The Silo

By Mike Laughrey

They called it the end of the world, but the world kept spinning, to everybody's surprise. In another life, Eric Wergo managed a white collar office and somehow got vastly different personalities to work together to make money. Now he leads a salvage team, looking through the remnants of civilization for food, water, medicine, tools, and survivors. So that part of his life is familiar, even if everything else is different.

His team was supposed to check a handful of farms some distance from town, and it was almost routine until they reach Northeast Section Site Twenty Two, known to many of the locals as the Ghost Farm. It's not that they can't find anything worth taking back, which has happened a few times; rather, they're having difficulty finding anything not worth taking either, including trash, mud, and rotten wood. The Ghost Farm is raising questions the longer the team stays, and Eric is determined to get to the bottom of it; if he can't bring back supplies, he's not leaving without answers.

Part One of the Against The Heavens series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Laughrey
• Release date: Sep 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370209880

Mike Laughrey

Mike Laughrey is an author, bibliophile, home workshop tinkerer, and self-proclaimed mad scientist. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, but prefers fictional reference works - nonfictional information that expands the knowledge of a fictional setting. He reads technical how-to and DIY books, military science and history, some high fantasy, and science fiction - good science fiction, not that scaremongering dystopian stuff that predicts a new and uniquely terrible future every other day. According to legend, anyone who can properly pronounce Mike's last name just from reading it is destined to lead the mole people in their conquest of the surface world.

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The Silo

by Mike Laughrey

Copyright 2016 Mike Laughrey

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March 29, 2025

The farm looked run down, decrepit, abandoned. A turn of the previous century house with peeling paint and broken windows looked out over an overgrown lawn and sagging outbuildings. Beyond that, fields were overgrown with weeds and pastureland was slowly giving way to trees. Only the barn and a silo remained relatively untouched by time or the elements, and not for lack of trying on the part of either force. It was a relic so far past its prime that it couldn't even be considered rustic. It was the type of farm that showed up in B-Movies about inbred cannibal clans, except that inbred cannibals had standards and this place failed to meet them.

Eric looked at the fallen buildings and sighed, then held up his clipboard and waved it back and forth a bit. Some thirty feet behind him, the salvage team dismounted the old truck and started grabbing their tools. It was a grab bag assortment of crowbars, sledgehammers, wrenches and saws. Out of the corner of his eye, Eric saw the driver walk behind the truck to check the five point trailer. While it wouldn't do to get caught with a flat tire in exposed territory with a massive pile of wood and scrap weighing them down, it still smacked of goldbricking while the rest of the team headed into the target site.

I count six buildings. One house, one barn, one garage, two stables, one pump house. The voice of the team coordinator, Lyla, sounded off. Eric nodded and gestured at the large silo standing tall behind the barn.

What's your count on machinery and scrap?

One feed silo, one grain bin. Assorted junk, nothing good for parts.

I figure the same. How long has this place been abandoned, you think? Eric didn't like having to ask for basic intel from the team, but the simple fact was that he wasn't a local - although being an Army brat as a youth, and then moving where his job took him as an adult, meant he wasn't a local anywhere. Lyla, on the other hand, grew up nearby and lived a life right out of a hackneyed Hallmark Family Movie; born in a small town, leaves for the glamor and / or money of the big city, comes back to the small town and forsakes the opportunities of the big city for that down home folksy place. Or something like that. She knew the countryside like the back of her hand.

I don't have the slightest idea.

Most of the time.

Hmmm. I wonder if it was just left to rot after the owners passed away. Or, maybe it was seized for back taxes and nobody would buy it off the county. Eric scratched the stubble on his chin; not a man fond of beards, he was being forced to adjust to the times like everyone else in the team.

Lyla pointed to an old gate that had fallen apart to such an extent that it was lying flat on the ground and provided no impairment to trespassers or livestock. There was the