“Men, Fort Hood has fifty thousand troops and fifty thousand dependents. The food we, and other details, have sent back won’t feed that many people. The Post Commander has ordered that only five thousand married troops and their families will remain at Fort Hood. Those five thousand will make up and maintain the core of the command and will immediately begin farming activities. They will await orders from Washington and the return of government control.
“The remainder of the married troops and their families will remain at the food warehouses they are assigned to. Your dependents will be transported out here to you. As you will have noted, not all of the food has been removed from these warehouses. Enough food was retained to feed the stationed troops and families for a one-year start up period. During that time, these troops and their families are to move to a farm assigned to them, with the full cooperation of the farm’s owners.
“There is enough food to get them started. They will provide manpower and firepower to plant and guard crops. The farmers who own the land will benefit from their presence, and the troops and their families will benefit from the land and the farmer’s expertise in a mutually advantageous arrangement. These farms have been previously identified and their locations have been made known to your officers. Those of you affected will receive additional orders tomorrow.
“The remaining troops are unmarried, or their families are not located at Fort Hood. Each of these soldiers is immediately placed on indefinite inactive reserve status, subject to recall at any time. Each soldier will be provided with a
one-month supply of MREs, his field weapon and five hundred rounds of ammo. The soldiers in this status may be transported to Fort Hood to leave from there, if they choose. Or they can be discharged from here—whichever is in their best interest. Get with your officer after formation and let him know your travel preference. Troop dismissed!”
Adrian smiled. He knew where he was going to go: his uncle’s riverbank home, a hundred and fifty mile walk from here. Roman had insisted that should such an event ever come to pass, Adrian’s first duty was to get home. Once there he was released from any further duty to family and to do as he saw fit, but he was to come home first.
Adrian’s platoon was comprised of single men. Given their unusual missions, there was no place for married men in the group. Some of them would be heading south; leaving from Fort Hood would give them a better start. Some would go back to settle personal affairs or maybe pick up personally owned items. A few were like Adrian, foot loose enough that leaving from here would be best, not needing to go back.
As the troops were dismissed, they broke up into the usual groups to cuss and discuss their new orders. Most were hit with shock; they had never thought of the future before. Others still were deeply disappointed to be cut loose. They had stayed in the army because they didn’t care for civilian life; they wanted to be soldiers. It was their first encounter with being downsized, an unpleasant experience under any circumstances. Doubly so under these.
Adrian gathered his squad mates. There was the normal belly-aching to start the conversation off, but it quickly got down to brass tacks—what each of them was going to do. Adrian told his men to meet with him in half an hour as he had an idea he wanted to present to them.
Once he was done, he walked over to the lieutenant.
“LT,” Adrian said, “my weapon of choice is the shotgun, and I want to lay first claim to it since there is only one here that I know of, and I don’t need to go back to Hood. That OK?”
“Not a problem, it’s yours. I don’t think we have five hundred rounds of twelve gauge ammo with us though; maybe two hundred assorted. I really wish we could keep you and your men with us. I argued strongly for it, but was over-ruled. I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t sweat it, LT. I have other plans anyway, but I do appreciate the thought. Two hundred rounds are plenty to carry and should last me a day
or two. Would you sell me a set of your civvies? I don’t cotton to walking around out there in a uniform. I think it would make me stand out a bit too much.”
“Hell, Adrian,” the lieutenant laughed, “I wasn’t thinking of you when I argued to keep you; I was thinking of me. You can have some of the civvies that I brought. I’m one of the new farmers and fatigues are fine for farming. Meet me at my tent at 1900 hours and you can take your pick.”
Adrian saluted, said, “See you then,” spun on his heel in a perfect about-face and marched to the bivouac area to where his team waited for him. “OK, guys, here’s what I’m going to do. I have an uncle that lives about a hundred-fifty miles from here. He’s a crazy old coot that halfway raised me. He has been a doomsdayer his whole life and made some pretty good preparations for a disaster like this. I promised him that in the event, and should I be able to, I would come straight home at the first opportunity. I’m heading there in as straight a line as I can.
“When I get there, I’ll hang around awhile and then decide whether I’m staying there or moving on. Uncle Roman always insisted that I bring along anyone I wanted to. He’s put back quite a bit of food, and the hunting is good. The river is full of fish and turtles and ducks. It’s the best place I can imagine to go right now.
“So, here’s the deal. Each of you is hereby cordially invited by Uncle Roman to come home with me. Once there, you and he can get to know each other and you can decide if you want to stay or not. Knowing my uncle and knowing you guys, I have no doubt in my military mind that you’ll be welcomed with open arms to stay—and I have no doubt that you will like it there. In fact, I can’t think of any better place for any of you. But it’s your call to make. I only ask that you keep this quiet; I don’t intend to invite anyone else, and I don’t want anyone else trying to tag along. Think it over and let me know by 2200 hours tonight.”
By 2100 hours, Adrian had already heard from each of the five men. They were all coming with him.
