After the Day- Red Tide Read online

  “Now, that ain’t very lady like now is it?” the cowboy hollered. “You win the first round and don’t let a gentleman have the chance to prove himself again. That’s not very lady like.” he still had that shit eating grin on his face.

  “Show me a gentleman and I’ll show you a lady,” she said walking back to Buck and the other two.

  “Now, I think we have a bit of a predicament here,” the cowboy hollered.

  “How do you figure, the lady won fair and square.” Buck hollered back.

  The cowboy stood for a moment.

  “That may appear to be the case but I know when I’ve been swindled.” the cowboy said.

  “I think you better let us go before you regret what you’re thinking. A girl beat you, doesn’t matter what you try pulling now. You can’t change that. We have a Jeep with a few boxes. You still have a warehouse full of food. There is no reason to have anybody die over this.” Buck said with his box and knife still on the hood

  “Do you really think I was going to let you go that easy?” the cowboy asked.

  Buck motioned for everyone to get in the Jeep. Sam and Bill hopped in the back seats. Carol stayed behind Buck.

  “What if he doesn’t let us go?” Carol whispered to Buck.

  “He will or he dies.” Buck whispered back.

  “Looks to me with those bows you don’t have much to work with on threats.” the cowboy said.

  “Carol, hand me an arrow.” Buck whispered to her.

  She did as he asked and slid him an arrow behind his back. She climbed into the Jeep and waited in the passenger seat. Buck stood alone against the cowboy.

  “Surrender now or we kill you where you stand.” the cowboy hollered.

  “Now, that’s not nice.” Buck said quickly picking up the bow from the hood and notching the arrow into the string. He pulled back, aimed at the cowboy and released at his head. The arrow struck with the look of surprise stuck on his face as his body dropped to the ground.

  The rest of the men raised their guns as Buck walked up to the cowboy. He stood over the dead corpse.

  “Don’t make deals with people unless you plan on keeping them.” Buck said to the corpse.

  He pulled the arrow out of the dead man’s forehead and placed it with the bow. Buck turned and addressed the rest of the men.

  “Do any of you disagree that we won the bet fair and square?’

  The men lowered their guns.

  “Ah, he was an asshole from day one.” a guy said in the back of a pickup truck. “Let’s get the hell out of here and let these people go.” The trucks pulled away as Buck went back to the Jeep.

  He sat in the driver’s seat and sighed at the relief of the moment.

  “Were you really going to let them take me if I lost?” Carol asked.

  “I knew you weren’t going to lose.” Buck turned to her and winked.

  The warehouse was directly off the highway. After a few turns they were heading back home with supplies and a full tank of gas. Buck drove past the large pickup truck that gave them the gas and saluted it in respect to its former awesomeness.

  They were back on the street by ten in the morning. The others came out to greet them and to see what they had found. Buck put the Jeep into park and jumped in the back opening the box of beef jerky and tossed packets out to the people surrounding the vehicle.

  After everyone ate breakfast, Buck explained the other boxes that were in the Jeep.

  “What do you mean that’s not food.” one woman said to the news.

  “It will be food. In the near future and it will give us seeds for much more too.” Buck replied.

  Each house was given one seed bank. With less than an acre for each lot the seeds were more than enough for people to work with. At the end of the street was a baseball field and playground. Buck saw that in a different light now. The coming year was going to be rough but they would get by as long as they stayed together.

  “You say you don’t have a plan and don’t know much but I think you give yourself less credit than you deserve.” Carol said as the people went back home opening their cans.

  “Really, why do you say that?” Buck asked.

  “Because, I think you’ve had a plan all along. I think you were going to kill that cowboy from the beginning, I think you had your mind set on finding seeds for us to plant and I think you had those bows for a situation like this.” Carol said looking into his eyes.

  “So, what was I planning with you?” he asked staring back.

  “I think, I think we’d better get inside and talk about this,” she started walking to his house. If he was reading her body language right, and he was sure he was, it was not talking she was thinking about.

  Chapter 3: Midwest United States

  Betty had bought the house in hopes of starting a revolution. Not the type of revolution with guns and bombs; a cultural revolution of gardening. Betty had gone to school to study botany and farming. During that time she learned about a revised form of farming called permaculture. The care of the soil was just as important as the care for the plant. When she learned about this, she had found what she didn’t know she was looking for. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in botany and went out into the work force to do the same job she had in high school, working in a greenhouse. The owner had tried to have her run the business with a modest raise but she didn’t want it.

  “I didn’t go to school and learn about plants to sit in an office.” was the reason she gave for turning it down. She had college loans that she was consistently defaulting on, but she didn’t care.

  Eventually, she saved up some money and bought a house that was foreclosed on after the economic downturn of 2009. Ten thousand dollars in cash put her in a poor neighborhood with high crime. Here, the city wasn’t pushy about zoning laws and inspections.

  She was inspired by the book Farm City by Novella Carpenter. Betty didn’t live on the west coast, her home since birth being the northern Midwest. She rode her bike, cutting her expenses by not owning a car.

