Heads nodded. "I need a show of hands. Those for allowing the making and distribution of wine." Five hands raised. "Those against the wine proposal." No hands rose. I didn't vote either way. “All those in favor of re-establishing the ban on making whiskey and beer.” Six hands raised and held steady.
"Thank you. Before this meeting, Shane and I found the whiskey still and destroyed it; Jesse is out of business." I hesitated before focusing on Morgan. "If Jesse insists on starting another still, he'll be asked to leave our group. This is not a small matter."
Morgan nodded glumly.
A week later, I opened Doc's door and stepped inside. It was the third day of March. Kira had calendars extending through 2075. She'd printed them off a computer file before we finally were forced to abandon power generation. She continued to protect them and kept them in a safe place where the kids wouldn't destroy them. I'd learned it really didn't matter what day of the week it was, we had the same work to do regardless of the date or the name of a day. But it felt good for some reason to know what month and year it was. Each day, Kira religiously marked off a day of the week on the calendar, so she always knew what day, month and year it was. In the near future, knowledge of that simple bit of information would slip away and be lost for many centuries. But life would go on without it.
When I removed my coat and sat a few minutes, the temperature was noticeably cool. Doc's breathing changed as I made noise stoking the fire and adding wood.
His eyes opened as I greeted him. "Morning Doc."
He grimaced in pain and a low grunt escaped his dry lips. His breathing rate increased as he said, "Tom."
"Can I get anything for you? Water? Maybe something to eat?"
"A little water, please."
He swallowed an ounce or so from a glass and then motioned it away. I sat it on the nightstand next to the bed, then sat.
"Has anything come to a head yet with that bunch of damn liberal pacifists?"
"I didn't know you were aware of that, but no they've not surfaced their concerns to me."
Doc's features hardened. "They don't have concerns, it's complaints. Don't let them put anything over on you or they'll get us all killed. Stand up to their lunacy."
"What do you know about their demands?"
"I used to respect John Alton, but no more. He comes in and sits once in a while. . . can't stand the man anymore. I've taken to acting like I'm asleep, but I struggle to stay awake and listen. He starts talking to me, using me for a sounding board, I guess. Seems the most liberal are pushing him to confront you about the heavy weapons you still have. Those radicals want them gone. We've not endured any real danger since moving here, and they believe we're safe and can negotiate any danger away. Some have turned into mush-headed fools."
"I agree, Doc. You can only negotiate when both parties have similar end goals. When one wants to be left alone to live in peace, and the other wants to take everything they have, negotiation goes out the window and you get oppression."
Doc breathed deeply several times, shuddered, then was still. His eyes blinked open again. "I turned sixty-five this year. In the life we had before, I'd have surgery early on, radiation or chemo and strong medicines after. I could have recovered to live another twenty years or more. Those damn'd zombies took that from me. The great strides in medicine made over past generations, hell even centuries, are gone. Wiped out by the damned zombie invasion. The girls use the wild herbs and plants we've gathered to fight the pain, but they're not effective, not like the pharmaceuticals were." Doc closed his eyes and relaxed. His eyelids fluttered several times, his breathing leveled to a slow, raspy, shallow rhythm. I waited as I watched a great friend I was about to lose. Soon, I rose quietly, slipped into my jacket, and left.
Outside the cabin, I leaned against the log wall, exhaled deeply, and watched the moisture in my breath be absorbed by the cold, dry air. Years ago, before the zombie invasion, I'd cursed the stupidity of immigrants coming here to escape harsh conditions in their home lands. Soon after arriving, they'd start petitioning to implement the same conditions they'd escaped because that was what they'd grown up with, and they were comfortable with it. Somehow, they hadn't grasped that those laws and religious beliefs were the root causes of the very conditions they wanted to escape.
Religion, huh! How many cases had been exposed where leaders in the Catholic Church conspired to protect pedophile priests who had attacked their young parishioners? How many times had numerous televangelists stood in front of cameras and cried and blubbered as they begged forgiveness after being caught in bed with some woman or man? How many young Muslim women had been victims of honor killings because their conversion to American ways made them unfit to live in the eyes of their fanatically religious fathers and brothers?
And Jim Jones; the conman preacher who convinced nine-hundred members of his flock to follow him to South America where he fed them cyanide laced Kool-Aid to help them commit suicide. Over three hundred were innocent children
I shook my head, attempted to get the foul taste from my mouth by spitting a
