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Authors: Michael Bunker

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BOOK: Digger 1.0
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He called them his family, this pack of
young pirates and beggars that had adopted him as their surrogate
dad. They weren’t kin to him, though. At twenty-two years old he
was too young to have kids as old as this bunch. They counted on
him for answers, though—the ten of them did—and now they wanted
answers about the goat dilemma.

That would have to be put off for a bit.
There were more urgent concerns. Like the water problem. A world
grown used to water delivered
just-in-time
through pipes and
pushed by electric pumps didn’t understand the miracle and constant
necessity of water. Not enough water, you die. Too much water, you
die. In a world without water coming through pipes, everything
revolved around having access to ample supplies of it. Just like
with animals in the Serengeti, water was the first and last arbiter
of life. Government services and grid utilities all disappeared
right at the very Beginning. Water had reasserted itself in the
world after the Beginning.

In the five years since he’d been on the
farm, they’d never caught enough water to have any extra. There’d
always been just enough. Now, with their expansion necessary, they
were trying to water the gardens and the animals and provide enough
for themselves with the same amount of liquid life that they’d
survived on back when they were just eating canned goods, rice, and
wild game. Rain wasn’t as regular and steady as it had been before
the Beginning… since that day when the world went blind for
twenty-four hours and the newer, darker world started. Now, the
stretches of dry and drought sometimes dragged on interminably, and
when it did rain, the word
deluge
wasn
’t good enough to describe how much
water descended from the heavens. Too much or not enough. For weeks
on end there’d be nothing, then the skies would open up and they’d
all nearly be carried away in sudden flash floods. In the wet
times, they couldn’t hold all the rain that came. The weather was
like that now, ever since someone—or something—broke the world.

The family needed to quadruple their water
catchment, at a minimum, if they were going to keep surviving in
this place. And that was just it. This was the end of the road for
all of them. They were done running and hiding. If the rumors could
be believed, there was nowhere else to go now. They’d have to make
it here, or it was over. For all of them.

