Sharecropping The Apocalypse: A Prepper is Cast Adrift Page 5

  “Sure I will, Julie grab that box of goods we got together for them please.” David asked and wondered if he should go talk to the old man himself.

  “You need some help?’ Sally asked Julie who was starting to get up.

  “No I got it.” Julie replied hurrying away from the table as Sally sat herself back down.

  “They ain`t getting even a nat`s ass glimpse of what’s behind that door!’ Julie thought resolutely as she made her way back to the house. “It is bad enough that they will probably be trying to figure out what we got food wise put up based upon what we are giving away to them” she fumed. They might start thinking something foolish as soon as they got their box of goods like ”oh since they gave us two cans of beanie weenies then that must mean they got at least 8 more cans they kept for themselves.

  Or maybe they would imagine that this must be the least favorite kind of food we had to give up and what kind of other delicacies were we holding back from them? They damn sure didn’t need to see all the gear inside neither. What passed for a living room in the small house had prepper gear like bug out bags scattered about that needed to be secured better.

  Julie came back shortly to the picnic table with the box and left the shotgun inside figuring it was no longer being used as necessary deterrent, however she did retain the comfort of her pistol.

  “That will get you by for more than a week if you’re careful.” Julie advised.

  “Yea get innovative in the kitchen, chili con carne over spaghetti isn’t bad and you will fall in love with cream of chicken soup and rice.” David said making some recipe suggestions.

  “Humm chili con carne, Chili without beans huh? Never seen it before, sounds like a meat sauce.” Sally said examining a can.

  “Yea it is, think of a chili hotdog. This is what David used to make them with. Its Hormel brand so the can stores longer than most other brands.” Julie told them becoming much more relaxed while talking about hard timing or comfort food. David and she had a ton of made up recipes and ad hoc ways to fix things in the pantry that they ate if they didn’t want to go to the store or couldn’t afford too already.

  “Well we really appreciate it. Thank you!” Sally beamed and gave Julie a hug.

  David deftly avoided getting hugged himself and changed the subject.

  “Hey Will, do you know anything about trapping or snaring?” David inquired.

  “No, unless a box and a piece of string counts.” Will said smiling.

  Out of his own personal meanness, frugalness or just his own thoughts on his chances of personal survivability he wasn’t going to give up even one modern animal cable snare. David had decided to give the neighbors on this case to just supply the bare minimum of knowledge about snaring with homemade snares and said nothing of his stash of commercially made ones. Commercial snares made from aircraft cable could make all the difference in the world in greatly enhancing his own personal chances for success.

  He had decided in regards to whoever else came to him or his door in need of or begging for food that he would claim to be only getting food for himself by foraging, hunting and a bit of trapping using what ever bits of wire or strong cordage he had around the place to catch the occasional small animal for the pot with a snare.

  His soon to be newly initiated greenhorn neighbor amateur trappers stood much less chance of success with their own clumsy and most likely flimsy attempts to ensnare some sustenance. Thus they were much less competition to his own trap lines success rate in providing game for his table.

  Hells bells, he muttered to himself. He already knew they would be most likely thinking about asking him for some spare bits of wire or string to construct a snare once he mentioned the concept and explained the basics. He would tell them he had none to spare of course and also tell them he was sorry for that fact, but he would tell them how to scavenge some usable material that their non prepper minds would have taken awhile to come up with on their own.

  The solution to not lending snare wire was very easy and obvious; every household has a bunch of electrical cords. Strip the plastic off and harvest the copper wire and twist or untwist it into the appropriate size wire for whatever critter it is your going after. Pull the wire off of pictures etc. Unwind an electric motor, get your Xmas decorations out just search around where ever your imagination takes you and locate the means to survive for yourself.

  David decided he would give the neighbors the old U.S. Army Survival manual he had gathering dust on the bookshelf for whatever good it might do them. Without a seasoned instructor around to explain some of the principles to them of hazy illustrations he doubted they would get much out of it but it would damn sure keep them busy and maybe give them some hope or success while keeping them out of his hair.

  Knowing that he was most likely only prolonging the inevitable by these actions and putting the curse of prolonged starvation on these folks weighed heavy on his mind, but he saw no other recourse. He had a very limited supply of commercially made modern snares and had already mentally committed to share some of this finite precious commodity with a different neighbor he had chosen as a hunting buddy.

  His neighbor Mike had two young kids and a wife to tend to, as well as an elderly mother to care for at the end of the road. Mike had recently medically retired from the Army as a maintenance Sergeant and had come home to his country boy roots. Despite an occasional bad back ailing the man, his assistance would factor in heavily in David’s long term survival plan and keeping that family ahead on the survival game was on his pepper’s agenda.

