Category: TEOTWAWKI

“No, Wayne, 25 megatons of wheat.” – World War III (1982 TV Movie)

Okay, he’s been frozen, had his butt sore from bike riding, and shot.  I hope he likes wheat.

This is part ten of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo,  TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, The Most Interesting Man in the World and TEOTWAWKI Part VIII: Barricades, Tough Decisions, and Tony Montana) and TEOTWAWKI Part IX: Home at Last, and the Battle of the Silo.

The story to date:  Our resourceful protagonist was hundreds of miles from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of society.  He’s bicycled and walked and made his way home. Upon arriving at home, he was drafted into the Watch, which was tasked with protecting his hometown, Millerville.  Millerville attacked a grain elevator south of town, with enough grain to feed the town for four and a half years.

The Silo, 7AM, Five Days after EMP

The bullet had gone into my left shoulder.  There was a burning sensation, and then the blood.  The strangest thing, I thought, was that it didn’t hurt more.  But what it missed in pain, it made up for in blood.  I’m not sure what the bullet hit, but there was a lot of blood.

I passed out.

I woke for a while – in and out of consciousness.  It was mainly when people were moving me.  There was a lot of yelling.  At one point I was in a golf cart.  I think.

Eventually I woke up in a hospital bed, surrounded by Coleman® lanterns and the hiss of the pressurized fuel that fed the flame in the light.  There were three other beds around me with injured people, I assumed from the raid on The Silo.  I noticed my right arm was hooked into an I.V., and a nearly empty I.V. bag was suspended above my head.  My right arm was held in place by Velcro® straps, I guessed to keep me from moving it.  I tried to move my left arm, and a bigger pain than I’d ever felt in my life lashed out from my shoulder.  I’d say I screamed like a little girl, but I’m pretty sure that most little girls couldn’t get the volume I had.

A nurse, the mother of a kid I’d coached in PeeWee basketball, showed up.

“Awake, I see.”  She smiled.  “I’ll go get the Doc.”

She left and walked back in with Dr. Walters.  He’d been in town for only a decade, so he was still a newcomer.  “I see you don’t duck very well.”

Normally, that would have been funnier, but my shoulder still ached.  I managed a chuckle.

“I’m pretty happy with the work I did on you.  I haven’t done surgery since Med School, but,” he gestured around, “I don’t seem to have much competition right now.  Your shoulder was hit, but that’s probably obvious right now – we’ll get you something for the pain.  The good news is that I think you’ll have a lot of motion after it finishes healing.  The bullet hit the bone, but bounced up and out.  I repaired it as best as I could.  You’ll never be as strong on that side as on the other.”

He continued, “You’re really lucky.  There are about five different supplies I ran out of during your surgery, that I have no idea when I’ll get more of.”  He paused.  “Thanks for feeding us.  The Silo was important.”

I’ve read that there’s an African language where the translation for “good” means, literally, “has food.”  That the food from The Silo would feed us for years, while we figured out how to feed ourselves was important.  Where would we be in thirty years?  No one could know that.  But today we could eat.

And today I could see my family.  I’d been gone for days, sent out to acquire The Silo, and now I wouldn’t be doing anything for a while until my arm healed.  They rolled my hospital bed into a private room.  My wife and sons were allowed in – they’d been waiting outside since I was brought in.

“So, dad, did you kill anyone?”

I know it was meant with youthful excitement of a thirteen year old, but it hit me deeply.  I’d fired off into the darkness, attempting to shoot at the muzzle flashes of the guns that were pointed at me.  For the first time in my life, I wondered if I had killed someone.

“I don’t know, son.  I really don’t.”

“Well, they say you’re a hero.”

My wife gently brushed my hair.

“Who is they?”

“Everyone!  I heard it from Timmy, who heard it from James.  Everyone in town is so happy!”

I forced a smile, “I’m just glad to be with you guys.  And,” I gestured with my hand towards my shoulder, “I think you’ll be stuck with me at home for a while.”

Lieutenant Brady stopped by while the family was there.  Instead of his regular police uniform, he was wearing the same SWAT team outfit he had been when we’d taken The Silo.

“Mind if I come in?” I waved him in.

“Glad to see you’re awake,” he continued.  “Glad to see you’re alive.”  He seemed uneasy.  “We lost a few out there – and every wound and loss will weigh on me.  But there’s good news.  Nearly every city around here has their own silo.  There’s plenty of food for everyone, so no reason to fight about that.  And we’ve developed a loose network for defense and information, because the cities are still draining.

“One nice thing is that all of the towns are really fairly easy to defend.  Most of them have some sort of natural barrier and only a few roads in.  I guess,” he chuckled, “that most of these towns were founded when an Indian attack was a real possibility so they were set up with defense in mind.  Never noticed that until now.  Ours is in an even better position.  We’ve got at least three towns between us and any big city.  We’ll know they’re coming.  But you, go home and rest.”

Going home was wonderful.

The house was like a freezer.  Natural gas and pilot lights and central heating was gone.  It was March.  Running water was a distant memory, and to the extent we had water, it was brought up in five gallon buckets from the pond for flushing, or brought up from the creek and carefully filtered and disinfected for drinking.  Things that soon disappeared?  Coffee.  Propane.  We had plenty of wheat.  And as a treat, one night a week we’d have some of the dehydrated food I’d had around the house for camping.  The dehydrated food would run out soon, but we’d have plenty of food, as long as we liked wheat.

Margo, my wife, had started gardening, as had every wife in town.  Every third day a farmer would stop by and tell us what we didn’t know – how to keep the deer out of our garden.  How to keep the moles from digging into the potatoes.  How to keep chickens.

Yes, chickens.

They were becoming very popular, and spreading rapidly.  You don’t have to kill a chicken for the eggs, and eggs were a wonderful surprise when you were just expecting yet more wheat the next day.  I heard a rumor that people were going to be able to get milk from a communal herd of cows, but you had to milk the cow yourself.  Butter!  Cheese!  If we could figure out how to make it.  And without Netflix® and PlayStation™ there were a lot of card games and board games after chores.  And a lot more fun under the covers at night with my wife.

The dark side of the new world was no information.  As a society, we were used to knowing the sex of the Queen’s great grandchildren and watching the birth live on CNN®.  Now?  We heard what we could, either from the bulletin board downtown or gossip from neighbors.  I was pretty sure that China would be “supporting” the population on the West Coast.  Alaska?  Either the Russians or the Chinese probably had moved their stuff in already.

The suicides were the most demoralizing.  It surprised me how many people were so tied into Facebook® and Twitter™ and the conceptions of what their lives would be that they couldn’t imagine a life without the constant information flow and distraction from the media they consumed.  And tobacco and drugs were gone.  Alcohol and weed?  Not so much.  You could turn wheat into a really bad beer or an even worse whiskey.  Weed grew like, well, weed.

But no one cared about weed.  The illicit alcohol was frowned upon since it took food to make it, but everyone had some at the dinner parties.

And that was another winner – neighborhoods were neighborhoods again.  We got together on Friday nights to have whatever wheat-based dish was popular this week, some eggs, and some moonshine.  I heard a rumor that someone was growing tobacco with success.  I had conflicted feelings about that.  But of vices, if people were having a cigar or a chew or a cigarette?  Far better than many I’d seen.

Life was good.   Were we ready to defend it?

North of Yona, EMP +45 Days

Former Corporal Walt Davis, late of 1^st Platoon, Charlie Company, surveyed the defenses of Yona.  They were in pretty good shape, all things considered.  The first few days after The Event, as his troops called it, was chaotic, but good for the platoon.  They had taken over a few small towns in quick succession, killing those that opposed them, but offering opportunities for the towns to surrender and offer up what the Platoon wanted, which was liquor, ladies, and food.  Not wheat, that was everywhere.  Steaks.

