Apocalyptic Apothecary

by Ron Foster

  “That could be me, you, Ann, Rachel, Donna and whoever else knows how to pass the message and the knowledge on of using old herbal medicine and remedies correctly. The idea I am calling “wish and want medicine” …everybody that looks at those old labels will be trying to remember what they can about the contents if they can read those labels at all. Opium they know, but we ain’t got any of that, however lactium, or lettuce opium as some call it, that I can make. What I can produce in my lab simply, is much milder, but it is not an addicting pain reliever like the more powerful stuff made from poppies so I just use wild lettuce. Quinine is something else that nobody thinks that they might need right now, but think about it. Why did both sides of the Civil War put such a value on it? Was it because they were losing so many troops to extended illness from mosquito bites? Just being able to read off or translate those labels for purpose, plant or dosage, should unequivocally tell you it takes a wide range of medicines to treat a wide range of ailments. If you notice, the surgeons of old were seemingly less worried about you being shot and in pain than having something wrong with your skin or bowels, it seemed. A lot of the friggin’ preppers we know are going to be more apt to be needing antacids, constipation medicine or antidiarrhea pills than they are needing non-script pet medicine antiviral or antibiotics most times, but some got that shit and more tourniquets and blood clotting stuff for gun shots rather than what medicine it takes to get over the flu or keep their body from shutting down for lack of a few vitamins they know don’t store well. Take this old book, Sloan, show it around to people, and learn something from it.” Zack said.

  “Show them this old timey empty medical chest, get their imagination going and tell them that if you can’t hang with working the fields, then you got to try instead to work diligently in the pharmacy to help fill some bottles etc. for it. If we don’t do that, us old bastards and bitches are going to hell in a handbasket and our wisdom will be lost forever. I ain’t just talking about medical knowledge, I am talking about all them thousand and one things that we have learned by now from age and experience which can still help make this and the next generations survive!” Zack said not really wanting to think about getting off his tree stump proclamation just yet.

  “Now that sounds like a fine idea for us to demonstrate strategically and cleverly just how to get folks to have themselves a different task and meaningful purpose in life.” Sloan said with a smile.

  “In the meantime, I will do my best work on convincing everyone this old timey medicine is so good it will chase off the devil and make them wish they had knowledge of all these old herbal medicines while the grid was up!” Zack said with grin.

  “Damn, you ain’t got to try to sell me no more on your project, boy, I am right there with you! Ain’t no sense in either one of us knowing how to out survive or outlast everybody at our age, particularly if nobody’s going to be left to carry on when we are gone. I am with you all the way and I will support you, but your little apocalyptic apothecary business is going to have to pour a whole lot of medicine down a lot of folks’ gullets for them not to ask you no fool questions or believe in helping us old rickety folks make more of it.” Sloan said before asking Zack if he had more to add to the venture.

  “Let’s avoid the cure word and use the words “HELPFUL or USEFUL Remedy” to get our point across and just get people to try to store some medicine for when it’s needed, sort of like we did the same for food and ammo ourselves back in the prepper days when we could. It’s an item that is always going to be needed and if you ain’t got it, those first two necessary things I mentioned might not be needed at all if you are too sick to eat or aim a rifle. Next, and this is the tough one, how do you store up compassion or teach younger folks the apocalypse doesn’t start at a certain age or circumstance? Having something to help another fellow human being medically will always give you more personal satisfaction than any amount of stored up Rambo tools to overcome a situation! Be good to yourself, try to be kind to others and the elderly or infirm, is all part of surviving. That kind of thinking might be the light of wisdom or fire under their butts that is needed for us all to survive! It took several hundred years for the uniform hydration formula for adults and babies to combine just plain old salt and sugar with clean water to save millions of lives, let’s not lose that information indiscriminately by just learning war tactics!” Zack said sagely.

  “I always try to be a compassionate man or woman amongst men and women, most folks these days have forgotten what that means as part of leadership. Be wise and be humble, because one day we all got to be our brothers’ keeper as they used to say!” Sloan said agreeing to the concept of sort of a warrior medic mentality.

  .

  4

  In a world with no antibiotics, how did doctors treat infections?

  “Times a wasting, Nick and I will most likely be dead and buried long before either one of us even know it, that is if I ever even think about going back around that damn grocery store again without some serious backup. We need some sort of way to convince them that tolerating me and my ideas now even after Ezra and I conned them and ripped them off like we did at the beginning of this crap is a good idea. They need to let bygones be bygones, because the only thing to put all of us back on the map is by doing some herbal medicine good if we want to get a handle on this outbreak of God knows what disease is afflicting the community and making it sicker than it should be. I am thinking it’s Cholera that we got, or typhoid or something else, but I got no real idea unless we can bag us one of those doctors and convince him to try my home brewed potions and elixirs out, if they are as short on meds as I think they are.

