A Tale of Two Preppers

by Susan Gregersen

  “Okay, ready? Tense!” he said and counted out loud to ten. “Release”, and he counted. She started counting with him.

  They did several sets, then she said she wanted to add in her arms, and then her back and whole body. She didn’t really have to tell him which muscles she was doing, since he didn’t tell her, he just followed his own routine and kept up the counting sequence.

  After a while he asked if she was ready to stop. She said she was, and they sat back down on the blankets.

  “We need to do that several times a day. For one thing, it’ll keep us from getting too restless and going nuts, but it’ll also keep us from getting things like blood clots in our legs from inactivity,” Jeff explained.

  Then he added, “And if we have to walk to get to safety when this is over, we’ll still be in pretty good shape. Not aerobically, but hopefully that’ll come back quickly.

  She had been about to make jokes about cabin fever, but stopped when he mentioned walking to safety. She hadn’t thought about what would happen when they “came out of the closet”, and she couldn’t stop a small laugh from escaping at the meaning of that phrase in the time before this.

  Jeff asked what was funny, and she told him, then asked, “what WILL we do now? How long do we stay in here? How do we know when it’s safe? And what is safe now? “

  Jeff sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve just started thinking about that. Everything happened so fast, I was just glad we found a safe place to hole up. I did some studying right before this happened, but there’s so much I don’t know.”

  “Me too. I was on a website that had a lot of topics, but I just glanced at a lot of them and spent most of my time on the ones about food and how to store it,” she said.

  Then she smiled. “They even had a section with trivial stuff and a ‘joke of the day’ column! It was nice to see people who were worried about things like survival and safety, who could still connect on a casual level!”

  “They had that on the site I went to, too! What site were you on?” he asked.

  “It’s called ‘prepared society’. It’s funny, it felt like family from the beginning. The people seemed to really like each other, and they were so warm and welcome to me, too.”

  She worried for a minute about the people she had only known for a few days, and only online at that! Then she realized, this is what it was all about for them! She felt better knowing others were out there, surviving and prepared to go forward from whatever was going on where they were.

  “You’re kidding! That’s the site I was on!” Jeff exclaimed and told her his user name.

  She was excited and said she’d seen the name and had read some of his posts! She told him her user name and he hugged her. “I saw some of your posts too! I never guessed! I remember feeling like that’s how you would feel if we’d been talking about this together. Jeannie, I’m so sorry we didn’t.”

  “We would have, if we’d had time! I think it’s cool, and amazing, we found the same site! But then, you always had an eye for quality!” she teased him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A week had passed and the canned goods were running out. They’d limited themselves to splitting a can twice a day, eating a candy bar, and sharing a bottle of juice over the day. The water was holding out, since they were limiting their activity pretty much to isometric exercises.

  They spent hours talking, covering every subject they could think of: their past, their present, their future, the dreams they’d had over the years, the things they wanted to try, movies they’d seen, politics, religion, recipes, you name it, they discussed it. They laughed, they cried, they connected in a way they hadn’t in the 6 years they’d been married.

  They got tired of the dark, they got angry that this event had happened, and then they got angry at each other. Jeff took half of the blankets and moved to the other side of the room. He took a pop-top can of peaches with him, and that’s all he ate for a day. Jeannie worked on a can of carrots all day and didn’t even taste them when she ate them.

  After several hours had passed, Jeff said in a plaintive voice, “I’m sorry. Can I come home?”

  It was so touching and mournful that it made Jeannie burst into peals of laughter. Indignant, Jeff said “Hey, I was apologizing. It’s not funny!”

  She stopped laughing long enough to say, “I know, but I can’t help it, you sounded so pitiful and sad!” and she was off, laughing again.

  He dragged the blankets back and plopped down on them, turning on the flashlight so he could see her face. It was red and blotched and he could tell she’d been quietly crying for quite some time. He hadn’t known. He forgave her for laughing and pulled her into his arms. She looked up at him.

  “I missed you. Please don’t leave again. We’re all each other has right now!” she said. “How long do you think until we can go out of here?”

  “From what little I read, two weeks seems to be the magic number,” Jeff said glumly.

  “Two weeks? That means another week of this? I can’t do it! I’ll go mad! Wait, I’m already mad!” she said. “Wouldn’t it be safe to go to our apartment as long as we don’t open the windows or go outside? Or at least into the hallway so we can run back and forth and get some real exercise?”

