Clark Stories

[Lbox88]

The Logger - Section 2 - Story #22

Section 2.

Air Force Technical Sergeant Vivian Woods helped the 2 Airman pull the body bagged 1st Lieutenant Detachment Commander out into a snow bank. The 3 of them shoveled some snow over the dead WAF Lieutenant and went back inside where it was warm.

Sgt Woods sat down in the dead Lieutenants chair and started making notes. She did not fully trust the computer but she would transcribe her notes onto the computer and print out her work lists. There were 9 left alive at this semi isolated Air Force Radar Detachment located on the upper peninsula beside Lake Michigan. The lieutenant had briefed Sgt Woods on everything she needed to know about running the place as her ranking sergeant. No one knew why but the lieutenant got sick way after everyone else had died. She had been vaccinated 3 years and 11 months ago. Sgt Woods just thought the vaccination had worn off. Everyone was wrong the Lt had died of a brain aneurysm.

There used to be 43 military people alive on this place. 33 were buried in a mass grave near the fence line – the Lt would be burial #34 when the ground thawed. Back to the business on hand - There was enough diesel to keep the 2 places they were living, eating and sleeping warm for this winter and maybe the next winter. There had been food for 45 people for 6 months so basic arithmetic meant there was at least enough for 2 years for 9 people. One small problem they had was the 2 military cooks for the small mess hall they had had also died.


Part 2

The 3 places she had been in radio and military land line computer contact with had not responded to her calls in the last 39 days. She was about 99.9% sure the US was not under any type of threat from anyplace world due to the die off caused by the smallpox, monkey pox, anthrax and radiation from the nuclear detonations. Using some of her born and bred West Virginia hills logic that meant there was no military chain of command left. Now the big decision she had to make – leave or stay – she could put that decision off until the snow melted away and currently make plans on what to do for that time.

The shelter in place the Lt had ordered worked fine. The no window auditorium/recreation room was built from concrete and had a 500 or so protection factor. Since they were mostly out of the westerly winds the radiation outside never went over 3 roentgens and that was from stray west to east swirling winds. There were 4 women besides her and 4 young males. The males and one female had fortunately been vaccinated 11 months ago in preparation for a 3 month temporary duty assignments to Korea. She and the others had just returned from Korea or one of the remote detachments in the Middle East and their vaccination was current.

Sgt Woods was a built right knockout of a woman; she was 5 foot 9 inches tall with dark brown hair and sparkly brown eyes. Her parents both retired Air Force chief master sergeants had raised her right. She remembered some of the basic instructions she had been given before enlisting in the Air Force she wanted to follow in her parent’s footsteps. Keep your mouth shut – listen carefully to instructions given to you – volunteer for all temporary duty assignments – volunteer for all extra training – study hard for all promotion tests – take college classes – the most important instructions she thought in her current situation they gave her was to volunteer to be a security forces augmentee and try to get sent to local security forces air base ground defense classes that were held on bases – Learn about available military weapons and how to tear them down and repair them, she went to the security forces armory after meeting one of the armorers in one of the classes. He taught her a great deal about Air Force weaponry - She had done all of that and because she had, her Air Force promotions came rapidly in the past 7 years. She kind of cussed the system because she had to have 8 years in the service before she could get promoted to master sergeant. But that promotion looked like now it was never going to happen.

She had many extra duties assigned to her other than her current one as radar maintenance supervisor – such as training NCO – weapons NCO (this meant she had the keys and combination to the weapons vault) – and the list went on. She decided after the Lt died to issue out one M4 weapon and set up a guard rotation in the evening since no one was doing their regular job. She laughed at that no one was doing their regular job. The radar had not been turned on since the missiles had fallen. The guard roster was simple – 3 shifts of 4 hours each starting at 8 pm to 12 pm – 12 pm to 4am and 4 to 7 am because usually everyone was up by 7 am and milling around inside and out.

A few weeks later she and one of the males who was a decent mechanic checked over the site vehicles. Three of the vehicles were one year old low mileage standard transmission, 4 wheel drive, bench seat 6 passenger pickup’s and the 4th one was a ton and a half 6 wheel drive stake body flat bed for hauling special ordered equipment from the small airport or rail line 160 some miles away. The coast guard dropped off fresh daily use supplies and fresh food twice a week from a cutter that patrolled the big lake and the fuel tanks were filled every 6 to 8 months from a tanker that ran a fuel line to the 50000 gallon fuel tank. The small site was basically a short term self contained operating unit.

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Part 3

The snow finally melted off and the small back hoe was used to bury the lieutenant. The decision to leave had been made over a month ago and most of the activity was geared towards planning the trip and what to take. Sgt Woods had talked everyone into travelling to the southern part of WV with her and once established there the people could make their own decision to stay or leave to other parts of the USA. The 500 gallon dual axle tow along fuel tanker had to have new tires. One of the airmen had an old pick up that had new tires on universal rims that were the same size that was on the tanker. The spare tire from the truck and the best tire from the tanker were mounted onto the tanker for spares. Except for some last minute loading the people were ready to leave.

Everyone was armed with an M4 plus 6 of them who were qualified with the pistol carried 9mm pistols. There were 24 M4’s and 12 pistols in the armory and 24000 rounds of ball ammo for the rifles and 4000 rounds for the pistols.

Vivian locked the place up and looked longingly at the tank that held about 26000 gallons of treated military fuel she was leaving behind. She just thought maybe someday I can come back with a few tanker trucks and get it if no one else steals it which she thought was highly improbable. Now the next problem to tackle is crossing bridges that I hope are still standing and not getting into an area of high radiation which meant steering clear of all major cities and major military bases. This was going to be an interesting circuitous trip of 1100 or more miles. 3 of the people who had passed on had long ago downloaded maps from MapQuest showing several routes down from the Upper Peninsula and those maps were in folders in all of the trucks. Everyone had a hand held radio with fully charged batteries and each vehicle had one plugged into the cigarette lighter so short range communications would not be a factor.

Sgt Woods knew there were a lot of things she did not have for this expedition and would soon need unless they drove non stop for 2 or maybe even 3 days if that was even possible. The 1st Wal-Mart would be raided for two 6 man tents and sleeping bags and self blow up mattresses. They had gone through all the dead people’s belongings and found 2 people that had small 2 man tents and some single propane cooking stoves. They needed a larger stove or 2 if they were going to cook meals for all 9. One of the deceased sergeants had a 357 pistol and 90 bullets and a nice Leupold scoped 30-06 with 54 hunting bullets. That rifle was in its travel case on the flat bed where it could be gotten to quickly. There were two 12 gauge pump shotguns with an assortment of shot and they were also easily gotten too. So she was going to reallocate some weapons, ammunition and items that would make their trip hopefully safer.

The 1st small town of about 4000 people they came to she stopped and looked for survivors. There were none but there was a gun shop that was locked down tighter than a bank vault. The search through their tool box quickly revealed they had no break in tools. The only thing in the tool box slightly with some weight to it was a ball peen hammer. Everyone paired up and went searching through dead peoples garages with one airman guarding the 4 vehicles. Crowbars and sledge hammers were found and brought back to the gun shop.

The door was broken down and 4 people entered the shop. Sgt Woods had told the searchers what they needed for ammunition and additional weapons. The 1st floor case she looked in she saw something else they needed – night vision. Another airman found several different water filters and they were snatched – they only had one 55 gallon drum of drinking water and the filters would soon be put to use. They had talked about the main caliber of long range bolt action rifles they would use. She did not care whether it was 308 or 30-06 because there was no difference in the ballistics (she had learned that from the armorer that taught her how to tear the weapons apart) the 06 bullets were heavier but she and the other 8 had no intentions of lugging 300 bullets around in a back pack through the woods. They would take whatever the place had the most of and standardize the ammunition they could always change out the weapons and ammunition later. But for right now she wanted a longer range scoped rifle that could shoot further then the 5.56 caliber ball ammunition for the M4. She had no idea what dangers lay ahead of them and she wanted to try and be half-way prepared for a long range fire fight. She was also well aware of what military weapons she would like to have but they would have to go to a military base to obtain that kind of weaponry. The closest military base, Selfridge ANGB on the outskirts of Detroit that would have those was close to a large city and she had not yet made a decision to see if the place could be approached. Indiana had Grissom Air Reserve Base 70 some miles north of Indianapolis. She would think about that also. Ohio had Wright Patterson and she knew she would find everything she would need there and that was on the way to WV with no detours. She was willing to bet Dayton and Wright Patterson had been nuked. She still had several hundred miles and 40 bridges to cross before she got out of Michigan so she had time to plan some more. But that last thought about Wright Patterson had Grissom ANGB (air national guard base) looking better all the time.

Part 4

Finally after 2 hours of going through what the rather large gun shop had; they ended up with 5 scoped 30-06 rifles and 3000 rounds of assorted 06 ammunition - eight 12 gauge pump shotguns and 500 rounds of 00 buckshot and 400 rounds of slugs. One of the female airmen said we have a tow ball on our pickup and we should attach a small tow along trailer to carry all this ammunition and gear we have now and will pick up at a Wal-Mart. They looked in a phone book for the closest U-Haul place. The closest one was 27 miles away. They decided to stop there and get one. Sgt Woods saw all the reloading equipment and made a mental note to obtain some for future use.

They still had not seen anyone when they reached the U-Haul place. It too had to be broken into. The airman who was the mechanic told Sgt Woods they should put tow balls on the other 2 trucks and attach an empty tow along to each pick up in case they wanted to get things they had not thought of. Sgt Woods grinned at him and said a little thievery eh. He turned a little red but answered her truthfully – yes mam. He said we need to take 3 of the 2 wheel dollies for heavy items; each tow-a-long has a place to strap one onto it. 45 minutes later the 3 pickups had a tow-a-long hooked to it and a dolly strapped to each one.

Travelling southward again Sgt Woods noticed Airman Kelley Weeks lightly tapping her hand on her thigh. Weeks was the back seat passenger in Woods vehicle. She asked Weeks to let her and the driver listen to the music. Weeks blushed and said I don’t think you would like my music.. Woods said it has to better then listening to the wind beat on the wind shield and roar through the side windows. Weeks said don’t say I did not warn you because I listen to oldies but goodies – country and rock n roll. She unplugged her ear nodes from the radio and a song by Dottie West (Country Sunshine) blared out of the tiny speaker. Woods and the driver both commented it was a catchy tune. The driver said I like it and Woods said isn’t that amazing I can understand every word she is singing. Little did they know that 40 years ago that song stormed the world as coca cola’s best known #1 world wide advertising hit jingle. And as they would find out later that evening it would take them 3 or 4 days to get the tune out of their mind and stop humming it.

The 1st 2 bridges were coming up at Crystal Falls on route 2 – she had decided to stay on route 2 because it was on the south western side of the state and they could always find a road leading out to the lake to get lake water. And after they got across the big bridge at St Ignace to Mackinaw City on rte 75 they would travel 10 or so miles and take route 31 all the way down the coast past the closest big city which was Grand rapids and route 31 kept them about 45 miles from there. But everything depended on if the bridges were still intact.

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Part 5

She gave a fist pump as she saw the first bridge at Crystal Falls was standing. As soon as they crossed the bridge she told the crew to find a motel to spend the night in and explore a little bit. After refueling the vehicles the 9 fixed themselves a can of Chunky soup with crackers and spread out in teams of 2’s to look over the town. Again nothing but bodies was found so they each picked a motel room and got a good night sleep. They had decided that 2 of the non drivers would split the 9 or so hour guard duty protecting the vehicles because they could nap while traveling the next day. Sgt Woods wanted to at least get to the really big bridge at St Ignace about 200 miles away on this travel day. Since that and the Mackinaw city across the bridge were fairly large towns they would do their Wal-Mart shopping at either of those places if the bridge was up and she firmly crossed her fingers.

They stopped at a small town named Manistique about 1PM for lunch and to refill the water barrel from the lake. It was a 2 mile drive to the lake and using 2 of the filters the water barrel was quickly filled. A sign said 90 miles to St Ignace and the big bridge. As they were approaching St Ignace the radiation detector in the pick up started ticking slowly. Sgt Woods watched the detector anxiously but it stayed in or below the 1 R area. She had no idea what could have been nuked in the vicinity – She thought maybe Sault Ste Marie and the international bridge across the bay that connected Lake Superior with Lake Huron and the huge connecting locks allowing free passage of the large lake cargo ships. She would never know because she was not going north to investigate. The bridge was buckled slightly but was easily crossable. They did not stop in either town because the radiation detector ticked slowly and stayed slightly below the 1 R mark. After they had turned off 75 onto route 31 south the detector silenced. They stopped 25 miles further South in a small town named Pellston for the night. They looked the small town over and still did not find any survivors. There was another small motel and that is where they spent the night.

