Paleo / The Doomsday Prepper

by David Liss

  People stocked up on foodstuffs at Costco and wrote their congressmen about fracking, but we preppers were far beyond that. Milo had a boat stocked with protein bars and a de-salinator parked in the lot of his apartment complex.

  There were other, more ambiguous signs that even here, among friends, we were unwilling to discuss.

  “I’ll tell you what keeps me up at night,” Hank said.

  “The ghosts?” Milo said. “There was one in the tree by my window last night, playing a corrido.” It was as if he’d told an off-color joke or disrespected the right to bear arms. Even Cerise recoiled. But Milo doesn’t always pick up on social cues. He chewed on in the appalled silence, oblivious.

  “What keeps me up at night is that Rodney compound,” Hank said. “They got guns. Shelter. They certainly got the numbers.” Bat Rodney and his extended family had been prepping for decades, preparing to take on the New World Order with a loose militia of paranoid rednecks. They wanted no part of Alamo Preppers, and in fact, words had been exchanged between members of their group and ours at a recent trade show. “They’ll be sitting pretty,” Hank added.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry,” Milo said. He winked at me a second time. Milo had become fixated on sea levels recently, and by that wink he meant to convey that the Rodneys would be at the bottom of the ocean with the rest of us.

  “The prudent thing would be to make a move now. But it’s risky. You’d have to time it just right,” Hank said.

  “What kind of a move?” I said.

  “Jesus, Eric. A move. The irony is, it’s easier to pull it off before the rule of law collapses, when nobody’s really expecting it.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean? I’m just saying, it would be the smart thing.”

  “You mean the smart thing would be to go and kill all the Rodneys now, before they kill us later.”

  Hank held up his hands. “Hell, I know it sounds bad. But these are the tough calls a commander has to make.”

  “A commander?” I said. Hank blushed. He’d already awarded himself a post-apocalyptic rank. Commander Hank. The nerve of this guy. “So are you going to do it, then?”

  “Are you going to do it then?” Hank mocked, adopting a sing-song voice. “Look, Eric, it’s not that simple.”

  “Why not, Commander?” Hank talked tough, but I was beginning to suspect that talk was all it was. His military buzz cut, his camo pants—certainly he wrapped himself in signs of manly swagger and preparedness, but even Milo’s plans made more sense to me, and Milo wore a waxed mustache. Hank’s operating theory of the end had been randomly culled from message boards—a bit of federal government overreach, a dash of the Book of Revelation, a strain of supervirus manufactured by French Canadian separatists.

  At the other end of the table, Lorna and Doug, our president and first gentleman, clinked their spoons against their glasses. “If I can have your attention one minute,” Lorna said, rising from her chair. “A toast is in order. Hank—share your news.”

  Whenever a prepper makes a significant step on the road to preparedness, they announce it to the group. I was toasted when I secured a field toilet and six weeks of MREs. That was over a year ago.

  Hank took his time. He subjected us to a long windup in which he thanked Lorna and all his fellow preppers for their constant support. It wasn’t just his achievement—it was a testament to the strength of this group. I stared at the remains of the cooling onion, hating him.

  “Stand up, Cerise, this is your moment, too.” He took her hand. He went on a while longer about how truly blessed he was before he spit it out. “We bought a Don Cheevers,” Hank yelled, raising his arms in the touchdown sign. I bit the tines of my fork till I heard my teeth grind against them. The whole table burst into applause and Hank kissed his wife on the lips.

  I was just sober enough to remember to clap, which I did, exactly three times. Three big wet claps of my clammy drunk’s hands, damp with beer glass condensation. More than that I could not do. A Don Cheevers—the leading name in disaster preparedness luxury in the south-central-Texas region. Don Cheevers hollowed out missile silos and bomb shelters and remade them into high-end condominiums that could see a family of four through any number of disaster scenarios in comfort and style.

