by Ron Foster
The military had already put the electronic warfare zap on any cell or satellite phones working in the area where the two houses of government were assembled and there was little that the senators and congressmen could do and no one to call to say they had just heard the president had declared a nuclear attack. Trump himself had left instructions for the bus drivers and the secret service escorting the dignitaries on their trip to secured safe locations. The nation was at war, congress could declare it when they got settled into their new homes for the duration of this tribulation. If any of the braying ass civic leaders not wanting to board the bus wanted to stay or argue about the instructions from the Commander and Chief, well then the President said just leave them there were they were at and restrict their travel anywhere for an hour. Don’t offer them any further help or assistance in anyway; but secure them for the one crucial hour America needed and then they were on their own now the same as their constituents would be to fend for themselves.
The North Koreans at first the pentagon had figured were most likely partaking of a strategy that follows Iran's playbook: Get close to developing a nuclear weapon and the rest of the world will make a deal. They had played that game for awhile and sought American aid and money as a form of extortion for not being bad you might say. However, it was known now that North Korea had also been manufacturing bombs for Iran and exchanging missile technology with them. No word could get out on the Presidents plan and life as we knew it soon imploded.
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Road Trips And Rendezvous
Travis eyed the deathly still neighborhood around his house by peeking around a curtain carefully. You couldn’t tell what might be going on these days outside but you knew to look for something amiss before daring to open your front door. Mostly you were looking for signs of any armed people moving around and trying to decide their intentions and why they were about.
Folks still had gas for their vehicles, well what was left in their tanks anyway, but you didn’t see very many cars moving anymore. Seems that everyone had a bit of sense about safely staying at home, but that didn’t necessarily mean staying behind closed doors.
That was the spooky part; you could basically tell how out numbered you were and peoples opinions on your current existence from the neighbors sometimes angry or cautious look in your direction. Those big extended families with lots of little kids up on the corner felt the crush of being cut off from the system the worst day one. A lot of them were used to the generational welfare trap of having babies to increase Federal and State dole income in single parent households.
The mommas baby daddies that used to come around there once in awhile with a bit of money from odd jobs or drug dealing didn’t come around much at all after the first week or so. Seems that a house full of screaming disrespectful misbehaving kids and naked babies running around from lack of diapers wasn’t to their liking either and they moved on.
Oh some stayed in the neighborhood, others brought back some food from their looting like modern day hunters providing for their tribe but the food and the patience of would be victims and places to loot quickly run out.
Seems like I have heard folks say that as much as 80 % of them poor kids didn’t even know who their father was or if they did know his name they had no way of knowing where he was at. They were used to not having father figures in the house and running amok and it was rare to have a responsible two parent household to raise them properly.
It was time to man up and provide and take care of families as a Father now but that wasn’t how it was playing out for the most part. Cousins, brothers, uncles, sisters etc. teamed up some if they lived close enough to each other and often times did but they were just as apt to get into a fight over food among themselves as they were with others they tried to victimize.
People that only knew how to respond to a problem by screaming, being ignorant, selfish and cussing hysterically and fighting or rioting to get what they wanted found out that didn’t work out too well for them anymore. A tantrum no longer got what they wanted or was even tolerated much or for very long either.
The cops weren’t putting up with it, the working-class citizens were already tired of it and after a few violent confrontations all sides got their guns and went at it as a free for all. The police formed their own enclaves protecting government buildings that served as communication centers for a time and let the streets run wild. Neighborhoods sometimes became armed camps and with the quantity of guns that existed in most of southern society they faired better than the northern cities by expressing with out further warning that things would turn pretty deadly if you stepped out of line or appeared to be a threat.
Middle class neighborhoods armed themselves and locked their doors and ate what little food was left in their pantries dreading the all too soon day when nothing but the dust would be left. They watched the streets for signs of trouble, large groups on the move and dreaded any knock that came to the door, cowered behind barricaded doors at the gunshots and screams that came in the night.
They talked to their neighbors about self protection; they sought defensive alliances and asked for answers about what they should do next which no one had. People tried to eat grass, hunted pets, stole, robbed and anything else to live another day. Some sought the easy way out through suicide, the woods filled with hunters and many people never made it home again, the church pews filled and suburbs became graveyards.