The next morning after some powdered eggs were scrambled and skillet biscuits made they set off again. The fuel truck was just passing the town sign when the driver heard gunshots and what sounded to him as bullets ricocheting off metal. The information was radioed to the lead vehicle and the reply came back well shoot at whoever is shooting at you and speed your vehicle up. The passenger in the ton and a half vehicle stepped out on the running board and sprayed 20 rounds of ammunition over the cab of the vehicle towards the only 2 buildings the shooter could have possibly shot from.

The convoy stopped about 4 miles down the road and the vehicles were checked for gunshot damage. The only damage they could find which was minor was the small dent and scratch on the towed metal fuel tanker which looked like a deflected bullet mark. Vivian went into her sergeant mode and instructed the passengers to keep a real sharp eye out from now on. It appeared there were survivors and they were not friendly. They also must be kind of stupid to fire on an armed military convoy. Sergeant Woods decided to stop at the next town called Petoskey, drive out to the lake and fill the barrel and take 131 to Kalkaska and then head east back towards rte 31 at Traverse City. She wanted to bypass the long big bridges on the lakefront at and south of Charlevoix.

They made it to Traverse City which set on the Grand Traverse Bay. The mechanic, Bradley told Sgt Woods that they should fill up the diesel tank here with fuel at the marina. When they got to the marina he told her we should pick up some diesel preservative like Pri-D to add to the fuel and maybe a touch of pri-ocide just to make sure the fuel was stabilized. While 3 of the crew were filling the tank up from an overhead gravity tank - Bradley went inside the marina and found just exactly what they needed. two 55 gallon drums of pri-D, he searched the place and found 15 metal GI type 5 gallon fuel cans. He brought those out to the 500 gallon tanker and strapped them onto the railing around the tank. He enlisted 3 others to help him use a dolley to bring the 55 gallon drums of pri-D out to a loading dock and backed the tanker next to the dock and filled the 15 five gallon cans with Pri-D. 2 of the others had used the filters attached to the hose from the 2000 gallon overhead diesel tank and filtered the fuel into their 500 gallon tank. Bradley told Sgt Woods we were lucky this time in filling our tank; I think we should get a small diesel generator and a pump to siphon the petrol up from underground tanks. Sgt Woods so wanted to say - make it happen #1 - but she said that is a great idea. They put the appropriate amount of Pri-d in the 500 gallon tank and drove into town looking for a Lowe’s. After making room on the ton and a half for the generator and the pump equipment and hose they decided to look the town over and spend the night. Sgt Woods and 2 of the females drove over to the Sutton Bay Trading Company out of curiosity. Looking at the wall on what the company sold 2 of them said ah a different food. They loaded up 50 or so pounds of dry mixed soup beans and 50 pounds of Mrs Millers homemade noodles, a variety of rice, dried vegetables, dried fruits and several pounds of spices.

Part 6.

Kelly Weeks said how are we going to soak those beans in time for a meal. Woods told her we will put them in a pot when we leave in the morning and stop an hour or so early for supper to cook them. That reminds me we have to go to the store for a 3 or 4 gallon Teflon lined pot for easy clean up after we cook those beans. What are you going to flavor them with? Sgt Woods said one of those 3 pound canned hams will be thrown into the pot about 60 minutes before the beans are done. Weeks said you better get another big pot to cook either instant potatoes or rice in to complete the meal. They got 2 large lidded Teflon pots to start soaking on a pot of beans as they traveled the next morning.

They left Traverse City after another breakfast of powdered scrambled eggs and skillet biscuits and stopped in Manistee about 65 miles south for a latrine break and to refill the water barrel at the lake. The trip took over 2 hours because Sgt Woods decided to travel safely at 35 mph in case of a road breakage and maintained a hundred yard distance between the traveling vehicles.

As they drove into Manistee they saw a man setting on the porch of a house just inside the city limit sign. He waved at the lead vehicle to stop. Sgt Woods radioed the remaining vehicles to keep their distance and stop while she saw what the survivor wanted. She gulped at his appearance as he approached. She had seen pictures of smallpox survivors and he had to have been one of them. His face was massively pockmarked with hundreds of scars from his forehead down to where his shirt covered his chest even his eyelids and ears were scarred. She glanced at his hands and they also were pockmarked.

He answered her question because he saw the revulsion on her face. He said nasty looking isn’t it. I am one of the 2 smallpox survivors in this town. The other fellow is still halfway bedridden and I am taking care of him. We both been out of the military about 7 years so I guess we still had a little immunity from our vaccination. She asked him if there was anything she could do to help. He said no we just can’t seem to get any information. We have plenty of power from solar and wind but there are very few broadcasts on the Ham bands. She told him we are just as in the dark as you are and she went on to explain about where they had been stationed, the trip to here and the radiation up north at St Ignace. She told him the reason they were stopping in the town. He gave them directions where they could get to the lake and told them he would ride his 4 wheeler over to chat some more before they left; he also told her to warn the rest of the people what he looked like so they would not panic at that he kind of chuckled and said I will see you at the lake side in a little bit.

All 9 of the Air Force people chatted with Roy and made quick plans to stop and visit with the still sickly Jenkins at Roy’s house before heading out. Roy told Sgt Woods that it was a nice gesture and would cheer Jenkins up immensely. It was Jenkins who wrote down the Ham bands that he and Roy monitored at 6PM every evening. All 9 of the AF people had a copy of the bands in their wallet and would hopefully someday be able to talk over the air wave with them again.

The convoy left about 2PM and hopefully would stop just this side of Muskegon in either Rothbury or Whitehall about 20 some miles this side of the large city Muskegon which was 80 some miles from where they were right now. Woods did not want to be in such a large city at night time not knowing whether there would be good or bad survivors in the city. She had plans on picking up some things at one of the Wal-Marts during the next day. The crew also had plans on cooking a big pot of beans, ham and rice for the evening meal.


Part 7

Geesh Clark thought to himself – I got all this money and right now it is worthless – but on the other hand shopping will be extremely cheap. He and Inez started making lists of what they should pick up before other survivors showed up and took every thing. He looked at her list and saw she was way ahead of him. The first item on her list was storage for the goods they were going to scavenge. It was a tractor trailer. It went on to clothes, shoes and a new list for feminine hygiene and baby clothes and items to make baby food. He laughed at his puny dumb list which had canned meats and soups. He had never thought about boots and Levis 20 years from now nor took into consideration on where he was going to store the items. He leaned back and really started thinking long term survival and how to maintain a good standard of living. He made another list starting with diesel fuel and preservative then onto propane and after a bit he wrote gasoline for the small lawn mowers, plows, motor boat and other items that would need gasoline. After an hour of writing he felt better about his list. He wrote on the bottom of his list get extra solar panels, mppt charge controllers and inverters even though he had spares.

They left the next morning to get the tractor trailers. He told her 4 or more would probably do them for 30 or so years. She said it is not going to be as simple as you think because we will have to document everything we put in the trailers and number the trailers so we can find our stuff later. 1 or 2 laptops with the battery removed so it won’t corrode and ruin the computer and 1 or 2 dedicated inventory desktops for backup. We can plug the laptop directly into an outlet and run them that way part time for 30 or so years. One more thing about storing clothes we will probably have to set off a bug bomb every time we open that trailer because of the moths eating the stored goods. He thought everything she said was a great idea and added some items on his list one in particular on a separate list were cedar planks to eliminate the moth problem in the clothing trailers. He would surprise her with that little tid-bit.

2 days later they had 4 fairly new tractor trailers parked in a row behind the shooting bench. Inez took a can of white enamel spray paint and marked them 1 through 4 in several places. Clark asked her why she used white paint she said so you can see the numbers better when it is dark. 2 more days and they had the treated 10000 gallon tankers of treated fuel and propane. He told her OK we can now start gathering stuff.

As they were driving to a clothing and shoe store Clark asked her where she had gotten the idea about using tractor trailers for storage. She said it was in those PAW fiction stories Stanley told me about and since I am an avid sci fi fan they fit right in with my mind set.

41 tow-a-long trip loads of merchandise, 12 days later and a bunch of inventory keying in to computers they took a break. She told him I see on the bottom of your list you have solar panels and equipment listed I think tomorrow would be a good day to pick up that and then we should think about what we forgot. He said OK that is what we will do.

Clark told her the next day about the cedar planks they would get at Lowe’s and she punched him on the arm for not telling her when she was blabbing on about bug bombs – he laughed and said well sometimes us men-folk need secrets so we can show the women-folk how smart we are – she hit him again and he laughed for a few minutes and heard her in the kitchen mumble something nasty about men. He chuckled some more.

While Clark was doing his scavenging Sgt Woods was still trying to get out of Michigan.

Part 8

That night the 9 people had soup beans, ham and rice for the evening meal. The mechanic got the last Styrofoam filled bowl of beans with 2 small cut up pieces of ham and threw some remaining rice on it to completely overload his stomach but he did not care it was good. That night after cleaning the cooking pot; the Styrofoam bowls and plastic eating utensils were burned in a small metal trash can outside a motel in the town of Rothbury. The 5 females shared 2 of the 6 motel rooms and since the weather was decent the men slept on the bench seats of the pickup trucks. The other 3 rooms of the motel had dead bodies in them and they had to leave the 4th room as a buffer from the dead body odor coming from the other 3 end rooms. For breakfast they opened 2 one pound cans of ham and had fried ham sandwiches on skillet biscuits and scrambled powdered eggs. They left at 830AM.

They looked around in wal mart in Muskegon and picked a lot of stuff up. Sgt Woods and the mechanic went to the outdoor camping section and picked up 2 Coleman stove baking ovens that set on top of the 2 burner stove. 4 Coleman stoves and 23 gallons of Coleman fuel. They had not heard anyone complain about not having fresh bread but they would have complained if they had anyone to complain to. Woods picked up 4 big jars of yeast that had a 2 year away expiration date on it, some more flour and 3 different kinds of cooking oil and Crisco in the bucket. They knew there had been people here because all of the guns had been broken out of their cabinets and the ammunition was missing. They planned on having spaghetti covered in jar spaghetti sauce that evening with canned meatballs and a canned dessert. Since they had planned on eating MRE’s most of the time they had not planned on a real meal menu they would work on that as they traveled. Woods was not the greatest cook in the world but she knew her way around in a kitchen because she had spent some time with the two military cooks and picked up a thing or 2. She knew Weeks was a good cook and told her about the Coleman stoves and ovens. Weeks said did you get some Teflon coated bread loaf pans and non stick Pam. That resulted in Weeks making another short trip back into wal-mart. Everyone got their 2 and ½ hours of shopping and they got out of the town about 130PM.

As they approached Grand Haven 15 miles away the radiation detector beeped about once every 30 seconds but the needle had not moved off the peg indicating a large amount of radiation. She thought I cannot believe our bad luck; here we are about a hundred or so miles away from getting out of Michigan and we are starting to run into radiation again. She looked at what was due east of them and the map showed Grand Rapids and Lansing. She could not think of any high value military targets in those cities unless it was just to kill people and then again there could be some radiation coming from the west of them across the lake. They would hurry and get out of this town.

Oh no she let out of her lips before she could stop the utterance. The draw bridge across the Grand Haven River was raised on the opposite side and lowered on this side. But the other thing wrong was there was no water in the river and looked like there had not been any for a long time. The river channel showed hard dried mud. They drove east along the river bank on the river bank roadway paralleling the empty river bed. The mechanic whose name was Bradley asked Woods to stop here along side a boat launch ramp. He walked down to the river and walked out across the bottom he walked all the way across to another boat launch ramp and came back. He said Sarge we can drive across because the river bottom is like concrete and drive up the other boat launch ramp. Woods said OK that is what we will do. She wondered where the water had went and then it hit her a nuclear bomb had hit the river many miles east of them and changed its course.

