2nd Earth: Shortfall

by Edward Vought

  We all agree to discuss the matter in depth with each other, mainly the people who would be involved. We do notice though that Dayna’s two younger sisters are spending a lot of time with Dan and Don. Carrie is making a fuss over Dan’s injuries and Don and Cassie are deep in conversation not far away. I ask Dayna if we could go out on the porch to talk for a few minutes. We discuss what exactly this would mean to our relationship and how she really feels about it. She tells me pretty much what she said in the house, she adds that she and Robin have become very close since they have been living in the same house and she really thinks she can live with sharing me. She tells me she is mainly worried about me, she is getting up when she looks back and tells me she isn’t sure I am strong enough for all of them. When she says that, she turns and runs into the house laughing. We decide we will talk it over with Robin and the children tonight. I ask about Melissa the other young lady who lives with us. Dayna tells me now I am being selfish, she laughs again and says Melissa isn’t sure what she wants to do yet.

  With that topic of conversation behind us most everybody wants to know what we are having for supper and when can we eat some of that beef we hung up yesterday. We all agree that it might get better if we let it hang for a while, but since most of the people in our family have never had fresh beef we figure tomorrow will be long enough. Tim and I start talking about how great a hamburger with all the trimmings would taste. We are looking at the calendar and realize that we are getting close to Thanksgiving. We explain that holiday to everyone and we all agree to celebrate it since we have so much to be thankful for.

  In the morning we have several jobs that need finished like the greenhouse. We concentrate our efforts and get the roof secured then turn it over to the family members who are going to get it ready for planting. Billy, Tim, Rod, and I decide to cut up a couple quarters of the beef and distribute it to all the houses so that everyone can enjoy some. We even figure out how to use the grinder to make hamburger. When I explain to Dayna what I want she promises to try to make some buns to eat hamburgers on. Between her, Robin, and Melissa they make some hamburger buns out of wheat that will rival any that I have ever eaten. We found some jars of mustard, relish and ketchup that are still good and with some onions out of the garden I think I may have found out what heaven is like. The weather turns rainy and cold and we are very happy that we had as much time as we did to get things done. Every house has a good supply of firewood as well as a full tank of propane so we are ready for winter.

  We make a couple more trips into town to get food from the store and other items from the farm store and we feel like we can last the whole winter fairly easily. There are vegetables planted in the greenhouse and when the weather allows us too, we are planning to plow up some of the fields to plant crops that we will need to keep us going. On Wednesday afternoon it quits raining for a while so Jessica and Jenny are out trying to lure more chickens into the coop. They have already grown the flock to over fifty birds, but the woods are full of them so they keep trying to entice them in. Usually either Dan or Don goes with them, but today they hurry out to put some feed down before it starts raining again. They come running back to the barn yelling and screaming that they are being chased by a wild animal.

  Tim, Rod, Billy, and I are cutting up more of the beef using the chart to make sure we don’t butcher the job. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Anyway, they run into the barn and just about jump into my arms when I ask them what they are talking about. They point to the woods behind the barn and sure enough there is a very large pig rumbling toward the barn. I am getting my rifle when Tim comes over and seeing the pig says it looks like a big boar to him. I tell him if he wants to stand here and talk to it to find out if it’s a bore then go ahead, but I am seeing bacon, ham and barbequed spareribs on the hoof. When we step outside the pig comes straight at us, now this is not a small 250 lb barnyard pig. This is a wild, razorback hog that has grown up in the wild fighting every kind of four legged predator and now weighs close to a thousand pounds and is as mean as any wild animal you can name. I have seen smaller compact cars than that pig.

  At first I tell Tim to run across the yard drawing the pig after him so I can get a head shot. He almost does it, and then decides that on that slippery grass he may not be able to outrun it. I was only kidding anyway. I take my time and shoot aiming right between its eyes. The first shot ricochets off that thick skull so I take a quick three steps to my right and shoot again. It takes two shots to stop that darn thing and it just does fall when it is only about six feet away. The tusks on that bad boy are at least six inches long. Tim asks me if there was any good reason for waiting so long to shoot. Now that the pig is dead I can breathe again and answer him. I tell him I waited so that we wouldn’t have to carry him so far to butcher it. Even Jessica and Jenny don’t believe that one. I can’t say as I blame them either.

  We take care of field dressing it in the bucket of the backhoe. We have plenty of company because everyone came to see what all the commotion was about. I was happy to see that the men all showed up carrying guns and came from different directions in case it was real trouble. While we work we are talking about how good the bacon and the hams are going to be when we can figure out how to build a smokehouse. Rod asks me what a smokehouse looks like. I can’t go into great detail because I have only seen a couple and that was many years ago. When I get through he asks me if it would look something like that, he is pointing to a small building set a little ways away from the barn. With closer inspection it is obviously a smoke house. We have to take some old meat out of it and check the pipe that takes the smoke from the small fire into the small building. I tell them it is not exactly what I had in mind, but it will do in a pinch.

