Surviving the Fog (17 page)

Mike asked Erin to dream up some ways to
entertain the tribe during the long months ahead.  Erin formed
a social committee made up exclusively of girls.  The
committee began by asking each of the campers what kinds of talents
they had.  By the time it became too cold to play outside, the
committee was prepared with a variety of activities.

When it got cold enough outside, they would
move their large chest freezers to a level place just outside the
door, and pack snow on top of the food.  The freezers held the
dismembered carcasses of three deer along with other items.
 Bags of potatoes, rice, dry cereal, powdered milk, and flour
were stashed under the floors of the bottom rooms along with the
canned goods from the logging camp.  Mike hoped they had
enough.  He wondered if Jacob might be able to get one more
deer.  He wondered how long the road would be open to Mary
Brown's house, so they could restock their butter.  At the
first meeting in Mike’s new quarters, the Council discussed their
food supply.

"Are we going to make it to spring, Yuie?"
Mike asked.

"Well, our original supplies are just about
gone except for some rice, cereal, flour, and powdered milk.
 Switching to water in July helped a lot.  We used up the
food that we found in the bikers’ shack and in the RV.  We
used up the first deer that Jacob killed, but we have three more in
the freezers.  We have twenty bags of potatoes and ten bags of
beets that Mrs. Brown sent, plus those jars of pickles.  And
we have lots and lots of her winter squash.

“And we have the stuff from the logging camp.
 They had supplies for twenty people for six months.
 Most of it is canned stuff, like beef stew, vegetables, and
beans.  There are some apples and pears left, but we ate all
the oranges.  We have a lot of lemons, but they are all
wrinkled.  We plan to use them to make lemonade.  That
should provide some vitamin C.  We have to watch out for
scurvy.

“We’re rationing food, and we eat less than
big men, so I think the stuff from the logging camp will last about
four months.  With that, the deer and the veggies from Mrs.
Brown, I think we can make our food last for about five months.
 We could go a little longer if we rationed a little
more."

"It's almost November," Mike said.  "So,
we can make it until the end of March.  We might be getting
hungry after that."

"Mrs. Brown will try to grow lettuce and
chard in her solar room this winter," said Hector.  “And she's
going to try to grow cucumbers and tomatoes in five gallon buckets.
 But she said that she didn't expect a lot of production from
the tomatoes and cucumbers until after the twenty first of March.
 That's when the plants will get twelve hours of sunlight.
 She will make bread from her wheat crop and freeze it.
 The road will be passable some of the time by early March.
 I think she will replant her wheat and oats in April."

"I should be able to get into the forest and
hunt in March," Jacob added.  "And I can still get into the
forest for a few weeks more.  What I bring back, we need to
eat first, and save the canned supplies for later.”

"You mentioned the trout pond at the Brown
farm, Jacob" said Jean.  "Fish should be a good source of
protein.  And I'll start classes on edible plants that grow
around here."

"You think that you know which plants we can
eat?" Kathy asked, giving the woman a dubious look.

"Hey! United States Forest Ranger here," Jean
responded, giving Kathy an annoyed look in return.

"When that calf grows up, it will give milk,"
Eric said.  The rest of them looked at him.

"No bull, shit," John said.  The guys
looked disgusted, and the girls giggled.

"That wasn't nice," Desi admonished her
lover.

"Sorry, Eric," John said with a grin.

"Is there anything else we are going to run
out of by the end of winter?" Mike asked.

"Toilet paper," said Yuie.  "Sooner or
later we will have to use worn out cloth.  Which we will have
to wash and reuse."  She shuddered.

"Holey crap," John exclaimed.

"Knock it off, John," said Mike.  "Some
of you haven't heard Jean's story, so I going to have her tell it
now."  He looked at Jean.

"All right, but first, I want to thank you
girls for offering me Jackie's clothing.  I know that can't
have been easy for you,” Jean said.

"This is what happened to me.  I was
sent by the Forest Service in the middle of May to visit an old
lookout station, Baker's Point Lookout.  The idea was to see
if the Service needed to destroy it to prevent possible injuries,
or to restore it as a National Historical Monument.

