Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV, and The Golden Horde

“I don’t need a receipt for a doughnut, man.  I give you the money, you give me the doughnut, end of transaction.  We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this.  I just cannot imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought doughnut.” – Dr. Katz

This is how I imagine dogs imagine the end of the world.

Bringing you up to speed:  our hero has been trying to get home after an EMP – bringing about what is known as The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) or The Stuff Hits The Fan (TSHTF).  The first day on the road went pretty well.  But, you know, that can’t keep up, can it?

Previous posts are:

• 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!

The next day?

EMP + 1, Noon.  111 miles from home.

Sound, at sea level, travels at about 1125 feet per second.

The velocity of a bullet from an AR-15 is about 3,200 feet per second.  And from a hunting rifle, say, a .30-06?  It travels about 2,800 feet per second.

Those numbers explain why I heard a soft splat on the asphalt in front of my bike wheel, then the buzzing sound of the bullet tumbling end-over-end in a ricochet off the ground before I heard the report from the rifle that fired the bullet.

If I had enough sensitive timing equipment, I could have even given a pretty good estimate of how far away the shooter was.

The average reaction time for a human to a stimulus that they’ve been waiting for is about a 0.25 seconds.  But when you’re in a car?  Some studies say 1.5 seconds.  Others say 2.5 seconds.  All I can say is that as soon as I realized that someone was shooting at me I hit both the front and rear brakes as hard as I could.  I think I was going about 20 miles per hour.  I probably pulled too hard on the front brake – the wheel locked and I went tumbling over the top of the bike, at least partially sideways, onto my right shoulder.

I tucked and rolled as I hit the asphalt, my backpack whipping me up in the air as I rolled up on and over it.  Rolling was better than sliding, and far better than holding my arm out and having my shoulder dislocated.

I came to a stop, my bike somehow in front of me.  It must have flipped over me and slid on the road.

My front bike tire jerked and popped, and then I heard another shot.

Adrenaline filling my system, time seemed to slow down.  I could see two immediate options – first, slip into the ditch near the road and get the hell out of here.  Second?  Play dead.

The second shot into the bike made that decision easy – they weren’t shooting to warn.  They were shooting to kill.  Thankfully they were lousy shots.

And the day had been going so well.

The first day’s ride had been great and mostly uneventful.  This morning I’d woken up with the Sun, but was so very sore, especially my butt.  I folded up my tarp, Mylar blanket, and poured some water on the fire.  My Lifestraw worked, and I filled up water bottles from a (barely) flowing creek bed by taking successive mouthfuls in and spitting them into the bottle.  It wasn’t exactly hygienic, but it was also unlikely that I’d give myself Ebola, cooties, or zombie plague.  The water was cool, but tasted . . . a bit off.  I trusted that the Lifestraw’s guarantee was good, even though it was unlikely that I’d ever be able to collect it wasn’t.

For the second day, I was averaging over 20 miles per hour.  The wind was at my back.  I could see smoke rising from where I thought the big city was, and wondered how bad things were getting there.  Thankfully, I was a good 40 miles south of the big city.  But when I was getting ready to cross under the Interstate a half mile east, and then my friend, the lousy shot, changed my plans.

And I was here in this damn ditch.

Thankfully the two-lane road that I’d been on was lined with trees on either side.  I got up, ran into the hedgerow and then out of the trees and into a pasture that was blocked from view of the overpass.  I pulled a camouflage rain poncho out of my pack – it was probably better visual cover than the orange t-shirt I was wearing, and started running back east the way I’d came.  There weren’t any shots, but the thought crossed my mind that they might be sending someone out to check on me.

I didn’t intend to be there when they got to my bike.  I did recall seeing another small creek about half a mile back.  I trotted in the pasture until I got there.  I noticed my legs were itching, and looked down.  Evidently I’d jogged through a batch of stick tights, and my jeans and socks were covered in at least three different types of them:  devil’s claw, cocklebur, and burr-grass.

No time to deal with that now.  I kept going.

I followed the stream bed, attempting to keep my feet on the flat sandstone slabs in the creek bed.  As I got a half a mile away, I stopped.  I’d built up a lot of heat under the plastic poncho, and I pulled it off.  I then took the multi-tool from my pack and started pulling the stick tights out of my pants.  Eventually I gave up and took the pants and socks off so I could pull all of them out.  It took about 20 minutes, and I heard no pursuit, but that didn’t surprise me.

I imagined that whoever shot at me wasn’t going to follow very far.  They’d made their point.  I wondered what had caused them to behave that way?  My only guess was that they were pretty close to the city, and that someone had decided to do a joy ride in an older car that still worked after the EMP, and had brought the city fathers together in a posse to protect the approaches to the town.

I got finished with sticker duty, and it was now about 2pm.  I kept following the riverbank south, until I hit a railroad – which was headed due east.  Right where I wanted to be going.  If followed the railroad tracks, walking briskly, until I saw the Interstate.  The Interstate crossed over the railroad, and then the railroad crossed over the last big river between here and home.  I decided not to linger on the highly visible railway – I decided to keep jog as fast as possible under the Interstate and over the river.

Nothing.  Today.  Tomorrow?  I imagine a bright boy at the city that was defending the Interstate would see this as a vulnerability that they’d have to solve and place a fire team to cover the bridge.

As it was, I made it past the bridge, and kept walking on sparsely populated farm roads well into the night.  I avoided the two medium-sized towns, and then about 2AM, decided make a small fire about two miles from the nearest farmhouse in a small grove of trees and sleep.

