Chapter 36 - Luna
Holy crap, we made it fit. It was like some insanely wild game of grocery Tetris, and we might not be able to see out of the windows, but we did it.
Our cars are loaded so we move over to help Shelly Anne load her car up but we all freeze in fear as headlights wash over us and a large truck comes into the parking lot.
Is this it? Is this the start of the looting Gigi said would happen? My heart races as I get ready to drag Gigi away to the cars but Shelly Anne waves at whoever is driving the truck and goes back to loading her car.
“It’s fine. That’s my husband. He’ll help me with the rest so you all should get going.”
Gigi yanks the woman into a brief hug and then pulls me away to our cars calling out, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, Shelly Anne. Read the damn sex scenes!”
She guides me over to the Escalade and takes my hands with a squeeze.
“Alright, Luna, I need to make a stop but I want you to go straight back to the house. Don’t worry about unloading everything.
Just get all the meat and other perishables into the house and get started making up the freeze-dryer trays.
I know you’re tired, Peach, but we don’t know how long we will have power.
We need to get those started so we can have at least some of the meat preserved. ”
“What? No, Gigi! Where are you going? We need to stay together!”
“Do as I say, Luna. This is important. I won’t be that long, probably an hour at the most, and then I’ll be back to help with the food. Go, Luna!”
I want to argue with her, demand that she follows me home, but I’ve never won an argument in my life against Elenor Cowen, so I know it’s pointless. Instead, I grab her in a tight hug.
“Be safe, Gigi, please? Don’t leave me alone to figure this all out.”
She pulls away and cups my face. “Never, sweet girl, but you’re stronger than you think. Now go. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
We jump into our cars and I follow her to the parking lot exit, frowning when she turns right. That way leads out of town and I have no idea where she could be going. I blow out a shaky breath. I have faith that she knows what she’s doing. I just hope she makes it back to the house soon.
The clock on the dash tells me it’s almost midnight and I feel exhaustion start to weigh me down.
The sheer amount of adrenaline coursing through me and the emotional swings that I’ve gone through in the last few hours have taken their toll, but as tired as I feel, Gigi saying we might lose power has me ready to go all night to get as much food into the freeze-dryers as possible.
I cross through the quiet streets of town and have just made it onto the bridge that spans the valley and small river that bisects the town when the night gets suddenly brighter and then flashes completely white.
All the skin on my body tightens and tingles like I’m about to be electrocuted.
I slam on the brakes and throw my arm up in front of my eyes as the flash of white blanks out my vision.
It sounds like rocks are crashing into the sheet metal of the car and the sound of glass cracking has me flinching, ducking, and screaming in fear.
A bunch of the boxes piled behind me slide over the front seats, smacking me in the back of the head and spilling onto the console and dash.
My heart is in overdrive as I throw the car in park and start shoving boxes and cans off of me.
Once everything is cleared away, I unbuckle my seatbelt and step out onto the bridge to try to see what just happened.
My mouth gapes open when I see part of the concrete guardrail completely broken away about five feet ahead of where I stopped.
The SUV is peppered with dents and ugly scratches on the hood and the windshield has a huge starburst crack on the passenger side.
I walk over to the broken guardrail and look over, but whatever that white streak was that shot past must have gone into the river because I can’t see anything.
My hands shake as I take a few deep breaths and turn to get back in the car but I freeze in place as more streaks of white shoot across the sky.
I push my shaking fingers against my mouth to hold in the scream that wants to form as a few of those streaks land on the side of town I just came from.
I know what those streaks are. They’re moon missiles, just like the guy on the radio said.
Cracked off pieces of the moon are falling to Earth.
I don’t know how long I stand there in shock but when sirens ring out into the night, I finally make my feet move to run back to the car and then speed all the way home.
I can’t let myself freak out over pieces of the moon falling on our heads.
There’s nothing I can do to control where they land so I force myself to push the fear to the back of my mind and keep focused on what needs to be done.
When I back into the driveway and wait for the garage door to open, I see quite a few of my neighbors standing out on their lawns.
I ignore them all, even when Mr. Tanner waves his arms at me and starts walking my way from across the street.
I back into the garage, ready to hit the remote to close it but before I can, he steps right under it.
I groan in frustration but push open the car door and hop down to greet him with a strained smile.
“Hi, Mr. Tanner. You guys doing okay?”
He looks over the windshield at the damage and his gaze narrows as he looks to see what is inside the car.
“Luna, I’m glad to see you’re safe. That’s quite the load you’ve got there for so late at night. Looks like you took some damage to your parents’ car, though. Where have you been?”
I dig my nails into my palms. It’s all great to have neighbors that look out for you, until they get into your business. I’m not sure why I lie to him. Something about the way he keeps trying to see into the car bugs me a little.
“Oh, yeah. One of those moon missiles came down when I was on the bridge and the car got hit by some broken cement. I was just coming back from my grandmother’s place.
She’s going to be staying with us for a while.
It just felt safer for her to be here with us.
” I wave to the SUV. “We packed up most of her stuff to move here. She should be along shortly in my Jeep.”
He cocks his head at me like he can see through my explanation.
“What about all those guys you’ve got living here now?
Where are they?” He asks it with a hint of disapproval that has me digging my nails in even more.
I kind of appreciate him checking in with me, but it’s not like him or his wife were close to my parents before they passed away.
If memory serves, my dad didn’t actually like him all that much.
My tone comes out curt when I answer him.
“Tomorrow. They’ll be back tomorrow. Anyway, I need to start unloading all this stuff so Gigi will be comfortable and it’s getting late. Take care, Mr. Tanner, and say hi to your wife from me, please.”
