2nd Earth: Shortfall

by Edward Vought

  We have two almanacs from two different years and they show that the amount of daylight on any given day is pretty close from year to year. Tim and I have been keeping track and since the hours of daylight are getting shorter we figured out that it must be fall. We also figured out by the number of daylight hours that we are probably in mid October. Pretty good thinking if I do say so myself. When I explain this to Dayna she tells me all I had to do was ask if it had been warm or cold for a long time before we got here. All I asked her was if she knew what month it is, she doesn’t, but she knows that it will soon be cold for a long time before it gets warm again. We decide since we are just a bit obsessive about keeping track of time that we use the information that we obtained using the almanac, along with a calendar that we found in the office, which is one of those that shows twenty years in small print on the back. We are saying that today is the 20th of October. Unfortunately we have no idea what year it is.

  When Tom and Billy’s mom hear what we are doing they tell us they recall how old they were when the attacks came and they have kept track of how many winters they have lived since. Going by their memories, which are probably a lot more accurate than our method of finding the date, we determine it has been twenty-nine years since the attacks which came in 1969 so we figure that it is somewhere around 1998. That is still eleven years earlier than the time we came from. Since we have a date to go by we figure what day of the week it should be based on leap years and all that stuff. According to the calendar today is Friday, Tim says that’s good to know. Since tomorrow is Saturday we get to sleep in. Dayna and Charity don’t understand why, but they say anytime we want to stay in bed later is okay with them. We tell them that since today is Friday we should celebrate. They don’t know what I mean so I go into our room and come back with something that Dayna has been asking me about all week, at least since I brought it home with us.

  When we were going through some of those homes looking for food I found a pretty nice stereo system for the day. There was also a fairly extensive record collection, and I found some other records that seem familiar from when I used to listen to the oldies channel, when we were going through some of the other stores and homes. Our generator is working great, so while we are using the lights to read by this evening, we also get to listen to some music. The older members of our family are very excited because they remember the songs and the music we have. Tom and Billy’s mom start dancing together the way they used to dance back then. Actually just about all the girls and even some of the guys are doing what they see the older folks doing. Dayna isn’t about to sit and watch while others are having such a good time so I have to show off my moves. Yeah right, it’s more like I have to be very careful not to break her feet because of my clumsiness. Of course, Tim is a good dancer which makes me look even worse. This is probably the best evening we have had as a family. We are really coming together as a group and everyone is pulling their own weight.

  In the morning everyone is humming or singing their favorite song from last night. Dayna talked for quite a while last night, after we went to bed, about how that is probably the most fun she has ever had. She amended that to be the most fun she has ever had with a group of people around. She is really something. I don’t know how I ever got along without her before we met. I know I don’t want to try now that I have. Since we have determined that it is soon going to be winter we decide to get all the food supplies as well as winter clothing we can and find another library so that I can find the books I think we are going to need. We are also going to the car dealership where we found the tires and see if we can get another pick-up truck or better yet a 1-1/2 ton stake body and an enclosed truck with a good sized box on it. We walk to the dealership while Billy takes the pick-up truck, along with a couple of the young men, looking for food. Tim and I along with Dayna and Charity find what we are looking for in trucks, but again the tires are flat. Since Tim and I both worked on cars and at garages from time to time for spending money. So we are able to get the tires off the trucks, and after starting the generator and the compressor, we are able to change them for what appear to be good tires.

  They do hold air, now we just have to be able to push them fast enough to get them started. We even find the keys to the trucks we want, so after filling them with gas, we are able to push the pick-up first and it actually starts on the fourth or fifth try. The stake body takes a little more probably because we can’t push it quite as fast as the other one. By this time it is getting late so we decide to drive the two new trucks back to the house and see what kind of day the others had. The others are all excited to see our success and are proud to show how much food they found, and some records that they managed to find as well. Billy says they found a library and can show us where it is, he says there are a lot more books than in the first one. They have a couple boxes of books that looked interesting to them, and as luck would have it they got some of the type I am looking for. Marty, who is one of the young men that was with Billy today, says they had a run in with the predators. Billy says it didn’t really amount to much. They were checking a store for canned goods in the stock room, and when they came out there were three predators waiting for them.

  “Just as we saw them, this lady and three other people came in the store. The predators went after them rather than mess with us I guess, but we weren’t going to let them bother the others either. They ran out of the store with the predators following close behind, with us after them. It must have looked funny if anyone was watching. One of the predators got to the lady and grabbed her by the hair from behind. Luckily I got there just a few seconds later knocking him down. The lady fell as well, but she jumped up and ran.”

