by J. F. Krause
Over the last few weeks, we’ve added a few more. First, when Anna, one of our teenaged survivors went off to start her Gap Year back in March, her younger brother, Todd the computer whiz, moved in with us at Calloway House. He’s down in our basement which has its own entrance and allows him to play his drums and entertain friends. Being just 16 years old, he’s mostly independent. He spends his days either at school with the other teenagers who haven’t finished high school yet and who are waiting to start their Gap Year, or he’s helping out on the computer network at the administrative building where I work. Of course, he also finds time to hang out with friends at home or at the student union at the university here in SLO.
All high school students, in addition to their regular coursework, have activities at the high school such as sports, music classes, art classes, or basic vocational training, so he really doesn’t have that much free time. He misses his sister Anna, but I know he likes his new digs in the Calloway basement, and he’s a huge help at the office.
When Anna left for Gap Year, she made arrangements for Chanelle, her ward, to come stay with us at Calloway. Chanelle is the same age as Jerry and the two bonded as best friends way back in Orange County. There was talk of her staying with my good friend, Irma Stein, but I wanted her, and I won. We have one more family member, sort of. When Carl Markowitz goes off with Irma on her jaunts all over the place as my special representative, Eric Bowersock, Carl’s 13 year-old ward, stays with our family. That’s been pretty frequent lately, so I just think of him as one of ours. He’s already connected with all of us so he’s at home with us or with Carl.
The hardest part of being a parent is usually what to do with our children while we are at work. Kevin starts work fairly early in the morning at the local hospital where he’s a nurse, so he gets home in time to pick the kids up from school. School starts early and the kids stay there after regular classes working on sports, music, art, cooking, survival skills, taekwondo, or whatever they want to do until their guardian picks them up. In our case, that’s around 5:30 PM. Kevin actually gets off work about 2:30 PM, but he volunteers at the elementary school’s afternoon program. He helps out as the school playground nurse, basketball coach, or one of the piano teachers.
I’m really busy most of the days so they all pick me up at the administration building to force me to leave work. Fortunately, Calloway House, my office, the school, Kevin’s hospital, and the university are all close together. We all walk right over to the university cafeteria nearest Calloway. That way I leave work at the office, and we have a great big family dinner together. Everyone is very proper, except for Dinah, who’s a serious mess. Our guess is she’s probably about 16 months old now. None of the kids seems to mind her lack of eating etiquette, but aside from Eric, I notice they all try their best to be at the other end of the table. They love her; they don’t want to eat next to her. Most people still eat in one of the cafeterias scattered around the community. Even though our farms are up and running, we don’t have the means to recreate all the readymade dinner items most of us were used to. Since most of us don’t have the skills to cook from scratch, and it’s tedious and time consuming to put together a nutritious meal for just one or two people day in and day out, let alone for a family of seven or ten, almost everyone just takes advantage of the cafeterias for their meals. It’s been a great way to interact with our fellow community members, and besides, the cafeterias do a great job. I’m sure we’ll eventually get back to something like we had in the past, but for me, I rather like things the way they are, especially with six, seven, and sometimes eight of us. Irma’s daughter, Cynthia, sometimes joins us for dinner, and when she does, so does Todd. Of course, sometimes we take dinner fixings home to Calloway and actually cook them there. We do that a lot on Saturday and Sunday nights.
I mentioned that Anna was at Gap Year. She started on March 1 along with about 2,000 other post high school late teens. The Coalition early on discovered that we had several needs that could be met by sending all the late teenagers away for a year for a common experience. First, we wanted to avoid tribalism, and getting a lot of our young people together for a year will help with that. At least we hope it will. Second, we needed to train a lot of people in their twenties, thirties, and forties in new fields and skills. At the moment we don’t have enough skilled electricians, plumbers, mechanics, art curators, train engineers, truck drivers, and all manner of the other professionally trained people we will need if we are to cope with current and future needs. We are sort of in the eye of the storm right now and this is when we need to get prepared for the day things start wearing out and breaking down.