Many citizens offered to take a stand with the police to fight what they saw as destruction. Mayors attempted to recruit the big farmers to help feed the masses but it wasn’t planting season and the juggernaught of famine and societal strife rolled on gathering speed and more fires started. The cities tried to keep the water pumping for as long as they possibly could for drinking water. National Guard water purification units offered their services in some areas and small towns but these were few and far between. When the taps shut off, people for the most part would leave or die heading for the temporary respite of the nearest known source of that precious and necessary life giving liquid.
Oh many would be just drinking on cases of looted soft drinks to stave off dehydration and such and still be hanging around their own neighborhoods but that wouldn’t last long. They also would be driven with need to migrate towards finding a dependable source of water as well as food.
The threat of death by dehydration was a better equalizer than a gun for your own safety at first. That is if you had water stored in your home and could stay off the streets and avoid the worst of it awhile. There would soon be less people left around to rob you, rape you, beat you, steal from you or compete with you for survival very quickly once the city water quit flowing and they were forced to migrate elsewhere. You would be left behind with whatever pitiful crap resources remained in your area to try to survive on where as the criminals and regular survivors would have absolutely nothing as soon as they got a half tank away and would never be coming back to bother you. They would like a plague of locust soon deplete certain areas resources and you had time on your side to scrounge where you were at if resourceful.
A funny thing occurs that running out of water does for a city and its inhabitants besides making them migrate further out, it also increases fuel consumption and demand further in. People seeking water at first daily would transport it back and forth to home from known natural or manmade sources burning up gas before they decided they needed to move closer to the water to conserve fuel. It was also the last desperate act they did when realizing they were but a tank of gas away from surviving or not surviving in many cases because of the bodies need for water.
Getting dressed for foraging and getting ready to go to the water hole with the rest of the animals meant looking out for predators. You avoided going to the water hole if you could. You didn’t know what was hiding in the bushes or along the path waiting for you to come to get something to drink or for that matter eat.
Travis and his wife Tina had immediately dutifully filled up the bath tub, the si
nks, pots and pans etc. the day that half the power in the US went out and they had done it even faster when it was announced that it was done by a terrorist act. They had started doing it slowly just to be on the safe side at first to have extra in the bathtub to flush the toilet with remembering a broken water main not long ago. This proved to be very wise move because many people got caught off guard when the water itself was shutoff all at once. The power companies announced limited power availability for the first few days after the initial attack and in Travis’s community they lost all power completely about a week into the big meltdown.
When residents were warned in other states to conserve water because there was only a three-day reserve and available unless the power came back on (it didn’t) panic swept through far too much of the country and the emergency water supply was gone in 24 hours.
The water stayed on for another week at Travis’s house but with barely any pressure to push it through the pipes. He and his wife had both got compulsive about filling a glass or some other container with the slow flow to reassure themselves that it was still trickling and also use it as a crystal ball clock for when the big migration to waterways to start up in earnest.
Travis and Tina used their time to make they rain catchments around their backyard gardens and attempted to grow some more greens. They had very little seed for the task but Travis advised that the natural weeds would soon move into the garden on their own and many of them would be edible if Mother Nature blessed them.
For lack of anything better to do and to get some exercise he also tore up patches of their lawn here and there and offered it to the fast growing weeds. If they were lucky purslane or some other kind of edible weed would take up residence on its own and they would be eating on those not particularly tasty greens before any kale or turnip tops grew in. He did spend some of his time shoring up the sides of his rain garden though. He considered it might be a futile act because they would be bugging out eventually but when that was they hadn’t decided as of yet.
Rain gardens are as old as agriculture itself especially in arid lands. For thousands of years, humans have harvested the water from rains too heavy to fully soak into the ground. A rain garden or catchment is a depression or basin on the surface of the soil where rainwater is collected from the surrounding landscape and can be used by plants in the basin. Basically a mud puddle.
A depression may be man-made; however, many occur naturally. A man-made rain garden should be placed to optimize the capture of water from the immediate drainage area, guide the run off. Ditches or swales also may be used to divert water from other drainage areas. Water from a rooftop may be channeled through gutters and pipes to the rain garden.
Travis and Tina’s neighbors were a long retired elderly couple that had a sloping hill in their backyard and Travis took his mattock over and Tina grabbed a hoe and they set about fish scaling the sides of the landscape with swales.
A swale is a depression or ditch that follows the contour of the land like the lines used on topographical maps to illustrate elevation and gradient.
As with a rice terrace, when seen from above the line of the swale it may curve across the surface of the land but when viewed edge on it will be perfectly horizontal and level allowing water to pool from end to end.
