2nd Earth: Shortfall (5 page)

The second day of the rain we have another family show up and ask if they can join us. Naturally we invite them in. Some of the families are familiar to some of the others because they have seen each other around. Until recently though, everyone was afraid to trust one another. Besides it’s easier to find shelter and the essentials when there is a smaller group. Our group really doesn’t have what you can call a leader, although most if not all the people look to Tim and me for guidance. We don’t take that responsibility lightly. We have both led missions with our SEAL team and know the importance of having someone willing to take charge when a crucial decision needs to be made. We have been discussing some possibilities with Dayna and Charity and of course we have also included Dayna’s father, Billy and his mother and some of the others that are their family’s leaders. We feel that we are going to have to make a very big decision soon and we want to make sure everyone can stand by what we are proposing.

On the third day of the rains we have our fighting practice. Dayna and Charity are enjoying using Tim and me for punching bags just a little too much. I have fought men that didn’t hit as hard as they do. Maybe when she sees the bruises she will take it easy on me. Today I am looking out the window at a truck that is parked across the street from the building. It reminds me of a truck that Gunny and I rebuilt when I was fifteen. I remember buying that truck for twenty dollars from a junk dealer and was so proud when I took Gunny to see it. He never said a negative thing about that beat-up old truck other than to ask me if I realized how much work it was going to be to get it in driving shape. We rebuilt that engine from the bottom up and with Gunny’s supervision I restored the body and rebuilt the suspension on that truck. Gunny was gone most of the time, but he left me detailed instructions of what to do and I followed them to the letter. When he would come home from a mission or whatever he was doing for the Marine Corps, we would go over what I had accomplished and I was so proud that he was pleased with the work I was doing.

Dayna comes over and asks me if I’m staring at a pretty girl outside. I tell her the prettiest girl in the world is right here next to me. Why would I even want to look at any others? She slips in front of me on the chair I am sitting on and wraps my arms around her. We really enjoy sitting like this even if the others tease us telling us to watch where we put our hands, there are impressionable young people around. This is really beginning to feel like what I imagine a family would feel like. It’s a good thing it quits raining during the night, we are starting to run low on some of the food items we have. When I can go out in the morning the first thing I do is check out that truck. I can’t believe I haven’t noticed it here before this. With four flat tires I don’t think anyone drove it here recently though. Tim, Billy, and I decide when we get back from getting food we will take a look at the truck and see if there is any way we can get it running again. We go back to the store a little farther from home and it is just like we left it. We gather as much of the food as we can load into our wagons and grocery carts. While we are here I decide to do something smart for a change and see what may be in the stock room.

We are all glad we did because canned goods are piled in cases from the floor to the tops of the racks in here. It looks like enough food to feed the family for the entire winter or summer, whichever season we are coming up on. The truck has to wait because we spend the rest of the day making trips and hauling cases of canned goods back to the home. We meet another small family and invite them to join us. This group has only four people in it. The leader is a woman of probably twenty-five and has three younger girls with her. She says they had a young man staying with them for a while, but she thinks he either joined the predators or they captured him. Either way she says they came looking for the four girls and they were smart enough to hide. They haven’t been able to find food in a couple of days because of all the rain so they are more than happy to join us. We only get a little while before it gets dark to check out that truck, it is in mint condition, but it has been sitting for at least thirty years. Tomorrow we are going to see if we can at least get it to turn over.

5

In the morning Tim and I don’t even wait to eat before we are outside checking out the truck. It’s a 1969, ¾ ton pickup with a slant six engine and a three speed transmission with the shifting lever on the floor. There is a toolbox behind the seat with a dent puller in it. That is very convenient, I use that to pull the ignition out and I can try to start it with a screw driver, which is also in the toolbox. As expected nothing happens, batteries don’t usually stay charged for twenty or thirty years if they are not being driven. I ask Dayna and her dad if they know of any garages or gas stations in the area. Dayna’s dad, whose name by the way is Tom, says he remembers cars and trucks and knows where we can find what we are looking for. He has been much more active and talkative the past couple of days. That could be because there are a lot of new people around or it could be just one new person, like Billy’s mom.

We head east for about ten blocks and sure enough there is a car dealership here. There are new pickup trucks in the lot and even on the showroom floor. All those tires are flat as well. We go back into the garage area and here we find tires that are on rims, but not on cars. They are soft, but not totally flat. Luckily this is a dealership for the type of truck we are working on so the rims will probably fit. I check around and find a generator in the shop that we are able to get running and a compressor that is building pressure in no time. We fill the tires full and check them for leaks. We find a small hydraulic jack on wheels so we take that with us as well. I always feel like we are stealing when we take things, I feel like leaving an IOU at least. We get everything back to the home with the help of a couple of grocery carts. We also found a five gallon can and filled it with gas from a tank they have in the garage. The gas in the truck may not be any good and there is a good chance this will not be either, but it is worth a try.

