TEOTWAWKI Part X: Gump, Wheat, and Chill: Now With 100% Less Netflix

“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.