Universal Mass Read online

  Universal Mass

  By Ronnie Coleinger

  Ronnie Coleinger Publishing

  Copyright 2014 Ronnie Coleinger

  Smashwords Edition

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – First Encounter

  Chapter 2 - The Reality of Human Existence

  Chapter 3 – The True Meaning of Disaster Preparedness

  Chapter 4 – Establishing a Community

  Chapter 5 – Creature Comforts and Practicality

  Chapter 6 – The First Snow

  Chapter 7 – Cold Weather Repairs

  Chapter 8 – The First Thaw

  Chapter 9 – Hope for Humanity

  Chapter 10 – A Fresh Start

  Chapter 11 – Shorter Days Begin as Predicted

  Chapter 12 – A Return to the Mountain House

  Chapter 13 – The Sky is Falling

  Chapter 14 – The Birth of a Child

  Chapter 15 – The Changing Seasons

  Chapter 16 – Planning for Long Term Survival

  Chapter 17 – Life in the Mountains Gets Better

  Chapter 18 – Over Hill and Over Dale – The Gold is Simply Everywhere

  Chapter 19 – A New Ice Age

  Chapter 20 - The Courtship of Britney Colebank

  Chapter 21 – A Slow Recovery for Humans

  Chapter 22 – The Cities of Modern Day Man

  Chapter 23 – Better Times Ahead

  Chapter 1 – First Encounter

  A sickening feeling overwhelmed Jenna as she stepped out onto her front porch. She sat down and tried to regain her sense of balance. She felt as if the world around her had slowed. The feeling was similar to what one would feel after jamming on the brakes of your family car: a feeling of sudden deceleration. When her body adjusted and the fog in her head began to clear, she looked around her, only to discover that everything around her seemed much larger. She realized then that her tiny body was sitting in clothing many times too large for her. She looked down beside her and realized that the wooden porch boards that were usually no wider than the width of her hand were now five or six hands wide. She raised her eyes and looked around the porch, realizing that she was now no larger than the ground hogs that roamed the farm. She managed to squirm out of the clothing that lay around her; her bra straps tangled around her left arm. She now stood perfectly naked on the front porch of her farmhouse.

  Jenna tried to stand and managed to get to her feet. Once upright, she turned towards the screen door leading into the front living room. She walked up to the door and looked up at the door handle that loomed two feet above her head. She needed to get inside, but not being able to reach the door handle posed a problem. She tried to force her fingers between the door and the door casing, hoping to create a wide enough gap to allow her body to slide past. When she realized her efforts were futile, she looked around for something to create a tool. She saw the box with her gardening tools sitting beside the planter. She walked over to the box and managed to pull the gardening trowel from the box. The trowel was very heavy but she managed to carry it over to the front door. She picked up the trowel, raised it high over her head and pushed forward into the fiberglass screen. The screen ripped as the point penetrated. The momentum of the trowel tore a six-inch long rip in the screen. Jenna laid the heavy trowel on the porch, reached up and tore the hole in the screen larger. When the hole was large enough, she stepped through and headed straight for the television remote control. When she pressed the power button, the television returned to the last channel she had been watching. A live NASCAR race was in progress: there were cars crashed all over the track. There was no sound and the cameras were in a stationary position. It appeared that everyone had left the track; she could not see anyone moving around. The window nets were still up on all of the crashed cars on the track. It was obvious that whatever had shrunk Jenna had also caused havoc at the racetrack.

  Jenna changed the channel to GCN, the Global Communications Network. The cameras were still on and aimed at the news desk where the news anchor normally sat. Suddenly, a tiny man crawled up on his chair, keeping the lower half of his body hidden from the camera by the desk. He said, “I have no idea what just happened here in the newsroom, but all of us have shrunk in size.” Then the man crawled down off his chair and dropped to the floor landing on his feet. With the cameras still rolling, he ran across the floor towards the back of the newsroom. The news anchor’s naked backside was visible to whoever may have been watching the channel. A small box at the bottom right of the screen showed the current time and date. The seconds continued to advance as Jenna watched. Jenna checked the date and time. She soon realized that less than ten minutes had passed since she walked out onto the porch and the date was still, June 26, 2112 AD.

  Jenna tried some other programs, hoping to discover what was happening to cause all the humans on the planet to shrink. She found that television programs that had been prerecorded were still playing as if nothing had happened.

  She walked across the room, slid a kitchen chair up close to the kitchen counter and crawled up where the radio was sitting. She turned on the radio and tried to find a station where someone was talking. All she got was static on the live talk programs, but channels playing continuous music remained working.

  Chapter 2 – The Reality of Human Existence

  The sun was beginning to set in the western sky. As the night sky darkened, Jenna could tell that something in the sky seemed different, but she could not put her finger on what was out of place. It looked to her as if the stars were moving faster than normal. She wondered if the planet had changed speed, but realized that she would most likely already be dead if that had occurred in such a sudden event. The huge planet would not just suddenly change speed; it would have to slow down or speed up gradually. She continued to stare at the stars, trying to comprehend the events that had so suddenly changed her life and apparently the lives of other humans.

