Midnight, Anna Dove [ebook smartphone .TXT] 📗

but six or seven families. We have decided to pool our resources here to wait out the summer and see what happens. We’ve set up food systems and we’re getting along pretty well,” he said. “Come on. I’m so glad you all are here. We were worried about you, Lily asks if we’ve seen you almost every day.”

“I saw the note on the door.”

“That was Jason’s idea,” said Dayton, referring to the brother older than him and just younger than Haley. “We didn’t want to write out where we had gone for anyone to see, but we figured that you might come up here, and we remembered all the times we spent in that little cubby under the stairs.”

“And you all came here when?” asked Elizabeth.

“We’ve been here about ten days now I think.”

“Is it safe here?”

“As safe as it can be, I guess,” said Dayton. “All any of us can do right now is just take a day at a time. We’ve set up systems as best we can, in order to survive here, and as far as what’s happening on a national level, I have no idea. I have no idea if our military is taking action, I mean, even if they exist right now, we just know nothing, and since I think everyone is under that same mentality, we just have to do what we can to keep ourselves alive and then see what happens. But as far as safety goes, we are out pretty removed from any major cities, and we have a system of watch guards set up around the border of the farm. No one fires a gun unless necessary, and if a gun is fired, we all know that it means danger.”

“So no hunting?” said Haley.

“We do hunt, we use compound bows and arrows, you know, the professional archery kind...arrow speeds at three hundred feet per second. Super effective and quiet. You know the Bozemans? They’re here too, and they brought several industrial strength bows. None of us are really any good at shooting except him, but we help with transport and skinning and cleaning and preserving. We fish too. In terms of food, we really do have a great system set up. You’ll see.”

“How did you all know to come here?”

“When it happened, Dad sent us boys on our bikes to all of the different houses with this plan. Gave everyone a week or so to gather stuff and come. We didn’t know exactly what had happened at the time, but since our phones stopped working we figured it was more than a simple power outage and we decided to move quickly.”

The farmhouse, having been constructed in the earlier decades of the previous century, was better equipped than most homes to operate without electricity. Methods and tools for light, heat, and water, the three necessities, had been restored post-attack. A plentiful supply of candles lit the rooms, their cheerful dancing flames adding softness and shadows to the space. During the daytime, sunlight streamed through the many windows and cast square patterns on the hardwood floors. For warmth, on chilly spring nights, the woodstove would be filled with freshly chopped logs, piled with twigs and balled up newspaper, and lit with a match, until the tiny flame catching the edges of a newspaper would spread, gobbling up the print, engulfing the snapping and popping twigs, and licking up the sides of the cut logs. Water proved slightly trickier to conquer. The first methodology was the rain barrel; placing the wide wooden barrel at the end of a slanted gutter, rainwater could be collected as it ran off the roof. The second methodology was sterilization; buckets of lake water were brought up and boiled in pots over the gas stove and then poured through a cloth to strain out bits of leaves and algae, dirt and pebbles.

At the edge of the forest was a chicken pen, filled with bustling hens and no roosters. There was also a garden, bustling and blooming and bountiful, containing vegetables, some originally grown there and some transplanted from their original plots.

The community had been arranged very carefully, taking comparative advantage into account when assigning tasks and responsibilities. A schedule had been arranged to rotate the property border sentries every four hours around the clock. Every person in the community over eighteen had the responsibility of acting as sentry for their four-hour shift.

There was a hunting coalition of men and women who had any experience in the matter. Mr. Bozeman led this effort; he was a skilled archer and marksman. He had brought a variety of professional bows with him to the community and an abundance of arrows. Leading a group of ten or so individuals, he brought back deer and rabbits regularly to supplement the vegetable and starch production.

He taught his hunter coalition how to skin the deer and the rabbit and preserve the meat by smoking it. His philosophy of nothing wasted was implemented religiously. The inside of the skin he scraped as clean as possible, and then set the hide in buckets of water overnight to make them pliable. Then he scraped them again, leaving hair on, and set them to cure in a large pit of water and oak bark, dug into the ground and lined with a plastic tarp. If they were to remain through the winter, they would need warmth, and the hides would help. Many of the other organs were cut up into small pieces to be stored for use as fishing bait, which proved massively successful.

The fishing coalition was led by Mrs. Bozeman. She and Mr. Bozeman had met on a group hiking expedition in North Dakota. She knew every fish species east of the Mississippi, and had spent a few years of her life living on the Chesapeake Bay studying the aquatic patterns and species for an educational project. She had brought a long,