by Jf Perkins
Renewal
By J.F. Perkins
Copyright 2011 J.F. Perkins
Kindle Edition
Website/Blog: http://www.jfperkins.com
Renewal
Terry pedaled slowly, weaving through the broken patches of tar-and-chip and deep mud holes of yellow clay. He had once heard his pappy talking about driving down these old Coffee County roads in a 1991 Trans Am, usually at incredibly high speeds, to hear him tell it. Terry tried to imagine it, but kids of his generation didn’t dream of cars. He felt lucky enough to have a bicycle. His bike was handed down twice before he got it as a graduation gift. He was the third generation to own it, but only the second to ride it.
The idea of trying to wash all of the clay mud was forcing Terry to choose his path carefully, but he was beginning to feel the pressure of time. The sun was getting high and hot. He wasn’t too thrilled with the thought of camping out in the wilds of the county at night. Even though the population had been thinned out considerably during the Breakdown, there were still plenty of folks tucked out in the sticks who had not been seen in town for years and typically thought the crisis was still underway. Those people usually shot first, then stole anything they could find on a body.
He finally wobbled over the crest of the rise, and with a long view of the curving descent, abandoned himself to the thrill of a ragged downhill run to the Duck River. About halfway down, through bump and speed blurred vision, Terry saw a problem. The center of the bridge was gone. Two seconds later, he was sure and pulled his fingers into the brake levers. That was when he discovered the second problem. Slippery clay mud makes for lousy braking. When he was sure he would disappear through the missing span of the bridge, his front tire grabbed an island of surviving pavement, the bike slowed drastically as the rear wheel came up and over. He splashed through the next puddle and slid to a stop on his back while his tools burst from his old Rubbermaid tote, scattering far and wide. He heard a faint grinding sound and tilted his head up to watch his brand new tape measure skittering down the concrete bridge, only to stop 3 inches short of the gap.
His first thought was relief; his second, anything but. His brand new Reclamation Corps uniform was covered in a slimy, orange-tan mud that smelled vaguely of fish… and possibly goat. Terry got up, found his hat, also covered in mud, and began the process of gathering all his tools. The truth was, they weren’t even his yet. The tools, along with the uniform, came as part of his recent graduation from the reclamation engineering school at Manchester University. They called it a university, because frankly, no one had the energy or resources to care what they called it. Terry always thought it was a lofty name for a former storefront converted to a school with about three courses of study, all involving how to extract food from the ground.
In his case, Terry and about three other guys in the county were tasked with finding all the old farm fields that had been built into subdivisions way back in the 1990’s and figuring out how to turn them back into farms. The county had a couple of civil engineers as well, but judging by the roads, and the average age of the engineers in question, they spent most of their time trying to get a cool breeze to come through the county office windows. Anyway, building roads was no longer a big deal. If you could walk it, bike it, or get a goat wagon down it, that was good enough. The real money, outside of farming a piece of land you owned, was in reclamation. The only people with money were willing to figure out ways to expand their farms, not to spend money on smooth roads.
Terry was out on his first solo trip, and it would take at least a handful of successful returns before he could pay off his gear and the certification fee. He was thinking about how much crap he would take if he came home covered in mud, since he was pretty sure this trip had been hand-picked by the older guys to serve as his initiation. He wiped his tools on a rag to clean off the major clumps and placed each one back in the tote in turn. He lifted the old bicycle out of its own mud hole with a slight slurping sound and set about tying the tote back on the rack. The bailing twine had broken in two places and he was forced to join them together with anchor knots he had learn from pappy. By the time that was done, the hot spring sun had turned his mud coating into a stiff, crumbly brick veneer. He pushed the bike onto the bridge and left a trail of ragged globs of clay on the concrete.
He could see that someone had put a plank across the gap in the bridge, and after he picked up his tape measure from the scorched edge, stood for a long time trying to decide exactly how stupid it would be to try to walk across it. One look down to the river below, which was about 4 inches deep, and his command of math failed him. He was sure he intended to try and calculate the ability for a two-inch thick plank, roughly ten inches wide, to span a fifteen foot gap over a thirty foot drop into shallow water, but the numbers would not come. Eventually, he decided this was another challenge he could not fail to meet, if he wanted to pass his initiation, and decided to cross on some irrelevant aspect of faith.
In his fear, Terry was almost surprised to find himself on the other side. Not a problem. The north side of the river had a dirt path access to the water. He decided to clean himself up, and when he reached the far end of the bridge, he leaned the bike against a large limestone boulder and skidded his way down to the water. The hot May midday and a coat of mud had Terry convinced that the entire world was sweltering hot. When he removed his boots and socks and stuck his billfold in the left one, he found out the truth. The water was cold! He flopped down in the shallows and rolled around on the smooth river rocks underneath. Soon, he stood up shivering and decided that was as clean as he would get without a mild case of hypothermia. He dribbled streams of water as he splashed out of the river, took a quick look into the trees, and carried his boots up the short hill to his bike. He wanted to get moving quickly, due to the schedule he was trying to keep, and due to the fact that his entire generation was raised from birth to think like predators and prey. Sitting in the bottom of a tight valley made him itch with an imaginary target circled on his back. He threw his boots on top of the tote and walked barefoot up the hill.
