“Will, are you all right?”
“They’re all dead, Mary. Don’t come out.”
But she did come out.
“You can’t shelter me, Will. The world is full of dead people now. It’s something I will have to get used to seeing.”
In less than a week Fred and Samuel were back with the boy and the bikers had taken over two more small Amish Farms off the Stumptown Road. The Amish hadn’t really known how to deal with such a thing and were waiting for their bishop to return. They had set a watch, several men with loaded shotguns to try to keep the bikers from taking over more farms, but for the last few days, having found a store of bourbon whisky in a non Amish house on Stumptown, the bikers had been content with slaughtering the livestock for their daily barbecues. Their plans to actually work the farms had been forgotten.
When Bishop Samuel heard about the takeover he was furious, but understood how his people had no knowledge of this kind of thing or how to react to violence of any kind.
“I think they did just fine,” Fred defended. “They set up a perimeter to contain these men and waited for their commander. You couldn’t expect them to mount a counterattack—even if they wanted to they have no idea how.”
“So how do we get rid of these men, preferably without harming them?” The bishop asked Fred.
Fred thought for a moment, trying to become the man he had been fifteen years before, leading men in the arid hills of Afghanistan. But those had been trained men, even though they were just reservists who had wanted only to go home, they knew how to conduct themselves under fire as well as how to shoot and take cover, and if they had had any qualms about killing their fellow men, they kept it to themselves.
Now these Amish men with their antique shotguns and clunky rifles were looking to him to show them a way to free their land without bloodshed. How was he going to do that, with no sergeants to help him (every good officer learned quickly that the NCO’s were the soul of the Army and without them nothing got done right.)?
“I think we need to gain time. We could offer to meet with them, show them we’re armed and ready to fight, but offer to let them keep those three farms if they will promise to leave the rest of the Community in peace.”
Fred was uncomfortably aware of how much that sounded like Neville Chamberlain leaving Munich in 1938, “Peace in our time,” he had declared, waving a piece of paper-- his worthless treaty. But there had been no making peace with people like Hitler. But what to do here? These Amish men might be able to mount some sort of defense if they were attacked—he could work on that with them—but offensive operations? With men, most of whom could not bear to kill another human being and had no training in small unit tactics? How could that work? They could not take back the farms. Not now, maybe never.
The Bishop thought this over. Fred was right. They needed time and perhaps these marauders could be contained. It was better than having to kill them. No matter what Fred had said the Bible said, he still believed in his heart it was wrong to kill a person under any circumstances. He knew most of the plainly dressed, hard-working men in the Amish Community felt much the same.
The next day both sides watched with raised eyebrows the arrival of Will and Mary on the now beat-up Honda.
Will’s back was still sore but several days of rest and hot packs had helped a lot and he was able to ride, though with more rest stops that he had taken before.
The bikers were watching the Amish church where meeting took place from across the fields with binoculars and the Amish had various people with birding binoculars watching the bikers. The noise of the arriving Honda had caught the attention of all the viewing devices. Tom and Jack thought it was a member of another motorcycle club that had been born here. Bishop Samuel’s youngest son, Aaron, was shocked that the man circled in his binoculars looked so much like him.
Bishop Samuel, the Elders and Fred Goodman were all on the church steps when Will and Mary rode up on the Honda. Will shut off the motor, got off and put down the kickstand. He helped Mary off and they stood together looking up at the gathering on the stairs.
Bishop Samuel could not have been more shocked if his oldest son had ridden in on an elephant and gotten down with a Hindu temple dancer.
“Hello, Papa, everyone. This is my friend, Mary.”
He could see things were much changed. There was an English with the group, something never seen before. And almost all the men were armed, also most unusual. He looked into his father’s shocked face and waited for a reply.
“Who is that?” whispered Fred to one of the Elders.
“That is William, Samuel’s oldest son, who left our community many years ago. We have not seen him for a long time.”
The awkward silence continued. Samuel’s eyes were full but he couldn’t think what to say. He should shun this rebel deserter but his sudden appearance had filled him with feeling he thought he had gotten over. What should he do?
Seeing his distress, Fred said, “Well, I heard Jesus told of a prodigal son who finally came home. Aren’t we supposed to kill a fat calf and have a barbecue or something?”
No one laughed at Fred’s joke, but Samuel went down the few steps and embraced Will, saying, “Yes, yes. My long lost son is home. Let us welcome him. Let us have a feast today in his honor as was told in Jesus’ story.”
The son and the father and most of the onlookers were weeping at this biblical scene of reconciliation. Only Aaron, the youngest son, did not weep, and watched his older brother with hooded eyes.
For his part, Fred saw the BAR in the boot on the Honda and thought, well, maybe now between our own biker Will and the BAR we have the gear to negotiate from strength with the bikers.
The bikers were watching the Amish have their fatted calf cookout that night and were very surprised to be invited. Or a few of them were anyway. A “delegation” as it was called in the note which Bishop Samuel sent with his younger son, Aaron.
“You really want us to come?” Jack queried the nervous Aaron.
