Chapter 4

[Preservation, West Georgia]

Mike is two years old. It's late spring of 2014. It amazes me to realize I track time now by my son's age. Shirley and I are trying for another. Actually, we have been trying just without success in getting Shirley pregnant. She said that we enjoy making love too much to worry about her becoming pregnant.

Janice and Bennie married six months ago and they had a church wedding after making their public announcement. I gave away the bride and Shirley, holding Mike, acted as mother of the bride and served as Matron of Honor. Jean, Melody, and Cindy were bridesmaids. Ben was best man with Michael, John, and Ted as groomsmen. It was a happy wedding and the new couple moved into a house they had reworked over the summer in the valley next to ours.

Michael, Ben, and Jimmy had set up their engineering shop together. Among them, there wasn't much they couldn't build. They make forays into Atlanta for parts and pieces for the things they build. All the food from the stores is gone as is most of the gas and diesel.

The five corner house women had moved on. Lucy had met and married one of the male newcomers. The other four had left for Texas when the free food ran out and they realized that they would have to work to eat and no one would provide a free meal ticket. Preservation is open but prostitution is not a real likelihood now and, I hope, never will be.

Lucy has been helping Shirley and I on the computers. We still had Internet though some sites were no longer available. We had mined it well though and had a lot of information stored locally. Lucy and Shirley were just looking for odds and ends to complete what we had originally hoped to do.

Our net met nightly and many people who had never been hams were actively on the air. It was the primary method of getting news out. Cell phone coverage was more and more spotty. The landline phones had gone with the power grid.

The Amazons moved back to Preservation last fall. There were children coming along to be taught and Atlanta was no longer fairing well. We had had no response in the last six months to our CNN ads for people. The Amazons hadn't found any new people in almost that length of time. I was still surprised, when I thought about it, that so few people survived. I am not sure it was even three tenths of one percent much less three percent.

We are going to have an organized deer hunt this year. The deer population has been growing and needs thinning. Wild animals generally are more prevalent though we haven't seen Robert's rhino again. My guess is that those more tropical animals had moved south to Mexico because winters can be cold though not too terrible.

We did have one ice storm last winter, which finished off the power in our area for those few who still had it. The Amazons had suffered from the cold and loss of power. They found one area of Atlanta that still had power but had given up based upon lack of return for their efforts.

I came in from working outside. We didn't have a big farm but it did have a large vegetable or "truck" garden that fed others and us. It was just starting to produce for the year and I was harvesting the first crop for this year. Shirley called to me as I came in.

"Jack, listen to this!"

From the speaker, I heard, "CQ, CQ, CQ, this is KG4AZQ, calling CQ. Over." Shirley said, "I think it's a recording. I responded and it continues to make the same call regardless. Listen." We listened to the same transmission even to inflection. Shirley keyed the mike, "KG4AZQ, this is K4SAA returning. Please respond. Over." A few moments later, the same call was repeated without change.

I said, "It's a recording. Hopefully, it's recording you. What frequency are you using? Oh. Why don't you respond again and tell him to respond to you on thirty-nine seventy or seventy-one eighty-five?"

"Okay, That will work. It sure sounded like a recording to me, too." She waited for the call again and did just that. She said, "Are you about ready for supper?"

"Yes, just give me a minute to clean up."

We started supper. There was still some gasoline to be had but we tried to use high mileage vehicles when possible. I had snagged a motorcycle which constituted most of my motorized traveling now. We also had a Hybrid car that we used rather than my truck. We tried to be careful as did the rest of Preservation.

I had found some horses to ride or pull a wagon or both. Horses had not survived well initially in this area for some reason. Cattle, on the other hand, had done quite well as had pigs. Chickens had had their problems. Too many predators and not enough care had left few. Eggs were now rare.

I was told and believed myself that my property would handle horses well. The Davidson's had had horses when they were younger according to Dad and Ted. The land had not been farmed in many years though it had good pasturage. We had cattle now, about twenty head. Our biggest problem was deer and rabbits invading our gardens.