  “Radiation works in a different way than most things. There was probably fall-out, which is like dust particles, only it’s radioactive. It can permeate through walls and windows. The thicker the mass in the wall or barrier, the safer you are. A dirt wall or sand bags, things like that, are supposed to be good. And having a turn in your entry. I’m not sure how it works, but the radiation apparently can’t turn corners. I don’t understand it, but I saw that in several posts on that forum. I had time to read through a couple fiction stories, too, that mentioned it, but I don’t think the survival information was fictional, only the characters and events were fictional.”

  “But what about these foot-thick cement walls you said the building was made of?” she asked.

  “Yes, they offer some protection. I don’t know how far away or which direction the blasts were, nor which way the wind was blowing at the time. We don’t have a radiation meter. So to play it safe, we should stay in here the whole two weeks if we can stand to do so,” he said.

  Jeannie gave a big sigh but didn’t say anything for a while. “What if we ran really fast and just grabbed a few things from the apartment? Wouldn’t that be low enough exposure that we’d be okay? That couldn’t be a lethal dose, could it?” she pleaded.

  “Grab what sort of things?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Books, maybe. We’ve got all those flashlights, what if we read together for just an hour a day, or even twice a day? It would make it a bit more bearable,” she said.

  He thought about it for a few minutes, then said, “Okay, but I’ll go. You stay here. Be ready to slam the door behind me. Wait, I think I remember reading something about decontamination. I’ll set out a change of clothes to put on when I get back. I’m going to wear a sweatshirt and pants, and yank them off and leave them in the hallway. Then I’ll wash off by the sink and put on clean clothes.”

  When the preparations were ready he opened the door only long enough and wide enough to slip out. The smell in the hall was awful and he peered through the gloom. The only light came from a few doors that were open, allowing light from apartment windows to come into the hallway. A mound was on the floor near the elevator, and as he leaned closer to look he gagged.

  It was a decomposing body, mostly bald and covered in sores. The eyes stared ahead in a face contorted in agony. Jeff ran to their apartment door and let himself in.

  The air was better in the apartment. He knew he shouldn’t do so, but he ran to the windows for a quick look. Most of the buildings within sight were destroyed and blackened by fire. Debris filled the street, and bodies lay here and there.

  As he watched, a hunched-over person walked along the sidewalk slowly, and what also looked like painfully. He drew back from the window. Grabbi
ng an armload of books from the shelves and a few magazines off the coffee table he hurried back to the maintenance room. He set the books down, stripped off the clothes and tossed them toward the body on the floor, so they wouldn’t be by the door behind which he and Jeannie hid.

  Back in the room he headed for the sink. Jeannie reached for the books but he held them away from her.

  “Let me wash them off, too. They might have radiation in the dust on them. I have no idea how that works.” He uncovered the sink, took one of the few clean rags left, and using one of the empty food cans, he scooped water out of one of the buckets of clean water. He dipped the rag and washed off, then wiped down the books. He scooped another can of water, leaned over the sink, and poured it over his hair.

  “Hey! No fair! You get to wash your hair!” Jeannie said, half joking. She knew they couldn’t spare the water, but her scalp felt oily and itchy. Her body felt oily and itchy. She knew it had to smell pretty rank in the room but they were used to it and didn’t notice it. Jeff didn’t notice it because his nostrils were burning from the horrible odor of the decomposing body in the hallway.

  After he was dressed and they were sitting back down he told Jeannie about the body. She, of course, had to spend time musing over who it might be. How they died was obvious: radiation poisoning.

  Then he told her about what he saw out the window. He thought she might scold him for going to the window, but she was so shocked at his description that she just sat in silence.

  “I wonder what is going to happen to us. I don’t want to die. But what kind of world do we live in now? What do we do? Where do we go?” Jeannie wondered.

  “I don’t know. You know, we used to laugh at the office about the ‘I’m from the government, I’m here to help you’ thing, and none of us ever expected to be the kind to sit helplessly and wait for the government to help, like after hurricanes and stuff down south, or floods or whatever. But now I’m sitting here, drowning in my own ignorance and lack of preparing and learning, wishing there was--no, HOPING there IS a government out there,” Jeff said. As an afterthought he added, “…and that it’s on our side.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At the end of two weeks Jeff said they could spend some time in the apartment each day, but had to go back to the maintenance room to eat and sleep. They’d used up the batteries in two of the flashlights reading half an hour, twice a day.

  They had started reading out loud to each other instead of both trying to read at the same time. During one of the times Jeannie was reading, Jeff’s eyes had been wandering over the shelves. Suddenly he jumped up.

