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Stories and AARs / Every Leaf In Springtime, Caravaneer 1 Fanfic
« on: August 28, 2015, 06:16:26 AM »
Description: takes place in the years before the events of the first game. As civilization crumbles around them, a family of Colorado ranchers is forced to fight for their livelihood, their freedom, and their very survival.
[Map should go here. See attachments]
Prologue:
The mules were freed from their pasture and loosed into the countryside. Paw hadn't been able to sell them and didn't have the heart to shoot them. Some other band of vagrants would likely do the deed, thankful for the steaks they'd provide.
The flatbed Chevrolet One-Ton was rusted as brown as the dust that for 50 years had held their livelihood and dreams. Their remaining possessions fit easily on the back, with room to spare for Paw, Maw, Chuck, Gail, Liz, Joe, Jess and little 6-year-old Billy.
The family took a last look around their 42 acre spread in the red-tinged morning light. They didn't have sunrise or sunsets in the Dust Bowl any more, just gloomy twilights that brightened into day or darkened into night. The house and barn were now half-buried by the dust and would soon be completely buried by the bulldozers of whoever the bank gave it to, not unlike thousands of forsaken homesteads they would pass through the cursed land on their way to the west. The adults and teenagers tried to keep a brave face as they hit the road, but none of them could manage it. It was a Trail of Tears all over; even Baby Billy knew good and well that they may never see Avard, Oklahoma again.
***
Paw had done better than most in the so-called promised land, pulling the family up from starvation to mere insolvency. Chuck had done better still, using his experience from The War to start an earth-moving business. The family stayed close together, with most of the brothers and brother-in-laws hired on to the company. They married, had kids, built houses in lots that were still big enough for gardens, pastures, other trappings of their Okie upbringing. Paw still dreamed at night of pushing plows through his wheat fields, but he had to admit that there were worse places to spend his golden years than Bakersfield. Californians sure did like their swimming pools, and even Okies had their own uses for holes in the ground.
One day in October, the family gathered at Chuck's house. The family patriarch had a large spread to hold his equipment, plus a couple of horses, some goats, pigs, chickens, and a garden that boasted almost every vegetable that would grow at their latitude. There was also a well-covered swimming pool, with a patio of reinforced concrete that seemed a little too big for its official purposes.
Billy and his wife were the last into the fallout shelter that would safeguard half of their extended family. Housing a dozen somewhat cramped people, Gail's husband had built a more-or-less identical one on his ranch outside of town.
All the young children were sent to bed early—just another drill, as far as they knew. Some of the older ones stayed up to hear the president talk, unpacked supplies, or played backgammon and checkers. Billy took the next watch and spent a couple of hours sitting by the door, his infant daughter in one hand and an M1 Carbine cradled in the other. All ears were glued to the radio as they waited to learn whether or not the world would make it through the night.
<<My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead--months in which our patience and our will will be tested--months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.
Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right; not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.
Thank you and good night.>>
After the teens were sent to bed, Jess' fiancé was the first to speak. "Well, I didn't vote for the man but I don't guess I can disagree with him. Do y'all think they'll be anything left outside tomorrow?"
"Well, Gus, I reckon that'll be ole' Khrushchev's call to make." responded Chuck
"Wish he would stop calling it 'Cuber.'" said Jess. "We tried and failed once to get the Reds off that island, so if he has to keep talking about it then he might as well do it right."
"We should have listened to Patton in '45 and pushed them back to Moscow when we had the chance." said Chuck, "Wouldn't have liked it at the time, but me spending a few more years clearing minefields would of been a fair price to pay if I could ensure that my kids never have to do it."
Billy returned his daughter to her crib and helped himself to a coke. "I don't know if that's such a hot idea, Chuck. I learned what fighting communists could be when I lost a few toes in Chosin. Give 'em a home field advantage and I don't know how many of you would of ever come home to have kids."
"Well, Korea was as much Truman's to lose as theirs to win…" said his older brother, "but you do have a point."
Billy and Chuck's wives and Chuck's oldest son returned from the kitchen with plates of rice and coleslaw, passing them out to the other adults. "So, how much food do y'all got back there?" asked Billy's wife, hoping to steer the conversation towards their current problems and away from pointless political nonsense.
