Digger 1.0 (4 page)

Ellis broke eye contact with Delores and
fixed his glare on Shooter. “What were ya’ll doing out by Fontana’s
Bridge?” It wasn’t an accusation, a rebuke, or even a challenge,
but the meaning was communicated clearly. If they were out at the
bridge, they’d better have a good reason, and they better have
followed the rules.

“We followed a buck that far, but we didn’t
cross the river,” Shooter said.

“You both need to be careful. Getting seen
out that far could lead someone back here.”

“We checked all over, Ellis. I promise.
Didn’t see any sign that anyone had been over the river.”

Ellis sighed. He knew that one day, if
something wasn’t done, that bridge would be the death of everyone
on the Farm. Other than by crossing that bridge, access to the
valley was nearly impossible in most places, and highly difficult
everywhere else.

He tapped his finger on the table, firm, but
not angry. “If that salvager told you he saw a horde, then he told
someone else he saw you.”

Shooter
’s head dropped a little and he shrugged.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“I am right.”

“We’ll make sure we’re not seen next time,”
Shooter added.

Ellis smiled and took a sip of coffee. He
waited a few beats for the import of the last conversation to sink
in.

“So, you saw a buck?” he asked.

“Yeah. Couldn’t get a shot, but we know
where to find him.”

Neil and Patrick, the last two members of
the family, shuffled in and found a seat on the long bench at the
table. Both boys were fourteen, and they were usually inseparable.
They looked like they’d had a hard night. The two had been captured
by highway gangs when they were really young and were used as
gophers and slaves and worse until, like many young people, they’d
escaped together into the Scraps. Most lone children their age who
never made it to the Scraps had long ago become either permanent
slaves or protein for the hordes. One or the other. Getting out was
rare.

Ellis poured them each a cup of “coffee”.
“Up late playing poker?”

Neil
almost grinned.
“I wish.”

“Coon got in the chicken coop last night,”
Patrick said. “We were up all night after the ruckus. Lost three
laying hens.”

“Dammit!” Ellis said, before looking around
at the faces at the table. “Sorry.”

Neil put his hand out as if he were asking
for something, and then slowly closed it. “We need more chicken
wire, Ellis. And if we can’t get it we’re going to have to make it,
which means we’ll need wire. The thinner the better.”

Ellis looked up at the sky and sighed again.
His answer was always the same. “I know.” He looked back at Neil
and then at Patrick. “So what happened with the coon?”

“We got ‘im,” Patrick said, smiling.
“Delores is going to fix him for supper.”

Coon
wasn
’t easy to cook. Ellis knew that from experience. Some
scent glands had to be carefully removed in order for the meat not
to be spoiled or at the least, unappetizing, but Delores had become
a master at the craft. A few of the family members had even grown
to like coon and they savored it as a delicacy. Everyone in the
family was always glad to have meat, no matter the type, and coons
were still plentiful.

Patrick winked at Ellis, “The good news is
that once we get the skin fleshed and stretched and cured we’ll
only need five more skins to finish your blanket. You’ll be toasty
and warm this winter!”

“I’m looking forward to it guys, and I mean
that,” Ellis said.

Neil slapped Patrick in the arm, “Yeah,
Chuck loves his coon blanket so much that he wouldn’t even trade it
to Patrick for that .22 pistol he wants.”

Patrick shook his head. “Burned myself
giving him that blanket as a gift.”

“Alright, then. Good work,” Ellis said. “You
boys get some sleep and then meet me in the gardens after lunch.
We’re going to build a new raised bed and then re-pot all the
seedlings the goats destroyed yesterday.

Both boys sighed together, but nodded their
heads.

Ellis sipped his coffee, his mind had
already moved on.

We’re going to have to blow that bridge
before someone uses it to come here and kill us all.

