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confrontations

Joe, his son Jeff and daughter Ann    

The next morning Tom and I took a quick trip back to the farmhouse, determined to find the occupants. This time we had our Uzi’s slung on our backs, hidden by our gray jackets. We parked a half-mile away and stayed in the trees to spy upon it. There was a horse in the backyard, grazing the grass, something we didn’t see the day before.

It reminded me of my own place and a longing to be home.

We had no intention of harming anyone. So we waited a good while, not to call out a confrontation. A girl finally appeared with a bucket of food for the horse. She appeared to be about thirteen.

Then a boy came from the house a few years older and behind him a man with a hoe, heading towards a vegetable patch on this side of the house. I wondered how to meet them without causing alarm.

I handed my gun to Tom and told him to cover me, just in case. It was warm by this hour so I took off my jacket and shirt, just wearing a tee shirt and blue jeans, obviously unarmed.

I walked out of the woods and before they saw me and called out “hello neighbor”. They were startled but stood where they were, silent and staring at me, a good sign.

The man said: “I don’t know you. You’d best be gone. We have the contagion here. If you come close you’ll catch it."

I said: “I can’t catch it. I have the vaccine and I have a farm much like yours, west of here. I mean no harm. I only wanted to meet you. I was here the other day in my jeep and called but no one came out.

”What’s this about a vaccine and you with a car and gas."

“If you let me come closer I can tell you all about it without shouting and if you want a vaccine I have plenty to give out. That’s one reason I’m here. Times have changed. The outlaws are gone. Let’s talk. If you think I’m a danger keep your hoe held up high.

Tom was wise enough to stay put, even as the two approached me, while the girl stayed back.

“Your not from the Church are you? You don’t look it.”

“No, not at all. They’re falling apart. I’ve been with a group of scientists and they have a vaccine, in pill form. It even cures those who already have it, even the very sick”.

“You said you had a farm. Now you say you’re with scientists. You're spinnin a mighty tall tale." But he was edging forward.

“I know, it’s complicated. But my wife got shot in the leg by some looters and it didn’t heal right, so after three weeks I set out this way and found them by pure luck. She’s in their underground hospital right now. They have a few doctors and set her bones straight. She’s there right now, healing. Thirty minutes from here, by car. They gave me this packet of pills. They really work, fix all the plague symptoms in just a few days. When I saw your place it looked inhabited. That’s why I stopped by, in a neighbourly way, to see if you needed any”.

This lowered his defences, his hoe, to the ground. “I’d like to hear about this, my wife is very sick, my daughter a little too. Come on in. Let’s talk."

I motioned behind my back for Tom to stay there. I felt safe going in.

Once inside the front door I could hear a woman moaning in a back room, deathly ill. He took me to her, and as a proof of what I said, that I was immune, I went right up to her and put my hand on her forehead. Anyone without immunity would never dare go that close to someone so infected. It would be suicide.

“She has a very high fever. You should give her this pill right away”. I took four out of the envelope in my pocket. “Give one to your daughter and she’ll be fine, cured forever. But your wife is so sick she needs to get to the hospital, right away. Maybe they can save her. They are specialists in this matter, about a dozen of them. I’ll gladly take her and you in my car, right now."

The man stood several moments in disbelief. “I’ve never seen a man walk up to someone with the plague and touch her. You’re either crazy or immune. She’s had it off and on for two years and my son and I haven’t got sick, and my daughter only a little”.

“Yes, they explained this to me. Some people, a very few, have a gene that protects them. You must have it and you son, and your daughter has half of it. But she has a different gene pool and isn’t immune. Let’s take your wife to this hospital. It’s close and has nothing to do with the Church. You know they hate technology. You have nothing to lose. She’ll die a week if you don’t."

This line did the trick, not on him at first but his children.

“Let’s take her Dad, please. She is dying, and this man seems nice."

“I think he’s telling the truth”, the boy added.

The man finally agreed. “I’ll drive my car right up to your doorstep. I have another man with me but he’s as nice as I am. He was in the woods watching out for me in case you tried something. But we can all fit in the Jeep and be there in twenty minutes. If you don’t like it, I promise, I’ll drive you straight back here."

In twenty minutes we were rushing her into the ward on a hospital gurney. The doctors wheeled her into the far corner and gave her an IV and fluids immediately, and the pill which they crushed up in a cup so she could swallow it. The children were impressed, looking around at things they'd never seen and never thought still existed. The man looked bewildered at first. But then he turned and thanked me. The children followed suit.

