“Having said all that, we recognized the need for a plan B. So when we came in here, we brought with us seeds from all the plants I mentioned before. A year in, before the seeds were too old to be stable, I planted two of each type of tree in the greenhouse. I’ve been careful to keep them cropped to keep them from growing too big and taking over the greenhouse. Each of them is only about three feet high.
“We will transfer them to the larger greenhouses, where they will be allowed to grow freely. If we get most or all of our orchard trees back, and if they bear fruit, that’s great. If we don’t, we will take these trees and transplant them in the orchard when it’s safe to do so. We can also use the seeds from the fruit they bear to plant additional trees in the orchard.
“That’s what makes the answer to your question so complicated, Brad. There are so many factors we simply don’t know. The best case scenario, of course, is that all of the orchard trees come back and bear fruit the following year. If that happens, fruit and nuts should be plentiful except for the citrus which will take a little longer.
“The worst case scenario is that few or none of the trees come back. If that happens, then fruit and nuts will continue to be scarce for the next three to four years.”
It wasn’t the quick answer to his question that Brad had hoped for, but the girls had explained it well.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Are there any other questions about fruits and vegetables, or about our countdown calculations or anything?”
There were no other questions. At least half of the group was punch drunk with elation, and hadn’t heard much conversation after the breakout announcement.
Mark stood up again and asked, “Is there any other new business?”
There was none.
“Very well. I’ve been informed that Sarah and Bryan have an announcement they’d like to share with you.”
Sarah held her place at the front of the group and Bryan joined her. Mark and Hannah returned to their seats. Mark looked at his wife and saw tears in her eyes. Hannah loved romantic moments.
Sarah asked Bryan if he wanted to speak, and he took a slight bow to give her the honors. Sarah faced the group and said, “Bryan and I have finally set our wedding date. It will be on December 24th. I asked Bryan what he wanted for Christmas this year and he said he wanted my hand in marriage.
Joe yelled from the back, “Yeah, but what’s the cheapskate giving you?”
Sarah looked at Bryan and said, “His last name.”
Then she kissed him. Everyone smiled and some of the women in the group dabbed at their eyes. Mark and Hannah looked at each other, not realizing they were thinking the same thought. They both wished that Phyllis was still there to share the moment.
Chapter 31
Little Markie walked out of his one room schoolhouse and went bounding home, where he found Hannah cleaning the RV.
He was proud of himself, and felt all grown up that he was allowed to walk the hundred yards home each day.
“Hey Mommy! Mommy, guess what?”
“Hi, little sailor. What?”
“Today we took a field trip.”
She smiled. She knew in advance about the elementary school’s excursion. But she pretended not to. It was much more fun that way, and gave little Markie so much more joy.
She feigned a look of surprise.
“A field trip? Wow, that is so exciting! Where on earth did you go?”
“We went to the greenhouse. Aunt Karen showed us all the plants. And do you know what she gave us?”
“No, what?”
“Strawberries! Two of them. She gave each of us two of them. Julie ate the green part but I didn’t. I’m smarter than that. And besides, after Julie ate the green part Aunt Karen told the rest of us not to.”
“Wow! That’s amazing! And what did you think about the strawberries? Did you like them?”
“Oh, Mommy, they were so yummy. They were sweet but kinda sour. Have you ever had strawberries?”
She scratched her head and pretended to fall into deep thought.
“I think so. But it’s been so long I don’t really remember. Did you bring one of them home to share with me?”
He looked at his feet and tried to find a good excuse.
“Well, I was going to…”
She laughed and cut him off.
“That’s okay little man.” She kissed him on the mouth and said, “You still taste like strawberries. So you shared with me after all.”
He smiled for a moment. Then his smile turned to chagrin, and he said, “Ah, mom. I’m too old for kisses. I’ll be six soon.”
Her shocked look returned, and she put her hands on her hips and pretended to scold him.
“Mark David Snyder! You will never ever ever be too old for your mother’s kisses.”
“Not even when I’m a million?”
“Not even then.”
He smiled, suddenly okay with it.
“Okay.”
“Now, then. What else did you do in school today?”
“I wrote my numbers. Starting at one and going through ten. Miss Helen said it was very good. Except…”
“Except what?”
He looked down. “Except… I wrote my seven backwards. But Miss Helen said that was okay, that we would work on it.”
Hannah hugged him and smiled.
“Do you want to know a secret?”
Markie loved secrets. He equated secrets with the spies he sometimes watched on the “Spy Kids” movies.
“Yeah, what?”
“Remember, it’s our secret.”
“Okay, Mommy. What?”
“Your Daddy is thirty years old, and he still writes his sevens backwards.”
“For the reals?”
“Yup. For the reals.”
He suddenly started laughing uproariously. Hannah aggravated the situation by tickling him, and Mark happened to walk in the door at that exact moment.
He shouted in mock alarm, “Don’t worry, Markie! I’ll save you from the tickle monster!”
