Just Trying To Stay Alive: A Prepper's Tale

by Michaels, Brian

  “I agree this has all been a damn nightmare that none of could have seen coming. But just remember our home and our neighborhood are not as important as our family. We can always find a new home,” I smiled softly. “As far as making the decision to go to the safe zone, will it be the right decision? We can only do what we feel is best and right now, I agree that now is probably the time to go to this safe zone before conditions get too much worse around here. It’s not going to be easy even if it is the right decision, but we’ll make it work no matter what. The most important thing is that we will be together.”

  “Just the thought of us leaving here and what we could encounter out there is terrifying me,” Emma added.

  “Well, we can’t look back at the way our home and neighborhood were and change them back,” I replied. “I wish we could but there is no way we could change things and make them the way they were before no matter how much we would like to do that. It is what it is and all we can do is move on.

  Emma smiled, “I keep telling myself that, but it sounds much better when you say it.”

  “Talking about moving on, I think now might be time for us to get up on the roof,” I smiled and hugged Emma. “What do you say we wake up the kids and get up on the roof, so we don’t miss our ride?”

  Logan and Katie sat in front of me, double checking their bags.

  I told everyone that we probably wouldn’t be able to take much in the helicopter, so they should pack two small bags.

  One bag of things that they would need the most, an extra pair of shoes, a change of clothes, snacks, their cell phones, and one or two small things that they couldn’t live without. I also said that I wanted everyone to be sure that they had a knife in their bag.

  I told them to pack a small second bag of things they would like to take, but things that they would probably be told to leave behind.

  Since we didn’t have any information about the safe zone, I said to assume we should take the kind of things we would take if we were planning on leaving in the car and needed to start fresh. I said I hoped that the safe zone would have everything we would need to start our lives over again, but not to assume anything.

  Logan’s possessions and necessities barely filled one bag.

  I had to tell Katie to dump her makeup kit, and three extra pairs of shoes she was trying to put in her main bag and put them in her second bag. Katie also had a week’s worth of underwear, her new pink days of the week underwear to be exact, but they didn’t take up much space.

  Emma and I each also had no problem fitting our things in one bag. The biggest decision we had was how much food we could take. Not knowing what to expect, and trying not to assume anything, we wanted to take as much food as we could. We each ended up with a small bag of extra clothes and the rest was granola bars, candy bars and other snacks.

  Logan and I also each took three boxes of ammo for the rifles.

  We all ate two cans of soup each, so we would be starting our journey with a full stomach.

  We had just finished our soup when we heard the sounds of explosions coming from the direction of town.

  “OK, I think we need to get up on the roof now,” I said.

  We dropped our soup cans on the floor and all crawled over to the opening in the roof.

  “I’ll go up first,” I said. “Logan, you come up next, then Katie. Emma you’ll be last.”

  I quickly climbed out on the roof and pulled Logan out behind me.

  “Logan, climb up to the peak and keep an eye out for the helicopter,” I said.

  Logan scampered up to the peak of the roof and started looking out in the direction of the rising smoke.

  Next I pulled up Katie.

  “Katie,” I said. “I want you to crawl up to the peak. Once you get up to the top, straddle the peak with one leg on each side and just sit there.”

  “This is scary,” Katie said as she looked at the dead moving around the house below us.

  “Don’t look down until you get to the top,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you, so you don’t need to worry about falling.”

  “I’ll try,” Katie replied nervously and began to move slowly on her hands and knees.

  I stayed close to Katie and held my hand on her back so she would know I was there and she wouldn’t panic.

  It only took her a moment to reach the top and she quickly straddled the peak to stabilize herself on the roof.

  I quickly moved back down to the opening and helped Emma get out on the roof.

  “Emma, when we get to the peak, I want you to straddle the roof and sit behind Katie and hang on to her,” I said. “If we are able to flag down the helicopter and it hovers overhead, the wash from the rotors will be strong enough to blow someone off the roof. You hang on to Katie and I’ll keep an eye on Logan.”

  “Maybe you should hang on to both of us,” Emma replied.

  “I will, up you go,” I said.

  I had just gotten Emma situated on the roof behind Katie when Logan began to shout, “I see the helicopter!”

  We all looked towards the smoke coming from where we had heard the explosions before to see the helicopter emerge out of the black smoke.

  Instead of taking a path that would take them directly over our house, the helicopter angled off to our right.

  “It’s not coming back our way,” Emma shouted.

  “Everyone wave your hands,” I yelled. “Maybe they will see us if we wave.”

  “Katie, wave your pink panties,” Logan shouted.

  I expected Katie to make a sarcastic remark, but instead, she reached into her bag and pulled out two pair of her pink underwear and started waving them over her head.

  We all waved and shouted, even though we knew that the helicopter would never be able to hear our shouts.

  We watched as the helicopter continued on its course for a minute, but suddenly it turned sharply and started coming in our direction.

  “They saw us,” Emma cried out happily.

  “You’re welcome everyone,” Katie said sounding pleased with herself as she shoved her pink underwear back in her bag. “The lady at the store told me that with these panties I would attract a whole lot of attention.”

  “Young lady,” I said.

  Katie looked up and gave me that innocent look of hers.

  “I was just joking Dad,” Katie laughed. “But I thought it was worth a try. They are a bright pink color Dad, someone would have to be blind not to see them.”

  “Logan, sit down on the roof and everyone hold on,” I said. “It is going to get very windy up here when the helicopter gets above us.”

  A moment later, the helicopter hovered above us.

  We covered our eyes and mouths as the swirling wind blew dirt and bits of the shingles in our eyes and faces.

