Ch. 7 Athena's Gift

Chapter 7

“He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere” Ali ibn-Abi-Talib

Much to Charlie’s dismay, his electrified perimeter was fried. The switch in the basement was even frozen in the on position. Fortunately, the attached solar cells were still working. Jeff and Charlie stayed in the basement, working on it.

The rest of us were upstairs with my mom, as she fired up the grill. The hog farm next door (a mile away) was still functional so pork was easy to get. Unbelievably, my mom had even started cooking rabbit and venison! I remember the days when chow mein was exotic.

Jill, Suzanne and I went out into the garden to collect some onions and late Morels along the creek that ran through our property.

About an hour later we all sat down to eat pork roast and vegetables. My mom is a great cook.

We spent most of the meal speculating about our visit from the Angels. None of us had the warm loved feeling one would expect from meeting an Angel. Jeff wasn’t sure why they hadn’t just blown in the front window and come in. His protections were designed for Demons, not Angels.

I felt like we had all just dodged a smiting.

It was decided that Jill would speak to the Elders at the Retreat about building a trade outpost at Ten Mile grove in conjunction with my mom and Charlie. The Grove had been abandoned for at least six months, maybe even a year. If the owner showed up again, surely a deal could be worked out. The irony of the Native Americans invading and taking over white man’s land, albeit abandoned, was not lost on us.

Jill and Suzanne were anxious to return to the Retreat, but we decided that we should all probably spend the night here. We wanted to let the Angels move out of the area. The promise of a hot shower and soak in the tub was very convincing.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon planting the tomato and rosemary seedlings that Suzanne had brought to trade. My mom agreed to send back onions, potatoes, carrots and said they could take an onion bag of Morels if they wanted.

Mom and Charlie had not one but two windmills in back of the barn, not visible from the road. They weren’t extravagant with their energy usage, but they weren’t missing out on anything either. At night we resorted to candles though, not wanting to advertise to travelers on the road that we had electricity.

When we got ready to take Jill and Suzanne back, mom packed up a small cardboard box with the fattest earthworms I’ve ever seen. It seems Mom had started a worm farm, and made a pretty good barter living off of it. They were apparently the magic trick to getting a home garden to produce long term.
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The drive back to the Retreat was again, surprisingly uneventful. We had a tense moment when we stopped to get fuel at the Paxton checkpoint. There were several groups of people just hanging around the station, I’m sure at least one of them was looking for an easy mark. But today, that wasn’t us.

We dropped Jill and Suzanne off to a very relieved community. The Angels had visited them as well. The stories indicated that Native American communities were not on the Angels original agenda. The Angels had appeared perplexed by the whole thing.

I asked if these were the same scary Angels that had visited us, and was assured that yes they were. It was hard to believe. Apparently, the Illiniwek had invited them to the circle, because they were having a dance! The Angels observed for a moment, but walked out of the community when one of the elder ladies attempted to purify them with some sage smoke. An interesting note- they didn’t do their jumping take off thing until they had stepped outside the community limits. Their skin also didn’t glow as brightly while they were at the circle. Hmmm.

What that told me was that Demons, Demon Touched and Angels could get into and may already be in Native American communities. They just weren’t as strong. The biggest evil and destruction that these communities needed to worry about wasn’t supernatural, it was entirely human. It was a sobering thought. As I reviewed all of the desperate, angry and hate filled people I had come across in the last few years, I realized how precarious the peaceful balance was here.

Jill and Suzanne assured me that vigilance was part of their jobs here. In fact they had a little training course they did for long term residents, to help recognize destructive elements to a society such as theirs. Any groups that had resources had to walk a fine line between human decency and security.

With a promise to return in two days, Jeff and I turned the Vega around heading for my mom’s.

I took Jeff to the checkpoint every day, but the Interstate was still closed. This meant that my mom and Charlie got a lot of extra work done around the house. Charlie and Jeff seemed to hit it off pretty well, and I think Charlie’s laid-back manner took the edge off of Jeff’s personality.
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I actually have three younger brothers. But when things started getting bad travel wise, my mom sent them to my granddad’s house about two hours to the south. She gets letters from them every few months, depending on how the mail is running. I have an Aunt living there too. They seem to be doing all right and promise to come back to visit when the road situation settles down.

We were a very fortunate family! Most of the people I knew had either lost someone outright to death or illness, or were suffering a slow family breakdown because of forced separation or abandonment. We lost a car. That’s pretty much it. Baby Brother Mike slid off the road last winter, totaled the car, and got picked up by Granddad’s neighbors. Not even a scratch!

As the summer progressed, traffic on the country roads got thinner and thinner. The one clear AM radio station that we could pick up went off the air. We had to rely on Charlie’s network of Ham radio friends for news. They were actually worldwide, but the stories from the East were laced with religious psuedo-logic and difficult to believe. Some reminded me strongly of the old ‘AIDS is a curse God punished the gays with’ rhetoric. Clearly those types of reports were coming from people who were recklessly afraid.

One day, we arrived at the checkpoint to find it was abandoned. Not a soldier in sight. We fueled up the Vega and the spare gas cans. One of the regular groups at the checkpoint had taken over operations of the station and hired a few of the locals to act as guards. We didn’t have much faith that this relative safety would last.

We ferried as much gas as we could from the station to the Grove and my parents. Eventually, enough people realized that the station was unguarded and it was overrun with bickering desperation.

Jeff and I decided that if we were ever going to get to Chicago we had to go now. We could do it on one tank if we didn’t run in to too much trouble. We also asked Jill and Suzanne if they wanted a lift, since they may not get another opportunity to head back toward Michigan. Though the Grove had become their pet project, they accepted readily. We all said good-bye to our friends and the transplanted kittens at the Grove. One of the kids had taken it upon herself to name them Pinky, Dinky, Finky and Stinky.

The Grove Illiniwek were generous with supplies, and Charlie had us armed to the teeth. We also had two simple self-powered homemade ham radios that would turn out to be gold. Ham radio operators were at a premium these days. The satellites that used to provide so much for society proved too difficult to maintain and some were even shot down to avoid catastrophic collisions. And cell towers…it became a double dog dare game for stupid kids to take them down. Then other stupid people would raid them for scrap materials.

Of course, maybe it was really smart Demons…