A Distant Eden (13 page)

Roman paused, and cleared his throat. “They see a house and get a small ray of hope. They knock on the door to beg for food. If they are the first, the occupants look at them with great pity and if they have any food, they may be foolish enough to share it with them. How can they help it? These people are starving, have starving children with them and are begging for a small scrap for their children. So the food is handed through the door to the grateful walkers. They go off a little way out of sight and divide the food up and wolf it down.

“They know it isn’t enough, won’t be enough. They have three choices: walk on and hope to beg more food, or return to the farmhouse and ask for more—or return to the farmhouse and take it. Sooner or later, they will turn to taking—and the people in the houses will not be treated well. If the residents aren’t killed, they will become walkers too. If the house is anywhere close to a major road near a city, it will be different. Those people will be flooded with walkers who will pile up against the house like driftwood, breaking in and stealing whatever food there is. Living on the outskirts of a city is disaster.

“The walker phase will last a couple of months. Within two months or so, the walkers will be mostly dead, leaving nothing edible in their wake. In the final days, the survivors will turn to cannibalism. History shows that cannibalism begins while they can still walk, but after other choices are gone. The problem with us being able to survive this phase is the sheer number of walkers—and the length of time they have to be dealt with. Depending on where you are, you may be overwhelmed in only a few days, or if you are far enough out it might take a few weeks. You’ll have to be really far out to be left alone.

“You can’t give them your food. But you can’t look them in the eye and deny them food either. You can’t shoot them; there’re too many. You’ll run out of bullets.

“I think the way to survive is to avoid them. Stay away from them. That way you don’t have to see them and get your heart broken. You don’t have to fight them if they can’t find you. My plan is to move our food into hiding places away from the roads. We live at the end of the smallest of paved roads. After us there are fields for miles. Your mother and I will move out there and camp inconspicuously. We’ll keep watch, and if we see walkers coming our way, we’ll move to avoid them. We’ll be like deer in hunting season.

“The reason for hiding the food in several places is so that we can travel light and fast. Plus, if we get in a bind and lose some food, we don’t lose it all. We’ll cook with solar cookers so there’s no smoke. You can smell smoke a mile away, and a starving person will think there is probably food cooking and look for it. The solar cookers will be a key survival strategy. We’ll be living out in the sticks for the next couple of months, checking back periodically to see what is happening to the homestead. If you get out here before the first phase ends, go to the Indian cave at the first bend downriver, where you used to play. We stashed some food there. Every three or four days, we’ll return to check it.”

Roman paused. “Where you live the next phase is going to be similar, but different. You’re going to see the walkers as they start out, leaving the city. That’s going to be a pretty fast phase for you, probably on the order of two to three weeks. After that, it’s going to get bad, real bad. What’ll happen next are the gangs. There are gangs already in place: drug gangs, neighborhood gangs, biker gangs. There will be criminal gangs that come into being quickly too.

“The gangs will raid nearby homes and neighborhoods looking for food stashes. Eventually they’ll have to go further out—and then they will encounter other gangs. Turf wars begin. There’ll be wars fought over the entire city. These will last as long as they find food. Once they can’t find more food, then the gangs will mostly disintegrate back to individuals who will take off walking. Some gangs will remain together, pillaging as they go. They’ll stay together as long as they can find food. Because they’ll be following everyone else out of town, they won’t last long. They’ll be covering ground that’s been picked clean.

“Other gangs will remain in the city, fighting over the last of the resources. By this time the dogs, cats, pigeons, squirrels, possums and raccoons that used to be in the city are gone. The remaining gangs will probably be centered on the Trinity River bottom, where there’ll still be some wildlife and fish. When that supply is exhausted, they’ll become cannibals themselves.

“The city will stink of death for a long time. There will be millions of bodies. People who are old or ill will die early. People with chronic diseases kept in check by medications will die as their medications are used up. People will kill each other. There will be huge numbers of suicides. Hundreds of thousands will die of cholera, typhoid, or dysentery from drinking contaminated water. There’ll be bodies rotting away in just about every third or fourth building, alongside the roads and in the parks, in the hospitals and jails and wherever else you can imagine.