  Hank looked so smug, like he just might ascend to heaven trailing clouds of glory. “Concrete walls four feet thick,” he said. People were shaking his hand. He’d pick us off one by one through the specially designed sniper holes if we even approached the perimeter of his Don Cheevers on Day Zero. Couldn’t they see that? But they were just happy for their fellow prepper whereas I, God help me, I wanted to put my teeth to the man’s throat.

  “Cheer up, buddy,” Milo said, slapping my back. He leaned in to me and whispered. “That Don Cheevers will be nothing but a watery grave.” He laughed behind his beard without making any noise. Milo is one of our younger members, still under 30, and he makes his living baking artisan bread. His theory of the end is that the waters of a bloated, poisonous Gulf will drown the Alamo City and environs. It was true that a Don Cheevers would be of no use in such a scenario; I only wished I had his confidence that that’s where we were headed.

  “Go buy yourself a second-hand canoe or some water wings and you’re way ahead of this asshole,” Milo whispered. I found it far more likely that death would come from the ground beneath our feet, but I nodded rather than raise objections. If Lorna overheard she would drop the hammer on the both of us. Talk prep all you want, but the bylaws of the group prohibit discussing the cause of D-day with any specificity. This keeps our meetings from devolving into arguments over solar flares vs. reversals of the earth’s magnetic poles or what have you. Anyway, I appreciated the sentiment. “Thanks, Milo,” I said.

  “What’s the joke?” Hank said. He eased back into his seat and gave me a look that suggested the joke was me. I invest in maintaining my personal appearance—my profession demands it. My hair is cut in a salon that serves herbal infusions; I buff my shoes with lambskin. If my mouth was now stuffed with sour cream and potato, this did not reflect my preferences. The weight gain was a deliberate strategy; everyone knew that. And yet right now, I just looked the pig.

  “My love life,” Milo said, grinning. His dating troubles are an ongoing source of amusement to us all. It’s hard to date outside the prep community, and even harder to date within it.

  “Poor baby,” Cerise said, tracing her fingers up his arm.

  “Now where you at with the water purification system, Eric?” Hank said.

  “Lisa said no.” To obscure my intentions, I’d pretended the system was for a family vacation I was planning: a rustic, multi-day campout deep in the wilderness of Big Bend country. Lisa had shot down both the purchase and the trip. I’d rather die. Her exact words.

  “Oh boy. She’ll really be kicking herself when the time comes,” Cerise said. “How are y’all planning to manage without potable water?”

  “Maybe I’ll just cut her loose,” I said. It was sarcasm. I love my wife, but I was in a dark place.

  “You do that, I might take her on as a concubine,” Hank said.

  “Please,” I said. “Cerise—come on—don’t let him talk like that.”

  “I’ll talk however the goddamn hell I want,” Hank said.

  “Not about my wife. Man, come on.”

  “Not cool, Hank,” Milo said.

  “We’ll have a duty to repopulate the earth,” Cerise said. “Many men will take on concubines. It’s not a sexual thing.”

  Hank raised his eyebrows to suggest that it might not exactly be a non-sexual thing either.

  “I don’t think that kind of talk is good for group cohesion. We’ve got to be able to trust one another, Hank.” I was groveling, because I knew he could do it—make my wife his concubine. He had the weaponry, the Don Cheevers, and he was pursuing a muscle strategy—he was fit and toned as a Hollywood actor. Lisa had once said he was “handsome as hell.”

/>   “I trust you about as far as I can throw you,” Hank said. “Last bit’s yours, Estrada,” he said, pushing the plate toward me. I scooped up the unidentifiable fried bits that littered the plate and shoved them into my mouth; they tasted like nothing but grease. Soon enough, though, people would be wrestling their own children for scraps far worse than these.

  * * *

  I left the restaurant too buzzed to drive and walked the streets of San Antonio for an hour, thinking about Hank and his Don Cheevers. We were supposed to be a colony; that was the whole point. The Alamo Preppers had promised to have each other’s backs, but now the Schoenfeld family would kick up their heels in that luxury bunker and let the rest of us fry, and nobody had even had the courage to call them on it.