  Naturally I take a lot of kidding about that, Rod and Billy tell Tim they hope I wasn’t on watch too often. I seem to miss the obvious fairly regularly. I remind them that I didn’t miss the pig. They tell me that as big as he was, and as close as he was, little Adam could have hit him. That’s going too far, Adam is only a couple weeks old, and he can’t hold the gun yet. When I remind them of that everyone laughs including me, I can take a joke. It feels good to have friends that feel close enough to each other to joke around like that. Pigs are a lot of work, we have to scald it to get the hair off, then quarter it and get it hung so that we can butcher it probably tomorrow.

  When we are done for the evening and are in for the night I get out a couple of the books we brought on butchering and preparing meat. They have detailed instructions on how to smoke the meat for good flavor and to last a good long while. I brought up the instructions that we found in the meat room and they are very similar so I am confident that we know enough to make our bacon and hams with very little difficulty. When Robin and Dayna hear we need hickory wood to smoke it they get a book on trees and find out what hickory trees look like. They say they know exactly where trees like that are not far from the house and barn. They found a bunch of nuts under one of the trees and forgot to look them up so now they know they are probably hickory nuts.

  Teddy who is Robin’s ten year old son asks if he can come with us tomorrow to gather the nuts and help me cut wood for the smoking fire. He always enjoys tagging along and I never mind so I tell him and his sisters Kathy and Karen that they are welcome to come along as well. In the morning before I start scraping the house we go looking for hickory wood. It has finally quit raining, but the houses are too wet to paint yet. Dayna reminded me that I can always scrape the loose paint off while it is damp. We find several hickory trees in a grove and the ground beneath them is loaded with hickory nuts. We can see the sign of either the big hog we killed or others that have visited here to eat the nuts.

  There are what appears to be hundreds of squirrels around chattering at us like they are trying to chase us away. The girls gather nuts into a couple of peck baskets they brought while Teddy and I gather sticks from around the trees that obviously fell off of them. We brought a wheel barrow out to bring the wood back in
so when we have all that we can carry without having it spill all over the place we head back. On the way out we hear the sound of several wild turkeys gobbling, I guess it is called. With Thanksgiving only a week away I take note to try to get us a couple of turkeys for that meal. The smoke house needs some minor repairs, which is not surprising because it has set unused for so long, but we make the repairs and make sure we have plenty of wood to keep it going for several days.

  We spend the rest of the day scraping old paint off the outside of the house. The temperature seems to be dropping almost daily now so we may have to put off painting until spring. In the evening Tim tries the short wave as usual only tonight he gets an answer from three different groups of people. At least they say they are and we have no reason to doubt them. One group is the same one we talked to before in Texas. The other two are from California and Illinois. They both talk about the same situation that we have found everywhere we have gone. They are doing their best to survive, but it doesn’t sound as though they have been as lucky as we have. Being careful not to tell them where we are we explain how we are surviving and they all agree that they could do that too. They say they are going to go to the library and get some books on the topics we talked about and see what they can do to become more self-sufficient.

  We discuss whether or not we should tell people where we are. We decide that we don’t know anything about who may be listening and we can’t always be as lucky as we have been so far. We do agree though that if we find others or if someone comes along we will be more than happy to help them. The others ask if we may be able to be on the radio more often so they can ask any questions they might have. We assure them we will try to make contact with them whenever we can. The days go by and are filled with work, good humor, and a great family. We have talked with the others and have made some suggestions to them, at least the ones in Illinois.

  We told them that we were up in New York, but came south to get where survival would be easier. We tell them we settled in South Carolina just in case someone is listening. They get a lot of details about how we got the trucks running and about using generators for electricity. They thank us very much every time we talk to them. It must be terrible to be living in the city and knowing that your food supply can’t last forever and not know what to do about it. Luckily for us Tim and I came from a place where we had the experience to help the others. The day before Thanksgiving Tim, Rod, and I go turkey hunting. I have always heard about how hard it is to hunt turkeys, but these birds have never been hunted. Odds are they have never even seen a man before, unless they have seen us around.

  We are standing in a field trying to decide how best to go about getting a couple big birds for tomorrows dinner to go with the ham that should be just about ready today, when a whole flock of them come right into the field we are in and proceed to peck at the ground. We just watch them we are so fascinated by the beauty of them. Finally we decide we better shoot a couple of them or we will be the laughing stock of the family, but we are hoping to do it without scaring the whole flock away from the area. Rod brought a bow and arrow along just in case we could get a clean shot with that. We are hoping for a head shot or a neck shot so not to ruin the meat with buck shot.

