The girls slept until almost noon the next day. It was their first night in a month where they had both security and comfort, it showed. After our morning meal we spent hours just talking about our lives before the attack. When they started to discuss their parents they became very sad and were each soon sobbing. I would guess that this was really the first chance they had to really think about what had happened. I attempted to comfort them, but with no experience in such things I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was helping or not.
An hour into our discussion Janie developed a bad case of the hiccups. I then offered up my tried and true cure. She was to sit motionless, take a deep breath and then breathe slowly for 30 seconds while focusing her mind on nothing. The focus on nothing and sitting still seemed to steer the brain away from telling the body to hiccup. The cure had never failed me before and it proved itself once again that day.
As the discussion continued Rachel talked about how for the first two days, neither of them moved from under their sleeping bags in the tree house. They had a backpack with some snack food in it that they had shared. Part of their reasoning for not moving was that they could not hear. They had been so close to the concussions that it was a miracle they were able to recover their hearing at all.
It was then that Janie Lynn revealed that she still could not hear from her left ear. She had kept that little secret from her sister all that time and never complained. I had no medical training and didn’t know the first thing about one’s hearing. I was lucky to get past getting the wax out of my own ears and I sometimes did a poor job of that.
I felt so bad for these two sweet little girls and what they had been through. It was different for me, having been an adult and not having anyone close to lose. Sure, I had lamented Renee’s almost certain death, but I had not been close to Renee for almost 15 years, these girls had lost their parents while just a few hundred feet away. One couldn't help but feel guilty for being a survivor.
I wondered why I was selected to live while so many others weren’t. My life’s history certainly didn’t qualify me for any humanitarian awards. As I pondered further I began to get the feeling that maybe, for me, this was a second chance at being a caring person, a normal person. I soon began feeling a real need to watch after the two girls.
It was at that moment that I decided that I was going to do whatever it took to care for and watch out for them for as long as I was able. I felt a rush at having a new purpose in life other than just surviving. I had not cared for anyone up close in a long time and it felt good to once again have those emotions.
We spent the next month mostly at the bunker. I tried to teach them everything I could and they were eager learners. Anything that kept us busy and passed the time seemed to really help with the anxiety we each had over our situation. Rachel took to Joanne’s garden, Janie Lynn to the chickens and cows and Heinz to chasing off rats.
The new help freed up some time for me to work on our little fortress. In my foraging of the surrounding county I had managed to find six more solar panels. It gave us enough electric power in the daylight to run almost everything we had at once. At night we switched to the hybrid battery pack and tried to be conservative, it was mostly used for lighting and electronics.
I had a PC in the bunker along with the rest of my electronic equipment and the girls spent many an hour during the evenings mastering the couple of games that were on it. It only had a CD player, but I didn’t have any DVDs or CDs other than the couple of games anyhow. I had a police scanner and weather radio that ran every evening also, just in case anyone out there was able to broadcast.
It had been two months since the attack and we had not detected a peep of a signal. The only conclusion I could draw from that was that the devastation brought upon us by these invaders was worldwide in scope. For a while, with all the latest technology, the world was beginning to seem smaller and smaller. It now seemed immense and had it not been for the company of my new little family it would have seemed very empty also.
With the extra time afforded by the girls tending the garden and animals, I had taken the time to get back to my coil gun tinkering project. The coil gun worked on the same principle as the doorbells I had designed at work. Coil up a bunch of wire around an iron bar and apply a current. A magnetic field would be generated in the center of the coil drawing the iron bar inward and causing it to strike a bell.
If the piece of iron was set on one side of the opening of the coil and a current applied for only an instant, the magnetic field would pull the piece of iron through the coil to the other side. This was the main principle behind a coil gun. When a number of coils were strung together, back to back, a piece of iron could be magnetically propelled through them. When the piece of iron got to the other side of the first coil it would meet another coil that would again pull it through, each successive coil afterward would accelerate the pull.
By lining up a bunch of coils and timing when they got powered on and off the piece of iron, a BB in my case would accelerate to potentially very high speeds. With the initial calculations I had done I figured that I should be able to get that BB moving as fast as a bullet from a high powered rifle. I had a few tricks up my sleeve, along with the old man's coil design, that I hoped would take me to a point of high power, which in itself, would be very impressive for a hobbyist.
I had a limited amount of ammo for my guns and it was a resource that was only going to become scarce as time progressed. There were no longer factories churning out tons of ammunition every day. But electricity was something that I knew I could generate more of. I reasoned that if I could create a weapon that didn’t require gunpowder we would be better off. I didn’t want to have to resort to using a bow if I didn’t have to. I hoped that, with some luck, my coil gun project could perhaps keep man from sliding back a thousand years on the weaponry front.
Well before the attack, I had procured a modest supply of ultra-capacitors from an Orlando salvage store which I had incorporated into my coil gun design. My ammo of choice had been BB’s of which I had a huge case of in one corner of the bunker. With my tinkering I had managed to get the coil gun to launch a BB at a pretty impressive speed for a hobby toy.
It would put a nice dent in a road sign from 100 feet. I felt that if I could somehow manage to double that speed I would have a weapon that was useful for hunting small game. With the farm we had going we had no need of hunting anything, but we didn't know what the future might bring. The coil gun was about five feet in length and weighed in at about 15 pounds. It was clumsy and bulky and wasn’t anything you wanted to carry into a gun fight. But it was what we had.
I had potentiometers on each coil and a bank of mercury switches that I would use to attempt to tune the timing of firing the coils. My tweaks to date had taken it from a balloon popper to a sign-denter. Over the course of the next several weeks, as I continued to tinker, I was able to get the power cranked up enough to punch a hole clean through the street sign target that now sat on top of what was once my home.