“Actually we do. You need not fear. We are not people of violence, even though we have many new guns, and we would never harm a guest.”
“It’s not so much that,” Jack said. “We just wouldn’t want to be the skunk at the garden party, so to speak.”
Aaron had never been to a garden party or any other kind of party except weddings, but knowing for sure what a skunk was, he got Jack’s meaning.
“Well,” he said, sniffing the aroma of the bikers, “Maybe you could bathe before you come over. The feast is just starting. The meat is not even done yet.”
The other bikers hooted and laughed.
“Jack, the boy thinks you stink! He thinks we all stink! There will be two skunks at the garden party!”
“Well, we do kind of have a pungent aspect to us,” Jack grinned. We have plenty of well water. Why not take a quick bath?”
How they all stared—a bath—
“Jack,” Tom said, “Maybe you’ve noticed the world crisis? Most folks don’t have water for drinking let alone bathing!”
“That’s true, Tom. Not that we were ever that much for baths when there was plenty of water. But the wells on the farms here give plenty of water. I’ll just pull up a bucket, soap up, and whoosh! By the way, you said y’all had new guns. Did that fellow on the Honda bring them?”
“The English, Frederick, he brought some, and my brother, William brought a special one for making war. My father wanted him to get rid of it but—“
“But what?” Jack asked.
Aaron became flustered and said nothing more. He was too naïve to know what he should say and what not.
“They think they might need it, that’s why,” answered Tom.
“They called it a ‘bee aye are,’” blurted Aaron.
The Bikers looked at each other.
“If they have a BAR now,” Jack said to Tom, “Maybe we ought to go talk things over. A gun like that in the right hands could really mess us up.”
The smell of the fa
tted calf wafted over early in the evening and Tom and Jack washed their faces and took off their shirts to take at least half a bath. Jack put on a clean white shirt that had been in his saddle bag since forever and put it on. The rest of the group looked on in astonishment as Jack was transformed into a real person.
“What?” Jack snarled at their slack-jawed faces.
No one answered. What was happening here? What was actually going to be negotiated over there?
They walked across the fields to the fire blazing near the church. All the Amish Community was there and they watched them approach with open curiosity.
As an Old Order Amish Community, Samuel’s people would have a glass of schnapps or even beer or wine from time to time. But this celebration brought out all the good stuff from all the cabinets. There was a table full of bottles and clean glasses, and after tense introductions Tom and Jack headed to familiar territory.
Fred was there with his wife and children and Will and Mary as well.
Bishop Samuel, Will and Fred and several of the elders joined them there. The bikers were suprised to hear what the Bishop had to say.
“There is no desire on our part to harm you or to expel you from the farms you already occupy. Will has told us of some experiences he had getting here and we are concerned that something may be coming far worse than you.”
Jack and Tom looked at each other.
“Worse than us?” Jack quipped. “Is such a thing even possible?”
They all smiled, the whisky making them a little more amiable.
Will told him about the five men who had attacked the house.
“So, you killed them?” Tom asked.
“Yes. There’s no reasoning with such –“
He didn’t really want to say “people” as he had convinced himself they were something less than that.
“And you think there may be more of them—?” Tom asked.
15.
Many in the cities had died of hunger and thirst after all the food was gone from the stores, all the hoarded supplies exhausted, and all the bottles of mineral water drunk. All institutions had failed the people. Without any communications, neither the police nor the army had any command and control infrastructure, and after all the meals-ready-to-eat were gone the soldiers were no better off than anyone else. After a month there were groups quarreling over the scraps of civilization but no one knew what was going on even a few miles from where he was, or what might happen tomorrow.
After looking and not finding, many people went to bed and stayed there to conserve energy, but ended up dying there. It didn’t matter much that the electrical storm had abated to the point that the aurora borealis now was only seen as far south as Boston or that you could now shake hands or touch another person without grounding yourself first to avoid a shock. Some vehicles might run if repaired properly but who could do that and where would you get parts? Everything was closed now, all supplies of everything gone, hidden, disappeared. Even the black market stopped working when it became clear that government issued paper money no longer had any value. You could buy with gold or silver, but who had enough of that to buy bread and potatoes every day?
Soon, those stronger ones who were not dead, who refused to lie down and die, began to move in gangs out of the city centers. They imagined that someone was hoarding the food somewhere out there and it was only a matter of finding it. They were not far wrong. There was tons of grain rotting in silos all over the world with no trains or trucks to pick it up and take it to market or to the factories or bakeries. Whole herds of prime cattle had starved to death in the Mid-west USA when the feed trucks stopped arriving, though in places like Argentina where the cattle were range fed, those cattle could still eat grass and their owners slaughtered a few and distributed meat to their neighbors, since without refrigeration nothing would keep. A few people knew how to smoke or salt meat, as had been done for thousands of years before, mostly indigenous peoples who kept the knowledge and the meat to themselves.
