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Post by garethn on Oct 30, 2018 12:46:10 GMT -6
Chapter 7 - Stab
Stab and I managed, with some minimal help from the other girl, to maneuver the cart contraption back down the road towards Greendale and conceal it in a track through some scrubby bushes. Not a terribly good hiding place but at least it wasn’t immediately visible to somebody on the road. We placed some branches on it to help hide it then sat down together on a log behind some bushes to wait for Laura.
It was a good thing that we concealed the cart. As we waited, a couple of groups passed along the road, both heading away from the direction of the smoke. I would have liked to talk with them but our load was too valuable to risk. I would have to trust Laura to find out what was going on.
I wanted to ask Stab about her background but sensed that direct questions wouldn’t work. Instead I told her about my life since the day and about the farm and she responded by telling me her story. Throughout the narration, though, she continued to refer to Theodora in the third person and there was not a flicker of emotion. It was if she were reading words that she didn’t understand.
++++
Before ‘the day’ Theodora had gone to a famous private school. Certainly I knew the name and knew that her family must have had money. I’d have liked to know where it came from but didn’t want to disturb her flow by asking.
When everything had stopped working, her father quickly grasped the scale of the unfolding disaster. On the second day, he had them walking out from their home - in one of the more affluent suburbs East of Manchester - towards their holiday cottage in the hills slightly north of us.
At first they had no problems. The cottage was very remote and they had plenty of food which they had extended with fishing from the nearby stream.
Eventually, the food had started to run out and when her father had gone into a local village to try to trade for some more, someone must have followed him back to the cottage.
The attack had been unexpected and overwhelming. The gang of about fifteen had firearms and they didn’t. At the end of it, her father was dead, her mother wounded and she and her younger sister tied up. Eventually her mother had died - though not before she had been ruthlessly used by nearly every member of the gang.
Theodora hadn’t been able to eat the small bowl of stew they offered her that night. She had seen them efficiently butchering her mother before they started to cook. They had clearly had plenty of practice.
The gang travelled on the next day, with Theodora and her sister forced to carry heavy loads of loot. There was the constant menace of a fist, a boot or a cruel grope if they failed to keep up. Mind you, even keeping up did not prevent the groping. The load was heavy, the terrain rough, the distances large and the food was inadequate.
After about a week, a couple of the gang returned from some side trip with several bottles of spirits. They had a special party that night with Theodora’s younger sister as the guest of honour. Though bound, Theodora tried to protest, even offering herself instead.
“Don’t worry,” one of the leaders had said, with an evil leer as he rubbed his hands over her body. “Your turn will come.” He had gagged her and, when she continued to struggle, kicked her into insensitivity.
Theodora had eaten the stew the next day. She had to. She was just so hungry.
Two days later she had been sold to the slaver caravan for seven tins of food and two bottles of spirits.
+++
“I’d like to give you a hug,” I told Stab when she had finished her story, “but I would completely understand if you didn’t want any contact.”
The way she flinched back was all the answer I needed.
“Then let me promise you this. If the opportunity arises, and as long as it doesn’t endanger my wife and kids, I will help you to get your revenge on that gang.”
She responded with the faintest glimmer of a smile.
As the morning wore on, I managed, with some difficulty, to extract the other girl’s name - Bev - but I got the impression that there wasn’t much of a person there any more. Somehow the spark had gone.
After about three hours, Laura reappeared, jogging down the centre of the road. I was shocked by this. She would have exploded if any of us had been so reckless with our own security. All thought of this vanished, though, when I stepped out of our hiding place to flag her down.
“There are five hundred Red Sleeves on their way,” she told me. “They are trying to outrun the plague.”
I simply froze. We couldn’t even start to fight off that sort of number… and then the plague… It was too much.
For a moment, I toyed with the idea of abandoning the cart - or trying to struggle back alone with it whilst Laura carried the news - but quickly abandoned these ideas.
“Decision, Mike,” Laura said. Though she would make any military decision without hesitation, this was a question of community priorities and, in the role of leader, it was my call to make.
“We need to stay together and keep the cart,” I said. “This stuff is too valuable and we both need to be involved in the planning.”
She nodded and went to start maneuvering the cart back onto the road.
“Come on,” I said to Stab. I reached down with a hand to help her to her feet but she jerked back so violently that she almost fell off the log. “Sorry!” I muttered and stepped across to help Laura.
The journey back was tough. Stab was driving the cart and Laura and I were pulling - with some occasional help from Bev. We needed to hurry but it was all we could do to keep the thing moving - particularly on the uphill stretches.
Fortunately we did not encounter anybody on the way back to the farm. The cart would be an obvious, tempting target and we were not in any fit state to defend ourselves if attacked.
At last the level of risk got too much for me. “If we’re attacked…” I struggled to tell Laura, “don’t defend us... break clear and… get back to the valley... As group leader... that’s an order... Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she answered against an overall theme of grunts.
“The news…. more important than us... or the food.”
As soon as we got the thing across the bridge, we abandoned it and started issuing orders. More people were summoned. Some of the younger, stronger troops were asked to pull it the rest of the way and a pair were sent out to bring Mike back in from his roaming patrol and send him to the farmhouse for a council of war.
Twenty minutes later we were round the farmhouse table, drinking water. There was the option of the contents of the teapot but, due to shortages, it was the same tea that had been festering on the back of the stove since breakfast and by now the brew was truly vile.
Laura briefly explained the situation then added, “So, do we try to fight them or do we run away?”
“Tricky question,” Mike said at last. “It's a challenge. Ideas anyone?”
“Can we hide?” Margret suggested. “Like, just stash enough to get by with and….”
“I don’t want to give up t’farm,” Alice insisted.
“Anyway, it’s just a slower form of death,” I told her. “With everything the farm can produce and with all of us on a starvation diet, some of us might just make it through to next harvest.”
“Do we know for certain that they’re going to come this way,” Susan asked. “They might keep straight on along The New Road.”
“With five hundred, they’ll have scouts out and are bound to find us,” Mike responded.
“Couldn’t we encourage them to stay on The New Road?” she asked.
“If we’re going to fight them, we’re better of doing it up here. The terrain is much more suitable for defence,” Laura answered, looking up from the LSW that she was cleaning. “I mean, maybe we could snipe at them a bit as they came along the road… trim down the numbers… try to take out their officers...”
“I meant that we should let them see us running away… from somewhere else… maybe somewhere in the village,” Sarah said.
This was greeted by silence around the table then Mike smiled a smile that would have worried me if he wasn’t on our side. “I like it,” he said. “We should have Samson, because he’s the most recognisable member of our group… and a couple of poor, defenceless little girls… hey, we get to see you in a frock, Laura!”
She made an obscene hand gesture but her face remained serious. I found myself thinking that it would take more than just a frock to make Laura look like a poor, defenceless little girl but decided to keep my opinion to myself.
“Should we sacrifice one of the Landies?” Mike asked. “They know we’ve got one. Let them see it driving away…. engine trouble…”
“And of course fill it full of ‘boxes of supplies’,” Susan added, “and strapped to the roof, too.”
I looked round the table and there were nods of agreement.
“It sounds like we have a plan,” Mike said. “Can you lot manage things at this end? You’ll need to set up a house down in town, make it look as if it's been lived in, light a fire… maybe even burn the place down as you’re leaving...”
