Blackout: Still Surviving
Page 1
Blackout
Still Surviving Book 1
Boyd Craven III
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
About the Author
Prologue
I’ve been a moonshiner, prepper, and an occasional poacher, almost as long as I can remember. It was a memorable time for me, when I started losing my baby teeth and my new ones pushed their way in… I can still remember the warm burn as my grandma rubbed a little bit of Grandpa’s corn liquor on my gums when the first tooth started wiggling loose… I remember it well. The other thing I remember is the canning and food storage. When we’d can, we’d put up three times as much. Grandma’s saying was ‘One for you, one for me, save one ‘cuz it’s free.’
I would later learn that nothing is free, even if all you’re giving up is your own time, but it stuck with me.
I grew up near Murfreesboro, Arkansas, and spent a lot of my childhood at the crater of diamonds, looking for the aforementioned diamonds. I never hit it big, but I found enough sifting through the caldera to keep my grandparents and me a little more comfortable than we otherwise would have been. I knew you weren’t supposed to sell what you find there, but everybody did it, and I always walked in from the wooded side and avoided the office anyway.
You could say I always skirted the law, but I’d never committed any great offenses. That was how I still tried to live my life.
I’d spent four and a half years at college, where I studied Chemistry. I’d had an idea that if I became a chemical engineer, I could get a job with an oil company and pull myself and my grandparents out of poverty.
I usually purposely avoided mentioning my parents, because it’s kind of embarrassing. The story goes my mom didn’t know who my dad was, and she ran off when I was two, and nobody heard from her again.
The state had been reluctant to put me with my grandparents at the time, but they were family, and there were few other good choices. Their reasons were because, at the time, there was no running water, we got everything out of the pitcher pump, and there was no central heat for when it got cold. That was quickly fixed by an old potbellied stove. Then they had complained about a leak in the foyer. Grandpa had walked to the old barn, pulled a scrap of tin, and climbed up on the roof and fixed it on the spot, according to the story.
I didn’t remember any of it, but it had been retold over the years, even as I tried to idolize what my childhood could have been like with two parents and two sets of grandparents.
It wasn’t a bad way to grow up, and I had no clue that this was an out of the ordinary situation for most people; it just was. The homestead was small, twelve acres that sat on a flat spot between two hills of our holler, as Grandpa liked to call it. Almost an acre of it was garden, and the rest was set up for the chickens, Grandpa’s game birds, and the barn.
When I wasn’t prospecting at the Crater of Diamonds, I was usually monkeying in the barn, and I spent a many a night in one of the old cleaned out horse stalls with my grandpa, close enough to the fire that I wouldn’t get cold. See, one of the other ways my grandpa made enough money to keep us in propane and make sure the taxes were paid was making corn liquor. I knew from the time I could talk that this part was a secret and it could get us in trouble, so I didn’t say anything. What it did do though, was make me more curious to learn all about it. And thus a new age moonshiner was born.
1
“Grandma?” I called as I walked in the front door.
Nobody answered right away, but I could smell that Grandma had just finished baking or had something in the oven. The front porch looked like Grandpa had been working on replacing the old planking with some rough sawn lumber. I had to grin at that. I’d done some horse trading with a local miller and traded him some of my special brews for a trailer full of rough sawn planks. They hadn’t all been dried to perfection like they would have been in a kiln, but they were straighter and truer than what had been there before.
I felt a little bad, I’d been gone a lot the last few weeks looking for work. I had enough of an education to teach, but not quite enough experience to get an entry-level position like I wanted.
I walked into the foyer, then through the kitchen to the living room in the back where a hallway led off, with two doors on each side and a closet at the end. Two bedrooms on the left, a bathroom then a bedroom on the right. If you went outside the back door off the living room and to your right, you could go through a set of Bilco doors into the rock-lined root cellar that had been dug before the house had been built over top of it.
I walked out to the back door and paused. Grandma was out there, a long ribbon tied in her mostly graying hair which had streaks of dark black shooting through it. She wore a plain dress with her colorful apron that had prints of chickens all over it. She called it her chicken math apron. She put that on when she went out to feed the girls - the chickens. For the most part, they roamed free, scratching for bugs, ticks, and other biting insects, and they kept the homestead surprisingly clean. The hard part was keeping the little dinosaurs out of the garden, which was why she went out with two coffee cans full of scratch corn and table scraps. It kept them familiar to her and kept them around close. She’d put one can out to pull them in, talking to them, then put another can in the henhouse where they bedded and laid their eggs.
I walked out the back door and greeted, “Hey, Grandma!”
She spun, and a smile lit her face when she saw me. She dropped the can of scratch and started in my direction, remarkably spry for a woman in her sixties. She about crushed the air out of me in a huge hug, her arms barely coming below my shoulders.
