possibly survivable but unlikely with our current medical facilities; second category.
One wounded arm… badly smashed up… spurting blood… will probably lose the arm but might survive; first category.
I flinched slightly at a gunshot behind me but it was only Kat finishing off the first man she had shot.
I hurried to get a tourniquet on the arm then a dressing on the entry wound in the second guys chest. Alarmingly, there was no exit wound.
“Get those two off the wagon and these two on it,” I told Greg.
“But...”
“They’re already dead, even if they haven’t stopped breathing yet. If we try and help them, the other two will die as well.”
I ran over to Kat and together we confirmed the other three were dead. Only one was worth the expenditure of a bullet to make sure.
Then back to the wagon at the run... help load the chest wound… my hope for him faded when I saw him again… then, as fast as we could, drag them back up the road to the bridge.
Confirm that we had been identified as friendlies by the nervous guards; it would be embarrassing to be shot at this stage… then try to pull the wagon up the steep rise from the bridge… but it was too heavy… even when wounded arm got off and tried to help… then Samson was there, breaking regulations by leaving the trench whilst on duty but I wasn’t going to tell… then on up to the cottage where Susan had set up a operation theatre… unload the wounded into her care.
Only then did I allow myself the luxury of being violently sick at the side of the road.
A while later, I was brought back to consciousness by Ron coming out of the cottage. I had collapsed against a wall and I don’t know whether I had slept or had just zoned out for a while. Ron was white; he looked as if he was in clinical shock.
“What’s up, son?” I asked, jumping to my feet and hurrying towards him.
“I held his arm,” Ron said. He clearly didn’t believe it himself. “I held his arm as she chopped it off… she had knives and saws and everything and she just chopped his arm off.”
He started trembling violently and I drew him into a tight hug but it was several minutes before he could even start to cry.
When, at last, the wracking sobs had started to subside, I asked him whether wounded arm had been awake at the time.
“No,” he answered, “Susan injected him with something to make him sleep.”
I omitted to mention that what she had injected him with was street heroin of indeterminate quality and a dosage determined by inspired guesswork. It was the sort of thing that the king, and a twelve year old boy, was better off not knowing.
“You do know that you saved his life, don’t you?” I asked him. “Susan wouldn’t have amputated his arm if she had any way of saving it.”
He thought about this for a long time then nodded.
A short time later, Susan appeared. She looked almost as white as Ron but she had a look in her eyes that told me she knew she had done the right thing. I went over to hug her but she wouldn’t let me touch her until I had washed .“You’ve got even more blood on you than I have,” she told me.
As she said it, I realised that my battlefield first aid had not left me unmarked. My hands, face and clothes were covered in blood and it was matted into my hair. I found it hard to believe that I just hadn’t noticed.
“How are they?” I asked.
The guy with the chest wound died,” she told me. “I doubt whether real doctors could have done anything for him. Alan is still hanging in there but I had to remove his arm.”
“I know, Ron told me.”
“Oh my God!” Susan exploded. “Ron was there… Ron was helping me… I should never… I’m sorry, Ron.” She had been so tied up in the moment that she had not even noticed who her helper was.
“He got to see some things that he probably would have preferred not to see… but he got to play an active part in saving somebody’s life,” I reassured her. “There aren’t many twelve year olds who can say that, are there Ron?”
It was about two hours later when Mike appeared. He had a huge pack with an AK47 strapped to the top and was swearing fluently, moderating himself only slightly when he noticed that Ron and Susan were present.
“What’s up?” I asked him, worried that somebody had been hurt.
He told us that he had been obliged to kill some people that he would rather not have killed - young and inoffensive people being used as pack horses by the Red Sleeves.
“Couldn’t you have just let them go?”
“They knew where we are based,” he answered. “The Red Sleeves would pay well for that sort of information… particularly if anybody had recognised who we are.”
“Pay?” asked Ron who, without prompting, had collected a mug of water for Mike.
Mike nodded is thanks. “Food,” he clarified. “That’s the only money anybody cares about at the moment.”
The rest of the day was spent clearing the battlefield and securing the loot. That evening, we gathered at the house though not before Angela, at Susan’s insistence, had given me a very short haircut to get rid of the matted, congealed mess that washing just wouldn’t fix.
“I had a conversation with one of the Red Sleeves before he died,” Mike told us. I didn’t ask for details of that conversation. It definitely belonged in the category of ‘best not to know’.