  Marty says he and Chip, another of the young men, called to the lady that they could help her, but she kept running. In the meanwhile, Billy was fighting with the three predators, and was not really having any trouble with them. After the fight, which ended fairly quickly, they went back to the store to load the groceries they found in the stock room. They were hoping the lady and the others would come back and they did, just as they were getting ready to leave.

  “The lady asked if we left any food in the store and we told them there is still some, however if they would like they can join our family and we will help them, so they don’t have to worry about finding food, or about the predators any more.”

  An attractive woman comes over from the side of the room and tells me she hopes they are welcome, because this is an answer to her prayers. She says they were part of a group with ten people in it, but they woke up a couple days ago and the others were all gone. They have no idea where they went and haven’t seen them since. We tell her that she and the two young ladies and the one young man in their group are welcome. They have already been told about our fighting classes which are going very well, and about everyone learning how to read. The rest of the evening goes by with us who can read, working with those who can’t. Since we know tomorrow is Sunday, at least by our calculations, we feel it would only be right to have some sort of church service. Now don’t go getting the idea that I am some kind of saint or Bible thumper. I’m neither, but Ma Horton went to church every Sunday, when she could and I went with her. It didn’t hurt near as much as I thought it would at the time.

  The next morning we get up, and since the Bible says that God rested on the seventh day after spending six days creating the earth, we are declaring Sundays the day we don’t work unless it is absolutely necessary. We spend about an hour taking turns reading from the Bible, and then talking about what it means to each of us. We may be way off base, but to us it is important that we understand what each of us is looking for, and maybe how we can all help each other attain these goals. We have the older people who were taught to pray by their parents, even if they may have forgotten how for a while, teach the rest of the family. I know how I learned to pray, and I have to admit that it is more like carrying on a conversation with a friend than talking to God. Ma Horton taught me to pray that way, so
I figure it can’t be all bad.

  Later in the day one of the young girls, who is only about seven or eight, that just joined us calls to her mother that the other people in their group just went by and are going into a building about a hundred feet up the street from us. I ask her if she would like to talk to them and she says she would really like to know why they left them alone the way they did. She, Dayna, and I head up the street to the building where they went and surprise them when we walk in. The group in the building looks pretty bad as far as having eaten recently and they look pretty run down. They are surprised to see the lady whose name is Robin, but not in a bad way, they seem to be relieved. She asks them why they left her and the children alone the other day. They say that they never meant to. They went in search of food and got chased by the predators and it took them a couple days to even meet up together afterward, and when they went back to where they had been staying, she and the children were gone. They thought the predators had gotten them so they have been looking for food and a safer place to stay.

  Robin looks at us as if she is asking if her friends can join our group. We tell her and them it is okay, but they will have to do their share of the work and abide the rights of the others. We are getting to be fairly full now. We still have room, but when our propane runs out for the generator we will probably look for another place, maybe closer to some area where there haven’t been so many people, and maybe even find a place with no predators. Even though we feel fairly safe here, we try to have some of the men and young men of the group stand watch at night. Most of the time it is just staying awake for a couple hours during the night and making sure no one breaks in. Just about every night we see predators checking out the building on the outside, but so far none of them have tried to get in. I don’t know about the others, but Tim and I expect them to make some kind of move against us, and fairly soon.

  I never noticed it before, because most of the people who have joined us usually wear fairly heavy coats or other loose fitting clothing, but Dayna tells me we have at least five women who are due to have babies fairly soon. I realize that I have been negligent in getting medical supplies in for just such an emergency. On Monday, that is one of our priorities when we go looking for food and books. I love the new pickup at least as much as the older one. Tim is driving the older one today with Charity and Marty along and I have Dayna and her father with me. Billy is staying behind today to make sure no one bothers our home or our family members.

  Today we go farther than we have yet. We are looking for other people and stores that we may be able to use for food. Not the people, just the stores, but we want to make sure we are not making someone go without, so we can have more. We come to a very large library and spend a good hour gathering the books I am looking for, and getting some great reading for the others. Dayna, and some of the other young people like us, have started reading some of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries. There is at least a full shelf of each. Dayna and Charity ask if we mind getting all of them we can, even though they can’t read very well yet. Tim and I tell them that they can get half the library if they want it. In fact we recommend they get a lot of different kinds of books because winter will be long and having good books to read will help a lot. We wind up filling one pickup with just books, and we even find a couple boxes of records that we think might be good.