The boys had a good start on the new raised
garden bed when Ellis excused himself for his regular walk around
the valley. He didn’t walk it every day, but he tried to make it at
least three or four times a week. Delores, Kay, and Amy were busy
starting new seedlings, and as he walked away from the farm, he
could hear Delores and Kay screaming “
Rooster!
” and then Amy cackling at the top of her
lungs at whatever she’d done to irritate the others.

Chuck and Shooter were occupied prepping
traps for the coons and any other predators that would infiltrate
the valley through the thicket and the woods. After they were done
making and setting traps, the two young men would start hauling
water up the cliffs in buckets—backbreaking work if ever there was
such a thing—and then down into the bowl of the valley to be used
to tide them over until the rains returned. If the rains returned.
The longer the drought, the stronger the doubt.

Chuck had proposed a system that would solve
all of their water problems forever, but it had to be done in steps
and none of it yet. The first stage would be to run pipe from the
top of the cliffs where Chuck and Shooter usually hauled it up in
buckets, down to the valley where it could be stored and used. A
second, more ambitious stage of the plan was to devise a pumping
system so water could be pumped up from the river to the peak of
the cliffs, eliminating the most painful and labor intensive part
of procuring water. Gravity would then feed the water down to the
farm. But creating a working water plan necessitated more time
engaged in the dangerous craft of obtaining salvage. When they went
as a team on salvage runs, not only were they all in peril of their
lives, but that meant the farm was being neglected, and the danger
level throughout their balanced system skyrocketed.

Stress relief. Curiosity. Security concerns.
Those were the main motivations for the walk. But it also gave him
a time to worry and maybe even freak out a little without spooking
everyone else. He carried a heavy burden at only twenty-two years
old, and everyone in the family needed him to remain stoic and
solid regardless of the circumstances that threatened to overwhelm
their little little lifeboat.

All-in-all, considering what was happening
in the rest of Texas, the valley was a little slice of heaven. A
corner of God’s good earth that, due to its geography and
constitution, remained hidden from the eyes of most of the rest of
the Basin, and the world.

In the days before the Beginning, anyone
trying to hide out in the valley would have been discovered quickly
by eyes in the sky. Satellites, low flying planes, helicopters, and
even the dreaded drones of a mortally wounded power-mad government
zipping around the Basin, would have seen the little occupied farm
hiding in the bowl that was the valley. Thankfully, airborne
threats now belonged to the past. At least Ellis hoped they
did.

The entirety of the valley was a rare
geological and geographical phenomenon. A valley, hidden in a mesa,
mostly surrounded by a river. For all intents and purposes it was a
half-mile wide cleft in an outcropping—a mesa—that overlooked the
oxbow of the Solekeep River near the southern edge of the Basin.
This meant the valley was elevated above the surrounding
countryside, and protected on nearly all four sides by natural
impediments to foot travel and curiosity. The whole formation was
like a castle built high within an imposing natural fortress. Think
of a shallow bowl placed on a stool. Ellis liked to think of the
place as a hidden paradise, held aloft from the world in the palm
of God’s hand.

To the east, and curling around the farm to
the south, were limestone cliffs, nearly perpendicular walls that
dropped over a hundred and fifty feet into the lowlands that
eventually led to an area known by locals as The Nowheres. There
was salvage out in the Nowheres, but not much. The sparse and
unforgiving climate made it expensive and dangerous to find
out.

To the south and moving toward the west, the
limestone cliffs terminated in a quarter mile stretch of almost
impassible brush, growing thick along a steep grade that ran right
up to the Solekeep, where the land dropped precipitously down to
the river. The woods that were closest to the farm formed a
traditional forest and woodlot, but the further south and west you
moved through the forest, eventually you would enter into a thicket
so dense that only rodents, small predators, and the rare deer,
turkey, or pig might be able to traverse it.

To the west and north one would find the
deep waters of the Solekeep, a beautiful and dangerous expanse of
fast moving water a hundred feet across and virtually unnavigable.
The river rushed north and then bent into a huge oxbow before
heading due east past the borders of the Basin before turning north
again and forming the eastern boundary of The Scraps. Just before
the northward turn of the Solekeep was the Pumping Station that
used to pump water from the river to satiate the thirsts and lusts
of the half-million residents of Central City before the Station
shut down and almost everybody died.