“Anyway, it looks like they’ve just got a couple more months of food in town.”
“How did they last so long,” I asked.
“They have an effective leader by the name of Cheetah - vicious and ruthless but an effective leader. He made some early decisions about who was going to eat and there were a couple of warehouses that I didn’t know existed. Oh yeah, and they’ve found themselves four proper military advisors too.
“As I say, they have a couple more months of food and they have started sending out reconnaissance parties out into the countryside - pick off any targets of opportunity but essentially just gather information. Find out where there’s more food to be had.
“They know we’re out in this direction and they know we’re dangerous so they’ll probably guess that we took out their raiding party. That can go two ways. Either they chose to give us a wide berth - they decide that we’re too dangerous to mess with - or they come here in force to simply wipe us out.”
“What do we do if they decide to come out this way?” Margret asked.
“We die,” Mike answered flatly. “We make them pay very dearly and then we die.”
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Post by texican on Oct 19, 2018 13:47:57 GMT -6
“What do we do if they decide to come out this way?” Margret asked.
“We die,” Mike answered flatly. “We make them pay very dearly and then we die.”
Several options....
Take out the leader and the military guys....
If no explosives are available, make them and mine the ways in and use them....
Arm everyone that can hold a firearm and train them how to shoot....
Fight or die violently and for the females it will be horrendous....
Texican....
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Post by papaof2 on Oct 19, 2018 18:05:48 GMT -6
Farming areas usually have some fertilizer. Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO) - also defined as granular fertilizer and diesel - is their likely available explosive. Someone military should know the proportions and amounts...
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Post by hamrad on Oct 20, 2018 7:29:52 GMT -6
Farming areas usually have some fertilizer. Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil ( Anfo) - also defined as granular fertilizer and diesel - is their likely available explosive. Someone military should know the proportions and amounts... I would expect most farmers in the uk to know how to mix it in the correct measures.
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Post by garethn on Oct 21, 2018 9:37:21 GMT -6
I would expect most farmers in the uk to know how to mix it in the correct measures.
I doubt whether you’d go far wrong with 50-50 by mass. Too much fuel oil and you’re going to be flinging burning oil about - which would wouldn’t be the worst possible outcome (depending on where you’re standing). But these people are hill farmers - mostly sheep with small kitchen gardens. They hold sheep pellet not fertiliser (unless you count sheep dung!).
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Post by garethn on Oct 21, 2018 9:40:20 GMT -6
Chapter 7 - An Education
A couple of weeks later, Laura held a further basic training course. We had delayed it slightly to give Alan a chance to get used to his one armed state but he seemed to be adapting surprisingly quickly. Laura had asked Samson and me to help out and, by the time I arrived, most of the recruits - new arrivals who were keen to impress - were there and looked keen to start but Alan and Greg were late. It was a hot summer morning and we all had things we needed to do so we were mildly irritated. When the two lads appeared, laughing and joking, it stretched our patience to the limit.
When Laura began her usual spiel about her training plan, Greg chose to make some sort of comment - I think it was something about being trained by a woman. I didn’t hear it but Laura clearly did.
“You, come here,” she said in a quiet, calm tone that had me inwardly flinching. I saw Samson smiling slightly.
He took a step forward, unsure as to what he’d let himself in for.
“Defend yourself,” she told him.
“What?”
She stepped in and slapped him across the face. “I told you to defend yourself. You won’t get that sort of warning in a real combat situation.” She stepped in to slap him again but this time he dodged out of the way.
“Good,” she said. “You’re getting the idea.” She made as if to slap him again but this time, when he dodged, she stepped through to kick him in the rear.
“You little…” he roared as he swung a wild haymaker at her which, had it connected, would have knocked her flying. She ducked below it and slapped him again.
“Use your anger, don’t let it use you!” she instructed him as she backed off slightly allowing a small gap to grow between them. He took half a second to compose himself then dummied with his left before driving an uppercut towards her chin. She stepped to the side, grabbing his wrist and rolled his body over hers. She turned to trap him on the floor but he was already rolling to his feet.
“You’re quick!” Laura acknowledged as she circled slowly to the left, “but not…”
She dummied a kick to his right knee, which he dodged, responding with a kick of his own towards her hip. She batted this to one side, throwing him off-balance and, seizing his left hand, dumped him face-first into the grass. Suddenly, her foot was on his shoulder and his left hand was being held painfully upwards.