It takes us a good hour and a lot of laughing to get all four tires changed. They hold air so we are at least halfway there. Since it is a standard we figure we will push it to get it started, but first we have to clear the street of enough debris to get it going in. With that done, I climb in while Billy and Tim push the truck so I can jump start it. It coughs a few times, but doesn’t seem to be firing so we dump some gas right into the carburetor and try again. This time it actually catches and runs until the gas is gone in the carburetor. It takes several tries before we get it to stay running for any time at all. Our family is very impressed with our mechanical prowess and can see the advantage if we can get motorized transportation. Dayna and Charity are as proud of us as they can be. After our efforts to drive the truck we spend some time working out and on our fighting then have a nice celebration meal and either read or work with the others to teach them to read.

In the morning the truck starts up pretty easily compared to yesterday. We still have to push it, but it at least catches and is pumping gas to the engine. We decide there is no better time than the present to see if it will go far enough to be any good, so we decide to drive to the market we have been going to most recently. On the way we pass a couple of other stores and decide to check the stock rooms to see if anything has been missed. We are pleasantly surprised to find at least two pickup truck loads of canned goods in this markets stock room. I also find an excellent set of knives in the meat department. Just because we have nothing to cut up yet, doesn’t mean we never will have. The truck is working great, it runs a little ragged, but that is probably from condensation in the gas tank. While we are out on our third trip of the day we decide to stop at the gun shop and clean out the basement cache. Luckily it is still there and with the help of a couple flashlights and some of the men from our family we load everything in the truck and take it home. There is enough guns and ammunition here to start a small war and keep it going for some time. We realize that another thing we are going to have to teach everybody is how to shoot.

With the truck running we have much more mobility than before. We decide to check the stores that everyone thought were empty and we actually do find some cases of good food in the stock rooms. On the fourth day after getting the truck running we are driving through a residential area of the city where there are mostly houses. Tim tells me that he recognizes this part of town, his grandparents used to live in a neighborhood very similar to the ones we are now in. We don’t like going into people’s homes, but back in the 60’s a lot of these homes were owned by European immigrants and they were usually big on canning and saving foods. Sure enough we find canned fruits like peaches, pears, apricots, and several kinds of vegetables and even preserves in jars along with some canned foods in cans not jars.

Wherever we find them we make sure the seal is still tight and then load the truck with as much as we can carry. It doesn’t take long to fill the truck, but we plan to come back to check for more. As I said before, we feel like we are stealing, but it will only go to waste if someone doesn’t use it. Many of the jars and cans we find have broken seals from the time they have been here. I remember Ma Horton telling me once when we were canning tomatoes that she read an article that said someone once found canned fruit that was over fifty years old and was still fresh in the jars. Some of the jars we found today even have meat in them like beef chunks and we found several large canned hams in one of the homes. If they are still good that will be a real treat for us all. One of the books I wanted to get at the library, and I was lucky enough to find two of them, is the Farmers Almanac. The reason I wanted that book is so that we can see approximately how much daylight we have on different days of the year so that we can figure out if it is fall or spring.

We have two almanacs from two different years and they show that the amount of daylight on any given day is pretty close from year to year. Tim and I have been keeping track and since the hours of daylight are getting shorter we figured out that it must be fall. We also figured out by the number of daylight hours that we are probably in mid October. Pretty good thinking if I do say so myself. When I explain this to Dayna she tells me all I had to do was ask if it had been warm or cold for a long time before we got here. All I asked her was if she knew what month it is, she doesn’t, but she knows that it will soon be cold for a long time before it gets warm again. We decide since we are just a bit obsessive about keeping track of time that we use the information that we obtained using the almanac, along with a calendar that we found in the office, which is one of those that shows twenty years in small print on the back. We are saying that today is the 20
th
of October. Unfortunately we have no idea what year it is.

When Tom and Billy’s mom hear what we are doing they tell us they recall how old they were when the attacks came and they have kept track of how many winters they have lived since. Going by their memories, which are probably a lot more accurate than our method of finding the date, we determine it has been twenty-nine years since the attacks which came in 1969 so we figure that it is somewhere around 1998. That is still eleven years earlier than the time we came from. Since we have a date to go by we figure what day of the week it should be based on leap years and all that stuff. According to the calendar today is Friday, Tim says that’s good to know. Since tomorrow is Saturday we get to sleep in. Dayna and Charity don’t understand why, but they say anytime we want to stay in bed later is okay with them. We tell them that since today is Friday we should celebrate. They don’t know what I mean so I go into our room and come back with something that Dayna has been asking me about all week, at least since I brought it home with us.

