After the fire was out, Calvin returned to the ranch house and made sure there wasn’t any fluids on the mattress where Bart had passed away. To his relief, there were none. When Bart passed, they were able to get his body out of the house before any serious decomposition started. Calvin found additional bedding in a closet and remade the bed. The group was a little crowded in the house as it was, and Calvin couldn’t see wasting a bedroom just because there had been a death in it; that was a luxury of the old world. He wasn’t going to ask Essie or Jared to take the room and figured Shannon might not want it either, so he hauled all his belongings into Bart’s old room and set up shop.
Calvin had no problem sleeping where someone had died. He was old enough to understand people die while others are born; it was the circle of life. He shook his head, thinking that the evening Bart passed, there was, without a doubt, a mother somewhere giving birth to a baby. Even in these problematic times, couples would come together, and women would give birth to children. Children were undoubtedly being born all over world at this very moment by mothers who’d conceived before disaster struck.
Calvin thought about a ghost town he’d visited years earlier while on a vacation in the Eastern Sierras. The place was called Bodie, and it had a graveyard outside the town. Calvin made the short walk to the graveyard and was amazed by what he found there. The ages of all those buried inside the little graveyard were marked on their tombstones. Calvin found the graveyard was filled with children under the age of two and adults who averaged forty-five years old.
The Bodie graveyard had been filled mostly during the gold rush, which in Calvin’s estimation, might have had a few more machines working than the world had now. Overall, Calvin thought the time when Bodie was a thriving gold rush town represented a technologically similar time as he was now living in. He would have to find a couple of quality horses and ensure they were good riding animals. Then Calvin could teach his friends how to ride. If and/or when they decided, or were forced, to move, horses would be a superior mode of transportation to the bikes.
Sure, they had the Beetle, but after you loaded the little German vehicle with people, there wasn’t much room left for survival items like food, water, weapons and ammunition. Having a horse or two laden with supplies would be a prudent alternative. Calvin had been on the final watch before the funeral and was now feeling the fatigue starting to take over. He closed the door to his new room and lay back on the fresh yet stale-smelling bedding. He had opened the window, so the room no longer smelled of death, as enclosures always do after harboring a corpse. He closed his eyes and breathed in the fresh morning air flowing through the open window and began drifting off.
Chapter 3
Barry was awakened by the light of a new day. He hauled himself out of his sleeping bag and wondered about the smoke he’d seen the day before. He reminded himself that being careful was most assuredly the only reason he was alive and not a prisoner of the federal government, or what was left of it.
Barry was a highly intelligent man who had worked in Silicon Valley before the solar flare had started a chain reaction that ended modern-day society. Although Barry had worked side by side with all the rest of the tech folk in Silicon Valley, he marched to a slightly different drum than most of his peers.
Barry realized the electrical pyramid scheme most of the world was teetering on had not been adequately reinforced to survive any sort of electromagnetic event. He’d begun preparing for its failure years before the solar flare stripped humanity of its beloved electricity and the host of gadgets, contraptions and machinery that depended on its precious electrical current. When the government came looking for him, Barry had been forced to flee his home, making his way into the hills just east of the South Bay.
After Barry stowed the sleeping bag in its own bag and replaced it in his pack, he made a quick breakfast, drank a cup of coffee, and began loading his motorcycle. The motorcycle was a BMW and had been modified and protected, so when the lights went out, the motorcycle didn’t cease to operate. When the team of government people had dropped out of a helicopter into his yard and demanded he come with them, Barry had used the motorcycle to escape. After the bike was packed, Barry started it and puttered his way back down the draw he’d chosen as his resting spot for the evening. The draw was a depression in the terrain between two parallel ridges, which offered Barry some concealment from the surrounding area.
As Barry gained back some high ground after exiting the draw, he searched for the smoke from the day before, but found no indication of anything burning. He picked his way across the hilly landscape, avoiding large patches of brush and cutting through fences when they interfered with his progress. The going was slow, but Barry thought it posed less of a risk than using paved road.
As Barry rode, the wind was in his face, bringing with it all the smells of the surrounding life. Every now and again he would catch the smell of rosemary, and then it would be gone, leaving behind