“...not fast enough.”
“So, you see, there are some things that a woman can teach you.”
“Yes, sir… ow… I mean ma’am.” His voice was not very clear because his face was being forced into the grass.
“I’m not a sir or a ma’am. I work for a living. I’m corporal or ‘Corp’ to my friends. Do you want to be my friend?”
“Yes, erm, Corp.”
“Right, what’s your name?”
“Greg, Corp.”
“Well, Greg, from now on, I want to see you here on time, every time and ready to learn. Is that going to happen?”
“Yes, Corp.”
“For your information, I can take down any man here in the valley except for Mike and, with Samson, it’s about 50-50.”
“True?” she asked Samson.
“On a good day for me,” Samson rumbled.
“But he’s huge!” Greg mumbled into the grass.
“And I’m quick as, incidentally, are you. You have the potential to be very good, if you’re prepared to learn from a woman. Are you prepared to learn from a woman?”
“Yes, Corp.”
“Good, then lets get on with the lesson.” As she said this, she rolled him over and hauled him too his feet.
At the end of the lesson, Greg approached Laura slightly apprehensively. “Corp, I want to apologise for what I said back there. I was just surprised to be trained by a woman, that’s all. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Apology accepted and appreciated,” she replied. “It’s a bit of a sore point… and on that subject, how’s your shoulder?”
“A bit stiff, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“Turn round.”
“Sorry?”
“I said, ‘turn round’. Or do you want me to turn you round?”
He hurried to do as he was told and she started to massage his shoulder.
“Oooh… aaah...” he grumbled as she worked her fingers deep into the muscle.
“Don’t be such a big baby,” she scolded as she felt his muscles start to relax under her ministration.
“And don’t be late next time,” she told him as she sent him on his way with a slap on the rear.
I wish that I could have taken a photograph of the look he gave her as he started to move back towards the house. It contained shock, outrage and, perhaps, a hint of something more, too!
Samson raised an eyebrow in my direction.
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Post by garethn on Oct 21, 2018 9:41:27 GMT -6
Chapter 9 - Saga
It had been quiet, ominously quiet, for a couple of days now. For the last few months we had been seeing people on the road every shift and there had been at least one half-hearted attack every day. For two days now, though, we hadn’t seen anybody.
It was frustrating to be stuck down here at the bridge when there was so much work to be done on the farm. We knew we were losing crops because of the lack of manpower to tend the fields but, given the choice between being overrun today and starving tomorrow, there was only one rational choice we could make.
Towards the end of the shift, Mike wandered down to the bridge and, after noting the quiet and checking we hadn’t been abducted by space aliens, he asked me to join him in the guard cottage when my relief arrived.
“What’s up?” I asked as I strolled into the cottage. There was a pot of Jimbo’s tea under a tea cosy so I risked a half mug and, preemptively wincing, took a sip.
“Nothing much,” he answered, throwing himself onto the sofa that took up one wall of the small room. The squads are getting a bit cumbersome and I think we need to split them into platoons. Move Samson, Laura and Jimbo up to Sergeants.
“So that will make you a lieutenant… or probably a captain, won’t it?” I said, testing the limits of my military knowledge.
“I was hoping to go for something like colour sergeant,” he answered grimly.
“As I understand it, that doesn’t really describe the job you’re doing, does it?”
“There’s no point in discussing this with you, if you’re just going to use logic,” he grumbled.
There was a knock on the door and Laura marched in. She saw me, shrugged and marched up to Mike.
“Permission to report, Sarge!”
He sat up and gave her a quizzical look then moved across to his desk chair to give the meeting the formality she seemed to be requesting. “Permission granted,” he stated.
“Reporting an inappropriate relationship within my chain of command, Sarge.”
“Message received and understood.” Both he and I were having difficulty keeping straight faces. “Dismissed.”
“Laura, sit down,” he said as she turned to leave the room. “Have you really only just noticed? The rest of us have been giggling about it for days!”
“Oh! You know I’m useless at this sort of thing!” she replied with evident frustration as she collapsed onto the sofa he had just vacated.
“Laura!” I exclaimed. “Even I spotted it and I’m famously completely hopeless at that sort of thing.”
“It’s because she refuses to date anyone who can’t whop her arse!” Mike explained to me. “He can’t... can he?” he asked Laura.
“Not yet,” she said with an uncharacteristic embarrassed giggle, “but with a bit more training, he’ll take you!”