  David rarely saw or associated with these neighbors much except to wave to them as they drove up and down the mutually shared dead end road. David had spent some time talking to Mike and his wife about prepping and mutually helping each other out after a hurricane when the couple had first moved in, but nothing really more after that. Now it was time to renew the friendships and mutual assistance pacts before Mike ventured down to David’s on his own to ask him if he could most likely help him with some dire food shortage needs.

  One thing that worried and concerned David quite a bit in these trying times was the levels of desperation people were reaching. Particularly of concern to him were the family men, the head of households who were hunters that lived in the cities and had families to feed. They must have been already rounding up their hunting buddies and holding meetings if they were able to meet up weeks ago. Some groups of hunters are just occasional friends from work that gather a few times a season, some have always lived in a neighborhood and grew up hunting with their country cousins. Hundreds of different backgrounds and ranges of experiences were represented, but starving groups of men were coming to the woods or were already in the woods silently praying for a shot at some game or trying to dream up some way to feed their brood.

  Talking about moving out of the house to the country was being debated in earnest amongst the hunting club squires of the city who had country club like hunting retreats to consider going to as the city began to slowly tear itself apart.

  The large and small elite private hunting clubs, big game guides, birddog handlers, professional anglers etc. all had them some personal and professional plans on occupying certain large tracks of prime hunting land.

  “The unrealistic among these affluent hunter survivors was that they thought the land could provide for them and their family’s needs until the power came back on. Well to be honest, no one really knew or could say when the power would come back on.” David mused while thinking possibly that these people were just more optimistic than him about the chances of turning the nation’s great cities power back on again. There were lots of smaller cities in states to the west that had anything from regular to sporadic power still on and maybe they could throw some help this way.

  Those cities with remaining operable utilities must be filled to beyond capacity as the destitute swarming masses of humanity from the east and west coast tried to converge on them in hopes of warm shelter and some food.

&nbs
p; David knew better than try bugging out to get to a working city. There was nothing there for him, no future or self-reliant freedoms to retain. His only hope of surviving was to remain on his land and depend on his preps and luck to hold out where he was at.

  He was sure that there were people right now who were making uninformed or mostly bad decisions right and left while making heroic efforts to get to these so called sanctuaries of modern living, but he was not having anything to do with it. Beyond the fact that a cyber-attack had wiped out infrastructure for the majority of the United States, as soon as that swarm of unprepared people hit a city and began to use up its scarce resources the first responders would be overwhelmed in short order and then what? Hell keeping that many first responders helping refugees and away from the rest of the nation and in the rear with the gear as it were, took all the manpower and resources this country had and then some.

  You probably couldn’t even buy gas and oil within 500 miles of those places now anyway, even if you had the hard currency to travel cross country it was a suckers bet because there was no guarantee you would find any gas to buy. There were already government imposed travel restrictions and from what little bit of chatter David could pick up on the shortwave channels of his AM/FM radio, gas stations as well as all refineries ,stocks and reserves of gasoline and oil were under federal government control. There was no gas around David’s small town except what folks had stored in a shed for the lawnmower or had dwindling rapidly in their vehicles gas tanks. Gas rationing for his particular county was thought to begin a month from now if they could get some trucks through and those rations were on a priority for fire and medical .There existed the unknown probability for civilians how much gas might be possibly allocated to them if any.

  It was evident to David that strife and brutal lawlessness would soon get the upper hand in the general population and whichever terrorist or state sponsored agency that had hacked our computers was sure to exploit things as best they could by making things much worse.

  The world hadn’t ended yet for the rest of the nation, but as far as David was concerned, the shit had already hit the fan on his end of the road and was here to stay. When hard winter hits a several months from now, it was a given that untold millions would soon be dead, much sooner for those in snow prone states. He didn’t have any second guesses about his status or geographical location, winter kills north or south. I guess the lists of the dead will be getting longer now as each hour passes.

  David had anticipated deaths shadow coming for a visit weeks ago, now was the time for him to start barring his door to it. The first door being locked of course was to the neighbors. They would just have to make do until he figured something else out or hopefully they would leave for greener pastures on their own. Putting the fear of God in them about that nuclear plant up the road was hopefully just a mean trick and not a portent of his own need to flee the area.

  David and Julie said farewell to Will and Sally and returned to the house and the chores of reorganizing it.

