Smoking Skillet

by Ron Foster

  “Well you got to have laws and someone to enforce them it seems to keep folks acting right, but look what happened right here in town of Badfelt. We had curfew before anyone else in the state did, we are a small town of less than 25,000 and people here ended up going bat shit crazy. Now I admit that a lot of them refugees from other states and the folks that broke down on the highway and walked in here was a lot of the cause for the trouble, but wasn’t it you that told me “lock the door, load the guns and forget about the outside for awhile?” You said “wait on the smoke to clear” “Wait on the water to stop flowing.” Wait on the dead snake to quit writhing or it will bite you etc.!” and a bunch of other shit about waiting on this or that before going outside regular I don’t remember! But thing is, you said we needed to sit tight and we have. Why can’t we move over there and do some honest work rather than having to watch our backs over here and eat whatever the hell it is that you manage to find or we have only a ¼ cupful of after splitting it with the neighbors most of the time?” Tina said hotly not liking the idea of this long term Spartan hard time living they had been enduring if there was an alternate lifestyle they had been too dumb to notice or hear about.

  “Now hold on now Tina, nobody said such a place even existed let alone sent us a welcome card to come eat. Remember this is all speculation now about Smileyville and we have no idea what’s going on 30 miles north or south of us in any of the other small towns either. Well I take that back, I know a little bit because we have that shortwave band on our radio that I can sometime here but I haven’t heard anyone really talking local and the operators I hear are mostly talking about how St. Louis and Chicago and such was still burning and finding out that FEMA camps are being offered in some places to evacuate too. Last thing they were repeating is telling people that FEMA was saying “don’t come to any facility we are over capacity” and we can’t feed what we got people wise already. I am telling you perhaps, just PERHAPS now mind you, that we might be able to get something in trade in Smileyville, This shit hitting the fan is a come as you are moment, remember?” Travis fired back

  “Well I am not trying to start an argument with you there on that point. I was just saying that the world could pass us by and we wouldn’t even know it just sitting here. You have been talking us bugging out here, bugging out there, but no stay bugged in here etc. for weeks and weeks. Now your idea of going beach bumming to Florida has got me intrigued and a bit infatuated I must say. I was looking forward to that. I would much rather be there with you trying to bring home crabs, oysters, scallops hell even stingrays than your little depopulate the neighborhood of birds thing we got going on here. I feel like such a traitor loading that feeder even if you don’t trap directly off it everyday just to attract more winged beauties that you are going to make Chop Sui out of. But it is what it is. Sorry baby, we both are getting kind of testy with these hard times and I was concerned that we were making bad choices by playing grey man and staying in the shadows all the time only watching others.” Tina said calming some now.

  “I am sorry sweetie; I didn’t mean to snap at you. It is just that I am pretty edgy these days’ as we both are and you know I will do whatever you want if I think its best for us, but being an outsider is sort of new to me and limits our options. Its new to you also I know but here we are. We didn’t plan on this, well not really. When you said we had to go down to settle your folks estate, I wasn’t thinking end of the world and what we were going to carry. Hurricanes I had covered give me credit for that. I was the one that reminded you it was hurricane season remember? Anyway we are stuck here until life reshuffles the deck and gives us a better hand or we get run off or give up. We ain’t giving up so I don’t want to wait around here much longer to get run off or have to move because of rowdies or lack of food and have been formulating some plans. Come on now, I did make it a kind of cool notion to talk about with our dart game!” Travis said with a wry grin.

  Travis and Tina had driven down from Tennessee to Alabama to liquidate her parent’s estate in a small but well recognized city. The house had been vacant for months after the demise of her parents and it needed to be readied for the estate liquidation while Tina went through the mementos and memories for anything she wanted to save. They were both preppers and had tons of gear and preps at home but in their hurry down here they had only grabbed the bug out bags and their clothes and not much else.

  Well that couldn’t be said to be entirely true. No not by a long shot if you took into account Travis’s so called “Hell with it” bags he had thrown in at the last moment. He could give you a good guesstimate what might be in them things but he really didn’t know their contents nor was he depending on them. See those things were created by frustration, innovation, poverty, borrowing, financial duress, plotting, scheming, learning, growing etc. all brought about by trying to achieve the illusive, the mystical, the impractical, the most awesome thing in the world… THE ULTIMATE BUG OUT BAG!!! Yay! Get ready for the applause and the pictures when you finally figure out it can’t be done and is a fruitless mind numbing venture if your newbie at it like even old seasoned preppers eventually figures out that they themselves have been out snipe hunting.

