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

Author:Craven III, Boyd
Language: eng
Format: azw3
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 he 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.”

In most old homesteads, folks never threw anything away, instead saving up broken appliances, jars, cans, etc., until they had enough to run it to the scrap yard or the dump. Blake’s grandparents had done much of the same, and when his grandpa retired, he decided to fix appliances. In various states of use, there were probably twenty or thirty different 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 into the bottom side of the freezer, and he left it hanging out a couple feet. He split the next pipe almost a third shorter and squeezed it 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 rusty cook stove. They brought it to the old freezer and set it down. Blake was thinking hard when apparently a light bulb went off in Sandra’s head. She laughed and said, “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. 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, which he kicked himself for almost forgetting about, was put some wire screen mesh over the top hole.

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