"Two or three years, depending on how well we ration." said Chuck. "Rice, pickled veggies and C-rations mostly; ain't gourmet by no means but hopefully we'll have plenty of fresh vegetables to eat."
Billy started to wonder if he should have gone to Gail's house instead. They would have beef.
"We can eat food from out of the garden? What about the radiation?" she asked.
"The initial radiation—from the blast itself— has little effect on plants. The fallout radiation probably won't hurt any of the plants that don't get touched by the fallout: peas in the pod, corn in the husks, potatoes in the ground, these would all be safe to eat so long as the outer layer was thoroughly washed."
"Okay, so what about the animals?" asked Billy
"It would be very bad if there's a blast too close to us, but they're in a stone barn with plenty of food and water. Y'all probably couldn't tell on the way in, but we took the bulldozers and mounded dirt around the walls, and the loft is full of hay. That'll help tremendously with fallout radiation."
"What about the pastures?" asked Mary-Jane, Billy's wife. "I know you've got several months of hay stored up, plus water from your pool and cisterns, but what good is it if you let them out in the spring and they start eating grass coated in fallout?"
Chuck took on a solemn look as he tried to answer this one. "Here again, if enough fallout comes our way there'll be nothing we can do for the grass eaters. Even a small amount may require decontamination; washing it down with the hoses or even scraping off contaminated topsoil and replanting the layer below it."
She shook her head doubtfullly. "If everyone tries scraping their topsoil, we'll have another Dust Bowl on our hands for sure." The words "Dust Bowl" sent chills down the backs of everyone old enough to remember.
"Good point, Mary-Jane. Some folks say that decontamination measures don't have to be all that thorough. Others say it won't be enough. Fact is that most of this is theoretical; we won't know what'll happen during a nuclear war until we live through one.
And, contrary to what the agitators in Hollywood like to say, I think we will live. People were predicting that humanity would go extinct during the Dark Ages and the Black Plague, but we didn't. We learned how to overcome our problems, we saw it through and what followed was, well, the Renaissance. God willing, we'll make it through whatever comes tomorrow."
Chuck spent the rest of the night reading parts of two documents to his family: "Fallout Protection: What to Know And Do About Nuclear Attack" from the Department of Defense and "Radioactive Fallout On The Farm" from the Department of Agriculture. Both had been published in the last few years, both more informative than the old Civil Defense handbooks from the early 50's, which most of the family were familiar with.
The remainder of the night was spent in prayer and, eventually, sleep. Many of those old enough to remember dreamt of a rolling black blizzard that choked out the sky and smothered everything on the ground, withering the crops and starving the livestock like an Old Testament Plague. All wondered what kind of deadly dust would await them tomorrow.
***
Life continued after that night in October. The decades went by, the family grew larger and so did Bakersfield. The Central Valley bustled with suburban development, growing too metropolitan for many of the Turners. Some started to wonder if it was time to migrate yet again.
Bill slowed the little sorrel mare at the edge of a saddleback ridge and wheeled it around, grabbing his hip to make sure it was still in place. He waited for the other riders to catch up and called out to the closest as she drew near.
"You know what, Mary-Jane, I hate getting old!"
"There are alternatives, dear." she yelled back.
He took a moment to spit before replying. "So I've heard, but the existence of even less desirable alternatives does nothing to take away from the fact that I hate getting old!"
"You wouldn't hurt as much if you would stop trying to make that poor pony fly." declared his daughter as she closed the distance.
Bill knew that, but he also took a fair bit of pride in knowing that he could still outride the youngsters.
The Rocky Mountain branch of the family had gone Cowboy in a big way. Rachel, Bill's oldest daughter, had married a rancher's son and settled deep in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near the town of Weston, Colorado. They owned a 900-acre ranch and generally leased another 900 acres focused on breeding seedstock Charolais cattle—a very small operation, by local standards. These were big, meaty beasts with wooly white hair; a very pretty breed of bovine. They also kept a number of donkeys, goats, turkeys, chickens, bees, even a few discount emus from some failed get-rich-quick scheme. No real market for giant birds, but they did taste good.