“I expect you’ll be leaving somewhere in the middle of the gang wars. I imagine most of those wars will be fought in and around the suburbs, like where you live. Your best bet on leaving might be to follow the creek you mentioned, down towards the river, then following the first major highway you come to until you are out of town. Then work your way here, avoiding the roads as much as you can. There will be walker gangs using the roads the same time you are traveling home. They will pretty much stay on the roads. You should travel at night; hide and sleep during the day. Always have someone on guard while the others are sleeping. Don’t build fires. Fires will give you away. Cold camping is no pleasure, but safer.

“Prepare food before you leave, food you can eat cold. You may not like cold cornbread, but you can eat it and it will fuel the engine. No matter how tempting it is to drink from what appears to be a clear clean stream, don’t do it. I did that once in Alaska while camping out, miles from the nearest road. Hundreds of miles from the nearest person. I drank out of the prettiest, cleanest, clearest, coldest mountain stream you can imagine.

“A hundred yards up the stream was a rotting moose lying in the stream. Only drink water that you have treated. For traveling, iodine is the best water purifier, but if you don’t have that then common household bleach works almost as well, certainly well enough. It only takes a little; put it in and shake it up, then let it work for at least half an hour before drinking it. Make sure, by trying it well ahead of time, that none of you get sick from bleach; some people do, like an allergy. So make some up now and have everyone drink it for several days. If one or more of you get sick from the treatment, then you will have to prepare and carry separate water for them.

“Water is difficult to carry because it’s so heavy and takes a lot of space—so I hope that no one needs to carry more than a two days’ supply with them. But make sure everyone has two days’ supply all the time and keep filling back up at every opportunity.

“Then there are the wild hogs you mentioned. I’ve been thinking about them and I have a hunch that they could be a problem. At last count before the grid went down there were an estimated four million of them in Texas. They were breeding so fast that they were adding fifty percent more each year. They could become to us what the buffalo were to the plains Indians in the 1700s. They could become a major source of high caloric and nutritious food.”

Roman looked at the battery indicator and said, “Kids, I’m going to let your mom say goodnight and then we’re signing off. The batteries are low and I need to charge them.”

Jerry and Karen found the tracks in the creek bed. Lots of tracks, one far larger than the others. The tracks were fresh and showed that a group of hogs had traveled up the creek and back down. Though Jerry was not an expert tracker, he examined them closely.

“Karen, look at this. Not one of the big tracks has been stepped on. The rest of the tracks are stepping all over each other, but not one of the big ones has been stepped on. I think that means the big boy came along after the group had left. Maybe he was trailing them to see what they found.”

Karen bent over to study the tracks. “I’ve read that big boars are solitary animals, only socializing to breed. Either this guy is in the mood, or he was checking to see if they found food.”

“There’ve been news stories about wild hogs in the river bottoms for years,” Jerry said. “Some really big ones were sighted too. Since the law prohibits firing guns in the city limits, they were safe and their population expanded. In recent years, the hogs have become bolder, possibly due to overcrowding in the bottoms. They’ve been moving into neighborhoods and not only tearing up yards but eating dogs and cats and occasionally attacking people.

“One poor guy was sitting in his living room watching TV when a large boar broke through his front door and attacked him, right there in his own living room. Now that the lights are out and the cars have stopped moving and people are hiding at night, the hogs are probably moving right into the city as fast as they can. Not only that but hogs love rotten meat, and there must be plenty of human bodies that they can get to and eat. Hogs have never been particularly frightened of people; they will often stand their ground and fight. I have a bad feeling that they are going to become more and more aggressive. And even worse, I think these hogs will start to see humans as prey. Just another source of food.”