“Westley Flagg, don’t you ever sneak up on an old lady like that!” she said, pushing back and pinching my shoulder.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said with a grin. “I missed you guys.” Then I pulled her into another big hug.
“I missed you too. Did you get the job?” she asked, her eyes shining.
“Not yet,” I told her. “They said they had two other candidates to interview. It’s not just teaching Chemistry, but Natural Science.”
“What grade?” she asked.
“Well now, that depends. This school is set up so that kids who progress faster can be in more advanced classes than, say, some kids who aren’t moving along as quickly. Most of my classes would probably be a mixture of ninth and tenth graders, though.”
“Well now, that’d be something! Good thing the family business doesn’t come up with any job application.”
“No way,” I told her, kissing her on top of the head.
She pinched me again and gave me a playful shove backward. “Your grandpa is in the barn working on a batch. He’s probably due for a break if you have it in you.”
“Sure do. Is the ground hard enough for me to bring my truck back to the barn?”
“The rain’s been threatening, but it hasn’t opened up yet. You’ve only been gone three days this time.”
“I know, I know. I had an out of town delivery to make and spent a day and a half there for the inter
view. Then I picked up supplies,” I told her, dropping a wink.
“If you’re talking about getting into that rum again…”
“Not much,” I told her, my hands in the air.
“Boys and their drinking… Oh crap, you get, you useless bastard.” Grandma used her leg to push Foghorn, her rooster, out of the way.
He’d charged into the middle of the hens who were attacking the can of corn Grandma had dropped and was trying to flog the smaller hens and the up and coming rooster out of the way. If he hadn’t been my grandma’s favorite chicken, he’d have parted ways with his head a long time ago and been re-named Stew.
“Love you, Grandma,” I said and walked a wide circle around Foghorn.
He and I had come to a non-verbal agreement. He avoided me, so I wouldn’t, in turn, invite him to dinner in retaliation. We usually walked a wide path around each other and this time was no different. He broke off, asserting his dominance and looked at me, his head cocked, his good eye staring at me. I headed back to the front of the house near the porch and did a quick ground inspection for anything shiny. Grandpa had been working on the deck, but he was lousy with a hammer. As a kid, he’d sent many a nail flying as he hit it funny, and I didn’t want to get one stuck in my tire.
Even though we were doing a lot better now than we had been when I was growing up, I was still frugal. I’d become something of an inventor as a kid, and most of my efforts had been figuring out better ways for us to make money when it was winter time, and when I couldn’t be picking for diamonds I’d been using my head to make life easier at home.
I fired up my little Datsun truck, a relic of the early 80s, and drove slowly back to the barn. The chickens scattered and I got out, leaving the truck in neutral, and opened the large sliding door. I hopped back in the truck and pulled into the barn, backing in next to the horse stalls. A light was on in the second one from the end, and I got out after killing the motor.
“Close the door, boy, I’m losing temperature,” Grandpa yelled.
I grinned and pulled the large door closed, not oblivious to the large wide cracks between the sections that made up the barn. It wasn’t air tight nor insulated, which was why I’d made sure the newest still was. The barn was mostly empty in the middle and left sections. The right side had the gardening tools, an old Ford tractor, and various farm implements, and the rest of it was old scrap. At one point, Grandpa got it in his head that he was going to make extra money scrapping in the winter time when he couldn’t get a ferment going, but soon found that it cost us more in fuel than the metal was worth. Old appliances, plumbing fixtures, spools of wire, plumbing and pipes… it had a little bit of anything and everything. Since I’d been enlisted to pick half of it or more, it could sit there for all I cared.
I opened the stall Grandpa was in and could feel the warmth as soon as I stepped inside. An old alcohol lamp was burning on a side shelf, casting light over the area. The open flame made me nervous when Grandpa Bud was running his old still. It was hardly airtight, and the alcohol vapors were very flammable, like gasoline. I didn’t worry now, though; he was running one of my keg stills.
“You know, boy, this here setup runs slick,” he said as I closed the stall door behind me.
“You like it? I thought you said it stripped too much of the flavor out?”
“I figured it out,” he said with a grin. “I got to run this one a lot slower than my old copper still.”
“You put a bunch of scrubbers in the mash and column?” I asked him.
“I’ve got enough to keep the sulfur taste out,” he said.
My latest still had been made out of an old stainless steel beer keg. The ball that trapped the air and the tube that connected it had been removed, and with tri-clamps, I’d fitted a copper column that could be run as both reflux and pot still. A reflux column made the alcohol work a little harder to escape and condensed the water back down, so the only thing that came out was the various forms of alcohol. Acetone, methyl, and, of course, the kind we all love to drink - ethyl alcohol. It was great if you wanted to make extremely high-proof liquor, but at the cost of stripping the flavor out of it.
The section that came off at a near forty-five degrees angle had its own condenser on it as well. You could run just that part without the other, and it’d work much like the old timers’ stills without stripping the flavor. Copper was used as much as possible. It neutralized the sulphuric flavors in the whiskey or rum.
