TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold

“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.