by Ron Foster
He was also accused many times of accumulating so much of what was now called personal wealth or businesses these days by being able to acquire it from the many offices he held but those that knew him knew better than to accuse him of that. He had worked hard for it and been aided by his uncanny talent for trading and knack for making opportunities where no one had noticed them before.
He didn’t have a monopoly on things but it could seem that way at times just because he or someone he had sponsored started up a business or something quicker than somebody else. Nothing wrong with that, he figured, and if he heard about somebody starting up another business he was always open for ideas of a partnership or an outright buyout. It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today was his motto and it had worked out well for him.
Capitalism under the guise of horse trading was his gig. Hell, the horse traders had all the money, horses were the rarest, most needed commodity around in his neck of the woods and his little community of 60 or 70 people on average only had 6 to show for all of them.
The loss of any one of the beasts would have been a major setback both financially as well as a source of labor. Two horses did mail duty, two did plowing and wagon hauling, one was for security duty, one stood by for emergencies or trading. You wouldn’t think mail was a big thing in a post apocalyptic world but it was, knowledge was power and power was money. The short range communication system was vital for everyone’s survival and welfare.” If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride” David would say when handling complaints about him charging his postage. Bernie had a similar saying from his own days of being raised on a poor farm “They must hunger in frost who will not work in heat when dealing with somebody griping about their general store bill come spring repayment time.”
If you had to get in touch with another trader, look for some medicine, get reports on highwaymen, bandits, etc., then David’s apocalyptic pony express mail system is all that you had and yeah it cost you to send messages and such.
Horses had to be fed, riders had to be paid, clothed, fed and armed. David had owed plenty for his horses and happened to be just lucky enough to have credit extended to him to get his 3 nags; he helped the community itself acquire the other 3 and managed their welfare at his livery stable. Pretty good setup some would say until you tried balancing his books on just what that little operation cost in real time goods and services. Bad neighbors count a man's income but not his expenses. Time you paid the riders, saw to the welfare of their families, yeah families were included also cause food was ever in shortage and their were no bachelors really to speak of, there wasn’t much left.
Everyone eventually kind of teamed up to be help mates and couples these days. It was a practical thing as well as a spiritual thing to seek out someone to share the trials and tribulations of each day with. Then neighbors bonded, etc., to help one another when a rider was out on a mail run or the men or women folks were out hunting.
There had been 3 births in the community the last two years: 1 child had died and the other two had worrisome bouts of sickness like all kids do but there was no doctor here. There were 7 or 8 younger children aged 4 to 12 that sometimes needed tending to but it was pretty much all hands on deck and everyone working at something as soon as daylight hit. When it came to the boys, he made them grow quickly, explaining life is like a grindstone, whether it grinds him down or polishes him depends on the stuff he is made of. They had plenty of great childhood memories to look back on and having a whole community attend your birthday parties was always a big kick for them whether there was enough flour around to make only one cake or not.
David was pretty good about attending to such details and reminded everyone If you come to the end of your rope -- tie a knot in it and hang on and hopefully someone around here would be around to help pull you up if needed.
Mental health wise his bunch fared better than most. They had been spared a lot of the chaos and violence of the cities and towns everywhere going through agonizingly slow demises. You see when the lights go out in a city, the countdown begins.
Now let’s say for illustrations sake, you happened to be in an elevator and the power went out. Your first inclination is an instinct to see light so you light your lighter or hopefully keep a small LED flashlight on your key ring and presto the fear factor goes way down.
Then you look for the emergency button and if it has an emergency box with a phone in it, etc. Then you wait, you’re waiting on technology to save your butt and that is what has put you in this predicament to begin with.
You now need technological assistance and you were lucky enough to bring some of your own. Now mostly a nice fact to know or so I have heard, is that elevator systems have redundant backups if say a cable breaks or some other thing happens. The elevator car has a brake to slow your descent down to the bottom of the shaft very slowly but eventually.
But we won’t get into the horrors of that scenario. Instead let us look at what happens to everyone else on the outside when the power fails from a solar geomagnetic storm. In most instances, automobiles survived but the grid did not. But there was no gas for the cars because there was no electricity for the fuel pumps.
You know there is an interesting phenomenon about folks getting low on gas in their cars; they got no sense usually about just how far to push their gas tank until it runs out. That is why many bridges have big signs on them warning you that you will face a $250 fine and possibly then some if you run out of gas on one. People just moving around the city began shutting down the city by running out of gas with traffic jams long before everybody decided to do the great exodus all at once.
