“Fast” turned out to be a relative concept in this case. Finding areas congested with cars was easy; accessing them all as they became bunched up and stacked bumper to bumper less so. The fastest approach by far was to park the Dodge up as close to the target vehicles as possible, which often meant driving onto curbs or sidewalks. In those cases where we couldn’t do that, there was no choice but to walk gas cans into the tangle of vehicles and walk them back out to the truck to empty into the barrel; a trip that got a little further with each gas tank that we tapped.
We had a fifty-five-gallon drum to fill. The average car gas tank holds between ten and fifteen gallons, but the cars never had full tanks. Sometimes we got lucky and pulled as much as five gallons out of one car, but most of the time it was one gallon here, two there, and so on. Very rarely did it take more than one gas can to empty a tank—we were far more likely to get a tank that was bone dry.
Dry tanks were particularly frustrating. We could tell if a tank had anything in it by banging on it but, unless we were dealing with a truck or SUV, we sometimes had to go to the trouble to jack the vehicle up onto stands so that we could crawl underneath and give the tank a whack. All of this work added to the total time we had to spend out there. It took us some time to figure out that a vehicle with a corpse in the driver’s seat was more likely than others to have a dry tank; many people seemed to have died in their cars while trying to leave the city. Their cars just stayed in park and idled down to nothing after the driver expired.
All things considered, getting that fifty-five-gallon drum filled took all freaking day.
The next trip was all about clothes. Specifically, Billy didn’t have any clothes for women or little girls and all the stuff he did have wouldn’t fit Jake because it was too big for him. I was also specifically on the lookout for feminine supplies of all varieties (razors, sanitary items, lotions, and such). This was a bit easier to handle and required less drudgery.
Jake and I took the Jeep on that trip. There were several good options for clothing stores in Jackson that Billy was able to mark out for us on a map; all of which were, unfortunately, in the heart of the town where traffic pileups began to make the roads impassable. Even so, we managed to find a workable path near enough to Teton Kids that we didn’t feel like we would be leaving the Jeep in a completely unguarded situation. We also learned that going house to house was a very viable solution that had the added benefit of allowing us to scavenge other goods while we were there (in one house we even found a nice bolt action hunting rifle, a few boxes of ammunition, and a heavy compound bow with broadhead arrows). Going house to house did have the drawback, however, of putting us face to face with the very unsavory remains of the former residents; many of these incidents were heartbreaking. I remember one particular house in which I found my way into a bedroom with the remains of a child laying in his or her bed. Next to this, an adult corpse sat in a chair, bent over with its head resting on its hands on the edge of the bed. The child was very close to Elizabeth in size. It was unclear who had died first: child or parent.
I left the house and Jake had me spend the rest of the day standing watch outside with the Jeep while he went room to room in subsequent homes, for which I was grateful.
The next trip out focused on food. Water was thankfully under control due to both the well out behind the house and the stream running through the bowl, but food became a constant concern for us. Our current stores (partly what we had brought with us on the road but mostly the provisions Billy had stashed away before we ever met him) would carry us through six months if we were careful, but we knew we wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever. We could only go out to scavenge food so many times before we completely exhausted anything that was left over. Our plan was to stockpile as much long life provisions as we could up front in a frenzy of concentrated gathering. This would provide us with the breathing room we needed to come up with a more permanent solution.
Billy spent a lot of time pouring through his books on the subject. For all of his interest in self-reliance and preparation, it seems he had never counted on things going so far south that basic services never came back. There was always this inner belief that infrastructure, agriculture, shipping, and emergency services would make a comeback after some reasonable period of time (the concept of “reasonable” being relative to the severity of the disaster that had preceded it). Though he had purchased books on the subject due to a broad interest in the content, he never really believed long-term survival would depend on the ability to maintain a subsistence farm indefinitely. He suddenly found himself needing to play catch-up with regard to such problems as production area per person, crop rotation, irrigation, and seasonal crops. Foods like potatoes and beets were planned to be our mainstays but we weren’t convinced that these were crops we could keep going all year round without first building some sort of enclosed greenhouse; the winters in Wyoming were bitter and, unfortunately, the growing season in our area was one of the shortest in the state. Billy spent hours reading through several books, taking notes, and devising planting schedules in a notebook.
An additional problem to all of this was the fact that we actually needed something to plant. We couldn’t just point at a section of ground and decree that “here there shall grow carrots.” We actually needed some carrots to stick in the ground. When Jake mentioned this at one point, Billy responded by digging a big whiteboard out of a corner in the garage (which had become our staging area for mission-based tasks like scavenging or work projects in the immediate area), hung it up on the wall, and began to divide it into sections with a dry erase marker. Within each section, he added a heading such as “Clothes,” “Shelter,” “Food,” “Weapons,” “Building,” and so on. In the square for food, he began to write entries like “Potatoes,” “Carrots,” “Beets,” and “Corn.”
He turned back to us and said, “The fundamental problem is that to plant a crop of something, you need a bit of that something to start with. That means we’ve got to go out and find this stuff to get started. Now, we can grow just about anything from seeds if we can find the seeds, but we may also be able to just find and transplant living vegetation. There are farms all around the area which may still have viable sources right in the ground. I say “may” because I don’t know where this state was in the harvest cycle when the Plague hit critical mass. Either way, we’ll need to scout and see what we can find. We’ll also be able to look for packets of dried seeds in places like home improvement stores. The people who lived in this state tended toward a self-sufficient nature; there will be all sorts of businesses out there that catered to the home farmer. Keep your eyes open for anything that says “Hydroponics” in the sign. Places like those should be goldmines.”
Jake snorted humorlessly to himself. “Out in California, ‘hydroponics’ was just code for ‘weed growing supplies’.”
Billy paused and seemed to contemplate this for a moment, looking up at the high ceiling of the garage. “The climate here for pot is all wrong but if you happen to find any, bring it back here certainly. I’d hate to think I’ve already smoked my last joint.”
I laughed at this and Billy hastened to add, “I’d never do that in front of Lizzy, of course.”
I laughed even harder. “Billy, after everything we’ve been through—after what that kid has seen, you think I care about you taking a hit? Just do it outside is all I ask; the stuff smells like a skunk’s business end.”