Too many animals on too empty of a landscape, thought Bill, who wondered how anyone could live like that. Oblivious to almost everyone not involved in American agriculture, there was still rivalry between planters and ranchers. Range wars had long ago given way to subsidy wars, but the sod-busting Turners and cow-punching McLintocks still had enough worldview differences and cultural nuances that their union at times felt like an interfaith marriage. It was, actually, though marriage customs were one area where Pentecostals and Baptists had few differences.
Still, George McLintock seemed like a good man. Rachel liked the life they were building, and they had given him some beautiful grandkids. They wouldn't be Okie by no means, but there were worse things you could do than letting your babies grow up to be cowboys.
The McLintocks, like the Turners, put their kids in the saddle not long after they started walking, and taught them how to shoot not long after that. After a day spent running up and down some of the steepest slopes on the continent, the party retired to the firing range to put some more holes in a rusted-out water tank.
"That your new Russian gun, George?" asked Bill, setting down his Parker-Hale 1200 at the end of another fusillade.
"Yeah, SKS, great ranch rifle. Kind of junky but it beats 30-30 for ballistics and .30 Carbine for knockdown power. Cheap too; going to get cheaper if more of them show up on the market. You should get one."
"I ain't using no commie gun; I saw the luck my brother had with their Belarus tractors."
George chuckled. "Fair enough, though surely you could appreciate the irony of using their own guns against them one day."
"I don't know if that'll ever happen; they seem pretty sincere about that Glasnost."
George shrugged. "Maybe they are, maybe they ain't. Even if they are serious, I ain't convinced that Gorbechov alone can stop doomsday; there's still the hardliners in his own country, there's still China."
While speaking, he grabbed another box of 7.62x45mm bullets and started loading them onto his stripper clip. He wondered if he should modify the SKS to use Kalashnikov magazines.
"Anyway, you ain't saying that fallout shelters are a waste after I paid your family to build one for me, are you?"
"Be bad business if I said so before you paid." said Bill, with only the slightest trace of humour.
"Eh, nothing wrong with being prepared." he continued. "Bad things can happen, and it don't even need human malice if what we're hearing about Chernobyl's true; human stupidity will suffice. What I'm saying is that my family spent 40 years worrying about dictators on other continents when we really should have been worried about the ones over here. No Korean nor Viet ever tried invoking eminent domain on me so's he could turn my property into another strip mine."
George laughed. "Human stupidity? Been reading the Edward Abbey books I gave you?" he asked.
"Maybe."
***
"Once every 30 years." said Pawpaw Bill as he peered out the passenger-side window. "That's how often you see snowfall like this on the Kern River."
Paul McLintock didn't bother to tell his grandfather they were somewhere in the hills between the Canadian and Purgatoire Rivers. Known to the Spaniards as "El Río de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio": The River of Lost Souls in Purgatory. Fitting.
The Chevy Blazer clambered over old mine and gas roads that would have been hard enough without the unseasonably bad weather. Heavy snow in October used to be rare, but then winters were coming earlier and harsher these days. Summers were bad too. Scientists were still arguing about it being a sign of global warming or a new ice age, though an increasingly erratic power and communications grid meant that fewer people were listening.
What stations were still broadcasting spoke of ill winds from foreign shores: a nuclear war in Europe, or perhaps a meteorite in Africa, firestorms in South America or a supervolcano in Asia. An obvious media blackout made it even harder to explain the strange clouds in the sky that made the sun shine in an eery pinkish tinge.
Cities were in pandemonium. The annual fall food riots were already the worst that anyone could remember, and official reticence in the face of Armageddon had done little to help the situation. Paul had brought his brother and a neighbour with him, all heavily-armed. Their trip from the suburbs of Santa Fe had been uneventful so far but he took no chances. He still remembered last winter, when his sister came home with the windows shot out.
Pulling Pawpaw out of his nursing home had been controversial; their homestead was going to be crowded already, food would be tight and he was one more mouth to feed. But at the end of the day they knew they couldn't leave him to the mercies of the riotous hordes that were now bubbling out of the urban infernos. Besides, they all knew he probably wouldn't be with them once the snow stopped falling and they wanted to make the most of the time they had.
Pawpaw did what he could to pull his own weight that winter, though there wasn't much to do but keep the fire going and butcher starving steers. One freezing night he went to sleep and woke up walking through the green grass and red clay of home for a picnic at the nearest fishing hole in sunny Avard, Oklahoma. Those left behind had only cloudy days and the looming darkness.
