SODIUM:2 Apocalypse

by Arseneault, Stephen

  After the girls returned with the day's harvest we decided that we should try to go out and scavenge a larger refrigerator if possible. My little soda fridge was no longer adequate for storing the food needs of three. We decided that if we could find one with an automatic ice maker all the better. My soda fridge did not have a freezer section and some iced tea was something that was on all of our minds. I had a sizable stock of teabags, but with the summer heat, none of us had any desire for warm tea, so the stockpile remained.

  Janie Lynn had managed to get milk from one or more of the cows. When I asked her she said she had once milked a cow on a school field trip and so she just did the same thing again, it had still worked. We all had a good laugh over it and each enjoyed our first glass of milk in months.

  The girls had also gathered up the once scattered chickens and now had them in the safety of a makeshift pen, they had been laying eggs like crazy. It seemed that man’s leftovers and nature’s abundance was providing us with all the sustenance we would need.

  It was late in the afternoon when the girls came running to me frantically talking and out of breath. A pack of dogs had circled the chicken pen and Heinz had run to their rescue. After a fierce fight with the leader of the pack Heinz had chased the dogs back into the woods. The girls had waited anxiously for Heinz, they had called to him repeatedly, but the dog had not returned. Aside from being their pet, Heinz had been their protector since the invasion began. I wasn’t sure how hard it would be on them if he didn’t return, or if he did and was somehow maimed. I cringed at the thought of possibly having to put him down.

  I loved animals and had never been one to harm them, ever since shooting my first bird with a BB gun as a child. The poor blue jay fell to the ground with a broken wing right in front of me. I soon put it out of its misery, but the whole episode had made me sick to my stomach. Other than squashing the occasional bug or catching a fish I had not had any interest in harming animals since. I would eat a burger in a heartbeat, but taking another animal down myself had been far from my mind.

  Heinz had been such a loyal dog and the girls were very attached. The first week without Heinz passed slowly with the girls breaking down in tears repeatedly. I offered what comfort I could, but not having had any children of my own, I was again unsure if what I was doing was helping or not.

  I guessed at the time that just going with your human instincts would sometimes be enough. After several weeks the girls had turned their sadness towards their daily chores and had been spreading some of their undelivered love for Heinz around to the cows and chickens. I knew deep down that this loss, as with any loss, brought its pain. But eventually that pain would slowly give way to the toils of our daily lives.

  As much as I hated harming animals I had decided that we were in need of more protein in our diets and a chicken would have to be sacrificed. The girls were not happy with the thought of slaughtering of one of Janie’s hens. They were however, all too willing to partake in the BBQ feast we had that afternoon. They later confessed to being very ardent animal rights activists and had even donated babysitting money to several animal rights organizations.

  Having had their first taste of chicken in months they then began to have a different perspective of what our ancestors had to go through in order to survive. From that point on they no longer had a problem with man’s dominance over all things living. They had no intention of slaughtering a hen of their own anytime soon, but if push came to shove they knew how to do it and would do so in the future if needed.

  The next day our trip out to find a new fridge was a hoot. I let each of the girls take turns driving Suzie. It was a skill that I thought might be of importance to us in the future. So, I decided to get each of them as much time behind the wheel as possible.

  I kind of enjoyed being chauffeured around as it brought back a few good memories of Renee driving me everywhere. That girl loved to drive and I was a happy passenger being able to actually look around at the world as it went by.

  I had to make a booster seat for Janie and she turned out to be a madman behind the wheel. She loved weaving back and forth on the road and making the tires screech whenever she could. So much so that I had to repeatedly ask her to stop because it was making me nauseous. Rachel was the old lady driver and was always very careful with her speed and any turns.

  It seems that quite often the first child is the responsible, cautious one while the second seems to have no fear at all. I had noticed that many years before with Rex and myself as well as with many other siblings. Rachel and Janie seemed to fit that mold perfectly.

  I had scavenged a flat trailer a few weeks earlier and had attached it to Suzie, if we were successful at finding a fridge we would be able to take it back with us. On that day luck was with us as we rolled through the remains of what was once an upper class neighborhood.

  It seemed every flattened home had a pool in the back yard. We happened to luck upon one where the home had been flattened, but the pool house had only been pushed over. It had been largely demolished by the impact on the home on the other side of the pool, but had been spared from a crushing blow of its own.

  And what happened to be sitting right in the middle of the pool house rubble; a nice, fat side by side, with an ice maker in the door. It was a scratch-and-dent special, but we weren’t particularly picky at that point. Part of the pool house roof had lapped over the top of it protecting it somewhat from the elements.

  It took us a half hour to back the trailer as close as we could get it and clear away enough debris so that it could be moved. We had no hand truck available so we spent another hour tipping the refrigerator from side to side to work it over close to the trailer. It took us another half hour to work it slowly up a makeshift ramp and onto the trailer itself.