“Good. I bought more supplies on my way back from the school interview,” I told him, hooking a thumb over my shoulder.
“Corn and sugar?” he asked.
“That, and some enzymes and ten gallons of farm-grade molasses.”
“Mole Asses. Boy, you and your rum is—”
“Hey, this is for me, not a big project,” I told him.
“Oh. Well, come take a seat, tell me about your interview.”
I did, noting Grandpa was wearing his famous bibs and a white t-shirt underneath. He had been losing weight rather quickly, but refused to go to the doctor. I knew off the top of my head it could be a few things. Diabetes, cancer, or something else. He still ate like he had a tapeworm and his eyes weren’t turning yellow, but Grandpa told me two weeks ago he’d rather not know than to know and worry about when his time was up. Grandma couldn’t be persuaded to talk to him about it either.
“First things first, how you like the new water pump?” I asked him.
“Beats pumping by hand,” he said. “How you figure out how to do that?” he asked me.
“Oh come on, Grandpa, you’re the one who taught me to wire a house up,” I told him, remembering many repairs and upgrades to the homestead.
In truth, though, we could have wired the barn for electricity but hadn’t. It would be a lot of work and a lot of costs. The electrical panel in the house was old, and I wasn’t sure we had enough amperage to get all the way out here. My fix had been to install a few solar panels on the back side of the barn, facing away from prying eyes, and hooking them to a charge controller that powered eight batteries I’d picked up at the junkyard. I didn’t use a DC to AC converter, but instead had used a DC electric submersible pond pump and various plastic hoses to use as cooling water.
The conventional wisdom said that you should use a cold water tank at least as equal in volume as the amount you ran. Since my keg system was fifteen gallons, that should’ve been all I needed, but I’d over-engineered it and used what I had on hand, an old fifty-five gallon blue barrel. To use it, all you had to do was make sure everything was hooked up and flip a switch I’d wired at chest level and adjust the water flow with a series of gate valves.
“I know, but I never thought about this. It’s slick; I’ve run two batches today, and the batteries ain’t run dry yet.”
I got up and went out into the other stall, opening it, and saw in the gloom the shine of the LED readout. The battery bank was more than enough, he’d barely used a third of it. He’d be good for another third before he’d have to make sure he didn’t discharge it too far and kill them. It also helped that we were getting power right now, as night hadn’t fallen.
“If anything ever happened, we could put a cistern up on a stand and let gravity do it,” I told him.
“If anything ever happened. You and your fancy tv shows. Doomsday… Bah.”
“Those guys are extreme, but it isn’t all that crazy of an idea,” I told him, retaking my seat.“Where are we at with this?”
“Hearts,” he said, nudging a large one-gallon glass jar.
“Just starting?” I asked him.
“Yeah, already did my first cuts,” he said, pointing to the pint jars off to the side.
“Ok, I’m going to unload the truck, then I can take over,” I told him.
“Day I can’t run shine is the day you bury me out back, boy. You hear me?”
I was used to this, and it had nothing to do with Grandpa fearing his morality; it’d been something I’d grown up hearing him say.
2
I unloaded the grain and sugar onto waiting pallets in the same stall that held the charge controller and batteries. Then I got into the truck bed and pulled back the sheet of plywood that had been covering the rest. Grandpa teased me about prepping, but I just couldn’t not do it. I remembered one winter when I was ten or eleven years old, times had been terrible, and we’d gone through Grandma’s stores. Even the ones she’d labeled ‘cuz, it’s free.’ Hunting hadn’t been any good, and we’d started eating more of our laying flock. We weren’t starving, but I was always feeling the rumbling of my stomach.
Since we were Shiners, we didn’t do much with the church. We used Sundays to make our deliveries when the busybodies were all holy rolling and not paying attention to the rest of the world. Still, I’d snuck in whenever I could and found a mixed bunch. People that knew what we did either loved us or didn’t. There didn’t seem to be any middle ground. Old religious folk is like that, even the ones who drank our shine they got from someone else.
I unlocked and opened the middle stall and hit a button. A twelve volt LED light lit up from near the center of the beam that ran across the stall, lighting up things. My stash wasn’t big, but it was growing. I had a pallet on the floor to stack stuff I hadn’t packed away in buckets yet. I hadn’t used Mylar and oxygen absorbers like the people on the internet tell you to, though I wanted to someday. Instead, I’d been packing things in old frosting buckets that had been washed out, bleached and set in the sun a bit. As long as the fool chickens didn’t crawl inside them. One wall was buckets, three rows deep, three rows tall, with sheets of plywood between each bucket so the lids wouldn’t crush. I unloaded two hundred pounds of rice in four big sacks, a large bag of beans and then various dried spices in one pound bags. Those I’d pack in their own buckets, all together.