 

~~~

 

Ellis was the first to find the place they
all just called “The Farm.” He’d wandered since the day of
blindness. Barely surviving. Avoiding people. Trying to get by in
the shadows. Funny that. When his sight came back, it became too
dangerous to live in the light. Somehow the darkness had stayed,
even when the blindness went away. He’d been at the farm a few
weeks when the rest of the family found him. A gaggle of misfits
who’d also come from hiding in the shadows. The relationship was
tense at first, but neither Ellis nor the rest of the group had any
intention of leaving the valley. They’d have to fight one another
for the farm, or work together to make a life there. The outside
had become too hostile, too dangerous for any of them, so together
they’d put down stakes and gambled everything in their pockets and
packs to make it work. Ellis let them stay, and in return—
in
gratitude
—the misfits made him their leader. It was a good fit
in many ways, and with more hands for working, the load became
lighter. Now there were friends with which to go out hunting wild
game, or to gather edibles in the woods, to work the gardens, and
to share in all of the other endless chores. Strangers became
friends. Friends became family.

Wild Game
.

There was another woe Ellis could add to his
list. The scarcity of wild game in the valley was notable, even
though things were beginning to improve. The deer and turkey were
only now starting a resurgence after being decimated in the years
after the collapse. The first year after the blindness was a
slaughter. For man and beast. Over-hunting, disease, and predation
by feral dogs had very nearly wiped out the wild game populations
for good. Ellis hated to think that some elements of the Beginning
might have been a good thing, but he couldn’t help thinking it. He
shivered when he considered what might have happened to the animal
population if sixty percent of the human race hadn’t been culled by
the devastating Auto Immune Influenza (HI8) that kicked off just as
the world began to go south. That the flu had devastated the world
was rumor. That it had ravaged Texas was fact. Hunger, disease, and
violence had claimed another sixty percent of the survivors who
hadn’t been felled by the flu. Blow after blow after blow. With
over eighty percent of the world’s population gone (so they said)
the animals had only just begun to reappear, but not fast enough to
provide regular meat for the family.

And the homesteaders couldn’t travel too far
outside of the homestead and its surrounding valley into the rest
of the Basin without running into the gangs who controlled the
highways, or worse… the
hordes
. Feral packs of humans, sometimes in numbers
running into the thousands. Tens of thousands. Maybe more.
Leaderless, soulless, and mostly mindless now, the hordes
crisscrossed the badlands like locusts, sometimes even penetrating
into the mostly desert Basin in their search for food. If you
happened to be out salvaging, you could hear them long before the
clouds of dust on the horizon announced their presence. How’d the
hordes come to be? Well, that was a topic of gossip and rumor, but
there were theories. Plenty of theories.

The small towns that remained were all
barricaded and defended by nervous and paranoid townspeople with
guns, and who could blame them for being nervous and paranoid? This
was the time of the gun.

The only urban area that wasn’t barricaded
and defended was Central City, the largest metropolis in the Basin.
It was once a growing and thriving University town, but now it had
its own horrors. If you could even get there.

Before the Beginning, Central City was a
moderately sized urban zone, formerly home to half a million
residents. After the blindness and then the devastation and
depopulation, it had proven to be too large for anyone to
control.

At least, up until now.

Now it was a relic of the time before the
Beginning. A monument, they say. A wrecked and rubble-strewn memoir
of a bygone era known for over-consumption, obscene wealth, and
codified corruption. Only the smartest, most efficient, and best
organized salvage teams ventured into Central City. Everyone else
avoided it like the plague.

Ellis reached into his pocket and took out a
charcoal from the flat, metal cigar tin he used for small tools and
necessities. He put another mark on the wall above his pallet.
Another day in the valley. Spring was moving on, and the family
needed to beef up the gardens before the heat of the summer made
starting plants more difficult. So many things to do. They needed
more raised beds because intensive gardening provided more food per
square foot than traditional row planting, and minimized the need
for large-scale irrigation or equipment. Salvaged industrial goods
made things easier, but even easier was never easy. The family
needed plastic, glass, windows, roofing panels, anything at all
that could be used to build more greenhouses so they could grow
food year ‘round. The list was endless. Sheets of tin or steel so
they could build more rooflines and catch more water; not to
mention gutters, PVC piping, catchment barrels or bags of cement
for cisterns. They needed to expand and develop, and they needed to
be doing it
today
. After five years, survival was still
about today. Getting through it and trying to improve the
situation, because tomorrow could always be worse, and it usually
was.

 

~~~

 

Amy was up and cooking breakfast. She was a
girl but everyone except for Ellis called her Rooster because of
the way she would crow whenever she won any competition, and how
she would get her hackles up when someone tried to treat her like a
girl. She loved to fight. She was twelve and she did most of the
cooking, not because she was female, but because the other children
were horrible at it. Rooster believed the old adage that breakfast
was the most important meal of the day. Her real name was Amy
Armbruster, but Ellis was the only one who ever called her Amy. To
everyone else she was just Rooster, and she was fine with that. For
now.

The collapse had marked them all in so many
ways. Because she was small, strong, and fast, Amy had successfully
escaped the predatory clutches of a gang of precious metal pirates.
PMPs. Like the unscrupulous buffalo hunters who in the 1800s would
kill a buffalo for its skin and leave the carcass to rot in the
sun, most of the PMPs lived by pillage, cared not for anything but
what they could steal, and preyed upon the weak. Small communities
of survivors, bands of salvagers, or any groups that were smaller
or less prepared than the PMPs could expect to be attacked if they
were found wandering the Basin. The PMPs would descend like birds
of prey, wantonly killing, then stealing any precious metals,
stones, or booty of transportable value. Killing a man for the gold
or metal in his teeth was common with the PMPs. The pirates were
known to shadow the hordes like jackals or dingoes and pick off the
slow and those who, through protein deprivation, had grown too weak
to continue.

