Stan Morris - Surviving the Fog

Jacob finished eating and took his bowl and spoon to the kitchen window. Mike noticed that no one had done the dishes for days. While they waited, a few of the girls began to trickle in, and soon there was a crowd of them entering. Mike did not see Ralph or Jackie. Jacob stepped up next to Mike, and then Mike stepped to one side.

“Hey!” Mike called out. The teens stopped talking.

Mike continued. “Everyone come close so that you can hear him.” The boys and girls crowded up against the podium.

Jacob told his story in a plain, flat tone of voice. By the time he finished some of the kids were weeping, others were just sniffling. Mike looked down at his feet. He felt worse than when he had heard Jacob’s story the first time, just from hearing all the crying. He felt like crying himself.

“Bullshit!” someone yelled. Mike looked up. It was Ralph, and the older boy sounded as if he were about to panic.

“You’re so full of crap! You never went there. You never saw anything. You’re just making this up, you and Chief there.”

Jacob stared at him. Then he said, “So go see for yourself. Go stand in the fog if you don’t believe me.”

Ralph looked angry and frustrated. “Screw you,” he snarled, and then he left. Mike still saw no sign of Jackie.

“Are you telling the truth, Jacob?” a girl asked quietly.

Mike realized that she was the girl he had seen running around the dirt track. He had learned that her name was Yuie. She was Asian-American, and she had long, straight black hair, large lovely dark eyes, and a fair complexion.

“Yeah, it’s true. But I don’t know what the fog is or where it came from,” he answered.

“It must be aliens,” a boy suggested.

“Oh, right,” sneered another boy. “And NASA or nobody else saw it coming.”

“Maybe it’s something the Russians invented.”

“Or the Chinese.”

“Or Al-Qaeda.”

“Whatever it is,” Yuie answered. “There are monsters in it, real monsters.” At that, everyone fell silent except the few kids who were still crying. Mike saw that Kathy was one of them.

“Whatever it is,” Mike said. “We have to decide what to do. We don’t know if anyone but us survived the fog. We don’t know if anyone is coming to rescue us. If they are coming, we don’t know how long it will take them to find us. We can drink water from the river, but what if we run out of food? What if we are still here when winter comes? It’s going to freeze. It’s going to snow. What are we going to do?” For minutes there was no response.

“We can cut back on the stuff that we are eating,” a girl spoke slowly.

“Yeah, we’ve been pigging it lately,” said another.

“But how can we stop anyone from just getting food for themselves?” a girl asked, and the other girls looked at Mike.

Mike had been thinking about that same thing. “We might have to put a guard on the food,” he suggested.

“A guard?” someone repeated. There was silence.

“I’ve got to roll up my bag,” someone said.

Slowly the teenagers drifted away. Most of them did not seem open to any discussion of their future. Mike felt frustrated. He felt like most of them were afraid to tackle the dangerous predicament that they were facing.

After a while, the only ones still in the dining hall were Mike’s group of boys and Yuie. After talking it over, they decided to make a list of the problems that they would need to solve.

“First on the list is the food,” Mike said. “We have to ration the food. We have to figure out how to get more food.”

“We could hunt game,” Yuie suggested.

“Do you know how to hunt?” Pete asked. “If you catch something, do you know how to cook it?”

“Not really,” Yuie admitted. “I can shoot a handgun or a rifle,” but I’ve never hunted.”

“There’s forty-nine of us counting Jackie,” said Mike. “Ask around. Someone must know something about hunting or about cooking animals.”

“I do,” said Jacob. They looked at him with surprise. “I hunt deer and birds with my Dad. I know how to cut the patches off, and how to gut them, and how to skin them. If we can kill a deer or a bird, I can get it ready to be cooked.”

“All of us are probably good at something,” said John. “We should make a list of what we know.”

“And we should ask everyone else, and make a list of what they know, too,” suggested Howard enthusiastically.

“I’m great at video games,” offered Pete with a laugh.

They all chuckled. Pete was popular, especially with the girls, but also with the boys. The handsome, blond, blued eyed boy had a great personality, and he always made the people around him feel better.

“Could we live in here during the winter?” Eric asked. They looked around, seeing the dining hall for the first time as a possible shelter.

“It’s pretty small for forty-nine people,” Howard observed, scratching his short red hair.

“And it’s got a metal roof,” Mike added. “It’s going to get real cold in here, I think.”

“But we have the oven and stove to keep us warm,” Eric argued. “And we have propane in the tank.”

“I wonder how much propane is in the tank,” said Howard. “How long will it last?”

Yuie knew the answer. “I heard the Admin say that she would have to order a refill at the end of next year.”

“And they weren’t planning to use it during the winter,” Mike pointed out.

“So they were planning to use it for two years in the summer,” said Howard.

“How cold will it get here?” Eric asked.

“Below zero degrees, my father said,” Howard replied.

“Will our sleeping bags keep us warm enough?” Mike asked.

“Some of the kids have mummy bags for below zero temperatures,” answered Yuie. “Most of us just have bags for about twenty degrees. If we’re stuck here, we are going to need a lot of wood to make fires.”

“I think we need to save the propane for as long as possible, and use it to run the frig during the summer,” said Mike. “We probably won’t need it for the frig during the winter. Stuff will stay cold enough if we cover it with snow.”

“So we stop using the oven and stove?” Yuie asked. “People aren’t going to like that.”

“Well, we gotta have some rules if we’re going to stay alive,” Howard stated. There was silence.

“Yeah.” Deep in thought Mike replied slowly. “That’s the hard thing. We’ve got to have some rules. And we’ve got to have some way to enforce the rules.”

“There’s a barbeque in the back,” said Pete. “We could at least start cooking with wood.”

“No one is using the stove now, anyway,” said Eric. “I think most everybody is eating out of cans without heating it up.”

“How much food do we have?” Mike queried Yuie.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“We have a lot of hamburger patties,” said John. “And there are a lot of hot dogs and buns.”

“We have milk for awhile. Most of it is boxed, but some of it is frozen concentrated so we have to mix it with water. And they were cutting it with powdered milk so we have a lot of that,” Howard said.

“Yuck, so that’s why the milk tastes so weird,” Pete complained, and then he added, “There are a lot of bags of rice and flour. Most of the other stuff is in cans, like beans, fruit, and corn.”

“Don’t forget the weenies,” Eric said.

“We’d never forget you,” joked John as Eric scowled.

“Let’s disconnect the stove for the time being. And keep this to ourselves,” said Mike. “And let’s get the barbeque out of the storage room and build a fire in it. If we keep it going, maybe people will get use to using it.” They all agreed. John volunteered to disconnect the stove.