An Acquired Taste Page 3

  The slow moving progress was due as much to his beginning to trust his new family as it was to breaking down his stubborn resolve.

  Becky, who was Scott’s nurse in San Antonio before they fell in love and married, took a particular interest in Charles.

  “The trouble with Charles,” she’d told the others, “is that it’s been far too long since he’s felt truly loved. It’s not enough to just love a boy like him. You have to show him constantly just how much you love him.”

  It was Becky who insisted on making Charles and young Millicent attend a makeshift school for three hours each day. She was their teacher and included math, reading, writing, science and history.

  To aid her in her efforts, she made Scott ride to the boarded up elementary school in nearby Junction and to bring back three copies of each of their textbooks.

  It wasn’t all work and no play.

  At the end of each school day, Becky did something fun with the pair.

  She taught them everything she knew about fishing, and was now teaching them to swim in a large pond behind the compound.

  Charles balked at first, claiming with great bravado that he was an excellent swimmer.

  He lied.

  Millicent was indeed a good swimmer, but Becky took her aside and asked her to pretend not to be.

  “It’ll help Charles not be so self-conscious if he thinks you need help too.”

  To make things more difficult, Millicent was a natural floater.

  Charles’ physical makeup was different. He tended to sink like a rock.

  It wasn’t his fault. It was what it was. Some people were more prone to sinking than others, and it was a bit more difficult to learn to swim.

  But Becky was patient and kind.

  She exuded confidence in the water and Charles began to feel more and more comfortable with her each day.

  On the day she towed the boy fifty feet from shore and had him swim back unassisted, she accomplished something she’d never thought possible.

  He looked a bit like a drowning man, flopping and splashing with a panicked look on his face.

  But he never gave up. Partly because he was determined to prove he could do it. And partly because he knew Becky was by his side with every stroke, ready to help him if he needed it.

  When he finally made it to the muddy shore he yelled to the heavens, “I did it!”

  He danced around and grinned from ear to ear, and almost tackled Becky with a bear hug as she climbed out of the water.

  It was a day of firsts.

  It was the first time he’d swam that far totally on his own.

  It was the first time he displayed pure unadulterated joy.

  And it was the first time he initiated a hug, instead of the other way around.

  Some days it was rather cool, and they opted out of swimming.

  But they always did something fun to reward them for working hard on their schoolwork.

  One day Becky took them into the forest and taught them how to make a campfire by rubbing sticks together. It was a trick she remembered from her girl scout days.

  They both tried and gave up when their skinny little arms gave out.

  Becky laughed.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “It’s a hard task to master. And it doesn’t matter. Now that you’ve seen it done, you’ll never forget how. And you never can tell when such a talent might save your life.”

  As the fire which Becky built warmed them, she surprised them by pulling a package of marshmallows from her backpack. They were only slightly stale, and after being burned black over the open fire tasted as fresh as the day they were made.

  Becky had already won Millicent’s heart. And she was well on her way to winning his as well.

  -7-

  Another thing Charles was learning was that he had value, something which was starting to surprise him immensely.

  He’d been abused for so long he’d begun to think his only purpose in life was to do the bidding of brutal and sadistic men.

  But it wasn’t true at all.

  It seemed young Charles had a calling. He could repair almost anything requiring a keen eye and steady hands. And he seemingly did so with ease.

  After the second wave of EMPs assaulted the earth and wiped out most of their electronic capabilities, Scott and Jordan immediately did two things: they constructed Faraday enclosures here and there around the property to protect what they had left, and they took inventory of what was forever destroyed and what they thought might be saved.

  The pile of discarded items was much larger than the ones they thought they could restore.

  Their first step was to put everything into the feed barn while they made modifications to the house. The feed barn was the size of a two car garage and had been lined with sheet metal when they built it. Then the sheet steel was covered with a very thin sheet of plywood.

  The doors were also covered with metal, which was then covered with wood veneer. It was lighter than plywood and would place less weight upon the doors’ hinges.

  From the beginning, Scott decreed that all electronics not currently in use would be stored in the feed barn. That included the two Gators, a type of all-terrain vehicle which would go anywhere in any weather conditions.

  The concept was simple. An electromagnetic pulse which struck the feed barn would not penetrate the metal lining. Instead it would dance around it looking for a way in. Provided the doors were closed and the building sealed, it would not find its way in and would dissipate instead.

  It worked like a charm.

  Scott was lucky.

  On the day of the second blackout he just happened to look out the window and saw that Jordan had left one of the doors to the feed barn open.

  He went out himself and secured it, and just hours later the second wave came.

  Those items in the barn were spared.

  Those items in the house weren’t so lucky.

  Item by item, things were removed from the house and inspected in the bright sunlight.

  Most of them were shot through and through.

  A couple of them inexplicably survived without a scratch. The same thing had happened during the first wave, and Scott was at a loss to explain why. He just wished more than a handful of things had been spared.

