Dead Hunger II: The Gem Cardoza Chronicle (36 page)

We chopped and swung for nearly an hour.  At one point, Hemp stopped and looked around the field, surveying the downed crops.

“You about done?” called Flex.  “Looks like you’ve got half the field chopped down and it’s boring up here.”

“Hold your big, John Wayne horses,” yelled Hemp, smiling.  “We’ve got the worse detail here.”

“Indeed you do, brother!” said Flex.  “Should’ve brought my iPad.  I could be playing Words with Zombies right now.”

Cynthia, Charlie and I laughed.  Hemp shrugged.  His usual, “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” shrug.  And the funny part was, he really didn’t have a clue.

“I think we have enough,” said Hemp.  “Let’s start gathering and get it tossed into the trailer.”

We all dropped our sickles and started scooping.  Our main harvest area was only fifteen yards or so from the trailer, so it didn’t take long to toss it all in inside.  And there was a lot of it.  By the time we finished, we had to push the foliage back with the doors to close them, and even then, some stray pieces hung out.

“Gonna be enough, Hemp?” said Flex from above.

Hemp looked up at him, shielding his eyes from the sun.  “Should be good for a start.  I may have to figure out a way to emulsify the oil in the water, but yeah, depending on the size of the still and the way it’s set up, we should be able to extract a decent amount of oil.”

Flex folded his chair and dropped it down to Hemp, who caught it and tucked it back into the storage compartment.

“Bring down the gimp!” I shouted, in reference to one of my favorite Tarantino movies, Pulp Fiction.  I briefly considered the possibility that Quentin was very likely a zombie now, or dead himself.  Was that irony?  Probably.

“Very funny,” said Flex, who also loved the movie.  “You won’t catch me in a leather body suit unless Hemp here says I need it for protection.”

“I’ll have to talk to Hemp about that then,” I said, smiling.  Yeah. Flexy in a leather suit.  What a sight that would be.

Flex started down the ladder, and I could see him hesitating as he went to grab each rung.  Pride wouldn’t allow him to groan at the pain he was feeling, but I knew him too well.  He was in a bit of agony. 

When he got down, I said, “Let’s get some Tylenol in you, at least.  I’m guessing that’s your first bullet wound.”

“Yeah,” he said.  “Not something electricians have to worry about.”

We loaded back inside and discovered that Cynthia had made burritos with canned beans, tomatoes and chili, and the interior of the coach smelled amazing.  I didn’t bother asking her how she learned how to make homemade flour tortillas, but she’d taken advantage of the additional supplies we’d stocked inside the mobile lab.

Despite our watering mouths, we decided we’d drive the short distance to the cabin before eating lunch. 

The drive leading from the gravel road to the cabin was only marked by a faded wood sign that said “JB,” about six inches by six inches.  Hemp eased the coach and trailer right at the sign and drove down the leaf-covered, unpaved drive about a hundred and fifty feet back, hidden by a canopy of trees.
There was a nice turnaround at the end, and
Hemp stopped in front of the cabin and put the motorhome in park.  He pivoted the captain’s chair around and smiled.

“I’m hungry.”

We all were.  There was still plenty of water in the storage tanks of the motor home, so we washed the sticky urushiol residue off of any exposed skin and sat down for a meal that went down fast.  I’m pretty sure we were all hyperventilating when we were done, we’d wolfed it down so quickly.

“That was some good shit, Auntie Cyn,” said Trina.  “Really yummy.”

Whenever Trina used her newfound verbal freedom with Cynthia I always cringed.  If
Taylor
wasn’t around I couldn’t suppress a smile, but when Cynthia’s daughter was within earshot, I knew it bugged her.

“Yeah, mommy,” said
Taylor
, throwing Trina a jealous glance. “That was the best shit I’ve had in a long time, too.”

“
Taylor
!” scolded Cynthia.

“She said it first!”

“And that doesn’t mean you can,” she said.

Taylor
crossed her arms in defiance, but didn’t argue further.

I think my face was about as red as it could get.  “Sorry, Cyn.”  I looked at Trina.  “I’ve asked her to refrain around
Taylor
.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, smiling. “But that meal can be a staple as long as the canned goods hold.  If we have to start growing our own tomatoes and beans, and slaughtering
our
own cattle, then I can’t make any promises.”

When we were done, we
looked through the windows and
checked out the area around the
small house
. Some old barrels that appeared to be well cured were stacked outside the small cabin.  The door to the place stood
ajar
, and no alarming noises or movement came either from the cabin or the surrounding woods.

“We know why we’re here, folks,” said Hemp.  “Who wants to have a look at the still with me?”

“Let’s just make sure it’s clear and we can all go in,” said Charlie.  “Shut the door once we’re inside, and Cyn can
sit with the girls in the front room and
keep an eye on the woods
.
”

“Fair enough,” said Hemp.  “We’re off.”

We got outside and Hemp looked at the roofline of the building.  His eyes went to a spinning vent cap.

“Looks like the back right corner – that’s a hell of a vent pipe coming off there.”

The nearest driveway we’d passed was about a half mile further up the road, and there weren’t any other drives off the main road we came in on.  In this world, the farther the zombies had to shuffle to get someplace, the better for us.

We all had our headlamps on, and carried our automatics in kill position as we cleared the building.  No dead bodies, no zombies.  We’d had a good streak of luck going, but all that did was make us wonder when the fuck we were going to run into a good nest of them.  Or gaggle.  Or murder.  I wasn’t sure what you called a bunch of zombies, and if George Romero hadn’t invented it, then we were probably free to do so.

Murder works.  And it goes both ways.  Them as a group; us as a method of remaining alive.

