AFTER THE DUST SETTLED (Countdown to Armageddon Book 2)

by Darrell Maloney

  “Dad and Joyce planted some more trees, over that way. More apples, but different kinds than these. Also peaches and pecans and plums, I think. They don’t have any fruit on them yet, so these will have to do for another couple of years or so. But they’re good apples.”

  Rachel thought so too. She ate two of them while they sat under the tree getting to know each other. She’d have eaten more, but she felt her stomach getting just a bit queasy.

  And she found two of the best looking apples on the tree to take back to her mom and sister.

  By the time they made it back to the house, they were on much better terms. She, for her part, softened just a bit. At least enough to have opened up a bit on her dreams for the future.

  As for Zachary, he was still trying to decide whether he liked this girl or not. She had a rough exterior, but he suspected she was all girl on the inside. She might never become his girlfriend, but they’d at least be great friends. He was sure of that. As long as she didn’t start threatening to beat him up again.

  -45-

  There was no longer room at the dining room table for everyone in the group, so they set up a kids table in the corner of the dining room for Zach, Rachel and Misty.

  At first, Zach was offended, and stated so.

  “I’m not a damn kid anymore. I’m fourteen years old!”

  Linda was having none of that.

  “You use that word again you’ll be fourteen years old and missing some teeth, young man. And last I heard, fourteen wasn’t grown up yet. So technically you’re still a kid.”

  He sulked, until little Misty chimed in.

  “If you’re not a kid, how come you’re acting like one?”

  Out of the mouths of babes…

  In the end, though, Zachary learned to like the kids table. He got to sit next to Rachel, who he was developing a real fondness for, and they could talk about things that interested them, instead of the gloom and doom that the adult conversation usually steered to.

  On this particular evening, talk at the “big people table” turned to the changing weather, and things that needed to be done before winter set in.

  Scott said, “We still need to dig that trash pit before the ground gets hard. It’s a lot harder to get motivated to go out and work when it’s cold outside, too. Jordan, do you want to help me?”

  “Sure. But tell me again why we need a trash pit? I mean, we’ve been burning the trash in a pile all this time and it seems to have worked out fine.”

  Scott laughed.

  “Sure, it seemed to for you, because you were always in the house watching it from the windows. You weren’t the one out there when the wind started to swirl, standing by with a water hose in case one of the embers got blown onto the roof of one of the barns.”

  Tom added his two cents.

  “Yep. The wind does tend to go in circles inside the compound. I guess that’s Mother Nature’s way of telling you she wasn’t happy about you putting up a big fence to block her wind’s natural course. But I’ll help as well. What’s your plan?”

  “I thought I’d dig a pit about six feet square and sixteen feet deep. Not so deep we can’t climb back out of it with a ladder. Put sections of irrigation pipe in the corners with half inch holes drilled in it so it gets air all the way down. Then once it’s done we can just fill it up with garbage. When it’s full we can dump a little gas on it, let it smolder as long as it wants until it burns down to ashes. Then we can fill it back up again.”

  “How do you plan to keep the youngsters or the animals from falling into it?”

  “Well, I first thought about putting a plywood fence around it, but decided that might be a bad idea because of the ember problem. Then I remembered that we have all that sheet metal left over from when we turned one of the barns into a big Faraday cage. Might as well put it to use to line the plywood on the inside of the fence so it doesn’t catch fire and burn down.

  “Want to start tomorrow?”

  “Sure. Why not? With the three of us working a few hours a day, it shouldn’t take but a few days. Then maybe we can start thinning the herd after that.”

  That got Joyce’s attention.

  “You’re going to thin the herd? But why?”

  “I’ll let Tom explain it. He’s the expert, and the one who suggested it.”

  Tom finished chewing a bite of pork roast and said, “You’ve got too many cattle. You should only have two bulls. Your best breeding bull, and another one in case the first one goes sterile or dies. And two or three cows. If you have any more than that, they’re just taking up space and eating up your feed supply.”

  “Well, I guess that makes sense.”

  “Something else we’ve decided to do is talk to John when he gets out of the hospital. See if he can find a big patch of grazing land and the people to guard it. If he can set something up where a herd of cattle can grow without somebody poaching them, then we’ll take him a bull and a couple of cows. If they slaughter their oldest cow for every second calf that’s born, their herd will grow and also give everybody an occasional steak. Eventually their herd will be big enough to feed hundreds of people, if they can protect it.”

  “So after what we want to leave for our own herd, and what we want to take down the mountain, we’ll have three head to butcher.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot of beef. Where are we gonna put it all?”

  Tom said, “I looked at the chest freezer over at my place. When I cranked up the generator, it seemed to work fine. So Scott and I are going to put it across the bed of one of the Gators and haul it over here. Between that one and the two you’ve already got, it should hold most of the beef. And we’re going to turn a bunch of it into beef jerky to take back down the mountain with us. It’ll be shelf stable and won’t have to be refrigerated, but will retain most of the protein that those folks will need down there.”

  “Have you guys ever butchered a cow before?”

  “I have, many times. And I’m going to walk Scott through the process. Anybody else who wants to learn, too. It’s one of those things that you never know if you’re going to have to do someday. Especially in these troubled times we live in.”

