Chapter 5

“Norm, look!”

“What?” I leaned over the side of the cherry picker’s bucket to see Gerrard pointing toward the freeway a quarter mile away.

“Look, I see a vehicle, and it’s not ours!” He braced his rifle on the truck’s hood and peered through it.

I lifted the pair of compact binoculars I carried, and scanned the road. Sure enough, there was a light-colored SUV towing a trailer, headed north from San Antonio on the freeway. I lowered the binoculars and lifted my radio. “Security alert!” I called. “Unknown vehicle.” I broadcast their position and rate of travel, and then I quickly lowered the bucket to the truck.

Gerrard was already in his car, which, to everyone’s amusement, was a police vehicle formerly owned by a local college. We rolled out toward the road, and away from the communications repeater we were installing. “Maybe I can actually use this thing to help make contact,” he commented.

“You’re planning to write them a speeding ticket?”

“You’re a funny man, Norm.”

“That’s what Abby says, too.”

The radio came to life before I could reply.

Half an hour later, we’d approached the vehicle, and they’d stopped to speak with us. Our first indication of their origin was the vehicle’s Mexican plates, from Nuevo Leon. The passengers were a young couple in their early twenties, a woman a few years older, and four preteen boys. The couple was from Oklahoma City, and they had gone to Saltillo to visit relatives when the contagion arrived. They had found the woman in Monterrey, and the boys on the trip to San Antonio.

After a meal in a nearby building that we’d selected with this scenario in mind, we told the group that they were welcome to resupply and continue their trip, or they could ask to stay with us. Either way, the building had a supply of food, fuel, and rooms for them to rest. It was several miles from our own home, and the exterior was monitored with closed circuit cameras that reported to our communications center.

The following morning, Stephany and Gerrard, along with me and two others, sat down to breakfast with the newcomers, which, of course Abel served for us. I barely listened to the conversation, as I was busy watching Abel and Isidora, the single lady among the arrivals, interact. She had flatly refused to sit and be served, and so she and Abel were off and running, speaking Spanish so quickly that I couldn’t follow it.

Abby had come to speak with the boys, leaving Isaac and Samantha, the young couple, to contend with the rest of us. They told us that they’d stayed in Saltillo for a while, but they’d decided to go back home after a few months. They were apparently the only survivors from that city, and they were surprised to learn that they were the only people we knew of who had survived the contagion together. They encountered Isidora while passing through Monterrey, and the boys in Nuevo Laredo. When breakfast was done, the newcomers asked to stay with us, and we agreed.

Isidora was a talented singer and musician, and a teacher. She quickly teamed up with Abby to expand our school curriculum to include music. I hadn’t considered it, but it came to me that I hadn’t heard music since the contagion. Hearing the young woman sing and play brought tears to every eye, and soon she had several eager students, adults and children alike. Isaac had trained as an architect, and had studied civil engineering. Samantha had studied history and languages, so she joined our cadre of teachers.

The central Texas winter passed without incident, and soon it was spring once again. Apparently, love was in the air, because we now had eleven pregnant ladies in the group. To no one’s surprise, Abel and Isidora were married, and the poor lady got pregnant almost immediately. She didn’t seem to mind, and Abel was thrilled. When I reminded him of our conversation about his marital preferences, he shook his head. “If I could explain it, I would,” was all he would say.

One spring morning, my radio came to life as I was riding a new section of fence on our farm. Predators were making a rapid comeback in our area, especially the feral dogs. We had taken to shooting them on sight, since they’d managed to bypass one of our fences and kill a dozen head of cattle. I reached for the radio. “Go ahead for Norm.”

“I’m talking to someone from Los Angeles,” Caetlin exclaimed. “Come quick!”

“Okay, but tell Stephany, too. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” I rode back to the stables, and then took my car to the communications center. Stephany and Gerrard were already there, and we listened as Caetlin transmitted again. By the end of the day, we’d learned that the California operator had contacted groups in Chicago, New York, and Edinburgh, Scotland.

Like us, they were small groups, none more than eighty people, including the children that came at alarmingly quick intervals. We shared Chanelle’s theory, and the others confirmed that they fit her hypothesis. There was much discussion about what we should share, and finally we decided that openness was better than isolating ourselves from people who shared our plight.

A critical part of that decision for every group was that no one group had people skilled in all areas. There were two doctors, a general practitioner in Chicago, and a surgeon in New York. One woman in LA was the only pilot we knew of, and so on. We had the only nurse, and the only musician, and so it went. Radio wasn’t the best medium for teaching hands-on skills, but the remote teachers could reference videos and other training materials taken from local colleges as aids in their courses.

By late summer, Caetlin had established a worldwide shortwave network, using the most powerful radios we could devise, with the help of a hobbyist we’d contacted in Atlanta. Juggling all of the channels and different conversations was a full-time job, but the young girl adeptly managed it, along with her cadre of part-time assistants. Then, one of the other groups floated the idea of data transmission, and the new, albeit slower, Internet was born.

One of the main topics of discussion on our new forum was about how to restart the power grid, and the fuel distribution network that fed it. We had no plant operators or other industry experts to guide us, although we had plenty of documents and teaching materials we could draw from. The problem was classic chicken and the egg. The refineries and pumping stations needed power to move fuel, and the power plants needed fuel to run. The only exception to this was a nuclear plant, but starting one of those monsters was a risk no one wanted to take.

Another main topic centered on the pilot. Simply put, her planes didn’t have a source of fuel, which would be required at every location she wanted to visit. Using ships was another possibility for long distance transport, but their fuel issues were the same as with the aircraft.

Two medical topics received some extra attention, as well. The first was the universal reports of every survivor having the same set of symptoms during the contagion. The second discovery surrounded pregnancies, or, more precisely, ovulation. To a person, any of the post-pubescent women could tell when she was about to ovulate – and she could control the release of her eggs. Joye ran some tests, and confirmed it with examinations and tests on couples who volunteered to test the hypothesis. If a woman did not wish to become pregnant, she wouldn’t. Most women still chose to have several children, but some only had one or two.

At bottom, there was a time limit for all of the groups. Sooner or later, the supply of stored propane would run out. Each group was doing their best to install solar power stations, but the work drew heavily on the limited workforce available at each site. For the time being, the power needs were modest, but that would change as the populations grew.

I was involved in many of these discussions as a self-trained jack of all trades. Isaac was our resident engineer, and he taught me a lot about the systems we were trying to resurrect. Our fledgling engineers and scientists were learning at a phenomenal rate, with Chanelle leading the way. While they figured out how to solve these problems, I worked mainly in propane recovery.

The system we developed to recover propane from ever-more-remote sites was to take a truck tractor with several propane trailers and a flatbed truck with a generator. With up to four trailers in tow, I could move nearly eighty thousand gallons of propane per trip. We found tank farms in Corpus Christi, Houston, and Dallas, along with smaller facilities in San Antonio. This fuel allowed us to keep growing, and grow we did.

Three years later, all eleven families in our group had an average of five children each. The mothers were still in excellent health, as I could personally attest to in Abby’s case. We had six children, all in perfect health. After the latest round of births, though, most the mothers stopped their ovulation processes.

When the tenth anniversary of the contagion came around, we had made some modest advancements in solving our long-term problems. Chanelle, now married and with her second child on the way, had managed to restart a small power production plant at a nearby factory that was connected to its own natural gas well some forty miles away. We routed the power through the local power grid by disconnecting branches we didn’t need, and powered up two critical pipeline pumps with generators we installed. At long last, we had all the electrical power we needed for the foreseeable future.