by John L. Monk
The night before, Jack had scoured the Yellow Pages looking for veterinary clinics. He’d weeded out places too far away, where he risked getting stranded if he had an accident or breakdown. He also disregarded places specializing in exotic pets or that proclaimed themselves exclusively cat and dog clinics. That left three locations in Front Royal and two in Warrenton. Warrenton was a little too far with the winter sky looming like an ominous gray helmet, so he headed back to the Dragster’s hometown of Front Royal.
Unlike the previous times Jack had been there, the town really was deserted now. The adults were all dead, like everywhere, but now the streets were empty of the children he’d seen wandering like refugees with no place to go. Now close to a hundred children were staying in the massive “Saskatchewan” model cabin. The Dragsters hadn’t liked moving to the Skyline, but Larry backed him up, so they had no choice.
Twenty minutes spent driving around town and he found a small, one-level building between a car dealership and a strip mall. The strip mall had a bicycle shop and a gun store. The gun store’s door, he noticed, had been bashed in at some point. The bike shop looked fine, though, and he briefly considered where bicycles might factor in one day. The big worry there was replacing the rubber tires when they wore out, became damaged, or got too old.
For now, he avoided the bike shop and the gun store and made for the vet’s.
Wilcox Veterinary Clinic definitely catered to farm animals. There were pictures of chickens, cows, and goats prominently displayed throughout the building. There were two vans parked out front with more pictures of livestock on them. Based on the brochures, and an empty shelf that looked to have once held cases of dog food, they’d also catered to the dog and cat needs of the community.
Jack’s spirits fell when he left the family-friendly reception area and entered the medical section in the back. There, a set of wide, stainless steel refrigerators stood gleaming against the wall in the meager light. He bit his lip in frustration. He hadn’t considered that some of the medicine might need to stay within a certain temperature range.
He poked through the cabinets for anything that looked like a vaccine, but they mostly held medical instruments, three-ring binders, or bulk supplies like sanitary wipes and surgical smocks.
Shouldering his disappointment, he opened one of the refrigerators and found numerous small boxes of vials, a few pill bottles, and a diet soda. Did all vaccines need refrigeration? He knew almost nothing about medicine.
Jack pulled out a vial and found it cool to the touch. But having gone through a full summer already, and now with winter upon them …
He checked the instructions on the box. It said to keep the temperature between thirty-five and forty-six degrees. Even if the vaccines weren’t ruined, and he managed to refrigerate them using the generator, how long could he realistically do that?
His goal was to keep every animal disease free and isolated until he could grow their stock. But first he needed bulls—another big worry, and one they’d only recently learned about. The sisters, Freida and Carla, had male cattle on their farm, but they’d all been castrated. Which made them steers—not bulls—and that was a critically important difference.
One good piece of news: the sisters had a rooster. They’d even managed to hatch a few chicks, which they were raising inside the house. Upon hearing the news, Jack advised the girls to wash their hands every time they touched them, because the books said the chicks could have something called salmonella. They should also put them in a large enough box to allow six square inches per chick. He’d further said to watch that they didn’t all gang up on one chick and kill it. When he went on about teaching the chicks to drink water, Freida said she’d done this before and he should mind his own business.
The air in the vet’s clinic was chilly and stale, and the perfect quiet spooked him a little. Like being in a tomb.
Well then hurry and get out.
Jack found an empty box and dumped all the vaccines he could find into it. He grabbed several giant pill bottles and dumped those in too. They’d definitely last longer than the vials. The last thing he did was go out to where the vans were and bust into one through a side window.
Each vehicle had a wide assortment of instruments for dealing with livestock and their many issues. Syringes, clamps, and special devices for hooves and feet. From the books, he recognized a giant steel guard for locking open a horse’s mouth.
Not really satisfied with his haul, Jack dumped it in the Jeep and set about raiding the other two veterinary locations—and that’s when he hit the jackpot. One of them had a supply of medicated chickenfeed. Not a vaccine, so it had no unrealistic temperature requirements. And it protected against coccidiosis, the most common disease for chicks. That little bug had been worrying Jack quite a bit since he’d first read about it. Another worry was Marek’s Disease which, unfortunately, required a special vaccine.
On the way to the girls’ farm, Jack worried … and worried some more. So many miracles the adult world had created, and most of them with a shelf life. Many would be useless within a year or two, and less than that for stuff like vaccines. But if he could rescue enough cows, chickens, sheep, and horses, and preserve as many special strains as he could before they were wiped out, he’d have saved something important for humanity.
That, he decided, was why he was alive. His parents had tried to make him a survivor in the most basic sense. Someone who succeeded where others failed. Now, Nature itself was his competition. Instead of running a corporation and paying bills, Jack would herd cattle, hunt varmints, dig outhouses, and fight off diseases by crossing his fingers.
He hated that he hadn’t realized all this before. Following the shootout in the Skyline, he’d dived into the books as a distraction from his troubles, only to learn he didn’t know the half of it.