Looking at the map she saw there were 2 more major rivers and bridges to cross before hitting the Indiana border. The first was in Douglas and the 2nd was at Benton Harbor. Route 31 merged onto interstate 196 about 12 miles from Grand Haven before crossing the Douglas Bridge. The radiation detector chirped out as they crossed the Douglas Bridge but went silent about 2 miles further on. She told the driver if the next bridge is intact don’t slow down for anything. They were going slow enough when they crossed the bridge at Benton Harbor for Woods to read the 2 signs – Paw Paw River and Charles Freeman Joseph Bridge. She knew rte 31 went east a mile or so ahead of them so they stayed on interstate 196 which turned into interstate 94 leading into Indiana. She also knew she would run into rte 31 shortly and she was a little hesitant about driving through South Bend but she decided to chance it. Grissom ANGB was about 50 miles south of South Bend in a small town named Peru. Now if she could find some friendly security force people alive there she would ask for some military weapons and hopefully they would give them to her.

[Lbox88]

Part 9

Alright they were back on rte 31 again and heading to South bend. Woods wanted to get through the city and stop about 25 miles on the other side and hopefully find a motel for a night sleep before travelling the 25 or so miles to the air base in the morning. They did not find a motel but a 4 cottage type bed and breakfast. That would do if the cottages did not have bodies in them. They were fortunate the place must have been closed when the virus hit because each room had clean sheets on the beds. There was a small lake behind the B&B with row boats over turned on the dock. The sign on the dock said please throw the large bass back for future breeding. Woods said to the people would you rather have spaghetti or fish tonight. 9 hands went up for fish. Inside the small aluminum building were oars, fishing poles, minnow traps, minnow seines and a sign that said worms can be dug from the compost pile behind this building. Bradley the mechanic looked around in the kitchen and found several molded rock hard pieces of bread and 8 fish fillet knives. Since it was early he broke off some of the molded bread and put it in the minnow traps to hopefully hurriedly catch some minnows.

Another sign on the left side of the large creek fed pond near a sandy beach said swimming only allowed in this area with no fishing signs posted beside it. Woods grinned because she had made sure everyone got a bathing suit in wal-mart and now they could get a total bath. She put her hand down in the water and it was warm so swimming would be on the agenda after they caught enough fish to feed them. It did not take but about 45 minutes for 5 of them to catch 20 some 3 pound fish - all bass. 3 of the people that knew how to fillet the fish made short work of the soon to be evening fried fish meal.

8 people were in the water with firearms close at hand on the bank and one posted guard watching the roadway. He would get his turn in half an hour or so.

Fried fish, fried canned potatoes finished off the evening. Weeks had 4 loaves of bread baking in the B&B kitchen on 2 Coleman stove ovens for tomorrow. No one had thought to get corn meal but they soon would.

As Sgt Woods was about to fall asleep she had the thought that security at the base may shoot her.

The next morning she told the other people the thought she had last night and said she would approach the main gate alone just in case there were trigger happy people manning the gate.

She approached the gate slowly and saw there was a guard manning the gate but he was in a chair leaning back against the gate as if he had no fear at all. He was dressed in fatigues with 3 stripes on his sleeves and had an M4 across his lap and a pistol in a holster. He waved Woods forward and did not get out of his chair. He saw she was a 5 stripe AF Tech Sgt and yelled out hello sergeant what can I do for you this fine day. Woods now knew that this 3 striper also knew that the military hierarchy was no longer around.

She asked him if he had another chair and he said sure grab one out of the gate shack and we will talk. She also leaned her chair against the gate shack and the conversation began.

He told her she was lucky she showed up because he and the other 11 Airmen were fixing to leave and blow the armories up. She told him she wanted some things before they did that and he told her sure you can have anything you want since it is going to another military person. He continued on with the Army people had just returned from Afghanistan before all this stuff happened and they had some real nice weapons including that new M110 SASS rifle with all the attachments including the night vision and day scopes. We all took 3 each and 2 each Marine Corp M16A4’s they carry.

Sgt Woods said oh my goodness where is everyone else. He said dead and buried. The 2 surviving Army troops pulled out 2 days ago. We did not find any Marine or Navy survivors.

He told Woods to call the other 3 vehicles up and you can meet the rest of our little group.

___

Part 10

That evening after Woods group had been shown to a room in the officer quarters which were nicer than the enlisted barracks they decided to have that spaghetti dinner and make enough for everyone. Woods learned that the mess hall had propane to cook with and there was a generator to power a water well and lights so that is where everyone headed to talk and compare notes.

Of course Woods did not remember all the names of the people she met except for the gate guard and his last name on his name tag was Divita. There were 7 females and 5 males in this group and all of them had returned from Korea in the past 3 years. She learned they were all going to take a Hummer with a saw mounted on 3 of them and a 50 caliber on one and head to southern Georgia. They talked her into taking 3 Hummers with a SAW (squad automatic weapon) on one and a 10000 gallon diesel tanker. Tomorrow morning one of them would take them to the Marine and Army armory to load up on weapons and ammunition. Woods decided each person in her group would take 3 each of the weapons and add the grenade launchers on the 2 spares. She could not decide on how many 40MM grenades for the M203 grenade launchers she wanted but to be on the safe side she would load one of the 24 foot dual wheel tow-a-longs down with the grenades, extra weapons and ammunition.

The next morning the mechanic pulled Woods off to the side and told her we should keep the pickup trucks and add some tow-a-longs to the 3 Hummers since we have 9 drivers that way we can take a ton more of supplies and weapons with us. He said we need to go to the motor pool so I can get some spare parts that I know break down frequently on those Hummers. I know I can get spare parts for the pickup trucks just about anywhere but the military Hummers are an entirely different problem. She said that is another good idea you have had in the past few days. It also solves a small problem on vehicles in case anyone wants to leave from the farm I have in mind we can set up for long term living.

Woods saw they would have to spend one more day here at the base to get their equipment loaded and that meant another evening meal in the mess hall. But this would be an easy meal some of Weeks baked bread and a large can of Dinty Moore beef stew with margarine for each person would take care of that problem. That also would give Woods some more time to work on the 12 other Air Force people on her plan. She wanted them to also go to WV with her to build a small community. Somewhere in the back of her mind a saying kept pushing its way to the fore front – it went something like there was safety in numbers. She had talked to several of the female airmen and found out this group had no quarrels with each other and were easy to get along with and the main thing was there were no hateful or despicable people in their group. She also learned 2 of them had coupled up with two of the men and it appeared they would be for life. She also noticed one of her female airman had taken a shine to one of the males in the other group.

The next morning Divita told Woods they had had a group meeting after the evening meal and liked the idea of the 2 groups travelling together and looking over this place she had in mind in southern WV. This resulted in another days stay at the base to let the other group inspect all their equipment for the trip and blow up the armories with the remaining weapons. Woods asked why would you want to blow the armories up – why not just take all the bolts from the weapons and leave a perfectly good building for some survivor in the future. Divita said we never thought of that. But we do know we cannot take all the ammunition there are 14 bunkers of Army, Marine Corp, and Air Force full of everything. Also the Navy has some bunkers that are full of big stuff they use at the testing grounds. Woods just said that does pose a problem. Divita said with your 9 people we could probably do it the way you want in 12 or so hours except for the big stuff and the big guns the Navy tests. She said OK one more day will not hurt anything. She did say I hope some of you people know how to use explosives for the Navy stuff. He just said yes we do.

It would be 4 more days before they left the base. 21 of them took all the bolts or top slide less weapons into one of the Air Force bunkers and left them. The door was locked back with a warning sign that the building was rigged to explode if anyone attempted to open the door or dig into the place from either the top side or bottom. She said that should slow most of the people down who were not insane. They blew up the Navy bunkers with the experimental big weapons and ammunition.

Part 11

What Sgt Woods did not know was the bunker really was booby trapped by Airman First Class McClung, EOD (emergency ordnance disposal) specialist. He had used 16 pounds of C4 – 8 pounds attached to a pistol laying on top of a C4 filled ammo crate and one M16A4 leaning against another C4 filled ammo crate. Of course these crates were surrounded by approximately 5 tons of ammunition and 40MM grenades.

Looking over the maps of Indiana Divita showed Woods the areas the Grissom people had travelled. They would have to go south on secondary roads by swinging well east of radioactive Indianapolis down into northern Kentucky. There they would stay 30 or more miles south of Louisville, Frankfort and Lexington before heading back north to hit 64 East to Huntington WV. Woods told the group Huntington is where we will start our first major scavenging and the 2nd place will be Charleston WV where we will do some more. We only have to go about 45 miles a little northwest from Charleston before we come to the mountainous farmland I want to settle down at. They all looked at the WV map and saw there were very few roads into that area of WV and the area showed no major cities or for that matter very few small towns.

Woods convoy consisted of 8 vehicles, 3 Hummers, 3 pickups, 1 ton and a half and a 10000 gallon diesel tanker. The Grissom Group had 10 vehicles, 8 Hummers, a low boy tractor trailer with caged siding and a 10000 gallon diesel tanker. They would stop at several U-Haul places to add tow-a-longs to the vehicles. The base was large enough to have a Post Exchange, Base Exchange, large commissary and a joint services clothing store. All of the people over a period of 3 days did their shopping for clothing, boots and health items. Woods decided she wanted 4 large suitcases and 2 foot lockers instead of duffle bags for her new clothes and used the duffle bags for other items.

Woods had learned from 3 of the male airmen that at Fort Bend IN they had a small firefight, Wright Patterson was radioactive out to 35 miles west of the base and they had been shot at 12 miles west of Cincinnati that is why they were going south down into Kentucky before heading east again.

They headed out about 815AM south towards Kentucky about 150 or more miles in a round about way on mostly secondary roads. Woods was riding in the front Hummer with a fellow named Spence. The vehicle had a SAW mounted on top and Woods was designated gunner. In the middle of the 18 vehicle convoy a 50 caliber was mounted on a Hummer and the trailing Hummer had another Saw. The lead, center and trailing Hummers had 2 people to man the weapons in case of trouble. No one had the slightest idea how long it would take this 18 vehicle convoy to travel the estimated 150 miles with latrine, stretch leg and snack breaks. Woods just thought to herself we will know when we get there. It was odd to travel along these roads and not see another running vehicle, workers in the fields, people walking around or sitting on their porches.

While driving along Sgt Woods was making lists. She got on the radio and queried the people about solar power and what would be needed to create an off grid system. 2 of the airmen knew about solar and one surprisingly was the multi talented Kelley Weeks who had dreams of one day becoming an electrical engineer.

They hung well west of Louisville and went south 40 or 50 miles before heading east again. They stopped for the evening in Elizabethtown right on I65 at the intersection of the Bluegrass and Kentucky Parkways. The sign said population 24000 so they would have no problem finding enough motel rooms to house them. This would be an MRE night so no one would have to cook. They spread out in teams of 2 and 3 to look over the town and scavenge items they may need or want. After everyone had returned Woods had a small meeting with people who were interested in solar power. Fancy that would you all 21 of the group were there and they had to move out to the pool side to have the discussion.

Weeks started the meeting off with what she thought would be the optimum amount of panels, batteries, inverters and charge controllers for an off grid 2 bedroom house. The other knowledgeable solar guy whose name was Bates chimed in after Weeks was through talking with I do not know what kind of resources are available in WV but I think we should go through the yellow pages here since we are close to Louisville, Frankfort and Lexington and take advantage of the solar companies in these cities and last but not least are solar batteries which we can easily carry on the flat bed tractor trailer. 2 other people spoke up with pressure canners and dehydrators. Woods said you 2 beat me to it and we will need loads of mason jars. Divita said looks like we gonna stay here for a few days doing some early long term survival stuff gathering. Woods laughed and said to the group I think Divita has it about right. They split up into teams that night on who would gather what.

Part 12

One of the security force members said we should get some bullet proof vests for our foray into the cities. That caused them to pull the yellow pages out again and a police supply business was located down town Louisville. Another fellow said let’s check out the city police department and the sheriff’s department here in town before we go riding through downtown Louisville. 6 of them took 2 Hummers one with a saw and ventured out into the not quite dark evening.

2 hours later they returned with 17 vests of varying sizes. Woods said that will do for the initial foray to the solar business and the battery shop. 7 vehicles will remain out of town until we do a quick search of the area we are going to scavenge from. We will then radio the 3 pickups, ton and a half, tractor trailer and the 2 tankers to meet us. She spread the Louisville city map taken from a gas station out on a pool side table everyone had their head band LED lights on so seeing the map in the dark was no problem. Woods said we can do this in the morning let’s hit the beds. Divita had the 2 hour guard rotation list posted on the soda machine so everyone knew what time to report for guard duty. There were 2 people on guard duty 1 in each Hummer with the saw machine gun strategically parked to cover the motel. The night vision batteries had been charged on the vehicle cigarette plug so they were set for the night. Woods saw she did not have guard duty tonight but would definitely have it tomorrow night. Her last words to the group were MRE breakfast at the pool 830AM.. As soon as it was daylight the 2 vehicle guards were pulled and a single guard was posted on the motel roof until enough people were out and about that everyone would be on the lookout.