  Most of the items, the vast majority, had components which appeared to be salvageable.

  Those were placed in the feed barn in a “project area.”

  Scott’s next step was to modify the house. In the event they were able to get some of their electronics working again, they certainly didn’t want to subject them to the possibility of a third wave.

  He started at his control center, located on the first floor of the house near the front door. It was nothing more than a work desk, really, shoved up against an interior wall. It was from here that a sentry sat twenty four hours a day, watching video monitors to keep an eye on what was going on outside.

  But because it was unprotected, most of the monitors and computers were damaged or totally lost.

  There were a few replacements on a shelf in the attic part of the feed barn which rode out the storm.

  But not enough.

  Scott fully expected to get the center running again, though to what capacity it was too early to tell.

  When it was up and running, he vowed, it would never be destroyed again.

  His biggest problem was that he needed materials. Once they’d built the feed barn they hadn’t stockpiled any extra metal, other than their leftover scraps.

  He knew where he could get some more. There was a sheet metal and plywood wholesaler on the far side of Junction a few miles away.

  His problem was how to transport it.

  His only working vehicle besides his farm tractor was one Gator. And although ideal for many purposes, the small bed on its back wasn’t exactly suitable for hauling full size sheets of plywood and sheet metal which was even longer.

  It was actually Millicent, thinking outside the box,
who came up with the solution.

  “Why don’t you take that old white pickup truck?”

  The pickup truck she was referring to was indeed old. Older than most of them, anyway. It was a 1970 Ford F-150. It was Tom’s.

  And it was dead, like nearly every other vehicle within a hundred miles.

  Told that, Millicent simply replied, “I know that, silly. But can’t you tow it with your tractor?”

  Scott felt so foolish he face palmed himself. Then he picked up the tiny girl and twirled her around until they were both dizzy.

  It was an ungainly contraption by anybody’s standards.

  An old F-100 tractor, in Ford Blue, driving along at five miles an hour along a highway which once featured a speed limit of eighty.

  Behind the tractor was Tom’s old truck, separated by the twenty feet of heavy duty chain which connected them.

  Behind the wheel of the old tractor, wearing a straw hat and depicting every stereotypical farmer ever born, was Scott.

  The only thing he lacked for the part was a long piece of hay straw hanging from his mouth and a chaw of “chewin’ tobacky” in his cheek.

  Jordan occupied the driver’s seat of the pickup, and was fighting the wheel every bit of the way.

  Never in his young life had he driven a vehicle without the luxury of power steering.

  He thought his arms were going to fall off. He finally leaned through the window on a long straightaway and yelled to his father to take the turns a bit wider.

  It helped a little, but not much.

  -8-

  By the time the pair made it to Southerland’s Wholesale they’d been on the road for almost two hours.

  Jordan was in sorry shape and claimed he needed to rest a while before he could lift his arms to help load the cargo.

  “They’re as worthless as wet noodles,” he complained.

  That gave Scott an opportunity to point out, for the hundredth time, how soft Jordan’s generation was.

  “That’s because you never lifted anything heavier than a game controller before the lights went out.”

  “That’s not true, Dad. I used to mow the grass every weekend and take the trash out every night.”

  “… And, you used to complain about how hard it was each and every day. Welcome to the new world, son. The new world is much like the old world was a very long time ago. When everything had to be done by hand. If you couldn’t hunt it or grow it or make it, you did without.”

  “I don’t like this new world, Dad.”

  “I don’t like it much either, son.”

  “When you were my age, you must have been in a lot better shape than I am.”

  “Not to be rude, son, but yes. When I was a boy we didn’t stay in the house all the time. We got out and we did things. We played sports. We rode our bikes for miles and miles. We walked to a lot of the places we went. And if we carried electronics, they weren’t as small as a postage stamp. My first listening device wasn’t an MP-3 player. It was a boom box, bigger than my head and your head put together. I carried that thing on my shoulder all the way through high school. You talk about something making your arms limp as noodles, that really did the trick.”

  “So… you were stronger than me when you were my age. But how about more recently? I mean, you don’t retain your strength once you start getting old and soft, do you? I always heard that if you stop using your muscles they start to weaken.”

  “What are you trying to say, son?”

  “Just that over the last twenty years or so, after you got out of your boom box stage, you stopped using the majority of your muscles and you’re not as strong as you once were, that’s all.”

  He finished with an added emphasis, as though to drive his point home, “After all, there isn’t much lifting involved in running a self-storage empire.”

  Scott wasn’t sure, but he thought he was being needled.

  “Are you making fun of my chosen profession, young man?”

  “Oh no, Dad, I swear. I’m proud of the business you started from scratch and built into the biggest self-storage chain in San Antonio.

  “I’m just pointing out that there’s not a lot of physical labor involved in your chosen profession, that’s all.

  “Unless you count filling out application forms and signing your name twenty times a day.”

