2nd Earth 2: Emplacement (12 page)

We are not saying anything, so Tim throws up his arms and asks us what is wrong with us. Even a bunch of dumb military types should be able to figure out that we could use that food and other things. Billy says he resents that, he has never been in the military. We tell Tim that we think it is a great idea, and that we will thank Charity when we see her, because he is nowhere near smart enough to think of that by himself. We decide to call a family council meeting with the representatives of each group present, and decide how we will accomplish this task. We all agree it should be done and we all agree that we could put our teens to work helping with this project. When we present it to them they are all happy to do it. Naturally there will be adult supervision. We decide to start with the town closest to us and then do the others working outward.

When we brought the last group of forty-five back we didn’t have room for everyone so we went to the next closest farm and cleaned that up for people to live in. There were many volunteers to move there and let the new people live in the more established groups. This all happened when I was out of it, but it’s nice to see our people are willing to help others. We are still in good shape for food supplies, but why let good food go bad when we can use it, especially as we continue growing. The people from up north say that up there this would be a waste of time, because everything froze during the winters unless it was in a well insulated room. We are lucky that is not the case here. It gets cold, but it doesn’t bottom out the thermometer and stay there for weeks at a time.

We start the project on Friday morning. The teens are all upset about having to miss their school time for this project. Yeah right, for some reason when they were all studying at home they loved it, but when we started holding classes in the meeting house, they look for excuses to get out of it. Not all of them, but some, I guess some things will never change. We decide to start on the far side of town and work our way toward home. We are driving through town when Teddy points and tells me there are people at two o’clock. I know he means that he sees them off to our right, but I have to be a smart aleck and tell him that’s impossible, it’s only 8:30. The people are trying to hide, but they are not able to avoid us. When they see the size of the group we have with us they ask if we are the ones with the settlement near here.

We admit that we are, but are curious how they know about us. The leader of the group, if there is one, tells us that they ran into three men driving an open car. The men had on military uniforms. They say they have been praying that it is true because the little ones are about done in from all the walking. One of the girls in the group says they walked from a place called Tennessee. At least that’s what the signs said. They were living in a town over there and were just about out of food and darn near froze to death this past winter. There are ten people in the group, three of those are adults, four are teens, and the other three look to be between six and eight. We tell them they are welcome to join us if they don’t mind working and contributing. They say they are more than willing, in fact they volunteer to help with the project we are on today.

The teens stay and help, as does the one man with the group, the two women and the little children we take back to the farm to rest and get something to eat. We bring sandwiches back for the young people who are working today. Even with as large of a work party as we have we only get about ten percent of the houses checked and emptied of all food and supplies that we can use like jars, lids, rings, pressure cookers, and things like that. Those ten percent filled four large trucks as full as we could get them. We did not take time to check them to make sure all the food is good yet. We will do that as we put it away and distribute it to the groups. I find out when I get home what a bad judge of age I am. Two of the little children in the new group are four and the other is five. One of the women, Shirley, and the man whose name is Mike have one four year old and one five year old, both girls. The other woman, Kim, is the mother of the four year old boy. The teen’s parents passed away so they have been living with the others.

We continue with the process of emptying the houses for the next two weeks. There is now enough food supplies to last our whole group at least a full year even if we don’t get the crops that we have planted and are planning to get into the ground yet. We have continued to look for people who may need the safety of living in a group like ours. There is no shortage of places to look and we have been finding a few every trip. The new farm that was established when we brought the group back from Rochester is catching up with the others quickly. That is as far as getting the buildings painted and yards cleaned up from the deep grass and weeds that have a tendency to overtake any patch of ground that is left unattended for even a short time.

James and Jenna are still amazed at the lack of deterioration on most of the houses, especially anything made of metal. They say the same thing that Tim and I surmised when we first came here. It appears that the radiation from the neutron blasts permeated the surface of the metal and even the wood changing the molecular structure and making it stronger or at least better able to withstand rust and rotting. We have tested the areas we go with a Geiger counter and have found no levels of radiation that would be harmful to us. James says that is consistent with the neutron technology that he studied back where we came from. The radiation from those blasts are extremely powerful and will kill anyone within a fairly large radius depending on the size of the bomb, but unlike the atomic or nuclear radiation it dissipated much quicker, leaving the area habitable much sooner.