Again the city map was pulled out and vehicle guard positions were assigned while 10 of them raided the solar panel business first. They would hit the battery shop after the panels and whatever else was needed and available were stacked on the roadway awaiting the tractor trailer.

They saw one man walking on the sidewalk with a rifle on his shoulder he took one look at the Hummer with the saw pointed at him and waved. He quickly reversed his course and walked down the sidewalk till he was out of sight. Woods radioed the 4 people in the guard vehicles and told them to keep a sharp eye out especially up towards the roof lines and upper story windows. Weeks and the other knowledgeable solar person radioed Woods who was standing in front of the business that the place had enough panels and equipment to run 40 houses. She said there is a loading dock out back and we will use the dollies in here to take everything out there. Woods told her to wait till one of the Hummers checked the alley out. The operation quickly moved to the back of the building. 3 hours later the loading dock was covered with quality panels, inverters, charge controllers and neat 2 and 4 gauge quick connect/disconnect battery wiring.

One of the battery shops was a little over 2 miles away so they headed to that location. The mechanic was called into the shop for his input. He told them you will need either twenty 12 volt batteries for each location or 40 six volt batteries. So initially you will need either 400 twelve or 800 six volt batteries for 20 houses and this does not include out buildings like barns or work shops and you need deep cycle solar or golf cart 6 volt batteries. Woods asked if there was enough room on the tractor trailer to put that much weight. He walked over to a desk and used a pencil and notepad to do some calculating.
He said yes we can almost triple the battery weight if we had to. He said this is going to take a long while unless I can get one of those forklifts running. One MRE meal and 390 golf cart batteries later on the loading dock the tractor trailer and the other vehicles were escorted into town. Woods said late that evening let’s take the freeway I 64 towards Frankfort and find another motel for tonight.

That evening Woods was given the bad news – they were going to need another tractor trailer. The low boy could carry the weight but there was not enough room on it to get but another 150 batteries with the solar panels. That brings up another item the solar guy said. We will need at least 25 diesel generators in the 6 to 10000 watt range to insure we can maintain a charge on the batteries during long term winter time bad weather.

Woods had guard duty that night from 10 to midnight. She was glad she had these people with her or she would be living like a caveman in a short period of time. With the generation 4 night vision she had on she saw a man pointing a rifle towards the other Hummer. You can say one thing about Woods she did not hesitate to open up on the man. She missed on the first burst of fire but she destroyed the car the man was standing in front of. He threw his rifle down and held his hands up. Woods thought the tracers scared him more then the automatic weapons fire. She hollered out to the man to lie on the roadway and decided to let the security force troops handle the situation. She radioed the female in the other Hummer to start a scan around her area and she would do the same to so see if he had any friends.

Divita showed up at relief time and gave her a briefing. The man was just another survivor and was looking through his rifle scope to see what he could see. He had been run out of Louisville by a gang of bad people and was heading to Frankfort to take up residence there. We drove him 15 miles back towards Louisville and told him his rifle would be right where he dropped it and he could pick it up tomorrow. We also told him if he saw us still here when he got here that the next burst of gunfire would not miss. He said I bet those people in Louisville hid when they saw the military roll into town. We told him we were sent by higher command to check out DC to see if any politicians survived the sickness and the bombs. She chuckled at that little fib as she was falling asleep.

[Lbox88]

Part 13

They now had a decision to make to either leave the ton and a half or leave the 50 caliber machine gun in the center of the convoy unmanned. They would have to do one of those things in order to have a driver for the new tractor trailer they needed.

Woods started the conversation the next morning by saying a fairly new stake body ton and a half vehicle would be most valuable doing farm work. They voted unanimously to keep the ton and a half. Woods looked at the map and told everyone it is about 200 miles on interstate 64 to Charleston WV and if we do not run into any trouble in Frankfort we can always come back. Fuel will not be a problem for several years. They looked in the yellow pages for a freight hauling yard. The mechanic said I can probably get one of the older diesel semi’s to run but I am not sure if I can get a new one to run because of the EMP. He fiddled around with one of the new semi’s and it started right up. Well he told the group that solves that problem because I would rather have a new vehicle than an old one because of maintenance issues.

After loading 500 more golf cart batteries onto the semi they were debating on what they should fill the rest of the tractor up with. One of the Hummer lookouts called on the radio that there was a girl and boy approaching the tractor trailer from the south side. Woods said let’s talk to them.

Woods waved at the couple to come over to her. She found out that this was a couple since childhood and the girl’s 19 year old twin brothers were hiding in a warehouse to see if the Army would kidnap the two. Woods laughed at that and put the couple at ease. The 4 had locked their little country farm down when they saw on the satellite TV what was going on in the USA and quarantined themselves till about 2 weeks ago when they started running out of supplies. The girl told Woods that there were a gang of bad people in town and they had to do their raiding for supplies at night. She thought the bad people had gone into hiding because of the large number of armed military people in Woods group.

The girl whose name was Jean sent her boyfriend back to get her twin brothers. After talking for 30 minutes the group found out the 4 newcomers had 2 diesel motor cycles parked about 3 miles away under a bridge. The light bulb in the mechanic and Woods mind must have gone off at the same time. Diesel motor bikes – she asked the 4 where on earth they had gotten diesel motor bikes. One of the twins said there is a dealer over in Lexington and the main distributor is in Chattanooga TN. The mechanic said we will have a lot of room left in the semi after we load up the diesel generators. The 4 wanted to go with Woods because it was just too dangerous for them to stay in this area. The 3 men were afraid they would kidnap Jean and do bad things to her.

The mechanic asked if any of them could drive a semi – the twins raised their hand. Woods thought this is nice because it will free up the military person to man the 50 caliber and give them another tractor trailer to add more supplies. The girl said we have chickens, pigs and a dry milk cow that we were going to pasture this summer and slaughter it in the fall unless we found a bull somewhere. If you can get me a pickup running we have an animal trailer. I can then take all our animals. One of the twins said I would like to have weapons like you and I know where we can get them. The Blue Grass Army Depot is only 30 miles out of the way south of Lexington. Maybe we can even get outfitted with clothes like you. Woods said she would let them know about that in a little while after they had gotten everything they needed.

After the generators were loaded and the mechanic had gotten 2 more tractor trailers running Divita said one more day will not hurt anything. Let’s take them back to their place and we can pick them up tomorrow morning and I was always curious about that Army Depot that destroyed munitions. Woods asked the mechanic if he could get a diesel pickup running for the girl to haul the animals. He grinned and said I believe that can be accomplished.

That night Woods called an all female meeting. The first question out of her mouth was who is not on birth control. 3 of the females raised their hand. She handed out a 3 month supply to each of them and said make a note all of you to raid the next drug store for a few years supply for each of you. A baby right now would complicate things because we are just not prepared to take care of a tiny one. Next year we should be able to handle it. We just have too much to do this year. I took all of the pills from the pharmacy at Grissom and that should get us through till next year in case you don’t find any pills. Weeks you make sure the new girl Jean knows about birth control and what we want to do about babies.

Part 14

The next morning the 4 new ones were helped loading their personal belongings into one of the tractor trailers. The chickens were caged and put in the animal hauler in front of the cow and the 5 pigs were in their own section of the long hauler. What little remaining chicken feed and pig feed they had was put in the back of the trailer on the side so it could be gotten to. There were 9 bales of hay left for the cow and it was placed in the animal hauler. Woods saw the water troughs for the pigs and cow but wondered how the chickens were watered so she asked. Jean showed Woods the flat watering trays that would be slid in to the chicken cages whenever they stopped. She said it would just slosh out while they were travelling

Woods decided to go the Army Depot and get these 4 people outfitted with military weapons and clothing then come back through Lexington and pick up the diesel motor bikes.

The mechanic had to go to a machine shop and get an acetylene torch to open the armory door at the depot. While he was doing that the 4 were taken to the military clothes store and outfitted with military clothes.

In the armory the mechanic found 6 M107 50 caliber scoped rifles, 6 M240 308 machine guns, 28 M16A2 rifles, 28 9mm pistols, 6 M203 grenade launchers and thousands of rounds of ammunition and 40MM grenades. Woods and the mechanic decided to take everything in the armory. She asked him to get some help and load one of the tractor trailers up with the armory contents.

One of the security force members told Woods they were going to top off the 10000 gallon tanker they had been using with the base fuel since it was military it had already been treated for long term storage. When the tanker was full all the other vehicles they had were filled from the base fuel supply. They had to use the generator they had to power the depot fuel system. One of the female security guards recommended they finish filling the solar panel vehicle with toilet paper which everyone thought was a great idea. They loaded the paper product onto the low boy trailer beside the fork lift the mechanic had thoughtfully driven onto the trailer. Blue canvass tarps were used to cover the paper product.

Back at Lexington later that afternoon while loading 30 diesel motor bikes into the empty trailer one of the twins asked about seeds for future vegetables to live on. Everyone just looked at each other. They stopped at a feed and seed store close to where the 4 had been living and loaded everything in the place behind the motor bikes.

Woods called everyone together and said I believe it is time to head to our future home we will plan a trip to come back as soon as we off load everything we have and come back before it is taken by other survivors. I would like for everyone to make a list in the next few days on what we will need for long term survival and that includes baby products and medical supplies in case of an injury. Weeks said to Woods let’s make one or 2 more stops at a Wal-Mart to load up on quick food items like canned meats and vegetables OK people you heard Weeks and make sure you get food you like to eat. That evening they stayed at a motel 5 blocks from a grocery center that included a Wal-Mart. They would load some food up tonight and finish in the morning.

That morning at another MRE breakfast Woods asked if anyone had any medical training. One Grissom Airman raised his hand and said he had worked in the emergency room for 3 years at the 2 bases he had been stationed. She got the story out of him in a few minutes. He was either going to be a nurse or an MD after he got out of the Air Force. He had been taking the science college classes for the last 3 years to get a jump on pre-med in college when he started full time. Everyone in the emergency room knew what he was going to do when he got out so he was kind of helped along with on the job training when things were happening. He really was an administrative clerk at the hospital and was assigned as the admitting clerk at the hospitals he had previously worked at. Woods knew a person can pick up a lot of hands on or working knowledge working around doctors and nurses especially if they kept him in the knowledge loop. She looked at him and said OK you are our medical person since you know more about it then any of the rest of us. She assigned 2 people to go with him to the pharmacies today to have them help pick up a ton of prescription medicines and over the counter medical supplies that will be useful to us in the coming years. People take your time we may as well completely fill the trailer up and if we finish in time we will leave and if we don’t we will travel a ways out of town to another motel and spend the night.

Part 15

That evening after the trailer was completely packed full they drove about 35 miles out of town to an interstate highway motel to spend the night. They found a rather large 2 story motel in a small town beside an off ramp. The town was Mount Sterling. There was no chit chat tonight. The guard roster was posted and everyone not on guard duty hit the bed.

At 1PM the next day Woods got on the radio and told everyone we are about 3 miles from my first choice to set up a community. I chose this place because it is 35 miles from Charleston, close enough to the interstate and is set up for I believe 24 couples – she paused a little bit and said well almost set up – we need to do some adjusting and you will see what I mean when we get there.

The sign on the metal roofed bricked over cinder block building said Strange Creek Nursing Home. It over looked the not so wide Elk River and the surrounding area was covered in flat farm land with 4 huge 8 foot tall chain linked vegetable gardens at one end and pasture that went for 2 or more miles long and 3 miles wide on the other end. There were several large outbuildings that were probably storage buildings, an empty covered swimming pool and 4 large metal roofed Gazebos with 1 large iron cooking grill in each. She told the gathered people I have been here once when I was 16 years old my dad had an elderly aunt that lived here and he decided to visit her one more time before she passed on. Let’s check the entire place out before we make any decisions.