This type of water gathering gardening not a lot of use if you have no rain but it is a good rain extender to benefit the plants longer and try to make up for a drought. Boredom was another reason the job was undertaken. Waiting patiently to die is not in the human spirit or nature, people want to fight to live and so they did, but most people only ended up dying a little sooner expending useless calories. Travis however had decided long ago that he wasn’t going to be bored and would rather fight with a spade and a pick axe first and hopefully only have to tussle Mother Nature once in a while to get through a calamity like this. But that was all going to depend on other folks leaving him alone long enough to grow something that was edible.
Old people like the Jones next-door tried their best to be resourceful as they could but you could see it in their eyes they had given up on life mostly. They were just going to admittedly resolve to die sooner than they expected and go through the motions of living another day while hopefully not having any further health issues soon..
Tina encouraged them to help out doing everything even when they weren’t needed and Travis made Carl feel more useful standing guard while he dug his garden or had him staying behind guarding the houses if he and Tina went on water procurement or foraging trips.
They had both been lucky so far and had not been targeted by thieves but they both knew they were out there and waiting. Travis dropped the dark window curtain he had been peering out of and told Tina that he was going out to check the snares out in the tree in the front yard.
“Ok Hon, is the street all quiet?” Tina asked.
“Yes it’s empty right now.” Travis replied picking up the old single shot 20 gauge Iver Johnson shotgun of his and going out the front door.
Travis sure wished he had a pellet gun of some sort instead of this single banger. There were plenty of birds around here but he wasn’t going to disintegrate them small things into feathers with his shotgun and the .22 Henry survival rifle he had wasn’t up to the task of hunting them effectively either. He had some aforethought though and he was lucky he had packed a couple rat traps in his bug out bag that sort of worked for song birds, but he still did wish that he had thought about to add some of the smaller mouse traps also. Wasn’t it himself that had said often if a Prepper cant catch a bird he or she would be reduced to eating what the bird ate and that included bugs and worms?
He had himself more than one way to accomplish that task however that also made up or his lack of small mouse traps. He had a lightweight survival gill net in his gear that he considered using as a “mist net” for birds on their flyways but he figured now that he finally unpacked that thing the mesh was too big so he left it in his pack for now.
He had been trying to remember every bird trap he had ever seen and it had taken him some experimenting to remember just how to do a few.
This works best when set in a clearing where the trigger stick offers a handy perch. The slightest weight on the trigger should cause it to fall and the noose to catch the bird by its feet.
Cut a 1/4-inch-diameter hole through one end of a stout 3-6 foot-long pole with a knife. If necessary, shave the sides of the pole to make it thin enough to make the hole. Sharpen the bottom end of the pole and drive it into the ground.
Whittle the end of the, about 6 inch, trigger stick so that it resembles a pencil with the point cut off. This end should fit loosely inside the hole in the pole.
Insert thin cord or fishing line through the hole and tie an overhand knot. Beyond the knot, form a slip noose. Tie the other end of the cord to a rock. Make the slip noose so that it drapes over the perch. Tension should hold it in position
Drape the noose over both sides of the trigger and insert it into the pole (if it's breezy, wet the cord with saliva to help it stay put). Draw the cord until the knot catches at the point where the trigger fits into the hole, to keep it from falling back through–until a bird alights on the small stick. When a bird flies down and perches, it will displace the stick, the rock will fall, and its feet will be caught as the loop quickly slides through the hole.
Itty bitty birds and wild weeds don’t make much of a meal but you can get by on them.
He and Tina’s meals these days had everything disguised as some kind of Chinese food creations with soy sauce etc. added. Travis reminded Tina they were doing good because of his ability to catch the birds because if you can’t catch them you’re reduced to eating what they eat which includes them worms and bugs he was damned if he would be eating.
“Good morning, Travis!” Mr. Jones called out from his garden across the fence.
“Morning, Carl! You out here getting yourself a little weeding done before the sun gets too hot out here?” Travis asked strol
ling over.
“Well sort of, I weed a bit and scratch around to see what’s edible maybe... Are you out pie making?” Carl said joking with him.
Carl’s wife Wilma had exclaimed jokingly and at the thought of eating common birds that it reminded her of an old nursery rhyme she had heard as a child and started singing “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” And this became their standing apocalyptic cookbook joke about being able to actually make one someday. Bird pot pie was sounding pretty good about right now.