[Map should go here. See attachments]
Prologue:
The mules were freed from their pasture and loosed into the countryside. Paw hadn't been able to sell them and didn't have the heart to shoot them. Some other band of vagrants would likely do the deed, thankful for the steaks they'd provide.
The flatbed Chevrolet One-Ton was rusted as brown as the dust that for 50 years had held their livelihood and dreams. Their remaining possessions fit easily on the back, with room to spare for Paw, Maw, Chuck, Gail, Liz, Joe, Jess and little 6-year-old Billy.
The family took a last look around their 42 acre spread in the red-tinged morning light. They didn't have sunrise or sunsets in the Dust Bowl any more, just gloomy twilights that brightened into day or darkened into night. The house and barn were now half-buried by the dust and would soon be completely buried by the bulldozers of whoever the bank gave it to, not unlike thousands of forsaken homesteads they would pass through the cursed land on their way to the west. The adults and teenagers tried to keep a brave face as they hit the road, but none of them could manage it. It was a Trail of Tears all over; even Baby Billy knew good and well that they may never see Avard, Oklahoma again.
***
Paw had done better than most in the so-called promised land, pulling the family up from starvation to mere insolvency. Chuck had done better still, using his experience from The War to start an earth-moving business. The family stayed close together, with most of the brothers and brother-in-laws hired on to the company. They married, had kids, built houses in lots that were still big enough for gardens, pastures, other trappings of their Okie upbringing. Paw still dreamed at night of pushing plows through his wheat fields, but he had to admit that there were worse places to spend his golden years than Bakersfield. Californians sure did like their swimming pools, and even Okies had their own uses for holes in the ground.
One day in October, the family gathered at Chuck's house. The family patriarch had a large spread to hold his equipment, plus a couple of horses, some goats, pigs, chickens, and a garden that boasted almost every vegetable that would grow at their latitude. There was also a well-covered swimming pool, with a patio of reinforced concrete that seemed a little too big for its official purposes.
Billy and his wife were the last into the fallout shelter that would safeguard half of their extended family. Housing a dozen somewhat cramped people, Gail's husband had built a more-or-less identical one on his ranch outside of town.
All the young children were sent to bed early—just another drill, as far as they knew. Some of the older ones stayed up to hear the president talk, unpacked supplies, or played backgammon and checkers. Billy took the next watch and spent a couple of hours sitting by the door, his infant daughter in one hand and an M1 Carbine cradled in the other. All ears were glued to the radio as they waited to learn whether or not the world would make it through the night.
<<My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can see precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead--months in which our patience and our will will be tested--months in which many threats and denunciations will keep us aware of our dangers. But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.
Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right; not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.
Thank you and good night.>>
After the teens were sent to bed, Jess' fiancé was the first to speak. "Well, I didn't vote for the man but I don't guess I can disagree with him. Do y'all think they'll be anything left outside tomorrow?"
"Well, Gus, I reckon that'll be ole' Khrushchev's call to make." responded Chuck
"Wish he would stop calling it 'Cuber.'" said Jess. "We tried and failed once to get the Reds off that island, so if he has to keep talking about it then he might as well do it right."
"We should have listened to Patton in '45 and pushed them back to Moscow when we had the chance." said Chuck, "Wouldn't have liked it at the time, but me spending a few more years clearing minefields would of been a fair price to pay if I could ensure that my kids never have to do it."
Billy returned his daughter to her crib and helped himself to a coke. "I don't know if that's such a hot idea, Chuck. I learned what fighting communists could be when I lost a few toes in Chosin. Give 'em a home field advantage and I don't know how many of you would of ever come home to have kids."
"Well, Korea was as much Truman's to lose as theirs to win…" said his older brother, "but you do have a point."
Billy and Chuck's wives and Chuck's oldest son returned from the kitchen with plates of rice and coleslaw, passing them out to the other adults. "So, how much food do y'all got back there?" asked Billy's wife, hoping to steer the conversation towards their current problems and away from pointless political nonsense.
"Two or three years, depending on how well we ration." said Chuck. "Rice, pickled veggies and C-rations mostly; ain't gourmet by no means but hopefully we'll have plenty of fresh vegetables to eat."