So, since we didn’t have enough instructors to train everyone who needed training, we created a Gap Year, which is held at Camp Pendleton, just south of Orange County. We started with 2,000 in March, then added another 2,000 in April, and in May and again in June, and still another 2,000 or so started off today, July 1. It’s meant to be a fun experience to give all our young people from across the Coalition some good memories to share with each other after all the horrible ones so many already have. Sometime next spring or summer, after the first cohort of older teenagers and early twenties have completed their Gap Years, Todd will graduate from high school and be loaded onto a bus along with some of his SLO friends and start his year away. So far, at least from what Anna and Zach (another very helpful young survivor) report back to us, he will have the time of his life.
Marco Coletti, our resident Marine sergeant is the superintendent of the Gap experience and personally helps to oversee the Gapper’s training in physical conditioning and weapons use while monitoring safety, martial arts, Esperanto, International Sign Language or ISL, survival training, Morse Code, semaphore, and lots of socializing. Of course, he doesn’t do all those things by himself. He has a staff of literally hundreds, or he will have when everything is fully operational. He has cooks, instructors, maintenance people, medical people, clerks, and party planners. In his private reports he tells us that at the current rate of use, we may have to reopen a factory to manufacture condoms before too long. He’s joking, or course, but I’m glad the kids are enjoying their year off. And yes, we teach family planning. We need lots of children, but we need them to be born into families that want them and are ready for them. Right now, we’re devoting a lot of our workforce to salvaging, cataloguing, and storing the machines and supplies we will need in the future since we just don’t have the personnel to build them again. It may be generations before we have the carrying capacity to resupply our needs from scratch. Conservation, maintenance, and repair are big operations for us nowadays.
We also have the start of our own Coalition armed forces. The Navy has been able to get a fair number of small coast guard type patrol boats and ships up and running. They’re spending most of their time lately getting ships that were derelict at sea under control. We found several sailors, cruise passengers, or staff trapped on ships surrounded by dead shipmates. Usually we found solitary individuals who were the sole survivors, but occasionally, there were two or three surviving together. We located almost all the survivors because of their emergency signals. Of course, if they didn’t know how to send out a cry for help, we didn’t always find them in time. As for the ships themselves, we don’t have a plan yet as to what to do with all the ships we’ve inherited, but no matter what we end up doing, the largest will probably never go out to sea again. It’s not an expense problem; it’s a lack of people problem. Fortunately, we have the expertise to mothball them so that’s what we are doing, albeit slowly.
Several ships just kept sailing until they grounded themselves when they ran out of ocean. Sometimes they created a mess that we just aren’t really able to clean up very well. The same thing happened when they ended up sinking. We have some oil slicks, and some oil leaks that may be around for years. It’s very depressing, but we’re learning how to mitigate the problems as best we can.
Aside from some cargo ships, and a few of the smaller cru
ise ships, the largest Navy ships we plan on maintaining are cruisers. We’re establishing regular runs to all points of the former developed world where our Coalition Communities are located. Right now we have reinstated an officer-training program and an enlisted training camp. It looks like we will have to wait until after the Gap Year before we start getting many new volunteers. We also decided to include our current members of the armed forces in the Gap experience if they’re interested. That decision reduced the military numbers a bit, but like on the civilian side of things, it allowed us to get better organized before we start building and training a serious Coalition Navy. We’re essentially starting from virtually nothing, organization-wise, since survivors were few and far between. Merging all the disparate parts has been a bit of a challenge, and of course, we don’t want the young men and women who have volunteered to protect and serve our communities to miss out on the Gap experience. If we don’t do it now while things are still pretty calm, we may not get to do it. We have no illusions that this will be a cakewalk as time passes. We know there are bad guys out there.