  Travis would tend to pack and repack his BOB so many times he couldn’t count them all over the years. New handy dandy stuff came out on the market, his old do it yourself or improvised stuff seemed so primitive so he wrongly sometimes went into debt to get new hi-tech crap that did the same thing etc and as his bug out gear got re-shuffled, re-identified, discarded, re-amalgamated, condensed, expanded, updated, cool factored, repurposed, realigned, prioritized or monetized etc. His sometimes impractical replacements and old extra gear got thrown into a gym bag and a couple extra backpacks that also got changed around and repacked with this transition.

  If you end up with extra gear and all preppers do, based on a disease we all get to somehow obsessively make sure those extra bits break down into duplicates or almost complete bug out bags. Oh no! Almost complete bug out bag? I need more shit! As you are assessing what an “almost complete” bug out bag is you find yourself buying stuff to complete whatever you got and add to the rest. Eventually like Travis you say enough and start tossing surplus “Prepper Crap” into a bag because you might need it, two is one and one is none, and eventually you think you could outfit someone else if need be etc.

  Well Travis had his bag and a couple food and whatever small duffels that had old surplus crap in them but wasn’t going anywhere accept an extra bag and tossed some new rations on top of it all and declared they were hurricane ready. They eventually decided they had enough get home or bug out gear for come what may on the trip and they left with no room for anything else in their vehicle.

  They had travailed with what they had 400 miles or so down here only to find out “this is not a test” calamity was occurring and say ‘oh crap I sure wish I had this or that’ that they had left stored back at home. This was true particularly weapons wise. Everyday carry pistols they had with them, .380 automatics carried on the person at all times. Battle pistols, check 9mm 17 shot jobs in the bug out gear and kept by he bedside after they arrived with 2 loaded clips each plus a 50 round box of ammo for reloads. Two .22 caliber Henry survival rifles with 200 rounds of top quality CCI ammo to feed to the long rifles. One foldable youth model Iver Johnson single shot 20 gauge shotgun. Greatest pipe gun Travis had ever got a hold of for packable size, features and weight. Course you start adding one ounce shells to it and you get a bit skeptical about functional weight but that was his meat getter and the only way he could figure out how to carry two long guns and minimize size and backpacking carry weight. Travis was a country boy at heart and he knew what tools it took to get the job done hunting when it came to trying to augment a dinner plate and a budget using the woods as a larder.

  You didn’t need no fancy gun; you needed a gun that worked like it was supposed to and went bang when it was supposed to. Travis had the same chances with that old 20 gauge single shot to
bust a deer with buckshot at 40 yards or even a hundred yards with a good slug as the more affluent man that paid $1,000 or more for an extra shot over and under engraved skeet gun. It all came down to the operator and his knowledge of the game he was chasing. Now weapon configuration and quality does come into play don’t get me wrong, but see Travis figured that a $350 Mossberg camo 500 youth model he had, even though it was a pump with 6 rounds was not the tool for the job he wanted to pick if he had another choice of gun to use to feed himself rather than defend.

  A full choke single shot turkey shotgun in the woods at the range it was designed for will beat hands down a home invasion short barreled cylinder bore in the field. That’s just a damn fact, to think otherwise is to be foolish enough to say given the choice of shotgun chokes you would rather limit yourself to a probable miss with no choke at a distance and have the pump shotgun with extra rounds as your main carry to fight off zombies with. Maybe you could compensate and take another shot rather than depend on a hit at distance with a full choke the first time but he figured that was just another likely miss.

  Survival strategy thinking for Travis now was all about, one shot, and one kill. He sort of figured if you get yourself into a situation where multiple rounds needed to be fired to get out of it then you need to rethink your survival strategies and the likeliness of you coming out alive begin with and needing all that extra fire power to do it.

  A 4lb shotgun and a 22 caliber survival rifle would cover the majority of his needs in a handy portable package that didn’t greatly reduce his mobility. The battle rifle, pump shotguns etc. he had decided could stay home this trip but he longed for their confidence building higher capacity capabilities when eying the questionable neighbors down the street.

  Food wise, the house that they were staying in now had its own stock of rather dated canned goods left in the cupboards but that didn’t bother them and this was a blessing. They had plenty of so called out of date canned goods at home in their own preps and knew that they were edible and tasty for years to come as long as the cans kept their integrity.

  But these stores the parents had put back were just a couple of weeks of “hurricane “food that had been stored and forgotten over the years. This inherited pantry bounty and what they had been buying for groceries themselves before the grid went down had been the sum total of what they had been relying on to get by, but even this much preparation had all but disappeared weeks ago. If it had not been for the edible weeds, the birds, some squirrels now and then etc they would have met their demise or been bugging out possibly weeks ago

  The birds were becoming more scarce and harder to catch, the season was starting to change and many types of the sparse scattered edible weeds they were depending on would be gone until next spring.

