Chapter 5

Eve was pregnant! We celebrated her announcement with a feast of bar-b-qued pig. That pseudo tomato mixed with our true tomato produced an excellent bar-b-que sauce when we added the proper spices. Actually, I preferred the taste of this new stuff to what we had at home.

I had also been working on a home-brew and had finally gotten it to taste well enough to offer to company, if we'd had any. Both Eve and I liked it, and we had developed a taste for beer while on military service. Eve was careful not to drink too much, and I kept my consumption in line with hers out of politeness.

That night, we had a hell of a rain storm, much worse than we had at any time last winter. Our main thought at the time was, "Thank God it isn't snow!" It rained so hard that we actually had some rain blown into our air intake, and some water managed to get into our cave by that route. The wind that went along with the rain was surely pushing 150-200 KPH, and it lasted much too long to be simply a tornado. We had no idea when to expect hurricane season, but this seemed to be as close to a hurricane as we wanted to get.

The animals took the storm in stride. The pigs ignored it as if they didn't have a care in the world. That was fine for them, but I wondered how it was going for their relatives down in the valley. Out of curiosity, as soon as the weather let up, I wanted to check it out.

Yeah, this had to be what Eve and I would call a hurricane, since an eerie calm set in just about daylight and lasted for around three hours. The wind quickly rose to be as strong as before, but it was blowing from the opposite direction. A hurricane, by any one of several names, was the only kind of storm that we could think of that had these characteristics.

Well, the storm was over by noon the next day, and let me tell you, all of us animals were happy. Even the pigs, who had been ignoring the worst of the storm, were happy to be moved outside. I supposed that they were getting hungry. Anyway, the dogs were happy to go out with the pigs, and the humans were happy to go out with the dogs.

The storm had just played hell with the trees everywhere that we could see. On our plateau and down in the valley, there were fallen trees and loose limbs everywhere. Fortunately, we were between crops on our little farm, so nothing was damaged there, but I was going to have to spend more than a week just cleaning up the debris scattered by all that wind.

Eve and I decided to take several dogs with us and go sight-seeing down in the valley. Besides our pistols, Eve picked up her crossbow and a quiver of 24 explosive bolts, and I armed myself with the RPG and six of the homemade rockets. She also carried some sandwiches and I carried the water. The dogs were Lucy, Ethel, Ed, Tom, Dick, and Harry. We were taking so many dogs just in case we needed help with predators, and these were the most aggressive of the dogs. The rest of the dogs were left to look after the pigs.

We followed our usual path down to the valley, but we had to spend a lot of time pushing downed trees and whatnot out of the way. It took us about three times as long to move down the path as it usually did. In fact, it took so long that we took a lunch break when we finally reached the valley floor.

We had only gone a hundred meters or so when we saw a sight which was completely new to us. There was a globular being about 15 cm in diameter, we assumed it to be an animal, that was clutching a small winged-gill beast with what looked like 50-60 streaming tentacles. The first thing that Eve and I thought of when we saw it was: "jellyfish." The small animal that it was holding was about half consumed. The dogs gave it a wide berth, so Eve and I did the same. We assumed that those tentacles were coated with some sort of poison, and we were not tempted to verify our suspicion. The jellyfish-like beast seemed to be so insubstantial that it must have been blown into our neighborhood by the powerful wind. At least, we hoped so! We also hoped that there were no more such beasties around and about.

The ground was so covered with broken limbs that it was hard to see where to put our feet. The walking was difficult, and it would have been easy to trip and fall. I hoped that evolution had bypassed the sea snake. They had been the most poisonous of all snakes, so I had no interest in meeting one of the current versions, if there were any. So far, no sale, so I was happy.

We finally worked our way to our meadow where we usually hunted the pigs. There were a lot of them here, but they were uniformly dead. Most were pierced by pieces of tree limbs, but there were a few other reasons for death, though we could not be sure what they were. There were just no obvious marks on the dead pigs showing where a limb might have hit them. Who knows what caused the death of an unmarked pig? I sure didn't.

The meadow was full of scavengers gulping down as much flesh as they could tear off a pig carcass. They were ignoring us, and I wanted to keep it that way. I called back every dog that looked like it was going to disturb an animal that was eating. I didn't want to start a ruckus that we couldn't win. Actually, I didn't want to start a ruckus, whether or not we could win it, but you get the idea.

There were several animals that we had never seen before, but they were almost all of the same general type: obviously evolved from fish and having the monster "wing" gills waving in the breeze. On the other hand, there were a few wild exceptions. The strangest looked like a squid or octopus offshoot, but I would bet on the octopus, because the beast appeared to be carrying a club with a stone head tied to it!

Well, I had heard somewhere that the octopus was the most likely of all of the undersea creatures to become intelligent. It had a brain nearly as complex as the human one, and it appeared to be able to reason. I just hoped that we did not one day face a war with the octopuses over domination of the Earth. As we were watching, the octopus used that club to kill a scavenger that was about to intrude on the octopus' meal. Shit! That was frightening!

By now, it was time for us to return home. We wanted to get there before supper, and it was probably going to take longer to go up the trail than it took to come down, even though we had moved a lot of the trash out of the way, already.

Eve and I discussed the situation with the octopuses for several days after that, but we could not come to a conclusion. We finally decided to wait it out and see what happened. We both knew that we were just putting off the inevitable, but we just didn't know what else to do. Of course, we knew exactly what we would do if the octopuses ever attacked us.

The sighting of the octopus did push me to develop a hand grenade, just in case. I made two hemispheres of very thin concrete and bonded them together with a lime mortar mix. One of the hemispheres was cast with a small hole that I could use to fill the sphere with gunpowder, and I used that same hole for the fuse. In these first prototypes, I had to light the fuse with a coal, but I hoped to come up with an adequate fuse once I had gotten the basic hand grenade to work.

I had to fiddle around to determine the proper wall thickness so that the hand grenade would hold together when it was thrown, and it hit the ground, but thin enough so that the maximum effect of the gunpowder was achieved. One of my biggest problems was keeping the dogs from chasing the thrown grenade, thinking that it was all a game. None were actually hurt, but a few did get a big scare from being too close when the grenade went off.

Lighting the fuse was a big pain, almost literally, so I looked for some sort of fuse arrangement. I finally came up with something similar to what I used with the RPG warheads. I set up a fuse within the grenade and used a compression-ignition device to set it off. I had a stick projecting out of the grenade. I banged the stick on its end and drove it down into the igniter. This lit the fuse and it was home free from there. After I had most of the development work done, it dawned on me to copy the stick-grenade design and put the striker inside the handle. This worked very well, and it nearly doubled the range I could throw the grenade. Eve could handle it now, which was also a big advantage. She had just not been able to master throwing the original sphere, which was about the size of a softball.