  “I assure you, son, that I am stronger than you, even if my job hasn’t been very physically demanding of late.”

  “Really, Dad?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Then would you mind switching vehicles for the trip back? With your superior strength I’m sure the lack of power steering in the pickup won’t be a problem for you.”

  Scott had gotten got.

  He’d been had.

  He’d been played.

  He’d bragged to his son he was the stronger of the two. Now he had to prove it to save face.

  The two looked at each other for several seconds, emotionless.

  Scott broke a smile first and said with much admiration, “Well played, son. Very well played.”

  “Hey, I learned from the best.”

  The next problem the pair encountered was the cargo they were picking up.

  The plywood didn’t need to be thick, and the company had a yard full of various thicknesses.

  They settled on the thinnest plywood available. A quarter of an inch.

  It was a no brainer.

  The sheet steel was another matter.

  It didn’t have to be thick either. They found several sheets of galvanized steel one sixteenth of an inch thick that would do the job quite nicely.

  The problem was that it was sixteen feet long. Twice as long as the pickup’s bed and longer than the truck itself.

  They took a sheet and placed it on the bed of the truck just to verify what they really already knew.

  That the metal would drag the ground the whole way back.

  “What do you think,” Jordan asked his dad.

  “I think you need to walk behind the truck and hold the metal up so we don’t damage it.”

  “Funny.”

  “I thought so.”

  “I was kidding. It wasn’t funny at all.”

  “You got any ideas, genius?”

  “Well, actually, yes I do.”

  Scott was wary. Jordan was a good man and a wonderful son. But he wasn’t exactly well known for his problem solving ability.

  “First, let’s go ahead and load the plywood on the bottom. We’ll put the metal on top of it.”

  “Okay,” Scott said. This was Jordan’s parade; he was just along for the ride.

  Once they loaded twelve sheets of plywood, Jordan announced, “We’ll need four sections of rope. Ten feet long should do it.”

  “No problem. I saw a roll inside the office. Hang tight and I’ll go get it.”

  Scott let his son lead the way until he saw where he was headed, then joined in.

  Jordan took one sheet of the metal and rolled it up, using a section of rope to keep it from unraveling. It was perhaps twenty four inches across.

  “I’ll need another one exactly like this one,” he announced.

  “No problem.”

  As Scott prepared the second roll Jordan began loading the rest of the metal across the top of the plywood. Only instead of letting it drag the ground behind the truck, he lined the end of the metal up with the end of the plywood.

  The other end stood high in the air against the back of the pickup’s cab.

  “Um…” Scott said. “I don’t think it’s gonna ride like that.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not going to.”

  Jordan used a piece of rope to tie the metal and plywood together at the end of the truck. It hung over the bed about a foot or so, but wasn’t in any danger of going anywhere.

  He took the two rolled pieces and placed them atop the stack, then folded the upright ends against the back of the cab back over the rolled pieces.

  He held them while Scott us
ed the last piece of rope to tie them down, wrapping them around the stack at the end of the truck.

  “Looks like a very ugly and very deformed camel,” Scott said as they stood back and admired their handiwork.”

  “Hey, a wise old philosopher once told me, “If it works, who really cares what it looks like?”

  “Sounds like a very smart man. Brilliant even.”

  “It was the best piece of fatherly advice you ever gave me.”

  -9-

  Tillie had an unnatural fear of dogs. Her doctors used to tell her she had a dog phobia. But that wasn’t true. She could watch old re-runs of Lassie without feeling as though she wanted to run and hide.

  Her neighbor and best childhood friend Sami had a dachshund named Schatzi who’d happily let Tillie pet her on occasion. So in Tillie’s mind all the psychiatrists were… in a word… crazy.

  She didn’t fear all dogs, she’d say.

  Just the mean ones.

  It had been over three decades since that fateful day which generated her fears. A dog took offense to the squeaky wheel of her stroller as her family walked by. He freaked out and attacked.

  No one knew why. He’d been a rescue, taken from a vicious owner sometime before who’d abused him in horrific ways. He’d always been a sweet dog, had never caused problems before.

  And he never did again. He seemed to go into depression, seemed to anguish at what he’d done to baby Tillie. Perhaps an even greater injustice than his attack on little Tillie was the judge’s order he be put down as a menace to society. Despite the objections of his owner, Tillie’s parents and most of the neighborhood.

  Tillie herself went to the dog’s grave for years to put flowers on it. She forgave him, she said. She got past it, she said. Yet she still cringed in the dead of night at the sound of a strange dog’s bark.

  At the onset of the first blackout, dogs and cats slowly began to disappear.

  Many were eaten by the truly desperate as they began to run out of food.

  Many were turned loose to fend for themselves. It was hard enough to find food for themselves, many cold-hearted pet owners reasoned. Sharing water with their pets and finding food for them as well was just too much burden to bear.