The Platoon also offered up membership to anyone who wanted to join, provided that they pledged allegiance to Walt.  This didn’t happen much on the first few towns, but after their reputation spread, they’d show up at a town and find that there were men lined up not to fight them, but to join them.

What started off as 25 soldiers had been as many as 100, which wasn’t bad, except that now it took four times the liquor, four times the women, four times the fuel.

It had been easy, except for that last town.  Everything had gone well at first.  They’d presented their women, as ordered.  Their booze.  But in the night, they’d been attacked, drunk off the booze, and attacked by the women themselves.

Walt had lost 43 men.  In retaliation, he’d blown up most of the town.  By the time they left it, what was left of it was just smoke in his rear view mirror.

But now he was . . . here.  Where ever the hell that was.  On the ridgeline, he scanned the town below.  Fixed defenses on the road, but nothing a half mile to either side.  This would be easy.  They simply hadn’t learned.  Walt was willing to teach.

He smiled.  Yona.  Stupid name name for a town.

### (for now)

We’re getting near to the home stretch.  Probably only one or two more of these in this series (at most).

In real life, I’ve had conversations with people about “the end of the world.”  The latest one (he brought it up) was that preppers were silly.  People like him, with guns, would come and take the preparations from people who didn’t fight for them.  He lives pretty far in the backwoods, but close enough to Dallas that he’d have tons of new friends moving in with him before he ever got to take away everyone’s stuff.

Another guy (who lived in Alaska) had the idea that he’d move into the backwoods with two fat women.  He also indicated that eventually, after he got hungry, he’d only need one woman.  Yeah.  Icky.

I don’t think that either of those are exceptional plans in the event of an emergency.  The situation I’ve sketched out over this series is probably too good to be true in many ways, but, I swear, the food part is based in reality.  In much of the Midwest, more food than you could eat in years is available.  In some places, the food is even more plentiful than sketched out in this story.  In others, like California or the East Coast, fighting over food will start whenever people run out of Nacho Cheeze® sauce.

While on my weekly tour of the Internet, however, I found this (LINK) excellent article on preparing and becoming (more or less) self-sufficient in food.  It’s not easy.  It won’t happen overnight.  So you need to have food on hand or a reasonable way to get it, and not food for an afternoon, but months, or more likely a year or more.

And people are the double-edged sword.  Too many and it’s just a horde.  Too few and you don’t have enough people and skills to provide food and defend yourself.  If I were going to make an error?  Yeah, fewer people is better than too many.

“We see our role as essentially defensive in nature.  While our armies are advancing so fast and everyone’s knocking themselves out to be heroes, we are holding ourselves in reserve in case the Krauts mount a counteroffensive which threatens Paris or maybe even New York.  Then we can move in and stop them.  But for $1.6 million, we could become heroes for three days.” – Kelly’s Heroes

I remember watching this movie as a kid.  Clint Eastwood – cool for 20% of the history of the United States.

This is part nine of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo,  TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, and The Most Interesting Man in the World and TEOTWAWKI Part VIII: Barricades, Tough Decisions, and Tony Montana)

The story to date:  Our resourceful protagonist was hundreds of miles from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of  society.  He’s bicycled and walked until he’s on the final stretch home, 12 miles away, 100 hours after the EMP.  He was sleeping in a parked car at a road barricade of the next town up the road from his home when a bullet passed through the window.

The Highway Outside of Yona, 6AM

I’ve never been a light sleeper.  When I sleep, it’s heavy and deep.  And since the night before I’d spent most of the night crouched under a tarp attempting to avoid getting wet and dying of hypothermia, I was about 20 hours behind on sleep.  But the sound of breaking glass followed by the crack of a rifle is a pretty good alarm clock, especially since the passenger window was the one I was sleeping under in the Xterra.

I popped open my door and slid out, staying as low as possible.  I felt relief that the interior light didn’t come on – and I crouched behind the car.  The bullet had come in the back window, and out the passenger window.  There weren’t a lot of angles that fit both.  I talked to one of the men manning the barricade:  “Hey, he’s shooting at us from that direction.”

Then in rapid succession – a flash of light, the sound of a bullet hitting the Xterra’s body, and the report of the gun.

The commander of the barricade shouted, “Aim for the muzzle flash.  Don’t fire until I call for you to fire.”

Another flash/bullet impact/report.

The commander asked, “How many have the area in your sights?”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

“Got him.”

About six of the men responded they were sighted in.

“On my count, fire.  Three . . . two . . . one . . . fire!”

Six rifles sang out.

By ROG5728 CC BY-SA 3.0 from Wikimedia Commons – Comments by Wilder 

No more flashes came.  Whether the shooter was hit, killed, or scared, I couldn’t say.  But there were no incoming shots.  But I was also fully awake.

“Guys, this is probably a good enough time for me to go.  It’s still over an hour to sunrise, but the full moon will give me enough light to get to road I’m taking home.”

That was at least a little bit of a lie.  I’d been thinking as I went to sleep that following the roads was officially stupid.  But trying to bushwhack every bramble covered patch of field and tree creek was also officially stupid.

But there were also railroads.

The trains were now gone, but the railroads had been in this area for over 100 years.  And railroads were very flat and bridged every little creek.  The distance from ties wasn’t perfect for my stride, but it was nice – on one or both sides there were trees that obscured my silhouette for almost every step I took.  When that wasn’t the case?  I scampered.

Sure, I was near home.  That didn’t mean that anyone watching might not want to shoot me on principle.  I knew I looked like I was sneaking, since I was.  But it was certainly better than the road, and I was making great time.

And I missed my wife.  I missed the kids.  The closer I was to town, the more fear rose in me – were they okay?

I hit the town about noon.  No one was guarding the railroad in.

Soon enough I was walking past the train station down the street towards the center of town.  I looked grubby, but it was great to be home – to walk by Taco Shack®, to see the (now empty) liquor store, and even the rest of the closed businesses.  It wasn’t long before two cops on a golf cart pulled over in front of me.

“Are you from town?”

“Yes, I just got back.”  I explained my trip.  The cops seemed a little surprised that it had gone so well and so quickly.

“Let’s see your stamp.”

“Stamp?”

“Yeah, the one the guys at the barricade gave you?”

“I didn’t cross any barricade.”

“Then how did you get in to town?”

“Walked in on the rail line.”

The cops looked at each other with the expression I assume I have on my face when I ask my family to help me find my glasses and they’ve been in my hand the whole time.  “Crap.  Okay.  Let’s see your ID.”

After reviewing what I assumed would be the last picture ID I’d ever own, they took out a piece of paper and stamped a star on it and wrote the letter “C” on it.  It was a self-inking stamp.  Then one of them signed it.

On the back was a list of rules:

1. No looting. No stealing.  All looters and thieves will be hanged.
2. No murder. A murderers will be hanged.
3. All able-bodied men must take part in the Watch.
4. All able-bodied men must be armed when out in public.
5. Review the Board daily for updates.
6. Curfew dusk to dawn for those not on Watch.

“Go home, get cleaned up, see your family.  Then report back to be assigned to the Watch.”

“Back where?”

“Oh, yeah – the county courthouse.  Nice building – designed before electricity – almost all of the offices have windows.  Check in on the first floor.”  The cop paused, “And welcome back.”

Most days I walk out the door to work and walk back in after work, and nobody even gets up.  Today was different.  As I walked down the last stretch of gravel road that led to my house, the front door flew open and a thirteen year old boy sprinted toward me . . . “DAD!”  He hit me with enough force that both of us sprawled over the winter-dead lawn.  His seventeen year old brother wasn’t far behind, and then I saw my wife, crying, running to see me as well.  Soon enough I was being roughly hugged and kissed in a pile on the grass by everyone in my family.