“Hang on…” I said tentatively, “this is just me thinking out loud here… but if they’re already following you up The New Road… can you take them all the way to Barnfort…”
“And trigger a little war! That’s a truly evil idea,” Mike said. “I like it.” He thought for a bit. “It’s going to require some tricky timing or the people in that Landy are going to end up in the middle of a battlefield… Laura, do you think you can manage that?”
“Sure… but why can’t you…”
“I’m going to take Cat, Gary and Margaret and go and buy you some time.”
Before his death, Jimbo had been running advance sniper classes and the three had been his most gifted pupils. Surprisingly enough, in Margaret’s case, considering her initial reluctance to even touch a weapon.
“I just wish we had Jimbo here…” Mike added..
“We all wish that but you work with what you’ve got,” Laura agreed with a sigh, handing him the LSW.
“We’ll try and give you two days,” Mike said. “Somebody meet me by that footbridge, just South of Greenford on The New Road. Bring the GIMPY. He left to round up the rest of his sniper team.
“Who are we going to have in those last three seats?” I asked when he had left. “I mean, there’s Ash but Mike’s taken the rest of our ‘weak and feeble women’ in his sniper squad.
“I’ll do it,” said Stab. She had been sitting in the corner with James and we had forgotten she was there.
Laura thought about this. “We’ve got a couple of days,” she said. “We might be able to train you up so at least you’re not a liability.”
“That’s one,” Susan said, “I suppose I could take the other.”
I was about to say, ‘no,’ but was beaten to it by Laura. “You’re the only medic we’ve got,” she explained. “We’re not going to risk you unless we have to.”
“We don’t have any choice,” Susan insisted. “Do you really want to put Emily or Lizzy on a battlefield?”
“I’ll go,” James volunteered, shocked at the idea of seeing his sisters in harm's way. “I mean, I’ll need to put on a dress or something but I should be alright.”
I wanted to forbid this too but couldn’t think of any good reason for doing so. It just made too much sense.
Susan studied James critically for a moment. “You won’t need a dress,” she said. “We just need to give a couple of visual clues and nobody will suspect.”
I was going to say something about his hair being long enough but Susan was sending me the sort of telepathic ‘cease and desist’ notice that all well trained spouses recognise.
“There are plenty of sixteen year old girls who are unhappy because they look like boys,” she went on and I realised that she was worried about this undermining his self confidence. ‘He didn’t look like a girl…’ she was telling him, ‘there were girls about who looked like boys’.
“OK,” Laura said, “we’ve got about an hour ‘til dark. “James and Stab, come on down to the training field.”
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Post by garethn on Oct 30, 2018 14:42:18 GMT -6
<Joke mode on>
Phil responds to papaof2 etc.
Thanks a lot for the advice, guys,” Phil exploded. “I want to watch when you tell Alice that she’s got to ensure that we’re getting the correct balance of Carbs, Fats and Proteins when she’s busy feeding all twenty of us for a week on one sheep, two dozen tired vegetables, a bag of rice, a pound of oats, four tins and whatever we can find in the fields and hedgerows. I’m sure she’ll let you know just what she thinks of your advice!”
“I’m not saying a big stack of field manuals wouldn’t come in handy, mind you. They can go on the fire and we’ll be able to put off splitting more logs for another couple of days!”
<Joke mode off>
I think this reflects the two different school of PAW fiction. There’s the ‘Preper preps correctly; Preper survives’ school and the ‘Indifferently preped person survives by living on his wits’.
I find the latter more fun to write (and I probably don’t know enough to be comfortable in the former).
Always remembering, of course, at all times the most important survival tool is the one you carry between your ears. Added bonus, if you lose it, your survival worries are over!
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Post by papaof2 on Oct 30, 2018 20:33:57 GMT -6
I agree on the two "schools" of surviving. I don't have perfect meal plans for every person who might be staying with me at some point in the future and I don't have much more than a guess about what some of them might need. Example: Do you know what foods are appropriate for a child with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome? There's one in the family who's not likely to be here with them living 600 miles away - unless the SHTF event happened during one of holidays when they might be visiting. That's an example of a bit of research that a few people will need to do but most (> 95%) would probably never be aware of.
Knowing the ballpark nutritional value of the available foods could help planning. Those who've lived in the country and learned which food combinations keep everyone healthy over the long term would be "balancing the diet" from experience and not the nutritional labels on the side of a can or box - and I've never seen such labels on a live cow, pig, sheep, rabbit or chicken; not on a corn husk or apple peel either ;-)
Lots of people survived for generations doing hard work before there was a college that offered a degree in nutrition. The question would be "Who has knowledge from practical experience?"
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Post by texican on Nov 1, 2018 16:26:27 GMT -6
Thanks G for the chapters....
Now as to food, a good food supply will carry a group for a while with scavenging, hunting and fishing depending on the size of your food supply....
Also, most rural areas have cattle, goats and sheep which can be slaughtered and eaten.... May take some debating with the owners, but if comes to starving or debating.... Debating always wins if you have sufficient in your group....
Do not forget that many many states have feral hogs and will have pet dogs that have gone feral that will have to be taken care of.... Not only can you eat the feral hogs, but also eat feral dogs depending on the condition of the feral dog.... Meat is meat when you are hungry....
Texican....
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Post by papaof2 on Nov 1, 2018 18:28:29 GMT -6
If you've read Tom Sherry's "Deep Winter" series, there are a lot of nutrition references in (I think) the second book "Shatter" - such as how many TONS of food would be needed to provide a year's worth of food for about a dozen people. Really scary if you're thinking of preparing for more than a few weeks of disruption in your normal food supply.
Some of the information resources mentioned in the story seem to no longer be readily available online the linkable spreadsheet with nutrition values for many foods - but it's probably available for a price if you search long enough. The "Keyhole" software mentioned for using downloaded satellite images is now a commercial product. That often happens when something useful is mentioned in PAW fiction that goes mainstream.
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Post by garethn on Nov 5, 2018 7:40:12 GMT -6
A couple of chapters because I’ve been offline for a couple of day. North Oxfordshire is surprisingly rural and I didn’t have internet.
Chapter 8 - Axis
Two days later, as the Red Sleeve army marched into Greendale, we were as ready as we were going to get. I was stationed at the footbridge and watched through binoculars as they started to loot the village though, of course, the most important thing they were looking for, food, had all gone months before.
Mike and his team had arrived a couple of hours earlier - startling me even though I had been waiting for them.
Suddenly the quiet of a world without technology was shattered by the shockingly loud noise of a Landy being started and repeatedly revved. The effect was like stirring an ants’ nest with a stick.
Groups of invaders ran about as they tried to pin down the source of the noise. Laura did what she could to help. When they were ready to leave, seemingly in a last desperate act of defiance, she took her shotgun and aimed towards the advancing multitude.
That shot was a work of pure genius, drawing on every one of her years of experience of watching novices shooting badly. She twitched, she flinched, she shied and, though she had her back to me, I would have bet good money that she had her eyes closed when she took the shot. I don’t know what the red sleeves made of it but I was impressed. Even if it had not been hopelessly out of range the barrel was jerked so high as to be almost backwards and the little shriek afterward just added to the whole. I wanted to applaud but, as we were supposed to be hiding, that would not have been appropriate.
