When the Power Is Gone: A Powerless World - Book 1 (11 page)

“Look – I’m sorry! We’re starving down there. We need food – something, anything!”

Bob let him go. Russ stepped up to Don.

“Then I’d suggest you start scavenging in houses people aren’t actually living in right now. There should be some things you can grab in some of these empty houses. The one across the street from us has flour, sugar, salt – things those guys you saw today left behind. I hope someone in your house knows how to cook, because you can make food with what’s in that house. I think all the houses on that side of the street are empty, so I’d suggest you get busy and see what you can find before those assholes come back. If I see you on this property again, you won’t get a warning. Now go!”

He grabbed Don by the collar, and shoved him toward the street.

Don shrugged his shoulders and pulled his sweatshirt back down. His cocky attitude from earlier was gone. He looked at the guys with just a touch of…remorse? Hmmm.

“I’ll do that – check those empty houses, I mean. You guys won’t see me again, not here. Good luck fellas.” He turned, and headed back to his house.

Russ and Bob watched him all the way. Once he had gone inside his own home, they came back into ours. Brian and the boys were coming in the back as well. When we were all together again inside Russ addressed the group.

“He may be gone for now, but they’ll be back. They will ransack the houses down that way and, if they’re lucky, get to some supplies before those scavengers. Hopefully, they’ll find enough to keep them fed until we get out of here. Guaranteed they’ll be through this place once we’re gone. For their sake, we better be gone.”

****

The night went like the last two. We heard the truck, but it was further down the road, so we couldn’t see what houses they were at tonight. That was even better – they were working their way down that side of the street. We didn’t know why they chose to work one side and not both, but we were counting our blessings for now. Maybe they had seen us out, and knew the house wasn’t empty. We weren’t careful the first couple of days about being seen. We didn’t think we needed to be, not that soon. They could have been in the neighborhood though. We weren’t really looking for anybody, at least no one that didn’t belong in the area. But we also didn’t know the folks from the other end of the street, so we wouldn’t have known for sure if anyone out there belonged or not. That’s the thing with preppers – we don’t get to know “outsiders”, because we don’t want them to know us, or what we have. We knew our neighbors on either side, and the ones directly across the street. The Nelsons were the last house on that side. None of us knew the guy between the Nelsons and the Whites. We thought he worked nights, but we didn’t really see him at all. We’d see lights on at different times of the day and night, but only glimpses of him. Kind of creepy actually.

We maintained the same watch schedule, but this time Rusty stayed up with Brian. He and Ben would alternate nights. Teenage boys still needed a good night’s sleep as much as possible. The wives stood watch with their hubbies. We drank coffee, talked, read, and planned. We were trying to decide when we needed to go, to head out for the farm. It hadn’t even been a week, but the burned-out neighborhood, and the scavengers, seemed hell bent to make us bug out sooner than we had planned. That would definitely be the number one topic of discussion tomorrow.

Since Russ and I had third watch, I had breakfast ready when everyone got up. We had saved up eggs from the hens for a few days, so I made breakfast burritos. Tortillas can be made with a minimum of ingredients, none of which need refrigeration, so I had a lot of those ingredients on hand. We had dehydrated cheese sauce for when the cheese ran out, which wouldn’t take long. Cheese making was not one of my prepping skills. I believe it’s an art. I had books on it, but hadn’t had access to the whole raw milk we would have at the farm. There was time for that later. For now, we still had shredded cheese in the freezer, some moved there from the fridge, some slowly thawing. When the gang came in, there were smiles all around. Eggs, bacon bits, cheese, tortillas – what’s not to love?

We wanted to move the animals out to the backyard for the day, to forage, but it started raining while we were eating. Not that the rain would hurt them, but we decided to wait a bit to see if the rain stopped. Since we had the trailers pretty much loaded, there wasn’t a lot for the boys to do, so I sent them after the tablet in the faraday cage and told them to take it upstairs and play until it stopped raining. They would be on critter watch when we did take them to the backyard. No more free ranging without a guard, thanks to Don the douchebag. And we would still be bringing them in every night. More work to protect a food source. Thanks a lot, Don.

Rainy day meant indoor work. Janet and I decided to go through the food stores we had in the house, to figure out how long we thought we’d be able to feed everyone, without having to break into the stores in the trailers. We were sure we had plenty, but it gave us a chance to gather everything up, to plan out how we would use it. With seven people, there were probably a lot of soups and stews in our future.  The guys picked gun cleaning. Ah, the smell of gun oil in the morning. 

Even though Janet was a stay-at-home mom, we were both equally skilled in the kitchen. I loved walking in there, looking at what I had on hand, and creating something I hadn’t planned. Janet was a recipe gal, while I was more of a “let’s throw all this together and see how it turns out” cook. Together, we were amazing. With a few basic ingredients, we could make some awesome meals. I tried to think how it would be to cook when there were no more grocery stores to pop into when you ran out of a particular spice, or flour, or sugar – that was a big one. Spices were easy to stock up on. Most of the time it took just a little to jazz up a dish.

