by an immediate left had him picking up Cannon Drive at its western end. He passed by the busy City Hall which was on his right, before continuing on towards the east and the safety of home.
Once on the road, after checking the mirrors several times Daniel calmed down a little. All of the anger he was misdirecting at Corinne dissipated; it was not her fault that men like that existed. ‘I’m just glad she still works for the Council,’ he thought kindly of his wife. ‘Without her stipends…’ Although it was his mind that had started the panic-inducing thought, it was his body that punctuated it with a shiver. Corrine was paid well, far better than he was anyway.
Daniel had become very adept at storing away all of the food that he bought or traded for at the Warehouse. He had amassed quite the larder in the basement by buying items in bulk and then finding clever ways to prolong its shelf life. With his meager pay barely covering the water bill now, this practice of long-term storage had become the main way that he helped out the household. All of the bigger fixes that he put into the house were just expected of him and he usually never got much credit for those.
Fear over his family’s future filled the conscious mind to brimming, while the subconscious managed the task of driving him home. His thoughts started to meander down all of the usual dark pathways, eventually settling on the household checklist which was always kept close to the surface. Chores like scavenging and cleaning plastic bottles to store big bags of beans or corn in had just become way of life, so had dropping a small perforated sachet of rice and salt into the bottles first to absorb any residual moisture left in the food.
Stockpiling items like tinder, matches and candles was done out of necessity. While a makeshift light could be made out of nearly any shallow container, just by adding a tightly rolled strip of cotton to the fuel it contained; lanterns were much more portable and distinctly brighter. The hundreds of candles that he had once owned, all collected from the surrounding houses when he was younger, were close to being depleted, and he had even been forced twice now to break-up and melt down all of the color-streaked, volcano-like glass bottles that were left behind. Daniel molded new candles by using a cardboard tube as the form and a spool of cotton twine as the wick. As a result he had just recently started buying the often-inferior beeswax and tallow candles. They never burned as clean or as long, and they usually gave off an odor that was anything but fragrant too.
The generator sitting in the Moore’s garage was never used anymore; they simply could not afford the gas to run it. Several red plastic 5-gallon jerry cans sat next to it in the garage, but only one of them was full of stabilized gasoline, and it was one of their most prized and cherished possessions. The house did have solar panels on the south side of the roof. Unfortunately, the ash falling from a series of new volcanoes in Polynesia had rendered them useless a decade before.
The impact of the volcanoes was felt in every corner of the globe and its grit fouled machinery of all forms. Solar panels were rendered useless as the number of particulates increased, dimming the sun and damaging the panels themselves, most of which occurred when grit-filled winter snows compressed on the panels before slowly sliding downward, carving away at the thin glass shroud over the photovoltaic cells, like repeated miniature glaciers. Food production took a sharp decline and with travel limited some localized starvations started.
With the world already ailing from the ash shroud terrorists attacked three nuclear generating stations in three different states; Watts Bar on the Tennessee River, South Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, and Enrico Fermi II on the Detroit River. Large swaths of the country were plunged in to darkness and the electricity that everyone depended on was never to return in most places. Chaos reigned as uncontrolled evacuations took place causing further conflict within the neighboring areas. When the Department of Continuance arrived in the decimated city of Warren after a year of confusion and pain a strained sense of normalcy returned with them.
What this meant to the Moore’s today without refrigeration was that they only stored canned, jarred, and dried goods.