Just east of the oxbow, in the northwest
corner of the mesa, Fontana’s Bridge lay rusting and mostly dormant
as the only easy passage into and out of the raised valley. The
bridge was grown over with brambles and vines, and unless a
traveler knew it was there, he’d be hard-pressed to find it. It was
the Achilles heel of the farm, which was fascinating because from
the sky, the bridge bifurcating the river just east of the oxbow
looked like a knife cutting the Achilles tendon of a giant.

Passing back to the east, the high walls of
the mesa’s edges restricted movement across the river and into
their little bit of Promised Land.

As Ellis walked, he thought about the bridge
once again. The river served as a moat around half of their home,
and the cliffs guarded most of the other half. Just like with an
ancient castle, the bridge was always the first and most glaring
weakness. And this one couldn’t be raised and lowered based on the
threat condition. If Fontana’s Bridge wasn’t there, the valley
would be like a medieval fortress, or a Biblical walled city. A
large and motivated army could certainly breach their secret
fortress, but short of that, ingress would be problematic for
anyone short on will and manpower. The valley wasn’t perfect, but
it was home.

The threats were all out
there
.

The completely unpredictable weather.

Plague and other biological evils.

Dangers from hordes, road gangs, the
precious metal pirates, and even lone gunmen and psychopaths who
were ever on the search for victims and plunder.

It was the Middle-Ages again, and death
lurked everywhere.

A town called Summner.

Kate always liked the name of the town of
Summner where she now lived. It sounded like summer. She remembered
summers to be good, before the meltdown. Before the time everyone
else called the blindness. As a kid and then barely a teenager,
she’d been busy during those summers. Ballet camp one year. Violin
camp the next. Swimming. Bonfires. The year her parents took her to
a place called Italy and then on to Germany.

That had happened, she’d had to remind
herself often. She’d been on a plane and she’d gone to all the
great music houses of Europe. Her parents had talked about
Juilliard. They’d talked about it because her teachers had
suggested it.

Had said it was obvious.

That had happened to her also when she was
young and before the meltdown of the world.

Along with other things.

She thought about the day everything
changed.

That first day, first
days
really,
had been sheer terror.

You see, she’d always been blind. Blind Kate
her friends had called her when they were feeling particularly
mean.

But on that day, she saw. She saw
everything.

She saw as if the pictures she’d made in her
mind were now suddenly real. Different, but real. She saw with her
eyes, rather than just hearing.

She saw planes plummeting to the earth, and
fires burning everything and everyone. She saw people screaming in
horror and holding their hands to their faces, rubbing their eyes.
And she saw them jumping from buildings too, unable to face the
darkness she had lived in all her life.

And she saw the sky.

What she saw there she couldn’t really
explain. Strings, like on her violin, wrapped up and tangled into a
huge knot.

And she could see a dragon, or what she
thought might be a black dragon, coiled around the knot and crowing
with glee.

And she saw death. So much death. And faces
locked in terror. Frozen in a fear that is beyond
comprehension.

Then there were the days after her world
went dark again. The entire eastern seaboard collapsing into death
and mayhem as the power grid went down (or so they said). She
couldn’t get out of the city. Not for weeks.

But she’d finally gone out on a homemade
raft with others. Others like her that thought the word “home”
offered something better than the conditions inside the city. A
government Safe Haven. FEMA in charge.

She remembered her violin teacher was with
her on the raft, paddling across the waters of New York, the smell
of smoke in the air, and the teacher describing the endless ash
settling on the water like dark snow. “Honestly,” her teacher, a
grand dame if there ever was one, “those people are animals,” she’d
said with contempt, the kind often reserved for a particularly flat
note, cast back upon the dying city that was once something great.
So full of promise. So...