With that encouragement, the army coalesced into a single unit and started to move towards the farm which, I noticed, was starting to smoke. As the Landy pulled away, the invading army started to give chase. Samson encouraged this by driving as if there were problems - over revving and kangarooing the car forwards.
They pulled a little way away from the pursuers but when they came to our footbridge, Samson allowed the Landy to stall. He popped up the engine cover and moved behind it.
“You there?” he asked in a controlled voice.
“All present and correct,” Mike answered. “We’re going to make our way up to the top now.”
The ‘weak and defenceless’ women climbed out of the car and started to mill about, apparently aimlessly. I was struck by the teenage girl in a pink sweatshirt and matching beanie. By a process of elimination, I knew it had to be James but I could hardly recognise him. Somebody had even been coaching him in how to move like a girl.
As the invaders drew closer, Samson tried the engine again and this time, miraculously, it caught. They pulled away but it seemed to be stuck in first gear. The engine whined pitifully and the vehicle just didn’t pick up speed. I held my breath. Would the invaders really be caught by this relatively straightforward ruse? If I had been in command, I would have sent a small, elite group to capture the Landy whilst the rest concentrated on looting the village
There didn’t even seem to be any conscious command decision from the group; they just set off in pursuit. Maybe the target was too tempting; nobody wanted to let it get out of sight. Maybe the commanders feared that, if allowed to wander off on their own, the small, elite group wouldn’t come back. Maybe Mike’s sniping attacks had taken out some of the more important leaders. Maybe it wasn’t really an army, after all; maybe it was just a mob!
With a quiet word from Mike, we set off up the track. We had to move almost bent double for a short distance until we were hidden from the road by the shape of the land. Then we set off at a run. We moved up the track, past the old farm, then onto the path up onto the moor.
At the track we turned right and headed back towards the road for a while before turning left to follow the side of the moor up towards the pass. Below us, we could see the Landy again, this time quite close to the burnt out husk of the supermarket delivery lorry that we had raided all those months before. It was stationary and the pursuers were still out of sight round a bend in the valley. I wanted to get down there, to try to look after those young people for whom I felt responsible, but I knew our best chance of success was to follow the plan.
We hurried on, pausing briefly when we reached the shoulder of land that marked the top of the pass. It was quite chilly up here with scraps of rain blowing on the wind but we were all bathed in sweat after running up the hill. I looked back to see that Samson and James were now pushing the Landy. The pursuers were still a long way back but gaining.
In front of us, the road dropped away quite steeply and we could see what remained of Barnfort. The mark of the fire still showed as a dark scar across the face of the familiar town.
We hurried down the far side until we reached a small copse of low, scrubby trees, just above town. Mike moved us round to the far side then paused. “Take a shot,” he told me, “anywhere, no need to aim.”
I did as commanded but my puzzled look must have asked my question for me.
“We’re bringing an army into their backyard,” he explained. “It’s only fair that we give them a little bit of warning.” He nodded down the bracken-covered slope towards the town and I could see the flurry of activity I had caused. There were people running about and manning defensive positions.
“Phil,” he said in the calm, almost detached tone he used when going into combat. “See that big truck?”
I nodded.
“Get down there. When they get to you, get the people out and get ’em moving up here - invisibly. Then take the brakes of the Landy and let it go - it should wreck on the corner down there.”
I hurried down towards the road. At first I could run, using the cover of the scrubby trees, but then I had to drop into a low crawl through the bracken. I could see the Landy approaching - coasting down the hill - but Samson was slowing at the corners, being very careful not to get too far in front of their pursuers. I was just in time to stop them and I guided them in so the Landy was concealed from the Red Sleeves by the truck.
As the passengers piled out of the car, I was pleased to see that the bright and floral colours had been replaced, or at least covered, by camouflage jackets and faces had been daubed with greens and browns. Laura started the kids moving up the hill as I lined my Landy up and, with a twinge of regret, released the brakes then went to join Samson and Laura who were giving it a push. As it began to roll down the road, the three of us threw ourselves into the bracken and started to move up the hill as its speed increased. It didn’t even reach the corner, but left the road a short distance before, rolling over a couple of times and noisily coming to rest a few yards from the road.
There was a roar of celebration from the invaders who were just appearing round the corner and could see the Landy being wrecked. “Freeze!” Laura hissed. Though we weren’t as far back from the road as I would have liked, there was much less chance of being seen if we stayed still. As they charged past us to claim their spoils, I could really study that army for the first time.
Although they were mostly young men, some were significantly older and, clustered towards the back, there was a group of young women and even a few children. About a quarter of the men had the red cloths on their arms that marked them as the officers.
There weren’t many carrying firearms anymore but there was a frightening collection of improvised and home-made weapons. The default was a spear, made from a knife lashed to a solid pole, but somebody had also been manufacturing swords - from leaf springs by the look of them. These, I noticed, were only worn by the red sleeves - presumably a status symbol. There was a variety of other weapons including axes and clubs and I saw one young man carrying two ice axes.
Almost as soon as the back-markers had passed us, Laura had us moving up the hillside in a low crawl but suddenly a shout went up from the troops further down the road - they had spotted the defenders down on the outskirts of Barnfort. There was temporary confusion as the front of the army stopped and the rear kept moving but this was eventually resolved by the officers with course shouts and the occasional blow. A group of senior Red Sleeves gathered to look down at the defensive army rapidly forming up below them. There weren’t as many people down there but they seemed to have more firearms.
The discussions amongst the Red Sleeve leaders were becoming quite heated, presumably disagreeing about whether they should attack or run away. Suddenly a volley of shots rang out and two of the commanders collapsed. The way the noise echoed round the hillside made it difficult to pin down the source and it took me several seconds to work out that the shots had come from Mike’s group above us even though I knew they were there. It took me several more seconds to realise that they were also firing down on the Barnfort defenders and, by this time, a second volley from Mike’s group had taken out more of the Red Sleeve leaders.
Then, below us, somebody fired a rifle down towards the Barnfort group… a couple of rifles barked in reply… and those were the last individual shots I heard as the shooting below us became almost continuous. With a few barked commands, a group of about forty of the Red Sleeves broke away from the main group and started to run up the hill towards the copse where Mike and his snipers were concealed. The rest of the army began to charge down the hill.
The group trying to attack Mike headed towards us, aiming for the cover provided by a fold in the moorside. The snipers managed to take two of them out before they reached the cover but then they could advance rapidly. I suddenly realised that their path would take them within 50 feet of us - and even closer to James, Ashley and Stab who were hiding just above us on the hillside. “Stay here,” Laura said to Samson and me in an urgent whisper. “Be ready to give crossfire once they’re past you.” Then she dived into the bracken and started to crawl up the hill towards the kids.
It was agony, waiting as the Red Sleeves approached. We could hear them talking - making threats about what they were going to do with the snipers when they found them. I buried my face in the ground, taking my cue from the apparently impassive Samson besides me, and tried to control my breathing.
After something only slightly shorter than forever, I felt a tap - Samson’s foot on mine - and I looked up. The attackers had passed us and were continuing on up the hillside. I trained my gun on one of their rear markers and held my breath as they approached the three kids - my three kids for now I felt as if all three of them were, in some way, my own.
They were almost past when one of them turned and shouted. They had been spotted.