  Hopefully the hardy winter greens they had planted would produce in time but they had gotten planted late. They were in the Deep South but that didn’t mean they didn’t get killing frosts. Winter was to be feared, the dying would start in earnest as the cold set in and peoples already weakened bodies and spirits would succumb.

  None of the houses on their street had fireplaces or wood heaters. Without a source of warmth there was no way they would survive the season. Carl and Travis had been brainstorming how to construct some kind of wood heater or fireplace but even if they could it would be .hard to feed them with any kind of wood regularly. They only had a wood carpenter’s saw and a cheap bow saw for the effort and neither had an axe or any other suitable woodsman’s tools to build up a wood pile. There really wasn’t any good firewood trees to be had in the neighborhood anyway, short of the really big ones needing a chainsaw and a strong back with a splitting maul to process and they speculated on how much wood they could possibly salvage by tearing out kitchen cabinets or whatever other wood they could find in the known empty houses on this block to see them through winter to burn.

  Travis told Tina they were going to have to themselves leave here and bug out eventually and that was a conversation neither one of them wanted to have. Travis said bluntly that they couldn’t take care of themselves anymore where they were at already and that he didn’t see them dragging along the old neighbors who were failing fast daily on a future dead end trip somewhere .

  It might sound like they were thinking every man and woman for themselves and to some, it smacks of thoughts of rats leaving a sinking ship, but go they must. When and to where to go was the big hold out question? Travis and his mate hoped desperately that Smileyville would offer some reprieve from forcing the bug out decisions on them but realistically they didn’t hold out many expectations for good news on that subject.

  There own town had showed them how easy it was for all semblance of civilization to break down to a shambles. Everyone remaining had asked the same question of themselves early on. “What do you eat when the world ended?” What others were doing he didn’t know, it wasn’t safe to get out on the roads, it wasn’t safe to leave what you had unguarded, they had no money or trade goods to exchange even if they did get lucky and find someone who was willing to sell food. They like so many other millions of people were basically on their own and out of options.

  At first some local farmers braved the mean streets to sell a little surplus but it was the wrong season of the year for any excess produce. The government’s plan to take over the big farms and distribute what they could to survivors had fallen flat on its face as far as he could tell. They weren’t handing out any aid that he knew of this far south.

  In the Midwest states maybe with their vast grain fields and silos but not around here. The radio talked about big farm and slaughter houses having distributed allocations but without fuel for the tractors to produce more, combines to harvest and trucks to deliver produce and feed for the domestic animals things just went down the toilet quickly.

  Everyone had the art of artificially producing food down to a chemical fertilizer science these days and depended on production from many geographically spaced places. The feed lots for cattle couldn’t get their grain or hay; the giant chicken houses that kept the price of poultry low couldn’t function without electricity to run cooling fans or pump water etc. and ran out of feed. What animals couldn’t be fed were slaughtered but there was no up and running processing plants and commercial refrigeration anymore to keep the system going.

  For most people, starvation and famine knocked at their door quicker than they could wrap their heads around the fix they were in and try to do something about it. They lost it; they lost their minds, they lost their wealth and they pretty much lost all modern means of further sustaining themselves as soon as the power went off.

  For those families or retirees that depended on the flimsy safety net of the Government dole or social security programs daily to get by anyway there were no answers. They soon found out that they lacked the basics day one and were the first to feel the bite of even deeper and darker hunger and despair. These economically challenged folks were also usually the least educated and most unprepared to cope on their own with out state aid of any sort and so were some of the first that resorted to unbridled looting and out right robbery.

  America could have maybe rebuilt the communities and nation given time, but the lawlessness occurring after the grid went down created a desperate situational crisis on top of the supply calamity already affecting everyone. For a large number of people and groups, being moral and constitutional became just two more words they had never learned the meaning of to begin with and they started doing as they wanted with out rule of law to keep them in check.

  The unwarranted hates and simmering racial divides had always existed before this calamity as did the entitlement crowds expectations of the government always saving them from themselves with food, shelter and security after a disaster. Generations of uneducated and uncaring unemployed had long ago removed some forms of personal safety and security in their communities themselves. They flourished in a lifestyle of their choosing in bad crime ridden neighborhoods that made even goo
d cops willing to make a difference in the status quo too scared or hamstrung by political correctness to enter.

  The poor neighborhoods were segregated that way because the residents made them that way and modern day culture enforced and awarded what yellow bellied politicians said couldn’t be changed. Everyone had hid behind their desks or stayed in their patrol cars and allowed the neighborhoods to get run down. Typically only some people of a certain race or class was allowed to walk down the street at high noon or midnight or be accosted by the vile violent residents exhibiting prejudices they said they were against and the cause of their own plights.