After: Whiteout (AFTER post-apocalyptic series, Book 4) by Nicholson Scott

Author:Nicholson, Scott [Nicholson, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Haunted Computer Books
Published: 2014-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The secret to good sauerkraut was to squeeze out enough brine to submerge all the leaves.

Franklin Wheeler had made the fermented cabbage a staple of his food supply after learning how simple it was to make and how long it kept. Over the years, he’d hauled in several ten-pound sacks of salt as part of his preparations. Doctors claimed all that pickled food was bad for the blood pressure, but not many of them were exactly around at the moment to bitch at him.

Wouldn’t be surprised if some German is mashing up a batch right now in a Bavarian cave. Unless the Zapheads have already taken Europe.

He sealed up a couple of Mason jars and tucked them away on a shelf in the root cellar. He wasn’t sure how many years the sauerkraut would keep, but so far, the longer he kept the food in the cellar, the better it tasted. He couldn’t say the same for the pickled beets, since he had no vinegar. They’d turned into a bitter red wine that might have offered some medicinal benefit but was just as likely to poison him. If he wanted to get drunk, he’d piece together a still and turn out some clear moonshine that would burn a blue flame both inside and out.

But times like these called for a clear head. Not that he’d ever been accused of having such. No, he was the wacko libertarian, the armchair terrorist, the Dr. Doom of the survivalist crowd. He was fringe long before Y2K, and about the only positive to come out of being an early adopter was he’d quickly figured out that the militia movements and the hardcore Constitutionalists were just another power structure. No, a man was better off going his own way, not defining himself by the value systems—or a lack of values—contrived by others.

A side benefit of solitude was that he slipped off the government’s radar. Posting Internet manifestos was a fool’s errand, anyway. Why, if you taught everyone in the world to be self-reliant and survive whatever catastrophe was going to deliver the hammer blow, then you’d been in exactly the same situation when it was all over. A world with way too many people, most of them without enough sense to piss a hole in snow.

Still, the solar storms had done more than just clean out the gene pool. They spawned an entirely new life form. Zapheads were human in shape and size and color, but their operating systems had been wiped clean and rebooted. Even the government couldn’t have concocted such an obscene clusterfuck. So this one was on God or the universe, whichever way you wanted to assign the blame.

Franklin stacked some apples and pears in a wooden bin next to the potatoes. The spring that oozed ice-cold water up from the rocks ensured that the root cellar maintained its refrigeration year round, and the cellar was dug deep enough into the bank that even the deepest freeze wouldn’t damage the crops.

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