  As the house began to get dark, Jenna turned on a light switch. The lights lit up just as they always had done. She thought about the planet’s electricity and decided that the power plants would continue to produce electricity for a short time, but they would eventually begin to shut down without human intervention.

  Now that the sun had set, Jenna decided it was time to sew some clothing to cover her body. She found an old camouflage shirt that had a missing button and decided to cut it up and sew a pull over dress. It would be very simple, just something to cover her body until she had time to make some pants and shirts. Once she had located a small pair of scissors, a package of sewing needles and some black thread, she began cutting up the shirt. She tried to save as much material as possible. She cut off the sleeves and the collar and then wrapped the cloth around her body. After a few more cuts with the scissors, she turned the material inside out and began sewing the garment into a functional dress. Her every move was difficult. The scissors were too large to fit her hands, the needle was too large and quite difficult to handle.

  As Jenna walked up to a wooden support post at the bottom of the basement stairs, she saw the pencil markings where her parents had documented her height as she grew. There were many pencil marks on the post; each mark had a date written beside it. Her father had glued a tape measure to the post when she was five or six years old. Jenna put her back to the post and held her finger at the top of her head. When she turned so she could see where her finger touched the ruler, she realized she was thirteen and one-half inches tall. She took a deep breath and looked at the top mark with her name on it. She was five foot and six inches tall then. She stepped up to the scales sitting on the floor and stepped up on them. She feared looking down at them. She knew that yesterday she weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. When she fin
ally looked down, she quickly stepped off the scales. The reading flabbergasted her. She now weighed twenty-six pounds. She realized then that she had shrunk by a factor of five.

  Chapter 3 – The True Meaning of Disaster Preparedness

  Jenna began rounding up all of her flashlights and batteries. Then she made certain they all worked. She went down into the basement and found her propane camping lanterns and the cook stove. As she considered how she would get them upstairs, she decided a better choice would be to create her shelter below ground. The basement would provide a better place to deal with life, as it existed today. Then she began moving every pot, pan and container she could find into a corner of the basement. She went upstairs and pulled the end of the garden hose down the stairs so she could fill the containers. By the time she climbed the stairs for the fourth time, she was getting tired. As she worked, the realization that she would need every drop of water she could stockpile forced her to continue with her project.

  Jenna went back upstairs and began moving things that she would need to survive down the stairs and placed them in piles so she could locate them when needed. She put one of the small flashlights into her pocket just in case the power was to go off. She could not imagine how dark the house would become when the power finally went off.

  As she found more containers to store water and food in, she realized she was too tired to carry them down the stairs. At that point, she began tossing things down the stairs and letting gravity do some of her work.

  As she stood in her kitchen, she wondered how she would protect her home, her sanctuary, if someone decided to steal from her, possibly kill her for the food she had stored away in the basement. She went into her bedroom and moved a stool up to a top dresser drawer. She opened the drawer and located her pistol. She tried to lift it, but realized she had to struggle to get the pistol out of the drawer and onto the floor. Then she located her box of shells for the gun. By the time she had the pistol and shells to the basement, she realized she would struggle to kill an intruder with the heavy weapon. She considered her options and hoped that she could defend herself with the small knife she now carried in the pocket she had sewn on her dress.

  When she climbed up the stairs to the first floor of her house, she gathered up some blankets and a small pillow. As she searched her house for things to make her basement sanctuary livable, she threw the items down the stairs. As she worked, she decided that she needed to move her life into survival mode. She began to wish she had taken the time to prepare for a disaster scenario many years ago instead of waiting until something unimaginable happened.

  It was now dark outside and Jenna decided that she needed to spend some time creating some form of footwear. She decided to make a pair of center-sewn moccasins. She had lots of brain tanned deer hide that would work just fine. She laid the leather on the basement floor and began marking out a pattern. Once she had a pattern, she cut out the first pair and began sewing them up. It took four hours to complete two pairs of moccasins, but she considered the time well spent.

  Chapter 4 – Establishing a Community

  The following morning, as Jenna walked along her gravel driveway towards her barn to check on her animals, she felt a wave of fear cross through her mind. She could hear the animals in the barn, but could see none of them outside in the barnyard. Normally, the chickens would be out of their coops, looking for their breakfast and the goats would be waiting impatiently at the barnyard gate for some attention and food. This morning, the animals remained inside their shelters. As she walked closer to the barn, she began to comprehend how difficult life with her new body size would become. Small stones no larger than marbles now caused her to stumble as she walked. She had to climb over the four-inch square boards that separated the driveway from the grass. The task of walking to the barn, something she had done thousands of times, now seemed like an Olympic event. When she finally arrived at the barn, she looked down at the moccasins she had sewn from some deer hide. She realized now that walking in the barn without rubber boots was going to be a nasty proposition at best. She giggled to herself as she remembered having to wash the manure from her feet over the years, especially the time she had slipped into the trough on her grandfather’s cow barn. She would have to find something waterproof to make a new pair of boots. She slipped off her moccasins and decided to walk barefooted while she did her chores; knowing that her body was washable.