That was the whole idea behind that technology, wipe out your enemy, but leave the cities and the usable items virtually undamaged. That way the victor could move in without having to rebuild everything as they did in the wars up to this point. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, everyone had the same idea at the same time. I know Ma and Gunny used to talk about how the Bible says that the world would be cleansed by fire when Jesus comes back for the second time. They as well as many other people I know felt that it might be talking about nuclear war, where all the countries on earth with that technology use them at the same time. All that we have read about that type of war would leave the world uninhabitable for thousands of years. At least for the type of organisms we know, like human beings and the animals that now inhabit the earth. It doesn’t change our lives in any way, but it is nice to try to understand what brought this world to the state that it is now in.

12

Our families are growing, not only in size, but in self sufficiency. We are very fortunate that everyone who has joined our groups wants very much to learn everything they can. Thanks to the efforts of Frank, Eric, and Tom, we now have at least a dozen men and young men who can plow the fields, and are good enough with the equipment to cultivate the crops while they are growing. Teddy loves to drive the big plows, and according to Frank, is one of the best even though he is still young. He still hunts with the others when we need meat. We have started canning a lot of the meat when we have excess. That is not often with the size groups that we now have. The topic of being able to replace some of the things we count on is discussed often, with no real solutions. One of the biggest items is the lids we use on every jar of food that we can.

We have been able to find thousands of the lids, rings, and jars, but we know eventually we will run out. It may not be for several years, or even in some of our lifetimes, but we are thinking about what will happen as our civilization grows. In many ways we are like the pioneers that started this country. But what scares those of us that have seen the technology that the world had, is how we will ever get back to even the level of the 1960’s, much less the level we knew back in our world. I guess we will just have to have faith that people will rise to the occasion and actually make the world better than it was. Perhaps all the new technology made people lazy, and caused them to forget what is important in life, each other. I’ll get off my soap box for now, it’s just that I can’t help but wonder sometimes.

We are continuing to build homes and to setup the prefab homes. Now that I have been declared fit to work again by Doc Betty, I am spending my days either working at the mill cutting lumber, or helping build or setup homes at the different groups. Apparently, while I was injured and unable to travel the others found several locations where the prefabricated homes were being stored. We have a crew of about 30 men and women who are getting very efficient at putting these in place and getting everything hooked up. There is an abundance of building materials in pretty much every town or city we have ever gone to.

Between Ken, Gary, Sara, James, and Jenna, they have taught our team how to do the electrical and plumbing hookups required to get the homes functional. When we first started putting the homes in place, it took us close to a month to get it ready to be lived in. Now they can get one of the homes ready to be lived in, in just about a week. We run all of our electrical wires underground, so that we are less vulnerable to attack. We have continued to put the system of tunnels between the homes as well. I had a dream the other night that we were attacked, and the only thing that saved us, was being able to get behind our attackers by having a tunnel that ran out into the woods. We all feel that the perfect place to have a tunnel come out in the woods is into a shed we built out there by the orchards, to keep the tools we use out there.

The biggest advantage to being as large a group as we are is that we can have several projects going at once. As soon as we mention the tunnel project out to that shed, we have more than enough volunteers to do the project. Billy’s wife Ramona can run a backhoe as well as anyone I ever saw, and so do several of the other women in our group. Many of the teenagers in the family enjoy driving the trucks, and are more than willing to do whatever they are asked to do. In this case, we will need to get quite a bit more of the conduit and the connecting joints. We figure it will take just about a mile, plus a couple hundred yards. Fortunately we know of several places we can get what we need.

