Chapter 1

The sky was getting blacker and more menacing by the moment and the mid-summer afternoon air hung thick with ozone, dank humidity and the stench of fear. A stranger was riding towards our small town — a Witchfinder, apparently, according to old Grampy, who was up in his usual nest high up in the windmill. Even though the stranger was still a good quarter of an hour away, if Grampy said he was a Witchfinder, then I'd take it as gospel truth and prepare accordingly.

Grampy, otherwise given the birth name of Ethan Grant, might be the eldest of us and fond of his home brewed squeezin's, but he was rarely (if ever) wrong about anything of importance and he took his self-appointed job of town watchman seriously. He owned the only good pair of spyglasses and even at his age still had the keen eyes to use them to good advantage. You can see a very long ways away on most days in the Kansas wastes. Nothing to see but hundreds of square miles of pancake flat volcanic rock scattered with patches of ryegrass for as far as the eye can see. On a good clear day right after a rainstorm, Grampy says that he can just make out the ruins of Topeka to the northeast. That's over a two day walk, likely longer if the weather suddenly turned bad, which it often did at the drop of a hat.

I pushed any further thoughts of the arriving stranger to the back of my mind. Witchfinder or not, he'd likely have no business with me, besides I had my orchard of dewmelons to tend. I did spare, however, another moment to check the darkening sky once again to see if those perpetually angry clouds would be releasing their precious rain today. Maybe. It felt like there could be rain, but perhaps not just yet. I could count on the fingers of one hand the days so far this year that we'd had rain, and it was already late summer and nearing harvest. The melons would be small this year and dry, much like last year's crop, but it couldn't be helped. Even a small rain shower would plump up the melons and nearly double the weight of the harvest. Not to mention the benefits to the ryegrass, our only other significant food source.

Grampy says that dewmelons, like witchery (and Witchfinders), are something new to this world since the days of the great eruption that occurred during my grandparents life. A bit like "cactus crossed with cantaloupes", he says ... whatever those other two plants are. I don't much care, without them our village would have starved out years ago. No one much likes the taste and they're a hard and constant struggle to make grow, but they're essential. With care and protection from the harsh winters, most dewmelon plants can survive and grow for ten to fifteen seasons before they need replacing. The older the plant the more melons it will produce and the sweeter the flavor. Yearling plant fruit is small and terribly bitter and a favorite of no one.

Mother Turner, the oldest of the matrons, knows a thousand ways to cook, season and prepare dewmelons, but the end taste result is much the same. Still, they stick to your ribs and sustain you for a long day's labor. Every part of the plant is used in some way. The rinds are boiled into a breakfast mash or dried and powdered to mix with ryegrass flour to bake as a flatbread. The roots, if boiled long enough, are chewable and mild in flavor. The waxy stalks and stems thicken our soups, and the smaller branches and leaves when boiled make a bitter but stimulating hot drink.

The trick to growing a healthy dewmelon is getting them every possible second of sunlight, extra bit of warmth, and every drop of water that can be spared. Not that there is much sunlight to get. Even on the brightest day the sky is an angry orange or red color with only a brighter halo to mark where the sun can be found in the sky. Grampy says this is due to all the massive amounts of dirt and rock that the eruption shot high into the sky over sixty years ago. It blocks out the sun, he says, keeping the earth in darkness and the land cold and hard. Someday, he says, the last of this fine dust will fall back to earth and slowly the sky will clear and the land will warm up again. When? He doesn't know, but he says it gets a little brighter every year. If Pappy says so, then it must be true.

To give the dewmelon plants that extra bit of retained heat, you need to carefully cover the ground with small hard stones that will retain the afternoon heat into the cold evenings, and prevent water evaporation. In the morning, as the stones slowly warm, they will condense dew from the air to moisten the ground. That combined with endless trips with a water bucket from the windmill pump provides a minimum of growth and an acceptable harvest. The bonus of any rainfall from the angry heavens is an unexpected, but thankful bounty.

Finding good soil for the dewmelon plants is the hardest part. The volcanic ash here is thick, at least several feet to over a yard deep in some places, and is compacted and fused into near solid rock at the bottom where it lies on top of the old once good topsoil. It can be the work of a man for an entire day to chip and dig out enough of this new sterile rock to clear room for just a few new seed plantings. The rock fights us for every inch of soil we try to reclaim, and it is hard on our old iron tools and the back muscles of tired men.

The ryegrass, our only other available plant, is equally useful. The head of the plant makes an acceptable grain which the womenfolk hand grind into flour for bread, the leaves if carefully treated can get spun into fibrous thread and woven into a rough homespun cloth. Pre-eruption clothing is now well worn and scarce, and saved for wearing on only special or holiday occasions. The bare stalks get baled into small hay bundles and are stored underground in the shelter for daily cooking or burning in the great stove there during the long hard winter nights. It is a poor fuel, but our only one and every stalk is carefully rationed.

Grampy says that when he was a boy, just before the great eruption of the super volcano of "Yellow Stone", somewhere to the northwest, that this land, Kansas, was so rich and fertile that its farmers could grow enough crop surplus to feed everyone for thousands of miles around. Our grain was even shipped to other countries on the other side of the world, he said. Today we do well just to carry a small surplus of food in storage in case of a famine year. I can remember several years in my childhood when winter lasted all year and summer never arrived, and most of the dewmelon plants died. In a good year, a small surplus can be traded for metal tools and other essential items, or sold for hard silver coins. A rare commodity prized by the few hardbitten traders of the wasteland.