              There are quite a few you can grow – sage, thyme, rosemary, basil – so a small herb garden can yield a lot of flavor. Flour is made from wheat, which you can grow as well. Yes, there is some milling involved, but we had grain mills. We could grind wheat, corn, coffee beans, and all with a manual (not electric) grinder. But sugar was an issue. Sugar comes from sugar cane. Not something you can really grow in Tennessee, since it comes from tropical places. We had hundreds of pounds stored at the farm, but even that would run out someday, if things didn’t go back to normal. The alternate was sorghum or honey.

Sorghum we could grow. Honey we had to cultivate, so to speak. We had these things waiting for us at the farm. The sorghum was planted, and the bee hives were set up a couple of years ago. The colonies were established and thriving. It took a bit to adapt to the difference in the taste, so Janet and I were working on ways to incorporate them into our recipes. If a recipe called for a cup of sugar, we substituted one-quarter of a cup of it in honey. We hadn’t yet completely replaced honey for sugar in a recipe, but we had subbed up to half. No one knew, or at least they didn’t say anything if they noticed. Over a cup, we’d need to cut back on the honey, to two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup of honey per one cup sugar, just because honey is so sweet. We’d play that by ear when the time came.

We had pounds and pounds of honey, store-bought, here in town, and Millie had probably just as much stored in the root cellar at the farm. God bless that woman. The sorghum was a larger process, and sorghum has a very distinct flavor, so we didn’t have as much of that put back. Monroe had gotten his hands on an old press and a huge pot to cook it down in at an auction. We figured if nothing else, we could use the sorghum, and possibly the honey, as barter items – maybe for sugar! Yeah, we got a good laugh out of that one when I threw it out there. We also had beets planted as a sweetener source. I don’t like beets, so I don’t know much about them, but Millie swears we can make sugar out of them. I trust Millie, so we planted them. This fall was going to be very educational.

While Janet and I collaborated over cooking, the guys had set up on the dining room table with all the hand guns. Even though we hadn’t had to use them yet, thank goodness, since everybody was carrying they were more exposed to dirt, dust, flour, clothing fuzz, all the things our bodies are around every day. A clean gun is a more reliable gun. That was their motto. Brian was a little embarrassed, because apparently he had just been to the range over the last weekend and didn’t clean his pistol when he got back home. You know, the old “I can do that later” excuse we tell ourselves. He had actually planned to do it today, which was Saturday, if nothing else had come up. Bob and Russ gave him a hard time, talking about the shameful condition of his pistol, then laughed, slapped him on the back, and told him not to stress over it. We have all been to the range and not cleaned our guns as soon as we got home.

Bob called up to the boys and told them to bring theirs down. When they came down the stairs and saw what their dads were doing, they immediately wanted to join in. It makes a mom proud to see her son asking his dad to help him strip down his pistol, you know? They pulled up chairs, and soon they were all razzing each other, telling jokes, and laughing together. Janet and I made a big batch of hot chocolate and passed it out to everyone. With the patter of the rain outside, and the laughter inside, it felt almost normal again – except for the kerosene lamps and the camp stove in the kitchen. But then again, this was probably the new normal. I didn’t mind. There was a lot less interference. No background noise, like lawn mowers or weed eaters (if anybody was worrying about how their lawn looked right now, they had a lot more problems than they knew), cars and trucks, air conditioners and fans, transformers – you could hear them hum on quiet nights. I was actually sleeping a lot better since I got used to the absence of mechanical noise and tuned into the natural sounds, like wind, rain, crickets, frogs, birds; there were just so many things I hadn’t really heard in quite some time. We got a dose of it at the farm, with the windows open, but even there we had fans and a/c, and unless you wanted to get up before dawn, you kept the windows closed, because that damn rooster was going to be crowing like a son of a bitch at the first sign of light in the sky. If we didn’t need him to make more chickens, I swear I’d stick him in a pot. Depending on how hot it got this summer, that might be a new sound we would have to get accustomed to once we got out there to stay.

By the time the guys had gotten all the guns cleaned, the rain had stopped, and the sun was peeking out. I was sure the animals were ready to stretch their legs, so we all went to the garage and grabbed rabbits and chicken cages. We carried them out back, put the rabbits in the big pen, and let the chickens run loose. They’d come to us as soon as we shook some feed in a can at them. We had handled them since they were babies, so there was no problem scooping them up.

We put the boys on animal watch, and Russ and I went to inspect the rabbit pen in the garage. Good thing about rabbit poop, it’s easy to clean up. We scooped it into a bag, spread out the straw and called it good. The chickens were another story. Even with them being in the pens, there were still droppings on the garage floor. We talked it over and decided to throw some water from the rain barrels on it. They were over-flowing from the rain this morning anyway. There was a slight downward slope to the garage, so the water would run the droppings to the door. Russ propped it open just enough for the water to run out under the door. With the rain, everything was still wet, so hopefully no one would notice a little extra water running down the driveway.