Mark jumped in the middle of the fray and held Hannah’s arms so little Markie could get his revenge. Hannah wasn’t really ticklish, but pretended to be. The whole idea of tickling his Mommy gave Markie so much joy, she wasn’t about to deprive him of it.
When Markie was all finished, the three collapsed in a heap, worn out and laughed out and tickled out. But not loved out. Not this family. Not ever.
Markie said, “Mommy, how come cousin David has a sister and I don’t?”
“Well, honey, God just hasn’t thought it was time to give you a sister yet. Do you want a sister?”
“Yes, please. I think a sister would be cool. Would you ask God if I can have one?”
Hannah looked at Mark, who just smiled.
“Sure, honey. We will ask Him. And you can ask Him yourself if you want to, when you say your prayers tonight.”
“Okay.”
“But you realize that God might think you need a brother instead of a sister. Would it be okay if he sent you a brother instead?”
“Sure. But I’d rather have a sister.”
“Why?”
“So we can name her Phyllis. I miss Grammy. I think Grammy would like it if we named her Phyllis. Don’t you think?”
Hannah had to turn away.
Mark picked up his son and hugged him.
“You’re right, little man. I think Grammy would like that a lot.”
Chapter 32
Bryan and Sarah had asked the elders for a private audience. They went before them and tried to explain their predicament. There was no longer a government on the outside of the mine. Might never be one again. And they didn’t want to wait that long to be married anyway.
“We want to be married on Christmas Eve, but we want it to be official. Since there is no government and no license and no preachers, we want to ask your permission to proceed. That will make it official enough for us.”
And so began the
clan’s tradition of going before the elders to ask for permission to marry. No one knew it yet, but in the years ahead, it would become one of the most cherished of all the traditions passed down from the mine to future generations.
But that was the future. Here, now, in the mine, Sarah and Bryan were nervous. What if the elders decided for whatever reason it wouldn’t be a good idea? What if they asked the couple to wait until the breakout, to see if somehow the local government was still up and running? What if they insisted that they find an ordained minister on the outside, after the breakout, so that the marriage would be legal in God’s eyes?
But the elders merely asked, “Do you love each other, and will you place one another above all else, for the rest of your natural lives?”
Bryan said, “Yes. And even longer.”
Sarah looked in his eyes and said, “Until the end of time.”
The elders looked at each other in agreement, and Bryan’s Uncle Marty, the chief elder, said, “Then you have our blessing. May you live long, love long, and be fruitful. And congratulations.”
Hannah had enough foresight to bring her wedding dress into the mine before the freeze. It had to be hemmed, since Sarah was five inches shorter than Hannah. But the hem was done carefully, so that it could be removed at a future date. Sami had already let it be known that she had “next” on the dress, and she was almost as tall as Hannah.
The rings were more of a problem. There simply weren’t any in the mine, and no way to get any.
On the night he proposed to Sarah, Bryan realized he had no ring to place on her finger. He took a dark blue wire tie from a loaf of bread, wrapped it around her ring finger, and looked into her eyes.
“You’ll have to believe me when I tell you that you have a stranglehold on my heart. It’s no longer mine. I just carry it for you now. It’s yours now and always will be.
“It pains me that I have no real ring to give you. This is all I have, but I hope you’ll accept it with all my love. If you look at it, you’ll see that two sides came together and became one. Then they became intertwined. As simple as it is, it is symbolic of us. We met as two. Now we are one. Will you marry me?”
Sarah cried and said, “After all that, how could I say no?”
Karen, the only true artist in the mine, came to the rescue once again. Unbeknown to everyone, she spend three weeks fashioning his and hers wedding bands from a pair of silver spoons. She was able to melt them down, form rings, and etch the rings with a fashionable design. She presented the rings to the couple a week before the wedding as an early wedding gift.
“I’m sorry there are no diamonds. Maybe these will do temporarily, until we get out of here and you can find something better.”
Sarah stammered between her tears, “Oh, Karen, these are perfect. They are beautiful. How could I ever find anything more beautiful than these?”
It was a simple ceremony. Mark presided over it on behalf of his brother, who would ordinarily have performed the wedding were he not the groom. It went off without a hitch, and as the husband kissed his bride for the first time there was a thunderous round of applause.
Well, as thunderous as a group of only thirty eight people could make.
When the kiss dragged on more than a few seconds, Markie stood up on his chair and yelled, “Ewww, cooties!” For him, it was time to go eat cake.
Sarah, as many other brides are wont to do, decided she wanted to shed a couple of pounds prior to her wedding. So she made a deal with the kitchen staff. She knew, of course, that the kitchen kept a tight control on the calorie count. They had to, to extend the food stores.
Sarah offered, “I’ll tell you what. I will forego a hundred fewer calories on my diet each day for the next twelve weeks, if you can take those calories and put them toward a small wedding cake.”
The kitchen staff agreed, and it wouldn’t have gone any farther than that. Except that ladies do talk, after all. Before the next day was out, every woman in the mine had heard of the deal and had agreed to donate a hundred calories a day as well. Bryan fell in line too.