11 of the rooms had a dead body on the bed. The dried up bodies and mattress were removed and the screened windows opened up in those rooms. There were 24 rooms separated by a huge day center or activity room with a wood burning stove, pool table, old time puck shuffleboard game, 4 card tables with new pinochle and regular card decks in slits on the sides of the tables, couches and easy chairs all directed to a large screen TV. 10 of the rooms on each side of the day room were large 3 room kitchenettes and 2 of the rooms on each end were 2 bedroom kitchenettes.

One person turned the water on and it worked. They searched for the well and saw it was solar powered and the mechanic assumed it was a shallow well that ran on 2 large solar panels with a battery box beside it. Right beside the well was what appeared to be a 2000 gallon water tank that also had a solar panel and battery on it to keep it pressurized. Two 10000 gallon propane tanks were found behind the storage buildings.

Woods asked Jean why there were 4 chain linked gardens. She said 2 of them are probably for vine plants like squash, cantaloupe, pumpkins and water melons that take up a lot of room and would cover up vegetables like tomatoes and peppers. I would make a guess one of the 4 was for corn and pole beans and one for vegetables. The chain link is to keep the deer and rabbits out. While I am thinking of it if we stay here we will need to build a chicken coop and put one of those aluminum barn buildings up for the cow for winter. I will turn the chickens loose in one of those fenced in areas today and the pigs in another one. The only thing we will have to worry about then are weasels and chicken hawks. I am not sure if a skunk can climb the fence but I know a possum or coon can. We do not want to lose the chickens to predators because fresh eggs instead of those powdered ones are 10000 times better. Woods agreed with that.

Woods had also noticed an 8 foot chain link fence was all the way around the building about 75 yards out. That fence surrounding the place had 4 drive through gates and a whole lot of walk through gates in various locations. She did not give it much thought thinking the place could be shut up tight at night to keep any of the dementia patients from wandering off. The fence was a requirement by the state just for that reason. The gates never were locked at any time because the inside building metal doors were locked which was not legal because of a fire threat. A fire would never happen in the building because there was nothing to burn the walls and ceiling were sheetrock which were mounted on metal studs and the rugs on the floor were fire resistant outdoor carpet that would take a blow torch to get them smoldering. The only insulation in the building was mounted between metal studs below the metal roof and it was fire retardant fiber glass. And there was no smoking allowed in the place anywhere. Divita also noticed the fence and just thought a small security barrier if we put razor wire outside the fence and out rigged razor wire on the top.

She called a quick meeting to prioritize the jobs. She first asked who wanted to stay and all the hands went up. 1 couple said they would stay here this year and head out to Georgia next summer to look for any surviving family members and if they did not find any they would return. Several others said they also would like to search for family members next summer but were definitely going to stay here.

It only took 10 minutes to get the jobs prioritized and teams working on them. One team would go to Lowes after the low boy trailer or flatbed ton and a half stake body truck was emptied and gather the materials for a chicken coop and look for a place that carried aluminum or galvanized bolt together buildings for the barn. Woods was so glad the toilets worked, she knew the septic system had to be huge to handle that many peopled rooms. Woods used an inverter that plugged into an auto cigarette lighter the mechanic had given her to use the laptop. She collated everything from the lists the people had made while driving here and used the printer to make the lists to give to whoever was going back to Kentucky to gather the items. She would make a copy for everyone to go over to check for missed items. That crew going to back to Kentucky would probably not leave for 4 or 5 days.

One of the twins asked Weeks if they would have enough electricity to run the walk in cooler. She said let me check the compressor on the one that is here. An hour later she caught up with the twin and said no we don’t have that much electricity. He said then we will need a large root cellar for the vegetables and fruit from the apple orchard. Weeks reported that little bit of information to Woods who put it on her list about 7 or 8 items down since they would not need the root cellar till harvest time. Of course electricity was the number one item on the list along with the chicken coop, pig pen, cow pasture pole barn and cow barn.

________________________________________

Part 16

Weeks and the other solar knowledgeable person whose name was Chet were designing a power system. They were going to split it up with one running 12 rooms and the other for the remaining rooms on the other side of the building. They saw immediately that the large refrigerators would have to be replaced by a DC dorm sized fridge for each apartment and they would have 4 small DC fridge/freezers available in the day room just to make ice. They also would have to have a third system to run the 3 washers and 110 volt propane dryers in each wash room. Weeks asked Woods if she wanted the pool system powered up. Woods asked if they can run a generator for 10 or 15 minutes twice or 3 tines a day to filter the water and send the chlorine out into the pool. Weeks said thank you for that suggestion because this power system is really getting complicated.

Jeans boyfriend approached Woods and said we can leave the cow out in the fenced in huge pasture if we build a 3 sided pole barn for her to go in for the nights and stormy weather. There is a creek running through the pasture so we will not have to worry about watering her during the summer but if it freezes over or we get too much snow in the winter we will have to run a water pipe to the barn and the chicken coop. The entry water pipe can be placed in one of those sunk in the ground cement casing water meter holders so it will never freeze. We can find a salt mineral block at a farm supply store out here fairly easy. We can turn the pigs loose in one of the fenced in garden areas a few times after harvesting everything to let them root around but we will also have to run a water pipe to them. I recommend we build them a permanent partially covered cinder block pig pen 2 or 300 yards out in the pasture near the creek to keep the smell away from the housing area. Woods put that on the work list.

All 4 of the new people cornered Woods the next morning and said we need to plow up the garden areas and get some seeds in the ground because we have time for everything to grow. Woods said OK you 4 are in charge of the garden and the animals if you need help ask me and I will assign you some helpers. Jean said we need the mechanic to get us a tractor running and delivered here. We know what to do with it once we have it. 3 of us will go with him to a tractor place and show him what we need. The tractor they have here is old and broken beyond repair and needs to be removed from the area as junk.

It was 9 days before the convoy headed back to Kentucky. They had accomplished most of the tasks. The hardest was rounding up a running gasoline powered cement machine to mix the cement for the barn floor. The floor had to be slanted just right to let the water drain out when the floor in the barn stalls were power washed with a gasoline pressure sprayer. Jean and her boyfriend would scrounge up some 5/8 inch 36 inch wide strips of mine belt from a coal mine for the cow to stand on during the winter months. The manure would be wheel barrowed out to another cement pad for composting. Another time consuming job was building the battery box along the back of the building. They had to make it large enough to house a generator for each bank of batteries in cloudy or bad weather. We don’t have enough wind for a wind powered generator but maybe later we can figure out something to put in the Elk River for some water power. They used two rolls of 4 foot wide aluminum for a permanent 7 foot wide non leaking roof over the generators and batteries. The power would be turned on in 3 to 5 more days after Weeks and her partner and 2 other helpers finished the wiring. They had to add to the Kentucky trip list 30 DC dorm sized fridges and 2 large DC freezers for deer, cow and pig meat. The 2 large freezers would initially be hooked into the solar washer room system and the power usage would be watched whenever clothes were being washed and dried. They had already planned to make it a rule that clothes would only be washed on sunny days.

The 11 dead bodies taken from the rooms were in contractor trash bags awaiting the mechanic to get a back hoe running for burial. Woods made a big decision after talking it over with the others and decided to bury them all in a 8 foot deep hole on the far side of the pasture. She already had the names of the bodies and was going to make a metal memorial plaque and put it on the front of the building and she had decided to put a 3 inch pipe up on the grave site with the names on another metal plaque attached to it for a grave marker. The plaques would come later after the priority projects were caught up. The soiled mattresses and bedding had been burned and the metal springs raked up and buried in another hole 6 feet deep with a lot of other non burnable trash items. They knew they were going to have to burn all there food and carry the burn barrels to a spot alongside the road and dig a large hole to dump it in to keep the rats and pests away from their area.

She called in the girl who had taken an extreme liking to one of the Grissom males and asked her her intentions. The girl told her we are going to move in together and I think he is the one and he thinks the same about me. Woods said fine try to keep in mind the baby suggestion. She would have 18 rooms occupied that meant 9 on a side. That left 2 three room and 4 two bedroom apartments. The 4 two bedroom apartments would come in handy when babies started showing up. She also knew that in a couple of years some of the people would want to move into their own house and that would be a lot of work setting up a house that had been empty for a few years. She thought trailers would be a better deal something like a new double wide on a good cinder block foundation. She made a note to bring it up next year and put it on her reminder list which was getting long.

Part 17.

Clark lived exactly 23 miles from where Sgt Woods had moved in. He hollered to Inez if she wanted to go to Lowes with him to get some new manual timers for the dehydrators. She said I will be ready in 2 minutes.

They pulled into the parking lot just as 2 Hummers and a ton and a half stake body truck did. Inez said this looks like an oops moment. Clark said we cannot out run those machine guns on top of those vehicles I recommend we talk to them and hopefully pray they are good people. Clark smartly left his rifle in the pickup and waved at the driver of the Hummer closest to him. The mechanic was driving it. Clark had no idea of what to say so he just said hello I am Clark. The mechanic said I am Bradley and I think we should shoot the breeze a little bit. Who is in your pick-up? Clark said that is my friend and almost adopted daughter, Inez. Bradley thought there had to be a good story behind almost adopted daughter. He said well bring her over we don’t bite. Inez walked over and the second she made eye contact with Bradley; Clark thought he saw electricity flowing both ways between them. Clark just said to himself uh oh I am regretfully about to lose my friend. They chatted for a few more minutes until Bradley said we are getting behind I think you should meet our boss who is a female Air Force technical sergeant tomorrow and he pulled his map out and said how about here on the interstate at 10AM and please bring Miss Inez with you. Clark said OK we will have a meeting then. Everybody went their separate way. When Clark and Inez got back in the truck he waited on her to say something. She put out a funny one when she said maybe you and his boss can double date with me and Bradley. Clark laughed all the way home. Inez would eventually get the last laugh.

Bradley told Woods about their encounter with Clark and relayed the part about the meeting tomorrow morning. Woods said so you think this Inez is cute do you. Bradley said I felt a connection with her. Woods said OK we will meet this Clark fellow and Miss Inez tomorrow. Bradley said this Clark fellow is about your age and kind of looks like an older Brad Pitt with a GI haircut. Woods just thought this meeting may get interesting.

If a person could have been inside Clark and Woods mind when they shook hands that morning all they would have seen was the little cupid with the bow and arrow and tinkling floating stars. They were both arrowed with cupids’ magic arrows. Clark thought WOW and Woods thought I hope we can get together soon to talk about things. Clark was not shy when it came to talking to good looking women and said you and Bradley should come over for supper in the next few days. Woods immediately said that’s a good idea Mr. Clark. He said it’s just Clark. They talked about communications and Woods said the scavenge crew in Kentucky is bringing back the HF equipment for us to monitor the airwaves. Clark said good we will be able to keep in touch then. They made an appointment to meet here at 4 PM 2 days from now. It was a good thing Bradley was driving because Woods probably would have wrecked the Hummer. She kind of floated on the bench seat all the way back to the complex. Inez looked at Clark and laughed all the way home. He did not say anything.

One of the twins was digging the root cellar when he ran into a solid wall of sandstone. He asked Divita if anyone here could blast the stone out. McClung showed up an hour later with a few pounds of C4 and some blasting equipment. The twin showed McClung what he wanted blasted out. The EOD man looked over the rock and said he needed a portable drill or electric drill and the generator with some concrete bits. He said I don’t want to break the windows in our close by housing so I will have to make about 8 or 10 small blasts. Divita and the twin moved back with McClung about 30 yards as he started breaking up the sandstone with small explosions. The twin thanked McClung and proceeded to dig out the root cellar which he finished the next afternoon. It was a huge root cellar 30 feet wide and 30 feet back into the side of the mountain. It would be about 9 feet high when he got the 6X6’s to hold up the treated 1 inch plywood held up by 4X4’s. The top of the plywood would be covered by roll aluminum to keep the plywood from rotting out for 40 or 50 years. He had one similar back in Kentucky and it was covered by about 3 feet of dirt. It maintained the permanent below ground temperature just fine. They would make a 4 foot wide treated plywood door with the inside filled with 6 inches of insulating Styrofoam. The roof would be slanted towards the front with a ½ inch slant to let any water go to the front and drip out over the outside aluminum covered wall which would also have 3 or more feet of dirt piled against it. The floor was mostly dirt and sandstone and the 3 inside walls were sandstone so no additional covering was needed for those walls. The water seepage would stop as soon as the grass grew back over the dirt on the roof.