The shouter was torn apart by a shotgun blast from Stab and the rest of us started to fire but there were too many Red Sleeves, too close to my kids. They were going to die.
Then Laura was in a kneeling position, firing - still with controlled single shots - into the Red Sleeves closest to the children. “You’re not…” bang… “going to do…” bang… “anything…” bang… “to those kids…” She was a killing machine: one second, one bullet; one bullet, one dead Red Sleeve.
I was vaguely aware of other people shooting, including myself, but Laura was deliberately forcing herself into the centre of attention by the sheer weight of her presence.
She flinched slightly as a pistol bullet hit her but it didn’t disturb the metronomic regularity of her shooting. Another bullet hit her as three Red Sleeves charged towards her. Two of them went down before they reached her but the third smashed into her, all his weight channeled through a spear he was holding. Laura was thrown backwards onto the heather, the spear protruding from her stomach. Her attacker was thrown to one side as multiple bullets slammed into him.
The battlefield was silent for what seemed like a long time as everyone tried to come to terms with what had just happened.
Then the GIMPY’s familiar chugging sounded from above, drawing a wave of carnage through the Red Sleeves. With that, their resistance faltered and they started running. Not many of them made it back to the road.
I wanted to collapse, to go into shock… anything, just to avoid the horror of what had just happened but I knew the situation was too critical and I forced myself to act. “Everyone stay away from the bodies!” I shouted. “They’re carrying plague.”
“Mike,” I shouted as I saw him approaching, his eyes fixed on Laura. He had the familiar, slightly glazed look in his eyes that I had learnt to dread. “Captain Mike Jenkins!” I shouted. “We are still in a life threatening situation. It is critical that you listen to me now.”
With a deliberate effort of will, Mike dragged his attention away from Laura and onto me.
“We have to put the six of us…” I glanced up at Laura. She wasn’t moving. “The five of us… into quarantine,” I explained. “We’ve been too close to these plague carriers.”
He was still battling ‘the beast’ but eventually he nodded.
“This isn’t over yet,” I went on. “You need to go and monitor what’s going on down there. We need to know how many starving plague carriers are going to be spreading out through the countryside. See if you can discourage anyone from coming back this way.”
He thought about this, nodded then silently set off, back up the hill
As I came out of my firefight tunnel vision, I gradually became aware of the sounds coming from the outskirts of Barnfort below us. Though a fold in the moorside blocked my line of sight, the battle sounded wrong. There were the familiar shouts and screams but there was only the occasional shot. I had the sudden incongruous thought that we had reverted to about the 16th century. Maybe we needed to think about making ourselves some cannons.
Shaking my head, I pulled my mind back to the matter in hand.
I looked up again at the woman who had taught us how to stay alive on a battlefield and, when the situation became critical, deliberately and consciously sacrificed herself so that my children - and by now I’d become as protective of all three of them as any parent - so that my children might live.
“Come on, let’s deal with Laura,” I said to Samson.
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Post by garethn on Nov 5, 2018 7:41:16 GMT -6
Chapter 9 - Christmas
Laura’s burial was traumatic.
Other deaths had been desperately sad, of course, but for most of us Laura’s uncompromising teaching was the reason we were still alive.
It was a strange affair because Susan insisted that the two groups of mourners stayed at least ten yards apart. Because Laura belonged in the ‘assumed infected’ group, Samson, James and I had the honour of performing the burial. Samson and I both had tears streaming down our faces as we lowered Laura into the ground. James, however, seemed to be completely impassive.
I was surprised how small and light she was in death. In life, she seemed to take up more space by force of her personality.
Afterwards, the five of us returned to the barn which was going to be our home for the next two weeks. Most of us were still in tears, of course, but as we walked in, Stab collapsed to her knees making strange little gasping noises. I moved to do what I could to comfort her, though I didn’t know what I could do as she reacted violently whenever anybody so much as touched her hand. I was beaten to it by James who scooped her off the ground and, sitting on a hay bale, held her on his lap as her gasps progressed into almost hysterical sobs.
I have rarely felt so proud of my son.
Since their mother’s death, he had been extremely protective of his baby sister, Lizzie, and since she joined us, Emily too, had been taken under his wing.
But now, as he held her gently on his lap and allowed her to cry, he had clearly decided that poor, little, damaged Stab needed a big brother too.
And, as I watched her, I realised that she had never really had the chance to mourn the death of her family. Desperate and heartbreaking though this collapse was, perhaps it would do her some good.
Not for the first time, I wished I could talk to Susan.
For two weeks we held ourselves in a careful quarantine - stuck in the barn, in the cold December weather, with no fire. Our only major worry in this time was when Stab became ill but it turned out to be just a cold - not really surprising as we were living in an unheated barn in the middle of winter and she was, of course, still badly undernourished. There was not much we could do about that, either.
Fortunately December is a relatively quiet time on the farm. Through some shouted negotiations with Mike and Susan we decided that we wouldn’t spend any time in the trenches - there was too much risk of infection - but we could take over the roving patrols. These turned into extended training sessions for Stab and she applied herself to learning everything we could teach her with a frightening intensity. She would still react with almost hysterical panic if anyone but James touched her so he took over most of her ‘hands on’ training - completing on the promise that Laura had made to her. As he taught her to move, and more importantly think, in a military manner, I gradually came to recognise that he was more of a soldier than I would ever be. That thought made me extremely uncomfortable - my fifteen year old son was a skilled and experienced killing machine.
I suppose it was another disadvantage of our extended isolation - I had time to think about these things.
After two weeks we were allowed out - just in time for Christmas. As I was reunited with Susan, I was shocked at how she had changed in the last two weeks. She now looked distinctly pregnant - her growing stomach highlighted by her emaciated body.
At noon on Christmas Day, I found myself back at the bridge defences and was rapidly coming to the conclusion that guard duty was an unremitting bind. For a week now there had been snow on the ground and, though various people had taken steps to improve the trenches, we were still just hanging around outside in a cold, damp hole in the ground.
When there was work to be done on the farm, having two people in the trenches seemed like something of a waste of resources. Now it was vitally important to ensure we stayed alert.
It was a couple of hours before the end of our shift when we were disturbed by some surprisingly musical singing from a couple of people coming down the track. I looked across at James, with whom I was sharing a trench, and smiled. “I hadn’t expected Carrol Singers!” he said.
Mike and Samson appeared round the corner and, after checking that we had neither fallen asleep nor lost any vital bits from frostbite, Mike told us that Christmas lunch was nearly ready up at the house and that they were there to relieve the two of us so we could join our family for the meal.
I was genuinely touched. We hadn’t been able to do much for Christmas but at least people were making an effort.
We had collected a tree from the woods on the other side of the valley which we had decorated - mostly with paper garlands that the children had made. Ashley had demonstrated an artistic side, of which I had not previously been aware, by creating a beautiful star from cardboard and scraps of aluminium foil.
I had found some proper artist’s colouring pencils that Mary must have left last time she was here and Mike had given me some chocolate bars that he had found when he had been clearing out Jimbo’s things so at least the children had something to open in the morning.
While the meal wasn’t the orgy of overindulgence that we would normally expect, there was a little more to eat than normal, and some of the more exciting foods had been pulled out from the back of the larder. It was a wonderful change from our staple lamb stew. Somebody had even found a bottle of champagne that was left over from the wedding.
