Genesis Discovered

Morning came, and while I was having breakfast, I thought of that laundromat and decided to wash my filthy clothes and, especially those sweat stained sheets from my bed. At one of the numerous hot springs spas that I would have to break into. I put everything I wanted to clean in a cloth bag and started back up the street, more littered with trash than I remembered the night before when it hid in the darkness.

As the sun peeked over the mountain to my right there was a lot of activity with sparrows, pigeons, blackbirds and various songbirds busily visiting the hot springs for water and nourishment. There were rabbits and squirrels running about everywhere, so I expected that predators were common: foxes, raptors, and perhaps even mountain lions and bears. But for now, it was a tranquil scene.

I soon arrived at the hotel and hoped to survey it as a potential place to live out the winter. It had a substantial masonry structure that had withstood the fires very well. I looked briefly through the broken windows and inside it looked fairly good considering it was open to the outside.

Just across the street was an active spring with very hot scalding water pouring out of the mountain and into a stream. Birds around its perimeter seemed to know just how far they could go without getting burned. It looked like an ideal place for me to do my laundry.

The old-fashioned laundry next door to the hotel had a laundromat in the front. What caught my eye suddenly was a small neon sign in front announcing, Open. The sign was not on the night before when I'd seen a dim light in the back through the grubby windows. There was electricity! Was there water? I tried the door, it was strangely open. A little bell above the door rang, but no one came out into the room. In front of me was a table for folding clothes. On it was a handwritten sign and a pile of quarters.

"You can use these quarters to do your laundry and take some if you need them. But remember, if you take too many, there will be no quarters for you the next time you want to do your laundry for free." It was signed, "Joe." I tried a promising machine to wash the clothes and dropped some of those quarters in it. When I turned the dial, I was surprised when the machine leapt into action. At the same time, I thought I heard something in the back where the laundry was and decided to investigate. I pulled out my pistol just in case it was a predator that had gotten in the place somehow. And, since the washing machine was working, it could be a human. Possibly, dangerous.

Beyond the counter window were tanks and machines with tables where laundry had probably been washed, dried and folded. There were also racks where clothes had once hung, there was but a remnant of that left near the door in the back where I thought the sound had come from. With my 357 Magnum raised, I carefully tried the door. It was locked. I still suspected something, so I called out loudly, "Is there anyone there!" And knocked with authority.

No answer. So I called out again and knocked again one more time. Surely, there must be someone there if the washing machine had electrical power.

Finally, a quiet, young sounding, female voice came from the other side. "Who are you? What do you want? I have nothing for you to take. Go away."

"I just came into town. I didn't find anyone here. Why are you here? No one else is alive. Why are you…?"

From a door behind the laundry, peeked a double-barreled shotgun with a blonde girl behind it. She saw me bending over the counter and looking through the counter window at her with my gun pointed into the room. I put my gun down on the counter and she put the shotgun on the table in the laundry and came to the door next to me..

She unlocked the door next to me and slowly pulled it open. Inside, in the dim light of the laundry, below me, looking up, was a very pale and thin young woman with pleading blue eyes that had the look of both worry and anticipation. She gasped, ignoring my gun and grabbed me around the middle in a big hug placing her head against my chest.

"At last! Oh my God! Somebody still alive!" She backed away for a moment. "Come in. Please come in." She started crying uncontrollably.

I met her halfway and hugged her again. I couldn't think of anything to say except, "That's okay… That's okay… I'm here and I'm alive." With that said, I was crying, too. We both were in a state of disbelief.

It was then that I realized that the reason I needed to wash my clothes was that I hadn't in a few days and I probably stunk more than I smelled myself. I was afraid to ask. She was in a pair of old bluejeans, T-shirt, and was barefoot. Her crying over, she sprang into action.

"Would you like some chicken soup? Err,.. pigeon soup? It's fresh. I made it yesterday. Where do you come from? I haven't seen anybody here for a long time. Everyone is dead, 'cept me." A tear involuntarily trickled from her right eye.