  We had not even thought to open it up yet and when we did so the stench of the rotten food almost bowled us over. I longed for my coconut rag for those 60 long seconds it took for us to clean it out. We decided to leave the plastic containers within it intact as we could always clean them out later. They would no longer be making any new Tupperware so we thought it useful to keep any of it we could find.

  Our tie downs left something to be desired so our trip back to the bunker was at a snail's pace. We didn’t care because the prize we had just acquired was worth its weight in gold. Rachel had also spotted and pilfered an electric ice cream churn from the remaining part of the pool house. We would have to look for rock salt on a future expedition if we wanted to make use of it, but the thought of ice-cream brought us immediate comfort anyway. Rachel was our selected driver on the way home as the precious cargo was in need of a careful and attentive driver.

  With the fridge cleaned up and moved into the bunker it was time to plug our little baby in. This was once a very pricey model and even had a little HDTV screen and DVD player in the fridge door. I had not put a TV in the bunker as I felt it was a distraction whenever I was attempting to work on my electronics. With no DVDs of my own it looked like we would have to look for a stash of disks on our next venture out.

  During the next few months we had become quite the scavengers. Several times a week we took the trailer out looking for anything that we might find useful. Even though all the homes and buildings in general had been flattened, if we looked hard and long enough, they often contained just about anything we wanted.

  At one local home improvement store we had come across a pile of metal sheds still stacked in their boxes. It didn’t take us long to make use of them as small storehouses for anything else we could find. We soon began stockpiling everything from tools to clothing to soap. It became evident, over time, that each of the items we had taken for granted for so long, would someday no longer be available. Items such as the deodorant used while working out in the hot sun, or underwear or shoes or shampoo.

  I sometimes wondered just how long it would take us to revert back to the smelly, half naked barbarians that we had once been. Would we be the last educated generation for the
next thousand years? We were stockpiling all the how-to books we could get our hands on, but would future generations be able to read them? I pondered that we would have to be the teachers of any future generations and then began to wonder if there would even be any future generations.

  We were just three people on this gigantic planet. Had anyone else survived? Probably so, but would we ever meet up with any of them or were they a thousand miles away? All these questions made for an easy road to follow to Depressionville.

  I would often catch myself contemplating a variety of scenarios, of possible futures, with my only deterrent being to stay busy with our survival. Scavenging was a good deterrent and we were getting good at it, having added our storehouses along with a wide variety of other equipment and machinery. I had no doubt we would need it all at some point and that as time continued we would have less and less of it.

  The scavenging had been a Godsend to establishing our little colony, but we had no doubt that it would not last and we would slowly be confronted with a much more difficult existence. It was to be an existence where each day something of value was lost or further diminished. I contemplated who the lucky ones were as a result of this human malady. I feared that our struggle to survive was only just beginning.

  Chapter 9

  We had been celebrating our new fridge and ice-maker for two days. The freezer would allow us to stockpile more food. The storage was needed because we were getting well into the fall weather; the growing season for our vegetable farm was getting short. We had taken to drying many of our extra vegetables in an attempt to have seeds for the next spring. We knew virtually nothing about farming, but we thought it was a good idea.

  Winter was short lived in Central Florida, but it brought enough cold snaps to kill off any plants we had going. We hoped our attempt at drying was correct as none of us had any experience with farming. We could cultivate, stake and pick what was there, but the thought of growing the plants from seeds made the three of us a bit nervous.

  A lady that I had worked with at the factory had once told me about her own farming experience. She had tilled a small plot, bought the seeds, fertilized and weeded, but was struggling to get anything to really grow that had any resemblance of store bought. Her Uncle and cousin, who also had small gardens, were starting to harvest after just six weeks.

  They would repeatedly offer up some of their goods as they knew she was still struggling. After a good bit of ribbing they had finally revealed their secret. They had purchased seedlings for only a little more than the seeds themselves and with the healthy head start were already weeks ahead of her. While the seedlings idea sounded great, they were not available; we were going to have to do it the hard way.

  We had all enjoyed our diet and had taken steps to make it better when we had the chance. The thought of going backwards on the food front made us a little uneasy. But we would cope with and overcome any hardship that came our way. That was one thing that I was now sure of.

  These two girls were like extensions of my own arms and both learned very quickly about what was needed to get any job not only done, but done right. Under the circumstances I was extremely happy with my new family. Neither girl seemed to have a lazy bone in them nor did they back down from trying to figure out what was needed for the task at hand.

  The bunker always stayed clean and the fields and animals well-tended. Janie had even taken to helping me service the transmission on ole Suzie. She seemed to have a fascination for all things mechanical and I was eager to share with her what I knew.

  I found out a few weeks later that what she really wanted was to be able to resurrect a car of her own that she could then take out joy riding. There was no way I would let her go out on her own and there was no way I was riding with that madman if she got her own car, but it didn’t hurt to let her have her fantasies. It was good that she dreamed of things besides chickens and cows.

