Ross Homestead
Oakwood, Utah
Jason and Jeff stood once again on the colonnade, waiting for their daily meeting with the bishopric. The bishop was late.
“How’s your boy?” Jason asked, already knowing the answer.
“He’s resting. His temperature is running hot and he’s breathing shallow. They don’t know if he’ll pull through without antivenin. It’s been a long time since any of the doctors have seen a snakebite that wasn’t treated with antivenin.”
Jeff gave the update but the truth was that he hadn’t been to see his son this morning. Visiting his son in the infirmary rattled Jeff so badly that he wasn’t sure if he could visit his boy daily and remain operational. Nobody else at the Homestead could do Jeff’s job. Nobody else could guarantee the safety of all the families. Jeff felt guilty as hell for not going to see Leif, but he had to put the mission first.
There wasn’t anything more for Jason to say. “Have you noticed the chill this morning?”
Jeff thought about it for a second and did his best to stop churning through worry about his son.
“Is the winter going to help us or hurt us?” Jeff asked Jason.
Taking it as permission to change the subject, Jason replied, “We’re not planting anything right now, not even in the greenhouses. The winter will take a lot of lives down in the city unless the government or the Church comes in with some big shipment of grain. We should be okay up here; we have around fifteen thousand pounds of grain and another ten thousand pounds of dried food. But the people down there… the winter will definitely hurt them. And that may become a serious problem for us up here.”
“Yesterday, I drove through the valley,” Jeff said. “It’s gotten bad fast. People are sick from drinking surface water and they’re about out of firewood. Everyone I saw looked like they had diarrhea.”
Jason exhaled. “I can’t afford to worry about the people in the city. If they’re already sick, and if the wood’s already gone, almost everyone down there is going to die in the next two months. God help them.”
Jeff turned the subject to defense. “We need to survive until the people down there are no longer a threat. We could be attacked at any moment. Starvation turns good men into vicious animals. At least some of the people in that valley are starting to look at their guns and ammunition and ask themselves, ‘how can I turn this into food?’ We are an obvious answer to that question.”
Jason looked at his wristwatch. He had started wearing a watch as soon as cell service died, since his phone had become just one more weight in his pocket. The Homestead could produce about forty thousand kilowatts per hour with its solar arrays, even in October, so keeping their phones charged wasn’t an issue, but a manual wristwatch was a better solution now that phones were obsolete. “I don’t think the bishopric is going to show. Yesterday, one of the neighbors told me that families are starting to go hungry in the neighborhood. The bishop might be working out a way to keep them fed. I also heard that they’re planting gardens in some of the yards.”
“How’s that supposed to work?” Jeff looked up. “Will stuff grow this late in the fall?”
“It’s not going to work at all. By the time they have starts, it’ll freeze and kill them, even in cold frames. Plus the photo period is going to go down each day over the next two months. Any planting now is futile, at least without grow lamps.”
Jeff looked at his own watch. “I need to get to work. Today we’re setting up a second layer of roadblocks and concertina wire on the streets in the neighborhood.”
“Thank you. I know you’d rather be with your son right now. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
“There’s nothing you can do unless you can go back in time and stock antivenin.”
Jason’s face fell. Not wanting to leave things on a sour note, Jeff gathered himself to leave. “I need to focus on things we can control. Right now, the best thing I can do is to keep this camp from being overrun by zombies.”
Jason turned to Jeff, apparently at a loss for what to say next. “That’s got to be hard.”
“The only easy day was yesterday,” Jeff replied, a shallow attempt to escape the conversation. He took his mug and walked away with a nod.
People were lining up at the Homestead’s water spigot two streets below the Homestead.
At least we’re able to get our neighbors clean water. I wonder if they appreciate it. Jason watched a group of men doing marching drills on Masterson’s yard. He didn’t know much about military training, but he doubted the value of what he was seeing.
Jason turned and watched as one of the Homestead Pinzgauer trucks rumbled up a dirt road on the mountain, taking a group of replacement guards to change shifts. Luckily he had purchased a small snowcat right before the collapse. They would be able to shuttle troops up to guard duty during the winter, too. Walking all the way up the mountain would burn calories they didn’t have to spare.
Jason looked out at the Salt Lake Valley. He couldn’t see the entire valley from his point of view, but he could see enough to get a mental picture of the millions of people drinking filthy water, running out of food, and burning the last of their firewood.
Jason could barely imagine their suffering. He felt a great disturbance coming from the thousands of tiny fires burning in yards, parks and streets. He wanted to connect to their suffering, to give them full regard. But another sensation took precedence, blotting out the tragedy before his eyes.
Those people in the valley felt like a mortal threat―a hungry, crazed, burgeoning cyst that could explode any day, dragging his family into horror. The dying people had become objects to him despite all his Christian ideals. The sullen waves of menace radiating off the dead and dying nibbled at Jason’s commitment to humanity, chewing it down to a fundamental terror: that he might watch his children die in the weeks to come.
Something drew Jason’s eye to Tim Masterson, standing on his front lawn giving orders. Jason’s fear focused on the man, drawing that fear into a red-hot point of rage. One petty, egomaniacal man became the incarnation of the evil that hunted Jason’s children.
The entire clusterfuck of an Apocalypse could be placed at the feet of people like Masterson—men with shallow, selfish myopia; men who ignored the lifeblood of a nation in order to advance their dingy ambitions. Politicians, bureaucrats, the power-hungry, the greedy, the self-absorbed; America had become a nation of narcissists and now millions of children would suffer terror, pain and then death.
As he weighed the cost of the nation America had become, Jason didn’t even feel a ghost of his old drive to be a better man. Instead, his heart did a hard one-eighty from morality, turning toward another, more ancient emotion.
Rage.
“Jeff, hold on.” Teddy ran up to Jeff with a square piece of material about the size of a phone book. The square had been shot to hell. “Check it out, dude. Armor for the OHVs. We’ve got door armor and it’ll stop a rifle round.”
The interruption irritated Jeff. He had been worrying about his son. He stared at the weird, black chunk of material and struggled to catch up with what the hippie guy was saying.
“What is it?” Jeff took the black panel and turned it over in his hands.
“It’s armor. For the OHVs,” Teddy repeated.
“It’s not going to work.” Jeff said, still trying to grasp what it was he was holding in his hands. He had tried a million materials as experimental armor back in Afghanistan for his Afghani troops, and the only thing that worked to stop bullets was heavy AR500 steel.
Teddy shook his head with a crooked smile, knowing Jeff was wrong. “When I woke up this morning, I thought maybe I’d get the chance to show you something new. I think we did it.”