“Ooof, get off!”

I rolled over and got up.  I’d never felt so welcomed in my life.  Hand held by my wife on one side, and with my shoulder being pulled down on my right by my thirteen year old, we walked into the house.  I sat down at the dining room table dropping my backpack near the door.  I was surprised to see three rifles and a shotgun by the door.  I was also surprised to see my seventeen year old had my .357 magnum revolver strapped to his hip.

My wife put a cup of hot coffee in front of me – I could see our propane camp stove in the kitchen.  I told them my tale, holding nothing back.  They looked a little shocked – there had only been a little bit of violence here, one carload of kids from the next town over.  And the Town Council had been pretty benevolent but paranoid, my seventeen year old thought.  I finished my coffee.  I wondered how long we’d have it until we ran out . . .

After cleaning up, I went down to the courthouse.  My seventeen year old accompanied me, and we both slung rifles – me with my old hunting rifle and he had a semiautomatic AR pattern rifle.  Oddly enough, the old courthouse rules said that I couldn’t carry a gun inside.  After the EMP?  I was required to.  There was a short line for the Watch – a couple of gentlemen looking to swap watches.  The clerk wrote the swap down.

“I’m here to register for the Watch – I just got back into down.”  The clerk, who used to take payments for car license plates, took the paper the cop gave me.  She raised her eyebrow.

“Hmmm – looks like you’ll be in C-Watch, per the request of Officer Brady.  Um-hm – Well, you can meet with C-Watch.  Tonight . . .” She scanned the paper, “. . . at dusk, here.  It says to prepare by wearing dark clothes, and bring a liter of water and . . . at least twenty rounds of ammo.”

“You’re lucky, Pop.  C-Watch does interesting things, not just watching the barricades.”

We went to check the Board.  B-Watch, which my son was on, had been split into two.  One part was going to watch the rail lines coming in from the north.  His name was on that team.   Looks like the cops paid attention.

We went home again (yet more walking) and had dinner.  It was the last of the steak from the freezer cooked over propane in the kitchen.  It was amazing.  And then it was time to report.

Dressed all in black, I felt like I should be sneaking with John Belushi in Animal House.  I had my rifle and thirty more rounds of ammunition, plus the water.  There were a few candles in the courthouse, and in the dark it was nearly dazzling.  It’s amazing how a little light shines in the darkness.

“Tonight we’re going to assault the grain elevator at Star.”  It was the cop who gave me the ID with the star on it.

Star was a little railway siding about six miles from town.  I was in a group of about forty men.  All of us were similarly aged.

“I know that all of you are competent, and will do your jobs.  What we’ll do is march down to Star, surround the grain elevator, and then take it by any means.  Any means.  Let me explain to you the importance of that grain elevator – we know, since everyone who works at the elevator lives here in town, that the elevator is full of grain.  Well, not exactly full, but nearly 75% capacity.

“Let me make this clear.  In those grain silos is enough corn, wheat, milo, and soybean to feed everyone in town 2,000 calories a day for the next four and a half years.  We’ve been through a lot, but four and a half years will give us time to figure out how to farm like it’s 1799.  Now, the elevator is in the possession of some punks from down south who just showed up and shot the night watchman last night.  No more than a dozen of them.”

Four and a half years of food.  Stunning.

Our leader, Lieutenant Brady, outlined the basic plan.  We’d split into four 10-man squads.  I was in Squad 2.  He used a whiteboard to show our positions.  Squad 2 was to set up along the intersection and provide covering fire as Squads 3 and 4 advanced alternately toward the office.  Squad 1 was to be held in reserve to fill in as needed for either of the other three Squads.

The objective was to take possession of the elevator by dawn.

I’d saw we marched, but we didn’t.  We walked the six miles to the elevator.  The Moon started to rise after about two hours of walking.

Lieutenant Brady set up the Squads, and personally led Squad three as they began leapfrogging into position.

Our job was simple – when Brady said “fire” we were supposed to fire a steady stream of staggered shots at the front door.  No more than one a second, one every two seconds would be better, but continuously.  And sequentially.  The idea is that anyone inside the elevator would be so distracted by the steady streams of bullets that they’d stay low.  When Brady said, “clear” we were to stop.  Simple.

We got into position and took cover in the ditch.

I took careful aim on the front door.  I’d picked a rifle with open sights – I figured it would be much easier to use than one with a scope at night and with the idea that I’d need to be able to swing it quickly.

I was right.  Soon enough the assault began.

“Fire!”

We fired.  The window shattered.

That’s when the shots from our right started – shooting at us.  Brady wasn’t there, but I’m pretty sure he would have wanted us to defend our position.  We did.  We swung our rifles and started shooting back.

Two of our group kept the fire going at the front door, covering Brady.

As Brady yelled “clear” – the other two members of the squad joined us in firing at the group that had been shooting at us.

There hadn’t been return fire for a minute or so . . . so when Brady yelled “clear” again all the firing stopped.

Except for the bullet that hit me.

### (for now)

I was out hunting one night and I had lost my daughter.  She was hunting with me.  It surprised me that she was able to get lost at the age of 13 in a piece of land that was half a mile on a side, but she did.  When it hit dusk, I shot my .30-06 into the ground hoping to give her a direction to go to.  What amazed me was the huge eruption of flame – greater than 10 feet – that came from the barrel.  Rifles without flash suppressors are bright in the night – which is why the military pays for flash suppressors.  So, muzzle flashes are real.  And they can be visible for long distances.  Oh, and my daughter showed up, and I seem to be unable to lose her now – she has my number and everything.

And nighttime vision is important.  When I was starting fires (in the fireplace!) as a kid I’d try to light as many places along the newspaper as I could with the match.  My Dad looked and said, “Three on a match – that’s unlucky.”  Then he told me the story that it wasn’t really unlucky – it came from World War I when soldiers would light cigarettes.  If you lit three cigarettes on the same match, well, that gave the German sniper plenty of time to find you and shoot you.  Which I would call unlucky.

Railroads will be ignored early on in a sudden catastrophe, but provide a great way to move from place to place to the extent they don’t parallel big roadways.

I love it the most when I do my blog and learn something.  The food storage was my biggest surprise.  I actually called elevator operators to see what their inventory would be in February.  “Definitely would be at least 50%.  Probably closer to 75% full.”

This shocked me – the common theme for TEOTWAWKI in a sudden collapse is that calories would be king.  And they would be in New York.  And they would be in California.  But here in the middle of the country?  This is where the food is.  Real answer?  We’d have years of food if we could keep it.  Years.  The biggest concern would be the food going bad in storage.  Where we live?  Maybe work on preps other than food – since we seem to have massive amounts nearby.  I’d guess that within a thirty mile radius we’d have enough food for 100,000 people for four and a half years – so we could afford a doctor or two.

I mentioned this to a friend because the conclusion surprised me so much.  “So, the optimum time to attack the East Coast and population in February, during a blizzard, is the exact time where all of the food is stuck in silos in the Midwest.  I’ve never read this anywhere.”

His response was the same as The Mrs.:  “You’re not the first to figure this out.  I’m sure the military figured this out in 1952.”

Sure.  But no matter.  I still feel good about figuring that one out.  Oh, and there are tons of cows around.  Literally.  We might be the only area on the continent to gain weight after the end of the world.

Guess marketing the End of the World Diet will have to wait.

“Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean.  I mean plumb, mad-dog mean.  ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win.  That’s just the way it is.” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

Somehow, I don’t remember seeing this cartoon.  It just looks awesome! (h/t)

 

This is part six of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo,  TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold)

The story to date:  Our resourceful protagonist was far from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of the society and the plentiful PEZ® it has provided.  He’s bicycled and walked until he’s only 45 miles from home, 70 hours after the EMP.

2:30 AM

The rain had started after midnight.  Before that, the night had been clear – I’d looked up and watched the Milky Way stretching across the sky.  I’d dozed and woke up, putting more wood on the fire.  But it wasn’t the rain that woke me up, it was the wind.  Just before the rain hit the wind went from a gentle breeze to big gusts of cold wind, followed by short pauses of stillness that teased me, made me think it was over.

Then the rain.  Cold, bitter, windy rain.

My fire had been blown out before the accumulating rain had a chance to form into streams that would have extinguished it anyway.

And the rain continued.  I jumped out of my sleeping bag and tossed my poncho, which had been over the sleeping bag, back on over my clothes.  So much for a night’s sleep.

The rain intensified.  I had tied off the emergency tarp above where I was sleeping, forming a sort-of tent, and I crouched under it.  I pulled the sleeping bag back around me and continued to crouch in the wind and rain.  The rope holding one corner of the tarp worked its way free in the wind.  I grabbed at the rope and pulled the tarp tight again.  A quart of nearly freezing water dropped right on my leg and foot as I disturbed a ripple in the tarp where water had pooled.

As I became fully conscious, I began to worry.  I wasn’t yet horribly wet, and the poncho would mostly protect me as I squatted under the tarp.  My feet, however, were in hiking boots that weren’t particularly waterproof.  And they were already wet and cold.

And the wind continued.  I shivered.  This was winter in the Midwest.  Sometimes snow, and sometimes cold wet rain, which was worse.  Snow was at least beautiful.

I finally pulled the sleeping bag under me, and managed to sit down and stay dry despite the water outside.  My feet were cold, but as the rest of me was dry, I eventually fell back asleep sitting up.

I woke up with a very stiff neck under a dark tarp.  But the rain had stopped.

My feet were still soaked, my hands were cold.  But I did have wool socks, and the wool would help retain heat even wet.  I had no idea what time it was.  I opened up a can of “cling pears” and drank the cool, syrupy liquid before eating the pears.

I tossed the can on the ground.  Littering used to be a thing I thought I’d never do.  Now?  I wasn’t going to carry an empty can to try to find a trashcan after the apocalypse.  In the dark, I got out of the tent.  The moon was out now and I could see my breath from its faint light.

I looked down.  The sleeping bag was now covered in mud and soaked with water.  I lifted it.  Probably thirty pounds.

I hated to leave it, since I knew that they wouldn’t be making sleeping bags again anytime soon, but lugging it the 45 miles to home was also a non-starter.  I packed everything else back up into the pack, after shaking the water off the tarp.

I started walking east.  Dawn was on the horizon.  I was a little surprised – I didn’t think I’d slept that long.  One thing I’d made on the road was a little spear – nothing more than my cheap Chinese knife duct taped to a sturdy stick – it doubled as a walking stick.  A pointy one.

Most houses were what you’d expect on a lonely country road.  A single-wide trailer from the 1980’s.  A farmhouse from the 1940’s.  A mini-mansion (ranchette style) from 2006.  But this house was amazing.  A brick wall, six foot high, and thick ran around the yard.  A three story brick . . . castle?  It looked like a silo, being round-ish, but had windows and obvious floors.

I shook my head.  No idea what that castle could have been.  A Victorian girl’s playhouse?

The main mansion looked like something a well-to-do merchant might have made.  I’d lived in the area for years, but never knew this house existed on this dirt road.  It was designed well before electricity, certainly.  That might be a plus for the new owners.  I could see smoke coming from the chimney, but kept walking.  I was only three miles from the highway.

About half a mile from the farmhouse a dog ran out onto the road.  It barked and growled.  It was mainly a German shepherd, but I could see that it wasn’t a purebred.  It was also barking and growling at me, so the pedigree was at best an academic discussion, all things considered.  It looked skinny.

I did not want to get mauled by a dog.  I also didn’t want to shoot it, if I could avoid it.  It was probably just hungry and scared.  But I was going home, and I was going to keep going on this road.  I stood upright, with my “spear” in one hand.  My pistol was in my jacket pocket – I could get to it easily if I had to.

I talked lowly, kept telling the dog, “It’s okay, boy, it’s okay” in a calming voice.  I walked slowly toward it.  It barked harder, jumping back and forth.  Agitated.

I kept walking, slowly.  The dog kept barking.  I went to the far side of the road, moving slowly, so I could give the dog a wide berth.

Finally I was side by side with the dog on the road.  It lunged.  No time to pull the pistol, I slashed with the stick, hitting the dog with the butt of the stick, rather than the blade side?  Why?  I have no idea.  But I struck the dog firmly in the ribs.  The knife blade passed in front of my face far closer than I wanted.

I quickly reversed my grip and pointed it back at the dog.

The dog that was backing up.

I’m pretty sure if the dog had been trained to be violent, I would have been in trouble, up to and including dead.  Thankfully, the dog sucked at attacking.  It was probably someone’s pet.  It lunged again.  This time, I stabbed it with the knife at the end of the stick, a glancing blow off of its chest.  It yipped as it ran away, off into the trees.

I looked at the knife – no blood, and only a spot or two on the ground.  I apparently sucked at spears.

I backed away from where I thought the dog was, so I’d be able to defend myself if it decided to make another run at me.  I pulled the pistol.

I was shaking.  It’s not often that violence is required.  Sure, I hunted deer, but the deer don’t have canine fangs and attack back.  After a few hundred yards I stopped walking backwards and turned around and started walking forward, glancing behind me occasionally to make sure the dog wasn’t getting ready to attack.

As I got to the stop sign at the main highway, I found myself for the third time in three days staring down the barrel of a gun.  This time an AR variant.  And as I looked to the left I saw another man pointing a deer rifle at me.  The rush of adrenaline didn’t stop me from noticing that both men had their fingers on the triggers of their rifles.  And the dead body off to my right.

“Where you headed, spear-boy?”

“Millerville.”

“Not this way, you ain’t.”

Fort Custer, EMP +3

There were three battalions of troops at Ft. Custer, with an average number of soldiers per battalion of 3,000, but only 7,000 soldiers lived on base.

The sergeant in charge the 1^st Platoon of Charlie Company usually lived on base.  But he had been on leave in Georgia.  Nobody had seen Lieutenant Janson since before the EMP went off.  He lived off of base.  Everyone knew him as a rookie who was homesick for Alabama, everybody had bet he was headed that way.  1^st Platoon, Charlie Company didn’t have anyone in command.

And that was a problem.

Initially, everyone had gone to chow on the first day after the EMP.  Sure, it was dark, but this was the Army, right?  They know how to cook even without power.

No.  The mess hall was just that, a mess.  There was milk, and boxed cereal, but there wasn’t anything hot.  And there weren’t any lights beyond flashlights.

A colonel had shown up, and barked a few orders before heading out of the mess hall.  The short version was that everyone was supposed to, except for meals, hunker down in their barracks until further orders arrived.  At lunch, someone had thought to get MREs and set them out, along with bread, peanut butter, jelly, and fresh fruits.  Sodas were out in the serving line.

Dinner was much the same.

The biggest stress on the troops was the lack of information.  Have a mixture of 7,000 mainly men, many at their peak of testosterone production, who were wired to be busy and have them do nothing?  A bad idea.

Day two and breakfast was there, but looking pretty meager.  Someone had gotten some lanterns going and had managed to hook propane up to the stoves so they had some hot food.  Things were improving?

