Ash: Rise of the Republic by Campbell Paul Young Page B

there with his
volunteers. They had made some impressive progress. Two more
welders and a surprising quantity of scrap metal had been scrounged
up and the team already had a fence stretching from the wall to the
road on either side. They were just starting on the gate when we
showed up. An hour later, we had a solid steel gate wide enough for
a car to pass through. We arranged a temporary guard schedule and
left them to head back to our corner of the neighborhood.
    Robert Werner was asleep on the couch when I
got back. Gesturing me into the kitchen, Deb told me how he had
lashed out at Mrs. Borger when she had tried to clean his head
wound. He was now sedated him with a horse tranquilizer.
    “There was nothing she could do for his ear,
but she sewed his scalp back on and shot him full of antibiotics.”
Deb told me, quietly.
    “What are we going to do with him?” I
asked.
    “He’s my responsibility” said Tracy. I
looked up to see her standing in the doorway, tears on her face. “I
shot him…”
    I gave Deb a loaded look and headed back
outside, leaving her to comfort the poor girl. The ash was still
falling and I wanted to get the grave dug before it got any deeper
on the ground.
    ****
    The next morning we met with the neighbors
again. I described our incident with Werner and everyone agreed
that the killing was in self-defense. No one knew the man well
enough to be his enemy, but at the same time no one was
particularly surprised by what he had done.
    Everyone had brought a detailed inventory
with them. We decided that each household should keep three days of
supplies at all times, and that the surplus should be stored at the
meeting house. We elected a woman from the north side of the
neighborhood, Maddie Cartwright, to manage the supply inventory and
ration the food. We organized a team to build a small smokehouse to
attempt to preserve some of the frozen meat people had stored away,
in case the power failed.
    The ash had been falling for nearly three
days at that point. It had drifted deep enough in some places to
completely cover the windows of our houses, and the road was
completely impassable to cars. We arranged a roof sweeping team to
prevent collapses – I don’t know how many thousands of people would
still be alive if more of the country had thought about that in
those early days.
    We had tried clearing the road with my small
tractor the night before but the loader bucket was the wrong shape
for that kind of work. It would soon be extremely difficult to move
around the neighborhood, so Scott, the retired mechanic, suggested
we try to requisition the old bulldozer that had been sitting idle
in a pole barn across the highway for the last several years.
    The meeting went on for another hour or so.
Water was going to be the next big issue to tackle. The power was
still on so the county pump stations were still working, but that
wouldn’t last forever, so we made plans to start digging a well. An
older woman who always kept a large vegetable garden in the summer
suggested a greenhouse using window panes from some of the houses.
One of our neighbors, Andy, was a lineman for the local electric
co-op. He offered to begin work on a wind generator using the bank
of batteries I had bought the first night. By the time we quit for
the day, everyone had something to work on.
    We made a good start that second meeting. I
remember being surprised at how resourceful everyone was, and how
eager to cooperate. I became the leader of our small community
without even realizing it. The initiative I took in organizing the
first meeting left everyone looking to me when important decisions
or disputes came up. It was not a role I felt comfortable with, but
no one challenged me. They were scared, desperate for direction.
They needed to be distracted from the fact that their world was
crumbling around them. I kept them busy and gave them hope.
    Over the next week, the various projects
began to take shape. Our supply team went to