Alone: Book 1: Facing Armageddon (22 page)

     This time I delivered bunnies.

     Let me explain.

     A few days ago I was in the back yard on my way back from the Hansen house. I’d just finished picking some fresh tomatoes and cu
cumbers from the garden and was going to eat them for dinner along with my rabbit soup.

     The oddest thing happened, though. One of the rabbits… not one of the original ones we started out with, but one of
the first litter, came over to me and just stood there in front of me, looking at me. I walked toward her, and she held her ground, like she was challenging me.

     I went to go around her and she moved too. Then I moved back the other way, and so did she.

     I thought I was losing my mind, but it was almost like she didn’t want me to pass. Or she was trying to tell me something.

     I knelt down to see if she’d let me pet her, and surprisingly she did. I thought that was odd because usually the rabbits all scatter when I’m around.

     Anyway, she let me pet her, and that’s when I noticed she was very pregnant.

     I’d forgotten how quickly the rabbits reproduce. And I started looking at some of the other rabbits as well. It’s
hard to tell which ones are females from a distance, because you can’t see… well, you know. But several of them appeared to be extra plump.

     It occurred to me that I need to take steps to keep the rabbit population under control, or I’m going to be overrun. I mean, we knew that the rabbits we had would produce an offspring of as many as
six hundred rabbits the first year. We didn’t see that as a problem. We figured that between the four of us, we could eat most of them. And that we could turn the rest into jerky to add to our dry stock or to barter later on.

     But I can’t eat six hundred rabbits in a year. And drying out rabbit meat over an open fire is time consuming.

     When I was in Jack Castro’s garage looking for supplies, I remembered seeing three small dog cages. The kind you put your dogs in when you take them to the vet.

     As far as I knew, they never had any dogs. I mean, I never heard any barking or anything. And these cages had plenty of dust on the
m, like they hadn’t been used in awhile.

     Anyway, long story short, I
went back and got those three cages. And in each cage I put two pregnant bunnies and one male.

     The girls would have laughed their asses off, watching me chase those bunnies around the yard. I think they’ve learned that whenever they see me pick up one of them, they never see that particular bunny again. So they run from me now.

     Needless to say, it took awhile to catch them. Especially the males. They had a lot more energy than the pregnant females.

     Anyway, I wrote out three signs and taped them to the top of each cage.

     The signs said to resist the urge to eat the rabbits. Rather, to let them breed. I said they would eat grass or most other green things, and didn’t need a lot of water. I said if they let the babies happen, they’d be mature enough to eat in just a few months. I also said that the mama would be pregnant again within a few weeks and would have her next litter six weeks after that.

     Lastly, I asked them to pay it forward. I asked them to decide when they had enough of a rabbit population to support their needs,
and then to do the same thing I did. That they put two pregnant females and a male back into the cage and leave it out to share with another family.

     Other than that, there’s not a lot of things going on here.

     Had to take a break and wait for daylight. My flashlight batteries went dead. Sorry about that.

     I’m finding that it takes forever for the rechargeable batteries to recharge, just charging for an hour and a half a day. I think when the weather starts to cool in a few weeks, I’ll start using candles. That’ll help. Right now, though, it’s too damn hot in here as it is.

     I noticed yesterday that the second corn crop is starting to sprout its ears. I’ll be able to harvest it in a few more weeks. The second wheat crop is waist high now, and coming along nicely. I anticipate that both will be ready to harvest before the first freeze.

     So all in all, I guess things are going fairly smoothly here. I love you, hon. Please give the girls each a kiss from me and tell them I love them too. I miss you so bad it hurts. But I’ll survive. I have to.

-49-

     Dave checked the garden. The vegetables were growing faster than he could eat them. He could exceed his daily calorie count, of course. But he didn’t want to do that for a couple of reasons. First of all, he was strong and had sufficient energy on most days to do the chores that needed to be done. He didn’t need any extra energy. So any additional calories he took in would merely be wasted.

     Secondly, he’d never given up on his dream to somehow find his family and bring them back with him. And if he was successful in doing that, they’d still need whatever food he could stockpile. He knew it
might take several weeks for him to make it to Kansas City. And several more weeks to get back.

     He also
knew he couldn’t make the trip in the wintertime. The ice and snow would just make it too treacherous. And it would be too easy for someone to follow him on snow covered ground.

     No, the smart time for him to set out would be the springtime. Which meant he’d be on the move instead of planting and caring for his crops.

     Which meant that when he returned with Sarah and the girls, they’d have less food to eat, without the two additional crops of corn and two crops of wheat.

     And that, no matter which way he figured it, meant he still had to conserve food wherever he could. Because when he returned with his family the following summer, they had to have enough food to live on at least until the following spring when
they could plant again.

     So eating extra calories just for the sake of preventing the vegetables from going to waste was just not an option.