No.  By dinner, the MREs were the picked-over least favorite food and the propane was gone.  The base store, or PX, was likewise empty.

The morning of day three, a corporal in 1^st Platoon, Charlie Company asked a simple question.

“They’ve forgotten us.  Who wants to get out?”

### (for now)

I’ve taught survival basics (the half-hour course, not the six weeks living in the forest fashioning an iPhone® out of bone and discarded pop cans) and have tried to drum into my students the simplest survival rule – the rule of 3’s.

• 3 seconds without Facebook©.
• 3 minutes without air.
• 3 hours without shelter.
• 3 days without water.
• 3 weeks without food.

Those laws are, of course, wrong.  I’ve seen an adult female live a full minute without Facebook™, once.  Some people can hold their breath for 4 minutes, or even slightly longer.  But nobody can do it for 3 hours.  And under certain climates you can make it longer than three days without water.  Or you might die in a day without it under certain conditions.  And I could probably make a few months without food, and my pants would fit a lot better.

But today’s lesson is shelter.  200+ days of the year where I live now, shelter wouldn’t be required to live.  In Los Angeles?  Probably 365 days a year.  But in a cold, driving wet wind with wind chill?  Yeah, you can die pretty quickly.  Clothing really matters in a situation like that.  Wool is your friend.  But in the high mountains in summer?  Put a cotton t-shirt on and get it wet from sweat?  You could have hypothermia in July.

Dog packs exist in the rural Midwest now.  After an apocalypse, they’d get bad, quickly.  Our hero ran into a lone dog and scared it away without too much trouble, probably because it was a scared house dog.  In a pack, however, they kill for fun.  And once they were hungry?  They’d be pretty good at it.  After a few weeks, a dog pack would likely become as dangerous as being between a Kardashian and a camera.

Fort Custer is made up.  But what happens when you have high testosterone trained warriors in an environment without a command structure?  I’m thinking we’ll know after a few more posts.

“After the First World War, Shandor decided that society was too sick to survive.  He wasn’t alone.  He had close to a thousand followers when he died.  They conducted rituals up on the roof, bizarre rituals intended to bring about the end of the world.” – Ghostbusters

Well, he has a point.  I think I need to post this to my timeline!

Previous posts in this series include:

This is part five of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo )

The story to date:  Our resourceful protagonist was far from home the night in February when an EMP hit, taking with it all of the society and the plentiful PEZ® it has provided.  He’s bicycled and walked until he’s only 60 miles from home, 58 hours after the EMP.

He’s just witnessed a Camaro pulling onto the road after hearing two shots in a farmhouse, and it was headed straight toward him.

EMP +2, 2:30 PM, 58 miles from home

The Camaro was half a mile away.  Hiding seemed like a good idea, but I looked to either side of the road there was no cover for 100 yards, and the camouflage poncho I was wearing consisted of dark greens and browns – it would be of no use against the straw yellow dead grass in the ditch here.

I stood motionless and waited.  I didn’t have long to wait.

The Camaro pulled to a stop in front of me.

The driver turned off the engine and soon enough a brushed nickel revolver was pointing at me out of the open window.  The thought entered my mind that he was holding the gun in his left hand, and maybe he wasn’t a good shot left handed.  But then I looked at the barrel again.  For whatever reason, the hole in the gun barrel looked as large as the full moon.  Betting that he would be a lousy shot with his left hand seemed like a lousy bet.

“Hands outside of the poncho.”

I slowly raised my arms to the side.

“Alright.  Hands above your head.  Lock your fingers together.  Slowly.”

I complied.  It’s not like I can run faster than a slug from the hand cannon he was holding, and, besides, I didn’t have anything to fight back with other than the cheap Chinese multi-tool that I had previously kept in my car as part of my emergency kit.

“Got a gun?”

I shook my head.  “Nope.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Millerville,” I replied.

“And where did you start?”

“Meridian.”

“You mean north of the Interstate Meridian?  That’s almost 200 miles away.”  He paused.  “How’d you get here so fast?”

“Bicycle, and then feet.”

“Impressive.  What did you see?”

“Can I put my hands down?”

“No.”

I sighed.  “Not much.  On the first day I just biked due south.  The next?  Due east.  Not a lot of people on the roads I picked.  I got shot at by the interstate running south from the City and lost my bike, but crossed under the Interstate on the railroad bridge.  Since then, I’ve been walking east.”

I still hadn’t seen the driver’s face – the sunlight reflected off of the car windshield.  I heard a single, humorless laugh.  “Unarmed.  Sixty miles from home.  I should just shoot you out of mercy.  Hell, I bet you haven’t even eaten since this started.”

The humorless laugh again.

He continued, “Okay.  Since you’ve obviously figured out that nothing electrical works anymore you understand, probably better than most, that civilization ain’t what it used to be.”

His arm withdrew back into the car, and I was relieved to see pistol disappear.

“For what it’s worth, the people in the farmhouse ahead are dead.  And I did kill them.  I’m the sheriff in this county, and I’ve been, well, taking out the trash today.  There are some people who will just be trouble, and they were pretty high on the list.

“If you really are going to Millerville, you should be armed.  There’s at least one pistol in there.  Probably some food.  So, go.  If I ever see you around our peaceful community again?  I’ll shoot you, too.  Now walk on over to that fence, and turn around and face the other direction until I drive off.  Good luck.”

I complied.  The engine on the Camaro roared back to life.  I heard the engine rev up and then the sound of the exhaust was up and over the little hill, lessening in volume continuously.

When I got to the farmhouse, the front door was open to the 1930’s or 1940’s era home.  There were two bodies on the couch in the front room, a man and a woman.  They looked to be in their early forties.  Both were dead.  I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a dead person – it had been at a funeral, my mom, I think.  Years.  And here were two dead people, dead less than an hour.  They had entrance wounds, center mass of their chest.  There was surprisingly little blood, but I imagined the back of the couch was a mess.  I wasn’t going to check.

Was the driver of the Camaro really a sheriff?  I had no idea.  I had no idea what these people had done.  A grudge, a score to settle?  Or?

It didn’t seem to matter to him to leave a witness alive, but in the end, he probably doesn’t care.  The chances of him seeing me again were nearly zero, and if the world ever did come back, the chances of him seeing me as a witness in court against him would also be effectively zero – I’d imagine the slowly cooling bodies in the next room wouldn’t matter to anyone left alive.  There’d be no one to press charges.

I’m embarrassed that I headed straight for their kitchen.

I skipped the refrigerator – it had been cold, but the power had been off for days.  They had a pantry, of sorts, behind a floral patterned curtain.  I looked around the kitchen – it was a mess.  Open containers of food on the counter.  Trash overflowing the trash can.  Dirty dishes everywhere.

In the pantry were an array of cans.  Corn.  Creamed corn.  I hated creamed corn.  But it never sounded so good to me.  Carrots.  Peaches.  Some pasta.

I looked around the mess on the counter.  Can opener.  Hmm.

There was an electric can opener, but there wasn’t a manual one on the counter.  I looked through the drawers, and couldn’t find one.  I remembered I had my cheap Chinese multitool – it didn’t have one, either.  But it did have a punch.  I put the punch up against the metal lid of the can, and smacked it with the base of another can.  Success – a small hole.  I repeated on the other side.  Another hole.  Since these were peaches, I decided that I could just start by drinking the juice.

It was the best thing I’d ever had in my life, sticky sweet, and tasting of summer.

I finally found a hammer in another drawer, and used it and my multi tool to poke a lot of holes in the can.  I used the needle nose pliers on the multitool to rip the small bridges of metal up, until I had a hole big enough to get an actual peach out with a fork I found in a drawer.

They were amazing.