“Look” I said, “I haven’t lied at all. Here’s my wife at this end, with her leg wound. Come meet her. The children followed me. The man stayed by his wife, watching intently everything they did. In a few minutes, Nancy and Mira were chatting away with the daughter like friends. The boy went back to stand by his father.

“I never knew we had such places. I’m amazed”, said the man “I thought the whole world had gone to hell”.

“It almost has and we need good people like you to spread the word and give out more pills. Do you know any others?"

“I just started this plot a few months ago. The house was abandoned and a wreck. We wandered through empty farms living on the scraps we found planted. The rovers never checked for such things. They’re ignorant. But we found potatoes and carrots in most places. We did this last year, one place to the next, close to the Church lands because the looters never came that close. But my wife took sick again and we had to stop. We haven’t met anyone except you. I had a big farm in Connecticut with three helpers. They died of the sickness. Then some soldiers told us we had to leave. That was two years ago. They said a war would start soon. So I left. I didn’t want to”.

“Yes, it’s dangerous in these parts and the Church is at war against itself. It’s a mess” I told him, “I’m going to a safe place, my hidden farm, and if you and your family want to come stay there for awhile and help farm it, your welcome. We even have an empty guest house, just the right size for the four of you. I need help there. Some of our people died in a fight with one of the last bandit groups. That’s when my wife was shot. But we killed all of them.

“The place is safe now and I’m taking a few soldiers just in case. But I do need someone like you who can tend animals and fields. It’s much bigger than yours and the house is new, with electricity and hot water. I’ll be going there soon and can take you. I have a tractor too, horses, sheep, a chicken coop and a hundred acres to plant."

“A tractor” he said. This amazed him. “I used to have three. But what about gas? Mine ran out years ago."

“Thousands of gallons in a tank” I said.

“Who the heck are you? Are you in command here?"

One of the doctors turned from his wife and said: “He’s even more important than that. He’s ‘the prophet."

“My god, your right. I recognize you now. But my wife, will she be able to be moved?"

“You’ll see how much better she is in two days, and we’re taking a doctor with us who can look after her."

The daughter had joined us again and heard part of our talk.

“I want to go” she said. “There’s a girl there, younger than me and just her mother and a wounded man."

“That’s why I need you” I said. “My friends there know little about farming."

“Let me think about it. It sounds good. We don’t like where we are, too out in the open, and we have hardly any seed”.

The girl ran back to Mira and Nancy. “We might be coming to your farm” she said excitedly. “Are you going too, Mira?"

“I’d like to, with Tom. I’m going to ask Luke if he’ll take us."

So it was planned for two days later. We had just enough gas to get there, along with one jeep, which the General reluctantly agreed to fuel up on the promise I send them back a thousand gallons. There was so little left they needed every drop desperately.

The General asked how I could get it back here. They couldn't send a tanker truck, no fuel for it. I told him I’d find one near our town. We didn’t even have enough for another trip to Durham. The scientists said they wanted ten times more books. They were eager to dive into the one’s here. But I commandeered them all, saying we had a mystery to solve of much greater importance then joy reading scientific journals, and the General agreed. I’d told him what Mira told me and what we found.

He led us to a conference room of sorts, where we spread everything out from the vault, books, maps, some handwritten notes and charts. I had all of them look over this collection. Even a former engineer and Tom helped out. We had to decipher these papers and knew it was vitally important, that it had to do with gas.

Food was brought in for us so we could tax our wits non-stop, all of us taking turns to peer at the dozens of papers for any clues to fit them all together, like a jigsaw puzzle. This biker must have had something to do with the industry before the plague. Some of the books were from Berkshire gas, stamped ‘company property’, and contained the maps of the underground pipes with the venting and flow control monitoring units and shutoff valve locations. He had detailed drawings of some of these fenced off check stations, always in remote areas and above ground, where you could open a valve and tap into it.

It was obvious he was looking for one such port where he could open a lid and find a line full of gas, millions of gallons.

The tanks at the refineries and elsewhere had long ago been tapped dry by the military, needed for the massive relocation of people. The refineries themselves had been destroyed by the mobs, set on fire, with most of those who knew how to operate them killed. But there were always shutoff valves between the supply points out west and the local storage depots, which were empty. But those tanks were only filled by opening valves, manually. So some pipelines might still be full. That was his hope before he died, a vast amount of fuel to tap into, a sea of it, in a world tapped out.

The General had been coming in every few hours, deeply interested in our updates. By the end of the day, we had three possible locations within a hundred miles. The closest was near Worcester, only fifty miles away. We had this plotted out that night. But we’d need my gas to get there with a convoy of jeeps and soldiers and a tanker.

