Free When A Plan Comes Together by Jerry D. Young

compunction about digging the grave on that property instead of their own.
     
    Thinking of the future, the family gathered up everything that might prove useful or have value in the future that the group had. It was stored in the garage.
     
    During that time, they saw no one else, but continued to keep themselves armed. Along with the pistol each wore, there was a long arm handy for use. There were two 5.56mm carbines and a 20-gauge semi-auto shotgun.
     
    They continued to keep the house locked up at night, though they slept in their own bedrooms, since the radiation was low enough in and around the house. The level was dropping a little every day outside their property, but they stayed close to home, anyway.
     
    The day finally came that they decided to go exploring. Just on their street, but exploring, none the less. The first day they just checked the house on the other side of them from the one with the new grave.
     
    It was with some trepidation that they went inside. They’d not seen any sign of their neighbors and didn’t know what to expect. It was the last time they went inside a house without their respirators. The smell was overwhelming from the five bodies.
     
    The deaths of those that had attacked his house had worn heavily on him until he saw the condition of the neighbors. All had been shot to death and left where they lay, including Mr. and Mrs. Dominic, and their three kids. The youngest was just a baby.
     
    The house was ransacked and left in a shambles. All the food was gone. The three couldn’t tell what else might be missing. “It was those animals that tried to get us,” Rex said, his jaws working in anger.
     
    It took another day to get a trench dug in the Dominic side yard and the bodies buried. As they continued to investigate the street, they found more bodies. Some had died natural deaths due to the fallout radiation. Some had died of dehydration, totally clueless on where to get water in their own home.
     
    Others, like the Dominic’s, had died during violent confrontations. The circumstances were similar in some, and Rex felt less and less stress about having eliminated the one group as a threat. But there had been other scenarios, too. There were fights among families, even fights between local families. Most had died early on after the attack.
     
    The gang that had come through later had salvaged what they wanted. It was part of what the Jones family had recovered from the gang members after their deaths. And it explained the two garden carts and three children’s wagons full of items that had been in the street at the time of the attack on the Jones’ house.
     
    When they got to Dave’s house, they found the door standing open. There were signs of a hasty departure, and subsequent scavenging efforts. There was no sign of Dave.
     
     
    With the fresh, canned, and frozen foods used up, Kathy, Rex, and Roxie opened up the containers of long term storage foods Jay had stocked. The plan in the binders referenced several books that contained recipes for using the basic foods. Kathy had read them while she was in the shelter.
     
    Rex and Roxie kept a supply of flour ground up for use from one of the six-gallon super pails stored in the unfinished section of the basement. The freeze dried and dehydrated foods were used sparingly to enhance and supplement the beans and grains that were the bulk of the family’s protein intake.
     
    The plan called for starting a garden as soon as possible, but with fall already in the air, the outside garden was put on hold. But the greenhouse was cleaned out and set up for use to grow whatever they could to supplement the stored foods.
     
    Roxie had a green thumb, and took the lead in the greenhouse work, with Kathy and Rex following her lead. Despite the slight haze that continued to reduce sunlight, the plants produced from the LTS canned seeds did all right, if progressing slowly.
     
    With the entire small development where they lived finally