Best of all, though, was the fact that we were all there to enjoy it. In spite of everything the world had thrown at us, my expanding family: Susan, James, Elizabeth, Emily, Ron and now, I suppose, Stab, had all made it this far.
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Post by texican on Nov 6, 2018 22:43:54 GMT -6
Thanks G for the two chapters....
Texican....
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Post by garethn on Nov 7, 2018 14:30:11 GMT -6
Also, most rural areas have cattle, goats and sheep which can be slaughtered and eaten.... May take some debating with the owners, but if comes to starving or debating.... Debating always wins if you have sufficient in your group.... Do not forget that many many states have feral hogs and will have pet dogs that have gone feral that will have to be taken care of.... Not only can you eat the feral hogs, but also eat feral dogs depending on the condition of the feral dog.... Meat is meat when you are hungry.... Until they’ve been here, it’s quite hard for most Americans to grasp how densely populated most of Europe is. I would be surprised if you could I find anywhere in England that is more than two miles from somebody’s front door or more than two days walk from a significant town. The relatively rural location I’m describing (an amalgam of Settle and Kettlewell in the Yorkshire Dales), is sixty miles from Manchester and forty from Leeds. In the scenario described, anything not actively protected will have been eaten within a couple of weeks of ‘the day’. You’d be lucky to find a rabbit or a squirrel, let alone a deer! The group has already brought their own sheep down off ‘the tops’ (where they would normally graze) because they knew they would otherwise be stolen. |
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Post by papaof2 on Nov 7, 2018 16:05:14 GMT -6
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Post by texican on Nov 7, 2018 21:34:13 GMT -6
Thanks PP2 for the links....
Texican....
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Post by garethn on Nov 8, 2018 4:02:33 GMT -6
Chapter 10 - Hunger times
As February turned to March, work on the farm started to pick up and there just wasn’t enough food for the work we were trying to do.
We were down to a starvation diet and we were all becoming thin and weak. The seed potatoes and lambing sheep were looking increasingly tempting but we knew that eating them now was a guarantee of starvation next year.
We ate the last scrap of everything. The few vegetables that were left were washed and eaten whole, nobody thought about peeling them; the single tin we occasionally allowed ourselves to add to the stewpot was rinsed with so much water it gleamed and every scrap of the single sheep we allowed ourselves per week was eaten - down to the bones which were given to the dogs. It was when I discovered Emily and Elizabeth sucking the juice out of the sheepskin that had already been boiled for stock that I knew that things were getting bad. Frustratingly enough, it was at this time that egg production from the chickens dropped off and we seriously considered culling their numbers even further and adding the stringy chicken meat to our diet.
We thought about food all the time but, by unspoken agreement, we tried to avoid talking about it. It just caused frustration and bad temper. I was glad that we had prepared so much wood the previous autumn. It was one less labour intensive job that had to be done in our starving state. The fields had to be prepared again but at least there weren’t the same number of stones to be cleared as last year.
“Mam’s stopped eating again,” Susan told me one evening in bed. We were spending a lot of time in bed these days. The lack of food meant we were tired all of the time. “Ned too… and I’m letting them.”
Even in the midst of the crisis I was shocked that Susan would be complicit in this self sacrificial suicide. On reflection, it explained why the meals of late had been slightly larger than our budget allowed.
I went down and talked to her the next day on my way down to the bridge.
“My spy tells me that you’ve stopped eating again,” I said to her.
“We ’ave,” she confirmed. “I might not ’ave the lists and spread things..”
“Spreadsheets,” I said automatically though I hadn’t seen one for over a year.
“...but I can see how much we ’ave in t’larder and I can see as ’ow it ain’t enough.”
“But we…”
“...an’ if thou tries to say as ’ow it is I’ll gi’ thee a clip round t’earole for lyin’.”
“But we don’t want to lose you, Mam.”
“An’ I ain’t sayin it don’t mean owt that you want me but we’re all ‘avin’ to learn t’ard way as how there’s a difference between wanting an needin’. I want to see me grandkids grow up but I need to know as how they’re goin’ to. I promised you t’year and that’s what you’ve ’ad.”
This wasn’t even driven by depression at the loss of Tom. She and Ned were deliberately starving themselves to death so that the rest of us would have a better chance of surviving. I took her in my arms and kissed her.
“Oh give over, you great daft lummox,” she said but there were tears in her eyes.
We scoured the countryside for anything we could eat. On one marvelous day the boys managed to snare four rabbits. Though we knew it was fat and carbohydrate we needed rather than skinny rabbit protein, it was still wonderful to get up from the table with a full stomach for a change.
And then we lost our unborn baby.
I was on a patrol on the tops with Mike when it happened and, by the time I had been located and relieved, it was already too late.
I rushed home to find Susan still clutching our towel-wrapped, tiny daughter. As gently as I could, I eased her from Susan’s hands.
“I wanted to call her Margery,” Susan said, eyes wide with shock and horror. “After Marge.”
“Then that’s what she’s called,” I said. I kissed tiny Margery on the head and gently placed her in the old shoebox that would have to serve as her coffin.
I tried to hold Susan but she was rigid and unresponsive as if she, too, was dead inside.
We buried our Margery the next morning at the top of the garden, next to Tom, Ned, Jimbo and Laura. Susan joined us for the burial but then returned to bed where she remained, unmoving, not eating, barely drinking.
I tried to spend time with the girls but I just felt too numb inside. Instead, I threw myself into farm work - the brain numbing, repetitive toil providing, if not solace then at least distraction and an exhaustion that would allow me to sleep.
I allowed Susan three days but then I went to her and sat down next to her on the bed. “You reminded me and now I have to remind you,” I told her. “When you made your wedding vows, you promised me you wouldn’t give up. No matter what happens, you wouldn’t give up.”
She didn’t seem to hear.
“I can’t do this on my own, love,” I told her and placed my pistol on the nightstand. “There are the three bullets you asked me to save for you.”
As she lay there on the bed, she started to spasm and it gradually dawned on me that she was sobbing. I pulled her to me and she grabbed me as if she was drowning, her nails digging painfully into my back. It was a pain I was happy to feel.
She allowed me to feed her the small bowl of thin mutton soup that was by now almost all we were eating.
The next morning, she came down for breakfast and, though we were both deeply scarred, life went on.
A couple of weeks later, a wave of flu crashed over our little community.
Presumably it came from one of our uninvited visitors - retrospective revenge for their execution. Certainly it spread through our military first and, for several days, I was effectively in charge of our defences. Fortunately there was only one encounter in this time - a hopeless and suicidal walk across the bridge - five incomers, five bullets - I didn’t even need to whistle in support from the observation post across the road.
Susan tried to impose quarantine but to no avail. Within a couple of days it had spread to every house in the valley. In our starving state we were all vulnerable.
Little Annie was one of the first to die and that shock was too much for Mam; she died the next day. Ned managed a couple more days before he succumbed too.
And then Susan became ill and I feared the worst.
For several days she went through a cycle of brief moments of lucidity followed by increasingly severe relapses. During one of the rallies, as I was washing her face with cool water, she spoke to me. “I’m fighting this, Phil, I really am. But you have to understand, I might not be strong enough.”
“You’re going to be fine, love,” I reassured her.
She just gave me ‘the look’. She was the nurse; I didn’t know what I was talking about.