"It coincided with my plans to take some
vacation time, so I spent a few days up there, kicking back and
relaxing.  When I left, I ran into the gunk you call, the
‘Fog.’  I didn't want to drive through it, so I thought that I
would take a roundabout way and bypass it.  Only I couldn't.
 Everywhere I went, I ran into it again.  And before I
realized, I stupidly ran out of gas.  I left my jeep and tried
to make my way down to civilization.  I spent a month going
this way and that backtracking again and again.  I had my
sidearm with me, so I managed to kill and eat game at first, and
sometimes I managed to catch fish from a stream.  But then I
ran out of bullets.  Later, I found myself northeast of here.
 That’s where I ran across a lodge called, ‘Eagle’s
Retreat.’

"Now, at first I thought I was saved.
 But as I made my way down the hill toward the lodge, I saw
two men beating the hell out of another man.  So, I got a lot
more cautious.  I went down closer to see what I could find
out, but I stayed out of sight.  By the time I got close to
the place, the three men were gone.  I waited until the next
day, when I spotted a woman pinning clothes on a clothesline.
 I got close enough to call quietly to her, and when she
sidled over to me, I had a very revealing talk with her.  She
told me she was a nurse.

"It seems that there were two different
groups at the Retreat.  There was a group of student nurses
and their instructors, and there was a group of artists doing their
art thing.  And there were some other people staying at the
lodge, besides the owner and his wife.  Two of these other
people were elderly ladies.

"The woman I talked to said that after people
realized they were trapped, things started turning ugly.  A
group of men stole some firearms from the owner, took over, and
started ordering everybody around.  They threatened the owner
when he protested.

"At first, they said that they were
organizing things so they could survive.  But then one day,
the owner and his wife disappeared.  They haven't been heard
from since.  The men said that the owner had decided to leave.
 The other borders didn't believe them.  Then the two
older women disappeared.  The men didn't even bother to
explain that.  They just said that it wasn't their problem.
 The woman I was talking to said that one of the male nurses
had disappeared the day before.  Also, one of the female
artists had been forced into a sexual relationship by the men.
 They withheld food until she agreed to sleep with them.

"Anyway, I hung around for two weeks.
 The nurse snuck some food to me every couple of days.
 Then, one day, as she was coming to give me some food, I saw
a man following her.  I don't know if she told them about me,
which I doubt, or if they thought that she was stealing and
stashing food.  I got out of there, right then.  I spent
two more weeks stumbling around in the forest before your hunting
party found me.  I had lost all my gear.  I’m sure that I
would have died there at that spot, if Nathan hadn't found me."

"More people," Eric murmured.

"More bad people," Desi added.

"Sounds like some of them are good.  But
right now they're trapped," Howard said.

"There's nothing we can do for them now,"
said Mike.  "But, when spring comes, who knows?"

"One more thing," said Jean.  "They had
goats and sheep.  I saw some of both, mostly sheep, wandering
around."

Erin wanted to do something for Halloween,
but no one had any good ideas, except for telling ghost stories.
 That didn't seem like such a good idea given their
predicament.  In the end, they asked a few people to sing
songs to mark the night.  So October turned into November.
 The days grew colder.  Jacob brought in a few more
rabbits, and to the surprise of everyone, a pig.

"A boar actually," Jacob said.

"It's pig out time," Yuie yelled.

"I was going to say that," John
complained.

The next morning they sliced the boars belly
in the deserted dining hall and ate bacon with the eggs that Mary
Brown had sent.

Snow began to fall more and more.
 Hector made a last trip to the Brown farm.  He reported
that things seemed to be fine at the farm.  The two little
kids were happily forcing their new older companions to play with
them.  He had helped Mary winterize her machinery.

The campers broke apart some of the cardboard
boxes in which the kitchen equipment had been delivered, and they
used the cardboard as sleds.  Some of the kids wanted to use
the emergency bathroom, but Mike declared it off limits.  They
had to use the outside toilets as long as possible, he said
firmly.

