Free Countdown to Armageddon by Darrell Maloney

wasn’t quite as much work. She visited Walmart again, to buy two hundred one pound blocks of cheese. Not all from one store, of course. She was considerate of others and only took about half of what each store had on the shelves. Then she’d move down the road to the next Walmart and do the same thing. She didn’t think it proper, after all, to inconvenience other shoppers who might also need cheese.
         After she got all her cheese and packed it in a side by side refrigerator at the compound, she spent four days melting red cheese wax in a pot on the stove. Once melted, she dipped each block of cheese in the wax, wrapped it in cheesecloth and then put it aside on waxed paper to cool and dry.
         She put four coats of wax on each block of cheese and then wrapped each in waxed paper. Then she lined them up on top of boxes of supplies that were in the basement storage room. The cheese would keep unrefrigerated for many years.
         In her prepper days Joyce had learned that eggs will keep unrefrigerated for up to a year if they’re coated in mineral oil.  Scott had planned to purchase chickens and roosters and to build a chicken coop in the back of the compound. He didn’t bother to tell Joyce, though, until after she’d purchased fifty dozen eggs, treated them and stacked them neatly in the same back bedroom as the dry goods.
         “I’m sorry, Sugar,” Scott said. “I should have told you before you went through all that trouble.”
         She countered, “Oh, it’s no problem. I hope you like eggs, because that’s what you’re getting for breakfast every morning for the next year.”
         Scott did indeed like eggs. And the thought of Joyce waking up next to him every morning for a year appealed to him. They were becoming closer and closer with each passing day. Being heavily involved on their mission helped. It also helped that they found they had the same interests and hobbies.
         Scott asked, “So, now what are you going to work on, since you’ve got our food stores all set?”
         “It’s funny you should ask. I want you to teach me how to drive that tractor, so I can help you with some of the outside chores. I’m tired of being cooped up inside all day while you’re out in the sunshine.”
         “You really want to learn?”
         “Yep. And I want to drive that little Bobcat of yours too. It looks like a lot of fun.”
         Scott had plowed under the field north of the compound where he planned to plant crops in the spring. But he found the soil was a lot rockier than he’d thought.
         The pair walked out to look it over.
         “I hooked up the rake attachment that came in yesterday. It works just like a hard garden rake. We’ll drag it across the plowed land and it’ll drag the rocks to the end of each row. A lot of them will slip through the forks of the rake, though, so we’ll have to do it several times. Once we get them all gathered at the end of the rows, we’ll use the bucket on the Bobcat to pick them up and move them out of here.”
         “Well, that’s not hard. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of days.”
         “Don’t kid yourself. That’s just the first step. Many of the rocks are still buried. After we’re done, we’ll replow the field. More of the rocks will come to the surface. And then we’ll go through the same process again.
         “We’ll probably have to go through the process four times, maybe five, to get all the rocks out of the soil. But that’s not even half the task.”
         “Oh, yeah? Why not?”
         “Because that’ll only clear the first ten inches of soil. It’ll be fine for wheat and sorghum, but corn has a deeper root system.”
         “Okay. So how do we work around that?”
         “We’ll use the bucket on the Bobcat to dig out the first ten inches of clean soil. Basically, we’ll dig a ten inch hole in the ground an acre and a