2nd Earth: Shortfall by Edward Vought

find the stash of good guns and ammunition that is kept in the basement.
    There is a very nice supply of shotguns, as well as other rifles, and even some military surplus guns. We load as much as we dare take room for, since we have only begun searching and lock the other guns up for when we come back. We visit the other stores in town and they all look like no one has been in them in years. Both trucks are totally loaded when we start to head back to the farm with a lot of treasures that will help the family live better. On the way out of town we stop at the farm supply store, and this is a treasure all to itself. I am looking around the front of the store, trying to figure out how to get most of the equipment back to the farm, when Dayna calls me to the back of the store.
    When I get there, she shows me the largest greenhouse I have ever seen. It covers almost the entire back of the store and is complete with tables for growing on and the heaters to keep it warm in cold weather. We men decide we can disassemble it without too much difficulty and move it to the farm. We find room on the truck for several bags of seed, when I say bags I mean like burlap bags full of seed, but these are plastic bags that size. There is lots of hard candy, in sealed metal cans, so we get as much as we can hold in the trucks and head for home with our treasures. We get back before noon and spend the rest of the day putting away the things we brought back. The guys ask if they can keep some of the guns in the different houses for protection. We all think that is a very good idea especially since we have been teaching the men how to shoot. We feel the bows and arrows will be a great help for hunting, because they don’t frighten the rest of the game away.
    The candy is a special treat that only some of the family has had before. We divide it up evenly between all the houses and there is plenty to go around. We decide to go back tomorrow, this time I will let Tim go while I stay home and work around the farm. They will begin taking the greenhouse apart so we can bring it back here and set it up to use all winter. We spend the rest of the afternoon going over where we think the best place for the greenhouse will be. We are walking all over the grounds trying to figure it out when one of the new mothers, Heidi, tells us she has been sitting on the porch a lot lately, and it appears to her that the sun is shining all day on the back side of one of the barns. It doesn’t take long to see what she is saying, so we have a pretty good idea where we will put the greenhouse. As luck would have it, we spend most of the evening and night delivering two more new members into the family. One is a very healthy little boy that was named Luke and the other is a beautiful little girl. Julie, the mother, named her Ruth.
    In the morning we help the others get ready to go to town. Billy is going with Tim and some others so he can show them where everything we would like to get is. They leave somewhere around mid-morning and the rest of us get busy doing chores around the farm. Dayna and I were talking about the large garden patch the family who lived before us had and how we remembered that there was still vegetables growing in it, even though no one has tended it in years. We spend a couple of hours digging through the weeds, finding squashes, green and yellow string beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, bell peppers, and potatoes. The more we pick the hungrier I get thinking how great these are going to taste. Dayna has never had fresh vegetables. She and Robin keep sampling what we pick if they find a small one. So far they love tomatoes and both kinds of beans. They will wait until later to try the others, mainly because they are too large to just pop in their mouths.
    The garden is quite large, and we get several pecks of vegetables. The cows have been milked today, and one of the young ladies in Tim and Charity’s house is churning butter this afternoon. Dayna