Chapter 9

I arrived back home shortly after Anna and Doris arrived there. Joan and Doris set up one of the guest bedrooms for Anna and they moved in together for the duration. Joan, Doris and I went into my study and began looking at possible new places to live. I suggested that a compound type of place with separate homes might be best. "You are thinking long term, Dad." Doris said. "You don't think Humpty Dumpty will ever go back together again."

"That's correct," I said. "So many, many people have died that we will be on our own and any government will be purely local and based upon family and friends. Friends will be survivors who are compatible."

Anna came in just then. "Jim," she said, "Hopefully, I am compatible with you three."

"I hope so, too, Anna," I responded. "It will take a while but I think we will band together into small communities and start preparing to live a very different future than what we thought a month ago. Some things will never be the same and some things will eventually cease to work without maintenance to keep them plugging along. Electricity is one thing I will miss. We can delay those days but I doubt that we can totally avoid them."

"Anna, what we are looking for is a place to move from here. I think Dad's right and we will have to become self-sufficient which means farming and livestock. A suburban neighborhood will not work too well. We don't want to go far but will look far enough out to be in the country and find a farm or two.":

"Joannie," Doris said, "I may have it! Look here all of you. This is Google earth and you can see the farm lands. There are two or three houses fairly close and that looks like a barn. We all crowded around the monitor and inspected what Doris found.

"You may be right. It's where we will start looking tomorrow. We'll all go together and have a picnic while we're out."

"That reminds me. I'm hungry. Sis, do you and Anna want to help me with supper?"

They nodded. I said, "I'll even help. There should be something simple enough for me to do."

I set the table.

We looked over the site and checked for a good route to travel there. It would be the first trip for any of us outside the subdivision. We watched a DVD movie on TV and went to bed. The next morning, I woke to the smell of coffee and followed my nose into the kitchen where Anna was working over the stove to fix breakfast. I appreciated the coffee a lot. She had been working on a list of food items we needed. She said, "I've cooked most of my life and this is a great kitchen. It's just lacking some food. We can fix that while we're out."

I took a sip of my coffee and said, "We can stop on the way back at one of the grocery stores and pick up anything we need. I guess I need to wake up the rest of the clan."

"Please do that and thanks for taking me in. I was getting crazy alone and had lost any thought of what to do."

"Our pleasure. I'll be back in a moment." I took my cup and went to wake my daughters and their children. I told them that Anna was making breakfast and it smelled really good. Everyone came piling in within ten minutes. I set the table again. I was getting good at this.

We ate a good breakfast including homemade biscuits and an omelet. The kids had never been picky eaters and they went after the food with a will. After breakfast and cleanup, we loaded into Joan's SUV and headed out. Our trip was uneventful. We found the three houses and a barn. We saw that the owners had released the livestock into the fields before they died. We found them inside the houses. We carried them out wrapped in blankets. I dug a large hole and we buried them together. I made a largish cross to put above the grave.

We opened the windows and let the houses air out. One house was the largest and had the best kitchen. It also had four bedrooms so we claimed it as our base point. We cleaned at it thoroughly letting the other two houses just air out for now. I took the grand kids down to the pasture and showed them the cows and horses. If they had pigs and it looked like they did, the pigs had headed for points unknown. The chickens were still in their roost and I spread some more feed for them. All in all, it looked like an ideal place to my eyes.

There was a creek between two of the houses and we set up our picnic there on some grass. While the little ones played in and around the creek, we adults talked about setting up here, what we would need to move from our old houses, and where each of us would live. Joan wanted a house of her own and decided to take little house across the creek which was closest to the big house. The rest of us would stay in the big house for now. I lay back on the grass enjoying the warmth and relaxing for the first time since all this started.

After a little bit, Joan and Doris left to join their children. Anna was sitting a few feet away and said, "How long were you and Mary together, Jim?"

"O-Over forty years from dating and marriage. It was a long, good time."

"I understand. Ted and I met after college. We would have been married twenty-nine years next September. It's tough to lose someone who's been with you so long."

"Yes, when Mary was dying, she was more worried about me than herself. She wanted me to keep going."

"Ted was the same way. When he was getting sick and I wasn't, he told me that I had to keep going. It looks like Ted, Jr., and his wife didn't make it either. They were going to start a family this year. I'm glad you and Doris came. I needed something to snap me out of my funk. I'm sad but ready for more life in this new world."

"I think you're right. In many ways, it is a new world that we have now. A lot of the old problems are gone. I just hope the people left are good folk. There won't be many. The records from this virus suggest over ninety-nine percent of the people infected died. When there was last information coming in, it had spread over the entire world."