At the beginning of November, they
experienced some days when the temperature rose into the seventies,
although most of the time the high was in the fifties.  By the
end of November, they were glad to see an occasional day when the
temperature reached sixty.  It became a game to see how low
the temperature would drop.  One night at the end of November,
many of them stayed up after midnight, and at four am they watched
the temperature gage drop to five degrees.

The solar heating system was
working well.  On days when the sun shone for several hours,
it became so warm in the small cave, that the boys who preferred
cooler air would take their sleeping bags into the central area of
the Lodge to sleep.  Some boys, who had been assigned bunks in
the boys’ room, traded beds with some of the boys who were sleeping
in the small cave.  Mike knew that eventually it would be
cooler in the girls’ rooms than in the cave.  He was worried
that a girl would request that she be allowed to sleep in the cave.
 
What would he say
?  
What should he
do
?

As December came in, Mike realized that his
birthday had passed a few weeks ago.  He was fourteen.
 He wondered how many other birthdays had passed unnoticed and
uncelebrated.

In early December, they received three days
of continuous snow, and Mike set a curfew.  Everyone had to be
in the Lodge by four o'clock.  There was a lot of grumbling,
and when the skies cleared for the next ten days, a lot of kids
thought that Mike’s curfew had been premature.

Then, a week before Christmas, on a clear day
when most of the restless kids had abandoned the Lodge to play
outside, a sudden storm blew in around noon.  The skies
darkened, the clouds opened, and an enormous amount of snow began
to fall.

At first, the kids ignored the snowfall,
thinking only of it as a chance for more fun.  Then, as the
temperature began to drop precipitously, they began to seek the
shelter of the Lodge.  Some went to the dining hall, thinking
to wait out the snowfall.  They soon realized that it might be
difficult to wade back to the Lodge through the blinding fury.

Mike had the Spears scurrying to and fro,
rounding up the strays, helping the kids in the dining hall make
their way to the Lodge, and taking a head count.  When all the
bathrooms were empty and the head count was complete, they were
short four campers.  There was a short intense meeting in the
Chief’s Room.

"Chief, we have to find them!" Erin wailed.
 "Maria is one of the missing."

"I understand how you feel, Erin," Mike
replied, his face grim.  "But I can't allow anyone to go out
in that storm."

"Maybe they are still in the dining hall,
Chief," said Howard.  "We could make our way to the old
Chief’s Headquarters and then to the dining hall and check."

"I checked it, man, I checked it," Ahmad
stated. “I made sure that I was the last one out."

"They might have gone in after you checked it
and left," Howard argued.  "They might have been down in the
parking lot or something."

"I was down there, Howard," John said.
 "I sure didn't see them."

"Maybe they broke into the Chief’s
Headquarters," Desi suggested.

"We can't let them freeze, Chief," Yuie
pleaded.

"Let me think!" ordered Mike roughly.
 Then he turned to Jacob.  "Can you make one more check
around the perimeter of our camp?" he asked.  "And then check
the Chief’s Headquarters and the dining hall."  Jacob
nodded.

"I'll go with him," said Jean.  "It'll
be safer if two people are together."

"I'll go too," Hector said.

"No!" said Mike while shaking his head
emphatically.  "I'm only risking two."

"There are kids out there," Hector exclaimed.
 "I'm going."

Mike looked up at Hector.  "I said, no,"
he repeated quietly.  "And I'm either the Chief or I'm not."
 He waited.

Hector breathed out harshly.  "You're
the Chief," he said.

Jean and Jacob left.  The others waited
minute by agonizing minute.  Mike, Hector, and Yuie stood
outside the door, straining to see through the blinding snow.

Suddenly Yuie shouted, "That's them!"

A few seconds later, a person came into view,
and then another, and finally it was evident that there were six
persons making their way back to the Lodge.

The three watchers went out to meet them.
 Yuie was crying and hugging Maria and the others.  Erin
and Ahmad came out of the Lodge to help.  Gradually, Mike got
them all shepherded into the Lodge.  Mike looked in wonder at
Jacob and then grabbed him in a bear hug.