  Betty was able to increase her income during the winter by convincing her boss to use the greenhouse for vegetable growing instead of the usual flowers. They still did flowers but the local restaurants who had been demanding local produce now paid top dollar for the colorful produce coming out of the greenhouse.

  At home she had turned the dead soil around the house into fertile workable land. In the backyard she started with a style called trenching. She spent hours turning the soil and set up walkways to keep the soil from being pressed down. After turning the soil she planted many things. Nitrogen rich plants like legumes filled the soil with their roots. On top of the soil Betty placed a layer of newspaper and mulch. On the side lot she built raised beds and filled them with top soil and compost. She covered the top again with newspaper and mulch to save time from weeding. Weedless gardening was not a cure-all for labor free gardening but it was a start and at least she didn’t have to go out every day and spend hours pulling out weeds.

  Boyfriends came and went, most of the men she met were discouraged by her alternative lifestyle. She didn’t know how she kept meeting the same type of man. She was blonde, curvy; she treated her breasts as an accessory when she dressed, but she spent her time outdoors or in the greenhouse. The owner of the greenhouse, an older man who had inherited the business and struggled to keep it going, noticed a spike in business after hiring her. She appeared to be a high maintenance girl but it was not the maintenance that most men were accustomed to throwing money at. Instead, she demanded time outdoors, working the soil, collecting food from the field and that was something that turned men off. She found they were more likely to watch her outside, enjoying the sight of her bent over shuffling leaves around, but at the end of the day the lack of a partner turned her off.

  After a few years her home had been in magazines and websites as an example of what could be done domestically in the self-reliance community. The neighbors thought she was strange except for the mid
dle-aged couple across the street who received fresh veggies from Betty throughout the summer in exchange for free security from them. Whenever someone was in Betty’s yard, Frank or Jane were on the phone with the police and having a car stop by to see people running away and hopping over fences.

  Betty didn’t believe in guns, she did carry pepper spray and knew where all the knives were in the house. For a short time as a kid her father put her in a martial arts class and learned the basics of using a staff for self-defense. Sometimes, when she was in the garden, she would practice a few strikes and thrust with the hoe or rake she was using but never took it seriously.

  When The Day happened, Betty was at home planting in the beds on the side of the house. The day was quiet. In an area where it was common to have loud music blaring from a passing car or the couple a few doors over fighting loud enough to hear, it was a pleasant change to have silence.

  Betty connected the hose to the rain barrel and watered the beds with fresh seedlings. The sun was getting higher and the heat of the day was starting to rise. Betty heard the screen door across the street slam shut and saw Jane looking at her. Betty turned off the hose and walked across the street.

  “I wasn’t able to get any greens out early this year.” Betty said figuring Jane was wondering about getting some fresh food.

  “Did you hear?” Jane asked.

  “About what?” Betty replied. At first she thought something had happened to her house and she didn’t know.

  “Washington D.C. was nuked, Frank thinks it was them commie Russians.” Jane said. Betty could hear the television inside the house close to full volume. Frank must not have had his hearing aids in yet.

  Betty thought Jane was watching a movie like Independence Day or Red Dawn and that she was confused.

  “Are you sure?” Betty asked.

  Jane opened the door and they both walked in. Jane had a large flat screen television. She told Betty once that if she was going to be a stay at home mom she would do it in style. The television fulfilled this desire even after the kids were out of the house.

  Betty saw two news anchors on the television and their voices echoed through the room. Betty cringed and put her hands over her ears.

  “Sorry.” Jane said turning the volume down and handing a hearing aid to Frank.

  “Hey!” Frank said turning and seeing that company had walked in.

  In the top left corner of the screen was a picture taken from a cell phone of a mushroom cloud in the distance. Other videos started to play on the screen and Betty wasn’t paying too much attention to the news anchors after she noticed all of their words were speculation.

  “This could have been an Al Qaeda attack.” a woman said. “Some of our experts are suggesting this could have been an attack from North Korea, the bomb brought in since they could not perfect rocket technology.” a man with perfectly groomed hair and a fresh pressed suit said.

  “Nobody will ever know who did this.” Betty said to Jane.

  “I still think it was those commies.” Frank said still twisting his hearing aid in his ear.

  Betty didn’t know how to tell them, but it didn’t matter who did it. She knew what mattered now was how they reacted. Not just the government reaction, but how the public reacted as well. At the moment she worried about the neighborhood she lived in. She guessed she was the only person in the area that had a home that was almost completely self-sustaining. Everyone else lived paycheck to paycheck or depended on the government.

  “Jane, how is your food situation?” Betty asked.

  “We’ll be fine.” Jane said.

  Betty worried she was insinuating the food she received from her.

  “Come with me.” Jane said walking to the door under her stairs. Betty figured it was either a closet or the door to the basement.

  Opening the door, Betty pulled a string and a light came on showing a set of stairs to the basement.

