Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (14 page)

     As each bottle was filled, Dave capped it and tossed it aside haphazardly into the yard. There would be plenty of time later to gather them and store them neatly in the house, out of the view of anyone peeking over the fence.

     The rain was coming down in buckets now, and he was barely keeping up. He switched back and forth between the east and west barrels, trying his best to keep them from overflowing, but he was losing the battle.

     It was backbreaking work. The full bottles of water weren’t heavy, weighing in at only seven pounds apiece. But after filling the first hundred or so, then tightly screwing the lids on before tossing them aside, he began to hurt. His back, his forearms, his hands. Had it really been so long since he’d done so much work that his body was actually rebelling? Was he in such a weakened state that a relatively easy task would wear him down?

     He sloughed it off. He’d have time to worry about such things
later. Right now he had a battle to fight.

     He desperately tried to catch every drop of water, even as the can behind him began to overflow.

     Part of him, the little devil that perched upon his shoulder and sometimes got him into trouble, told him to slow down.

     “You already have plenty of water,” the little devil said. “Between these bottles and the ones you filled from the tap, you’ll have fi
ve hundred bottles. That’s four hundred gallons, more or less. And that will last you a very long time. So relax. Take a break. Sit down and rest for awhile.”

     But Dave knew better.

     He knew that although the rains came frequently and torrentially in the springtime, the summers in San Antonio were a different story altogether. Summers tended to be very dry, sometimes bordering on drought conditions.

     He also knew that once he planted his crops, he’d have to irrigate them to keep them alive. And as his rabbit population grew, he’d have to share his water with them as well.

     Yes, four hundred gallons packed away in plastic bottles seemed like a lot. And yes, he’d have three hundred more gallons available for the crops in the rain barrels.

     But once spring transitioned into summer, he’d use more water than he could replace. And if he didn’t get as much as possible stored now, he might pay a heavy price later on.

     Dave was disheartened when he looked over at the barrels beneath the rain gutters. Both were overflowing, pouring hundreds of gallons of precious water onto the ground. The barrel behind him was doing the same thing, despite his efforts.

     So he did the only thing he could do. He pressed on, and cursed himself for not planning better.

     Yes, it was true that if Sarah and the girls had been there, the four of them would likely have been able to keep up.

     But it was also true that if Sarah and the girls were there, they would have needed to stockpile even more water. It takes a lot more water to keep four people alive than it does for one.

     There had to be a better way. He just had to find it.

-30-

     Hi, honey.

     I feel like such an idiot. We got our first heavy rainfall yesterday, and I wasn’t ready for it.

     I thought I was. I had all the barrels in place, and the empty bottles prepositioned on the deck. Still, I couldn’t keep up with it all, and so much water slipped through my fingers and rolled away.

     I remember a talk we had not long before you guys left for
Kansas City. We were sitting on the deck, looking out at the stars, and you asked me if I thought we were ready for the blackout when it came.

     I, being my usual macho self, told you we were. I said we’d thought
it all through. That we’d left nothing out, and had planned for everything.

     Now I realize how stupid I was. And how poorly prepared we were.

     First, we had no plan to reconcile if we were far apart when the EMP hit. Yes, we had backpacks full of water and energy bars in each vehicle, and in each of the girls’ school lockers in case any of us had to hike across town to get home. Yes, we trained the girls to walk out of school immediately when the EMP hit, and to walk directly home. We taught them to spend the night in abandoned cars if it took more than a day, and not to talk to anyone along the way.

     We thought we had it covered. And it never occurred to me, not even in my wildest dreams, that we’d be stuck a thousand miles apart.

     If it were only that, I’d accept it as an anomaly. One single oversight in all of our months of planning.

     But the water situation showed me that there were other places I’ve dropped the ball. I should have planned better. I should have been a lot smarter.

     I guess I should look at the bright side. I got all the bottles filled. And when I ran out of bottles, I took two large pitchers from the kitchen and made dozens of trips from the rain barrels to the bathtubs. I got both of them filled as well as the kitchen sink and pretty much everything in the house that’s capable of holding water.

     Right now it’s too muddy outside to do much. After the ground dries out in a couple of days I’ll plant the corn crop. Then I’ll plant the wheat and then the garden vegetables.
 

     My plan is to use the water in the house first for irrigation, then to start emptying all of the barrels. They’re all full, but I have nothing to put additional water in. It sucks to admit it, but if w
e got another good rainstorm tomorrow, it would all go to waste. Every single drop.

     I inventoried the soda bottles.
There are eight hundred and six of them. That’s a little bit of good news, I suppose.

    
That’s far more than I’d have guessed, and I’m amazed that we drank that much soda in two and a half years.

    There’s got to be a better plan, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. I’ve been racking my brain to come up with something, but so far I’m running on empty.

     By the way, and I have to tell you this because it’s so unlike me. When I woke up this morning, I was so sore that I just said to hell with it and rolled over and went back to sleep. I didn’t wake up until around noon. I could have slept longer, but I was afraid if I didn’t get my lazy ass out of bed I’d stay there all day.

     It was downright painful, getting out of bed. I don’t know if it was the digging and the raking before the rain, or bending into the barrels filling all of those bottles during the rain. Actually, it could have been the running back and forth between the yard and the bathtubs with the tea pitchers.

