THE DAY: A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series) (19 page)

Colonel
James B. Irwin Elementary School

Birmingham,
Alabama

              
"Hey,
Mom, what’s for dinner? I’m
really
hungry." Chris, twelve years old, was noted at the safe house for having
an empty pit for a stomach. The unavoidable problem was that the twenty
families had now been living for almost two months at the school named to honor
one of America’s astronauts who walked on the moon. The food the families
brought to the school was dwindling. On the first day Scott’s wife,
Sally, along with Audrey,
were
designated responsible
for meal planning. Soon after the families locked themselves into the school
Sally and Audrey inventoried the available food. They found that about three
fourths of the food was in the form of canned meat, vegetables and fruit. They
also counted over thirty bags of rice and beans. Dried spaghetti filled out the
food available to them. Within two days there was no more bread, fresh meat,
nor fresh vegetables or fruit.

              
Once
the inventory was completed, the forty adults met to plan how they would
consume the available food.
Scott, who was seen by the
families as their informal leader, asked Sally and Audrey to give their report.

              
Sally
listed for the group what the inventory showed, then said, "It’s
clear to me that we have only enough food on hand to feed eighty-seven people
for no more than seven weeks, give or take."

              
Beau
snorted and said, "
Hunh
?
What about all those canned goods and
bags of rice I saw when we moved stuff into the school kitchen? We must be the
worst
preppers
in the land."

              
Sally
looked down at her hand-written list, looked up at Beau and softly replied,
"Beau,
brother
Beau
, don’t forget that the
number of people is eighty seven. Multiply that number times three meals a day
and you need 1,827 meals a week. Beau, that’s over
7,800 meals a month
. Unless we can pray up some miraculous
expansion of the food in hand we will
barely
make
it seven weeks."

              
Audrey
added, "Here’s
worse
news. What Sally and I concluded, after counting up the food supplies, is that
we have to cut back to
two meals
a
day, even to make it through seven weeks."

              
"What?"
The heaviest set man
in the room was having none of it. "I would
die
if I don’t eat three meals a day. How can you
seriously
…."

              
Scott
interrupted, "Look, we’re not talking about running over to the
super market and picking up a few bags of groceries for dinner. The stores, as
we all know, are
totally
picked
clean. We only have what we have, and what we can
scavenge
in the days ahead."

              
Beau
said, "Scott’s right. Think about how we get more food once what we
have is all
gone
. It’s late
summer, so it’s too late to plant gardens. If we make it through the
winter, which I pray that we will, then next spring we can plant gardens in the
inner court yard here of the school. In the meantime we have to find ways to
supplement our diminishing food supply. We had some success hunting right after
The Day, but since then we’ve come back almost empty-handed. It looks
like the woods around here have been
hunted
out
. Too many hungry hunters it seems. I’m open to ideas."

              
Sally
added, "There’s a dairy farm a couple miles from here. It has a
large number of dairy cows."

              
"That’s
not an easy solution," Scott replied, "We don’t
own
those
cows,
they’re the property of that farmer. I don’t know if I’m
totally comfortable with just
shooting
the man’s cows."

              
"Scott,"
Beau said, "
get
real
. It’s either
shoot
the cows and
live.
Or don’t harvest them, and then ….
just
die
."

              
"But,
we’re not
savages.
Most people
here are Christians. We don’t
steal
other people’s property. We have to…."

              
"You
know, Scott, those are nice words….but, man,
we
gotta
’ eat
. If it’s us or
some farmer
….
I
choose
us
. Plus, man, if you don’t think that somebody will eat
those cows if we don’t, you’re living on another planet. We’ve
been here now what, how many days?....I’m already losing track of
time….I
betcha
’ that most, if not all
those dairy cows have already been slaughtered and have either been eaten or
are being smoked and dried for eating later. There are a lot of hunters in this
area, and they
all
like to eat, you
agree?"

              
Sally
asked her husband, "Scott, dear, isn’t he right? I love you dearly,
but he has a
good
point. If the cows
aren’t used for food, they’re not going to be used for dairy farm
purposes. How would the farmer get them milked with no electricity? No gasoline
to haul the milk in tankers to a processing plant, which has no electricity to
homogenize the milk in any case. I’m just saying that if we have some
gold coins, or silver, why don’t we offer to
buy
a cow or two or three?"

              
The
heavy set member of the group responded to Sally’s idea, "I have a
small bag of pre 1964 silver coins. If we can have three meals a day,
I’ll throw in my coins to buy a cow,
alright?
"
For the first time since the group had fled to the school, laughter filled the
room. The group adjourned after accepting the offer and appointing a group of
three men, headed by Beau, to come up with a plan to negotiate to buy a
cow.
 

Rancho
McDonald

North
of Durango, Colorado

              
"Dad,
there’s someone down at the front gate," Zach yelled across the
barn yard to his dad, Larry McDonald, Colorado farmer and
prepper
.

              
Larry’s
head snapped up as he looked at Zach and then at Rancho McDonald’s front
gate. In the five years the McDonalds had been living at their remote Colorado
ranch he could count on one hand the number of people who had shown up
uninvited. He reached behind his back to insure that his
Glock
was securely on his belt where he always kept it when he wasn’t sleeping.
At night it would be in a holster taped behind the headboard of his bed. What
Larry saw didn’t cause him any great joy. Two large men, both armed with
long rifles, were standing at his gate. It was some time now since America was
attacked with multiple nuclear devices. The nukes’ EMP effect knocked out
the use of the McDonalds’ electronic devices, but their water was pumped
by hand, they had plenty of cut firewood, their plentiful food and ammo stocks
were secure and their 1952 Ford pick-up truck still worked.