When I got to the second can of corn, I cut my finger on the ripped up lid, deeply.  I dripped blood on the floor as I went to the bathroom and found some topical antibiotic and a bandage.

I wondered how long until a tube of Neosporin® would be worth more than gold.  I guessed that the answer was that it already was.  After wrapping up my finger, I looted the medicine cabinet, dumping everything into my bag – nobody would be making more medicine anytime soon.

As I walked back toward the kitchen to finish the corn, I saw an actual Leatherman® multitool on a dresser in a bedroom.  I checked – it had a can opener.  I went back to the kitchen.  Slowly, but steadily I opened the next can of food.

It was about 10 minutes after I finished eating, while I was looking for guns and ammunition, that the pain hit my abdomen.  I doubled over as waves of pain hit me.  I almost didn’t make the toilet before . . . well, before I needed to get there.  But I did make it.

After scrounging around, I found an old .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol – how old?  It looked like it might have been old enough to have served with Patton in World War Two.  There were twenty-odd rounds of ammunition and two magazines – a perfect match.  I also found some really old rifles in a closet, but no ammunition for them.

But in the hall closet?  The mother lode.  A sleeping bag and a small tent.

I put enough food into the bag for three days.  I hoped that would be enough to get me home . . . .

I left the house.  Maybe if I were a better person, I’d have buried the couple on the couch.  As it was, I was thinking more of me than them.  I headed east.  And I kept walking.

### (Until Next Week)

My guess is as we enter the third day, people are starting to get a little crazy, and not ex-girlfriend crazy, but Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre® crazy.  Our current society is built upon lots and lots of information, along with lots and lots of luxury.  I define luxury here as “stuff that’s not required to live.”  Day three will bring a deficit of both. As the snow storm pounds the East Coast and they have an epic battle to just stay alive.  In the Midwest?  Sparsely populated, and (during this story) unseasonably warm.

This meme was found here (LINK).  

What goes through someone’s head when the Sun is shining, the weather is nice, but the car won’t work, the stores are closed, and there is absolutely no information coming from anywhere?  Nothing good.  And this will be combined with declining supplies at home.

The average house has less than three days’ worth of food on hand.  The average store has less than three days’ worth of inventory.  But the stores are closed.  On day one, some people are out of diapers.  On day three?  Half the people are out of food.  And none of them know what is going on.  On day four?  We’ll get to that next week.

This meme was found here (LINK).

The reaction of the “sheriff” was an interesting one.  First, he wanted to know about what our hero had seen.  His communication channels are nearly certainly down, and getting any kind of information would be helpful in protecting his town.  Also, it looks like, he’s figured out that things will never return to normal.  That’s another unsettling thing – people won’t go after witnesses.  Why would they?  Authority is simply gone.

Would a sheriff proactively go after the bad guys after TEOTWAWKI – “taking out the trash” as he called it?  Maybe.  A good sheriff would know the troublemakers, the ones likely to cause trouble.  A good sheriff would know which people got off on a technicality.  And even a good sheriff might have a grudge.

Would scores be settled?  As to old vendettas being settled – that’s a certainty.  People are pretty good at keeping grudges, and there are some actions that are kept in check only by the threat of prison.  On day one, you’d see this behavior – scores being settled – in any medium to large size city.  On day three?  That city would be tearing itself apart.  Small, rural areas wouldn’t see that behavior that soon.  We all know each other.  To a certain extent, the Wilder family is still the new guys on the block, and we’ve lived in this house for a decade.

Regardless, as the sheriff said:  “Civilization ain’t what it used to be.”

Medicine now appears as a first time topic.  We take the current miracles of our age, antibiotics, antibiotic creams, and sterile bandages as commonplace.  And they are.  They’re also amazingly inexpensive.  However, in the past this wasn’t the case.  A simple cut on a finger if it resulted in infection, could lead to death.

Lastly, people are used to eating consistent amounts of food daily.  After intermittent (involuntary) fasting, digestive systems will change.  Yeah.  A small detail.  And maybe I’ve already said too much about that.

Yeah.  Digestive systems are icky.

“She’s the last of the V8 Interceptors.” – Mad Max

So, the only perfect car after the apocalypse is a V8 Interceptor, right?  But what does insurance cost after the end of the world as we know it?

This is part five of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You, Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde)

EMP +2, 2PM, 60 miles from home.

I could hear the big V8 engine coming about a mile away.

And that was good, because I had no idea who was driving it.  As much as I’d have loved to hitchhike home, I had the gut feeling that anyone putting that much gas into the engine had a purpose in mind that didn’t involve taking me home.

I broke for the ditch on my right, and the dubious cover of the small tree beyond – the only cover for 40 yards.

I was still wearing the camouflaged poncho – it was nearly uncomfortably warm, even on a 50°F day.  But it had the benefit of not being orange.  I got behind the tree, got low, and stayed still.

Forty seconds later a 1960’s era Camaro topped the small rise and blew past me on the road, loudly.

As the high pitch dopplered into a low pitch as it passed me and moved away I guessed that the owner had taken considerable liberty with the state laws that governed noise reduction – the car was loud, uncomfortably loud.  And it didn’t slow down – whether or not it had seen me hiding behind the shrub.  Where ever they were going, whatever they were doing, it didn’t involve me.

That was good.

After a minute, I got up, and started walking again, east, following the Camaro.

Walking is boring.  Boring, boring, boring.  Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, was also quite a philosopher – and in what was probably a pretty dismal day he wrote the following:  “People distract themselves so they don’t have time to think about how wretched they are.”  It’s not exactly what he said – he was French, but it’s close enough.

But the boredom was alternating with apprehension.  My family was miles away, and I had no idea what was happening with them.  The good news:  they had been at home.  If it weren’t winter, they would have slept through their alarms, since their alarms were all electronic, and most of them were hooked directly to the Internet, and none of that was coming back soon.  But since it was winter, someone, probably my wife, had woken up when it got cold in our bedroom.  And knew something was wrong.

They were smart, though, and I imagined that they would have figured out pretty soon that the lights were gone for good.  At least I hoped they would.  We had actually spent time talking about it, more as a thought experiment, a “what would you do if” conversation on the deck on the mild spring and fall evenings.  My apprehension was like my apprehension about being on the road – my sons and wife would be fine, except for . . . other people.  Like the people in the Camaro.  Random people who had needs, desires, or bad blood.

Borehension?  Apprehendom?  Not sure there was a word for it.  But I kept going, one foot in front of the other down the road.

The third emotion I felt was hunger.

I’m not sure that I’d ever really been hungry, in my entire life.  I was only on the second day of this trip, and I hadn’t eaten.  The emergency food rations in my backpack – 6000 calories – were five years old.  I’d never rotated them.  And they’d been kept in the trunk of my car on 110°F days during five summers.

What causes food to go bad?  Heat, light, and age.  My trunk had given them two out of three.  When I opened the package, what wasn’t hard as a rock was rotten.

I threw it away before I got hungry so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat it.  It was heavy, and it was useless.

I couldn’t remember when the last time I had gone a day without food.  It was probably a few years ago.  But there hadn’t been many of them.  Now I was on my second day without food, and I had probably been burning 10,000 calories a day between biking, walking, and shivering at night in the cold.

But this part of the Midwest was nice for walking.  It was flat, and the roads ran straight – unless there was a river, lake, or hill, the roads went due north and due south, and there was one nearly every mile.  And I needed to head due East, so I kept going East.

And my feet hurt.  I worried about getting blisters.  If I had to finish this on foot, which looked likely at this point, blisters were my biggest enemy.  Outside of people I didn’t know.  Like the guys in the Camaro.

As I crested the next small rise I saw another farmhouse about a half mile off.  The Camaro was there.