That was too much for Mike. He collapsed with laughter.
“Thanks for your support and understanding!” she grumped at him but she couldn’t keep it up and soon was laughing too.
“It shouldn’t actually be a real problem because of what we were just chatting about. The squads are getting too big. I need to promote the four of you to sergeants.”
“Hurrah!” Laura responded. “More money.”
“Tell you what, I’ll double your wages - that’ll make… oh yes, still nothing!”
“Thanks, captain!”
“Don’t you start!”
“It’s the job you’re doing.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it!”
The saga of Greg and Laura was suddenly torn from our minds by the continuous ringing of the alarm bell: a large scale attack; all trained militia to their defensive positions; everyone else to shelter. Mike’s chair was thrown over as the three of us tumbled out of the cottage and, as we sprinted down the hill towards the bridge defences, I could hear our alarm signal being repeated at the farms up the lane.
Then the shooting started at the bridge.
I will never know how we survived the next twenty four hours. If the attackers had been slightly better coordinated, and if we didn’t have that core of experienced military personnel, we would undoubtedly have been overrun.
I spent most of the time on the hillside to the south of the bridge, working with Samson and a couple of others to stop people who had crossed the river lower down from working their way round behind our bridge defensive positions. The hillside was quite steep and we held the high ground so not many came that way but it was wooded and the trees allowed those that did to come dangerously close. On a couple of occasions, I was forced to use the hand-to-hand fighting techniques that Laura had been teaching us and I had the appalling experience of witnessing just what Samson was able to do with that overlarge knife he carried.
Fortunately the summer night was quite short and there was a significant moon for much of the time but, for the few hours of real darkness, the fighting was more confused and frightening than anything I had ever experienced. I have vague and disjointed memories of movement and shadows flickering amongst the trees. We had no choice but to blindly trust our training to know where our squad mates would be - anyone outside our fighting positions was a target.
It was probably mid-afternoon the next day when the all-clear rang - a long sequence of widely space rings on the bell. Our squad gathered itself together and limped down the hillside to the command cottage. We were all covered in blood; most of it wasn’t ours but I had a cut above my eye from when I had run into a tree and blood on my arms from bandaging a minor bullet wound on Samson’s left arm.
Perhaps the most telling thing was the way that Samson just collapsed against a wall when we reached the cottage and shut his eyes. This was Samson who could keep going when three normal men would have given up - and he was exhausted beyond words.
There were three neatly wrapped bodies just outside the cottage: Alan, the younger of the Drummond lads and a young woman from another of the farms who I hardly knew. Susan came out of the cottage when she heard my voice; she appeared to be in a state of shock.
“I shot people,” she told me, her eyes wide with horror. “Me… shot people…” I reached out and took her in my arms. We were both covered in so much blood that it didn’t matter.
I don’t know how long I held her but we were interrupted by Laura coming out of the cottage. “Sorry, but Martin needs you,” she said to Susan. With a sigh, Susan unpeeled herself from me and hurried back in.
“He’s not going to make it,” Laura told me in a flat voice that told me that she, too, was at the end emotionally.
“But what… how?” I asked stupidly. Martin was too young to be in our militia. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near the fighting. He hadn’t even been through our basic training.
“Mike got caught over at the observation post so I had to make the call,” she said, as if confessing. “For two hours, we had no reserves… no reserves… So Susan and Alice and anyone who could handle a weapon was there in the trenches with the rest of us. Martin knew how to fire a shotgun...”
She started to collapse and I put an arm round her and eased her to the ground then sat down next to her with my arm still round her shoulders.
“I had to,” she said, her voice rising at last with the emotion. “We were that close… that close... to being overrun.”
“And then everyone would have died.”
She nodded.
“You don’t need me to tell you that you made the right call, do you?” I asked.
“No,” she whispered with a slight shake of her head as tears started to run down her cheeks.
Ron appeared, moving amongst us with food. I don’t remember when I had last eaten but I no longer had the small supply of emergency rations that we were all required to carry so presumably I had grabbed a bite at some stage during a lull in the fighting. In spite of everything, my body took over and started eating the hunk of bread and the lump of cold lamb that were offered.
We were still sitting together when Mike stumbled into the scene. He had a manic grin on his face and his eyes shining with that familiar glazed look. “Well that was a jolly little fight,” he chuckled.
