Fallback Read Online Free PDF Page A

offer.
    Bethany gave a sad smile as she latched the chicken enclosure. “I know, honey. I’ll miss you, but I understand. Anyway, I went and talked to Rich this morning. He said the West neighborhood is getting crowded, and they want to use the houses on Alder Court for some kind of manufacturing project. They were going to annex the next block, but we don’t have time to build more wall right now. So those people need new housing, and I’ll have roommates here. I won’t be alone.”
    Melissa leaned out the back door. “Hey, Ells, time to go!”
    I gave Bethany a quick hug and turned away, my eyes more than a little misty, and went out front to meet Melissa. She was on the sidewalk with Rebecca, who was vibrating with impatience.
    It took about ten minutes to arrive at the council chamber. It was a grand name for a nondescript event room at the community building in the central neighborhood. What had once hosted birthday parties and baby showers was now the command post where our safety and survival were orchestrated.
    We watched people come and go for a few minutes, speculating on who might be selected, and trying to guess the skills of the few people we didn’t know. Finally, we went inside and were directed to where the council members sat at a long table. We each went up to one who was currently unoccupied, gave our names, job skills, and training, and that was it. The council knew most of us personally, and they would meet that afternoon and evening and decide who was suited to the job and how to divide up the teams. We were to report back in the morning for the results.
    There was too much to do to sit around dwelling on whether we would make the cut. Rebecca had a guard duty shift coming up, and Melissa was due in the kitchen. Many residents’ jobs didn’t allow them a lot of time to cook for themselves, or the time to garden or obtain enough food to be self-sufficient, and the communal kitchen filled that need. In addition, for the work we did for the community, everyone was entitled to eat there if they chose, or to receive portions of things like bread, pastries, or stews to supplement what they were able to provide for themselves. I wondered how we’d manage food preparation and distribution wherever we went.
    If we were chosen.
    I headed off to Liz’s house, still the main collecting point for books, documents, and information of all kinds. My current task was to help sort information the fallback teams might need, and make four sets. Sometimes I could allocate a whole book, if we had others containing the same information. Other times I had to use our dilapidated desktop copier to reproduce the material. As a former Library and Information Sciences major, this was right up my alley.
    As I worked, I was grateful for the scavenging crews, who had obtained several good laptops, a few tablets, and some solar chargers. We normally used the generator at Liz’s to power the office equipment, but I didn’t know what the situation would be for the fallback locations. We’d include a couple of solar charges and alternate power sources with each information package, as well as some material Liz had saved to flash drives in the early days of the outbreak before internet function was lost.
    With teams about to be chosen, I felt an increasing sense of urgency and worked late into the evening. When I arrived back at the house, everyone was there and every bit as exhausted as I was. We had dinner, then decided to watch a movie, not something we often did. But it had been sunny and was expected to remain so—according to our freakishly accurate weather prognosticators—and the batteries tied to our solar panels were fully charged.
    Melissa hooked up the DVD player while Rebecca sorted our limited movie collection. “What should we watch?” Rebecca asked, gravitating toward cases with things blowing up or bleeding on the covers.
    “Nothing violent or scary,” Bethany said decisively. “Too much of that