from the bottom made filling buckets easier or, like he was doing now, attach a length of garden hose to.
The barrel was only half full; a result of two warm and rainless weeks. This meant that Daniel had to hunch over to get the water flowing out of the hose with enough force. Daniel tried to rinse away the dust from his modest assortment of fruits and vegetables. The ash, which did coat everything, seemed particularly attracted to the fragile plants. At first, it would just congeal, refusing to wash away. Copious amounts of rain water, eventually, made the grayish glop yield from the garden plant’s leafs and sprouts.
Last year, Daniel had put together the garden beds by using rows of 6x6 landscape lumbers. The frames and soil filling them had come from the same place, the burned-down house directly behind the Moore’s place. All that remained standing of the former, colonial-styled home was the indignant chimney. Daniel reclaimed the pieces of lumber from the landscaping that was still above ground and without rot. Peeling away the damp, springtime sod from the rubble-strewn yard, he scraped at the top-soil underneath to fill the new frames. The dark, rich soil would not be missed by anyone still breathing; the chimney had been the lone occupant of the lot for ten years.
At times, the dust would come in very fine, while at others it stung to stand in the wind because it was so thick and coarse. The grainy, brown and gray hues muted primary and secondary colors alike, permanently streaking structures when it rained. Enduring despite the harsh conditions, gloomy buildings stood in stark contrast to the vibrant greens all around.
Daniel stood proud, trying to visualize the growth of his healthy-looking tomato plants. A succession of quick popping sounds, followed by two larger bangs emanated from the immediate south. The gunfire, coming from somewhere along the divider with Detroit, reminded him to get back to working on shuttering the windows.
The windows themselves had already been sealed with liberal amounts of sealant and spray foam, thwarting most of the ash and dust’s advance into the house. To make his new defenses effective, and yet still be removable, Daniel decided to build the shutter framework on the inside of the house. If a fire broke out, he still wanted to be able to get his family out, even if it meant breaking out a window to create an emergency exit.
From the stories that Daniel had heard, marauders showing up at your door used to happen quite frequently in the early days of despair. Settling down into one place was the quickest way to put a target squarely centered on your back. The gruesome tales that spread their way around the scattered community were of prolonged sieges on the homesteads and enclaves that lay outside the small protected areas.
Even if, after days of sinister effort, the raiders found themselves rebuked, they would usually just leave without setting their unclaimed reward ablaze. There was always that one last glimmer of hope for the damned; that they would eventually think of another way to get inside. Destroying buildings, especially those with some of the last remaining provisions inside, had become an almost unthinkable last resort. Despite knowing all of this, Daniel was no more certain about his ability to repel a gang single-handedly than he was about what they would do afterward, if he did manage to stave them off. Securing the windows was not being viewed as a way to keep the world at bay, but more as a way to gain precious distance and invaluable time. When, or if, those types of things were ever needed.
Everything was to be cut and pre-drilling with hand tools, to aid in the sinking of the long screws. The plywood would be marked for cutting after the framing was done on each of the different sized windows. He was, most definitely, not looking forward to cutting it all by hand. This made him thinking of running the generator briefly as he fumbled to close the sliding glass door wall without spilling an arm full of long lumber. Thinking the noise would be an unnecessary risk, Daniel took the more painful, safer path.
Daniel would have been done with the window project sooner, but deciding to cut advantageous viewing ports into each piece of plywood took longer than planned. After his last scroll saw blade broke, he was forced to cut them with a flimsy drywall saw. The port holes