Wilson Harp - EMP

“Is she okay?”

“Yes. But she’s shaken up quite badly. She is resting in bed right now. She slipped off to sleep a few minutes ago.”

I was stunned. I felt like I had lost my mind. With everything that had happened, the idea Mom would have been in danger in her own house was something I never would have suspected.

“Wait. Someone broke into the house while Mom was here?”

Dad nodded.

“What happened? I mean, Mom may have been able to chase me around with a switch when I was a kid, but…”

Dad’s face softened as he smiled for a second.

“She had this in her hand,” he said patting the pistol at his waist.

“You keep that in the nightstand by your bed,” I said. “Where was she when he broke in?”

“She was still in bed. They broke in just a few minutes after we left for the bridge.”

That was early. Very early in the morning.

“Was anything taken or broken?” I was worried they might have been here just to attack Mom.

“Yeah,” Dad said. “They grabbed the medicine off the dresser.”

“What medicine?”

“My heart pills and your mom’s brain pills.”

My breath caught in my throat.

“But you need that medicine,” I said. I felt stupid for voicing the fact, but I was panicked.

“I know, Davey. And your mom needs hers. But we all knew we would run out eventually. I only had about a dozen pills in there, anyway. I was down to one every three days trying to stretch them out.”

Ted’s words about scavenging in other towns came back to me. I didn’t want to think about it, but my folks both needed medication to live. I knew it had to be done.

“He ran out of the kitchen?” I asked.

“Uh, yes,” said Dad. He was flustered by my sudden change of topics.

I hurried to the garage and looked for the container Dad had stored the aspirin he used to decoy Mom with. The container was missing.

“It’s gone,” I called back to the house.

“What is?” said Dad as he hurried through the kitchen.

“The aspirin out here,” I said as he poked his head out of the kitchen doorway.

“I didn’t even think to check out there,” he said.

“Someone knew where we kept it.”

“They’ve been spying on us?”

“Yes,” I said. “They have been watching and waiting for the right time to break in. When we left this morning, they must have been near and seized the opportunity.”

Dad frowned and put both of his hands on the top of his head. “Let’s ask around and see if anyone else has had any medicine stolen.”

I nodded. “I’ll go do that. Did Mom get a good look at the man?”

“No. She couldn’t describe him anyway. Maybe after her nap she can be of more help, but I think today is going to be a bad day. The shock of what happened sure isn’t going to help in any case.”

I examined the place where the hinges were tore out of the door frame. I didn’t think it would be too easy to fix. I looked down in the garage and noticed the door and the man must have landed on the hood of Dad’s car. The paint was scratched in several places and there was a noticeable dent on the front right fender.

“Think that will buff out?” Dad asked as he looked over my shoulder.

I laughed and thought back to when I was sixteen and had a small fender-bender with Dad’s car in the school parking lot after a basketball game. When I got home, he went ballistic. He screamed and yelled at me. When we went inside, he told Mom I had ‘wrecked the car’. She went outside to look at it and informed him she had popped the dent out and the scratches would buff out with a little elbow grease.

We both knew that wasn’t true, but she had made us smile and soothed over the very contentious evening.

“Why did you run into Casey’s car that night?” Dad asked. He was thinking of the same thing, apparently.

“Well…” I stumbled over the words. “Anne had just told me something, and it distracted me.”

“She just told you something?”

“Yeah, she told me what she wasn’t wearing under her skirt.”

“Ah,” Dad said. “Sorry I yelled at you, then. Come on, let’s get a tarp up over this doorway. I’m going to shut and lock the garage door. We’ll just have to use the front door from now on.”

It was going to be a longer walk to the outhouse, but I agreed we needed to lock down access to our house. It saddened me that after weeks of feeling scared of starvation, disease and the loss of our normal lives, we now added criminal activity to the mix.

I shut the garage door and padlocked it while Dad found another tarp out in his toolshed. He brought in some woodscrews and a couple of screwdrivers and we set some anchor points for the tarp to attach to.

When we were done, I went to visit some of the neighbors to see what I could discover about our thief. None of the neighbors had seen anything that morning, the excitement at the bridge was what most wanted news about. But a few had noticed things disappearing. No medicine, but some tools, a few books, and even a small jewelry box with some inexpensive earrings and necklaces inside.

When I told them we had a break in and medicine was taken, they all seemed taken aback. Some of the men talked about forming a neighborhood watch, as if we didn’t watch out for each other before, and most mentioned they would start locking their doors again. The age of community seemed to come to an end that afternoon in the south section of Kenton. All because we had someone with criminal intent on the loose.

It was noon by the time I made it to the Marsh’s house and picked up a bucket for harvesting. Millie told me she needed help in the waxed and green bean field. I was happy to be picking a new crop. Every new food we added to our diet was an added defense against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency. At least that is what the books said. I think most people looked forward to the first wheat harvest. The lack of bread was the primary complaint from everyone.

I understood why those in the olden days would have huge celebrations at harvest time. It was survival. A good harvest meant food for the future. It meant there would be a future. I imagined the celebration we would throw at the first wheat harvest would seem like the Pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving.

The rows of beans seemed full and bushy after the substantial rain we had. I had chosen to pick them facing away from the wheat and corn fields because I knew they would distract me as I worked. A few of the younger teens, who were working the field with me, asked how I gathered so many beans in such a short while. So, when I went back with a fresh bucket, I showed them how to gather. My grandmother had taught me when I was a child and I was amazed at how everything came back to me.

Yellow wax beans and long green beans filled my bucket and I thought about how many would be going into the daily stews and meals and how many we would have to can, jar and dry for the winter. I knew some of the retired farmers and hobby gardeners knew how many planting and harvesting seasons we would need of each plant, but how many people could be fed through the winter months? That was my concern.

Beyond that, we needed a steady supply of meat. We needed chickens for eggs, cows for milk, and pigs to slaughter. All of these animals surely had to be available somewhere but, as Ted had pointed out, because the big factory farms of these animals did not have a ready source of feed, most of the animals were likely dead from starvation anyway.

There were a few dairy cows on some outlying farms, but those cows couldn’t produce enough milk for 5,000 people. Nor could the pigs that were available feed that many. We needed more food, and that meant either barter with a group that had those animals or taking them from those we didn’t mind taking from.