“But, if I die, please don’t give up,” she begged. “You can mourn for a week, and help our girls to mourn too, but then you get on and do what you can to get everyone else through to spring. Please will you promise me that?”
“You know I can’t refuse you anything,” I said, kissing her on the forehead. “It will be hard but I promise.”
Then she lapsed back into unconsciousness as her temperature started to rise again. I sat with her through the night as she tossed and turned in her state of feverish delirium. I held her hand, tried to get her to drink, and, occasionally, washed her forehead with cool water. Presumably somebody else took over my watch duty. I didn’t care.
Then, I guess about four o’clock, the fever broke. Within a couple of minutes her temperature dropped tomore normal levels and she fell back into a much calmer sleep.
I was standing, looking out of the window when, by the light of the moon, I noticed the flicker of movement from the yard below. Someone was down there. I slipped downstairs and, taking my rifle from its place by the front door, I stepped out into the pre-dawn chill.
Moving cautiously, and with my eyes everywhere, I crossed the yard to the chicken coop. The door was slightly ajar and I could hear the sounds of movement from inside.
I waited to one side of the door and, as a figure emerged, I smashed him over the back of the head with my rifle butt. He collapsed to the ground. I was considering just putting a bullet in the back of his head but something made me roll him over first. It was Titch - a distant relative who was staying down with the Drummonds.
“You bastard!” I said as he climbed back to consciousness.
“It was just a couple of eggs,” he replied.
“The couple of eggs that could mean the difference between life and death to my kids,” I replied.
We held a trial, of sorts, that morning. The flu had devastated the ‘elders’ of the community that I would normally have asked to sit in judgement but we managed to find five senior family members. I presented the facts of the situation then Titch was given the chance to present his own case.
But after he had admitted taking the eggs, his fate was sealed. Within ten minutes, Mr Drummond had taken him outside and put a bullet in the back of his head. He was thrown in the mass grave, down by the main road. Nobody had the energy or the inclination to did a grave specially for him.
I thought the matter was closed but later that afternoon, Mr Drummond appeared with his remaining son. They were each carrying a box of food. “It’s to make up for what he stole,” he explained.
“But this is much more than…”
“I should think so!” Mr Drummond replied emphatically. “We pay our debts. Besides, we’ve got one less mouth to feed now.”
Those two boxes of food made all the difference. It was on March 21st, the equinox and coincidentally the anniversary of ‘the day’, that we noticed that the nettles had started sprouting down in the big patch in the lower field. For the first time in weeks we could eat almost as much as we wanted. The only limit was the terrible things it did to our stomachs if we ate too much of the boiled nettles.
We had survived the first year.
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Post by papaof2 on Nov 8, 2018 16:08:00 GMT -6
Making it to the end of the first year is indeed a milestone! Sparse though their resources have been, they're much better off than anyone who was still in town when the train went off the track.
I think I'm more concerned about the collapse of infrastructure (food, water and all types of waste removal) than about the root cause (epidemic, EMP, etc) of a disruption to things needed for "normal" living. An EMP would make some things non-fixable but an epidemic or the poisoning on multiple water sources could cause the loss of enough skilled people that the infrastructure could not be restarted: Can you run an oil refinery or an aluminum smelting operation or the nuclear power plant that provides power to the smelting operation or the planting and harvest of 10,000 acres of corn or wheat?
If we have even half of our average yearly rainfall, we'd be OK for the basics (2 gallons of water per person per day) without expanding the rainwater collection system originally installed during a drought severe enough that the only residential outdoor water use allowed in the county was for vegetable gardens.
We have (limited) stored food but I have canned and refrigerated heirloom seeds for a small garden - depending on the season and possibly on cutting down a tree or two. In warm weather, we could cool the house with natural convection (open a shaded basement window and a window on the upper floor). In winter, we'd contract the living area and I could erect a tent in one room to create an even smaller space to be heated if needed. With some solar power, we'd have light and some communications - and maybe limited running water. Cooking would be natural gas (as long as it lasts), propane grill, fireplace, Coleman stove and assorted small camping/hiking stoves - even a kerosene lantern with a small cooking surface on top. That lantern is an all-in-one heat, light and cooking device.
I'm armed although not to the level I would prefer - that's future project.
We have books for information and entertainment. As long as there is some solar power, we can have music on CD and video on DVD using a laptop with a 15 inch screen (and listening via headphones). No, it's not a 50 inch screen but it's adequate for two people sitting close together ;-) Or I could ask my wife to play the piano - if we're at a point that sound won't attract unwanted visitors.
We do not have a broad support structure in the area. Most of those living closest to us own their property but are too old to be active participants in shovel and fork gardening or manual wood cutting and splitting (I have a two-man saw), etc. We could do most of our own but not enough for a dozen more people. There are three younger people who might be the "do-ers" of an organized group but that's not enough people to support all the others without fuel for tractors and the like.
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Post by texican on Nov 8, 2018 18:59:54 GMT -6
Most do not realize what societal collapse will create.... No government, no rule of law except by firearms, no filled store shelves and for way too many no food in the house.... The horrors of starvation, depredations of humans on humans.... And death for a great percentage of society.... Some will live for they either have and others will take the means to do so.... Just how prepared can one be with limited funds that is the bane of most.... That purchased all the McMansion, new gadgets, vacations, etc.... It will be a dark new world for most of those that survive.... Turning away starving children and families so you and yours might survive another day will be heart wrenching.... Will you do this so you and yours will survive?  The ill, the young and the old will perish first.... It would be better that a plague take the most so fewer will suffer thru the dark times.... This is more frightening than the vast majority of people can comprehend.... This is why we moved out of the Dallas burbs into the mountains of Okieland, but even here many live from paycheck to paycheck and on welfare.... These have very little chance at survival for they can not / will not prepare.... Life will be like it was 500 years ago with a daily struggle to grow crops to survive another year.... Only the return of Jesus Christ can end the coming madness.... God help us.... Texican.... |
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Post by supermag on Nov 8, 2018 19:47:17 GMT -6
In all the stories I've read, I've seen starvation worried about, witnesses by the main character on outsiders, alluded to as a serious possibility, etc but I've never seen it described as well as you did and I've never seen it happen to the main family. Bravo for having the guts to write reality instead of the hero worship most do.
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Post by freebirde on Nov 8, 2018 23:12:19 GMT -6
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Post by papaof2 on Nov 9, 2018 2:56:02 GMT -6
Following up to my previous follow up ;-)
This spreadsheet
smartekits.com/nutritional-calculator-complete-solution/
Excel 2007 and up - about 1900 foods - $9.95
free sample with 50 foods
has vitamins and minerals plus the calories, protein, carbs, etc of a typical nutrition label plus the various amino acids. If you need that detail of nutrition information, this might be a good item to have. The spreadsheet is in Excel 2007 format, but there was an update pack for Excel 2003 that allows it to read and write Excel 2007 spreadsheets so this spreadsheet works with software that old and anything newer.
There are some prepared foods (wheat bagel), some component foods (cheddar cheese, Atlantic cod) even some fast food items from Burger King, Domino's, KFC, etc - those places likely won't be in operation post-SHTF but you might have the ingredients to make your own pizza.