Jerry stood up straight to stretch out his back. “As they attack and kill and eat people weakened by disease and starvation, the hogs will get bolder. Between eating dead people and the live people that they kill, they’ll develop a taste for human flesh and become willing to attack to get it. Boars are hard to kill, even with a gun. They have a thick shield of gristle and scar tissue that covers their shoulders and back. Bullets will penetrate the shield, but it slows the bullet dramatically and causes it to expand before it gets to anything vital. Many hunters have found some of their bullets just beneath the shield when they skin them out. On some boars, the shield has been measured over three inches thick.

“Their hearts and lungs are small and more forward than most animals. Their skulls are shaped something like a ski jump, so a bullet hitting the skull from the front at a low angle often deflects off. It takes a well-placed, large, heavy, fast bullet to bring one down immediately. They will run up to two hundred yards even after a decent hit. Having one fall dead on the spot is rare.”

Jerry continued following the tracks, pointing them out with a stick he had picked up. “Hogs can sprint up to thirty miles per hour, reaching that speed in just a couple of strides. With their massive weight, low center of gravity, fast speed, wicked sharp tusks, pure animosity, thick frontal shielding and lack of fear, they are incredibly dangerous to a man on the ground, even if he is well-armed. Once they get a taste for man, it’s going to be a real problem. On the other hand, they are excellent to eat. They pack lots of protein and fat. They provide great caloric load, so we will be hunting them too. But it won’t be like hunting deer. It’ll be like hunting bear.”

Karen said, “They’re going to be especially dangerous to children. We’ll have to make it an iron clad rule that children don’t go anywhere without an armed adult along.”

Cautiously, Jerry looked around. He spotted what could be the large boar lying in thick brush thirty yards away. “Karen,” he said in a whisper, “I think I see one over there. We have to go back, right now. I want you to walk back to the house as quietly as you can. I’ll follow along behind you. I’ll keep an eye on him. You just go and don’t look back; I’ll yell if you need to break into a run. Now go!”

Karen did exactly as instructed. She walked quickly but without noise to the house. When she was through the fence she turned and watched Jerry as he walked slowly and backwards, always facing the hog but with quick glances behind him to avoid tripping. Following his line of sight, Karen could make out a large dark body, almost like a cow, lying in the brush. It wasn’t hard to see once spotted, but it was easy to miss. “Damn,” she thought. “It must weigh five or six hundred pounds.”

Jerry came through the fence and they hustled back under the house. Once inside, Jerry called a meeting to recount the excursion.

Dave said, “That’s going to make collecting water a challenge. The stills and traps in the field are producing pretty well, but that hog may tear them up, and he may lie in wait for us too. A wild boar that size isn’t something to fool with. But I’ve been thinking about water and I have an idea. If it works out, we may be set for water until time to pull up stakes. Jerry, you’re going to need to come with me to do some looking around this evening.”

That evening they stood, hidden behind the brush, at the edge of the street. Dave explained, “You know that water pressure depends either on pumps or gravity. When the pumps stop, then the only water that is going to move is on a slope. Open the pipe at the bottom of the slope and gravity will drain the water out. That’s all elementary. What finally occurred to me is that this street slopes down then back up. The middle of the four blocks is the low spot. Residential water mains usually run beneath street centers. Generally, they’re eight or ten inches in diameter.

“Each house taps off the main with a smaller pipe. The main is lower than the houses, so the tap pipes run uphill to the houses. That means that there’s a chance we have four blocks of eight or ten inch pipe holding water right there beneath us. Treated water at that. Based on rough math we could be looking at three or four thousand gallons of pure clean water, and all we have to do is get it without being seen. We don’t want to share our water. What I want to look for is some way to get to the pipe at the lowest spot.”

Dave and Jerry began their search, and before long found that the lowest spot was beside an abandoned house. The house had a water meter buried in the yard near the sidewalk. The water meter was two feet below the surface, putting it down close to the level of the pipe. Dave said, “Great, now all we have to do is tie into this pipe right behind the meter valve and we can get the majority of the water out—assuming there is any.”