With an enormous effort of will, I managed to contain my rage. “Mike, we are all exhausted,” I said. “People we care about are dead and dying. Now, if you can’t manage at least a little common decency then…” but then the anger simply boiled out of me, “just f*** off!” I screamed.
He staggered back as if I had hit him then collapsed onto the roadway and sat hunched over.
A few minutes later, Greg appeared. He had obviously been crying. He came over to Laura and she held up a hand to allow him to haul her to her feet, than grabbed him in a desperate hug.
After a minute, she let out a deep sigh and untangled herself from Greg’s arms. “Looks like I’m in command,” she said, nodding over to Mike, whose shoulders were juddering as he sobbed.
She looked around. “You two,” she said to Jimbo and me, “I’m sorry to do this to you, but we can’t just abandon the positions. Could you go and do an hour on the bridge then I’ll send someone down to relieve you so you can get cleaned up?”
I allowed her to grab my hands and haul me to my feet, then I checked my ammunition supply and filled my water bottle and waited for Jimbo to join me.
“Did you hear Grasswell’s gone?” he asked as we limped together back down the lane towards the bridge. He sounded uncharacteristically flat. He, too, was utterly exhausted.
“What?”
“Apparently there was some sort of… I suppose you’d call it a siege except it wasn’t that well organised. The place collapsed yesterday, which is why there were suddenly all the crowds.”
I nodded blankly. I’d have to think about the long term implications later. For now, I was just relieved that so few of us had died.
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Post by texican on Oct 21, 2018 13:16:49 GMT -6
Thanks G for the chapters....
Now Laura and Greg will be a pair....
It will be fight and win or fight and die for the foreseeable future....
Life will be horrendous when TSHTF.....
God help us when this occurs....
Texican....
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Post by pbbrown0 on Oct 22, 2018 18:02:24 GMT -6
.... Life will be horrendous when TSHTF..... God help us when this occurs.... Texican.... Matthew 24:21-22 ... for then there will be great tribulation such as has not occurred since the world’s beginning until now, no, nor will occur again. In fact, unless those days were cut short, no flesh would be saved; but on account of the chosen ones those days will be cut short.
Mark 13:19-20 ...for those days will be days of a tribulation such as has not occurred from the beginning of the creation that God created until that time, and will not occur again. In fact, unless Jehovah had cut short the days, no flesh would be saved. But on account of the chosen ones whom he has chosen, he has cut short the days.
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Post by garethn on Oct 23, 2018 1:44:34 GMT -6
Chapter 10 - Harvest
By the middle of August, we had been harvesting for weeks. Both the produce from our vegetable patches, as they became ripe, and any wild food we could find, particularly bilberries from the moors. For several weeks the kids - and some of the adults - seemed to have permanently purple mouths. Much of our precious sugar was used in preserving them.
We all became experts in hedgerow foods and we had to be careful to avoid over harvesting. Only with the nettles was that not a problem. There always seemed to be an abundant supply of them.
Then we started bringing in the main bulk of our crops. The hay had to be cut, raked into stacks and dried in the sun before being brought into the barn. Try as we might, we couldn’t get any sort of cutter to attach to our ancient working tractor so that meant hours of sweating labour cutting with an old scythe that, ironically, had been used for keeping the nettles under control and with wooden rakes that Ned and Gary had manufactured based on an ancient one that they had found at the back of the barn.
The haymaking was a massive labour. For two weeks, we had everybody in the fields from dawn to dusk. Though there were still raids almost daily, we had to risk cutting right back our defensive operation. If we failed to bring the hay in, we were dead anyway.
Fortunately, the weather was kind to us with the hay. By the end of August, it was all cut, dried in the sun and either carted into the barn or piled in covered stoops in the field. Then the sheep were allowed into the hay fields to tidy up.
Then it was on to the oats. There were two distinct areas of the field. About half was sown with seeds from the farm store all those weeks ago. We had collected all that we could find. As an experiment, we tried by sowing the rest of the field with some of the animal feed oats. These were much less successful and I suspected that something had been done to the seeds to stop them from thriving. We carefully kept a stock of the successful strain separate to be used as seed for next year. We meticulously cleared the field and even had Emily and Lizzy following the rest of us to make sure we hadn’t missed a single grain.