Mark rebelled until Hannah threatened to withhold her feminine charms until after the wedding. Then he came around quickly and joined the rest.
As a result of the effort, the kitchen was able to prepare a fabulous cake, with decadent whipped icing, and ice cream to boot.
It was a beautiful wedding and a joyous and very happy reception.
Chapter 33
Within two weeks Frank Woodard had managed to find more than a dozen families or small clusters of survivors in the neighborhoods around Buena Vista Drive.
His days had become a routine. He’d leave his house with a duffle bag full of food for the hungry, and would seek them out by looking for telltale smoke coming from chimneys.
Once he gained the trust of those he helped feed, he took them to the Symco warehouse and helped them select food that was still safe to eat. He showed them there Symco stored their flashlights, and batteries, and a dozen other things that would help their situations. And he’d encourage his new friends to come back daily, to build up their stocks of food at their homes, in case bad people ever took control of the Symco warehouse and cut off the food supply.
Frank didn’t know it, but some around the neighborhood had taken to calling him “Saint Frank.” It wasn’t a sarcastic title. He was seen by many as an angel from heaven.
For Frank’s part, he was happy to be able to help. But he was also disheartened. By his count, only fifty nine people survived in a neighborhood of several thousand.
Frank’s friends Jesse Martinez and Joe Smith started on their own new mission. The snow pack was just two feet high now, and the two of them began getting help from volunteers to bury the dead in rather macabre above ground burial mounds.
They went methodically, one street at a time, then one house at a time.
The routine was the same. They knocked loudly on each door, and Joe yelled, “Hello in the house! We mean you no harm! We come to help you! If you do not want us here, make a loud noise and we will leave you in peace.”
The volunteers would wait for about thirty seconds. Then Jesse repeated Joe’s words in Spanish.
After another thirty seconds, the group broke into the home and conducted a room by room search. Any bodies they found, including the bodies of pets, were carried to the back yard and laid in the snow with as much dignity as they could manage.
Then the group took sledge hammers to the bottom few courses of bricks on the house, causing the bricks above to collapse into a pile at their feet.
The broken bricks and chunks of mortar were then used to cover the bodies. It would allow them to decompose slowly, without being left to rot in the open or picked apart by buzzards or other birds that might have found a way to survive.
It would also lessen the chance of human survivors being stricken by airborne disease, spread because of the decomposing bodies.
By the time spring came around, all of the survivors in the area had enough food to get them to the thaw, and nearly all the bodies were buried. Families from the different streets began getting out and following the paths in the snow to the others’ houses. A sense of community was starting to build again.
No one knew what became of the marauders. They appeared to be long gone. Some worried, though, that they would be back.
Others believed that the marauders were within their midst, and had merely stopped their terroristic ways because they grew tired of it, or finally stole enough to survive and decided they didn’t have to rob and kill anymore.
In Frank’s mind, the marauders moved on after they decided that this particular neighborhood didn’t have much left to steal. Perhaps they found more lucrative neighborhoods to attack, or took over a Walmart or some other large food source.
There was an ongoing debate about why the Symco Distribution Center was spared the wrath of the marauders. Some of the neighbors thought it was just a fluke. That it slipped through the cracks simply because the m
arauders didn’t know what it was. They thought it was the simple fact that it didn’t say “food” on the side of the building. That it could therefore be anything. A carpet distribution center. A lumber distribution center. Anything.
This faction of the neighbors believed that if it had said “Symco Foods” on the side of the building, it would have been scavenged and occupied by armed killers long before Frank, Joe and Jesse ever made their first trip there.
There were others among the neighbors who believed that the Symco warehouse was a gift from God Himself, left intact so that they could survive and carry on.
Frank didn’t know which story to believe. He just took it for granted that they were lucky to be alive, and blessed with the food that would help them stay that way.
Frank was on his way back from Symco one day that spring, taking delight that the top of the snow pack was shiny. That meant that the temperature was above freezing, and that the pack would melt a tiny bit that day.
He and the others stopped to catch their breaths, when one of them looked skyward.
“Look! Right there! To the right of the sun!”
Frank looked up and, to the right of the yellow marble in the brown sky, he was able to catch a glimpse of a cloud.
Granted, it was just a slightly darker patch of brown in a lighter brown sky, flying through the haze. But it was the first time they’d been able to make out a cloud in almost six years. It was a good start, and a good sign. It meant the sky was clearing.
Chapter 34
In a large field behind the Trucker’s Paradise Truck Stop, Joe Koslowski was laying on a couch in his compound taking a nap when a drop of water hit the side of his face.
It wasn’t enough to wake him, but he did raise a hand to his face to wipe away the water. It was a subconscious reflex he’d repeat several more times before the dripping water finally woke him up.
Joe looked up and saw the drops falling from the heavy canvas tarps which covered the compound, saying, “What the hell?”
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