When we were going through some of those homes looking for food I found a pretty nice stereo system for the day. There was also a fairly extensive record collection, and I found some other records that seem familiar from when I used to listen to the oldies channel, when we were going through some of the other stores and homes. Our generator is working great, so while we are using the lights to read by this evening, we also get to listen to some music. The older members of our family are very excited because they remember the songs and the music we have. Tom and Billy’s mom start dancing together the way they used to dance back then. Actually just about all the girls and even some of the guys are doing what they see the older folks doing. Dayna isn’t about to sit and watch while others are having such a good time so I have to show off my moves. Yeah right, it’s more like I have to be very careful not to break her feet because of my clumsiness. Of course, Tim is a good dancer which makes me look even worse. This is probably the best evening we have had as a family. We are really coming together as a group and everyone is pulling their own weight.

In the morning everyone is humming or singing their favorite song from last night. Dayna talked for quite a while last night, after we went to bed, about how that is probably the most fun she has ever had. She amended that to be the most fun she has ever had with a group of people around. She is really something. I don’t know how I ever got along without her before we met. I know I don’t want to try now that I have. Since we have determined that it is soon going to be winter we decide to get all the food supplies as well as winter clothing we can and find another library so that I can find the books I think we are going to need. We are also going to the car dealership where we found the tires and see if we can get another pick-up truck or better yet a 1-1/2 ton stake body and an enclosed truck with a good sized box on it. We walk to the dealership while Billy takes the pick-up truck, along with a couple of the young men, looking for food. Tim and I along with Dayna and Charity find what we are looking for in trucks, but again the tires are flat. Since Tim and I both worked on cars and at garages from time to time for spending money. So we are able to get the tires off the trucks, and after starting the generator and the compressor, we are able to change them for what appear to be good tires.

They do hold air, now we just have to be able to push them fast enough to get them started. We even find the keys to the trucks we want, so after filling them with gas, we are able to push the pick-up first and it actually starts on the fourth or fifth try. The stake body takes a little more probably because we can’t push it quite as fast as the other one. By this time it is getting late so we decide to drive the two new trucks back to the house and see what kind of day the others had. The others are all excited to see our success and are proud to show how much food they found, and some records that they managed to find as well. Billy says they found a library and can show us where it is, he says there are a lot more books than in the first one. They have a couple boxes of books that looked interesting to them, and as luck would have it they got some of the type I am looking for. Marty, who is one of the young men that was with Billy today, says they had a run in with the predators. Billy says it didn’t really amount to much. They were checking a store for canned goods in the stock room, and when they came out there were three predators waiting for them.

“Just as we saw them, this lady and three other people came in the store. The predators went after them rather than mess with us I guess, but we weren’t going to let them bother the others either. They ran out of the store with the predators following close behind, with us after them. It must have looked funny if anyone was watching. One of the predators got to the lady and grabbed her by the hair from behind. Luckily I got there just a few seconds later knocking him down. The lady fell as well, but she jumped up and ran.”

Marty says he and Chip, another of the young men, called to the lady that they could help her, but she kept running. In the meanwhile, Billy was fighting with the three predators, and was not really having any trouble with them. After the fight, which ended fairly quickly, they went back to the store to load the groceries they found in the stock room. They were hoping the lady and the others would come back and they did, just as they were getting ready to leave.

“The lady asked if we left any food in the store and we told them there is still some, however if they would like they can join our family and we will help them, so they don’t have to worry about finding food, or about the predators any more.”

An attractive woman comes over from the side of the room and tells me she hopes they are welcome, because this is an answer to her prayers. She says they were part of a group with ten people in it, but they woke up a couple days ago and the others were all gone. They have no idea where they went and haven’t seen them since. We tell her that she and the two young ladies and the one young man in their group are welcome. They have already been told about our fighting classes which are going very well, and about everyone learning how to read. The rest of the evening goes by with us who can read, working with those who can’t. Since we know tomorrow is Sunday, at least by our calculations, we feel it would only be right to have some sort of church service. Now don’t go getting the idea that I am some kind of saint or Bible thumper. I’m neither, but Ma Horton went to church every Sunday, when she could and I went with her. It didn’t hurt near as much as I thought it would at the time.

The next morning we get up, and since the Bible says that God rested on the seventh day after spending six days creating the earth, we are declaring Sundays the day we don’t work unless it is absolutely necessary. We spend about an hour taking turns reading from the Bible, and then talking about what it means to each of us. We may be way off base, but to us it is important that we understand what each of us is looking for, and maybe how we can all help each other attain these goals. We have the older people who were taught to pray by their parents, even if they may have forgotten how for a while, teach the rest of the family. I know how I learned to pray, and I have to admit that it is more like carrying on a conversation with a friend than talking to God. Ma Horton taught me to pray that way, so I figure it can’t be all bad.