Spare Parts
Part Fourteen
Over the previous days in the bunker Sarah was always awake first, mucking about and trying her best with the ready to eat meals or attempting something on the stove for breakfast out of ancient freeze-dried ingredients. Garrett made sure to beat her to it that morning. He never quite forgot his Aunt’s penchant for omelets. As Garrett told Sarah to lay out the table and take a seat, he got busy chopping and stirring. “Do you need anything” and “Can I help” came calling a few times but each time Garrett only brought up that it was Sarah’s turn to take it easy. It wasn’t so much a trick or a lie as it was giving her ample time to accept that the work of catching chickens, transplanting vegetables to a field just outside the bunker entrance was all work better done by two. He would have to tell her about the final and ugliest days of her people, even if she never had to take a stroll directly across the path of the center of the village.
Garrett only just managed to set the plates down before Sarah was looking at him with her brows furrowed. She took a bite and smiled. “This is great. First time anyone ever cooked for me since momma died. Now spill it.”
Previous lessons learned about young women with intense eyes. Lessons learned on the road with Melissa. Bullshitting was worthless, it wasn’t sparing them or lessening a blow, it was just lying and making them feel like you think less of them for it.
“They’re all gone. Everyone. The goats too.”
Sarah kept on eating for a few more bites. “A few winters ago, the crops got real bad. I figured on the goats being gone.” Garrett shrugged and considered following things up by mentioning what else he found until Sarah continued. “When the goats didn’t do it, they started in on pail men, I thought I was a goner but the Elders decided a child would do the trick better. Is that what you found?”
“Six of them. They didn’t go willingly.”
Sarah finished her meal and slid the plate to the side. “Now you really know why I won’t shed a tear for them. We should go up there today, start seeing what can be saved. Maybe burn the rest if we can.”
“I was thinking about that last night actually, between this place venting steam, the caldera up top burping lava from time to time, and a seemingly untouched village full of bleached bones above, that would really drive home the lesson that nothing good can be found here. Plus, if the worst case should occur and this place becomes unstable, you would still have emergency shelter if some of those huts winter well enough.”
Sarah nodded, “Good thinking, better than mine, as always. Still, we should go collect chickens and see what we can save.”
That was life for the next few weeks, well, months really. They managed to catch the chickens and build a coop for them in the remains of the burnt-out suite closest to the bunker door. Compared to the old coop it was massive and with the lighting replaced overhead it would de well enough to keep the chickens eating, breeding, and making eggs. Then came the vegetable garden. Sarah started a compost and fed that back into the ground by the steam and Garrett set up a rabbit proof fence from supplies down below. It would be plenty for Sarah unless or until a bad harvest or harsh winter. Teaching her about jarring and fermenting would help that, and saving seeds besides. Besides that, there was nightly lessons in reading, Sarah took to it naturally enough but she was reluctant to stay long down in the powerplant to learn how to operate the terminal. There was also a consistent and slow sorting, collecting, and cataloguing of everything left of use in the bunker. Every morning Garrett woke and assisted Sarah in making breakfast and from there on everyday was spent in working and learning.
The stockpile was immense. Beside the decades if not centuries of time the original denizens of the bunker lived there. In spite of how many hundreds of them there must have at one time been, the bunker still had perfectly serviceable, if not delicious, ready to eat meals. That didn’t include freeze dried and hermetically sealed and preserved foods. Anything that could brine and pickle. Sarah could live and die a dozen life times and not die of hunger. Much less the eggs, fresh chicken meat when she felt like it, and the replanted vegetable garden planted just outside the bunker door by the creek.
The physical library, once unlocked to her also served as a possible life long love affair of down time distractions and it wasn’t long after Garrett gave her the tools to understand words that the palsied girl would settle in every night with a book and a small pocket dictionary to make sense of anything she didn’t already know.
All of that, and even more as he left her to work on searching and cataloguing the lower levels for supplies as he got to servicing and maintaining the individual vents from the power plant on up, there was always that inside itch. A never-ending itch that built in his mind and expressed itself in his extremities. Nightmares both new and old left him waking up with deep scratches along his arms and legs. The condition only seemed to get worse as everything in the bunker came together.