  Jeannie asked what was wrong. He had spotted a radio behind some tools on one of the shelves. It must have been belonged to one of the workers. They excitedly pulled it out and turned it on. Nothing. They thought to check the battery compartment and it was empty.

  Pulling batteries from one of the flashlights on the shelf they popped them in and turned the radio on. It came to life, but all they heard was static on both AM and FM, all the way up and down both bands.

  They were discouraged. Even when they resumed reading, neither could concentrate on what was being read; even Jeannie, who was reading and not comprehending what she was reading.

  Before their first foray together out of “the closet”, as they called it now, they had breakfast. The canned goods were gone and they had started cooking rice and pasta in the empty food cans. They used as little water as they had to.

  That had been the advantage of the canned food, it had the water in it. Now they were going through the water a lot faster. It was almost gone now, and Jeff had been wondering whether the water in their bathtub was still potable. He carried one of the five-gallon buckets with him when they headed to the apartment.

  The smell in the hallway was bad. They pulled their shirts up over their mouths and noses and skirted past it. Jeff looked back in surprise. His pants and sweatshirt were gone! He didn’t even want to think about the condition of whoever had taken them, but it also alarmed him to think people had been in the hallway and they hadn’t heard them.

  Oh well, Jeff shrugged to himself. That meant the people in the hallway couldn’t hear them, either, and that was good. Very good.

  They closed the door of the apartment behind them. Jeannie wandered around, touching the furniture, touching the kitchen counter, doing the same in every room. Just touching. Looking. Longing. Not saying anything.

  She came back to the living room and sat in her desk chair. She put her hands on the keyboard, touched the mouse, then got up and walked over to a big, soft chair and sank into it.

  Jeff knew what she was feeling, even though neither spoke. The future probably wouldn’t hold such comforts. They were letting go. They couldn’t restore the world they had known. They had to embrace and accept a new world.

  “Do you suppose the clothes in our dressers and closets are safe? I’d love to have something different to wear.” Jeannie asked.

  “I think so,” Jeff said. She went to the bedroom and came back in fresh clothes. She looked tired and pale, and her hair was stringy. He felt tender toward her. She hadn’t complained, yet he knew she had to feel crummy. “How about if we wash your hair over the bathroom sink? The water won’t be warm, and we’ll have to be careful not to use too much water.”

  She lit up like he’d given her the best Christmas present ever. “Oh, Jeff! That would be wonderful!”

  They went to the bathroom and by the dim light that came in the small window, her hair was washed. She leaned over the sink and Jeff scooped water from the tub and slowly poured it over her head.

  When they were done she gave him a hug and thanked him. She felt some of her energy restored, partly from the hair-washing, and partly from the feeling of well-being because of Jeff’s caring act.

  Each day they went to the apartment for several hours. Mostly they read, dragging the chairs from the living room over closer to the window.

  One restless day Jeannie pulled the couch out to see if she missed anything, not really expecting to find anything, and lo and behold, two cans rolled out! She’d missed them in the haste of packing up the food to go to the closet. One was a can of blueberry pie filling and the other was a can of chicken noodle soup. They celebrated by eating both for dinner that day!

  The next day Jeannie searched all through the apartment, tearing apart the rest of the hiding places where her food stash had been. She was sure she’d find something else she missed, but dejectedly she had to accept that nothing else was there.

  “Well, we could start seeing what’s in the other apartments on our floor,” Jeff said. At Jeannie’s shocked look he said, “I mean the ones with doors open. They’re probably abandoned. The people won’t be back. And even if they do come back, this is a matter of life and death. Extenuating circumstances,” he argued his point.

  She reluctantly agreed, not wanting to think about the fact that they lived in a world where that was acceptable now.

  The apartments with doors open had been pretty well searched by now. Clothes and other belongings were scattered around, and furniture over-turned. Jeannie picked up a pan off the floor in one kitchen and waved it at Jeff. “SCORE!” she cried.

  She opened the utility closet and moved aside a mop and some rolls of paper towels and discovered part of a case of drinking water in bottles on a shelf. “Jeff! Water!”

  He ran into the kitchen as she was pulling the case out. He helped her set it on the table. There were 19 bottles left in a case that had held 24! They couldn’t believe their luck!

  Jeannie picked up a couple of serving spoons and a spatula and they headed for the door with Jeff carrying the water. She looked longingly at the real plates in the dish drainer on the counter. They didn’t have the water to wash plates, she knew, and they’d have to keep using paper plates or eating out of the cans. They had a pan, now, though! She felt rich!