Billy started to wonder if he should have gone to Gail's house instead. They would have beef.
"We can eat food from out of the garden? What about the radiation?" she asked.
"The initial radiation—from the blast itself— has little effect on plants. The fallout radiation probably won't hurt any of the plants that don't get touched by the fallout: peas in the pod, corn in the husks, potatoes in the ground, these would all be safe to eat so long as the outer layer was thoroughly washed."
"Okay, so what about the animals?" asked Billy
"It would be very bad if there's a blast too close to us, but they're in a stone barn with plenty of food and water. Y'all probably couldn't tell on the way in, but we took the bulldozers and mounded dirt around the walls, and the loft is full of hay. That'll help tremendously with fallout radiation."
"What about the pastures?" asked Mary-Jane, Billy's wife. "I know you've got several months of hay stored up, plus water from your pool and cisterns, but what good is it if you let them out in the spring and they start eating grass coated in fallout?"
Chuck took on a solemn look as he tried to answer this one. "Here again, if enough fallout comes our way there'll be nothing we can do for the grass eaters. Even a small amount may require decontamination; washing it down with the hoses or even scraping off contaminated topsoil and replanting the layer below it."
She shook her head doubtfullly. "If everyone tries scraping their topsoil, we'll have another Dust Bowl on our hands for sure." The words "Dust Bowl" sent chills down the backs of everyone old enough to remember.
"Good point, Mary-Jane. Some folks say that decontamination measures don't have to be all that thorough. Others say it won't be enough. Fact is that most of this is theoretical; we won't know what'll happen during a nuclear war until we live through one.
And, contrary to what the agitators in Hollywood like to say, I think we will live. People were predicting that humanity would go extinct during the Dark Ages and the Black Plague, but we didn't. We learned how to overcome our problems, we saw it through and what followed was, well, the Renaissance. God willing, we'll make it through whatever comes tomorrow."
Chuck spent the rest of the night reading parts of two documents to his family: "Fallout Protection: What to Know And Do About Nuclear Attack" from the Department of Defense and "Radioactive Fallout On The Farm" from the Department of Agriculture. Both had been published in the last few years, both more informative than the old Civil Defense handbooks from the early 50's, which most of the family were familiar with.
The remainder of the night was spent in prayer and, eventually, sleep. Many of those old enough to remember dreamt of a rolling black blizzard that choked out the sky and smothered everything on the ground, withering the crops and starving the livestock like an Old Testament Plague. All wondered what kind of deadly dust would await them tomorrow.
***
Life continued after that night in October. The decades went by, the family grew larger and so did Bakersfield. The Central Valley bustled with suburban development, growing too metropolitan for many of the Turners. Some started to wonder if it was time to migrate yet again.
Bill slowed the little sorrel mare at the edge of a saddleback ridge and wheeled it around, grabbing his hip to make sure it was still in place. He waited for the other riders to catch up and called out to the closest as she drew near.
"You know what, Mary-Jane, I hate getting old!"
"There are alternatives, dear." she yelled back.
He took a moment to spit before replying. "So I've heard, but the existence of even less desirable alternatives does nothing to take away from the fact that I hate getting old!"
"You wouldn't hurt as much if you would stop trying to make that poor pony fly." declared his daughter as she closed the distance.
Bill knew that, but he also took a fair bit of pride in knowing that he could still outride the youngsters.
The Rocky Mountain branch of the family had gone Cowboy in a big way. Rachel, Bill's oldest daughter, had married a rancher's son and settled deep in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near the town of Weston, Colorado. They owned a 900-acre ranch and generally leased another 900 acres focused on breeding seedstock Charolais cattle—a very small operation, by local standards. These were big, meaty beasts with wooly white hair; a very pretty breed of bovine. They also kept a number of donkeys, goats, turkeys, chickens, bees, even a few discount emus from some failed get-rich-quick scheme. No real market for giant birds, but they did taste good.
Too many animals on too empty of a landscape, thought Bill, who wondered how anyone could live like that. Oblivious to almost everyone not involved in American agriculture, there was still rivalry between planters and ranchers. Range wars had long ago given way to subsidy wars, but the sod-busting Turners and cow-punching McLintocks still had enough worldview differences and cultural nuances that their union at times felt like an interfaith marriage. It was, actually, though marriage customs were one area where Pentecostals and Baptists had few differences.