At the top, he was no longer dripping. Terry was just miserably wet. He wrung his wool socks out and put them back on, along with his boots. He got remounted the bike and pedaled on, up Powers Bridge Road. Before long, he was passing an old school on his left. The sign was gone, like every other sign in the world, but his map told him it was once an elementary school. Now it was just a burned husk of ragged cinder block walls, the original brick cladding piled around the foundation. The rusting playground, ironically, still stood in relatively good shape off to the side. The road right at the entrance was devoid of pavement and blackened between scraggly weeds. He knew that meant that cars had once burned there, and they burned so hot that the ground underneath was just now recovering. He wondered if anyone knew the story of Hickerson Elementary. Maybe he could find it in the library, but there were literally thousands of battles fought in Coffee County after the whole country collapsed and there was no guarantee that this one would be a fight that was big enough to be recorded.
Terry started pedaling again as the hills near the river gave way to huge, flat fields, clearly operating as farm or pasture land when things went bad, but not in use today. It was still too far from town to make it feasible, he guessed. If this was too far, then it was sure bet he was being sent on a wild goose chase into the wilderness, since he still had a couple of miles to go. Of course, it could be that the land was just played out, and without nice petroleum-based fertilizers or enough manure-making animals left to cover it, there was not much to do except to wait for the fields to recover.
He was making good time when he made the left turn onto Blanton Chapel Road. He kept looking to his right, expecting to see a field full of 20th century disposable hou
ses any time now. He passed a few that looked like the right style, but nothing that matched the description the office had given him. When he had gone a half mile, and started back down into another creek valley, he knew he had missed it. The only possibility was the field with three houses, or the completely overgrown one next to it. He needed a better fix.
Part of Terry’s education was surveying, which was done in the old way, the way they did it before lasers and GPS. GPS had been gone for 35 years, when the Chinese decided to take out any satellites they could target. America made them pay for it, but it turned out to be one of the last effective jobs of the US Military. They took out the satellites, we nuked them back to the Great Wall, or at least that’s how it was always told. After that, and a whole lot of nuclear war in the Middle East, oil was mostly gone. America used the last of its own reserves to bring home anyone they could, to be deployed in the fight to maintain order in the states. Before long, it turned into an army with no fuel and no bullets, and a whole lot of panicking civilians with plenty of ammo. At that point, the soldiers just dissolved into whatever safe escape they could find. No one to this day would say much about grandparents in the military. In the end, the powers-that-were turned our own army against us. Even though most people understood they were just following orders, no one could shake the sense that those soldiers just should have known better.
Terry pulled out the local survey from an ancient leather binder in his box, and went searching for a nearby iron pin. He hacked his way across an overgrown ditch with a machete until he found a corner post that was still standing, despite the fact that the wire had dissolved long ago. He dug into the heavy grass around the base of the post until he found a bit of white plastic ribbon held under a metal pin. His sweat dripped on the ground while he caught his breath and realized how lucky he was lucky to find the pin so fast. He knew RE’s that had spent two days doing what he just did in 10 minutes, and plenty who never found the pin at all. Survey pins made decent weapons in a pinch and a good source of metal any time. The only reason they were still in the ground was that they were hard to find, unlike old metal road signs which became everything from primitive blades and arrowheads, to shingles and shutters on plywood huts. His own grandmother, bless her soul, had used one to roll biscuit dough when he was little.
With the pin located, Terry knew exactly where he was, and walked 100 yards back down the road to the place he had seen before. He rounded the row of thorny Osage orange trees that had grown up to replace the fence that was once there, and he saw immediately that everything was wrong.
First, the grass was cropped close to the ground, almost like someone was keeping it mowed. Second, the entire layout of the place was wrong. There was supposed to be an entrance road leading to a square drive crammed full of houses. Except for a patch of gravel over an old drain tile, there was no sign of any pavement at all. Instead of twenty-one houses, there were exactly three. Terry was a rookie, but he couldn’t help feeling stupid for missing the details on his first pass. That’s when he saw the man with the shotgun rounding the corner of the closest house.
Terry was unarmed, except for an old stainless Gerber belt knife. His first instinct was to run, but the man was too close, so close that Terry would get shot in the back just trying to mount the bike. Then he thought, wait a second, he was here on official business, and that ought to count for something, so he squared his shoulders and waited for the man to arrive.
