Chapter 2-47: Providing for Family (1/2)

The conveyor she’d built rumbled to life with speed, and corn seed began to spew into the back of the farm’s main truck, with two others borrowed from neighbors waiting to take up the rest of the load.

The owner of the granary wasn’t too pleased to see them pumping in seed to their trucks at the same time as he was filling his silos for the farmers in the area to buy, but he couldn’t do anything about it. They were using their own equipment and trucks on the service road, just keeping pace with the train as it dumped its load for him.

It took about an hour to fill all three trucks, and Sama broke down her conveyor quickly, hopped on the last truck being driven by Josiah, and they trundled on home, having saved over three dollars a bushel in seed costs after everything was calculated.

------

The corn was waist-high by the Fourth, even though the weather was as cool and dreary as ever, and the rain was typical on and off. The stalks still grew like gangbusters, and with the blessing from the Church of Flora they’d managed to gain with the money they saved, there were no problems with bugs across the fields.

Sama had them plant half the fields as sweet corn, and when it came near harvest time, spread word around that the best sweet corn crop in two decades had come in, and they were selling it for fifty cents a cob, come pick it!

The first few people were skeptical, until they ripped open the cobs and saw the bulging yellow kernels, like something out of an old cartoon. Mom was boiling it in a cooker there for people to eat and try it out, and pretty soon word was spreading, and people wanting that incredible corn they’d seen photos of on the internet were pounding on the door wanting to buy as much as they had.

They had five hundred acres of sweet corn to harvest, but their labor force basically took care of most of it themselves. The people eating it hadn’t tasted corn like that outside a greenhouse or Floran field, and were happy to pay the inflated prices for The Sunny Corn of the Piotrowski family.

Even the Florans and Aruans were amazed at the harvest, and weren’t shy about buying up lots of it for their own use. What couldn’t be cooked now could be canned or frozen, after all.

All in all, it was the best year farming they’d ever had, cleared their debts out completely, and allowed them to invest in some money for the future.

None of them talked about the Pattern in the back of the property, now staked out with more plants on it, catching more sunlight for next year’s harvest.

They were gonna be the best batch of beans the county had ever seen...

-------

More years pass...

“Sama! Sama! Look! Look! It’s a Walker!”

Sama was tossing manure into the old pickup. She’d started boarding and training horses on the side for extra money, and even established equestrians marveled at her skill with them.

Good manure, properly Energized, also made a pure fertilizer additive that worked above and beyond Catching Sunlight. When you can talk to the horses and cows, they generally didn’t mind dumping most of their loads in one location, keeping the place cleaner for themselves.

They were a lot easier to take care of, too. She might only have a few free points of ki, but Whiskers of the Wild was a fine thing to Invest them into.

Jill was running towards her, pointing at the figure lurching towards the back fence from the treeline there, moving awkwardly and stiffly... and definitely coming after her. Her baby sister, like all of them, had grown up on a steady diet of undead-killing news, movies, games, and videos, and recognizing a Walker wasn’t hard at all.

By their clothes, it looked like some guy had gone out hunting and got himself killed somehow, and naturally risen up at midnight. Sama touched the tags at her throat that she wore, that everyone wore, so they could be identified if they were killed and ended up Animated.

“William! Grab the axe!” Sama shouted, pointing at her younger brother, then the woodpile with said item stuck into the splitting stump. Knowing better than to challenge his older sister when she talked like that, the eight-year-old sprinted for it quickly.

“Jill! Go into the barn and grab the lasso by the door.” Already breathing hard, Jill didn’t stop as she swept by, and Sama narrowed her eyes and went down to meet the poor bastard, pitchfork in hand.

He was definitely in hunting garb, and given the season, likely poaching out of season, not all that uncommon in someplace as wild as this. His clothing was ragged and torn, and by the way he was lurching, he’d broken his leg and probably his hip somehow.

Zombies only had minimal intelligence, so it kind of fell over the back fence of the yard, clambered back to its feet, one leg bending impossibly as it did so, and continued towards her as the closest prey.

Dead three or four days, she judged, and given the color, it had taken him a while to die, probably from internal injuries.

Given she didn’t weigh much, it was probably a good idea to get some velocity behind this. It wasn’t like this lump of dead meat was going to dodge.

She slammed into him with a hundred pounds of sinew and long prongs, driving the steel in deep and leaving it there to control him as he flailed at her and the steady wood, sending it stumbling this way and that as it flailed at her and the tines in its chest.

Jill and William came running up together, the former with the lasso, the latter with the axe. “Drop the axe. William, take the other end of the rope; drag it low between you and hook this dead thing’s feet.”

Zombies weren’t people, and even though this was real life, her siblings got over it fast, boosted by the utter disdain she was showing towards it as she kept it away from them.

With a whoop, the two of them caught its ankles and yanked its feet out from under it. It fell heavily to the ground as Sama let go of the pitchfork, grabbed the rope, and hogtied its legs in seconds.