Free Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) by Samuel Gorvine Page A

was gone from the stores, all the hoarded supplies exhausted, and all the bottles of mineral water drunk. All institutions had failed the people. Without any communications, neither the police nor the army had any command and control infrastructure, and after all the meals-ready-to-eat were gone the soldiers were no better off than anyone else. After a month there were groups quarreling over the scraps of civilization but no one knew what was going on even a few miles from where he was, or what might happen tomorrow.
    After looking and not finding, many people went to bed and stayed there to conserve energy, but ended up dying there. It didn’t matter much that the electrical storm had abated to the point that the aurora borealis now was only seen as far south as Boston or that you could now shake hands or touch another person without grounding yourself first to avoid a shock. Some vehicles might run if repaired properly but who could do that and where would you get parts? Everything was closed now, all supplies of everything gone, hidden, disappeared. Even the black market stopped working when it became clear that government issued paper money no longer had any value. You could buy with gold or silver, but who had enough of that to buy bread and potatoes every day?
    Soon, those stronger ones who were not dead, who refused to lie down and die , began to move in gangs out of the city centers. They imagined that someone was hoarding the food somewhere out there and it was only a matter of finding it. They were not far wrong. There was tons of grain rotting in silos all over the world with no trains or trucks to pick it up and take it to market or to the factories or bakeries. Whole herds of prime cattle had starved to death in the Mid-west USA when the feed trucks stopped arriving, though in places like Argentina where the cattle were range fed, those cattle could still eat grass and their owners slaughtered a few and distributed meat to their neighbors, since without refrigeration nothing would keep. A few people knew how to smoke or salt meat, as had been done for thousands of years before, mostly indigenous peoples who kept the knowledge and the meat to themselves.
    So, from the inner cities and slums of New York and Philadelphia, London and Paris, Peking and Shanghai, mobs of desperate, filthy starving people, mostly men, surged outward to the suburbs and beyond, looking for the land of milk and honey where all the food had gone. Sometimes they got lucky and found a stranded semitrailer full of crates of Cheerios or rotting bananas, and mostly they drank from streams and rivers. If there was no other food, when they caught a stranger, they cut some wood and had a barbecue.
     
    At the time when the Amish barbecue was under away, a man was pedaling down the darkened road across the valley, lit only by the three-quarter moon. He had the lean wiry body of an experienced cyclist, but his expensive 10 speed bike was dirty and battered. He had lost his helmet and the cuff of his right pant leg was held by a strap which prevented it from tangling in the gears. He had a light pack on his back and looked as dirty and battered as his bike. His name was Phil Green, and he was nearing the end of his rope when he saw the light.
    Afraid of what it might be, he approached cautiously, working his way across the fields, pushing the bike.
     
    “--so if I understand right, we could stay as long as we helped with the defense of the whole Amish community and worked our farms instead of just easting the stock?” Tom was saying.
    “Obviously, if you slaughter your animals for food every few days there will in a short time be nothing left. At that point I suppose you and your men could just move on, but I suggest that thinking about the longer term, if you actually work the farms, take care of the animals, eat the eggs instead of the chickens, plant and harvest, you can stay and perhaps survive what God has sent us.”
    To his credit, Samuel