The General was so excited over this possibility that he pulled me into his office for a long discussion. He altered my plans, had me set out the next day on this mission. I tried to plead with him, saying a thousand gallons that might come back from my place was a better risk than this, a potentially unlimited amount, based upon the clues of a dead man. Each trip held the same dangers, anything could go wrong, from mechanical failures to snipers to looters. But he was dreaming of an astronomical amount and all the future possibilities of power it entailed.

I was finally won over by his reasoning. It was all or nothing, one roll of the dice left for our disastrous situation. A thousand gallons would only buy him a few more months of stalemate. This line might solve all our problems and save countless lives. With gas and the pill he’d be invincible. With a fully functional, healthy modern army of trucks and tanks against bands of sick, starving renegades hiding in the woods, and the rest of the Church to the south in hardly better condition, we could take over and restore sanity to the ragged remnants of this continent, and then the world.

He paced back and forth in his office as he spoke, more excited than I’d ever seen him, talking like a true general again. I wondered how much whiskey he’d been drinking all day. I could smell it on his breath, as he walked right up to my face with most of this oratory.

But that didn’t matter at all to me. It’s what he said that did. It might sound a bit grandiose but his reasoning was solid. I agreed with him and told him I’d go, as I was the one who knew the territory.

I also used this concession to get what I wanted. I told him my simple needs, the farmer and his family, Jim the doctor and Tom and Mira to be part of my trip back to my farm, along with four soldiers and two more jeeps, if we did find gas. I told him I promised to protect those I’d left behind and make my farm workable again. That was the deal in exchange for this exploratory trip. If it failed, I’d be giving up the gas I needed to get home.

We shook hands more tightly than ever before.

I went to the doctors and asked if the woman could be moved in two days. She was already improving with the IV and drugs and they said ‘yes’. With two night’s sleep and so much attention she’d be ready. I rushed to the farmer in the commissary, enjoying a large meal with his children and told him the news, to make sure he was ready to join me.

The farmer nodded, if his wife’s fever was gone. The children were eager to see my farm and electricity again. Jim was at a nearby table with some of the other scientists, tired from their day-long mystery solving, each of them with a book in hand and far more interested in the pages than the food on their trays.

With him I was brief. "It's now or never to see my place. I have a wounded man there that needs your attention. I have a million times the reading matter that you have in front of you, and I'll pay you with a laptop. You can ride back here in a few weeks with some soldiers." He instantly agreed.

Tom was back in the upstairs room with Mira, where they spent their first night. I had another cot rolled in and would have the whole night to convince them. But it only took a few sentences. What they both wanted was to be far away and alone in each other's arms, their own private Shangri-La. My farm fit that bill perfectly. 

The next morning, I set out with the convoy, using up the last gallons of gas stored at the base. Boston too was nearly dry.

We had a fuel tanker truck, new and in fine condition, sitting three years empty. But a few of the soldiers with automotive experience got it revved up and going. I insisted they come along. Ahead of us was a single jeep, loaded with pumps, hoses and two generators borrowed from the hospital, and the men who could set them up, along with Sheila who seemed to be the best at reading engineering charts, a woman for all seasons. She sat with me and the driver’s cab of the tanker as we set off for Worcester.

We arrived about noon and soon found the location in the woods on the outskirts of town. We saw not a single soul on the way. There were seven of us and we used the jeep to open the chain link gate. One simple bump and it flew open.

There were metal boxes and electrical cabinets and other boxes with dials mounted on them. But the valve was easy to spot, right in the middle, with a backup manual wheel to open it, in case power was down.

A long pry bar finally got that turning, stiff with rust and disuse, and as we opened the lid and peered down thirty feet with a flashlight, there lay the liquid gold we sought, in a dark, red, resplendent sheen sparkling back at us, not flowing, not oil, but crude gasoline.

All our problems and countless lives could now be saved, by some dead biker who once worked for a refinery, who knows how long ago?

How often is it, that some dead man, six feet under, saves countless lives by some notebook he leaves behind, men women and children now breathing, who never heard, or will hear his name. But every breath they take are an homage to his discovery, like some silent, oft repeated, thankyou?

We set up the pump and a generator and, in a few hours, had the tanker holding eleven thousand gallons of old but usable gasoline, full to the brim. The pipe was full, and we hadn’t put a dent in the amount we withdrew. It could be hundreds of miles long. The volume was huge, whatever the diameter of the pipeline. We had all the gas imaginable, beyond the wildest dreams of monarchs.