David’s buddy Clinton had told him how this scenario had played out for him up around St. Louis. Anyway, Clinton lived in a small town downstream on the Mississippi river and basically said the roads were so clogged with traffic nobody could bug out of the city even if they had the gas.
Lots of people got stuck in traffic and had to leave their cars and walk home. Things got really bad when the water for the cities and towns ran out and everybody started walking out past all the stalled cars towards water and the countryside where they thought food was.
Those people that did manage to get their cars out of the city previously before all the traffic jams and wrecks used their edge and had already depleted what resources were still left when they passed through. So these new desperate people became more desperate when looking for resources.
So did the defenders of the homes and businesses remaining. The original and subsequent problems being you need food and shelter and somebody might have some of that in their house but they don’t want to let you in. Now being, hopefully, a well adjusted modern person you’re faced with decisions and dilemmas you never thought about before.
You can go look for another place and hopefully those folks will be nicer to you and hopefully they will be a big farm that raises everything you need but these are few and far between these days or you can go off in the woods and play Daniel Boone or something and try to live off the land before you eventually starve doing it or you can think about robbing folks.
Maybe you are lucky and you are able to talk some farmer into letting you stay on his place for doing lots of chores and having your help defending the place against other people approaching it with guns just like you did that might soon arrive.
Maybe the farmer man starts shooting at you on sight as you walk up the driveway to try to beg for some water? Could be you get lucky and find a vacant house with some food in it? Lots of folks didn’t make it home after the solar flare went off.
What are you going to do and how are you going to act when that food runs out? Do you have the means necessary and the knowledge to grow more food even if you found yourself a nice vacant safe farm? Have you gardened before? Do you know when and how to plant under various conditions? Would you be physically able to do so and for how long?
A simple thing to remember in surviving trying times is don't quit trying! I can’t an
swer all these things for you but make yourself a plan for what might be next when you can.
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Could you jump start society? Do you posses any kind of lost or useful survival knowledge to apply to the problem? How many people would still know anything about hooking up a plow to a horse or an Ox that is if you were somehow miraculously lucky enough to find them?
A huge clash of societies will war on those that probably could in someway have saved their butts with sharing country wisdom. However, as masses of the unskilled, the uneducated in self reliance, the ruthless, the starving the crazy and the dying all converge on the neat little suburbs and surrounding towns and countryside houses it ain’t going to be no tea party. The country folk will just be defending their homes, the destitute and dying just trying to survive. You could say the city folks will eat themselves to death because in order to eat you drive everyone else and yourself mad if you don’t have a plan.
Clinton said he was a bit a bit mentally mad himself and he didn’t know anybody that hadn’t been shot at or fired a round themselves in the general vicinity of somebody else threatening to bother their stuff before.
David had agreed and told him “Out of all the things I've lost in life, I think I miss my mind the most” and then grinned. Everybody had a story and some were just more gruesome than the next. People in general were broken now both physically and mentally. They mended over time some but traces or out right permanent damage always remained. Gatherings containing lots of new faces and away from the community like attending a trade rendezvous was just too stressful for many.
Clinton had come down the river on a sailboat and had managed someway or another to get lost enough to end up at David’s Lake compound almost a 1000 miles from his beginning. He was one of the people who were staying back at camp to watch things and had no desire to leave his safe little existence here.
In David’s geographical instance he was caught in when the solar storm hit, most car computers were affected and basically fried as people just stopped or wrecked as vehicle engines died at whatever speed you were traveling down the road at. Some airplanes fell out of the air and crashed and burned, lots of emergency landings were happening on interstates both successful and not. Folks got basically stranded where ever they happened to be and death turned his hour glass over and waited for the inevitable outcomes. It was seriously bad times for those hoofing it out of Atlanta.
Old people, Folks with medical conditions were the first to go just trying to walk home. Violence got some others; lots of people were traveling and didn’t have anywhere to go. David thought about his good buddy Stewart who had got stranded in Atlanta and the man was from of all places, the U.K.
His newly acquired trader Farnsworth had been just as resourceful as Stewart when he got stranded himself far from home. He was an Englishman also. David was proud and happy he was accompanying him to the Trade Rendezvous. That boy was a natural born salesman.
He had been stranded at the Atlanta International Airport when the power went out and after sitting around just long enough to see a plane crash coming in while he was waiting on a cab, took off walking away from the place before the pandemonium started. He then figured out real damn quick that some kind of EMP event must had just happened when he saw the motorcars and lorries on the streets all stall out at the same time.
First he had ducked into an underground parking lot and waited to see if any evidence of a nuclear attack was afoot. While he was waiting on a blast wave or flash that didn’t come he had himself some time to do a bit of thinking.