     Instead, he revisited his plan to store drinking water in the bottom of his chest freezer, hidden beneath a bunch of spoiled and rancid food.

     He went to the garage and opened the freezer. He
slammed it shut again a lot more quickly.

     The food was already spoiled when he put it in there. Unable to dry out, it then mildewed and the smell grew exponentially worse.

     It was so bad he wanted to vomit.

     In his mind he debated whether it was even worse than the decaying bodies that permeated the air around him.

     He decided that the mass of stinking decay had to go. And the only place he could put it to keep from stinking was in the ground.

     So he went to the center of his
back yard and dug a hole, two feet deep and two feet square.

     A couple of the rabbits jumped into it as soon as he finished, happy that this human finally decided to stop eating them and decided
to help them to dig their tunnels instead.

     Dave didn’t bother removing them. He knew it would be a lost cause. They’d merely jump back in as soon as he was out of view.

     Instead, he walked up the stairs to the medicine chest in the bathroom and took out the Vick’s Vapor Rub.

     Sarah used to rub it on the girls’ chests when they were congested, to help them sleep better at night.

     But Dave had a different plan for it.

     He stuck his finger into the heavy paste and
took a large dollop of it out of the jar, then rubbed it between his upper lip and nose.

     It burned his nose. But the smell was pleasant, and immediately blocked out all other smells.

     Next, he put on some rubber gloves from the kitchen and went into the garage, where he scooped the disgusting muck from the freezer into a large garbage bag.

     He carried
the bag at arm’s length to the back yard, where he placed it next to the hole.

     He’d expected to have to reach into the hole to remove several rabbits before he could place the bag inside the hole.

     But it turned out that the rabbits didn’t like the awful smell either. As soon as he brought the bag out the door, they scattered to the far corners of the yard in an attempt to get away from whatever was in the bag.

     Dave couldn’t blame them a bit.

     But that wasn’t all. The smell was so bad inside the freezer that even the bottles of water reeked of it. Even though there was a sheet of heavy plastic that separated them from the spoiled food and they never actually came in contact with it.

     Dave took the bottles over to the garden. The crops were only a couple of weeks from harvesting now, but the water in these bottles would  never be consumed. It would be used to irrigate the crops for their last few days.

     The inside of the freezer also reeked, until Dave washed it down with straight Clorox bleach. Then he left the freezer door open for a couple of days before rinsing it.

     His plan was to harvest the rest of the vegetables and berries from the vegetable garden, and to freeze as many as he could. He was confident that running the freezer an hour and a half per day would be enough. He’d tested it, in fact. He knew that normally the condenser on a chest freezer would come on periodically throughout the day to drop the temperature down to the desired level. Then it would turn off again for several hours.

     Dave found that when the freezer was only powered for ninety minutes a day, it ran pretty much non-stop, but was indeed able to reach the desired setting on the thermostat.

     The well-insulated freezer walls and door kept the temperature from rising too much during the other twenty two and a half hours a day.

     Dave simply reset the thermostat to twenty degrees. When the condenser was running, it worked hard to lower the temperature to that level. And once it was that cold, the insulation kept it cold. It seldom rose over thirty degrees the rest of the day.

     He knew he had too many vegetables to fit in the freezer, though, so he was simultaneously working to dry out many of them.

     He used a system Sarah had found in a prepper’s book. Dave still remembered the day he walked into the bedroom and found her reading it.

     “What
are you reading, hon?”

     “Oh, it’s a book called
Prepping for Armageddon on a Budget
. I think you’ll like it. It was written by a former Marine like yourself. And it has all kinds of tips for prepping that don’t cost an arm and a leg.”

     “Too late. I’ve already spent two arms and one leg. That’s why I move so slow.”

     “Very funny. No, seriously. There’s some good stuff in here. Right now I’m learning how to dry out the vegetables from our garden so they’ll be shelf stable and will last for years.”

     The process was simple enough.

     He used the same stew pots he boiled his drinking water in. Only this time he filled them with sliced or chunked vegetables.

     He took the stew pots and placed them atop a folding table in his back yard, covered with screens to keep the flies out.

     Then he let the sun do its thing, heating the aluminum pots and drying out the vegetables inside.

     He stirred each pot several times a day to allow the vegetables on the bottom an equal chance to dry, and brought them inside at night so they wouldn’t absorb water from the morning dew.

     By the third day in the sun, the vegetables were dehydrated, completely free of moisture, and were shelf stable. They would last for years, stored in plastic zip lock bags.

     But whenever Dave needed them for a pot of soup or rabbit stew, just a few minutes of boiling reconstituted them and made them edible again.

-50-

      It was late September when Dave noticed it was starting to get cooler in the evenings.

     He was glad. He’d had enough of the hot weather. In the dog days of summer it was unbearably hot in his safe room. There were times he was tempted to place a cot in the middle of the back yard and sleep there instead.