The next morning, Adrian met the lieutenant at the temporary armory and picked up the selective fire twelve-gauge shotgun and one-hundred-seventy-five rounds of ammunition. The shotgun was capable of single fire, semi-auto, or full auto, delivering 20 rounds from the drum magazine in four seconds. It had a tube magazine when the drum wasn’t used, and looked pretty much like any black plastic stocked semi-auto shotgun.
Adrian could snipe with the best of them, but action was almost always close quarters, and nothing in the world was as effective then as twelve gauge double ought buckshot. The ammo selection also contained rifled slugs accurate to two hundred yards, accurate enough to take down either man or deer; birdshot; explosive rounds; and incendiary rounds.
The rest of the squad took their standard issue M4 5.56mm rifles. Each man also chose a sidearm, all but Adrian taking the 9mm. Adrian carried his own personal model 1911 .45acp; it delivered stopping power with perfect balance.
The men were issued MREs, which they packed into backpacks. At Adrian’s urging, each had scrounged civilian clothes to wear. They were going to look like a military patrol in civilian clothes no matter what they did, at least until their hair and beards grew.—although, until their beards and hair grew, they’d look like a military patrol no matter what. But Adrian was sure that uniforms would have been a problem.
The men were given their discharges and they set off. Before they got to the gate, Adrian halted the men and said, “OK, we can do this one of two ways. One, we can go on acting like we are still in the army. With me being the sergeant what gives the orders and you being the sergeants what follow those orders immediately and without question. Or two, we can be the civilians that we officially are. We can vote on everything and discuss each step. Either way is fine with me, but if we get into any kind of action at all, we have to have discipline or we are going to get waxed while we sit around chewing the fat. What do you say?”
Bollinger spoke up for the rest of the men, as he usually did. “Civilians—hell, we’re still army and at least until we get to Uncle Roman’s we stay army. Once there we can rec
onvene this pissing party and see what we want to do then. Move out, Sergeant. You’re wasting our daylight.” The rest of the men grinned and nodded, they never had a lot to say, they mostly did their talking with weapons.
Adrian’s group was the first to leave the warehouses and faced a novel situation at the gate. As usual there was a crowd of half-starved civilians waiting around, hoping for a food distribution. Each morning they were told there would not be a food distribution that day, or any other day, and to move on as they were wasting their time. But each day they did not listen, waiting and starving impassively.
At first the soldiers were bothered by this, but they were under strict orders not to share food. The soldiers soon grew irritated with these civilians for hanging around when they should have been out foraging for food. After a while they understood that these people were going to stay there until they starved or were forced to leave; they didn’t have the will to forage. It was an encounter with people that would never stand on their own two feet, always expecting others to take care of them.
As the squad reached the gate and the guards opened it, the civilian crowd stirred. This was different; army soldiers in civilian clothes were leaving the warehouse compound. Hope stirred in their eyes: hope of food and the nightmare of hunger coming to an end. They began to move forward, and then they started to run. It was turning into a stampede when Adrian fired a burst of fully automatic fire just over their heads, sending them diving for the ground.
Adrian shouted, “You civilians! Back up now or die right there—your choice! You don’t get a second warning!”
The mob began backing up, hatred written large on their faces, and as soon as they did, Adrian and his squad stepped out through the middle of them. The civilians turned and watched resentfully until they marched out of sight.
Chapter 7
Roman quickly acclimated to the new reality. He had been thinking about it long enough that it came as less of a shock to him than most; a fulfillment of a prediction. He had a lot to do and he knew that there wasn’t anyone else to do it, so he got to work.
The first thing was building his sand-filtration system for the water; a four-legged wooden box with a sloping bottom, standing four feet off the ground. He filled the box with clean sand and began pouring water through it. The box had a small hole in the bottom. The water would flow through the sand slowly and out the hole into a bucket. This was the first of three steps. The sand filter removed the majority of the debris that was in the water; small pieces of moss or other items. It did not make the water fit to drink.
The second step was to distill the water. While the river was crystal clear, it could still retain harmful materials, items either dissolved or just too small to see. Normal distilling required a lot of heat, and that meant burning a lot of wood. That required burning a lot of calories collecting and burning the wood. Roman had a better idea: a solar still. It would not require any more energy than the sun shining and very little human effort.
He dug a shallow and wide hole, which he lined with plastic sheeting. Roman had two large rolls of 6 mil, clear, plastic sheeting that he had purchased because the stuff was always handy. Once lined, a clean bucket was set in the middle of the hole on top of the plastic. The filtered water was poured into the hole with the plastic acting as a large bowl. To keep the bucket from floating, Roman put a weight inside.
Roman placed another sheet of plastic over the top of the hole and drew it almost tight. This plastic was allowed to sag an inch in the middle. He weighted the edges of the top plastic with rocks and dirt for an airtight seal. He placed a small rock on top of the plastic directly over the bucket, causing the sheet to droop in a shallow cone shape with the low point over the bucket. The hole had been located in an area that received sunlight all day.
