Eupocalypse Box Set by Peri Dwyer Worrell

Author:Peri Dwyer Worrell [Worrell, Peri Dwyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-18T07:00:00+00:00

It’s an Ill Wind

Jeremy felt more at home than he had in a long time. Working all day in the salty Gulf breezes, falling asleep at night to the sound of the waves on the seashore close by, talking with neighbors with a musical Texas twang in their voices: it all felt right.

Not that the folks in Indiana and Arkansas weren’t nice and all; they were. But he was a Texas Gulf Coast boy born and bred, even if his mom, rest her soul, had been a Kiwi. Even if she’d never lost that God-awful Yankee accent, Joanne had been in Bolivar long enough that she was an honorary Texan, but more important, she was family.

Jeremy wondered about his father and sister, but they’d never been real close. His sister Evie spoke Spanish, an essential skill now that the border was wide open and people flowed across the Rio Grande as they pleased. His dad never spoke anything but English, and Jeremy hoped he was making out alright. He would get down there to check on them—probably in the spring.

But in the meantime, Jeremy had an idea germinating in the back of his head. Before, he’d had his own landscaping business. His daddy had owned a ranch, until ranching got too hard for a small outfit to compete in. Jeremy knew how to run an honest business, supplying people with things they wanted.

And he thought of all the unsown fields across the US’s bread basket this past summer—farmers who’d planted hybrid seed or GMO Terminator crops which wouldn’t breed true and had no good seed the past spring. He thought of all the uneasy whispers or nervous laughter he’d heard as people dipped way into the bottom of their corn cribs or flour bins.

The price of alcohol fuel for his ATV had gone up. Last year this time, unsold crops were sitting on loading docks, in trucks or in silos, or rotting in the fields for lack of distribution. The entire rural US had become a diffusely distributed factory: ten million kitchens canning and pickling and smoking and salting; a thousand gristmills revived from their limbo as tourist curiosities and reopened for business; ten thousand hastily built smaller mills operating on mule or horse or human power, the raw produce available for the price of a share of the finished product.

That included the finished product of the still, a craft handed down through the generations since the first Irish immigrants had taught their sons the art of making uisce. But it had gone from twenty gallons of ethanol for an ounce of silver to one, and now two silver coins got you just one gallon. This winter would predictably deplete the stored grain from last year. If the few farms still growing heirloom grain and vegetables had a good year, there might be a slim supply of seed available next spring. From what Jeremy had heard, it would take three or four good years, or six to ten bad ones, to get the seed stock up from the level of scarcity.

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