He nods slowly, does a slow scan of the open garage and then steps back with a nod.
“You let us know if you need anything. Goodnight, dear.”
The minute he steps outside I reach in and tap the remote to shut the door and then get to work unloading.
When we packed the back of the SUV, we put all the fresh perishable food at the end so we could get to it first. My arms feel like dead weights by the time I get it all into the house and the floor of the kitchen is completely covered.
There’s still most of what we took from the store in the car, but I shut the hatch and leave it for tomorrow.
Penny’s nosing around all the bags of meat so I shoo her outside the back door and then go to the lowest level of the house where my mom’s hobby room is.
My dad built floor-to-ceiling shelving on one side for all the supplies for her many ventures, along with a work counter on another wall.
The two extra large freeze-dryers are against another wall with cabinets filling the rest of the space.
I find the manual for them and toss it on top of the seven long trays from each freezer to take upstairs to the dining room.
I take a few minutes to read over the cook times and sigh when I see most of the meat is listed at around twenty hours to dry completely.
The good news is the manual says I can do around forty pounds of meat in every batch so I can double that with the two freezers.
It takes time to unpack and sort all the different meats into groups.
My eyes keep going to the clock on the stove, wondering when Gigi will get here.
I’m so freaking worried about her getting stuck somewhere or hurt because of the moon missiles coming down.
There’s nothing I can do about that, or Gage’s flight, or Jules and Reid being near the water, or Torrin not being here.
I can’t control anything except what’s right in front of me, so that’s what I keep my focus on.
I start with the ground beef. I fry all of it up in multiple batches in multiple pans.
I drain all the grease off, rinse each batch with water to remove as much of the grease as possible and then spread it out on the dryer trays and season it all with different spices to use in different dishes.
Taco seasoning, Italian, chili, and just plain.
Once all the hamburger is cooked and laid out, I chop up onions and peppers and fry a bunch of those before adding them to the hamburger trays and mixing them in.
It takes forever to carry all the trays down to the basement and get them loaded in the freeze-dryers.
I set the times for twenty hours and slowly plod back up the stairs, more than ready to drop dead in my bed.
The sheer amount of meat still to be done, as well as the cooking pans that need to be washed, has me rubbing at my tired eyes but it’s Gigi stepping into the house that brings tears to them.
She strides over to me and wraps her arms around me in a desperately needed hug.
Some of my exhaustion flows away now that she’s here.
She lets go and turns to look at the piles of meat trays with wide eyes.
“Oh my! How far did you get, darling?”
I blow out a breath as I look around the messy kitchen. “I got all the ground beef processed and into the freeze-dryers but it’s got a twenty-hour timer before they’ll be ready. I’m not sure what else to do right now.”
She pats my back with a smile. “Good girl! Alright, we can make jerky in the oven and do some pressure canning to get some more of this put up. Is the canner up here or in the basement storage room?”
I chew on my bottom lip in thought and then say, “Basement.”
We head back to the basement with a quick stop to give Penny a belly scratch. She’s flopped on her back on the couch with all four of her paws in the air and her tongue hanging out to one side while snoring away.
“Show me the freeze-dryers, Peach. I saw them when she first bought them to start that business but not since.”
I take her into the hobby room and she peers through the glass viewing area with a hum. “That’s a lot of ground beef. How do we pack it once it’s done?”
I open the cabinets beside the dryers and wave her over to explain everything. Mom had paid me to be her assistant that summer, so I know how most of this stuff works.
“These are mylar pouches. You put the meat in them, add oxygen absorbers, suck out any extra air, and seal the bags up with this tool. After that, the food is good for twenty-five years as long as it’s stored right.”
Gigi kneels down on the carpet and drags boxes from the bottom shelves. “What’s in these? More packing supplies?”
I have no idea so I get on my knees with her and start opening the boxes. Inside are sealed mylar bags. I pull one out and can’t stop the soft sob that overcomes me. The label on the bag has mom’s handwriting and it’s like she’s reached out and gifted these to me from the grave.
Ten Luna Burgers
I drop the bag and rifle through the other ten in the box. They all say the same thing. I lean back on my heels and hold one of the bags to my chest like I’m giving my mom a hug.
“These are her homemade hamburgers, Gigi. They were my favorite food that she’d make for me. I can’t believe they’ve been down here all this time.”
There are a hundred freeze-dried burger patties in this box alone. I’ve tried so many times to recreate the recipe but it just never came out the way she would make them. This is such a gift to me.
Gigi starts pulling out more of the boxes and sorting through them excitedly.
“Five pounds of egg crystals, ten in this box. That’s fifty pounds of eggs! Look, this box has Mexican rice and beans. This one has chicken fajita mix and bags with tortillas.”
We go through all of the boxes and find chili, chicken chunks, shredded BBQ pork, various vegetables, and different fruits.
There are even some bags with freeze-dried desserts.
This is all the food she made to sell in smaller serving bags on her website for hikers.
She must have packed it all away when she moved on to the next project.
Candle making, I think it was. God, I miss my mom.
Even gone, she’s still taking care of me.
We leave everything there in the cabinets and go to the storage room to get the pressure canner and the two flats of jars stored with it and carry them upstairs to add to the ones we got at the store.
“We will get more jars tomorrow when we go out to shop. For now, help me process some more of this meat.”
I glance at the clock and see it’s 2 AM now and sigh. Before I do anything else, I need a big pot of coffee. It’s going to be a long night.