So, from the inner cities and slums of New York and Philadelphia, London and Paris, Peking and Shanghai, mobs of desperate, filthy starving people, mostly men, surged outward to the suburbs and beyond, looking for the land of milk and honey where all the food had gone. Sometimes they got lucky and found a stranded semitrailer full of crates of Cheerios or rotting bananas, and mostly they drank from streams and rivers. If there was no other food, when they caught a stranger, they cut some wood and had a barbecue.
At the time when the Amish barbecue was under away, a man was pedaling down the darkened road across the valley, lit only by the three-quarter moon. He had the lean wiry body of an experienced cyclist, but his expensive 10 speed bike was dirty and battered. He had lost his helmet and the cuff of his right pant leg was held by a strap which prevented it from tangling in the gears. He had a light pack on his back and looked as dirty and battered as his bike. His name was Phil Green, and he was nearing the end of his rope when he saw the light.
Afraid of what it might be, he approached cautiously, working his way across the fields, pushing the bike.
“--so if I understand right, we could stay as long as we helped with the defense of the whole Amish community and worked our farms instead of just easting the stock?” Tom was saying.
“Obviously, if you slaughter your animals for food every few days there will in a short time be nothing left. At that point I suppose you and your men could just move on, but I suggest that thinking about the longer term, if you actually work the farms, take care of the animals, eat the eggs instead of the chickens, plant and harvest, you can stay and perhaps survive what God has sent us.”
To his credit, Samuel said all of that without preaching or condescending.
“So we would be farmers?” Jack said with a tone of surprise, as though Samuel had said “astronauts” not farmers.
“Sure, why not?” Fred had interjected. My family arrived a few weeks ago, and these fine people showed us what to do and we have a small house south of here and some acres we work and it’s going along fine.”
“What did you do before?” Jack asked.
“I was a scientist. We were studying the Sun’s corona and we were probably among the first to see and analyze the data.”
“So you knew it was coming?” Will asked.
“A few days before, yes. It took two days for the coronal ejection material to reach the Earth. We told the right people but no one imagined how bad it would actually be.”
“And now you’re a farmer,” Tom said.
“That’s right. I knew Samuel from before and figured that the Old Order Amish, who had always lived without electricity and modern technology, might have the best chance of survival.”
At this point Phil Green was seen at the edge of the firelight, standing quietly with his bicycle.
People drew back instinctively from fear. Several reached for their firearms.
“I saw the fire, “Phil said, tentatively. “My name is Phil. I’m alone. I’ve been pedaling for over a week and I need to rest. I’m very hungry, too--”
The smell of the roasting meat was making his mouth water so much he could hardly speak.
“Where are you from, Phil?” asked Fred.
“From Philadelphia. My wife Louise and I had a small apartment in a high rise building off the park. The apartment was useless after the first day and we moved to the Park with thousands of other people. There were huge barbecues as people emptied their dripping freezers and cooked the meat over anything that would serve to hold charcoal. When the charcoal was gone they used wood.
“We ate and ate, filet mignon, lamb chops, chicken, duck, you name it. People brought it all out after a few days when their freezers became too warm. There was wine, whisky beer and good fellowship in a new adventure: how to live without the modern world we were born into. Weeks later, with the food and the fellowship long gone, the park emptied as people went to find another place. Some said there was food in the suburbs and that only we in the
cities were hungry. Anything could be said and believed because all the sources of information were gone. There was no information but rumor and vile gossip.
“A man in a cape went about recruiting volunteers to with him to Voorhees where he said the Jews had hidden all the food. Even some that thought the idea absurd went with him. After all, who knew anything anymore? Somebody might have food hidden in Voorhees. There were others who had messianic ideas and knelt praying and waiting for the Messiah to return. They prayed to the aurora borealis and some professed to see the Virgin Mary dancing in the moving colors and shapes.
“As people got hungrier fear and loathing grew. Past placing blame, having eaten all the cats and dogs, and whatever rats they could catch, they turned on each other—“
“Did you eat rats?” Jack asked.
“Sure. People call it “street rabbit.” Having never eaten a rabbit, I couldn’t compare them. But rats taste like chicken—“
Everyone laughed.
“Well,” Samuel said. “You don’t have to eat rats tonight. Stay and share our feast. My son, William, returned after many years away and this is a feast in his honor.”
“You said you had a wife,” Fred said. “What happened to her?”
“Oh, they ate her. The rats were all gone—“
Phil had just barely escaped with his life, because he had been close to the bike and had out pedaled the mob. He had not stopped all day and night and had collapsed in a field and slept. He had washed his face and drunk from a stream, filled his water bottle and gotten back on the bike. He couldn’t really say how long he had been pedaling except he had started in Philadelphia and here he was in Lancaster County.
The few men Will and Mary had encountered at the house a few days before had been the vanguard, like the lone locust that previewed the onslaught of a plague of locusts. Because that what it was. A migration, plague, a great population movement from the cities outward, seeking food and life. It would be wrong to compare them to the “walking dead.” These people were the living dead, the almost dead, the moribund—but they moved grimly on, seeking something, anything they could eat, a horse, a dog, a cat, a person, it was all the same to them. And they were millions.
Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) Page 6