Still, George McLintock seemed like a good man. Rachel liked the life they were building, and they had given him some beautiful grandkids. They wouldn't be Okie by no means, but there were worse things you could do than letting your babies grow up to be cowboys.
The McLintocks, like the Turners, put their kids in the saddle not long after they started walking, and taught them how to shoot not long after that. After a day spent running up and down some of the steepest slopes on the continent, the party retired to the firing range to put some more holes in a rusted-out water tank.
"That your new Russian gun, George?" asked Bill, setting down his Parker-Hale 1200 at the end of another fusillade.
"Yeah, SKS, great ranch rifle. Kind of junky but it beats 30-30 for ballistics and .30 Carbine for knockdown power. Cheap too; going to get cheaper if more of them show up on the market. You should get one."
"I ain't using no commie gun; I saw the luck my brother had with their Belarus tractors."
George chuckled. "Fair enough, though surely you could appreciate the irony of using their own guns against them one day."
"I don't know if that'll ever happen; they seem pretty sincere about that Glasnost."
George shrugged. "Maybe they are, maybe they ain't. Even if they are serious, I ain't convinced that Gorbechov alone can stop doomsday; there's still the hardliners in his own country, there's still China."
While speaking, he grabbed another box of 7.62x45mm bullets and started loading them onto his stripper clip. He wondered if he should modify the SKS to use Kalashnikov magazines.
"Anyway, you ain't saying that fallout shelters are a waste after I paid your family to build one for me, are you?"
"Be bad business if I said so before you paid." said Bill, with only the slightest trace of humour.
"Eh, nothing wrong with being prepared." he continued. "Bad things can happen, and it don't even need human malice if what we're hearing about Chernobyl's true; human stupidity will suffice. What I'm saying is that my family spent 40 years worrying about dictators on other continents when we really should have been worried about the ones over here. No Korean nor Viet ever tried invoking eminent domain on me so's he could turn my property into another strip mine."
George laughed. "Human stupidity? Been reading the Edward Abbey books I gave you?" he asked.
"Maybe."
***
"Once every 30 years." said Pawpaw Bill as he peered out the passenger-side window. "That's how often you see snowfall like this on the Kern River."
Paul McLintock didn't bother to tell his grandfather they were somewhere in the hills between the Canadian and Purgatoire Rivers. Known to the Spaniards as "El Río de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio": The River of Lost Souls in Purgatory. Fitting.
The Chevy Blazer clambered over old mine and gas roads that would have been hard enough without the unseasonably bad weather. Heavy snow in October used to be rare, but then winters were coming earlier and harsher these days. Summers were bad too. Scientists were still arguing about it being a sign of global warming or a new ice age, though an increasingly erratic power and communications grid meant that fewer people were listening.
What stations were still broadcasting spoke of ill winds from foreign shores: a nuclear war in Europe, or perhaps a meteorite in Africa, firestorms in South America or a supervolcano in Asia. An obvious media blackout made it even harder to explain the strange clouds in the sky that made the sun shine in an eery pinkish tinge.
Cities were in pandemonium. The annual fall food riots were already the worst that anyone could remember, and official reticence in the face of Armageddon had done little to help the situation. Paul had brought his brother and a neighbour with him, all heavily-armed. Their trip from the suburbs of Santa Fe had been uneventful so far but he took no chances. He still remembered last winter, when his sister came home with the windows shot out.
Pulling Pawpaw out of his nursing home had been controversial; their homestead was going to be crowded already, food would be tight and he was one more mouth to feed. But at the end of the day they knew they couldn't leave him to the mercies of the riotous hordes that were now bubbling out of the urban infernos. Besides, they all knew he probably wouldn't be with them once the snow stopped falling and they wanted to make the most of the time they had.
Pawpaw did what he could to pull his own weight that winter, though there wasn't much to do but keep the fire going and butcher starving steers. One freezing night he went to sleep and woke up walking through the green grass and red clay of home for a picnic at the nearest fishing hole in sunny Avard, Oklahoma. Those left behind had only cloudy days and the looming darkness.