Amy had escaped just such a PMP crew. They’d
tracked her for days, but she’d turned out to be too fast. Too
wily. And after a few days hiding in the Scraps, she’d teamed up
with the rest of the youth in the family for protection and
survival. She’d proven to be intelligent, aggressive, and really
good at salvage, so the other youth had welcomed her into their
crew. That was before they’d all finally stumbled upon the strange,
raised valley, hidden in the top of a mesa. As with most of the
youth on the Farm, the external scars were fading, but sometimes
the internal ones never do.

 

~~~

 

As usual, the milking crew of Karl, Renny,
and Marlon weren’t at breakfast when Ellis got to the kitchen.
Those three were a constant team, working together because of their
proximity in ages (ten, twelve, and thirteen respectively.) They’d
already eaten breakfast and gone off to do their chores. Delores
was there in the kitchen, and so was Harvick (a young man everyone
called ‘
Shooter
’), and
so was Caroline (known as ‘Kay’). These three were eating breakfast
in the kitchen when Ellis walked in, stretching and yawning.

“Delores made
juevos con papas
,” Shooter said between
bites. “Fried to perfection.”

Eggs and Potatoes
, Ellis thought.
Always a good start for a day’s work.

He smiled at Delores and patted her on the
back. “Can you put mine into an omelet with some soft goat cheese
and throw a good handful of greens in there?”

Delores smiled back. “Sure, Dad.”

Calling Ellis “Dad” was a running joke. He
was only a few years older than her, and four years older than
Charles (Chuck) who’d just turned eighteen. Ellis had only been a
few months younger than Chuck when the blindness had hit. He
didn’
t feel older at all.
But
they all looked to him like a father figure, and the
leader of their family. To most everyone he was usually just Ellis,
but a few of the children found it humorous to call him Dad.

Delores, at sixteen on the verge of
seventeen, was the oldest young lady in the family. She’d been
discovered by the group hiding under a desk in the collapsed office
of an old KOA campground after her family was cut off and trapped
by a horde near the swamps southeast of the Stanton-Lowville
Prison. Talk about emotional scars. But Delores was the resilient
kind. Strong. Deep as a cool mountain lake. Ellis always smiled
when he thought about her. She was the group’s philosopher and
moral compass, and she questioned
everything
. She sipped at
a cup of “coffee” made from roasted and steeped cereal grains.
“Goats got out again this morning,” she said.

Ellis took a deep breath and rolled his
eyes. “How much damage did they do?”

“They weren’t out long before the milking
crew caught ‘em, but they’d eaten about ten percent of the greens
before they were caught.” She looked at him over her cup. “We need
to do something about this, Ellis.”

Ellis nodded his head as he poured himself a
mug of grain coffee. He knew that the
we
who needed to do
something meant that
he
was going to be expected to come up
with a solution, and then everyone else would implement it to the
best of their abilities.

Ellis looked around the kitchen and then
sighed. “Here’s what we’re going to do… and I know no one is going
to like it.” He watched as their eyes and then their heads dropped.
They listened, but they didn’t look at him.

“We’re going to have to take turns with
someone staying up with them all night. Then we’ll tie them out in
the morning and check them regularly throughout the day to make
sure they have something to eat and plenty of water.”

“Water—” Shooter said. “We need to do
something about that too.”

Ellis closed his eyes, opened them again and
nodded. “I know, guys.”

“Shooter and Chuck talked to a salvager
yesterday out by Fontana’s Bridge,”
Delores said.
“Said he saw a horde a few days ago.”
When she said “horde,” her eyes met Ellis’s and he nodded almost
imperceptibly. He knew what visions—what memories—the word evoked
in her. Her first family had been consumed by a horde. But she was
strong now, and brave. She was turning seventeen soon and was
mature for someone twice her age. There was a slight tilt of her
head, but her eyes held Ellis’s gaze without interruption. “Said
they skirted the Basin heading north. Said the dust cloud on the
horizon nearly blocked out the sun.”

BOOK: Digger 1.0
13.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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