Chapter 29

Actuaries are often faced with the unenviable task of assigning value to a human life. Typically, this value is represented in terms of money. In a survival situation, where money no longer functions as a unit of account, opportunity cost in terms of time, energy, and resources necessarily becomes the value metric.

How does an individual’s contribution to the community measure against the time, energy, and resources utilized by others to support them?

This was the moral dilemma the survivors at Scirewood Academy had to wrestle with as they considered the terminal and low-probability patients in the Overton Clinic.

Feeding and caring for them took a tremendous amount of time. Many patients could not eat on their own, and had to be spoon fed or, in the worst cases, fed through a nasogastric feeding tube. Preparing the mushy, liquid meals took considerable time and energy. So did cleaning up afterward. So did sterilizing everything. And that was just the food.

They also had to bathe the patients and turn them. They had to change and wash their soiled cloth diapers. They had to clean up their vomit, and keep them properly hydrated. Open wounds needed to be cleaned and redressed. Medications needed to be dosed and administered.

It was a full-time job for the nurses and faculty to care for so many patients, and the toll it took on everyone in terms of time, energy, and scarce resource usage was tremendous.

Compassionate euthanasia for the terminal patients was rejected by everyone when Kali suggested it. None of them was yet prepared to deal with the guilt and emotional baggage that decision would bring. As a compromise, the feeding tubes were removed from the nine terminal patients. With only days left to live, they wouldn’t starve to death. Instead, they would be kept hydrated and remain under heavy sedation until the radiation sickness finally took them.

For the borderline patients, the decisions that needed to be made were orders of magnitude more difficult. Although they all had some chance to live, their recovery could take weeks or months, and even then, their odds of long-term survival were greatly diminished.

A patient could survive for several months, only to succumb to a secondary infection because their immune system was so compromised. These patients would be a long-term draw on their time, energy, and resources, until they either recovered, or the capacity for support ran out.

Thankfully, the immediate necessity and complicated logistics of securing long-term stocks of food for the small Scirewood community provided Mike with a much needed distraction from this heart wrenching moral quandary.

A paper map of Asheville hung next to the white board in the assembly room, with a pin placed on a spot near the interstate, between Swannanoa and Black Mountain.

“FreshVale Foods distribution center,” Mike said to the small planning committee, consisting of Team Food, Team Defense, and a dozen handpicked students. “A one point six million square foot facility, servicing the grocery chain’s two hundred retail stores. I’ve asked one of our students, Amelia Scott,” he said, gesturing to the brown-haired junior sitting in the front row, “to join us today, because her dad worked ... he’s an operations manager there. Not only did he previously discuss his job with her, but he once gave her a tour of the warehouse. Amelia, why don’t you tell everyone what you saw when you were there.”

The tall, heavy set girl stood and fidgeted, speaking in a soft, tremulous voice. “Well, um, ... it was huge,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’ve never seen a building that big before in my life. Dad works on the delivery side, where all the trucks get loaded up with stuff going to the stores. At any given time, they might be loading fifty or sixty trucks, with the same number unloading on the receiving side.

“Um, let’s see ... they did a bunch of stuff there. Not just canned stuff, but fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, frozen stuff, plus all the other things you see at a grocery store like soap and tin foil and makeup and stuff like that. They had these really big refrigerators and freezers that were, like, so tall you could drive a forklift inside them. They even had whole rooms that were filled with nothing but bananas.”

“How much food did they have there at any given time, do you think?” Mike asked, prompting her for the most relevant piece of information.

“Oh, tons! Like, I don’t know ... thousands of pallets. Tens of thousands, actually. Dad said they process something like two million cases per week.”

“Thank you, Amelia. You can sit back down. So, we have a DC sitting just thirty miles from here, with two hundred grocery stores of food inside of it. This, in my opinion, is our single best option for securing our two-year supply of food in one shot.”

“What are the odds someone else already got there first?” Charmagne asked.

“Hard to say,” Mike answered. “It’s only been two weeks, so chances are good that the vast majority of people are still living off what they had in their pantries, what they scavenged from their neighbors, and whatever was already sitting on store shelves when the blackout occurred. I’m not sure how many of them would even know this place exists, but even if someone got there by chance or otherwise, there’s enough food in there for tens of thousands of people. There’s no chance someone walked away with all of it.”

“They don’t need to walk away with it, Mike. All they gotta do is move in and defend it.”

Mike nodded. “Good point, and that’s exactly why you’re here. There’s definitely going to be a huge intelligence gathering and defensive component to the planning and execution of this mission. That means scouting it out ahead of time and providing security there and back, because it’s going to take a monumental effort to get all the food we need picked, sorted, palletized, loaded, and transported back here.”

“How much food are we talking about?” Rachel asked.

“Why don’t I let Sgt. Chapman answer that question, since he and Theresa already ran the calculations on that during the charette.”

Chapman stood with a handful of notes in his hand and approached the whiteboard, uncapping a pen. As he spoke, he wrote the important figures on the board.

“I was kind of shocked by how much food we need,” he began, also sounding nervous to be speaking publicly. “Our calculations were based on feeding fifty-eight people for two years. Forty-six students and twelve adults. That includes everyone, even those in the, uh, clinic right now.

“Based on rough estimates provided by Rachel for the basal metabolic rates of adults and students, we calculated the caloric needs of everyone on campus for two years. it totaled up to just under ninety million calories. But that was just the baseline. We know we’re going to be doing a ton of hard labor over the next two years. More work than most of us have ever done. Factoring in the additional physical activity, we adjusted that number upward to around a hundred and six million calories.”

Charmagne whistled at the figure, and Chapman acknowledged it with a little nod.

“Yeah, a shit ton of food, Staff Sergeant.”