The cinder block pig pen did not look anything like a professional brick or concrete layer would have made but it would have taken a 10000 pound hog to break through the walls. The twins had designed it big enough to hold 24 pigs. The pasture 3 sided pole barn was in place and the crew was waiting on the barn concrete floor to dry before erecting the aluminum/galvanized building on top of it. Things were getting accomplished and when the 10 people on the Kentucky trip got back any construction left would speed up. There would be a nice helpful surprise for all the residents when the Kentucky crew returned hopefully tomorrow.

The Kentucky scavenger crew met a man at the RV supply warehouse where they were picking up DC fridges and freezers. He had worked there for many years in the maintenance department. He gave them more information than they could absorb in the amount of time they were there. He told them he would monitor frequency ####### three evenings a week and if they needed any more information they could contact him at that time. What they did learn they took immediate advantage of it. They were directed to a DC air conditioner and refrigeration warehouse and told to pick up certain DC 3000 watt AC’s for their room use. But what was important they learned that the special DC 9 and 12000 watt AC’s that had the cooling limiter removed or set to the 38 degree mark would cool their walk in cooler down to 38 to 40 degrees F if they added some insulation to the inside of the cooler and made sure it was airtight. He also told them that one of the DC 12000 watt AC’s would probably keep their rather large root cellar in the mid 40’s and would run off of six 275 watt panels charging 8 of the 6 volt batteries. They also learned that the large DC freezers at the warehouse they were going to take drew about the same amount of electricity that the DC dorm sized fridges did. The last thing he told them was you may want to put up some wind power systems for winter time use for when it is cold, windy and overcast.

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[Lbox88]

Part 18

The returning Kentucky crew was briefed on what had taken place since they left. Then the Kentucky arrivals briefed the crew on their acquisitions. Weeks and the other solar man almost had a stroke when told about what they had brought back. But after they recalculated the power draw they decided things were OK. The next day they saw they were going to need more storage space or leave the supplies in the covered trailers. They decided that would not do and actively began a search for quick construct aluminum storage buildings. Woods said let’s do it right by putting up 3 or maybe even 4 large 60 X 60 one story buildings to make sure we have enough storage room for everything during the next 50 years. We can have another brain storming meeting on what to put in each of them after we get them built.

8 of the people began to pour a pad for the HF antenna and 3 of them started putting the radios’ together in the day room.

Woods and Bradley left for their dinner date with Clark and they all heard some oohs and ahhs as they left the building. Both of them left kind of red faced especially Woods since she had not been known to have a boy friend but motor mouth Bradley had told all of them about what he had seen of Woods reaction to Clark. Some of the female airmen questioned Bradley closely on whether he was sure this Clark fellow looked like Brad Pitt. He just smiled and said wait and see.

Inez cooked up a small ham and real smashed potatoes with lumps in them with some thick white light butter and pepper flavored gravy sauce and home made rolls with a side of green beans flavored with a small piece of extra salt soaked ham bone with a little meat left on it. I will save my 5 star meals for me and my new man and this meal will do for an introduction. Clark again wisely kept his mouth shut.

Woods had eaten some good food before but had never had chunks in her mashed potatoes nor had she ever tasted gravy like what was served. The ham was perfect and again she had never tasted such a combination of lightly salted ham flavored green beans. She just could not grab the words to describe how good this meal was. Bradley just inhaled the meal like he had never eaten in the past year. Inez secretly gloated because she knew everything turned out perfect. All Clark had to say was these rolls are the lightest you have ever made Miss Inez. She was already beaming so that little gratuitous remark slid on by. A cup of fresh ground roasted coffee beans making the kitchen smell like heaven and a perfect cup of coffee finished the meal. Inez did not make a dessert she was saving that surprise for the next meal. Bradley helped Inez wash the dishes and Clark and Woods sat on the front porch listening to the whippoorwills and watching the lightening bugs. They did not talk much just enjoyed each others company. Bradley and Inez came out after an hour or so and said they were going for a short walk and when they returned he and Woods would return to their home. Woods moved over next to Clark held his hand and lightly kissed him on the cheek. She said we should do this again. Clark said yes we should maybe tomorrow morning for breakfast. Woods laughed and said no but maybe a noon meal in a couple of days. If that was all Clark could get he reluctantly agreed.

Bradley drove over to Clark’s place early in the morning the day they were supposed to have lunch and told them today was the day the power would be turned on and Woods wanted to make sure the place did not burn down while she was away so she had decided to stay at the home. Bradley was authorized to bring Inez and Clark to the place for the power turn on.

Three of the girls actually swooned when they saw Clark get out of the Hummer. One of them told Weeks that she never believed Bradley when he told her that Clark looked like the movie actor Pitt. But she confessed he was about 95% in the right. Weeks asked her what the 5% was that was missing. She said he is about 3 inches taller than Pitt and about 30 pounds more muscled up. Weeks just said I see.

Part 19

As they were driving over to the rest home Inez asked Clark if what she was seeing off in a pasture was a cow. Clark said no that is a bull. Inez laughed and said yep I see it now. Clark and Bradley laughed at what was a kind of single entendre or maybe even an unintentional double one. Inez blushed a deep red and kept her head pointed out the window.

Weeks and the electrical crew double checked all the battery connections and held their breath as Woods closed the breaker sending DC power throughout the building. The next job was to turn the breakers on in each room to see if there was power. Everyone went to their room and reported back to the day room that they had power. Weeks and her solar partner just grinned. A load of clothes was thrown into a washer at each end of the building and this time a grin came from everyone. OK people this is the big test 10 of you go into each room in one end of the building and turn the AC on. Weeks had run out side to that battery bank to watch the Outback power monitor. The digital readout went down a little but since this was noon there was enough sunlight shining on the panels to maintain the batteries. She would worry about night time usage later. She told herself we can always add another hundred batteries and panels but she was just speculating. Everyone knew to turn off any power when they left the room and not run the AC constantly just enough to cool the room down and then turn it off. The day room had 2 small DC AC’s, 3 large freezers and 4 small ones to make ice. Weeks made another trip outside to watch the power monitor for that section of the building. It stayed steady for 15 minutes. She went back inside and turned off the 3 large freezers. She said no sense in wasting power cooling down an empty freezer. There were lights in the barn but they had not been turned on. Electrical wiring had been run to the site of the storage buildings that would soon be built.

Clark and Inez were impressed with the place after the tour. He knew it was here but never had any reason to visit. Woods said one more thing to check and she called another Airman over who had dabbled in Ham radio before he came in the service. Several people were sent outside to see if the radio would pick up their hand held 2 meter radios which was another success. He told Woods he would show several people how to monitor the airwaves. Woods asked what times do those 2 people we met in Michigan monitor the radio? Everyone pulled their paper out of their wallet that Jenkins and Roy had given them. One person said frequency ###### at 6PM every day. OK this evening we will try to contact them.

The twins had 11 more people helping them finish up the root cellar and that took 2 more days. One of the female airmen from Woods crew was a fairly accomplished carpenter and that made the work go faster on the cellar roof and door. After the root cellar was finished and 2 electric florescent pull chain lights installed that 13 person crew started on the aluminum bolt together storage buildings.

Jean and her boy friend took their dry cow to get it bred with the bull in the pasture Inez had seen. While they were leaving their cow they saw several more cows with calves and the big light bulb in their brain lit up. They took 2 cows with their 4 young calves. They would slaughter one of the cows calves for fresh meat and set up a milking program with that cow thereby giving them fresh milk. Jean thought they could use the extra milk from the cows to fatten up the pigs. They would check the freezer space to see if they had enough room for 4 calves. Jean also knew how to make jerky and can any left over meat. She told her boy friend we have enough help to do this in an efficient manner; he agreed with her.

The next evening Woods had a meeting because one of the crew mentioned they should have concrete floors in the storage buildings to make it easy to drive the fork lift around in. Jeans boy friend said it would be fairly easy to put a concrete floor in after the building was built there would just be a 3 or 4 inch gap between the poured pad and the aluminum walls. So she put that on her list to get accomplished. She asked if anyone knew how to run a cement mixer truck. The mechanic said I believe I can get one running. Woods said that would sure ease up the work load instead of using the small power cement mixer they had. Bradley said he would take a few people with him to the closest cement plant to check out the operation.

Weeks reported back on one of her trips to Lowes that there were other people moving around because she had seen some doors broken off of buildings that had been locked up a few days before. Another meeting was called after work that evening. Woods said there were other people moving around the area. Some new rules were made that one or 2 of the people travelling away from the compound would drive one of the Hummers with either an M-249 or one of the M240 machine guns and everyone would wear a bullet proof vest when they left the compound. Divita said I saw an alarm company right outside of Charleston I will look to see if there are solar battery powered infra red or motion detector alarm systems we can surround the compound with out to 500 yards. Woods said I really do not want to start a guard rotation system but we will have to sooner or later. We can do 360 coverage of the compound with 2 people one in each end room on opposite sides until we get an alarm system installed. But we still will have to have one person stay up to monitor the system.

Part 20

Jean asked Woods to let her and a crew build a large walk in meat smoker under one of the Gazebos because it already had a cement pad for a floor in the next 3 or 4 weeks in anticipation of slaughtering the calves and a pig. Woods said I thought most slaughtering was done during cooler weather. Jean said yes that is correct however we have an empty 12X12 walk in cooler to store and age the beef for a few days until we get it cut up for the freezers. Woods wrote that down on her work list.

It took Divita and a 5 man and woman work crew 6 days to ring the compound 500 yards out with motion and infra red detectors and install the monitoring station in the day room beside the HF radio.

Bradley figured out how to run the cement truck mixer and had to wire a large generator into the plant to dump the mix into the truck. They would pour the pads in the four 60 X 60 foot aluminum buildings as soon as they were finished being built.

Woods told Clark what they were doing and about the wind power system they were looking for. He told her about the wind power on Cheat Mountain about 70 miles from where they were now and showed her his day night camera system mounted on his roof. She said that would be nice because we would need only one person to monitor the entire outer compound from the day room. She wrote the camera idea and wind power location down in her notebook and would bring it up at the next group meeting. He said when I bought the camera system it was expensive but now it should be relatively cheap since there is no money being used. She laughed and said I hope we get everything accomplished before the survivalists in the deep woods come out in force wanting to scavenge or cause trouble. She told him what Weeks reported about finding buildings being broken into. She then told Clark that she hoped they could make friends with the survivalists because she had unattached females and males that were hoping to find a partner.

Weeks supervised the installation of the 8 solar panels and the building of the battery box beside the root cellar. The 12000 watt AC was slid into a wooden chute through a hole that had been dug out beside the door leading into the place. She asked if anyone had gotten indoor and outdoor thermometers to monitor the inside temperature when they turned the AC on. No one had so she put it on the list to pick up several when someone made a trip to Lowes.

The female carpenter brought back enough 3 inch thick blue board insulating Styrofoam to do the 12 X 12 walk in cooler and enough tubes of 50 year caulk to make sure the cooler was air tight before she put the Styrofoam on the walls and ceiling of the stainless steel cooler. She decided the 6 inch thick enamel painted cement pad the cooler sat on did not need any insulation. She carefully cut out a hole in the wall and built an inner frame for the AC to set on. Weeks came around and ran the power to the AC. They would now test the temperature since someone had brought back several indoor/outdoor thermometers. A ¼ inch hole had to be drilled through the door to run the thermometer wire through and the thermometer was attached to the door after the inside and outside of the hole was covered with caulk around the wire to insure air tight integrity of the cooler. 3 hours later the temperature was 40.3 degrees inside the cooler. The cooler was turned off and the door left open till they had something to put in it. Weeks noticed the small power drain and decided to put 8 more panels on the roof and add 10 more batteries to the bank of batteries that ran the cooler and the other items on that system.

A week later Weeks gave out three 600 DC/AC watt inverters for each room. She told everyone I had to wait to see if we have enough power to run the infrastructure of the place before I turned all of you loose with your DVD, laptops, and boom boxes. She told all the females that if she caught anyone using a hair dryer she would personally help hold them down till all their hair was cut off. Everyone got the message – conserve power.

Divita came back from a local scavenge trip and reported he and the security crew with him had to kill a man standing in the Lowes parking lot that was shooting at them with a 30-30 rifle. They found no other people around and just assumed he was crazy to fire on 2 machine gun armed Hummers. They also opened up on 17 people with rifles that refused them access to the city and another Lowe’s they wanted to pick up some things from. They killed all 17 of those people with the M-249 after the dummies opened fire on the Crowe’s equipped bullet proof Hummers. Security around the complex was stepped up and Clark was informed. Another trip to Kentucky was on its way to bring all the batteries back from the 2 battery shops they had not cleaned out. These batteries were going to be drained, rinsed out, dried, filled with motor oil and stored in one of the storage buildings for future use. The battery acid would be stored in non reactive plastic jugs and gallon glass jars.