  I want to take a moment to tell you about driving around the city the way we do. First off, even though the city has been almost totally wiped free of human life, there are still hundreds of thousands of cars on the streets. Many of them are stopped right in the middle of the lanes blocking the whole street from being able to drive down it other than on the sidewalks. Many of the sidewalks are covered with debris from decaying buildings that have been left empty and desolate for almost thirty years. It is not uncommon to see skeletons in cars or in buildings. Often when we enter a home or a building we have to be very careful to make sure that it will not fall down around us or that the floors haven’t rotted out. Over all it is a pretty depressing way to live, but this is all most of the people we now call our family have ever known.

  We are looking for a medical equipment store or a pharmacy that has some of the medical supplies we will need. We finally find one and it turns out to be a great place to get what we will need. We fill boxes with sterile bandages, elastic bandages, and suture kits in case someone needs stitches. I find an entire doctor’s bag complete with stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer, a light for looking in ears and throats, and a variety of needles, bandages, and other medical supplies. I throw in a couple extra stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs just in case. We also load up on vitamins, even if they may not be the best anymore they probably have some potency left. We also get a good supply of scalpels, surgical clamps of all kinds, and anything else that one or the others of us thinks we may need. We leave there and find a supermarket, not far down the street, and fill the truck up with canned goods from the store room. From the looks of the store there have not been many people going there, if anyone.

  With no more room to put anything, if we find it, we head for home. We get there about mid afternoon and find that the rest of the family has been busy as well today. They went looking for bookshelves, because even though the offices we are using for a home have several book cases, with the addition of the books we got today, we would not have had enough room for them all. They also found some partitions like they use in offices for cubicles, to use as separations for people who have been sleeping in the big outer room from the small offices that some of us married people have been using. Billy is proud of all the work that they accomplished today and is happy that we found so many treasures. Tim and I show him that we found even more treasures than the ones mentioned already.

  Next door to the medical supply place was an athletic equipment store where we found several footballs, basketballs, baseballs, tennis balls, and pretty much every kind of ball you can name. We also brought back some baseball gloves that are not too bad, and a basketball hoop to put up as soon as we figure out where to put it. The young people like the balls and other toys they have to play with as well as a bunch of books for really little people that we found. Our new family is really coming together and working toward a common goal. After our reading lessons Tim and I go over some of the books we really wanted. They are showing us exactly what we wanted them too.

  6

  The weather turns rainy again and the temperature is definitely getting colder. We have to use the generator more often, than we have been, to keep the building reasonably warm. It has electric baseboard heat and I am just glad that it still works. No one is complaining because we are still much warmer and fed better than they were when they were living as individual groups. Dayna tells me that before this year they used to build fires in barrels to stay warm. Not only were you cold all the time, but you smelled like smoke, and although there is plenty to burn, it isn’t the best way to live. We spend days like this talking about what we may want to do for the future and continuing to teach the others how to read and write. They are very fast learners and most of them are already able to work their way through some of the simpler books and as I said before, many of us enjoy the teenage mystery books.

  The mothers in the group are at least able to read to their children, and the expectant mothers are getting bigger every day. I can’t believe I didn’t notice that before Dayna pointed it out to me. Tim and I are concerned with being attacked by the predators, so we have been looking for a place high enough up to afford a good field of fire, and still have access to it and away from it without being seen. We had to check out four or five buildings in the close vicinity to find exactly what we want. Even then it took us almost a day and a half to clear the stairways enough to be able to get to the roof. Once on the roof, we had to move some things around to be able to get to the edge for a good field of fire. It is worth it though, because now we can see and control the entire area for about ten blocks in every direction. Not withou
t moving of course, but we don’t have to leave the roof, just move to another section. We even set up some cover at each location just in case an attack comes during the rain or even when it snows this winter. Dayna told me that in the winter the predators don’t come out as much. That could be because they are lazy or because people don’t move around as much during the bad weather days. The others agreed with her about that, when the weather turns bad, there is very little movement around here. People are too busy just trying to stay alive to think about much else.

  We have been talking about moving the family to a warmer climate, where we can grow what we need to eat, and can maybe get away from people like the predators. Of course not knowing if the rest of the United States is as badly devastated as this city doesn’t make it any easier. We do figure though, that if the rest of the nation was much better off, someone would have come here looking for survivors or at least to check out the damage. We all agree that Virginia might be a good place to try. I know I spent quite a bit of time in that part of the country growing up even though we usually lived in North or South Carolina. We figure we can try Virginia, and if it doesn’t work the way we think it will, we can always try somewhere else. Under normal conditions we could drive there in less than eight hours from here, but we have no idea what we are going to run up against. We have been spending some time working out a route to get us to Virginia. Then we will have to look around for a place to stay. Hopefully, we will find a farm or something similar that has been vacated and we will be able to move in and get started farming.