We hold a meeting to decide where the tunnel should originate, and everyone says that they feel it should come out of three of the homes in our group, and have them join into the one main tunnel running into the woods. The crews begin working on the basement walls to connect to the tunnel in our house, Tim and Charity’s house, and Ken and Carries house. The other houses all connect to ours, so everyone at least in our group should have access to the new tunnel, if it is required. I think I told you that we have started putting weapons and caches of ammunition and food supplies in the tunnels. The point came up that what if someone else accidentally finds the tunnels, and uses our own weapons against us?

We decided that is a distinct possibility, so we have been getting the locking type of gun cabinets or gun safes, some of them are called, and have been locking the guns and ammunition in them, in the tunnels. I know what you are thinking. Now we have to memorize a dozen different combinations. Not really, we have the combinations hidden in the room with the safe. It is scratched into the bottom of the battery powered lantern we keep in the room with the other items in there. This particular project is going to take us most of the summer. Once the ground is dug up, and the tunnel set in place, we will have to be very careful to cover the ground over, so there is no trace of what lies beneath it.

We are also putting in vents because of the length, and we will hide them in bushes, so that they are not readily visible to someone in the vicinity. Luckily for us there is a trail just about wide enough through the woods for us to build the tunnel without having to remove more than a couple of trees in the path. Ken, who was in the Army Corps of engineers in the other world, is intrigued with this project. He says even they never did anything like this, at least while he was with them. He is our project leader, and has spent many long hours drawing up the plans, and calculating just what we will need to accomplish it. As with the other tunnels, we will be running electricity and lights the entire length of this one. We will keep battery powered lanterns at intervals, and even oil and propane lamps along the way as well.

Some of the people on this project suggested that we start at both ends and meet in the middle. We feel that is an excellent suggestion, and perhaps if we had more experience with projects like this, we would feel more comfortable doing that. Unfortunately we are afraid we may have to wind up moving the shed in the woods as it is, mainly due to some large trees along the route we have to follow. Plus, we have no idea what we will encounter, when we start getting farther out from the houses. Even digging between the houses we have found some extremely large rocks that took us a couple of days to be able to move.

All three houses are now fitted with an entrance to the tunnel, and those are now connected to what is going to be the main shaft. If anyone is watching us they will know exactly what we are doing. It is impossible to hide the kind of activity that is going on with a project of this magnitude. We have volunteers from all the groups to get this done, and it is going to take all of them. We are working on a section approximately a hundred yards long at a time. That way two back hoe operators can be digging at either end, and working toward each other. While they are digging the trench, others are going to the places where we get the conduit, and are putting it and the connecting joints along the path we will be going. That takes more heavy equipment operators to get them off the trucks and place them in the proper orientation to be put into the completed trench.

While this is being done, others are bringing large dump trucks full of gravel, to be dumped into the trench, to level the tunnel and to keep water from gathering around the bottom. The first couple of days it seems like not much gets accomplished, because the backhoes have to get the trench dug before much else besides preparation can be done, but once the first section is ready, the backhoes can move to the next section, and the others can do the work of building the tunnel. I have to admit that it sends chills down my spine to watch our extended family work together like this. For most of them, less than a year ago they were struggling to stay alive in cities, and now they are working together, building whatever we need to make our lives better and safer for all. We can all see the pride in their eyes, and in the way they carry themselves as well.

Even while we work at projects like this one, we all have guns close to hand, just in case we are attacked while we are working. I’m sure it was much like this when they built the railroads across this nation. The days go by, and the teams keep building the tunnel. Even Ken, who is pretty much a perfectionist when it comes to building, is impressed with the work that we are doing. I enjoy very much helping with this project; even if I go home every evening just about totally wore out for the first couple of weeks. Ken seems to be everywhere at once; making sure no detail gets left undone. Even as we are building this tunnel, the other teams are planting crops and cultivating them, so that we will have plenty of food for the winter. Our hunters help with the other projects until we start to run low on meat, then they go out and bring back enough to last until the next time.