Only Mam remained at the farm, keeping the place running and preparing meals which were as substantial as she could make them in the circumstances - heavy physical labour from dawn to dusk meant that we needed all that food. She also looked after little Annie. The two had become very close with Mam showing an open affection towards the little girl she had never shown to any of her grandchildren. Maybe she felt that, because of her experience, the little girl needed particular attention, or maybe, because she was slowly stepping back from her role of matriarch, she no longer felt the need to stand slightly aloof from the younger members of the family.
Once the oats were cut and dried we made a start on the bulk of the vegetables. The potatoes and carrots were quite successful but the greens - mostly cabbage and beans - were less so. Without commercial pesticides these had been ravaged by insects in spite of our careful hand tending. We gathered what we could.
At last, the harvest was in. The stacks of vegetables in a cool corner of the barn looked impressive. So I went back to my lists and tables and did the calculations.
Then I checked the amounts and redid the calculations.
I then rechecked them even though I knew I was going to get the same result. It wasn’t going to be enough.
On reflection, we had overestimated in a couple of ways: we had failed to take account of loss through disease and insects when farming without chemicals; and we had failed to take account of how poor the soil was. Though we had worked to enrich it, it hadn’t been enough.
We would do better next year.
If there was a next year.
We began a desperate search for any more wild forage that might help us through the coming year. We all grew heartily sick of nettles and, when we found a pair of oak trees in a sheltered spot, down by the guard cottage, we sent the kids in shifts to throw stones at the squirrels to keep them off. They even managed to kill a couple which went straight in the pot. When the acorns fell, they were collected and, after roasting, grinding and repeated soaking, could be used to make flour.
David was sent up on the tops with his bow and arrow and managed to take several pheasants and quail but we had to stop when the loss of arrows became too great. If he missed his target, it was almost impossible to find them amongst the heather. We also shot a couple but, on balance, it was too much ammunition for not enough meat.
As the first storms of autumn started to roll in, we knew we were in for a long, hungry winter.
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Post by papaof2 on Oct 23, 2018 8:00:35 GMT -6
One of the things that would be a problem for most people in any SHTF event would be the proportions for farming: How much seed? How much fertilizer (and when)? How much water (and when)? The example of the native Americans putting a small fish in the mound of each group of corn kernels tells us that the newly planted seeds need to be fed, whether with granulated fertilizer or the scrapings from the hog pen (also known as the smell of money ;-)
Having a couple of #10 cans of assorted heirloom vegetable seed might be a good start on a garden for two people but probably not adequate for a group of 20. The losses to insects and disease without the usual chemicals could be substantial. Remember that the majority of the Irish in the US are descended from those who fled the famine caused by failure of the potato crop.
Do you have any seed potatoes among your other seeds?
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Post by garethn on Oct 23, 2018 10:12:40 GMT -6
Do you have any seed potatoes among your other seeds? A few but they really weren’t set up for large scale agriculture - and the soil quality up in the hills is terrible. That’s why the main ‘crop’ up there is sheep. They can cope with tough, stringy grass!!
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Post by freebirde on Oct 23, 2018 16:50:00 GMT -6
Remember that the majority of the Irish in the US are descended from those who fled the famine caused by failure of the potato crop. Point of clarification: I wasn't so much a failure of the potato crop as the English confiscating the crops, potatoes, oats, and such, to starve the Irish out. Another case of the victors writing the history. Yes my family name can be traced back to Ireland, Wales, and Scotland among others.
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Post by texican on Oct 23, 2018 17:47:28 GMT -6
Veggies so important to one's nourishment.... Now how many sheep does the farm have? All of the sheep can be used for food except for the horns and hide.... Now a counter attack against the other groups to acquire food could be a consideration.... Kill or be Killed.... Texican....
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remembergoliad
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Post by remembergoliad on Oct 23, 2018 18:50:58 GMT -6
Veggies so important to one's nourishment.... Yes, but when run through the sheep, they provide you with the essential nutrients for living just as if you'd eaten them along with all the unnecessary carbohydrates and sugars the nutrients are packaged with. (By "run 'em through the sheep", I mean eat the sheep afterwards, not literally catch the remains of the vegetables! ) Nettles pack so much more nutrition in than most other veg. In fact, leafy, above ground vegetables and fatty meat are enough to ensure adequate, if not plenty, to sustain a human being.
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remembergoliad
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if you send friend req on FB, message me too. I won't accept if I don't recognize you.
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Post by remembergoliad on Oct 23, 2018 18:51:40 GMT -6
Thank you for your writing, garethn. I'm really enjoying your story!
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