One of the members of the Robotics Club, Olivia Redding, raised her hand. “How much space does a shit ton of food take up?”

Chapman had an amused look on his face when he answered, and his eyes lingered on her a bit longer than necessary. “That’s a damn good question. Pretty much all the work we did that day was so we could answer that very question.

“After figuring out all the calories we’d need, the next thing we did was put together a menu. We had to consider things like nutritional completeness, both micro- and macronutrients, satiety, which is how full something makes you feel, variety, caloric density, and shelf stability, because whatever we get needs a shelf life of at least two years. We then made a list of forty food items that we thought would satisfy those criteria.”

Chapman handed the list to Mike. “Pass this around,” he told him, then resumed his presentation. “The list is divided into eight sections: grains and carbs, proteins, fruits and vegetables, legumes and nuts, dairy, fats and oils, baking and cooking essentials, and convenience foods.

“You can read the choices we made for each section yourself, but it’s pretty much what you’d expect. Rice, pasta, canned tuna, peanut butter, canned fruits and vegetables, lentils, nuts, powdered milk, coconut oil, flour, sugar, canned soup, things like that.

“We also figured it’s a safe bet that someone’s getting knocked up between now and then,” he said, to a roll of titters from the girls. “Yeah, so we also supplemented the list to include things like formula, cloth diapers, baby wipes, bottles, and a couple other things. Those are just bonus items. Worst case, we can make do with just the original list if we had to.

“Once we had our shopping list, we estimated the unit size and packaging type for each item. For instance, a five-pound bag of rice, or a sixteen-ounce jar of peanut butter. You get the idea. Next, we estimated the number of calories that each of these units might provide, and this is where that math teacher, Marcus, surprised the shit out of us with something called ensemble averaging.”

“Basically, we gave everyone the list and asked them to make their best educated guess about the number of calories in, say, a sixteen ounce jar of peanut butter. Then Marcus did some magic with all the guesses on Mike’s laptop, creating distribution curves or some shit. Basically, he told us there’s a high probability that we’re close to the true amount for all of them, just because so many people made guesses. Crazy, right?

“Anyway, we next estimated case sizes and case dimensions using the same approach. How many units per box, how big is the box, that kind of thing. The short story is that we expect the average case to be around a cubic foot, and contain a little over thirteen-thousand calories of food.

“A standard pallet is forty by forty-eight inches, and can be stacked around six feet high without too much risk of the load tipping over, so that’s around eighty cubic feet per pallet. Do the math, and each pallet holds just around a million calories of food. Nice and easy. Since we need a hundred and six million calories, we need a hundred and six pallets of food.

“A standard forty-foot shipping container holds twenty pallets, so we’re talking five full shipping containers worth of food, if we stack the pallets a little higher than six feet.

“We also estimated that it’ll take about a hundred sixty man-hours just to stack and wrap that many pallets, assuming all the cases we need are nearby and ready to go. But they won’t be. We’ll have to find them first. So, we’re going to need ... I don’t know, call it fifteen to twenty people working together if we want to get it all done in one day. Otherwise, we’re going to be sleeping there for a couple days.”

He set the pen down and turned to face the committee. The room was silent.

“A hundred fucking pallets?” Charmagne said at last. “How the fuck are we going to transport that many pallets in the Deuce? You can only fit four of them back there. You’re talking, what? Twenty-five round trips, at sixty miles per? I ain’t as good at math as Rainman Marcus, but that’s gotta be over a thousand miles of just driving. You know how much diesel that’s gonna burn? Not to mention time. We’re talking days.”

“That’s why we’re going to need an eighteen wheeler,” Mike said. “At least one. Maybe two.”

“Oh, and you know how to drive one of them, Mike? Cause I sure as fuck don’t,” Charmagne said.

“No, but Eric- I mean, Specialist Draper has some experience, and he thinks he might be able to do it, with a little practice.”

“Shit,” Charmagne said with a disdainful sneer. “Did he tell you that?” Mike nodded and she laughed. “His so-called experience is playing video games, Mike. Truck driving simulators. He ain’t never driven no real semi before.”

Mike blew out a long breath and shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It’s the best we’ve got.”

“What about a flatbed trailer we can tow behind the Deuce?” Chapman asked. “There has to be forty-foot trailers lying around that we can use.”

“I thought about that,” Mike said. “The problem is unloading. I can get a forklift running at the warehouse, and we could load a trailer using the exterior ramp if we had to. But the real problem is unloading the pallets once we get it back here. With the containers, we can just back them up to Overton and be done. With the trailers, we’d have to unload them all by hand.”

“Why not just leave the food on the trailers, then?”

“No protection. Rain, snow, mice, thieves. You get the picture.”

What about a covered trailer?”

“Possibly, but you’d have to find just the right one. It would need to be tall enough, and able to support that much weight, including the weight of a forklift for loading. Thankfully, those exist. They’re called containers.”

“Plus,” Charmagne added, “If we gotta lit out of there in a hurry, it’s gonna be a lot easier to just hook up them containers and go. Otherwise, we’re gonna be leaving behind all our food. No, I see where you’re going now, Mike, and you’re right. We’re gonna need to figure out how to drive them semis.”

“There’s a more important reason to prefer shipping containers over anything else,” Mike said to several puzzled looks. “Transloading.”

“What the hell is transloading?” Rachel asked.

“It’s where you move the container from one mode of transportation to another. In our case, we’re going to need to move the containers from a truck to a boat.”

“A boat?” several people said at the same time.

Mike nodded. “A big boat. A cargo ship of some kind.”

“Why the fuck would we wanna do that?” Charmagne asked.

Mike asked Chapman to take his seat, then looked among the planning committee members.