Tanker truck on the highway Gettyimages.  

Though Sheila wanted to know, climbing down the rung ladder. She put her hand in, sniffing it, rubbing it in her fingers, even tasting it, that the gas was dirty from sitting so long and crude, the way they shipped it, refining it a bit more for various octanes at the destination points, some big city, but she declared it was good, and told us with a few filters, easily made, we could improve it.

When she emerged, with a pencil in her ear and a pad in hand, she scribbled some numbers and declared that we'd have 124,080 gallons per mile of pipeline. That was a number fit for a general.

I wondered how she knew so much. Even the soldiers, all motor geeks, were impressed with her. We tried some out, filling the almost empty gas tank of the tanker with it. It ran a bit rough but made it home.

As we sat in that front seat, the soldier driving, I had to ask where she got such stray scientific expertise in such various fields. She told me she liked to read everything she got her hands on, any journal, any book related to science.

I told her I was the same way for a long time with literature, reading all day long, careless of the hour, feet on my desk, living in a shed, in ragged clothes and no money, reading dictionaries even, such was my love of words. But then I added that I had no social life back then and didn’t miss it or even notice it or my condition, living on Saltine crackers, oysters, a can of beans for dinner, what others would call abject poverty. Yet those were the happiest days of my life.

She looked at me, through her thick-lensed glasses, and said she was much the same, that she had no social life, no friends, and never had. But being in science she easily supported herself through university by writing articles for reputable scientific journals. She said she could knock one off in a day and the money would support her for a month.

She didn’t like that chore because it always entailed phone calls for more articles and queries of all sorts, disturbing her days of unalloyed study, so she wrote just enough to pay her bills, though she could have made twenty times as much. She had multiple PhD's, she never taught, but they kept her on at Harvard, in a league of her own, a perpetual student, because she was so smart and they knew it. One day she might just save the world, they thought, and today was her day. She lived alone and never had a boyfriend, or any friend.

When the plague worsened and the riots took place, she just happened to be sitting in that small, neon-lit basement cafeteria that night, in a corner with her book. Even the team she was saved with were neither acquaintances nor friends. All knew her name from her publications. But she hardly talked with them. It was the older scientist who recommended her for these ‘outings’ to the coffee shop as she called them. Then she said with a sigh: “I suppose I like him best. And I like you” she added, “because you never talk to me”.

“Well, I’ve changed” I had to tell her, “For better or worse, I don’t know? But I was exactly like you five years ago.”

“Strange, I thought, people like us, so similar, don’t hook up”. I said this aloud.

“We don’t” she replied in almost a whisper, “because we can’t communicate. Imagine us married. I’d be sitting at one end of a couch, book in hand, and you the other, never saying a single word to one another. For dinner we’d eat alone, I my food, you yours. Then we’d retire to our separate bedrooms because you or I might like our reading light on much longer than the other, who would be bothered by it, trying to sleep. So in separate bedrooms, we’d rarely have sex, so rare it would probably be more of an inconvenience then a pleasure”.

“It seems like you’ve imagined this whole scenario out, down to the smallest details."

“I do that a lot. And that’s why I’ve refrained from dating, though I’ve had offers."

“That’s because your pretty."

“And most men are just lusty. But the relationship would sour in no time."

“I suppose there are a lot of marriages like that or used to be” I replied wryly. At least that elicited a smile from her.

“Well, I don’t need it. You have Nancy and you're happy."

That was the last thing she said on the trip back, and I wondered what it meant, the whole way, because I found it hard to believe a woman of her beauty and talent and temperament could pass a whole lifetime without a mate.

I'd been that way for a time, infatuated with literature into my mid-twenties. But when love did hit, like a wrecking ball, with Naomi, I realized a far richer reality and there was no going back.

I was clumsy in this wider world at first, an ingenue, or an idiot, you might say, in my first days in New York. But I grew wiser with time, and when I met Nancy, I made it work, our happy marriage.

I wanted to tell her this. She had all the qualities for a great relationship, just not the experience. And she had to have the occasional desire for an embrace, or a kiss.

But I remained quiet, even a bit sullen, mussing over this missing chapter in her encyclopedic mind.

At least the general was happy, exuberantly so, as we pulled in the gate. All his problems were solved in an instant. He had a mobile army again, possibly the only one in the world. And he had the vaccine, again, the only one in the world.

The soldiers cheered and threw their caps in the air as Tom and Myra helped distribute another forty cases of beer.

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