  “I will go see what I can do, no sense you kicking an anthill by coming around. If I can find me some kind of medical personnel around, you can have your meeting over here with them where I can control it, ok?” Nick said thinking that was best and Zack agreed.

  “I think in the meantime I will go visit Rod’s camp and see what’s doing over there. Let me go round up Dee for a ride and you can either meet us over there or get up with me when I get back.” Zack said.

  “Will do!” Nick said and Zack went to find Dee and see if anybody else wanted to go on this jaunt with him. Not finding any takers, they loaded up and headed for the gated community.

  Zack and Dee rode along in contemplative silence mostly, deep into their own thoughts of trade and hopes of finding some food. Trading was easy, finding food of any sort offered was a whole nother thing unless someone had hit a mega score somewhere scavenging that produced a hefty surplus but that was an extremely rare and unlikely occurrence.

  “How are you all making out over here these days?” Zack asked one of Rod’s gate guards who had recognized Dee’s Cadillac golf cart and was unblocking the gate to allow them in before they even got there.

  “Bored, but I like that way. Well, that ain’t quite true, I don’t like the alternatives of not being bored. Been quiet around here for weeks and I hope it stays that way. You on a trading trip or are you coming to visit Rod?” Stewart said as Mabel, his assistant guard today, walked over also.

  “A bit of both actually, you got anything interesting for barter?” Zack replied before Dee drove in the gated community and parked while the guards re-secured the gate by driving a U-Haul truck back across the entrance.

  “Myself personally, Zack, no, I pretty much don’t ever get out of the community to find much of anything for trade but if you tell me what it is you are looking for, I bet I can find it.” Stewart the gate keeper said, hoping they would mention something.

  “I got a little silver flatware to barter. Got anything to eat?” Mabel asked expectantly.

  “Well, damn things seem to be looking up for trading! You have those spoons and forks with you?” Ann asked thinking some profit could be had.

  “No, but I can get them down here quick enough.” Mabel said, knowing full well already that the newly arrived visitors were very familiar with how the trading with gate guards worked. In
a way, the guards were like special order shopkeepers if someone came to the community wanting to trade. Guarding the gate always came first, but if they called up to base camp on the two-way radio and made an inquiry, trade goods runners or actual traders themselves could be summoned, as well as extra guards to handle a situation, if needed. The guards, if they had nothing to trade themselves, always got a bit of commission for running security for the transaction or making a referral which made life interesting and was a duty bonus.

  If it was a big trade being contemplated, one that couldn’t be done at the gate or if warehousing was needed, the first house on the road in with a locking garage was used next to what served as the CQ office and extra security guard post.

  Gate guard duty wasn’t such a bad gig to be stuck on then. The regular shift ran 4 hours on, 4 hours off, depending on the community’s staffing needs. There were plenty of people around to man posts with, so guard duty only came up a couple times a week for everyone usually. The one guard duty you didn’t want, was to get stuck out on listening post monitor duty about a hundred yards or so hunkered down in the deep woods in back of the community. The bugs and heat could get pretty bad back there during the relentless sunny days; it was spooky at night to be out there all alone except for you and your “foxhole buddy” and if it rained it was a pretty much a miserable wet shift, in spite of the rigged tarp setups to try to stay dry. There was a lot of talk about doing away with that particular watch duty now, mainly because things were so calm around here these days and threat levels weren’t anticipated to be high because of so much mass die off or people bugging out of the area. The North, South and East houses in the Gated community all had window watchers assigned who were looking out for any strangers or dangers trying to sneak in the back and the sides of the community, but that was some good sit-down rest work mostly. You just sat back and looked out the window and tried not to run down the radios in boredom checking in on the other outposts.

  When this security plan was originally first implemented, each house in the row would alternate their watch duty in couple hour shifts, each taking their turns to peep around their back yards but not all houses had the proper field of view. When the community had their first scare of real live armed backyard creepers, folks learned quickly that security was serious deadly business and for whatever reason, many households took some of the tent campers into their homes to perform or assist with their assigned house watch duty. Some took in boarders just to reinforce their own household armaments and home protection. Many of the regular residents in the community lacked firearms and training, while pretty much no one in the camped-out prepper group was unarmed. Taking an armed stranger into your home had its own ramifications but most unarmed homeowners had opted to do so. This was particularly true if they were elderly and saw the writing on the wall when it came to this new post-apocalyptic living arrangement of an armed camp neighborhood.

  A lot of people would sort of rent or hire themselves out like mercenary house sitters or guards to those that could to offer pay in coin, offer a free room, or maybe some room and board as compensation, if they were really lucky. There was a community duty roster posted that was based on assigned sections or platoon that assigned some kind of a task that would come up here and there for a person to do regularly every week or so. Roving guard was a duty the same duration as regular guard duty, but this duty required that you stay outside and walk and wander around the neighborhood periodically looking for dangers. while armed. This duty was usually only watching from dusk to dawn for trouble but if a threat was apparent, day duty might occur.