"I'd love some. In fact, I may have some food in my truck to add to it. Is that okay? Yeah, you're right about that. Everywhere I go, everyone is dead, 'cept me." We both laughed nervously at the realization.

She motioned for me to follow. I followed her through the other door into a small living area. She motioned me to sit in a chair by a small table and walked over to a kitchenette in the corner of the room. I was surprised to see her pull a pan of soup out of the refrigerator, pour it into a bowl and put it in a microwave that worked, heating the soup. Questions too many, popped into my head to ask all at once.

"How do you have electricity?"

"My dad put it in. Our electric bill got too high, so he had some guys help him install solar panels on the roof. There are even a couple of wind turbines that work at night for us. Anyway, my dad was a kind of electrical whiz and that stuff has all been working since he put it in about seven years ago. Yes, when I was nine. I remember him saying that we would never have to pay another cent for electricity. And then, we were so lucky when all the electricity went out and we were some of the only few that had electricity in town. We helped a lot of folks out that way, until my dad got sick." Her voice quavered as she said it. "Like everybody else.

"When the bad days came, our two employees left. They were scared. My grandpa and mother died when I was five, so dad was the only one here to run the laundry and laundromat. Few people stayed in town, but those that did kept coming around to wash their clothes because they couldn't themselves except in the hot springs and many couldn't get access to those. All locked and gated to prevent vandalism."

She served me some soup with some stale crackers and continued. "Well, that didn't stop the vandalism. It got pretty bad, and dad made me stay upstairs. But he managed, mostly with the shotgun to keep those thugs away and offered anyone to be able to wash their clothes here free if they didn't mess with us. After a while, everyone knew they could count on us and didn't mess with us. The bad guys left town and those that were left started to die off slowly. Mostly from starvation." She started crying. I wanted to hug her again, but let her cry, knowing what her loss was. I changed the subject.

"That's great soup. Tastes really fresh. Is it from a can or scratch?"

"It's scratch. We… I mean… I have been out of cans for some time. This is from our…ah… my garden from last year and my pigeons. What few cans of food we… I have left are rusting and no good." She sighed and looked down. Obviously distressed.

I thought I'd try to cheer her up. "Well, you're in luck, young lady. I've got lots of food in my truck if you don't mind wild food that I've been gathering. By the way, what's your name?"

"I'm Lisa, Lisa Adams. And I'm so hungry, I would eat anything at this point. It got really bad until we grew things in our garden on the roof last year. But I'm about out of everything and was really worried what I was going to do." She looked so sad saying it, and tears, once again, welled up in her eyes as she wrung her hands together while saying it."

"Well, Lisa, I'm so glad to meet you. I'm (I told her my name and reached out my hand to shake hers) and could you show me this garden. Maybe I can help you?"

"Okay, let's go upstairs." I finished my soup and followed her up an old-fashioned sturdy stairway in the back the building. On the second floor was a very large apartment with rooms along one side that probably were bedrooms furnished in old, if not antique, furnishings and an old wool carpet that had seen a lot of wear on the floor.

"This was my grandparents' home until they died. My grandmother, Mona, died before I was born, but Grandpa Jacob stayed with us and died the same year my mother did when I was five. He spoke Polish and Yiddish and had a strange, but endearing accent, that rubbed off a bit on my father, his only son.

"Grandpa Jacob joined the Polish Army that was defeated in one day by the Germans. Since he was a healthy young man and told the Germans that he was Jacob Adams, a Christian, rather than his real name, Adamski, he was sent off to work in the factories in Germany during the war. After the war, he got on a ship for the United States and worked in a sweatshop in New York City, saving his money until he spotted a business opportunity in Hot Springs in 1951. He hopped on a train and came out with all the savings he had.