New Year’s day: the hottest and coldest day of the year. So full of potential, and yet so stifling in its limitations. He needed time, and he needed people who were driven and willing to work and do things that maybe didn’t make much sense to them.
In short, he needed a miracle.
3
A week after he’d delivered the feed, the weather turned cold, dropping low into the twenties.
Jack, struggling with a nagging suspicion, opened his book on chickens and looked for anything on weather. Sure enough, most breeds could die if not properly protected from severe cold. Jack had assumed they were like cows and other livestock that didn’t seem to mind the cold so much.
He hated himself for not thinking more clearly. If some cabbage didn’t kill him, ignorance surely would. And who was he kidding? He was the biggest cabbage of them all.
You just fake it better.
Still smarting from his mistake, Jack got on the radio and told the girls they needed to ensure their coop was protected from drafts. The girls, of course, told him everything was fine and that they knew what they were doing.
Maddening! Help too much and people got stubborn. Help too little and things slipped.
Now that he was thinking so much about chickens, a feeling of dread crept over him. He tried to envision what was going on at the untended farms in the area. Like an idiot, he’d convinced himself everything would be waiting for him after the winter.
Common sense suggested a chicken coop could be either open or closed. If it was open, the cold would get in. If it was closed, then someone had to feed them or let them out to forage. If a coop was open and they didn’t freeze, there were skunks and foxes and rats and hawks and every other kind of predator to contend with.
The chances of any being alive were slim to none, but that didn’t mean he could just give up.
Almost overnight, Big Timber’s priorities took a major shift, and Jack put a halt to all unnecessary scavenging. He and his captains called a meeting with the remaining Dragsters, most of whom had decided to stay after the old leadership and its loyalists had been run out. They stood outside shivering in their winter coats, breath steami
ng in the air. For all that, they were curious and even happy. Anything beat sitting around.
“I need volunteers for the most important thing you’ve ever done in your lives,” Jack said, cringing a little at how it sounded. “That said … when I tell you what it is, you’ll probably laugh. Which is fine. A year ago, I would have laughed too.”
When he’d told Greg what he wanted, his friend had howled for a good five minutes, really laying it on. Even now, the crowd was snickering quietly in anticipation of something monumentally silly.
“Just tell us, already!” one of them called from the back. “I’m freezing my balls off!”
That brought a rumble of laughter from everyone, because it was a girl who’d yelled it.
Jack didn’t particularly like crude humor unless it came from Greg, who somehow pulled it off to amazing effect. From strangers, he hated it. Found it grating. Still, if he acted like a prude, they’d lose respect for him. Once that snowball started rolling, nothing could stop it. So he laughed along with them, forcing a smile and holding it for a ten count before letting it drop.
Lisa glanced knowingly at him, a more genuine smile playing about her lips.
He ignored her and called for quiet. “All right, I’ll just say it: we need a group of volunteers to go looking for chickens.”
Well, that did it. The whole group laughed out loud, including most of the captains. Everyone but Lisa and Brad, really. Greg tried not to, but Jack saw him with a hand over his mouth, face red, heaving and bucking around desperately to keep it in. Jack wished he’d just laugh with them, because the strain was keeping it going, adding to the hilarity.
Tony wasn’t trying to hold it in—even though Jack knew he understood the seriousness of their situation. Tony liked to play dumb, but in many ways he was one of the smartest kids at Big Timber. But for some reason, he enjoyed pushing Jack’s buttons, and he was doing it now. If Lisa didn’t like the annoying kid so much, Jack would have dumped him in the Skyline with the Dragsters.
“Oh, don’t look so pissed,” Larry said, coming over and patting him on the shoulder. “Wouldn’t have laughed if you hadn’t told us not to. We all need a reason to laugh right now.”
Jack searched their faces and found nothing but affection there. They were laughing with him, not at him.
“I guess I walked into that,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “All right then. We need chickens—shut up Greg—and we need them fast. I’ve written some instructions: what to look for, what to do if you actually find any still alive.” He pointed at Steve, who had an enormous orange coat on with fur around the face. “Bring your big coats. And if you volunteer, you stick to it and do it right.” He smiled grimly. “If we mess this up, we’ll never have fried eggs again for the rest of our lives.”
“Eggs suck!” one of them shouted—a boy of about eleven, much given to joking around and teasing, though he tended to get really obnoxious when Jack was nearby. In a way, he was a skinnier, whiter version of Tony.
Larry was on him in a flash—ran over and punched him in the face, knocking him down and kicking him repeatedly in the side. Jack’s first instinct was to pull Larry off and berate him for resorting to violence. Instead, he let him do it and held his tongue. The vague smile on his face remained fixed in place as he pretended not to notice.
“If you find any alive,” Jack continued when Larry climbed off the kid, “you will note the location on a map and return with it. After that, we’ll see who wants to spend the winter protecting our future.”
As he delivered the words, and at the looks of excitement on the Dragsters’ faces, he felt something unclench inside.
“All right then,” he said, “who wants to help?”
