CRACKED: An Anthology of Eggsellent Chicken Stories by J. Posthumus (read after txt) 📕

Delores couldn’t go around taking in strays. The garden had allowed her to build up a little store of dried vegetables for a rainy day, but the rooftop garden and the chickens were hers. If she started sharing, a dozen beggars would appear before long, and she couldn’t support so many.

The girl’s voice echoed back up the stairwell. “I can’t stay where I came from. The canned food ran out. I don’t dare go to the settlement after I saw them out hunting. I saw how they treat people there.”

“Did they see you? Did they follow you?” Delores knew better than to care what happened to the girl, but she didn’t want trouble with the thugs from the settlement if she could avoid it.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Good. Then go away, like I said.”

“What if I bring you something? You said you needed a power inverter. The red kind with metal fins?”

“Right. We can talk if you’re good at scrounging things. Run along and find me an inverter that will take a ganged set of twenty-four volt solar panels and put out a hundred and ten volts AC.” It never hurt to ask, and Delores could stay in her penthouse bunker for a long time with just her garden and her chickens if she had power.

After a few minutes, the can on the balcony clanked again, and Delores was alone once more. “Kids these days.”

She slept lightly that night on a couch near the alarm cans, tossing and turning as visions of a dozen hungry children plagued her, demanding her time and trampling her garden. The warning alarm remained silent through the night.

As the sun peeked out over the dead city, Delores measured her water supply. “Looks like I’ll need those dehumidifiers back online. It won’t do the garden any good if the barrels run dry.” Khan surveyed his domain nearby, so Delores knelt beside him for a moment until he sprinted away with a squawk. “Don’t you worry, Khan. I’ll always save enough water for you and the girls.”

The plants needed a lot more water than she and the chickens used. It was never a problem during the rainy part of the year with her rain barrel system, but the dry spell made things harder. If the garden died, she would die, too. When she first moved in, she’d scrounged all the equipment she needed out of the building’s basement where the centralized cooling systems sat. The maintenance crew had left manuals behind, which made it easier to figure out how to wire up the dehumidifiers and collect the stale water they put out.

Delores picked up volume T from her Encyclopedia Technologica for something to read over breakfast, picking up where she left off the day before. It was her fifth read-through of the set of books she found in what she now called the library. A tech guru who used to live in the building one floor down had a thing for books. “It ain’t the internet, but it’s given you birds and me a home with a few comforts. Look at this entry, Khan. It’s about an old guy named Tesla. Says he was as much a showman as a scientist, always arguing with Thomas Edison. Something about AC verses DC power, like the broken inverter. If we were near a fancy camper supply store, I’d raid it for DC appliances and ditch the inverter entirely.”

Then again, gallivanting around the countryside as a scavenger was too much work for an old lady like her. She only did what was required to survive and take care of Khan, Jabber, Wocky, and the chicks.

A few pages later, Delores checked the sun in the sky and put the book away. Reading time was over.

“I guess I can’t count on that girl to help me find a new inverter, can I, Khan? No telling how much trouble she would be, always coming around to trade for my food. I’ll be out hunting and scrounging for a bit.” She grabbed her shotgun, and Khan strutted back to his work defending the garden from pests. Delores made her careful way around the barricade and down the stairs. She armed the spring-loaded spike traps as she passed them, just in case someone came to visit while she was gone.

“Careful, Delores. Hospitals don’t treat broken hips no more. The doctors died, and the thugs already took the medicines away.”

Nearby buildings had a small black X sprayed on the concrete in front of each door. She’d visited and reclaimed everything useful from the closest buildings before marking them, so it was time to venture a little farther out this time. She crossed the adjacent grassy park and headed to the nearby row of businesses clumped around a common parking lot. Offices often had better tech than living spaces.

A rat scampered away and into a hole in the wall of a building. “I’m glad you’re down here. I’m not sure if the girls are tough enough to take you on, but you’re too small for me to bother.” She patted her shotgun. “I’ll stop in the park on the way home to see if I can scare up some extra protein.”

At the business complex, Delores waited at each corner for a moment to listen before proceeding. She’d been through two offices with no luck and painted a fresh black X on the ground in front of each. A peek through the window of the next building, an office with computers on the desks, showed promise. Delores rounded the corner and collided into another person, connecting with knees, elbows, and heads all at once. They both collapsed into a heap. Delores lost her grip on the shotgun as she fell, and it clattered to the ground out of reach.

As she scrambled to recover the gun, a familiar voice said, “Is this what you need?”

The girl from the night before sat on the ground holding a voltage inverter in front of her as if she could deflect