  One-person extra was always staying awake and playing fireguard. They would monitor individual households on shifts at night while the others slept if tensions got high, or news of another forced entry close by was heard about. The community kitchen was used sometimes, but normally it was closed as small groups fended for themselves by scavenging, fishing, bartering, foraging and trying to grow crops. The community sent out hunting parties and some folks just got by doing some kind of community service to get a meal. Charity still existed but food it seemed did not.

  The pecking order of such platoon sized militia groups of 7-10 people operated under their own leaders and rules pretty much but somehow, they and the community as a whole, were working things out hand in hand surviving best they could. Not so the rest of the town, or for that matter those still in nearby major cities. Oh, you had a few hold out neighborhoods still operating like this one Rod headed up, they had managed ok so far, but for most that were elsewhere, it was just misery, death, starvation, gunshots and ever burning or smoldering fires as homes were consumed.

  The drinking water had run out seemingly long before the food had, or the uncontrollable rampant fires had forced people out of the cities the first month after the last drop of water ran out of the spigot. It was during this time that refugees covered the roads like locusts, consuming whatever they could heading for the nearest waterway to get something to drink or die. Chaos, societal collapse and mass hysteria took on new meanings as the haves and have nots struggled over dividing what was left to eat and tried to avoid the predators at the water holes.

  Two weeks into the disaster, after it was realized that the water was cut off for good, it was fair to say 80% of folks had no food at all left. Most had very little to start with and now had no means of getting any more except robbery and people were really feeling the physical and mental effects of starvation in a maniacal predatory state.

  People who had ignorantly drunk unpurified river water were already dead and gone and it was a blessing to be rid of them in many ways. For others, just burning the calories to haul water, hunt, fish, plant a garden etc. made just trying to do the bugged-out basics of prepper living a high-speed hourglass of bodies and minds wasting slowly away.

  Many folks who had either foolishly or unwisely chosen for their own reasons to bug out and head for the woods, or had been unluckily forced to leave the cities in a hurry, were now trying to move back in those dangerous confines with hopes of foraging and scavenging the dead places like starving dogs. But alas, there simply was rarely anything at all for them to find that was close to edible left. Armed, resourceful and desperate wanderers soon became a new force to contend with for the preppers who had wisely bugged in with their supplies and were staying as long as they could. Eventually they too were considering that same revolving door of death and bugging out. Everyone played these post collapse hunger games differently, but the real fate outcomes of hastened death prevailed and continued to take their toll.

  Day to day survivors living together as hunters, gatherers and looters is a confusing and dangerous game to play. The criminal element of just plain marauders existed also, but their ranks had been so thinned that they posed much less of a threat as disease, infected wounds and judicious shooting on sight if recognized as such a threat occurred not so frequently.

  Zack meanwhile, had slowly begun to comprehend his own place in the world and to find peace within himself in doing so, as he decided exactly how he was going to fight this disaster. Disaster preparedness was his weapon, getting folks ready for one, come what may and teaching them the best he could, he decided, beat any stockpile of ammo or guns in his arsenal. Murder and mayhem were waning, but that was just one stupid mistake away.

  Keeping people focused on community resiliency and anticipating their crumbling health issues filled Zack’s time. In turn, those that he was trying to help, followed his leadership and their help and thankfulness provided him and others with sustenance. The saying “many hands make light the work” was especially needed even more now, as many people didn’t have the physical or mental strength they needed to carry on. The people of the gated community recognized the need to form of themselves a tenacious group of weary battle-hardened communal survivors. They were fully aware by now that it took an “all hands-on deck” approach to get through the coming days and nights.

  Today was a bad day for trading at the g
ated community, no extra food was to be had and little home brewed herbal medicine got bartered. Dee and Zack just shrugged it off and she drove slow going home now, in case Zack saw something he could poach with his .22-rifle for the stew pot. And by something, that included pretty much anything and everything that might be considered edible including a crow he took a shot at but missed. He was sort of glad he did too and was more or less dependent on Nick and Knobby out hauling fish trotlines for his dinner.

  .

  5

  Homefront

  “Ezra, what are you going to do about us needing to go get you some gas for that truck of yours?” Zack asked while hiding under the shade of the shelter of his mansions’ spacious porch roof to beat the heat of the hot summer day.

  “Nick and Knobby are supposed to be arranging to get me some somewhere. I haven’t heard back from them on that yet. It’s a pain in the ass for me not to have anything for trade, but things work out over here for the best ok, I guess. Sitting around over here playing it safe is the smart thing to do, but I sure would like for us to try to figure out a new scavenging trip sometime soon. How long you figure it is going to be before it’s safer for us to venture out further and try to get something tangible?” Ezra asked.