It doesn't cover everything but probably enough to handle typical needs: i.e., what's the difference between a chicken egg and a duck egg or between cow's milk and goat's milk? To bring this sideline entry into the story - which milk might be better if you're feeding an infant?
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Post by garethn on Nov 10, 2018 4:17:52 GMT -6
Life will be like it was 500 years ago with a daily struggle to grow crops to survive another year.... Sorry defeated by technology! My reply: I suspect any full scale collapse would take use closer to the Stone Age and, as Brian in CoT1 said, “and we don’t even have the knowledge that the primitive hunter gatherers had.” |
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Post by garethn on Nov 10, 2018 4:23:26 GMT -6
Chapter 11 - Advance Australia Fair
It was the middle of July and for weeks now, we hadn’t seen anyone… not a soul. It was starting to feel as if we were the last people left on earth.
I was in the observation post - across the road from the bridge - and musing quietly on whether we were wasting our time by having six people on guard at all times. I was coming to the conclusion - not for the first time - that simply standing guard made a pleasant alternative to all the backbreaking work that awaited us otherwise… particularly on a warm summer’s day like today.
I was shaken from my dreams by a familiar but utterly unaccustomed sound and looked across at Ashley, with whom I was sharing the trench, to confirm that she was hearing it too. She nodded.
Looking down the valley towards Greenford, we could see a helicopter approaching. As it drew closer, I could make out a flag which, if I wasn’t mistaken, identified it as Australian military - or possibly New Zealand - I always had difficulty with those two flags.
I was slightly at a loss as to what message to send. Our coloured paper code didn’t stretch to helicopters! In the end, though, I decided I really didn’t need to bother trying to send a message. If they hadn’t noticed a helicopter, they really weren’t paying attention.
A little over an hour later I was, once again, scratching my head as to what signal to send. We’d just spotted a military convoy coming up the road... half a dozen jeeps and several lorries. We didn’t have a signal for that, either.
I was saved from making a decision by a calm but assertive voice behind us. “G’day! If you turn around slowly and don’t point those weapons at us, nobody’s going to get hurt.”
Ashley’s hands moved towards her rifle but I told her sharply to leave it.
We turned slowly around to find two soldiers looking down on us. I was pleasantly surprised to see they were holding their rifles butt end first. They would have put us down if we hadn’t cooperated but at least we’d have been able to get up again.
“Corporal Dave Palmer, Australian military,” he said. “We’re here on a humanitarian mission. Sorry to surprise you like this but we can’t let you start taking potshots at us before we get a chance to talk. If you want to unload and shoulder those guns we can walk down and get to know one another properly.”
We immediately did as we were instructed. Though they were avoiding violence, it was clear that violence remained an option if Ash or I made it necessary.
“So Australia’s unharmed,” I asked as we walked down towards the road.
“Us and the Kiwis were knocked about a bit but we’re basically OK,” he answered.
“And do you know what it was? Some sort of big solar flare?”
“It wasn’t a solar flare,” he answered, “but, when last I heard, they still hadn’t worked out what it was. It was some sort of huge electromagnetic thing from space - cooked almost anything electronic or magnetic... oh yeah, it knocked the earth’s magnetic field out of kilter, too. It’s gradually coming back up but north seems to have gone south, as it were.”
“We’d noticed that much,” I said. An early encounter up on the moor had drawn my attention to the strange state of the earth’s magnetic field and I had occasionally been studying the effect.
“It’s why we took so long to get here,” he went on. “The planes couldn’t cope and kept falling out of the sky. It was a bit embarrassing for the air force boys, to be honest.” He gave a brief smile. “Oh and if you fly at any height, your insides are seem to be cooked - something to do with the magnetic field, they say.”
By this time we had reached the bridge, the convoy was rolling up towards the junction. Mike had already come to the conclusion that there was no point in trying to fight the visitors and had stood the defenders down.
We milled around for a while, making introductions,
I hurriedly pulled James to one side, smiling when I saw he was holding a bar of chocolate. “Go and find Ron,” I told him. “You and him are to go and hide in the barn.”
He gave me a puzzled look.
“Sorry son. There are good reasons but I’m not allowed to explain. Just do it, please. Oh… and tell the people at the house what’s going on.”
“Yes sir.” He set off up the track at a run.
Returning to the throng down on the bridge, I found the office in charge, a Captain McGillan, and said, “We’d offer you tea but we ran out a couple of months ago.”
“We can do tea,” he answered, “but we could do with somewhere to stage for a couple of days.”
Half an hour later, we were all down in their mess tent that had been set up in the middle of their camp, down in the lower field with - glory of glories - mugs of tea. There were even biscuits.
I wasn’t the only one with a tear in his eye when Samson raised his mug in salute and simply said, “Jimbo”. The rest of us echoed his toast.
The captain described, in some detail, the state of the country. After the starvation and waves of plague last winter, it was almost completely depopulated with only occasional pockets of survivors scattered about. He also explained that they were there on a humanitarian mission, distributing medical and food supplies.
Mike looked at him quite sharply in response to that and, when we had finished our tea, pointedly invited the captain and me to join him for a stroll outside. He led us out of the tent.
“Ok,” Captain,” Mike said as we walked up towards the house. “I can live with ‘it’s above your pay grade’ but you can stop feeding us this line of crap right now. A couple of things I don’t need to tell you: you don’t send a small lightly defended humanitarian mission well in advance of your main lines; also, since when do humanitarian missions run with helicopter support? Oh yeah… and some of your lads don’t move like normal squaddies… they might as well have ‘special forces’ tattooed on their foreheads.”
The Captain chuckled. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
He thought for a moment then went on. “Everything we’ve said is true up to a point but I have to admit that we haven’t been completely straight with you. We are looking for something but I can’t tell you what it is.”
There was an awkward pause and Mike looked across at me. The decision, he was telling me, was mine to make.
“So you might be interested in hearing about one of the bodies we had to bury just over a year ago?” I suggested. “Military convoy had been shot up.”
“We might be very interested,” he agreed with a grim expression. “I take it that you recognised one of the bodies.”
“Come on, we’ve given you something. You let us know what you’re looking for.”
“We’re after a couple of important people,” he answered. “We have reason to believe they may have been traveling through this area.”
“The king is dead, long live the king,” I said.
“So the young prince survived?” he answered tersely. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“We’re going to get him now,” I answered, leading him into the barn.
“James and Ron, you can come on down now, please?” I had correctly guessed that they would be up in the hay loft.
As we walked back into the mess tent, the Captain nodded to a senior sergeant and, at a barked command, the military jumped to attention. The room fell silent.
James stared at the military and then at Ron who, by now, had almost become like a younger brother. “Oh crap,” he said.
“Mind your language, young man,” Susan told him quite pointedly. “There appears to be royalty present.” The whole time, though, she did not take her eyes off me. I would have some explaining to do later.
“The phrase is ‘as you were’,” Mike told Ron. “They won’t relax ‘til you say it.”
He repeated the phrase and, at another command, the soldiers in the tent sat and relaxed somewhat though they remained distinctly reserved. “OK,” I said, “I see I have some explaining to do but it’s a long story and I think these two young men would appreciate some tea and biscuits first.”
As more mugs of tea magically appeared in front of us, I began the tale.
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Post by garethn on Nov 10, 2018 4:25:55 GMT -6
This chapter (is the epilogue a chapter?) contains the favourite line I have ever written!