Hemp pushed
open the door in the back rear corner and whistled. 
“Now this is a still
. 
Very professionally built.
”

He walked in and started inspecting the configuration. 

“
This tank is essentially the cooking tank.”  He tapped the stainless steel tank and it echoed back, a hollow metallic sound.

“Seems to be between batches,” he said.  “That’s good.  This big reservoir is where the poison ivy will be packed inside a basket, which is probably inside
this tank
.  This conical shaped hood comes off by unscrewing these six pivoting clamps.  After we pack the container
with the ivy,
I’ll pour about four inches of water in the bottom.  Then we heat it.”

“How’s it heated?” I asked. 

Flex leaned behind it and found the propane tank.  “Got a full tank,” he said.  “Big propane burner beneath the pot.”

“Excellent,” said Hemp, continuing his lesson.  “The water should come to a boil pretty quickly with that burner, and as it vaporizes and travels up through the plant matter, the oil condenses with the water and travels through this braided line, and drip
s
down this column here.”  He ran his finger along the lines and tanks. 

“So when all is said and done, we’ll have some pure oil, once separated, and some urushiol hydrosol, which is essentially a colloidal suspension, which will work as well as the pure oil for our purposes.”

“Colloi what?” Charlie asked.

“Just oil suspended in water, which is also excellent for our needs.  Unclamp that lid, would you, Flex?  Guys, we won’t need to shred the plant matter, but we are going to need to pack it in here as tightly as possible.  I want the steam to have a tough time getting through it.  The tighter the better.”

Flex flipped the pivots and lifted the lid off.  Hemp and I grabbed the large basket inside by the handle and lifted it out.  It was about 30 inches in diameter by 2 feet high.

“Not a very big basket, Hemp, said Cynthia.  “How long does a batch take?”

Hemp shrugged.  “We’ll know after the first one,” he said.  “But I’m guessing around forty-five minutes to an hour per batch.  Maybe less.”

“I saw a wheelbarrow on the side of the house,” said Flex.  “Babe, let’s go get some plants.”

As I walked alongside Flex, I nudged him.  “I’m not sure, Flexy.  I was thinking about the . . . the thing.”

“About what?”

I looked behind us to be sure we wouldn’t be overheard.  “You know, the baby, and the poison ivy.  If breathing in dust and stuff from this could hurt it.”

“Fuck,” Flex said, “I should’ve thought about it earlier.  I think Cyn can help.  You stay in the front room with Suzi and keep an eye out.  Good call, babe.”

I was relieved.  I didn’t need to do anything to jeopardize the new life growing inside me.  If Hemp was as smart as I figured, he probably knew I was pregnant anyway, and he likely would’ve said something to me when I was picking the stuff if there was a risk.

With Suzi on my arm and the girls chattering beside me on a worn-out sofa, I watched through the window as Flex, Cynthia and Charlie used the wheelbarrow and their arms to bring the plants inside.  Before long they had all of it stacked in the far corner of the distilling room with some of it spilling into the hallway.

Hemp continued preparing the equipment, adding the necessary water for the first batch and getting the burner fired up and cranked to full heat.

In forty minutes, H
emp approached me with a glass beaker he’d taken from the mobile lab.  It contained exactly 90 ml of a greenish-yellow oil.

“This is life,” he said.  “For us, that is.  For the
m, as little as one micron mean
s death.”

“I wouldn’t know a micron if it bit me in the ass,” I said.

“If you take a pencil that has been finely sharpened,” said Hemp.  “And you make a dot on a piece of paper, that dot is approximately 615 microns.  Does that give you some idea?”

“Fuckin’ small.”

“Extremely fuckin’ small.”

“So we have a lot of kill power there,” I said.

“Yes, if we mix it correctly and don’t waste it.  But by the time we’re done with all the batches, we could have up to a gallon of this.  Mixed properly, that gallon could kill 100 zombies a day for five years or more.”

“What were you saying to Flex about emulsification?”

“Well, we all know that oil and water don’t mix.  Even when they’re forced to mix, they ultimately separate again.  We don’t have to be too concerned about it, because the vessels we’ll use to spray the ghouls will be small enough to shake.  We just have to ensure that at least a micron of oil is in each spray, and it would be almost impossible for it not to contain enough.”

“That’s easy.  I like easy.”

Some movement caught my eye low to the ground outside the window.  I leapt to my feet, Suzi pointed outward.

“What is it, Gem?” asked Hemp, alarmed.

“Take a look,” I said in a whisper.

Outside, rooting through the leaves and crunching them underfoot, was a feral hog.  It wasn’t all that big, but it was grey and snorting, but most of all it looked meaty and potentially quite tasty.  It stared directly at the cabin window I stood in front of.

“It has to weigh at least a hundred pounds,” said Hemp.  “Shoot it!”

I hadn’t had any fresh pork in too long.  I did love my pork, and the son-of-a-bitch in front of me looked like a fat plate full of carnitas.

“I got him, Hemp.”

I took one very slow step sideways, hoping the window was dirty enough and the sunlight was glaring enough that the pig didn’t see my motion.

Once I was clear of the window I moved quickly to the door.  Gun readied in my right hand, I eased the door open and looked at the pig.

It was busy rooting through the leave
s
again.  I
declared that
it would be
this particular pig’s
last root session.

I raised Suzi, my barrel pointing straight at
its
head. 
It turned and looked at me with
its
beady black eyes.

I
fired
, hitting it cleanly, and down it went l
ike a cheap
New Orleans
hooker.  My hands went up, and I was whoop-whooping like some primate from Clan of the Cave Bear that just got her first kill.

In a way, I guess it was
like that
.  My first
pig
kill, anyway.