  Linda said, “I’d like to learn.”

  “Well, come on out then, little lady. The more the merrier. But I have to warn you ahead of time, it’s not a clean process. You’re likely to lose your appetite for meat for a few days the first couple of times. It’s not like walking into a supermarket and picking up a couple of steaks.

  “After a time or two, though, you’ll get past the bad part and won’t think anything of it.”

  “Okay, count me in. When do we start?”

  “We’ll wait until after we dig the trash pit. By then we’ll see if the flies are gone for the year. If they’re gone, we’ll go ahead and do the butcherin’”

  “What do the flies have to do with it?”

  “Once we skin the carcass we’ll hang it up to cure for a day before we cut it up. That lets the adrenaline work its way out of the meat and it tastes better. If you’ve ever eaten beef with adrenaline in it, you’ll know how bad it tastes.

  “We need to wait until the flies are gone so they don’t lay eggs in the beef while it’s curing. Don’t want maggots in the meat either.”

  Joyce put down her fork and looked Tom directly in the eye.

  “Would you three mind terribly finding something to talk about besides blood and guts and maggots? Some of us are still trying to eat our dinner.”

  Tom felt sheepish.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  -46-

  Hannah was a go-getter and a hard charger. She jumped right in, helping out wherever she could and insisting that she and the girls have chores to do like all the others.

  Linda tried to protest.

  “But you’re our guests here. After everything you’ve been through, you should just relax and enjoy life again.”

  But Hannah was having none of it.

  “I appreciate it, sweetie. But us b
eing here makes more work for everyone else. More food to cook, more vegetables to pick, more dishes to wash. It’s only fair that we pitch in to help. And besides, it may sound strange, but doing housework and working in a garden and doing laundry makes me feel… normal. And I haven’t felt normal in quite a while.”

  Jordan happened to be walking by.

  “Oh, then you can relate to Zachary. He’s never been normal.”

  Zachary, working the security console nearby, yelled, “I heard that. Shut up, Butthead!”

  Hannah spent some time with Sara too. They’d taken out a calendar and tried to figure out when she’d conceived. Their best guess was that she was about five months along now, give or take two weeks. That meant they’d welcome in the new year with a new baby.

  Hannah was concerned, though, to find that Sara’s family tended to miscarry, especially with the first baby.

  “My mom had two miscarriages before she had me,” Sara told her. “My aunt had them too. She, my aunt, never was able to have any children. I was the only one for my mom. She said she wasn’t up for trying for a second one. She used to call me her special gift when I was little.”

  Hannah wasn’t aware of the recent problems Sara had had with her mom and step father.

  “Your mother sounds like a very sweet woman.”

  “Yes. She once was.”

  Hannah sensed there was more to tell, but Sara didn’t seem to want to talk about it. So she didn’t pry.

  They would have been interrupted in the middle of it anyway.

  “Hannah!” Joyce yelled from the security console. “Robbie’s on the radio for you!”

  Hannah went running. It had been two days since Robbie’s last update on John. Two long days of wondering and worrying, and it had been driving her crazy.

  “Hi, Robbie. It’s Hannah. How’s he doing?”

  “Well, it seems to have hit him pretty hard. The doctor said he’s having a rough time of it because he was just so damn exhausted, and that complicated things. Also, the doc said he waited too long to go in. He should have gone as soon as he felt the symptoms.”

  “That’s my fault. He wouldn’t go in until the girls and I were safely away from there.”

  “Oh, hush. It’s nobody’s fault. And the doc says he should be fine despite that. It just might take him a little longer to recover.”

  “Did they say how long?”

  “No. They said it depends on how their supply of amoxicillin holds out. Did you know he’s allergic to penicillin?”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Well, the penicillin is plentiful, but they couldn’t give him that. They’re giving him amoxicillin instead, but they don’t have a lot of it, so they’re only giving him half doses. They say it’ll keep the infection in check, and will eventually cure him, but it’ll take longer.

  “I guess the bottom line is this. Get comfortable and don’t promise the girls he’ll be out any time soon, because it may be a few months.”

  A tear formed in Hannah’s eye but she ignored it.

  “That must be driving John crazy. He hates lying in bed. He always has.”

  “Oh, you don’t know the half of it. He’s driving the nurses nuts. Keeps trying to get up and walk around. They had to hide his prosthesis, thinking that would keep him in bed. But he got out anyway, started hopping around on one leg. Said he needed his exercise despite his exhaustion.”

  “Yep. That’s John, all right.”

  “Anyway, the doctors finally told him he was too weak for such foolishness and that such antics would delay his recovery even more. That’s when he finally calmed down and accepted the inevitable.”

  “Did he have any messages for me and the girls?”

  “Just that he loves you all very much and to please give the girls each a kiss. But he said to be sure to say it was from him so they knew it was special. Otherwise they’d think it was just a regular old Mommy kiss.”

  Hannah managed a laugh.

  “Tell him I love him too. And thank you, Robbie.”

  “You bet. I’ll call again in a couple of days. Signing off now.”

  Joyce looked at Hannah and said, “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

  “He is. He really, really is.”