I stopped and sat down, off the road, back into the ditch to watch.  No reason to highlight my silhouette against the ridgeline.

Two gunshots.  Separated by about fifteen seconds.

A minute later, two people got walked out of the house and got into the Camaro®, and started it up with a load roar.  They backed up, and then the tires threw out gravel as the driver gunned the engine, fishtailing as they straightened out the car onto the main road.

Headed straight back toward me.  And I had no illusions.  They were armed.  And their intentions weren’t good.

And I was a witness.

Meanwhile, in the big city to the north . . .

Tim looked out and saw that three houses in the next block were on fire.  He had gone to help, but all he could do was stand outside with neighbors that he’d never talked to as everything they owned burned.  He’d thought about inviting them to his house, but, again, he didn’t know them.  Maybe their next door neighbors would invite them in.  Or maybe there was an empty house they could stay in, until things returned back to normal.

He and his wife, Arlene, had some firewood, and had kept the house warm that first night, but now the firewood was low.  They mainly used the fireplace on Saturday nights, only.  And that was for atmosphere.

Tim had walked the half mile to the supermarket, and saw that it was closed.  But it wasn’t closed.  The windows had been broken out, and walking through the sliding doors that had been permanently pulled open, and nothing but darkened chaos inside.  Tim didn’t see a single item on the shelves, as far as he could see.  Nothing.  The store was empty.

Tim walked back home.  Not a car on the streets.  At his front door, he called out, “Arlene-ee, I’m home.”  No answer.

His next door neighbor, who he had stood with as his house burned, came down the hall.

“Can I help you?”

### (Until Next Week)

I typed in “Cover, Concealment, and Camouflage” into my browser.  What popped up?  The first link was Crosman®, the BB and pellet gun manufacturer.  On their page, they have copied the USMC Marine Rifle Squad Field Manual.  I guess I love these guys now.  Oh, who am I kidding.  I already have a pellet pistol and rifle from them.  Here’s their link (LINK).

Cover is what protects you from being shot, like a log, a tank, or hiding behind your mom – to be clear, not my mom, but your mom.  Concealment is what protects you from being seen, like a log, a tree, a hill, or hiding behind your mom.  And Camouflage is the use of manmade and natural material to avoid being seen, like incorporating brush to break up your outline, or using mud or charcoal to make sure your face doesn’t shine, or using camouflage clothing to blend in.  Your mom is awful camouflage, since she can be seen from space, and everyone stares at her because she’s so big.

But when moving through territory where you’re a stranger, or, you just don’t want to be seen?  Concealment and camouflage are critical.  Except they won’t work for your mom – she couldn’t hide behind a hot air balloon.  But your momma didn’t read Pascal.

Guess this was before Facebook®?

Pascal really did say something like the quote in the story.  He really was quite a philosopher – his book, Pensees, published in 1670 (read it here for free), showed that even back then mankind had a tendency to want to distract themselves so that they didn’t have to think about their actions.  “People distract themselves so they don’t have time to think about how wretched they are.”  Yup.  We do.

Back then?  Books were the distractions.  Then plays.  Music.  Radio.  Television.  Comic books.  Video games.  The Internet – Facebook®, Twitter©, SnapCat™, and MySpace®.  Everyone’s still on Myspace®, right?  And don’t forget work.  Anything so you don’t have to think about yourself, the consequences of your actions, and if you’re doing the things that follow your values, or, if religious, the values of your religion.

Yeah, tough.

Now imagine being in the culture where we are surrounded by Weapons of Mass Distraction on a continual basis.  And then they’re all gone – except for books and comics.

What will that do psychologically to the survivors?  I mean, you’ve lost everything, but the biggest thing you’ve lost is the ability to forget yourself.  I imagine depression and suicide will be pretty popular – people who will end themselves rather than confront themselves.  I sure hope you all like that quote when I put it on Facebook® complete with a cat or a bikini girl sitting on a 1960’s Camaro©!

And, yup.  A 1960’s era Camaro® has no systems to be impacted by an EMP.

Imagine, all of these things will work after an EMP. 

Americans, for the most part, haven’t felt hunger since the Depression®.  There isn’t a lot of evidence that many Americans died during the Depression™ due to hunger, but there were plenty of people that were hungry, but even then few people died due to malnutrition.

To clarify how pampered we are as a society:  a day or two after Hurricane Katrina, my wife and I were watching the coverage of that unfolding tragedy.  Someone on CNN® got on the air and said that PEOPLE WERE EATING PEOPLE IN THE SUPERDOME® DUE TO HUNGER.  Now, like I’ve said before, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a day without food.  But to go full cannibal after two or three days?  What?

I mean, if I was really hungry . . . maybe . . .

NO!

NO ONE EATS SOMEONE AFTER THREE DAYS WITHOUT FOOD.  NO ONE.

I mean, unless that was a normal thing for them from before.

But we are so very used to a normal flow of calories that it’s difficult for anyone to conceive of going a day without food.  What about a week?  Two weeks?

After an EMP that would certainly happen people will get hungry.  And that’s not unusual during human history.  During the Medieval times, what did the peasants do?  Drink and party all winter?  No.  They huddled in cold houses under blankets after eating the bare minimum to survive the winter.  They hardly did anything all winter long.  Because they were peasants.  And it sucked.  And their wifi was really slow, too.  But they didn’t get blisters.  Just kidding, they got lots of blisters, because they were peasants.

Blisters are horrible, and can cause fatal infections if not properly treated.  Thankfully our protagonist has extra socks, disinfectant, and Neosporin® if he gets a blister.  But they will ruin his progress if they get too bad.  But he can count on his neighbors to help, right?

Well, not necessarily.  How well do you know your neighbors?  I was sitting outside tonight making sure The Boy didn’t inadvertently crush himself as he changed the oil in the Wildermobile®.  He was using jack stands under the front axle for the first time, and I wanted to make sure he didn’t mess up.  Thankfully, I only had to offer two or three life-saving tips, and three or four car-saving tips.

What showed up while I watched him work?

A neighbor dog.  A sweet terrier with a flowered collar and a Denver Broncos® bandana.  Which of my neighbors liked the Broncos®?  They’re not a team in favor, here.  It wasn’t my new neighbors to the north.  Maybe the new ones to the northeast?  Sadly, even here in rural Upper South Midwestia, I don’t know my neighbors well enough.  Modern life seems to be set up to separate us – we have little time between work and kid sports and kid clubs and everything else.

We’ll see what happens to Tim, but it’s not likely that he’ll be with us too long.  He seems woefully unprepared.  Like your mom.

“I thought I was prepared.  I knew the theory, I . . . reality’s different.” – Interstellar

Heh heh.  During the hurricane we were in, I think we gained weight.

This is part III of a series of life after an Electromagnetic Pulse Takes down much of the electronics that form the systems that allow us to live our lives in the relative luxury we have today . . . part I is here (Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You) and part II is here (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word)).  As always, comments on inaccuracies are welcome – I’ve learned quite a bit about our systems writing these, and love getting the feedback to make them more realistic.

Okay, back to the story . . . our hero has realized that an EMP has occurred, secured transportation, and is heading home.

THE TOWN HAD BEEN quiet as I had pedaled through.  Not many people are out at 3am, and almost none of them are happy about it.  In a town this size, I bet there wasn’t more than one cop on duty when the power went away.

The wind was at my back, and a pretty stiff one today.  It was okay.  The road was clear of traffic and there’s a stillness when you’re going the same speed as the wind.  It’s odd – you are travelling at 20 miles per hour (same as the wind), but there is not a hint of wind.  It’s also nice, because when you bicycle in cool air, your feet and hands get very cold.  Because you’re going with the wind, you can hear much better than someone just standing outside in the wind – your senses aren’t supernatural, but it certainly feels that way.