Part 21

After hearing about the incidents in and around the towns Clark turned the volume up on his alarm system and left his bedroom door open so he could hear the alarm if anyone entered his detection system. Inez told him even though we are well off the beaten path we will need more people here to protect the place if bad people move into our area. Clark just slyly mentioned oh I think there will be 2 new people living here soon. It took her a few seconds to pick up on that comment. She hit him again on the shoulder. He ran away from her and laughed. While Clark and Inez were having that conversation Sgt Wood was daydreaming about her and Clark. She was rudely ripped out of that day dream by the buzzing sound of the alarm monitor. She stepped into the day room and asked the alarm monitor watch person what she had going on. The Airman said someone or something is approaching in the south eastern quadrant I should have a visual on who or what in a few more seconds. It was a black bear that would walk a little ways and then stand up on its hind legs to get a better scent of what was in front of it. The roof had several firing locations surrounded by sand bags with bullet proof vests between the sand bags. One of the security force airmen that had been sent to the roof radioed he could see the bear. Woods radioed back and said shoot it. He lined the military dot reticule scope up on the bear 490 yards away and shot it. The 50 caliber anti-materiel Raufoss round caused the bears body to sort of explode and burn. The airman who had shot the bear just said a really bad series of dirty words out loud as he scoped the animal after the shot. Later, Divita and 4 others dragged the remains of the bear to a pickup truck where it was loaded onto and driven 3 miles away and dumped in the woods off of a dirt side road.

10 days later and 2 more trips to Kentucky cleaning out Wal-Mart, Costco, other grocery warehouses and another semi load of solar panels and batteries the crew started organizing the 18 tractor trailer loads of scavenged goods onto the 4 newly poured just dried concrete pads in the aluminum storage buildings. They saw 4 days later that another 25 or so trailer loads would be needed to half way fill the buildings.

Green fresh garden things started showing up in the day room on a long table for people to take to their room and cook or make small salads with. The only time they had a group meal was on a Sunday afternoon because of the work load. The 8 to 10 gallons of milk a day they were getting from the cow was way more than the 21 of them could consume but the hogs had no problem making short work of the overage. It took a lot of food to feed 21 people.

Woods asked Jean how the garden was doing and Jean told her we will soon be overloaded with fresh produce unless we can freeze some of it especially the 640 plus ears of corn. Woods called Weeks and asked about installing 3 more freezers in the day room. Weeks said yes we can do that easily we have plenty of power and 15 or 16 spare freezers in one of the warehouses. Jean walked away whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy.

The rest home day room kept 4 two gallon jars full of fresh pickled eggs from the now 45 or more layers and it was one of the twins job to keep them full. Since they now had peppers and onions ready for harvest people began to notice that 2 of the jars had a myriad of vari-colored vegetables in them and of course everyone had to sample those first before just the plain white ones were eaten. Jean’s next project was pickles.

At the next meeting Divita who was in charge of the fuel and propane told everyone it looks like we have enough for 5 to 8 years remaining but we have not yet went through a winter. I recommend we bring in 15 or 20 tankers of propane and treated diesel and park them out behind where the propane is now. That would guarantee us at least a minimum 30 years supply. Woods just said OK.

Weeks and her solar assistant calculated the amount of kilowatts needed from wind power and decided two 20 or 30 kilowatt wind systems would take care of winter time bad weather events if the wind blew since they were not really in a windy place. One could be automatically routed through the battery banks to keep the batteries charged and the 2nd would be the spare. She told the 10 person crew and her assistant who were going to pick up the equipment that they would need a crane to lift the 1000 or heavier pound head and propellers to the top of the 120 foot pole. The mechanic had to go with them to get one running or find one they could use at the wind farm. They took the low boy trailer to haul the systems back. They did not know they would have to make 2 trips to bring the crane back with them.

2 days later the wind systems were on location and the cement pad was being poured on the slightly windy side of the mountain and the hold down bolts inserted into the 36X36 inch thick wet cement pad. Her assistant had brought back the set up instructions and Weeks almost kissed him for that because she was not entirely sure how to make the connections to her cobbled together solar system. 10 days later the wind systems were in place and tested. Weeks secretly patted herself on the back for figuring it all out and hooking it together. Clark had went on this trip because he wanted a 5 or 10000 kw system to augment his system 30 or 40 years from now when things started breaking down or fuel became unstable. He knew his batteries would outlast him but if he had no way to charge them they would just be a heavy boat anchor. He planned on feathering both of the wind systems and just let them hang out in the weather. He also kind of figured they would be operational 50 or so years down the road because of the long life weatherproof materials they were made from. Weeks and 7 of the rest home occupants would help Clark erect the 2 small wind systems and she would wire it into his system but leave the connecting breaker switch off until he un-feathered the blades and needed the power.

All the major construction projects were completed and people had time to kick back and enjoy themselves. Some hiked, some lay in the sun by the pool, some played pool, ping pong, shuffleboard and amazingly some bird watched. The scavenge trips were down to one or 2 a week and that was because someone would think of something they had forgotten. The day room had over 20000 movies to watch and a new movie or old movie was shown 2 times a day. People could also take the DVD into their room and watch it on their own DVD player. But everyone usually congregated in front of the 64 inch big flat screen in the day room and chatted about the movie.

Part 22.

The romance between Clark, Woods and Inez, Bradley had really heated up in the past 45 days. Woods was ready to move to Clark’s house as was Bradley. That would open up 2 rooms at the rest home but Woods and Bradley would only be a radio call away. This move would not happen for a little bit.

Someone monitoring radio traffic would always chat with Roy and Jenkins every evening for a few minutes just to pass the time. After one chat session a voice sounded out telling who they were and where they were. The radio monitor sent someone to get the Georgia occupants because the transmission was coming from southern Georgia. After a 10 minute talk the in-house Georgia residents were assured that a search for kin-folk survivors would begin in the morning. Contact would be made in 2 days after the locations were searched. That took a load off the couple that wanted to drive down there to search for their folks. They really did not want to make such a long trip with just the 2 of them going. They had talked it over many times and had almost convinced themselves to wait several more years till the country stabilized and a small infrastructure with law and order became established. This search by local residents would solve that trip problem.

There was a lot of chatter on the airwaves and Woods group were getting an idea of where good and bad locations were. They were also finding out where male and female partners could be met. The unattached people in the rest home paid real close attention to these open over the air chats. Sgt Woods’s theory about the deep woods survivalists coming out of their locked down fortified positions was right on. It was late July when lots of people were seen in the cities and travelling the roadways. Some of these people were contacted on the road and in parking lots near stores - they were evaluated and either given or not given the rest home radio frequency to contact whenever they were finished scavenging and resupplying for the long haul.

Inez had listened to Bradley and Woods talk about the number of contacts they were making out in the cities and kept her mouth shut. She was aware of the 50 couple rule she had picked up on in biology class to keep civilization moving ahead so that did not apply any longer. What she and Clark were worried about was getting some help here to work the expanding animal population, orchard and garden. They had had many talks about the number of people they would want and need to make things roll along. They wanted to move 6 double wide 4 bedroom trailers with a young couple in 3 of them and it did not matter whether they had children yet. They were thinking long range and how many people the small farm could support. That number was 16 adults and a large number of children. Clark wanted to put a couple in 3 trailers and he, Woods, Inez and Bradley could easily live in the rather large 4 bedroom 2 and a half bath house which would make the initial grouping of 10. The 3 extra trailers would be for the grown up kids that wanted to stay and for expansion over the years. Inez said in that down home country folksy way she had of speaking – well it looks like you are going to initially need 12 more tractor trailers for storage. He told her well saddle up because we may as well start on something.

Clark and Inez had no problem hauling 18 53 foot trailers to the farm and parking them in a line on a gravel covered area. Some of the trailers they picked up on the interstate and trucking stops had tons of useful items in them. They would inventory the items in those trailers when they had time. Clark grinned as Inez went down the row of trailers painting the big white numbers on each of them. She looked at him and just said this is to make sure there won’t be any future problem of who owns what trailer. He did not say anything when she put a big master lock on each of their trailers.

The planning for Bradley and Woods move began. The 3 couples had been selected and were making their own plans. The 3 couples move would not take place for several months because the double wide trailers would have to be erected.

Woods called Divita and Weeks in to see who wanted to be in charge when she moved out. Weeks begged off saying she had too many other duties. Divita told Woods he would do it if Weeks would be his assistant. Weeks said I’ll do that but overall day to day activities belong to you. He laughed and said OK Sgt Woods you have your replacements for when you move out.

Woods had almost a tractor trailer load of personal goods, future items to be used, firearms and ammunition stored in the storage building. She had Clark drive one of the empty trailers from his farm and the 3 couples that were going to move to the farm when the trailers were built helped her load it. The following week Bradley did the same.

Bradley used the cement truck to pour the footers for the 6 trailers. Things were moving along slowly but steadily.

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Part 23

Inez was at the rest home talking to the twins and Jean about cows, pigs and the garden. She was going to do some trading with them; she had brought 15 pounds of different heirloom seeds and she wanted a like trade of different vegetable seed items. This was easily done since the Kentucky 4 had brought several hundred pounds of seeds when they were scavenging the seed and feed stores. They also would make a potato trade next planting time. Inez had noticed they grew fingerling potatoes and she wanted to try them. The Kentucky people were firm believers in sweet potatoes and that had been one of the things that had slipped Inez’s mind when she planted her and Clark’s garden. She also knew the 150 X 150 foot fenced in garden for veggies she now had would have to be quadrupled for the initial 10 person group next summer. But she would have lots of help so that was a moot point.

Clark was looking at the rest home water system and he decided he would have one exactly like it for the 6 trailers. He had something the rest home didn’t and the 4 Kentucky farm people were trying to figure out whether it could be done at the rest home. Clark’s barn had a walk in milk cooler, a separate section for eggs and a meat hanging section to age the slaughtered beef or deer. Jean asked Weeks and the carpenter to look at Clark’s system to see if something like that could be installed in the large rest home aluminum barn.

Inez told the 4 Kentucky people that they should bring 5 or 6 more people with them and pick a few truckloads of apples, pears, peaches and nuts from Clark’s orchard to store in their root cellar. She had looked at the rest home root cellar and saw the DC air conditioner kept the place 10 degrees cooler then the natural local ground temperature of 56 degrees. She knew these 10 degrees would make the stored vegetables and fruit stay fresher many more months then the 56 degrees in Clark’s root cellar. She would see if a trade for something could be made to get the carpenter and Weeks to install a system like that at Clark’s place. Inez also had a notebook and pen and she wrote these things down.

Clark and Inez had captured 3 domesticated pigs that had gone feral and they would breed those with the rest home pigs to stop the in-breeding that would eventually happen. They would do that with their chickens next spring also. In years to come they would maybe have to go to a full size cow to serve the 16 adults and maybe 10 or 12 kids.

Clark had to borrow the rest home low boy to pick up the 3000 gallon water tank, the ton or so of garden fence chain link and the thousands or so feet of water pipe for the trailers. The 8 of them had their work cut out. Weeks and the carpenter would show up on alternate days to give them a hand. After the cinder blocks were put down for each trailer to set on it took the crew of 8 sometimes 10 or 11 days to prep each trailer.

Again Clark borrowed the low boy trailer and picked up 12 air tight wood/coal burning stoves for the trailers. He had to go to 2 Ace Hardware Stores to get the double wall stainless steel pipe with extra lengths and the installation accessories.

Finally 94 days after they started all 6 trailers were inhabitable. And this was done with stops for harvesting, drying, smoking and canning. But 8 people can get a lot done when they all pitched in. The cow and pig were next on the list to be slaughtered and then they would start on the 3 extra fenced in vegetable gardens. Inez liked the idea of one fenced in area just for things like pumpkins, squash and other vine plants. She would rotate the last 2 between corn and vine plants but she would not initially grow as much corn as the rest home crew did.