  Hank was a bastard now, but come the fateful day, he had the potential to be a true monster. I could picture him sitting bare chested on a throne wearing multiple necklaces and drinking wine from the skull of an enemy. “Well, that’s Hank for you,” people would say, because it would not be the least bit out of character. And they’d say the same thing about me, when they passed my severed head on a pike.

  I wandered through tables of tourists drinking margaritas at patio restaurants, past wandering mariachis. The mood in the streets was festive. The the groundsmoke, the occasional bursts of lava that spewed out of city manholes, and the quakes—all these things were natural occurrences and now, without D.C. breathing down our necks, we would be able to respond to them with more efficiency and less waste. Nobody knew what was up with the birds; we laughed that off.

  This world looked so solid, but it was about to be ripped away like a bandage. At last I found myself at the Alamo. It was all aglow, sitting like a big sleeping camel over its graves. Usually I feel nothing at all when I look at it, but tonight it struck me as a monument to un-preparedness, to men who hadn’t had any strategy at all beyond drawing lines in the sand and sending grandiose letters. Well, they’d paid the price. As my family would, when the day came.

  “Step aside, friend,” a man in a coon skin cap and fringed chaps said as I stood in the plaza. He looked to be in some distress.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, failing to notice at first that I was speaking to a dead man. We’d made eye contact and now I was stuck. The safest thing was to bide my time. There was a theory that the underworld itself had been disturbed and was slowly leaking its inhabitants up to the surface. The industry maintained these incidents were caused by a naturally occurring and harmless hallucinogen found in the groundsmoke. Myself, I had no opinion.

  “I’m late for the battle,” the ghost said. His horse wandered over, clicking its hoofs against the cobblestones. Its mane was braided with flowers, but a flap of skin hung from its muzzle and its eye was an empty socket.

  “The battle of the Alamo?” I said. The ghost looked at me as if he didn’t think much of my intelligence. “You’re way late. That battle’s over.”

  “Who won?”

  “The Mexicans,” I said.

  “Which side was I on?”

  “By the look of your rags—meaning no offense—I’d say you were a Texian.”

  “Well, shit,” the ghost said. “Goddamn it. I hate to lose.” The breeze picked up and he just sort of blew away in the smoke.

  “So do I,” I said to the empty air. But it occurred to me then that my ancestor had not died here at the cradle of Texas liberty, as Hank’s had. He’d lived. Under the command of General Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez deLebrón, the Mexican army had been better trained, better provisioned, and possessed of a far better plan. They’d fought to keep what was theirs, and they hadn’t left a Texian alive.

  * * *

  The next day, I dropped by Hank’s office just before the lunch hour. His place was a boutique agency, with his own name on the door. It was next to a gun shop, and inside a coffee-stained yellow carpet ran wall-to-wall. He had two silk palms in there and a murky fish tank. A single catfish swam back and forth above some plastic reeds.

  At first glance, I found it hard to believe Hank was doing the kind of volume that could finance a Don Cheevers. My clientele would never set foot in a place like this, and that realization only made me angrier.

  I cleared my throat, because the door’s entry chime had not gotten the receptionist’s attention. She was wearing a paisley tie and her gray hair flipped upward at the ends. She was reading a home décor magazine. “Yes?” she said, without looking up.

  “I don’t have an appointment,” I said. “I’m a friend.”

  She raised her head and studied me. “A friend?” She said it as if the idea of Hank having a friend had never occurred to her. “Well then go on in. Knock first,” she recommended when I had my hand on the door knob.

  “Enter!” Hank yelled from behind the door. “Hey buddy. You get home okay last night?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Look, about the Don Cheevers—“

  “Would you like to see it?”

  This was easier than I’d expected. “I sure would,” I admitted. The general public was not given access to any Cheevers facility. Stop by for a tour? Forget it. First you had to be recommended by a current owner, then you had to pass a rigorous screening process, including a credit check, which meant I had no hope of even peeking inside one on my paycheck. How the hell Hank had cleared these hurdles I couldn’t comprehend.

  “I just bet you would,” Hank said.