The man could see that Terry was unarmed and moved his twelve-gauge from pointing to port arms. Terry breathed a quiet sigh of relief, thankful that this wasn’t a shoot first bandit. He held up his hand and said, “Hello, sir,” in what he hoped was a friendly but official way.
The man replied aggressively. “What do you want?”
Terry suddenly felt outmatched by forty pounds, at least twenty years, and of course by the shotgun. “Well, sir,” he stammered just a bit, “I work for the Reclamation Corps, and I was sent out to survey this land for, uh, reclamation, you see.”
The man turned his head without taking his eyes off of Terry, indicating the land behind him. “Looks pretty reclaimed to me.”
“Well, sir, the survey requests come from the legal land owner, so I guess whoever owns this land doesn’t know that.”
The man shrugged and said, “Me and mine have been here for over 11 years. I figure we own it now.” He waggled the end of the shotgun to emphasize the point.
Terry began to feel the embarrassment of a twenty year old sent back home with his tail between his legs and pulled himself up to his full six feet. “Sir, it’s my job to survey and report, and I intend to do just that.”
The man smiled a little, a tiny show of respect for the boy, and said, “Alright then. I don’t have any shells for this thing anyway. Why don’t you come up to the house, and I’ll show you around. My name is Bill, by the way.”
Terry relaxed and stuck his hand out. “Terry Shelton, sir.”
Bill gave his hand a single pump, and turned toward the houses. Terry shoved his bike across the ditch and followed across the grass. They walked into the shade of the first house, and Bill showed Terry where to park his bike. They kept going until Bill mounted the porch steps on the back of the middle house. The northern exposure kept it pleasantly shaded. Bill whistled and people appeared from three different doorways at once. Terry had another burst of nerves as he found himself surrounded by three more men, mostly in their forties, and four women, roughly the same age. The women looked older than the men on average, but Terry knew that was just how things worked these days. He definitely felt like a little kid among all these adults.
Bill set about introductions, “This is my wife, Aggie. Aggie, this is our local Reclamation Engineer, Terry…” Aggie was lean with long gray hair and deeply tanned skin. She wore the same jeans and cotton work shirt as everyone else. Terry shook her hand and looked her right in the eye. She looked back with considerably more force of presence, and Terry quickly looked away. Bill introduced everyone else in rapid fire sequence, but Terry couldn’t remember any of it. He did pick up on the fact that they were all related. The entire group was built around a set of siblings, he decided, but he failed to absorb the details.
Bill continued, “Our young friend here has been sent out to survey this land for reclamation.” This brought a chuckle from some members of the group. Terry blushed bright red as he realized that he was the butt of some kind of joke.
Bill slapped him lightly on the shoulder. “It’s ok, son. It’s just that every time we see some kind of ‘official’ out this way, it’s always trouble and never any help.”
Aggie saved him. “It looks like you had a hard trip, Terry. How about some sassafras tea?”
“That would be great, ma’am.”
Aggie stepped through the back door and the rest of the group went about their business, throwing light greetings over their shoulders as they dispersed. Bill smiled and waved toward an old aluminum chair with reeds where the nylon used to be. “Have a seat, Terry. Take a load off.”
Terry settled into the chair and couldn’t help but sigh as his legs relaxed.
“How was the Powers Bridge Road?”
“Well, sir. It’s pretty rough since the rain. Lots of mud.”
“I can see that,” Bill replied, looking Terry over with another smile.
“And the bridge has a big gap in it. No one told me.”
“Been that way for years. We keep it that way for a variety of reasons. I’m betting you are just out of school, right?”
“Yessir.” Terry looked at his hands.
“So, they’re messing with you, huh?”
“I reckon so, sir. I mean, the bridge is pretty close to town, and I’m sure somebody has been out here before now.”
“Yeah, they’ve been here. But those were tougher times. It’s been a while since we had any real problems out here. The bridge has been that way since ’22. Apparently there were two groups of real assholes on either side of the
river. The ones on the other side were getting pounded, so they blew the bridge and scattered. They were still assholes and mostly ended up dead. The ones on this side were a real problem for our folks, but they were mopped up inside of a year. Once they were gone, the last of the other group set up shop on the other side. Still there as far as we know. We heard their place is a real cesspit.”
“Well, it did smell pretty bad when I came over the hill. I thought it was just pigs or something.”
“Long pig, maybe,” Bill said with a grim look in his eye.
Terry’s eyes got wide. “People still do that?”
“Unfortunately, they do. Do me a favor. Drop the plank in the river on your way back. They won’t make trouble in a stand up fight, but they have been known to sneak across the river at night in search of easy prey. Luckily, easy prey we are not.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have shells, sir.”
“We don’t, but we do have a good supply of rifle ammunition, among other things. We got a young fella who could hit you a half mile away. He’s been upstairs watching you since you passed the woods by the old school.”
Terry was surprised again. “Really? I never noticed anyone.”