We also have the beginnings of an Air Force. As with the Navy, we’ll mothball most of the equipment and keep just enough of it activated for our own transportation and defense needs. Right now, the only places we have regular armed patrols, whether Naval or Air Force, are our coastal areas and the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the South China Sea. Much of Africa and large parts of Asia are dangerous now. We have no choice but to look the other way when it comes to most unorganized areas, no matter how much we want to help. First of all, we don’t have the personnel to make a difference, and we’re still training. We would end up getting a lot of people killed, and we wouldn’t be able to permanently solve the problems anyway. It’s a variation of what my mom used to tell me: “You aren’t the answer to their problems”. Only now it’s “we aren’t the answer to their problems.”
On the other hand, even though some areas of South America aren’t organized yet, the local communities down there are actively engaged in search and rescue missions. Things are different in Africa and parts of Asia. It’s pretty wild in some areas. Despite that, people continue to just show up at one of our communities, sometimes after walking away from what sounds like the scariest situations imaginable.
Finally, we have a small Coalition Army. To me, it’s more along the lines of the Army and the Marines combined. After the Battle of Indianapolis, we decided to keep a standing Army ready to deal with the badly behaved amongst us. We concluded the trial of the Hawkins’ Gang back in May. I just consider us to be very lucky on that one. The good guys (us) knew how to fight, and the bad guys (them) didn’t. We’re a lot more ready now than then, and in a year or two we’ll be incredible, at least for our size. The old world was Gulliver, and this new one is Lilliput.
As Executive Director of the Coalition of Communities, I spend my time reading reports and sending out letters or making calls of encouragement. I also spend a lot of time setting up ad hoc think tanks to deal with problems as they pop up. There isn’t a single organization or institution that survived even partially intact. In a way, that may have made this all easier since we’re developing what I hope are pragmatic solutions for all the challenges. Most of the time, we have the expertise, it’s just scattered all over the place.
Irma
Year 1
April 1
As soon as Bobby invited me into his office I knew what was coming. I can’t say no to Bobby, but in fairness to me, I don’t think many people can. He thinks he’s shy and introverted and doesn’t know anything about survival after a pandemic, and he’s right, of course. But to be honest, no one knows what to do in a situation like this. One thing Bobby has, though, is good instincts. He instinctively knew that we didn’t have time to wait and grieve. We had to get people together to solve problems. He also instinctively knows that someone, somewhere, has the answer, or at least part of an answer, to almost any problem we face. In his mind, the best thing to do is get the right people in a room and start asking questions until the answer is plain to everyone. He has, as he calls them, ‘think tanks’ going on all the time. The military people are headquartered in Chicago, Shanghai, and Paris, but they do all their group meetings in SLO. Bobby says that not only does it produce results, it forces us to keep the lines of communications open. He wants people to be on the move because if we get used to staying home and playing in our own back yard, that’s what we’ll do all the time, and we’ll lose our means of transportation and then our transportation infrastructure, and then we’ll start fragmenting, and fighting and eventually, well fall back into the dark ages. I’m pretty sure one of the think tanks came up with that, but it could have been Bobby for all I know. It makes sense to me no matter where it came from.
One of the good things about Bobby is he isn’t a micromanager. That’s also one of the bad things about Bobby, because he expects people to do things that might not be comfortable to them solely because it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately for me, I was a divorce attorney when the sickness happened, and there’s not a lot for me to do in that field lately. There was only one complete family, at least that I know of, that came through this thing intact: the Modi family in Manhattan, and I don’t think they want a divorce. There have been a couple of marriages already, but it’s a little soon to see me hanging up my shingle and going back to work. So, until I have to take up some teaching responsibilities at the university in SLO, I’m pretty much at loose ends.
In the meantime, Bobby likes to ask me questions about the law and how evidence works and so on. He’d probably like to take some law classes one day, but for now, he really is way too busy, and he won’t let anything come between him and his family time. He’s laidback at work, but he’s a fanatic about family time. Like most of us, he believes our kids have been brutalized enough.
