The World Burns: A Post-Apocalyptic Story by Boyd Craven III

Author:Boyd Craven III [Craven III, Boyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

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Blake butchered the hog when they got it in the barn, and hung large cuts of it from the rafters. It was cooler in the barn than the outside, but Blake wasn’t going to leave it for more than half a day.

“I’ve had a project I was always meaning to do.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“I was going to make my own smoker and then blog pictures of it and make an eBook out of it. I just never had the time.”

“Do you need a hand now?”

“Sure, let’s get that dolly and go into the scrap pile.”

Like a lot of old homesteads, folks never threw anything away, instead saving up broke appliances, jars, cans etc. until they had enough to run it to the scrap yard or the dump. Blake’s grandparent’s had done much of the same, and in his grandpa’s retirement, he decided to fix appliances. In various states of use, there were probably twenty or thirty various appliances stored in the barn. One of them was an old upright freezer with wire racks.

“This is the one,” he said pushing the cart under it and moving it into the open doorway.

“What is that?”

“My smoke chamber. Come on, I’ll show you.”

They cut two circular holes into the freezer. One was down along the bottom and about six inches in diameter and the other was a small one inch diameter hole in the very top back corner. Blake kicked through his old pile of piping and came back with two pieces of black pipe about four feet long each. They had been from the old wood stove that his grandpa had used to heat that part of the barn. The first one fit perfectly, and he left it hanging out a couple feet, the other end into the bottom side of the freezer. Next he split the pipe almost a third shorter and squeezed them into a somewhat circular shape. He pushed it in to test it for size then pulled it out and made it about eight inches long with a hacksaw. He fit it in again and smiled.

“That’s the hardest part.”

“So where’s the rest of it?”

“Come on, let’s find something.”

They went back into the pile and found a cook stove that was mostly rusty. They sat it down. Blake was thinking hard when a light bulb went off and Sandra started laughing.

“I know, we can set the freezer on the old work bench and use an elbow to make the connection to the stove.”

“That’ll work. We’ll have to play with the flue adjustments. We don’t want to cook the food so much as smoke it.”

“It’s better than smoking it over an open fire.”

“True,” he smiled.

It took them another hour to get things set up the way that she’d envisioned and he’d need a ladder to get to the upper rack of the new ‘smoker’ but it should work in theory. The last thing he did, that he almost kicked himself for forgetting about was to put some wire screen mesh over the top hole and then held it in place by wrapping the pipe with bailing wire.

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