  Stepping down the creaky stairs, Betty reached the bottom to see the walls lined with shelves that had canning jars filled with food. Some of it, she guessed, was items she had given to Jane. She never canned anything herself, instead throwing leftovers and rotten food into her compost. Now she was feeling ignorant of her choices and feeling a desire to go straight to the store and buy all of the canning jars she could ride home with. She owned a trailer that attached to her bike and thought about how much weight she could ride home with at one time.

  “As you can see, we’ll be fine.” Jane said looking around the basement. “If anything happens you’re welcome to come over and get some.”

  Betty was happy the karma of her kindness was paying off.

  “Still, I should go pick up some stuff.” Betty said.

  “Not a bad idea.” Jane said. “Our parents lived during the depression. They taught us to always have extra food in case there is no longer extra.”

  Betty left and went back home. She pulled her bike out of the shed and attached the trailer. She rode down to the closest market with all of the cash she had in the house. She locked the bike up to one of the parking signs and went into the store to find it wasn’t busy. Even the staff was glued to the television sets that were available. Cashiers took turns watching the lane that was open and alternating to watch what was happening on the television in the break room. Betty grabbed a cart and quickly walked through the store grabbing anything that she could not grow herself or that had a long shelf life. Powdered milk, honey, and canning jars were at the top of her list. She filled the cart thinking about how she would load everything on the trailer. She stacked the canning jars and bought all of the jars in the store plus all the spare rings and lids they had. She went to the counter and started piling up the items on the conveyer belt.

  “You heard right?” the cashier said chewing her gum. “We’re just waiting for everyone else to flood through the door.”

  “I’m surprised nobody is here now.” Betty said.

  “They’re still getting fresh video in from Washington.” the cashier shared.

  The total came up and Betty pulled out her debit card.

  “Here is one hundred and the rest on the card.” Betty stacked the items back in the cart and hauled everything out to her bike. She stacked the jars and put the boxes of milk toward the back of the trailer. The honey she squeezed in where it would fit then tied everything down with elastic ties. The ride back was exhausting but she felt better about her purchase. The security of her purchase made her feel better regardless of how hard things would be from now on.

  She carried everything into the house and spent the rest of the day in the yard. The food she raised would be more important now than any previous year. It wasn’t difficult to have a bad feeling about what happened. Thousands, possibly millions of people died in a split second and more could die in the coming days and years in the future.

  Things in the neighborhood were quiet for a few days. Betty still went to work and she convinced her boss to start growing more food plants in the greenhouse to offer a local source of food. The staff started their work and by the end of the week there were a few hundred plants that had sprouted. They worked hard to get things organized and growing well, then the power went out. It was unknown what exactly happened. Immediately, they had a problem. The greenhouse worked on an electrical system that opened vents and started fans when the temperature was too high or too low. The system regulated itself and now everything had to be done by hand. People rotated shifts. Thermometers were hung along the length of the greenhouse. The staff worked around the clock for weeks trying to keep the greenhouse growing. The longer the lights didn’t come back on the better they felt about the choice they made. When the first greens were picked from the lettuce bed they handed them to Betty.

  “This is the most expensive lettuce I will ever eat.” she said putting the raw greens in her mouth and chewing.

  The rest of the crew laughed and began harvesting the food that was ready. Word around the greenhouse spread about gun shots being hear
d in the surrounding areas. Everyone rode bikes in to work. Cars ran out of gas weeks before and nothing was being supplied. Stores had closed since nothing was on their shelves. Some tried to go back to the paper credit card machines but soon stopped with the cards altogether when they realized the mail was no longer being picked up. News was slow and it also consisted of assuming that if things weren’t working locally, they were not working anywhere else either.

  Betty had been spending most of her time at the greenhouse and went back to the house once a week to check on her garden and make sure nobody had broken in.

  After the harvest, she rode back home that evening to sleep in her bed for once. When she got there she walked by the side door and saw the inevitable. The door had been kicked in, the frame broken. She set her bike against the house and looked inside. She didn’t hear anything. The house appeared empty. She checked the basement first where she had stored some canned food from her garden. It was all still there. She went upstairs and the kitchen was ransacked but as she looked around nothing appeared to be missing. She went in the living room and her television was gone and the DVD player. She went upstairs and found her bedroom a mess. Her bathroom was untouched except the toilet paper was gone.

  She went back in the bedroom and started picking up her clothes. As she organized her clothes she quickly noticed something.

  “They stole my panties?” She looked around again. “They stole my panties!”

  The thought sunk in for a second.

  “EW!” she screamed. “That is sooooo gross!”

  She finished putting her clothes away and went across the street right away.

  Jane answered the door before Betty could knock. The loss of electricity had made them more aware of their surroundings.

  “They robbed your house.” Jane said.

  “I know.” Betty said.

  “I saw it happen but how do I call the cops?”

  “It’s ok, I’m glad you’re ok.” Betty said. “Do you have anything to fix my side door?”

  “Oh, I’m sure Frank has some nails and stuff. My husband has all that and never lets me get rid of anything.”