That’s why, when he told me he needed me to go to Bloomington, Indiana for the Hawkins Gang trial, I knew I couldn’t say no. I asked Carl Markowitz to come along and, of course, he loves this sort of thing. Frank Higgins, a former defense attorney in Los Angeles, asked if he could come along as well, and Bobby naturally agreed. The more the merrier he said.
So there we were in Bloomington where Frank had offered help to the Hawkins Gang defense team as Bobby’s representative, and I was assisting the prosecution by interviewing potential witnesses. I didn’t think we’d be in Bloomington very long since I thought the defense team would ask for a change of venue, probably to Chicago, and I was right. Before Frank got here, I think they were planning to ask for the trial to be moved to Panhandle, but I’m sure Frank steered them to Chicago. Panhandle isn’t a member of the Coalition, and they didn’t want it anyway. Panhandle is a bit peculiar, but they aren’t hooligans. They don’t like rapists and murderers any more than we do. What they do like is white people and Capitalism, and that doesn’t make any sense at all in today’s world. They’ll figure it out, eventually.
As soon as we arrived, we were met by the Speaker for Bloomington, a former real estate broker named Sofia Metzger. When the classical musicians survivor group chose Bloomington as the home of the new Coalition Symphony, she immediately took to the want ads blog that Todd set up for all the different work groups and invited all classically trained or oriented professional or amateur musicians to make Bloomington their new home. One of the attractions for making Bloomington the center of classical music right now is that before the sickness, the University of Indiana was probably the world’s largest music school. A lot of the musicians who took part in the symphony discussion had roots here. Besides, New York and London aren’t that big and exciting anymore, although both of them are still larger than Bloomington. There were already concerts going on most evenings in Bloomington even before we got here. Carl and I attended a string quartet concert the first night we arrived. It was broadcast on the new Coalition TV station. Carl, who knows a fair amount about serious music, said they played a light program, but that the quartet wo
uld undoubtedly get stronger as they worked with each other more. Amazingly, the quartet members were all on the breakfast crew the morning after their concert. It reminded me of how so many pre-sickness actors in Hollywood survived by waiting tables before they got started with their acting careers.
Their music brought back memories of life before the sickness. It was so reassuring, and I was going to need a lot of reassurance because I was helping interview the victims of the Hawkins Gang. It was a shattering experience. I interviewed several in the days before the trial began. One girl in particular stood out, not because she was particularly brutalized because they all were treated horrifically. She stood out because she managed to escape.
When the Gang appeared at the intake desk on the day of their takeover, they quickly murdered Charles Smith and Maxine Berger whose only crime was that they were sitting at the intake table and Stanley Hawkins wanted to establish his credentials as a man not to be disobeyed. Kerry Ramsey was a freshman in one of the colleges in Indianapolis when the sickness struck so she had followed the sound of the initial siren and had checked herself in at the intake desk just two hours before Hawkins showed up. She was watching some of the children and was immediately taken into captivity by the Gang. She, along with all the other women and girls between the ages of 10 or so up to maybe 50 were taken into the Sandoval Hotel where they were locked into one of the conference rooms on the second floor. Then, a few at a time were taken to various rooms, stripped, and chained to a bed. She told me all the women tried to be strong for the little girls who were screaming in terror as they were dragged from the conference room. The gang took the younger girls first and it was horrible hearing them wailing as they were carried away. Then it was her turn and she found herself crying frantically just as the younger girls had. The man controlling her slapped her and called her all the names she had heard bandied around high school and college, but when they called her a bitch, she knew they meant exactly that. To them she was no longer human. She tried to tell herself it was just locker room talk, but when someone is feeling your crotch without you’re permission, making sure you understand they’re the boss, and you’re powerless to protect your own body, she experienced just what that locker room talk meant as it was acted out on her.