All of them except the kid Larry beat up raised his or her hand.
Jack would have liked to assign one captain per car, but he only had nine captains, including himself, so some of the kids would have to captain themselves. In total, he sent thirteen cars. An unlucky number. Larry would have made it fourteen, but Jack kept him back. He needed help transferring the generator to the farm to power the heater in Freida’s coop. The obvious choice for that duty was Brad, strong as he was, but Jack had business with Larry that couldn’t wait.
“Sup, man?” Larry said, taking a seat in one of the plush, leather recliners in the Paul Bunyan cabin, where the captains lived. With everyone out chicken hunting, it was emptier than it had been in weeks.
“You hit that kid today,” Jack said. “Why?”
“Aw, man, that’s what eating you? You heard him, what he said. That guy’s always—”
“Just tell me why you hit him. I’m not upset. I want to know.”
It took another minute for Jack to assure him he wanted information—data—and not excuses or apologies.
Cautiously, Larry said, “They’d already laughed at you about the chickens. But what he said?” He shook his head. “He was trying to get them to stop listening—turn it all crazy like it gets sometimes when nobody pays attention and does what they want. I was thinking of the Army, and how all these guys are the troops. Army dudes don’t put up with that.”
“So, they hit them?”
Larry shrugged. “Probably not. But hey—it got their attention.” He laughed shortly. “No offense, man, but they’re way scareder of me than you.”
Jack thought about that. Did he want people scared of him? How could he keep them scared on a daily basis? Would he have to keep doing scary things?
Larry squirmed uncomfortably, his expression pensive at first, then brooding, and finally downright defensive. “Okay fine, if you don’t like what I did then—”
“Would you calm down?” Jack said. “I think you did the right thing. I should have realized it before. It’s like you said—like in the army. They’re afraid of you because you’re big and don’t mind hitting people. But we have a problem.”
“What’s that?”
Jack tapped his chest. “What am I here for?”
“Well, uh … you’re smart. You’re always reading books. And you got all that meat for us.”
“Not all of it,” Jack said, “but some, sure.” He tapped his chin as something occurred to him. “I saw a movie about the army, once. The troops were all scared of the drill sergeant. But they were really afraid of the general—even though they seemed to like him okay.” Jack shook his head. “Problem is, I don’t think I’m that scary.”
Larry shrugged, but didn’t deny it. “If it happens again—he runs his mouth or something—what do I do?”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “Let me deal with it.”
“Cool. So we gonna move this generator or talk about life?”
Jack smiled. “May as well. Since we’re here and all.”
4
The generator was heavy—about a hundred and fifty pounds. It was also bulky, and a pain to get off the ground and into the truck. The plan was to have Lisa set it up once she got back from her search. Cars with full tanks—fuel cars—would need to be found and parked at Freida’s farm. In fact, every farm they found with live chickens would need a generator and fuel cars.
Lisa had promised to show him how the hookup was done so he could do it too. The books said the heater’s main job was to raise the temperature a few degrees above freezing to, at the very least, keep the birds’ water from freezing. It said some birds did fine in winter, while others survived better with a little pampering. Jack intended to pamper every living bird they found until the danger of extinction had passed.
He wracked his brains for things he might have missed. Everything he knew about animals came from library books. Even Freida was mostly ignorant about their proper care and feeding, however much she pretended. Being the daughter of a farmer didn’t mean anything if all she’d ever done was goof around on social media and watch TV.
While Jack brooded, Larry drove them to the Dragsters’ old headquarters in Front Royal. One of his friends had tried hooking up a generator last fall and died trying.
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sp; “In this room?” Jack said after they broke into the basement.
“Yep. Electrocuted. Real messed up, too. Burned him from the inside. You could tell because his whole body turned pink. We came in and found him lying there dead with the thing still running.” He pulled a face and shook his head. “Electricity kills quick. Lisa’s crazy for messing with it.”
The unit in question was as big as the one they’d dropped off at Freida’s farm. There was an extension cord stuck in one of the six plugs on the side and a gas can still on a coffee table.
“Did they run it inside?” Jack said.
“I told you they did.”
“Were the windows open?”
“I don’t remember,” Larry said. “Why?”
Jack grimaced. “Carbon monoxide. Like the Holocaust. When you breathe carbon monoxide, it kills you and turns you pink.”
He’d learned that fun little fact from a documentary his parents made him watch. It had freaked him out so much they couldn’t get him to eat salmon after that. To this day, he sometimes found himself holding his breath when he smelled car exhaust.
Larry blinked in surprise. “Really? Everyone thought he was electrocuted. We were afraid to touch the thing after that.”
“Probably a good idea,” Jack said. “Come on, let’s get it out of here.”
They loaded it on the back of the truck, then stopped by a hardware store to grab another unit. They also picked up some outdoor extension cords and space heaters. And because the Sickness had struck early in the previous winter, there were plenty of snow shovels on hand, and they picked up some of those too.
“Can you think of anything else?” Jack said, peering through the gloom around him.