As the sun heated the water between the layers of plastic, the water evaporated, leaving behind minerals and metals. The upper sheet blocked the evaporated water, where it condensed into droplets that, following the slope of the plastic, reached the low point where the rock held it down and dripped into the pot. It could take a single hot day, or up to three or four cool days to evaporate and condense into the pot. Because of the slowness of it, Roman set up multiple stills. By tending them every day, they had a constant supply of filtered and distilled water.
There was yet a third step to follow. Roman wasn’t one hundred percent sure that the water did not contain some biological agent that could cause sickness. While evaporated water wouldn’t normally carry biological contaminants, the low temperature of the evaporation still system, and the fact that contaminated water was close to and sealed up inside with the collection bucket, meant to Roman that bacteria could still get into the drinking water. Carefully collecting the water and putting it into mason jars, he then pasteurized it to kill any stray biological contamination. Using the cardboard and aluminum foil solar stills whenever the sun was out, the water could be brought to 160 degrees for six minutes—that would do it. The solar stills would bring a quart of water to that temperature in a couple of hours; it took tending, but it was a quick routine. Pure clean drinking water was an absolute survival essential.
Cooking water didn’t have to be pasteurized. The heat of cooking would do the same thing. Washing water could also skip the pasteurization process because it was used with soap and not internally consumed.
After taking care of the water situation, Roman cut some of the bamboo growing on his creek bank and made fish traps. Years before, Roman had purchased a bamboo-splitting tool. It was cast iron and looked like a small wagon wheel. This tool quickly and efficiently turned a bamboo stalk into eight narrow strips suitable for many purposes, especially basket weaving. The fish trap was a form of basket. It was shaped like a large minnow trap; two inverted cones allowed a fish easy access, but made it difficult to swim back out. It was a full day’s work for Roman and Sarah to make nine of them.
Roman wasn’t sure how many it would take to feed two people, but he wanted to have enough. He tied the bamboo strips together with reinforcing steel tie wire, of which he had several rolls because, once again, it was always coming in handy. In the future though, when he had more time, he would take a sharp knife and cut thin strips of bamboo “bark,” soak it in water until soft and use that.
They also made two turtle traps. These were like the fish traps but with larger openings. He only made two because he wasn’t certain how much turtle they would be willing to eat, not having any experience with it. If it turned out that more traps were needed, more traps could be made.
They placed the fish traps, which were baited with mussels they dug up and broke open with rocks, completely underwater in places where the fish would be channeled towards them. The turtle traps were placed near logs where turtles sunned themselves, with the trap tops partially out of the water so that any trapped the turtles could get air. These too were baited with smashed mussels.
After the first day, Roman pulled out all but four fish traps. Four traps provided enough fish for Sarah and him; he was still putting fish back. He put up the turtle traps because they were full of turtles. He kept one turtle to start with. After cleaning and cooking it, he decided that unless they became really tired of fish, he would save the turtle population for later days.
On the fourth day, Roman was getting some reception on his truck radio—not much, but enough to tell him the solar storm was passing on by. He unwrapped his ham radio, and installed the antenna up in a tree—not easy for a sixty-year-old-man. Living down in the river bottom, radio reception wasn’t great, so the antenna had to be as high up as possible. He began hearing broadcasts from many places around the world. As usual, just as they had during disasters like WWII, the ham network provided the best worldwide communication system. Ham operators have provided emergency communications, quietly and heroically, after disasters since before WWII, yet the public almost never heard about them.
The news he heard was almost as if he had written it himself. The entire world
’s electrical systems were down and weren’t coming back. Communication by satellite was a thing of the past. Those orbiting pieces of extraordinary machinery had become inert lumps of metal. The astronauts in the space station were in communication—those were some of the saddest conversations Roman had ever heard. They were showing signs of radiation sickness. Being out in space, their bodies were riddled with radiation and they were rapidly dying.
Food riots and mass starvation were the stories. Panic reigned in every city. Roman stopped listening to the general radio traffic. The news was predictable, there was nothing he could do about it, and it used battery time. While he could have talked to others, transmitting used up battery power—power he wasn’t about to waste just to talk. Roman had a solar panel battery charger, but it was slow. Instead, he turned on the receiver every night at 9pm and listened on the designated frequency for thirty minutes. He also made three short transmissions, letting any listeners know he was on the air.
On the sixth night he heard Jerry checking in. Roman quickly responded with Sarah listening. As they held hands, a rush of relief washed through them. Roman hadn’t realized how tense he had been, waiting to see if there would be contact. They quickly established where they were and what they were doing and how everyone was. Then to save batteries they both agreed to check in each night with a quick acknowledgement unless there were important things to say. Roman asked when they were leaving town. They explained about the sick children, and that it would be at least a month. Sarah was devastated.
After talking with Sarah a few minutes they made regretful farewells until tomorrow. Roman shut down the radio. Now he just had to worry about Adrian. But Adrian didn’t create much worry in Roman. Roman knew that Adrian was more than capable of taking care of himself; and since he didn’t have a family to worry about, Adrian would be fine. Sooner or later he would show up, healthy and fit.
A Distant Eden Page 5