     Or maybe it was all of it. Whatever the case, I am more sore today than I’ve ever been in my life.

     Anyway, here’s the
punch line… after I got up, I realized that I didn’t really have anything to do. All of my inside projects have been done. I have plenty of things to do outside, but I can’t because both of the yards are a muddy mess.

     I wound up spending a good portion of the afternoon sitting on the deck, watching the rabbits humping each other in the
wet grass. I can almost taste that rabbit steak now.

     One thing I did do was try to clean up some of the mud I tracked into the house. If you were here you’d have killed me. I didn’t want to waste a lot of water, so I sopped most of the mud up with bath towels. After I got most of it up, I poured just a cup or so of water on the floor and used one last towel to finish the job.

     It wouldn’t meet your cleanliness standards by a long shot, but I’m a man, and you always said men aren’t much different than bears.

     The carpet between the back door and the bathrooms is totally shot. It’s damp and muddy and I know of no way to clean it. Sorry.

     As for the muddy towels, I’ll hang them on the clothesline so the next rainfall can wash them for me. The line’s full of my underwear and t-shorts now. They got a good washing, and as soon as they’re dry I’ll bring them in. I’m glad, because I ran out of clean underwear several days ago.

     Dirty underwear. Seems like a sad place to end this, but it is what it is. I love you.

-31-

     It turned out that the solution to Dave’s water collection problem was right under his nose.

     On the day after the rain, he sat on his deck, still waiting for the muddy ground to dry out, when it occurred to him that the stench of decaying bodies was gone.

     He was convinced that it was a temporary respite. He knew the bodies were still out there, and once they dried from the torrential rains the smells would be back. But the break would be nice while it lasted.

     It occurred to him that the rains had come down pretty heavy during the deluge, and his street was on a slight incline. Had the torrent been strong enough to wash the remains of the dead looter down the hill to the
storm drain at the end of the street?

     He hadn’t looked out the front window in
several now, and he climbed up the stairs hoping to see the vulture-picked bones washed away.

     He wound up being disappointed, and elated, at the same time.

     The body was still there. It had shifted position, and had been washed fifty feet or so closer to the bottom of the hill. It was, in fact, directly in front of Dave’s house now.

     He decided that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps any future looters might assume the front of Dave’s house was a dangerous place to be and would steer clear of it.

     But that wasn’t what made him elated.

     What made him elated was the site of a long line of garbage cans, sitting on the street, and
as far as the eyes could see.

     He’d forgotten that the day the EMP hit, two months before, had been garbage day.

     He kicked himself for being so stupid. The answer was there, in the street right below his window, the whole time.

     He’d been so confident that his
well made plans would provide plenty of water for a family of four. But he watched thousands of gallons slip from his grasp and fall to the ground. Even if his family had been there to help him, it wouldn’t have mattered. They’d still have run out of vessels to put the water in.

     If only he’d had thought ahead of time. If only he’d have retrieved some of those cans. He could have filled every one of them with water as well.

     Dave suddenly had a new mission. One he could do while he was waiting for the ground to dry. One that would prevent the same thing from happening again the next time it rained.

     Something that could expand his water stores exponentially.

     Something that theoretically could save his life someday.

     The EMP had hit that day before the garbage truck had come down the street. Nearly all of the cans were still filled with a mixture of garbage and rainwater, except for a couple that had been turned over by dogs looking for food.

     They would be heavy because of the water weight. They’d make a lot of noise if he just pushed them over. He’d have to tip them over quietly and let the water drain from them, then slide the trash out of them and onto the street. It was risky. He might come across a trigger-happy neighbor who’d mistake him for a looter.

     But he had no choice. It was an opportunity he just couldn’t pass up.

     He had one thing on his side that gave him an advantage over his neighbors, and anyone else who might be about.

     Dave could see in the dark.

     Not literally, of course. But with the aid of the night vision goggles he’d packed away in his Faraday cage, he could see several hundred yards in almost total darkness. It would be a great tool to use for this project.

     At just after midnight, Dave unlocked the bar that held his garage door down, and very slowly eased it up about a foot and a half. He did so with some apprehension, because he knew it was prone to squeaking. But he got lucky this time, and it didn’t make a sound. He took that as a good omen.

     He lay down next to the door and rolled out into the driveway. Then he came to one knee, very slowly, and looked both ways, up and down the street.

     He did everything deliberately slowly, because he knew that in the darkness, fast movements could catch the eye of someone watching and give him away.

     Still from a kneeling position,
he pulled his AR-15 rifle from the garage and carefully lowered the door.

     It was a moonless sky. Another good omen. Moonlight was something he didn’t need. But it would have made it much easier for others to see him. The stars in the sky gave his night vision goggles plenty of light to amplify into an eerie green field of vision. He couldn’t see as well as he’d be able to in the daytime, but
he could see far better than anyone else out there.

  
  Carefully, over the next hour, he went from car to shrub to wall, wherever he could find a hiding place, so that he could move up the street in short bursts.

     Along the way up one side of the street and down the other, he turned over a total of twenty two garbage cans, slowly and deliberately.

     He skipped a few. The tell-tale streams of water coming from the bottoms of some cans indicated they’d been dragged to and from the street so many times that they had cracks or holes in the bottoms. Those were no use to him, so he left them behind.