  Rachel was definitely becoming the domestic type. In some ways it was like having my mother back around in that she was always cleaning or preparing something and constantly telling us to pick up after ourselves. I think it gave her a sense of responsibility and purpose and it gave Janie and me a sense of home comfort.

  Despite our luck at having much of what we had that summer and fall it was still hard on the three of us. You could only keep yourself just so busy before your mind would want to wander back to what once was. On one of our scavenger trips we had managed to come across a nice stash of videos. We were eager to get them back and into the fridge TV for viewing. Our glee at having a movie night soon turned to sorrow as all it did was remind us of what was gone, the people, the places, all that man had accomplished in the last few thousand years, all was gone in a few days.

  It had been nine months since the attack. We had not seen hide nor hair of any alien ships, or any other craft in the air for that matter, no TV or radio signals either. It was just us and the big empty Earth. I was amazed at how quickly Mother Nature was reclaiming what had been taken from her. Without the constant mowing the sides of the roadways were overgrown. What had once been finely manicured lawns now struggled to hold back the wild shrubs and small trees.

  The birds and small mammals had seen a population explosion. We were constantly fighting, trying to keep the raccoons, possums and armadillos out of our garden. And, the foxes and wild dogs were a constant harassment to our chickens and cows.

  We lost several of our cows and a half dozen of our chickens that winter. The makeshift chicken coop had been raided by foxes one night and we found two of our cows dead in the pasture. I surmised one had gone from just being old, but the other I didn’t have a clue about as to why.

  I was hoping that some disease was not going to ravage our small herd. The milk and the potential for beef if we needed it were precious resources I did not want to do without. When spring came the remaining animals were still healthy and as such my fears of a cattle epidemic waned.

  We had managed to salvage a front loader that had not been flattened on one of our excursions. With a little TLC we were able to get it working quite well and it became our farm tractor. It did a great job of tilling the soil in our garden which would otherwise have been a very laborious task.

  We had also managed to scrounge some farming books from what had at one time been the local feed and seed. Rachel had read them from cover to cover and although they were at times a little technical for her, she stuck with it and was quickly becoming a fountain of knowledge about farming practices. We had made a good decision by drying seeds the previous fall and the spring planting was now well under way.

  I had noticed the last couple times out on my dock that I was seeing a number of small gators. There was a sea-wall down my property and across the Kendall’s and it had kept any gators from venturing into the yard in the past. Only once had I seen one in the canal.

  Gators don’t like humans so they usually make themselves scarce, but it was looking like there was going to be a gator population explosion soon. In years past, gator hunting season had kept the population in check. Without that annual culling I reasoned we were probably in for a big fight in only few short years, having livestock that near the water was undoubtedly going to get tricky.

  We had all been settling into our daily routines and I was tiring of not making any new progress on my coil gun. So, I decided it was time for a little adventure. I had two goals. The first was to see if we could find a truck and the second was to see if we could make it over to the coast around Cocoa Beach. I was never a big beach goer myself, but the girls were thrilled with the idea.

  We ventured out the next day looking for a truck. We had seen a few cars that sat unscathed, but I had no desire at the time to retire Suzie. But with the road conditions slowly worsening I knew it was only a matter of time before she would have trouble getting us around.

  I could not remember having gone past any auto dealerships in our past outings, but perhaps I just hadn’t noticed. Flattened buildings and cars were the n
orm, but occasionally, empty cars could be found still intact. I knew where the nearest auto dealership had been so we made our way there to begin.

  Upon arrival we were disappointed in seeing all the flattened scrap iron on what had once been their prime lot. The buildings were all flattened as well. It looked like we would be shopping for something used. This same highway had previously had a number of used car dealerships so we moved our efforts down the road. Unfortunately, the fate of those buildings and vehicles was the same.

  We continued our ride and decided to go down several of the side streets that we had not been down before. Once again we had a lucky strike. A six foot block wall holding up dirt from a higher property and a large tree had helped hide and protect a nice flatbed tow truck.

  I wanted to thank the homeowner personally for parking where he did, but by the looks of his pummeled hovel that wasn’t going to happen. We would have to hot-wire it, but I knew how and it would be a much better vehicle for us to use on our scavenger raids.

  I thought we might take a chance and see if we could find a key in the rubble. The odds were almost impossible, but I thought we would give it a try anyway. In our scavenging we had come across numerous dead bodies, but it had been long enough now that there was no longer a horrid smell that went with them.

  We had also become desensitized to finding bodies as after a while the shock of it had worn off, it was still unpleasant, but we had a task to do so we did it. As Rachel and I poked around in the rubble Janie checked the passenger door and found it unlocked. She next climbed into the cab and after a quick search had keys in hand. The dual batteries in the beast were weak, but still had enough juice to start her up.