I was fairly content with my life as a dewmelon farmer, but being still a young man barely in my twenties, I sometimes have trouble resisting the call of the unknown lands around us, even after I grew up from being a teenager, and was allowed such curiosities. Our young boys and girls are put to work at an early age, the boys helping the men with the dewmelons or the ryegrass, or pumping and carrying endless buckets of water to the fields. The girls, segregated and constantly supervised, working with their mothers and aunts preparing food or spinning and weaving ryegrass fibers into cloth. A seemingly endless task.

As the boys and girls grow older, the watchful eye of the matrons if anything only increases. With food and survival always precarious, our population is managed carefully, with the elder matrons determining if and when a lad and lass will even be permitted to court, let alone be allowed to marry. Rare are the opportunities for a young couple to find a private moment semi-alone in which to even speak, let alone conspire to indulge in other future more private actions. The eyes of the matrons watch for this like hawks, and at the first signs of any 'unsuitable attachments' inundate the would-be romantic couple with enough extra work to dampen their ardor indefinitely.

At least the young men were permitted adventure and exploration. In the late fall after the harvest and in the very early spring before the ground is warm enough to break apart, the young men break up into small bands and scatter out beyond the horizon. In theory, these trips are to locate new patches of good ryegrass or other hardy but useable vegetation and capture any wandering poultry or livestock (a rare occurrence). In reality these trips were to let the young men blow off steam and 'treasure hunt'. Often there was much treasure to be found. Pre-eruption tools, especially old farming ones, dug up from half buried old farm houses were worth their weight in silver coins. Even a large bag of rusted scrap metal could be put to good use by our resident tinker, Joshua to mend our windmill or water pump. Anything that could be found and put to use was one less item that we would have to trade precious food or coins for later.

As a boy treasure hunter and scrounger, I was without peer. While most of my peers concentrated on group efforts to dig out feet of hard volcanic stone from on top of old farm houses in the local area, I discovered an easier and sometimes more rewarding strategy a bit further away. About two days walk north (when the days were short) there was an old pre-eruption highway. Apparently a fairly large and major one. During the disaster, which Pappy said happened suddenly and with little warning, most people were caught unprepared and grabbed their family and valuables and tried to escape at the very last moment. Soon their cars were overcome by the falling ash and couldn't move, becoming tombs for most of their occupants. Finding these trapped and buried cars was easy if you knew what to look for. Namely, rounded sort of domed bumps a few feet high in the otherwise totally flat terrain of black rock. These were much easier to break into, the work of a few hours rather than a few days.

Over the years I found a great many lost treasures this way, and some I even kept hidden for myself in the event of need. Sometimes, I wished that I were once again searching old ruins instead of endlessly chipping away volcanic rock. Idle thoughts ... I was soon to be a married man and would have other more important duties in the village. The explorations this fall after the harvest would probably have to be done by others ... at least this year.

Life in our village is hard, and I've never heard it said from any traveler, tinker, trader or wasteland wanderer of any other town or place where life was softer or easier.

I had quite forgotten all about the Witchfinder and was hard at work moving rocks when I felt a hand tap my shoulder. It was Joshua, our resident tinker. The man who keeps our tools sharp and the windmill turning to pump clean water out from deep in the ground.

"There's a Witchfinder in town and he's ordered everyone to come out and appear before him in the street. Women folks too. Got everyone in a stir and bothered. Looks like he might be staying a day or two too ... he had me put his things into the Garland's place and stable his horse. You know what that can mean..."

Joshua's tone didn't imply a question. Witchfinder's were as close to being the Law as anyone knew of. We had no regional government outside of our town, and most of the other villages and towns in our area knew nothing about what was happening anywhere out of their eyesight. No one was quite sure what actual authority a Witchfinder really had, but in practice, there wasn't anyone who cared to dispute their right to do pretty much anything they wanted. The alternative was a fast and excessively violent death, or worse, a slower and excruciatingly painful death.

"Oh, and I don't like the way he's already looking Nancy over ... just so you know and are a bit prepared. Don't do nothing foolish boy, he'll be gone soon enough!"

His last observation and cautionary word of advice was unnecessary. The appetites of Witchfinder's were legendary, and Nancy, my fiancée, was without a doubt the prettiest flower of our town. If he hadn't singled her out already for further attention I would have been surprised. It didn't mean I'd have to like it much though.

It had been a few years since our last visit by one, in fact when I was a boy they were a not uncommon visitor, passing through several times a year. Not all of the Witchfinder's had a taste for young women; some liked their fruit a little less ripe and still green on the tree, and at least one preferred the nocturnal company of a teenaged boy instead. Fortunately not me. It was more than a passing rumor that Joshua himself preferred sleeping with a lad, his apprentice, rather than a woman, but I couldn't say this was true one way or the other. Joshua was a very useful and necessary member of our town and since we didn't have many bible-thumpers in our community most folks didn't rightly care one way or the other. Life is difficult enough without worrying much over what other folks are thinking or doing.

When it came to dealing with Witchfinder's our townsfolk just grit their teeth and obeyed ... there wasn't naught else that anyone could do anyway.

No matter how many times I told myself to remain calm on the short walk back into town, it didn't seem to have much, if any, effect. Catching my first glimpse of our lordly guest didn't improve my attitude much either. He was dressed all in black with a big black hat and dark leather duster coat and heavy boots, like a story tale figure from the old wild west. The arrogance on the face of the man was palpable, as he surveyed our dusty and unwashed ranks as if we were but lowly cattle, or sheep to be sheared.