After some negotiating with the 13 remaining rest home occupants Woods got 240 325 watt solar panels and 360 6 volt golf cart batteries for the 6 trailers with 10 spares of panels and batteries each. That left the rest home with over 2000 panels and 2500 oil filled 6 volt golf cart batteries which should last for a hundred or more years. Weeks had designed the power system for the 6 trailers and decided 10000 watts per trailer would be sufficient to run the lights, DC air conditioner, DC dorm fridge, DC freezer, trailer size washer, lights and any other small electrical devices. Clark and the 7 people crew had cut down power poles and used the 4 gauge electrical wire to run the line from the wind power system to the trailer complex and Clark's battery banks. That job would have been impossible with out heavy motorized equipment to do the lifting and power pole hole digging. They finished up the major construction in between snow storms sometime in late January.

One of the trailer occupants had found the neatest round steel frame fire wood holders that would hold a little over a cord of wood. They did some more searching and found 20 of them in a warehouse behind the hardware store. Of course they brought all of them back. Each trailer now had 3 and Clark had 3. It did not take long for the 8 person wood gathering crew in Feb to fill all of the extra wood holders. This neatened up the area around each trailer and eliminated wet fire wood.

Weeks had found a boyfriend and everyone thought Divita had met a nice girl. Time would tell if they were a match. One matchup did not last long. Divita saw Weeks had a black eye and bruises on her wrists and was crying one morning. He never said anything to Weeks. He found her boy friend drinking a beer alone in the day room. He quietly asked him to help him with lifting an item in one of the warehouses. The man whose name was Samuel R Drondon hemmed and hawed around for a few minutes before getting up. Divita never could understand women the way they picked abusers for a mate and he thought Weeks was smarter than that.

In the warehouse Divita walked up behind Samuel and using a military 9MM pistol shot him twice in the back of the head. He then loaded him in the back of the pickup and covered him with a blue tarp. He picked up a shovel, two two gallon cans of motor oil, 2 gallons of diesel fuel and 2 gallons of gasoline and drove to where they had dumped the bear. He dragged Samuel's body to a clearing and burned it. He hung around and kept pouring motor oil and diesel fuel on the body till most of the flesh was burned off the bones. He used the shovel to break and spread the bones all around and found a small hole to dump the skull in which he shoveled some dirt over then laid a big rock over the hole. He then merrily went back to the rest home. He had stripped Samuel’s rifle and pistol and threw them out into the woods. The wooden stock from the rifle had been burned to ashes with the body. He went to the day room and asked loudly where Samuel was. No one knew. His turn to monitor the compound came up from 1 to 3PM. Weeks later that evening asked everyone where Samuel was and Divita said I thought I saw him walking out the entry way 5 hours ago with his rifle over his shoulder and a back pack. Weeks just said good and went on about her business. Later that night Divita thought to himself that he hoped he had done right by what Sgt Woods said to him when she called him off to the side and told him to make sure he took care of our people and not let any harm come to them. In his mind he had done right and that was all that really mattered.

Part 24

Woods told Clark that it would be a good idea to put up one of the 60 X 60 aluminum buildings to store toilet paper, Kleenex, paper plates and any other long term items that would be useful for the people living here. Clark said that also will involve some more scavenging to fill that huge place. She said yes it will and you may want to think about storing some spare tires for 40 years from now. Inez had been listening and she said I think you should bring Bradley in on this conversation. Clark gave her a questioning look. She said 2 small spare tractors to work the garden preferably 2 that have never been run except for the factory engine test. Bradley said 40 years from now the neoprene gaskets on the engine will have to be replaced. If we can find standard transmission ones the transmission will last forever. Another problem will be the gaskets in the hydraulics. Clark said OK let’s get the building built before planting time.

There had been a few shootings in the close by cities involving larger groups taking from smaller groups and females being kidnapped. The rest home crew had not had any problems like that because they always took 2 Hummers with the machine guns mounted to over look the scavengers. And the scavengers were always armed with an M16 or M4. Clark and crew never went anywhere without at least one armed Hummer and they also had not yet had but a few small fire fights because when the M249 opened up the bad people scattered to the 4 directions rapidly leaving a lot of bodies laying in the streets. Both groups had always had the trailing Hummer hang back to see if they were ever followed and so far no one had attempted to do that.

After Clark had the aluminum building built they were finding they had to go further afield to find the toilet paper and other items to fill the place. On one trip Sgt Woods radioed the other vehicles to stop in the middle of the road. She and Clark broke into a hobby shop model airplane store. He said don’t tell me you want a hobby. She said yes I want a working hobby for security. He thought a little bit and said you want to put a tiny broadcasting camera on one of the radio controlled airplanes and circle the place. She said yes Sherlock Holmes and I will take enough for the rest home to also use. He said that is a brilliant idea.

Everyone got into model airplane building in the next week. Woods was going to experiment with electric and gasoline engine models. She wanted the longest flight time which she already knew would be a gasoline engine unless this mountain top had some real nice thermals. Plane color was automatically going to be a sky blue to help hide the plane from any curious observer. The cameras they had were not what she would call the first line of spy in the sky cameras. She also had no idea of where she could find any decent model airplane cameras. She just wished the internet would be online for 10 minutes. But since that was not going to happen she would use what she had and what they could find later.

After 3 or 4 spectacular training crashes she learned how to use the remote control device efficiently. She found that a plane with a little over 4 feet long of really strong light weight wingspan and what the instructions called a 100cc propeller driven engine she could keep the plane up for a little over 2 hours. She built 4 of that model and installed the 100cc engine, the camera and batteries. Another thing she quickly found out was if she did not keep the plane in visual sight or knew where it was she would lose the plane. That almost happened until she just used the remote control and turned the plane 180 degrees from the direction she knew it was travelling. Another thing she found out was there was only 2 easy ways onto the farm and both of them converged near the iron gateway entry. So she only had to circle the plane about 500 yards out beyond the gate and monitor the camera output. She was not stupid and occasionally made a circle of the farm out about 1200 yards. After flying the plane over the farm for 3 or 4 practice runs she knew where the plane was without looking for it because she recognized the terrain it was flying over.

Flying the plane unless it was in the loop out near the gate was tedious and would wear a person out quickly so they set up a schedule on clear non windy days to check the farm out every 3 hours for 15 minutes. This consisted of getting the plane out in its loop and drinking a cup of coffee while watching the monitor. Of course every one knew this schedule would not be exactly adhered to but it was something.

The next thing they talked about was what would be used as money if the infrastructure ever started growing again. Woods said all of the military people from Michigan have several thousand dollars in silver and gold coinage. We started breaking into coin shops on the way back and split up whatever we found. Clark had not really thought about it because he had over a million dollars in gold coins and 500 rolls of late 1800’s and early 1900’s silver dollars in the shelter safe and buried on the farm. Bradley said one of the Indiana group had told him they had done the same. So we are all set on money and they all laughed because it was going to be a really long time before any type of state, regional or USA money system was re-implemented.

Continuing the conversation one of the couples asked about mason jars because they had watched and helped their parents can goods.. Inez said we do not have enough. Woods wrote that down on her always handy notebook. Inez said the problem will not be with obtaining enough mason jars it will be with the lids that will no longer seal in about 4 or 5 years.. Clark chimed in and said I bought a few gross of those forever reusable lids when the internet was up and running. Inez said you did but that is only for 2 gross of jars and I don’t think 288 mason jars will hold enough food to feed 16 people plus a large amount of kids many years from now.. She finished up by saying 2 and a half gross of filled mason jars per trailer would probably last a small family a year. They tabled the lifetime Mason jar lid discussion for the moment and went on to other critical long term items they may need.

Part 25

The rest home original group of which 8 were now residents of Clark’s farm had been way ahead of the curve when they started their big time scavenging. Several of the group now living at Clark’s farm wanted to retrieve a small percentage of those goods to store here. Some said as soon as the group started replacing them at the rest home; the new people would not want to share those goods they had helped bring to the place in their early work. Woods said we 8 will go and negotiate with the 13 living in the rest home before it gets out of hand. That stopped that before bickering started on who owned what.. They continued on the list of future critical items until someone mentioned sugar – Inez said bees will mostly alleviate that problem. Woods wrote that down. Salt was another critical item in their long term plans. They knew the ocean was hundreds of miles away and they also knew there was a salt mines close to where they were but it used massive amounts of power to wash or pump up the liquefied salt from deep underground.

2 days later Woods and the other 7 negotiated with the rest home 13 to take a small percentage of critical items from the 4 aluminum building storage areas. They made a written agreement to trade labor, other items or produce for any additional items later on as the years went by. The 8 each took all their personal belongings, weapons and ammunition. That was a total of 8 semi truck loads. The storage building on Clark’s farm was about 35% filled by the end of the month. Inez had looked at the Tattler life time lids and rings boxes Clark had ordered and saw they were manufactured in Colorado but their distribution center for the east coast was Frankfort Kentucky. That resulted in a hurried up convoy to KY. They did not take all of the lids in the warehouse which had about 2 million. They took a half million to supply themselves and trade with the rest home and other people in the future. The rest home had enough mason jars to supply the 24 rest home rooms for a year but they did not have the life time lids. The 8 scavengers would keep this little trip a secret but would eventually in 4 or 5 years when the rest home lids started failing let them know they had the reusable lids. The 80 gross of mason jars they accumulated put another little storage dent in the aluminum building. 3 weeks later and 14 trailer loads of goods from 3 and 400 miles away - they saw they were going to need another storage building. Bradley came to the rescue by putting a large gravel field down and putting two 24 X 24 foot aluminum buildings up for the 2 spare tractors, tires and mechanic equipment. He talked Clark and the other people into letting him build another covered building with a car lift in it. That was a huge job because of the cement that had to be poured and that took 10 days of 8 people labor.

They had 4 serious firefights during the summer scavenge trips and had to ambush 3 automobiles at different times with the 50 caliber that were following them. The 2 people in the Hummer that destroyed the following vehicles hooked a tow chain to what was left of the vehicles and towed them off the road into wooded areas. This would insure no one would ever know what happened to the followers or what direction they had taken. Everyone in the rest home was now partnered up and there was only one 2 bedroom apartment unfilled. Clark’s farm and the rest home had locked down the places after the last firefight and again increased security.

It was now Oct and the huge harvest was in, canned, dried, smoked and root cellared. The only people leaving the farm or rest home were visiting each other, trading produce, having cookouts and enjoying each others company. The residents at Clark’s farm had built a 24 X 40 aluminum building that was used as a day room and had pool tables, ping pong tables, shuffleboards and card tables for the occasional Pinochle tournament they had. There was talk of building an indoor swimming pool at Clark’s place and the ground breaking would be sometime in late Feb. Clark was hoping the violence would dissipate by next summer. He did not think that would happen until all the bad people were killed. It seemed to everyone that these bad people came out of the ground because they had increased. No one knew whether they were good people that had joined the gangs for protection or were just predisposed to be evil. Woods had three teams of snipers from Clark’s place and the rest home that went out on search and destroy missions especially when they noticed the gangs putting up road blocks to do harm to innocent people travelling around. They killed every person at every roadblock they found or heard about with massive amounts of fire power from the 50 calibers, M-203 grenade launchers and the saw machine guns.

The rest home had miles of pasture so the bulk of the cattle would stay there with Clark’s place having 4 cows and 2 bulls. The bulls would be swapped out every third year to keep the cow lineage diversified. The twins who had coupled up were in charge of that program. Jean and her boy friend were one of the couples that had moved to the farm. Clark immediately left the area when Inez and Jean started talking because they could talk for hours without stopping.

It took the 3 sniper teams a year and a half to eliminate 99% of the gangs remaining in the surrounding cities. The 5 or 6 who survived vacated the area. Woods made sure they were at least 300 miles away before she called the teams back. They had already killed 4 of the 6 remaining gang members they were surreptitiously following when she recalled them.

Cottage industries were popping up everywhere in this rather large safe zone and barter was the name of the game. The 3 extra trailers on Clark’s farm never did get a young couple but with the amount of children the 5 farm couples were producing they would soon be filled. Clark and Woods had 6 children in 9 years and Woods said that is enough for our own little Army. Inez and Bradley stopped at 4 saying that was all they could take care of. The rest home had a turn over whenever the couples living in the 3 rooms had 2 or more children.. There was just not enough room for them to live comfortably. Those rest home couples and their children moved to empty apartment buildings or houses in the city and started more industries. Several enterprising people had started repairing the infrastructure like water and sewage in the cities. Full time electricity was still years away but it was being worked on.

The USA was on the slow road to recovery.

End story #22