  -47-

  While the men were digging a big hole in the yard, the women had their own fall project. They’d taken two ladders to the old apple tree behind the compound, down by the fishing hole. And they picked as many apples from the tree as they could, so they didn’t freeze on the tree when winter set in and went to waste.

  After they’d gotten as many as they could reach, they tied a rope around the branches and played tug-of-war with them, trying to shake them enough to make the higher apples fall. And they were successful, for the most part.

  Their yield was a little over two bushels. Not bad at all for one old tree that had been picked at all season.

  And for the next three days it was hard for any of the group to walk into the house without feeling their mouth water. The women had baked five apple pies. Three were served after dinner, on three consecutive nights, with fresh cranked homemade vanilla ice cream. The others went into the freezer for another time.

  The apples that weren’t used for pies were canned or turned into apple butter.

  Their next mission was to gather as many pecans as they could from an old pecan tree even farther back on the property. They were a poor quality nut, not much bigger than a hazelnut, and with thick shells. But it was all they had until the paper shell pecan trees they’d planted started bearing more nuts. So they would have to do. They shelled them and put the nuts aside for Thanksgiving.

  As Tom put it, “I won’t mind having chicken for Thanksgiving instead of turkey. So long as there’s some good ole Texas pecan pie to wash it down with.”

  Linda did manage to put enough of the pecans aside to make a batch of pecan rolls. When they were hot out of the oven, she took a tray out to the yard for the men working on the pit.

  And after they finished the treat, she stayed and watched them for awhile, fascinated by the project.

  They were about twelve feet deep or so, judging by the distance the sixteen foot ladder protruding from the hole.

  Scott climbed down the ladder to take his turn. Jordan had just finished his shift in the hole, and was covered with dirt.

  Once Scott was at the bottom, Tom lifted the ladder to give him more space.

  Linda peered over the side and saw Scott below, digging up dirt and filling four buckets. Each bucket was attached to a rope, which was tied loosely to the bumper of the Gator.

  Once the buckets were filled, Scott yelled, “Okay.” Then he stood back to take a break while Tom and Jordan pulled the buckets to the top and dumped them into the back of the Gator. Once they dumped them, they lowered them back down and repeated the process.

  “Where are y’all dumping the dirt?”

  “We’re using it to build a low berm around the corn and wheat field. It’ll help keep some of the rainwater from running off before it can soak into the ground. Hopefully it’ll make it easier to irrigate the crops.”

  “It looks like a slow process.”

  “Well, yeah. But it’s not that bad. We’re pulling out about three feet a day or so, and this time a year there’s not much else to do. No crops to tend or anything.”

  “When are you going to start your butchering?”

  “We’re going to see what the weather looks like after we finish this project. If it’s still warm like this, and the flies are still out, we’ll wait a little longer. Bringing in the hay and tall grass will take four or five days. We’ll do that while we’re waiting for the flies to die off. Then we’ll winterize all the equipment and dismantle the shed over at my place.”

  “How come?”

  “To give the cattle some shade. The shed ain’t doing any good over there. So we’re gonna bring it over here and put it in the pasture, over the stock tank. Next summer it’ll keep the direct sunlight off
of the cattle’s water and give them a little bit of shade on a hot day. Nothing worse than drinking hot water on a hot day, whether you’re a man or a cow.”

  “That’s true. You’re a good man, Tom Haskins, thinking of the herd and all like that.”

  “Well, I figure they give their all for us. Might as well be civil to ‘em. Even if they are dumb animals. They’re still God’s creatures, and they give us an opportunity to survive. What are you ladies working on the next few days?”

  “We’re going to start harvesting everything in the garden today. I figure we’ve got three or four bushels of cucumbers and squash, and probably that much of tomatoes and potatoes. And that’s just the beginning.”

  “What are you going to do with ‘em?”

  “We’re making pickles out of half the cukes, then canning the rest. Canning the tomatoes and squash. We’ll put twenty pounds of potatoes in paper bags, then put ‘em in a tub surrounded by peat moss. According to the research we did on the internet last year, that’s the best way to preserve them so we can cut them into plugs for the spring planting.”

  “Joyce is going to use some of them to slice real thin and make potato chips. And the rest we’ll dry out in the oven. Some thick sliced for au gratin potatoes, and some grated for potato flakes.”

  “So I don’t have to give up my taters and country gravy over the winter months?”

  “No way, Cowboy. I know you wouldn’t survive without your taters and country gravy.”

  Tom smiled and leaned over to kiss her.

  “Ew, back off, Cowboy. You’re covered in dirt.”

  “Aw, a little dirt never hurt nobody.”

  “Come and see me after you clean up later. Then we’ll talk about it. You boys want some iced tea?”

  “Sure, that’d be nice, and thank you.”

  Linda turned to go into the house and met Sara halfway.

  Sarah asked, “What can I do to help the harvest? Hannah says we’re going to start gathering vegetables today.”

  “Are you sure you’re up to it?”

  “Oh, yes. Hannah says it’s important that I stay active and get some exercise, right up until the end. And that I need to spend time in the sun too so the baby gets lots of vitamin D.”