“Where the hell do I go now and what am I going to do when I get there?” he had muttered to himself worriedly. He was now big time lost in a strange big city. A freaking EMP had just gone off, who the hell did it remained to be seen but he figured Korea was dumb enough to do so by accident or on purpose, he considered. He had been suspicious of those wobbly satellites that they had put up in space for a long time now.
This wasn’t the effects of a full blown nuclear blast though as far as he could tell. He guessed this was true after waiting a considerable time for any aftershock from some kind of bomb going off. Like his countryman Stewart, his first thought went to trying to get to the consulate at the International Trade Center.
He had been in Atlanta before and knew it was somewhere in the far general direction east so it was just keep walking now and poke and hope later. If you are always dwelling in trouble, change your address his daddy had told him.
He bought water and food along the way at a small store for cash and then as he was walking down a congested sidewalk his light bulb went on. Up ahead was a Hilton Hotel, if the power was down they would have no idea if he had a reservation or not so he just walked in like it was a normal power outage and demanded his room.
Being a Hilton and used to accommodating most everything and everybody with good service, he managed to get himself checked in and into a room. He then proceeded to be freaked out about the power outage and blend in with the rest of the folks and help eat up what room service could provide in the main restaurant to the stranded guests and bided his time thinking about how to escape the city or stay where he was at scenario.
He sat and mingled with the other guests some at the candlelit bar while charging his drinks to his room of course while it remained open for awhile and made himself some new alliances. Picking out who was going to be your shipmate around these hoity-toity boogers wasn’t too difficult, either they looked and acted like they could survive on their own for awhile or they didn’t.
The fitness types who had money and time to burn on health clubs gathered together and the old folks found their pecking order. Office and Hotel staff just disappeared eventually. There were a couple of old vets he had overheard telling war stories but they weren’t combat troops, though that fact didn’t matter to him. He knew they were the type of folks that he wanted to be with and gravitated towards them.
Farnsworth hadn’t himself spent a day of military duty in his life but he had been around enough British military and seen all the old movie pictures enough to pull off a ruse that he had served in Her Majesty’s service and he told them he sought out kindred soldiers.
“Hell, these Yanks will never catch on to me stretching the truth a bit. None of them ever served around London so how the hell can they tell I am not what or who I say I am?” He had surmised and proceeded to even get as bold as he should be the highest ranking member of their little entourage of former military members.
That ruse worked for a while but not very long at all after they had spent their 2nd night in a city that didn’t recognize such niceties. They had armed themselves upon his direction originally from the hotel’s kitchen. The question of how to carry a big butcher knife or carving knife without a sheath gave them all pause for thought and the men wore the odd results of trying to create some out of cardboard and tape.
A search for the janitor’s closets and lots of wild hacking the heads off mops and such had provided walking sticks but that wasn’t shit to the punks they knew surrounded the place in the ghettoes of the downtown city.
Those boogers living there had guns and gangs and such and didn’t take kindly to strangers on their turfs especially white or foreign ones. When the British Consulate was not found, Farnsworth’s value as a buddy or a Brit soon waned and they lost their direction and purpose to be a cohesive unit. Knowing they all had to eventually get out of the city was an awareness that they all understood to be paramount, what to do next or today took on new dimensions of dissention and half-hearted purpose.
Farnsworth went from being a leader of sorts to some kind of lackey status as their true predicament actually set in. They had been aimlessly looking for the Trade building for days thinking that a government presence would be there but that was not to be. They had sort of waited too late or gone too early in their chosen directions because now looting was open and rampant.
People didn’t seem to even be in that big of a hurry about it eithe
r and it seemed to be done now in an almost celebratory mood that was just waiting to turn mean. Sirens still blared and the sounds of gunfire were common but for their eyes no official presence of any kind was noted or ever present.
The consensus amongst them was to try to find firearms or friends with some if they were meant to survive this mess but how does that work when you got no money, no prospects and no idea where to get some if you did?
This overbearing thought wasn’t lost on Farnsworth as he considered their plight and Rogers, one of the men in his group, said something about pawnshops. They hotly debated for awhile that these places would have been already looted or death to approach before conceding they had no better solutions in mind.
They had seen a few people open carrying and had discussed the possibilities of trying to set somebody like this up or over power them for a robbery by surprise but nobody felt like being that stupid at the moment.
They were homeless and far from where their support groups were, so what now? They had all realized this fact and except for their military camaraderie they didn’t have a pot to piss in amongst them all.
Farnsworth said their only chance was finding what he called “Like needs Like” which was further explained as needing folks of their own kind and moral values.