I was exhausted.  I was, I guessed, 75 miles from home.  I missed the bike very much – I’d be four or five hours from home, at most.  Now?  A day?  Two days of walking?

That seemed like forever, especially on a day where I’d been shot at the first time in my life.  What would happen next?  I slept, and the rough ground wasn’t an issue.  I was exhausted.

### (Until Next Monday)

I’ve never been shot at.  But one thing that I’ve been told is, “don’t point a gun at someone unless you’re ready to shoot at them.”  I think this would be the rule in a catastrophic collapse, and also in the event that we have the long, slow collapse or civil insurrection I’m actually expecting.  Eventually, we’ll get there if things go south.

But why did we get in the story to the point where people, namely your protagonist, were getting shot at so quickly?

My thoughts are that being close to a big city when things collapse is like having a Martian death-ray pointed at your head.  People in big cities are barely under control when the economy is booming, the benefits are flowing, and the cops are out in force.  The cops won’t be at work long during a collapse scenario – they’ll be protecting their family, not yours – that’s backed up by recent experience during hurricanes like hurricane Katrina.

John Wesley, Rawles wrote about this and uses the metaphor of “The Golden Horde.”  Yes, I know there’s an odd comma in there, and no, it’s not a typo.  It’s the way Mr. Rawles chooses to do his name – ask him, not me.  Anyway, his quote on the subject from his blog (LINK) is:

As the comfort level in the cities rapidly drops to nil, there will be a massive involuntary outpouring from the big cities and suburbs into the hinterboonies. This is the phenomenon that my late father, Donald Robert Rawles–a career particle physics research administrator at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories–half-jokingly called “The Golden Horde.” He was of course referring to the Mongol Horde of the 13th Century, but in a modern context. (The Mongol rulers were chosen from the ‘Golden Family’ of Temujin. Hence the term “The Golden Horde.”) I can remember as a child, my father pointing to the hills at the west end of the Livermore Valley, where we then lived. He opined: “If The Bomb ever drops, we’ll see a Golden Horde come swarming over those hills [from Oakland and beyond] of the like that the world has never seen. And they’ll be very unpleasant, believe you me!”

And I think that Mr. Rawles is right.  And the operative distance where the Golden Horde will show up?  About a half a gas tank.  That’s, on average, how much will be in a tank.  So, if you’re more than 150 miles from a major city, that’s a start.  I cannot stress enough that this is the biggest threat that anyone can conceive of during a collapse.

Most people aren’t 150 miles from a city.  And the people 40 miles due south of the big city, in this case several hundred thousand people?  They’ll get hit early, and hard.  In this fictional state, they’re also armed.  You won’t be coming down the Interstate to get them.  The tractors will pull cars to block the exits, and nothing will get off the Interstate alive.  Country boys aren’t necessarily great at long shots of 500 yards plus, but they will learn very quickly.  And they won’t waste ammo on warning shots.  The dead body in the road will be the warning.  Or they could just post a sign that says “no PEZ® this exit” – that might work as well.

So why did they shoot at fictional me?  They probably got a dose of the Golden Horde early.  And a dose of people coming to your town with no good intent would make you distrust almost everyone you didn’t personally know.  The closer you are, the more intense the outbound pressure will be.  And normal people living in the cities will do almost anything once they realize the old rules are gone and the new ones won’t be coming back.  I think it will take longer in the suburbs where the nuclear family with the 2.1 kids feel that they have too much to lose and will be certain that the old times will be coming back.

When they lose it, and start hiking or driving out?  Ouch.

But more about that next Monday, probably.  Or the Monday after that.  But definitely probably next Monday.

I have a knapsack in every car that I drive over 20 miles from home.  In each of these knapsacks I have a Lifestraw®.  I have no idea if they work well, other than the Internet, which says that they’re pretty good.  But the nice thing is that they’re $20, which allows me to have three of them for $60, and that’s less than a single water filtration pump.  Of which I also have three four.  Water is important.  It’s not as good as beer, wine, or whiskey, but it’s still important.

Which brings up another point – if your life is on the line, redundancy is key.  “Two is one and one is none,” is the phrase most commonly used among preppers.  And it makes sense.  You’re entering an environment where every preconception you had about life has been shattered.  Constitutional rights?  Probably not a big selling point for the Warlord Trevor from Brentwood.  Having several ways to get water makes sense.

I actually have one of those camouflage ponchos mentioned above in each of my packs.  I bought them for about $16, and they were pretty thick stuff.  My theory if you’re using the emergency bag is you’re either wanting to be seen (most likely) or not wanting to be seen (EMP level stuff).  The ponchos are good.  They have multiple purposes.  And when you put them on, you’re invisible!

Okay, you’re not invisible.  But when you properly use camouflage, you’re horribly hard to see.  I can attest to being shocked during a paintball game when a camouflaged friend stepped out of a tree and I had NO idea he was there.  And he was 20 feet from me.  And I was looking for him.  Camouflage, properly used, is like magic.  And they are really good at keeping you dry.

Which is good, but invisible would be better if people were shooting at you.

Heck, invisible would be awesome most days.  Then I could sneak into the snack room at work and not feel guilty about eating a whole donut, rather than cutting one in half.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t feel guilty about taking the last cup of coffee.  Why would I feel guilty about taking the last doughnut?  It’s JUNGLE RULES!