              
Larry
decided not to get too close to the gate. He stepped forward just a few feet,
on the way whispering to Zach to get a rifle from the house.

              
Seeing
Larry move slightly in their direction, the roughest looking of the visitors
yelled, "
Hey, man
, come over
here and talk to us."

              
Larry
stopped, saying, "That’s all right. I can hear you from here. What
do you
want
?"

              
"Okay,
pal,
have
it
your
way
. We’re just trying to be….like….like….
friendly
…..you know?"

              
"What
do you
want
? I’m not asking
again."

              
"
Cool it man
, that didn’t sound
too friendly
to me. We just need a
little food. You know, man, some foodstuffs.
We’re hungry
."

              
Larry
considered how best to respond, finally deciding it was best to terminate the
conversation and get rid of the uninvited intruders to Rancho McDonald. Out of
the corner of his eye he saw Zach, his rifle up to his shoulder, standing
several feet away from Larry, just as he had taught him. "We don’t
have any extra food. You’ll have to move on. Try the churches in Durango.
Now,
scat
. We’ve got work to
do."

              
The
visitor who had said nothing so far started to lift his rifle into firing
position. Larry filled his hand with his
Glock
quicker than the intruder could fully raise his rifle, calmly saying, "
Stop right there
,
Kemosabi
.
Lower your
rifle,
now….NOW….or you
won’t
be walking out of here."

              
The
visitor slowly complied. The verbal visitor, though, took everything to a new
level, "So you think you’re the
Lone
Ranger
, right? Well, you’re
gonna
’
need a lot more than that pea shooter in your hand and the rifle in your
teenager’s quivering hands to stop us from eating. I
told you
that we’re hungry. We know you’re
preppers
. We know you’ve got food, probably
lots
of food. It didn’t take long
in town to find out where the
preppers
in this area
are located. Did you think you could put away enough ammo and food to last you
forever
? Did you think you
wouldn’t have to
share
it?"

              
Larry,
his
Glock
steadily trained on the men at his gate,
his voice rising, replied, "I told you to scat. Now
scat
. Get out of here….and
don’t
even think
about coming
back."
    

              
"Mister,
you must think that nothing has changed in this country.
Ya
’
been up here in your little enclave and you must
not know
how many people died with the nukes and the fallout.
Ya
’ must
not
know
how many
preppers
like you have been taken
out by hungry folks, folks like us. Everybody knows somebody who’s a
prepper
and where they live, so no one is safe, get my
drift,
pal
? We don’t mean you no harm, we just
wanna
’ eat. But since
ya
’ don’t
wanna
’ share
,
we’ll leave. Sure enough, we’ll leave
ya
’
little rancho enclave. But, pal, you can count
on one thing
….we’ll be back….
we’ll be back
….
when
you least expect it
. Adios,
Mister
Lone Ranger
. Tell Mrs. Lone Ranger that we have
plans
for her."

Colonel
Jim Irwin Elementary School

              
"Sally,
we’re out of rice," Audrey was shaking her head as she looked at
the empty food storage container.

              
"I
figured we were close to empty.
How about the frijoles, the
beans?"

              
"We’ve
got enough to feed the kids today," Audrey replied, "but not enough
for the adults. I
don’t know
what we’re going to do tomorrow." The ladies had stretched their
food supplies to almost eight weeks, originally estimating that seven weeks was
the maximum. Each person in the school/safe house had lost weight. For a few
weeks they were able to provide meals, even though limited, three times a day.
They had to eventually move to a two meal a day schedule, but had been on a
once a day schedule for the last three weeks.

              
Sally
asked the five ladies in the kitchen of the school, "Apart from prayer,
what’s our plan to feed everyone tomorrow?"

              
"Today’s
food scouting party isn’t back yet. Maybe they’ll come across some
food in one of the nearby houses."

              
"Audrey,
our food scouting guys
haven’t
located any food
in abandoned houses for at least two weeks. That’s one reason we’re
where we are. We
keep eating
, but we
don’t
keep finding food.
Eventually….eventually….we’re
totally
out of food. We’ve already voted, twice, that we
won’t take food away from anyone. We only take food that has been left in
homes by people who are
dead
, or who
knows what, but, nevertheless, are no longer in their homes."

              
Sally
jumped in, "But, here’s the
final
issue, what Scott would call the
real
bottom line. Abandoned food is nowhere to be found, now. We can’t raise
food until next spring, and then it will take the growing season before we can
harvest and eat the food. No one in our hunting teams has found any game in
weeks. We all have been praying, but we need to prioritize our
praying….Girls,
we are facing
starvation.
We especially need to pray that the guys’ plan to buy a
cow
will work
."

              
"Oh,
how I
wish
we had listened to the
Bible," Audrey sighed, "if we had fled, like Marty and Tom and Liz
and Max, we wouldn’t be watching our children wither away and die. God
knew what He was doing when He warned us to flee."

              
Sally
replied, "What’s the verse?
The
prudent see the evil coming and flee from it
. May God help
us.
"