  Rod decides to try to shoot one with the arrow anyway, we all figure the worse he can do is miss and if he does we will shoot if they start to run off. There are so many it seems almost impossible to miss. He takes aim at a very large tom, which is a male bird, and lets fly his arrow. At first we think he missed because the arrow never even slowed down when it went past the turkey. Actually it went past two of them very closely. Both birds seem unconcerned, but when they start to take a step they both fall over and lay there. Their legs kick the air a few times, but that is all, apparently Rod’s arrow went though their necks severing the main artery causing them to bleed to death quickly. The others walk away totally unconcerned while we pick up the two dead birds and head back to the house to clean them. It is not quite as easy as that because the birds must weigh between 45 and 50 pounds each.

  Everyone is pleasantly surprised when they see us coming back because they didn’t hear a shot. Rod gets the chance to do a little bragging about his hunting prowess with a bow and arrow. Everyone is impressed as they should be, I knew guys back when we were in our previous state that would go hunting every year and never even see any game much less kill two turkeys with one arrow. It takes a while to clean them, but we have plenty of help and finally have them hanging fully cleaned and ready for the oven almost. We are totally ready for a big Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

  11

  Thanksgiving is a great day for all of us, Tim and I try to explain what football is and we wind up outside after dinner playing a game in the yard. It is with no doubt the most fun I have ever had playing any game. Dayna, Robin, and the children tackle me on every play no matter who has the ball. We decide we have to play more games and have more fun now that survival is a little easier. Not that it will ever be able to be taken for granted, but we at least have a pretty good chance now. Everyone takes turns saying what they are the most thankful for, and for just about everyone it is that we are all a family now. I have never had a problem with hay fever in the past, but today my eyes seem to be watering more than they should. The day is over much too soon and all of us agree that we need a large building or room that we can use for holidays, and just to get together when we want to as a family.

  We are not sure if we can find enough good building materials to build something that size, but we are definitely going to look into it. The day after Thanksgiving we decide to go to a larger city that is about thirty miles southeast of us. Actually, we decided a few days ago, but this is when we planned to go. Today we are driving the two big trucks in case we find something we can use and it is only Billy, Rod, Tim, and I going. We feel comfortable leaving the others in the capable hands of the other men. The ride down is uneventful although we do see another gas tanker and another propane truck not more than ten miles from home on the highway.

  The driving is like always, we have to weave in and out of cars that are left on the highway. It is not as bad as most of the trip down here, but it keeps us on our toes. About halfway there Tim, who is riding with me, points to a building on the side of the road. It is, or should I say was, a banquet house and it is made of sheet metal that looks like it is still in very good shape. We decide to stop to investigate. We all agree that this would be the way to go for our large meeting room or building. We have some tools with us so we try a few of the nuts and bolts holding the sheeting on and they come off with very little effort. The building has obviously been deserted, except for some four legged customers, so we have no qualms about taking it. We will have to come back for several loads, but it will be worth it.

  We get to the outskirts of the city and it’s obvious that there are people living here. Not like the way they did before the war, but like we did in the city. It is a pretty good sized city and the streets are pretty much impassable for the large trucks we have. We pull into the parking lot of a large supermarket and from out front it appears to be almost empty. Billy and Rod stay with the trucks while Tim and I go into the supermarket just to see if we are correct. The stockroom still has several pallets of canned goods, but we decide to leave them since we don’t need them and the people here will. Back at the trucks Billy says that they have seen some men running from building to building working their way closer to us. He and Rod both say they look like the predators back in the city. We are sure that we would find people like that in every city we could ever visit. It was like that before the war, and will be like that as long as there are people on this earth.

  We decide to look around a little more before going back so we find a street that we can drive down and work our way deeper into the city. The city doesn’t look like it is in quite as bad a shape as New York was, but the weather down here is milder than it is up there. We see men around, always hiding, but so far we have not seen any women. We are
almost all the way through the city when we see another farm market like the one we have in the other town. We decide to stop here to see if they have any seed or more chicken feed that nobody seems to need around here. Actually there are pallets full of all kinds of seed like corn, green beans, wheat, oats, alfalfa, melons, tomatoes, and pretty much every kind of seed we could want. We load a couple of pallets into the enclosed truck, by hand of course. We also find a bunch of starter kits for starting plants before you plant them in the ground.

  We come across a section in the store that has several books on healing and staying healthy using herbs. Tim says that Charity asked him to get any herb seeds if we come across them. We take the entire display along with a bunch of window boxes that they say are great for growing our herbs in. We would like to be able to browse and look around for more treasure, but we have noticed several men slinking in our direction since we have been in here. We get outside and start to get into the trucks when we see an older man and a woman with two younger women and a young man running toward us. They are yelling at us asking if we would take them out of the city. We can see they are being closely followed by several rather ominous looking young men. We let the first group run up to the trucks while we wait for the men chasing them. They come to an abrupt halt only a few feet away when they see us. The one who is probably the leader tells us to turn them over and we will not be harmed. The older lady behind us tells us that they have been trying to find them to rape them for weeks now. She says if we turn them over the girls will be raped and the men killed.