South out of town with the north wind at my back, I thought about the trip ahead.  I’d become so used to using either my phone for a map or the GPS that I knew there wasn’t one in the car.  It had been a long time since I’d seen a map in a convenience store.  Heck, it had been a long time since I’d seen a magazine in one.  But the trip ahead was fairly simple – head south and then head east.  That was where home was.

There was one big city between here and home – hundreds of thousands of people.

And that was the danger.  It wasn’t cold.  It wasn’t planes falling from the sky.  It was people.  And there were, probably, about a million between me and home.  The last thing I wanted to do was to go through them, even if I could do it today before things became really chaotic.

My bet was that I could head south and then loop around to the east.  From memory, there weren’t many people at all along that route, and if I could make 120 miles or so, I could turn east.

And it was mostly quiet.

For the most part, all of the little towns I passed through might have a gas station and a small diner, but the route I was on was pretty unpopulated.

About hour two, or forty miles according to the mile markers, I heard a low rumbling off to the east.  I pulled the bike to a stop and looked.  A small, bright orange spot was visible on the horizon, with a thick, black cloud beginning to form above it.

I pulled a water bottle out of my backpack and took a long drink.  Nice thing about the day being cool was the water was cool, too, about 60°F.

I wondered for a second on what could have caused the explosion on the horizon.  I vaguely recalled that there was a crude oil refinery off in that direction.  Yeah, that was probably it.  Refineries are run very efficiently, and lots and lots of automated valves and switches and such allowed them to run with only a few people.  But all of those were electronic.  Looks like something failed.

As I watched, in fairly quick succession I saw two more fireballs.  I straddled my bike and waited.  About a minute and a half later, I heard the twin rumbles from the new explosions.  Fifteen miles?  Twenty?  Certainly far enough that I don’t have to worry about hazardous vapors on this trip.  I put the bottle back in my pack and continued pedaling.  There are things I can fix and things I can’t.  Exploding refineries after an EMP were definitely in the latter category.

Most of the small towns had forgettable names and were so small that I was through them in three or four blocks, and they looked mostly deserted, though I did see smoke from quite a few chimneys.  The strength in this area, at least, is that most of the actual homes (versus the trailer homes) were built back before piped in natural gas, before electricity.  They’d be warm, as long as the inhabitants had wood to burn.  Of course, there’d be house fires as chimneys not used in decades were used by people who’d not used a fireplace or woodstove in as many decades.

At last I came to a big enough city that I’d heard the name before.  It looked to be a mile or so on a side.  I decided it was a city that was big enough that I didn’t want to risk going through it.

I decided to skirt it to the east – it looked like the most of the city was to the west of the road that I was on, so, a quick detour a mile west might be all that I needed to do.

After going a mile east, I turned south again.  A mile later?  I was staring at a dead end, caused by a river.

It was noon.  I had two options.  I could head back to the city, where I was reasonably certain that there was a bridge, or I could head farther east, where, in sparsely populated country like this I might not see another bridge for miles.

I decided to chance the city.  It was small, I told myself, and a lone guy on a bicycle wasn’t much of a threat, right?  Although my legs were getting a bit tired (I hadn’t biked in three years) I felt a surge of adrenaline as I neared the city.  I got up speed.  It turned out this road entered the city right at the bridge.  There were a few people at the bridge, but no physical barriers or any sort of road block.  There were a few shouted questions “Hey, what’s going on out there?” as I went by, but that was all.  I just smiled and waved.

I noticed some of the men were armed, but nobody raised a weapon toward me as I headed away from the town.

I kept on going south without further incident.  I headed east, more or less directly toward home after I’d gone about 120 miles south.  No hypotenuse for me.  Straight south, then straight east.

I turned east in another quiet, small town.  I pedaled with the mild evening wind for about an hour until I came to a small streambed.

It was secluded, three miles since the last house, and there were trees all around the stream.  Good.  I found firewood, plus a small, secluded grassy patch.  I got some small sticks, and piled up some of the sandstone from the creek bed for a fire ring.  I pulled out my knife and turned one stick into a “fuzz stick” – a lot of small, shallow cuts into the stick, leaving the wood together so that it looked like a fuzzy stick when done.  If you don’t have paper – it’s a great way to start a fire since it has so much surface area.  I also gathered handfuls of dried, dead grass (easy to find in February!) and added in some very small sticks.

If you don’t have lots of matches, make each one count.  Spend the time preparing to make the fire before you strike the match.  And I had no idea if I could even make it home in three days.  A big snowstorm might set me back for days, or weeks.  And how many matches did we have at home?  It was time to save them all.

The small fire was nice.  I’m not sure if it was the light or the warmth, but it was pleasant, unlike my butt, which was very sore, and I’m sure I’d feel fire in my legs tomorrow.  As I went to sleep that night in my makeshift tarp-tent, I was completely unaware that this would be my last completely peaceful day until I got home.

### (until next Monday)

The first day after a catastrophe like this is bound to be filled with a tremendous amount of inaction – nobody will know quite what to do.  Everyone will walk by the switch on the wall and flip it, expecting, believing that the light will come on.  We’ve been conditioned for that.  Ultimately, the vast majority of people will believe that things will return to normal, even when it’s clear that they never will.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks in his book The Black Swan about how his family talks about what they’ll do when Lebanon returns to normal, which at this point no one thinks will ever happen, even though the Civil War that tore Lebanon apart started in 1975, 43 years ago.  Lebanon had been one of the most advanced countries on earth, but now large areas of the country are considered “no go” for almost anyone with a modicum of sanity.  But people expect that one day . . . it will return to normal.

This is wonderful.  If the lights are going to come back on, slaughtering that neighbor that played the music really loud (Bon Jovi?  Really?) while you were trying to sleep is a bad idea.  If the lights are done?  So is that neighbor.  Scores will be settled, especially if it involves Bon Jovi.

During that first day, people will begin to understand that maybe this catastrophe is different.  Outside of every catastrophe that has hit the United States in history, this one isn’t regional.  90% of the unaffected population won’t be available to turn to for help, which happens today after a hurricane or volcano or Rosie O’Donnell-created earthquake.

A regional incident means that the region is going to be helped.  A national or global event?  You’re on your own.  Every rule changes.  Think you own that second house down by the lake?  I think the family that moved into it might not care.  And neither will the sheriff.

But there is one place where the time delay between civilization and Mad Max® level insanity is thinnest:

Modern cities.

Win a sports title in a modern city and you can be happy if only two people are killed and the arson is limited to a small area near downtown.  The larger the city, the quicker the violence hits, and the more violent it will be.  Google® “Selco” if you want to hear the grim stories from his survival in the cities during the Balkans War in the 1990’s.  And those were cities that had spent years under the Communist® system with people who were used to working around failing systems.  Imagine Baltimore when things go really bad?

Again, in a catastrophe like this – avoid cities and other people at all costs.

I hinted around that there are other infrastructure pieces that will have issues after an EMP.  Refineries, pipelines, and power plants are absolutely dependent upon control systems that pull data from the boiling oil or high pressure natural gas and use it to make decisions. Many times those decisions are made at millisecond speed via computer without any input from a human required.  And without those systems?  At best, the pipelines and refineries and power plants won’t work.  At worst?  Systems that are used for safety won’t work.  Normally, everything is designed to go to a safe state.  But those safe states often rely on there being power, even battery power.  There will be some failures in those safety systems.  If we’re lucky, it just wrecks equipment, and not result in huge fireballs.

Nuclear power plants are a special case (and not in a good way), which we’ll discuss in a future post.

Oh, and the fuzz stick thing?  It works really well.