"Grandpa worked for the elderly couple that built this place as a laundry to support the hotel next door. But in 1950, the hotel installed their own laundry and didn't need the old couple's services anymore. When my grandfather came, he helped them convert the front of the laundry into a laundromat and installed the machines. He hired a young lady, a German immigrant, Ingrid, to do alterations. They fell in love and had my father, Joseph, rather late in life." She paused for a moment. A strange look on her face…. "I don't know why I am telling you this…"

"That's okay. I would've asked you anyway. So it's hard for you to leave here. Lots of tradition. And your only safe…"

"That's right. I've been safe here thanks to my father. I don't think anywhere else it safer. He saw this coming. He had us store lots of food, 'for emergencies,' and build the rooftop power station and garden. Not only so that we would save money, but so we could withstand what happened the last three years. I'm so glad it seems to be over. But I'm still afraid to go outside."

"Can we go up on the roof? I'd like to see what he built."

We climbed another set of stairs to the third floor. It was mostly open like a gymnasium, but there were a couple of rooms and evidence that it once had been roomed off from marks on the hardwood flooring. There was a large coop in the front of the room, near large windows that could be opened. The floor was swept clean but an aura of pigeon poop remained in the dusty air.

"Lisa explained. This is where we kept our pigeons during the very bad winters. They gladly stayed here and could fly around the room for exercise. So many would land on our hands in search of food, only to be taken downstairs to become our food. Last spring, we only had three laying pairs. We… I lived mostly on their eggs."

Lisa opened the doors to two rooms. The first room had many shelves with a few cans left and some packaged food along with bags of rice, flour, and bird food. It was obvious that it wouldn't last very long into the next winter. I immediately had plans to remedy that. But didn't tell her.

The second room was filled with wires and switches and batteries in a perfect set up for providing power to the building from sources on the roof. It was very well done and very professional. I only worried about how long the batteries might last without replacement. Several years, I hoped.

We climbed another set of stairs to the roof. There was a coop there that was alive with pigeons. As soon as we came out into the sun, several flew over and landed on Lisa's shoulders and hands, cooing softly to her. "There are wild ones that joined our tame ones when they learned that there was food and shelter here during the winter. I feel so sad when we had to eat them." One landed on my shoulder and begin nibbling on my ear.

In addition to the solar panels and two windmills on each end of the building, there were several big boxes with lettuce, onions, radishes, peas, beans, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, squash, pumpkins, and even, potatoes started in the warm spring sunshine. There was a circular chain of buckets to a large cistern mounted on the building gathering roof runoff that was allowed to overflow to keep it fresh that brought water from the cistern to the roof to water the plants and provide water for the pigeons during dry spells. Very ingenious. I was impressed. Lisa cut some lettuce and pulled some scallions for a salad for us in the afternoon meal that I promised us from what I had in the truck.

So it began. We were a team. When we arrived back downstairs, I suggested that we go outside for a walk to look around.

"I don't think I can do that. My father insisted that I stay inside because he said it was 'bad' outside. He always left me here, locked in when he went out scavenging for food. He said that going outside is what killed everybody. I believed him and stayed in except to go up on the roof briefly to tend to the pigeons or the garden."

"It's been much better the last year and a half. I've been outside the whole time. Things have changed. Animals are flourishing everywhere. You've got to come out and see it. I haven't seen anybody for thousands of miles. And everything is alive and growing this spring. It's amazing to see."

"Okay. I'll go. But only because you're here and will protect me when we go outside. Do I need to take the shotgun?"

I smiled. "No, I always carry my pistol in case something tries to eat me." She giggled and I knew that she would go out with me.

She got us a pitcher of ice cold water from the tap. "Springwater they piped directly to the building. Thanks to those original builders. And, we have hot water from the ground as well. It heats the whole building during the winter and provides the laundry and laundromat with hot water. My dad sure new how save money like his father, but all of that was installed by the original owners, also very frugal with the lowest prices in town."

The water was very refreshing and was obviously full of minerals. In spite of her shut-in lifestyle, that water probably kept her healthy. To be safe, she locked the door once again to the laundromat and we walked out into the street in the early afternoon sunlight.