  “I said I would.” I assumed he was messing with me, offering a treat and then withdrawing it, a game a certain type of person likes to play with a child or a domesticated animal, but to my surprise he scooped up his keys. “Then let’s go.”

  * * *

  The Cheevers was near the city center, on the site of an Air Force base that had been decommissioned some years ago. A massive underground bomb shelter had been converted into 60 luxury condos, each more than 2,000 square feet in size.

  I rode shotgun, beneath a seatbelt specially modified to accommodate Cormac, Hank’s Irish Setter. Stray pieces of harness brushed against my suit, covering me with dog hair, as Hank talked up the Cheevers. These things had chef’s kitchens with stainless fixtures and granite counter tops. Whirlpool tubs. The latest and greatest in alternative power sources, water filtration, and an on-site hospital and rec room. Future residents were already meeting up for barbecues and holiday parties. It was a “truly select group” of area movers and shakers. There was a rumor that Don Cheevers himself would be setting up camp here when the time came, and there was no greater endorsement than that.

  Hank dropped names and shared details on the way over, and by the time I stepped out of his car, he’d made sure that I understood he would be spending his doomsday in more style than I had ever experienced. Hank implied that apart from the financial concern, there was no question of someone like myself being admitted here. I indulged in a little silent fuming as I brushed Cormac’s hair off my sleeves.

  * * *

  The inside of the place was straight out of Dwell, but for the absence of natural light and one strange feature. Toward the back of the condo I found a floor-to-ceiling wire structure. It was separated from the main living quarters by a narrow hall. Hank had rattled off the features of every other amenity like a damn brochure, but on this wire room he was silent.

  “I’m going to shoot straight, Eric. I don’t make enough money to fund this place, you know that. I doubt my sales are 2/3 of your yearlies. So go on, ask me how I got it.”

  “How’d you get it, Hank?” I said, expecting to hear wouldn’t you like to know, but Hank was unusually agreeable this afternoon.

  “Premiums.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “My customers pay premiums on policies they’ll never collect. You’re an insurance man; I don’t have to tell you the entire industry will collapse within the first twelve hours of an E.O.D. situation. My customers are simply throwing their money away.”

  “Mine too,” I said. He wasn’t wrong. Th
e very thought of how little use even my best, most comprehensive products would be at the E.O.D.—that’s end of days, in the parlance—robbed me of my peace.

  “What was it you said the other night—might as well light them on fire? I couldn’t agree more. So instead of incinerating those wasted sums, I redirect them here.”

  “You’re stealing them.”

  “Only in a manner of speaking. Those policies are about to be useless. So Cerise and I prayed on it, and we’ve been given to understand, it’s better that cash do some good for someone.”

  “But what if—I mean, Hank—” I was stammering. Hank stood there, waiting for me to say the words. What if the apocalypse never happens? Then he’d go running back to the group with the news that I was just a hobbyist. Now and then, lonely misfits mistook our society for a mere social club, a group weird enough to be accepting of those with below-average interpersonal skills. They usually slipped up and revealed that what they truly wanted was love and friendship, not a workable survival strategy for doomsday. We considered these types to be beneath contempt.

  “Now hear me out,” I said, holding up my hands before he got any wild ideas about my commitment level. “This thing is happening and soon. But in the meanwhile, all it takes is one historic flood. Or a 32-year-old drops dead of a heart attack. What then, Hank?”

  Hank was a big guy with a cropped military haircut and pale, wide eyes. He didn’t look the least bit brainy. He looked like the avatar of a video game, the type that would run repeatedly into a wall if you left the controller in position while you stepped out of the room to refill your Dr. Pepper. If even a small scale disaster befell one of his customers before the main E.O.D. event, he’d be left holding the bag, but he didn’t seem to get that.

  “Well, shoot, Eric, I guess that’s where my comprehensive personal liability policy kicks in.” The dumb bastard had thought of everything.

  “So what do you want from me?” I was enough of a business man to see that a proposition was shimmering in the air between us and Hank was about to put it to me.