  As Jenna stepped up to the barn door, she looked up to where the door latch clipped into an eyebolt. She used the handle of a broom that sat by the door to force the latch up and out of the eyebolt. When the latch fell free, she slowly opened the door, all the time wondering if the size of the animals was proportional to her own. She had seen birds flying around the farm as she walked to the barn and they were tiny in comparison to the trees where they had landed. A bird landed beside an earthworm that slithered around on the wet grass and grabbed it as the worm tried to escape into its hole. The tiny bird pulled and pulled. Even though the worm was tiny, the bird soon realized that its meal was quite strong. The bird simply squawked and flew back up into a tree. It would have to wait for a less aggressive meal before filling its belly. Jenna understood how the bird felt; she too felt as if she was up against an impossible task.

  As Jenna walked into the barn, the goats ran towards her. They all mobbed her, all in need of attention. She was happy to find that all of her critters were safe and healthy, even if they were now tiny in comparison to their surroundings. As Jenna loved on the goats and then poured feed into a long wooden trough, she heard the sound of human voices. Someone had called her name. Jenna ran to the open barn door and looked around the edge to see who was calling her and if she knew them. When she realized that the four people walking towards her barn were from a neighboring farm, she quickly headed in their direction. As they waived to her from across the yard, she realized that had also hand sewn some of their clothing and used it to cover and protect their bodies.

  As she stepped up close to her friends, they all began to talk at once. One of the two men asked Jenna if she was all right. She smiled and said, “I guess I am as okay as any of you. It is hard to comprehend what has happened to all the living things around us. I watched GCN last night and the people in Atlanta are also tiny like us, as are all of the creatures around us.” One of the men asked if Jenna was able to feed her animals and provide water. She smiled and said she had fed and watered them, but feared climbing into the hayloft to push down some fresh straw for bedding. The men both said they could help. Within a few minutes, the men had thrown a rope over a beam to use as a safety line and climbed the ladder into the loft. They worked hard to push the heavy bales of straw and hay down from the hayloft. When they returned to the ground, Jenna said, “I will build a new ladder with rungs closer together and venture up into the hayloft tomorrow, but I still find myself struggling with this small stature that my body now must endure.” One of the ladies giggled and slowly turned herself around, showing off her clothing. She said, “I am wearing a dress that I made for my two year old grandchild a few years ago. It fits quite nicely, don’t you think?”

  As they all stood and talked, they discussed the need to protect and help each other until they had some idea how to cope with the changes that had occurred on the planet. As they talked and worked out a plan, Jenna said, “I have begun moving all of my things down to my basement. I think that it will be the easiest place to protect if someone decided to rob me. My basement maintains a stable temperature year round, although I do have a wood stove down there if I should need it.”

  Randy, one of the neighbors to the north said, “As you all know, my home sits high up above the river. It is one story, faces south and gets good sun during the day. Since I built it into the side of the mountain, rock and ten feet of earth cover three sides and the roof. I think we could all live there quite comfortably. The house has ten-foot high ceilings and we could build a mezzanine type loft where we could all sleep and then use the lower secti
on for living quarters. There is adequate game in these forests and we could gather water, fish and trap in the river below the house. It would also be easy to defend if those around these mountains fall on hard times.”

  As they discussed the idea of turning Randy’s house into a fortress, they finally agreed on the plan. Jenna laughed and said, “How in the hell are we going to get our belongings up to Randy’s house? I had trouble even lifting my pistol let alone trudging my belonging up into the mountains.” Randy said, “We can use my four-wheeler to pull a wagon, if we can figure out how to drive the thing. I cannot reach the foot pedals and steering wheel at the same time.” He giggled like a two year old and then said, “I am a little short on one end lately.”

  Rodney, the neighbor to Jenna’s south said, “I think we should all take a walk up to Randy’s place and try to figure out how to modify that vehicle so we can gather up our things and spend tonight at Randy’s. I figure that desperation will begin to set in very shortly and some people will begin to loot what they need to survive. I think we need to figure out how to protect each other and do it immediately.”

  As they stood talking, Jenna’s neighbors from across the highway walked across the road and joined them. As they all greeted each other, Randy said, “We are going to group together and move into my house in the mountain. We all feel that we can manage and survive this event if we join forces. We have room for you two, but any more people will stretch our ability to provide food and resources. I think the seven of us can manage to store away enough food and fire wood to survive a winter. We may not have electricity and certainly will not have propane to heat and cook with, so wood will become the only fuel available to us.” Robert put his arm around his wife Kathy and said, “I built a smokehouse that I am using to preserve fish and meat. I can easily tear the one I have apart and move it up into the Mountain House or build another one.”