The Orchard

It had all ended. No one had seen it coming, well not anyone that wasn’t important and we hadn’t lived anywhere important enough for people to know, to be warned. The sun had burned everything. The people who had been left, it wasn’t pretty.

Many people who had survived the burn had starved locked in their homes waiting for the technology to come back. It had knocked out everything. The batteries in our cars, the motherboards of our computers. It had fried our TV’s and shut down the electricity worldwide. Anything that needed it to run had been taken away, which was, sadly everything.

It had only been a few days when the first other casualties were reported. People who needed electricity to sustain their lives. Those who were dependant on life support systems, those who needed surgeries.

At first, they had told us it would only be a few days, to buckle down and make do with what we had. It was more than a few days though. Way longer than just a few simple days. My family had been lucky. Being out on our farm. We had been trading things for the Amish for a long time. Or, “no-techs” as they had come to be known.

We knew how to grow our own food. How to make sure we knew how to til and water our fields without the help of machines. How to trade services for something most people didn’t even recognize anymore, paper money. It had saved our family.

Saved me and my 3 younger sisters. Saved our mom and Dad and Zeke, the only brother we had. We had even figured out how to build a horse and wagon right away while the rest of the world was crashing down around us. While people were locked up out of fear of the raiders attempting to hold onto the last bit of food they had managed to attain before the crash.

Things started going bad. People started just up and stealing things all the time. Even we ran out of money. At first, it didn’t seem so horrible with the no-techs helping us. They had taught us to plant things that helped a lot. However, eventually, there were things we couldn’t easily get because refrigeration went too, butter, sugar, coffee. Things you couldn’t find close to home got harder to come by unless you had something important to trade. A nice painting, a piece of jewelry.

Mom and dad trading everything we had of value. Everything but Mom’s heart-shaped locket she had inherited from her grandmother saying that one day it would save us. That as long as we held it one day it might save our family.

Our news of the outside world was slow in reaching us. Everything was much slower. The first time we heard that we were starting to die out was 3 years after the crash. That women weren’t having babies and that when a female baby was born she was usually deformed. So deformed most of the time they died within hours. It took a long time for our small community to realize how bad the problem would get.

The no techs helped us figure out a way to make a living without all the technology the world had lost. They had taught my family how to plant and take care of different types of trees. Our most successful crop is apples.

We started our own Orchard. It took a few years but eventually, we had a great crop going. A business that kept our family afloat while the cities were razed to the ground. While the world around our tiny piece of civilization continued to thrive.

The raiders stayed close to the cities driving everyone else out. We thought we were far enough away to be safe. We were wrong.