If we hadn’t been close to leaving, we would have captured the chicken poop, and saved it to put on some of the plants. Since we weren’t staying, there was no reason to save it. We didn’t need to take it with us to the farm – there was plenty there as well. We had a great compost pile out there, and since the chicken manure is really high in nitrogen, with good amounts of potassium and phosphorus, it was an excellent addition to compost for a garden. Did I say what a font of information Millie and Monroe were?

We had leftover spaghetti for lunch, with a small salad made from the plants in our little garden. I wanted to use what we could before we had to leave. There’s nothing like fresh vegetables pulled from your own garden. There was just a little bit of cool left in the freezer, so we were going to have to get what was left in there eaten. Shit on a shingle was on the menu for this evening. That would take care of the last of the ground beef. Beef stew for tomorrow, and we’d be pretty much done with the fresh meats. We had smoked and dehydrated the roasts and tenderloins, and they were all sealed up, most of them in the trailers.

It seemed like it always came down to food. When all the crap was out of the way – jobs, bills, ballgames, TV shows, online surfing – it left eating, sleeping, making sure there was more food to eat, and surviving. Simple, basic, hard, honest work and living. Problem was, there were people out there who didn’t plan on hard, honest work to live. They planned to take what other people had worked hard to get. Those guys were assholes, and there were going to be a lot of them out there.

As if to emphasize this, we heard a commotion outside. We headed for the windows front, side, and upstairs. Out front, we saw Dan and Don Baxter walking out the front door of the Nelson house, carrying grocery bags. It had to be the staples the guys had found there. They put them in a wagon, like I used in the yard, and went to the house next door. We didn’t see the raiders at that one but we could have missed them, if they went through the back yards. They went around back, looking for a kicked in door apparently. They came back out front in just a minute, empty handed. The raiders had skipped that one, probably because they couldn’t see in. The Baxters being who they were didn’t want to exert the effort to break in themselves, at least not yet. They wanted the easy haul. The Whites were next door. They went around back, and in about 10 or 15 minutes were walking out the front with more bags. Apparently they got over someone taking their neighbor’s stuff, as long as it was them. Imagine that.

We couldn’t see them out front any further, but Brian was upstairs watching. He let us know they hit the next two houses the scavengers had broken into when they kicked in the White’s back door. From what he could see, they had a wagon full of food stuff. Maybe that would keep them quiet for now. That much food, handled properly, could feed them for at least a week, maybe two, depending on what all they got, and how it was prepared. But we doubted they would handle it properly. Their mentality would be similar to the raiders. If they could get it from someone else, why not?

We all went back downstairs, and got ready to batten down the hatches for the evening. Janet and I got busy with the gravy and potatoes. The guys went out back to gather the animals and bring them in for the night. The boys had hosed down the chicken cages while they were out, so between the wet ground and cleaned containers, the chickens and rabbits were pretty clean. They were all put back in the garage, and Russ closed the overhead door all the way.

We made up a batch of iced tea, sweet of course – we are in Tennessee, after all – and laid out bread for those who wanted theirs that way. Bob would actually put bread on his plate, potatoes on top of that, and the meat and gravy over the whole thing. Actually, that sounded pretty good. I might have mine that way tonight. As everyone got settled, Russ started a conversation.

“We’re on close to a week since everything went off. I wasn’t expecting things to escalate this fast, but we couldn’t have planned for that fire. I think we need to decide when we’re going to head out. I don’t want us to be here when those scavengers start on this side of the street. I don’t want to take the chance on anyone getting hurt. I think tomorrow two of us need to ride the bikes through the woods, back to the main road, and see what it’s going to take to get the rigs through there. I wouldn’t have a problem with that being me and Brian again, if you’re in, Brian.”

Brian grinned and nodded. “Sure thing. My legs were burning after our ride the other day, and I forgot how good that felt. I’m in.”

Bob looked at Brian, shook his head, and around a bite commented, “Dude, you’re sick. No one ‘likes’ exercise. It just ain’t natural.”

Brian laughed, and the rest of joined in. “I’ve been told that before. I’m working on it.”

Bob busted out laughing at that, and Russ continued.

“Alright, I’d like us to get out early, hopefully before the assholes that are ‘shopping’ our street get out and about. We can be out there and back before they get their thieving asses out of bed.”

My stomach immediately knotted up. Anytime any of us were away from the group was stressful. I hoped there wouldn’t be many of these occasions.

Russ continued. “We need to know if we can get through there without stopping to move vehicles. There’s a chance the scavengers have cleared a route for themselves. If they have, and we can get out of this area without many delays, once we get a mile or so past the mall, it should be pretty quiet. One of the reasons the farm worked out so well as our destination is because there aren’t many people in that area, including on the way. Once we determine whether or not we have a route, we can decide when we are heading out. I would like that to be in the next day or so. This is the first hurdle before we make that decision.”