“Does that mean we could watch movies on the TV in here?” asked Elizabeth.
“Well, yes, but I don’t think we want to burn up our emergency energy watching movies,” Billy said. At her disappointed expression, he quickly amended: “Hey, maybe we have movie nights every so often, though. We can’t be running stuff around the clock, but we’ll have special nights sometimes for movies, okay?”
Elizabeth seemed to think about this compromise for a moment; finally smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Is it alright if I have some more?” I asked, gesturing at the bowl.
Jake sat up and looked over the bowl at my plate. “Damn, dude.”
“It’s good!” I barked defensively.
“We should eat it all. Anything we don’t finish will just go to waste,” Billy said. Everyone spooned up a second helping.
After a few more bites, Billy spoke while chewing, unable to contain himself long enough to swallow first. “You know, the other thing about the solar on the garage: it’s not getting the best efficiency. Too many trees around it. Another one of my projects was going to be to take down the trees closest to it. This has the added benefit of providing fresh lumber for anything that may need to be built.”
“Oh, what do we need to build?” I asked.
“Anything really. Another building, tanning racks, livestock pens, and fences… we’ll think of more over time. A new project always starts with someone saying ‘You know what would make things better around here?’”
“Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Jake said.
Conversation around the table stopped at the implied meaning behind Jake’s statement. Finally, Billy put his fork down and looked at Jake. “We do. Think you might stick around to help?”
Jake chewed for a moment while he considered this. “Well, I did help you get here, but there’s obviously still much to do. I can stick around for a while to help you get settled in.”
“Okay,” Billy said as he wrapped another bundle of pasta around his fork. “I can work with that.”
14
GOOD TIMES
I’d love to report that the next few days were happy ones, but life is rarely a simple, single-emotion experience. There were definitely periods of happiness but, more importantly, it was also the first time Elizabeth and I had felt truly safe in months. Now that I wasn’t constantly on edge all the time, I finally had the opportunity to get inside my own head to process the grief over everything we had lost, everything we had been through, and (perhaps the worst) some of the things I’d done to survive. The others seemed to sense the need I had to work through these things and gave me a wide berth when there wasn’t work to be done. I spent a lot of time walking by myself around the property within the vicinity of The Bowl (the term I had begun to use for the grounds on which the cabin was built and the surrounding valley almost completely encircled by mountains). Billy told me that the area contained within the valley was a very rough and irregular square mile—he had purchased only a portion of the area when he acquired the land, but the concepts of such things like property lines seemed to lack relevance anymore; we just looked at the whole thing as our territory.
During my walks, the guys both insisted that I go armed as we were all still thinking about the squatters who had been here before us and wondering if they would return. I didn’t want to lug my rifle around, bullpup or not, so we compromised: I wore a Glock at all times, taking it off only to sleep at night but keeping it at my bedside. Billy had a Glock 17 in one of his safes in the garage that I preferred to the 19 we had out on the road. It felt a lot more solid and substantial in my hands, and it also had some kind of fancy glow in the dark sights that Billy had installed after he purchased it. He said they were tritium, which meant about as much to me as if he had said they were super awesome unobtanium—all I knew was that I could see them in the dark and they were a lot easier for me to line up than the 19 with its flat, white dot sights. It also came with a belt and molded Kydex holster that rode comfortably on my thigh, putting it right under my hand when my arm hung naturally at my side.
Those walks were a big part of what helped me to work through my issues, and they are a practice that I continue to this day. Communal living is close living, and I’ve found that a regular dose of solitude plays a large role in keeping folks from clawing each other’s eyes out. Gibs likes to say that I’m “going out past the wire,” the old jarhead.
In the evenings I would spend a bit of time sitting on the porch while the sun went down. The others always detected when I was back, indicating that they were keeping a steady eye out for me, which made me feel good. Lizzy would come to join me around this time. Shortly after she arrived, Billy usually came out to bring us both a mug of hot chocolate like an old grandmother. He would then light some candles for us to see in the failing light and ask to join us, to which we always agreed. We would chat about nothing particularly important and sometimes plan out the following day.
The days themselves were not just filled with idle soul searching; there was plenty of work to keep us busy. Every day brought a new scavenging run of the surrounding areas, with the rarity of what we were going after dictating how far we would have to push out. Priority one was to get ourselves a decent gasoline reserve. We could all feel the clock ticking on unleaded gas, and we wanted to make as much use of those vehicles as we could while they would still run. I personally wanted to drive my vehicle as much as possible. I really loved that Jeep; it was my first new, truly nice car and I only got to use it for that first year after the fall of everything before the gas expired (we managed to extend the life of gasoline with the use of fuel stabilizers—we found box after box of the stuff on one of our earliest runs to an auto shop).
Before we could go out for gas, we needed containers to store it all in, so our very first run involved heading down to the hardware store and other home improvement stores to get as many plastic fifty-five-gallon drums as we could get our hands on. Jake and Billy made that run in the Super Duty with the trailer while I stayed home with Lizzy. We were learning that our small number was going to pose a challenge to our ability to effectively gather supplies in an efficient manner. The evidence of the squatters on the property cemented into our minds that concepts like enforceable property rights were a thing of the past. Our “ownership” of a thing depended completely on our ability to defend that thing from other people. If we left any of it unattended, there was nothing at all to stop others from coming in and taking it. This was, in fact, the very thing we were doing as we ventured out to gather supplies. We didn’t know if we were taking anything that someone else was depending on to be there when they returned to it. We saw something we needed, and there was nobody there to claim it; we took it.
After the plastic barrels were secured with the surplus diesel supply transferred into them, Jake and I went out hunting for gas the following day in the truck while Billy stayed home with Elizabeth. The truck bed was empty of everything at this point with the exception of one of the now cleaned steel barrels, every gas can we owned, the drip pans, the jack and jack stands, and the mallet and taper punch. The mission here was to get as much gas as we could as fast as we could.