Epilogue
Two days later, I was on a helicopter at the start of the journey to Australia. Emily and Lizzy were in the row behind me, buzzing with excitement under Susan’s supervision. Ron was sitting next to me and I could see he was more nervous about what was going to happen in Australia than the helicopter flight.
James was notably absent and my mind jumped back to the conversation we had had, the evening that the military convoy had arrived.
“Mike, I have a favour to ask,” I said to him.
“I can’t think of anything I’d refuse” he replied.
“When I first met Stab, I told her that, when the opportunity arose, I would help her to take her revenge on the gang.” The military had reports that that particular gang had survived and was still active in the area just north of us. “The gang that…” I trailed off. I didn’t feel it was my place to let others know anything about her background.
“The gang killed Theodora’s father; raped, killed and ate her mother and little sister; and, when she was starving, gave her stew containing the flesh of her dead sister to eat; then sold her into slavery,” Stab said. There wasn’t a flicker of emotion… nothing.
“You’d like my help when you go to eviscerate them?” Mike asked Stab.
“Yes please,” she replied. Her voice had a serene, innocent quality as if he had just invited her to take tea in the park.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” he said with a smile. I was happy that I wasn’t on the wrong side of that smile.
“And Mike,” I added, “when you find them…”
I paused briefly; I didn’t believe I was saying this.
“When you find them… feel free to release the beast.”
There was a stunned silence round the room broken by James quietly saying, “I’m going with them.”
“No you’re not,” I responded bluntly, shocked that he might even suggest the idea. “You’re coming with us.” After some tense negotiations, and after showing them Robbo’s letter, it had been agreed I was too act as the young king’s personal regent and that my immediate family and I would be leaving with him.
“Phil, come with me a minute,” Susan said. It was her most mild and gentle tone but I had no difficulty recognising the steel behind it. I allowed myself to be led outside and didn’t miss the reassuring nod that she gave James as we left the room.
“Phil,” she said to me when we had found a quiet corner of the yard by the workshop. “I’ve got news for you. I know you think of Stab as a daughter but James certainly doesn’t think of her as a sister.”
“Oh?” I replied. “Oh!”
I thought about this revelation. “But he’s only fifteen.”
“Sixteen,” she replied.
“Sixteen?” I responded. On top of everything else, I had managed to miss my only son’s sixteenth birthday. I began to gently bang my head against the workshop wall.
“Stop it!” she said, giving me a light slap. “If you remember, back in February we were all busy starving to death! Anyway, it’s irrelevant. He might only be sixteen but he’s a sixteen year old combat veteran. Different rules apply to them.”
She took both my hands and turned me round so I was looking her in the face. “You only have two choices, love,” she said. “He stays here with your blessing or he stays here without it.”
I gave a sigh and Susan kissed me on the cheek.
“I suppose he does have a certain history of inappropriate relationships with near relatives!” I said with a smile, remembering the thing with Rebecca just after ‘the day’.
Though she laughed, I received another slap for that and a quiet warning not to breathe a word about it when Stab was about.
We returned to the farmhouse kitchen, hand in hand. “Come here son,” I said as we walked through the door.
As he approached I studied him, really studied him, probably for the first time since ‘the day’. He was almost as tall as me now. When did he grow? And his eyes... It almost made we weep when I looked into them. He had gone straight from a child to a hardened soldier. Maybe one last mission and then a couple of months working with the newly arrived military would provide him with a way to learn how to live as an adult in the unfamiliar, sane world. Maybe, even, damaged but surviving Mike was the father figure he needed at the moment rather than me.
I held out my arms and pulled him into a hug and, as we hugged, Stab started to edge towards us. This was Stab who reacted with panic whenever anyone so much as touched her hand. With a smile to my son, we released one arm each and invited her to join us. Slowly, hesitantly, she allowed herself to be pulled into our hug.
+++
After the final checks, the machine’s engines started to power up. I looked across at the young King and smiled. The noise made it almost impossible to talk.
As the machine powered itself into the air, I looked over the young king’s shoulder as the valley fell away below us. At first, I could only see the new forward operating base that had sprung up in our lower field. Apparently we were the closest thing to civilisation that they had found for almost thirty miles.
Then the solid, Yorkshire stone farmhouse came into view: the farmhouse which had provided us with some measure of security in a world beyond sanity; the stone farmhouse with its sad row of graves in its back garden which were now slowly being claimed by nature.
And, as we continued to rise, the whole valley appeared, nestled into the arms of protective moorland. The valley where so many of the people I cared about had lived and died.
I looked across at Ron as he grasped my hand almost painfully. How could we even start to explain what we had been through. Almost everyone I had ever known was now dead; I had personally killed more than one hundred people - many for the simple crime of being hungry; I’d experienced an almost medieval battle and the Christian sacrament being perverted into a ritual of sadistic cannibalism.
Set against that, there was the way that Alice and Ned had deliberately starved themselves to death to allow my children to survive those dreadful hunger times; and the way that Laura had consciously sacrificed herself to save the young people for whom she felt responsible.
I untangled Ron’s hand with a smile then fished a couple of scraps of paper from a pocket. I almost broke down when I saw Laura’s characteristic neat handwriting on one of them - but the reverse was blank so it would have been unthinkable not to use it. In another pocket, I found the tiny stub of a pencil.
I thought for a few moments, tapping the pencil on my teeth, then started to write:
“I knew at once that something had gone badly wrong...”
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Post by bluefox2 on Nov 10, 2018 8:48:20 GMT -6
Well done sir, Well Done.
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Post by papaof2 on Nov 10, 2018 13:42:28 GMT -6
AU & NZ aren't totally self-sufficient - I don't think they're major growers of coffee, tea or chocolate - but if they survived then perhaps there should be several time zones' worth of other areas that survived: sources of rice, tea, iron ore and/or steel (I think either AU or NZ produces aluminum [aluminium]) plus production facilities for electrical and electronic items from LED bulbs to hydroelectric generators, clothing, fabrics, footwear and a long list of other things. Some things might become greater luxuries: considering the destruction in the UK, what's the state of wine production in France? Many more things would require some adjustments in lifestyle.
But if "it's good to be king" it's also good to be the young king's "family" until he comes of age.
Nicely done!
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Post by texican on Nov 10, 2018 14:15:42 GMT -6
G,
Good ending to a great story....
Texican...
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Post by supermag on Nov 10, 2018 21:18:11 GMT -6
Great story, thank you
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Post by garethn on Nov 11, 2018 6:47:31 GMT -6
AU & NZ aren't totally self-sufficient - I don't think they're major growers of coffee, tea or chocolate - but if they survived then perhaps there should be several time zones' worth of other areas that survived: sources of rice, tea, iron ore and/or steel (I think either AU or NZ produces aluminum [aluminium]) plus production facilities for electrical and electronic items from LED bulbs to hydroelectric generators, clothing, fabrics, footwear and a long list of other things. Some things might become greater luxuries: considering the destruction in the UK, what's the state of wine production in France? Many more things would require some adjustments in lifestyle. Never explicitly stated but US, and the rest of Europe / Asia are in the same state as the UK. (Otherwise there would have been overflights etc). While Australia / NZ are not currently self-sufficient, I expect that they could easily stop the ‘slide back’ at around 1950s technology level and re—build from there. |
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