After taking several more test shots with similar results I could no longer contain my excitement. The girls were at the Kendall’s tending to their daily farming rituals and I went running over to tell them of my news. As I ran I was yelling and waving my arms. They at first turned and began to run away towards the woods. I guessed they still had a little of the "flight for survival" instinct in them.
When I slowed to a walk they stopped their run and returned to see what was happening. They were very unimpressed with my news and quickly returned to their chores. I hadn’t stopped long enough to think that two young girls would have no interest whatsoever in my coil gun project. So, I returned to my masterpiece without a victory celebration, but with my excitement level still very high.
I had one more innovation to try on my gun, but it would have to wait. I had surmised that if I could somehow deliver the energy a coil needed to the whole coil at once and not just from one end of the wire to the other I would be able to ramp the coils magnetic field up far faster than normal. That would lead to not only a tighter set of coils, but to a much higher output energy transfer to the BB. I already had an idea of how I was going to accomplish the feat, but I had no idea of how long it might take me to bring the idea to something that was usable. I had decided that time seemed to be one thing that I had plenty of and after my own little victory celebration that evening I would start work on it the following day.
After the girls returned with the day's harvest we decided that we should try to go out and scavenge a larger refrigerator if possible. My little soda fridge was no longer adequate for storing the food needs of three. We decided that if we could find one with an automatic ice maker all the better. My soda fridge did not have a freezer section and some iced tea was something that was on all of our minds. I had a sizable stock of teabags, but with the summer heat, none of us had any desire for warm tea, so the stockpile remained.
Janie Lynn had managed to get milk from one or more of the cows. When I asked her she said she had once milked a cow on a school field trip and so she just did the same thing again, it had still worked. We all had a good laugh over it and each enjoyed our first glass of milk in months.
The girls had also gathered up the once scattered chickens and now had them in the safety of a makeshift pen, they had been laying eggs like crazy. It seemed that man’s leftovers and nature’s abundance was providing us with all the sustenance we would need.
It was late in the afternoon when the girls came running to me frantically talking and out of breath. A pack of dogs had circled the chicken pen and Heinz had run to their rescue. After a fierce fight with the leader of the pack Heinz had chased the dogs back into the woods. The girls had waited anxiously for Heinz, they had called to him repeatedly, but the dog had not returned. Aside from being their pet, Heinz had been their protector since the invasion began. I wasn’t sure how hard it would be on them if he didn’t return, or if he did and was somehow maimed. I cringed at the thought of possibly having to put him down.
I loved animals and had never been one to harm them, ever since shooting my first bird with a BB gun as a child. The poor blue jay fell to the ground with a broken wing right in front of me. I soon put it out of its misery, but the whole episode had made me sick to my stomach. Other than squashing the occasional bug or catching a fish I had not had any interest in harming animals since. I would eat a burger in a heartbeat, but taking another animal down myself had been far from my mind.
Heinz had been such a loyal dog and the girls were very attached. The first week without Heinz passed slowly with the girls breaking down in tears repeatedly. I offered what comfort I could, but not having had any children of my own, I was again unsure if what I was doing was helping or not.
I guessed at the time that just going with your human instincts would sometimes be enough. After several weeks the girls had turned their sadness towards their daily chores and had been spreading some of their undelivered love for Heinz around to the cows and chickens. I knew deep down that this loss, as with any loss, brought its pain. But eventually that pain would slowly give way to the toils of our daily lives.
As much as I hated harming animals I had decided that we were in need of more protein in our diets and a chicken would have to be sacrificed. The girls were not happy with the thought of slaughtering of one of Janie’s hens. They were however, all too willing to partake in the BBQ feast we had that afternoon. They later confessed to being very ardent animal rights activists and had even donated babysitting money to several animal rights organizations.
Having had their first taste of chicken in months they then began to have a different perspective of what our ancestors had to go through in order to survive. From that point on they no longer had a problem with man’s dominance over all things living. They had no intention of slaughtering a hen of their own anytime soon, but if push came to shove they knew how to do it and would do so in the future if needed.
The next day our trip out to find a new fridge was a hoot. I let each of the girls take turns driving Suzie. It was a skill that I thought might be of importance to us in the future. So, I decided to get each of them as much time behind the wheel as possible.
I kind of enjoyed being chauffeured around as it brought back a few good memories of Renee driving me everywhere. That girl loved to drive and I was a happy passenger being able to actually look around at the world as it went by.
I had to make a booster seat for Janie and she turned out to be a madman behind the wheel. She loved weaving back and forth on the road and making the tires screech whenever she could. So much so that I had to repeatedly ask her to stop because it was making me nauseous. Rachel was the old lady driver and was always very careful with her speed and any turns.
It seems that quite often the first child is the responsible, cautious one while the second seems to have no fear at all. I had noticed that many years before with Rex and myself as well as with many other siblings. Rachel and Janie seemed to fit that mold perfectly.
I had scavenged a flat trailer a few weeks earlier and had attached it to Suzie, if we were successful at finding a fridge we would be able to take it back with us. On that day luck was with us as we rolled through the remains of what was once an upper class neighborhood.
It seemed every flattened home had a pool in the back yard. We happened to luck upon one where the home had been flattened, but the pool house had only been pushed over. It had been largely demolished by the impact on the home on the other side of the pool, but had been spared from a crushing blow of its own.
And what happened to be sitting right in the middle of the pool house rubble; a nice, fat side by side, with an ice maker in the door. It was a scratch-and-dent special, but we weren’t particularly picky at that point. Part of the pool house roof had lapped over the top of it protecting it somewhat from the elements.