We have had three small groups of between four and eight, come to our little community in the past month. They all say that they heard about us from the Colonel, who is still traveling around with his two compatriots. They tell everyone they meet about us, and how to find us. They all tell us he warned them that if they are not willing to work, then they may as well stay away. He also warns them that if they are looking for trouble they should avoid us as well, because we will give them all the trouble they could ever want. So far everyone that has come to us is pitching in wherever they are needed. We know they will need to be taught, and that is never a problem, because we all have had to learn many jobs since coming here.

We still rest on the Sabbath, no matter how much work we have to do. We also make sure we make time to have a dance, or a get together of some kind, so that we can all socialize and relax at least once a week. Our family is growing from within as well, it is now June and our family has increased in size with the birth of six beautiful baby girls, and seven handsome baby boys. The girls all teased the new moms, telling them they don’t remember the winter being that cold last year. All the new people are always telling us how happy they are to have found our community to live in. We always tell them how happy we are that they found us.

Speaking of happy, yesterday which was Saturday and Ramona was working on the trench for the tunnel, and she was the farthest one out from the group. Usually, there are at least a couple of the men with the backhoe operator, but in this case they were moving large stones away from the edge of the trench, about fifty yards away. She got down to check something out, when she heard a loud grunting fairly close behind her. She turned to see a huge wild pig coming straight at her at a full run. Naturally she tried to get back up onto the backhoe, but her feet were muddy, and she kept slipping on the tracks in her haste. Just when she thought she was going to get gored by the tusks on that beast, she heard the report of a large caliber rifle fired twice, and turned to see that pig go down no more than ten feet from her.

She looked up to see Teddy walking toward her carrying his .307. He told her he was hunting about a quarter mile away, when he had this overpowering urge to come over this way. When he came out into the clearing, he saw the pig running at the backhoe, so he shot it. The first shot took the pig in the neck severing the spinal column, and the second took him in the head, killing him instantly. The shots brought all of us running with our own guns, but by that time all we could do is help load the beast into the bucket on the backhoe, and get it to the barn to be processed. Teddy just recently turned thirteen, but most of the time seems to be closer to twenty. He does have his moments when he is still a young man, and we all appreciate those moments as well as the others very much. He seems to be in the right place, at the right time for us all the time.

The summer goes on, as time has a tendency to do. The crops are growing great, and the individual gardens are growing well. This is the first time many of our family have ever had the opportunity to grow their own food, so they are as excited as they can be watching the vegetables grow. We have run into some problems running the tunnel into the woods, but we have been able to work our way through them. Many of the members of our groups have started asking why we are even bothering to put the tunnel in. They say that we have not had any trouble in almost a year now, and as strong as we are, we will be able to take care of any trouble that may come anyway.

It is easy to see why they may feel that way, but for those of us who came from the other world, or whatever it was, we have no reason to believe that we will be left alone to live our lives peacefully. It has been our experience that there are always those that think they have the right to take anything they want. Those of us with a military background agree that we will never feel totally safe from people like that. We also agree that we will do whatever it takes, to prepare our families to defend ourselves against that evil.

Our shed in the woods had to be rebuilt to accommodate having the tunnel come up inside it. We actually had to dig a basement level, and build a block and concrete room under the shed. The underground room is large enough to hold food and other supplies in case they are ever needed. We made a trip back to the outdoor store, to get as much of the supplies as we can from there. We have also made trips to military bases to get anything that we feel will be useful to us. The tunnel is complete, just about the same time that we have to start picking and canning most of the fruits in the orchards.

We thought that we had a great crop last year, but after trimming the trees last fall, the crop this year is almost double what it was then. No one is complaining though, and it is really cute to watch the children who are old enough to help pick especially the cherries and apricots. It seems like they eat almost as many as they put in the container they are carrying. It was the same way when we were picking red and black raspberries and strawberries earlier in the summer. We have so much fun, it hardly seems like work. The wheat mill is running pretty much every day, to keep flour ground for making bread, cakes, and other treats that the very creative ladies in the family experiment with. So far they have not made anything that went to waste, even if it didn’t turn out to be quite as good as it looked in the cookbook.