  2

  Chapter 2

  Death Rides A Cold Horse

  Whoever had unleashed that cyber-attack or whatever it was that hit America including the possible use of scalar electromagnetic pulse weapons on the US infrastructure, hadn’t as of yet, well that was as far as public knew anyway, taken any credit for doing it at this time or given a reason. A Cyber-attack is not the very clear and definable smoke plume coming out of a missile on somebody’s foreign shore. ... Also one must consider it’s not just the idea of the detection part of it; it's also how you choose to respond, or maybe rather when you respond. ... You may want to watch an attack play out inside your system so you understand more about it, or you might be seeing if it left any backdoors or Trojan viruses on your computer server if you are going to setoff a major counterattack. ... You may not always want to let the other side to you know “know that you know” that they are the ones attacking you and you caught them at it.

  Your response may be that you want to hit them back immediately, or maybe you want to let it settle a while and design something particularly devilish or a cyber and electronic attack of your own as a response that totally overwhelms any counterattack...

  Whatever was going on in the darkening big world, David knew to wait on several other shoes that were going to drop as battle plans now were most likely being scaled up to what is called increased asymmetric warfare. Something is coming, and the executive branch of our government has been planning for it for a long time. Whether this attack is from without or from within, the chance of a violent end to our way of life is scary real.

  Asymmetric warfare deals with vulnerabilities, leverages, and our centralized power grid was America’s greatest vulnerability. The enemy, whoever they were, had just played their first card in this little game of snuffing the candle out on civilization and David’s military background understood asymmetric warfare as the following steps.

  (1) A long insertion phase in peacetime, when the WMD/weapons-of-mass-destruction and teams are inserted, and then

  (2) An operations phase, when the inserted teams start unleashing the weapons of mass destruction (anthrax, smallpox, nuclear explosions, whatever).

  “The operations phase is now upon us, and the next month or so to use a Chinese phrase – will be “interesting times”. Well we know we had state sponsored terrorists and spies running around in the US of every ilk for some time, just what kind of crap they were going to release now and how we were going to respond militarily was anybody’s guess. It is almost certain that some of these portable weapons have also been inserted into the U.S”. David mused shuddering and went back to his tasks at hand after one final thought.

  “So this next year or so if he and Julie could somehow survive all its hardships would be almost biblical in scope and its scale of misery and death. These coming bad times will certainly be falling into the realm of what the Chinese so laconically refer to as “interesting times”.

  He and the Prepper community for years had been warning others that there are plenty of ingenious evil minds out there that are at work daily finding nefarious ways in which they can wreak terror and havoc upon other nations…It’s a real threat, very tangible and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our efforts to prepare, and that’s why it is so important to be vigilant and advocate for more safeguards to our power grid system.

  David sat up in his deer stand quietly but still impatiently awaiting an animal to come by. He normally didn’t hunt so close to the house, instead preferring for deer to think the paths that crisscrossed his backyard and orchard as a free zone to be safely traveled so that he could observe their wanderings and migratory movements. Today though he needed to bag one and he knew their traditional approaches to his property well. He had observed the deer utilizing various trails so many times that if he put his mind to it you could almost set a clock on his predictions of when and where they would be seen.

  The squirrels suddenly stopped thumping in the litter. The blue jays quit their shrill piping. And there he was. A beautiful six point buck. The deer didn't weave through the saplings or step into the clearing as he was normally was apt to do. He was just suddenly there on the edge of the woods tentatively looking around and listening. Fifty yards ahead, a bit farther than David liked with a shotgun but fine all the same. David didn’t want a chance for the deer to get spooked and return to the scrub so he took the shot. BANG! And it was over and David climbed down from his tree stand after waiting a bit to be sure the animal died and didn’t run off wounded before he went to check out his prize.

  David positioned the deer’s head laying downhill so that when he cut its throat the carcass would bleed out more quickly and thoroughly. While performing the task he grumbled to himself about how hard this pioneering living was if you were trying to stay clean and preserve water. He wiped his knifes blade clean with some fallen leaves and headed back towards the house to inform Julie of his successful hunt.

  He fol
lowed the winding wooded trail back to the house and hollered” Hey Julie’ cautiously before starting to unlock the door.

  “I am in the kitchen” she called back nonplussed before coming to meet him half way into the house.

  “I saw your happy self coming down the trail through the window as I was finishing up the dishes. I take it you had some good luck?” Julie said having heard the shot and noting David’s lopsided grin.

  “Yea no problem, that fat deer was just where I said he would be. Hey you still got any water in the sink?” David inquired. One of the things that changed a lot when the shit hit the fan is the fact that everything became really dirty, really fast and cleaning anything up was now a calculated chore in efforts and scrimping on the materials used.