  We watched as a man was lowered down in some kind of harness as the helicopter continued to hover.

  The man finally landed on the roof next to us and undid his harness.

  He knelt down next to me and shouted to be heard over the sounds of the chopper.

  “Have you been up here very long,” he asked. “We almost missed seeing you. In fact, we would have missed you except I spotted something pink waving in the air that caught my attention.”

  I looked down to see an ornery “I told you so” grin on Katie’s face.

  “We just climbed up here,” I replied. “We are the people that contacted you over our CB radio yesterday. The dead destroyed our CB so we couldn’t talk to you this morning, we decided to climb up on the roof and hoped we could get your attention.”

  “So you decided to come with us after all,” the man shouted.

  “Yes, if you will still take us with you,” I shouted.

  “Good, let’s get moving,” the man said. “The chopper will pull you up inside. I’ll help you and will go up last. Who is going up first?”

  I signaled for Logan to get up.

  “Logan, you go up first and help your mom and sister when they are pulled up,
” I shouted.

  Logan nodded, and the soldier pulled over the harness and pointed for Logan to put his legs into the loops.

  “Sorry, no guns,” the soldier said. “Please leave the rifle, you won’t be needing any weapons where we are going.”

  Logan looked at me and I nodded that he should do as we were instructed.

  Logan was pulled up and disappeared into the helicopter.

  Katie was pulled up next, followed by Emma and I went last.

  When I reached the helicopter, I found Katie was all smiles as two of the crew were helping her get comfortable.

  I gave her one of my fatherly looks and her smile quickly turned to a serious expression.

  When the crewman was pulled up, he closed the bay door and undid the harness.

  “Make yourselves comfortable, we should be back at the base and will be landing in about thirty minutes. If you want, you can look out the side windows to get a look at what is taking place below as we fly back to the base. I’m sure you are curious about what is out there,” he said. “However, I will also understand if you would prefer not to look.”

  But we all slid over closer to a window because we wanted to see what it was like in the rest of the country side.

  I noticed Emma looking at me with a smile on her face.

  Katie and Logan both eagerly watched as the view of the neighborhood slowly moved below us.

  Myself, I didn’t know what was to come, but right now I could feel what felt like the weight of the world being lifted off my shoulders.

  Part two

  The Safe Zone

  Chapter 1

  The helicopter had been in the air for about half an hour.

  During most of the trip as we had studied the landscape below us, we noticed the endless stream of the dead that covered the land below.

  The last half of the trip, the eastward migration of the dead had thinned out with only small groups of bodies moving east together below.

  Seeing fewer of the dead only enhanced the feeling of relief I had been feeling ever since we got on the helicopter.

  “How much further to the safe zone?” Katie asked.

  “About ten more minutes,” one of the crewmen replied.

  “What’s it like at the safe zone?” Katie asked. “Is it like staying at a hotel?”

  The crewman laughed.

  “No, it is more like going camping,” he replied. “It is just an area we were able to make secure enough to keep out the infected. Our priority for now has been just to keep everyone safe. We have only been there for a short time and hope to move all the survivors to a better facility soon. Things are pretty basic so don’t expect anything fancy.”

  I pointed to the man’s uniform.

  “Air Force?” I asked.

  “Navy,” the man replied.

  “I assumed you would have been Air Force,” I said. “Being in a helicopter and this far inland. How did a Navy man like you end up here?”

  “It’s a long story,” he smiled. “I’m Navy, Pete over there is Army, Jake is National Guard and Bob, the pilot is Army.”

  “I’m not an expert by any stretch, but what kind of unit is made up of men from all those different branches of the service. Have you men been selected to create some kind of Special Forces unit?”

  “No,” he replied. “We just sort of banded together after everything went to shit. Units from all branches of the service was being transferred through Ellsworth to different parts of the states to battle the infected.

  After a few days the power went out, all the communication lines went down and then the planes stopped coming. There were a lot of us men remaining without an assignment, or without any way to go where we had been assigned, so we combined our units to defend the base until we would get new orders. That was a few weeks ago.”

  “Have you received any word about how the fight to control the infected is going around the country?” I asked.

  “Nothing for some time,” the man replied. “The last communique we had was that it was wasn’t going well.”

  “I would think with all the weapons you guys have that it wouldn’t be much of a battle,” I said.

  “From what I understand the problem wasn’t our weapons but the men themselves,” the man replied. “The military found that our men were quickly becoming infected when confronted by the infected. The infection then spread through the ranks so fast that after twenty-four hours we had lost all communications with our people.”

  “That sounds like what happened in our neighborhood,” I replied. “One day people started to get sick, the next day there wasn’t anything around but the walking dead.”

  The man nodded.

  “So our small group decided that the best course of action for the time being was not to confront the infected but to try to create a safe zone to keep them out and to just wait,” he added. “Since we don’t have the manpower to take the fight to them, or the medical expertise to keep from getting infected, we decided to wait them out. After the infected die out, we hope to venture out and see if we can join up with other units like ourselves and regroup.”

  “How many people are there at the safe zone?” I asked.

  “At last count somewhere around two or three hundred,” the crewman replied.

  “Is that all that have survived?” I asked, surprised by his answer that so few had managed to survive.

  “It is all we have been able to locate in this area, we are limited in our ability to safely search to a one-hundred-mile radius,” the crewman replied. “I’m sure we’ll find more when the situation stabilizes, right now we believe any other survivors are hiding and trying to stay out of sight. I can’t blame them, you’ve seen what it is like out there.”

  “The man I spoke to yesterday said the safe zone is set up at Ellsworth Airforce Base,” I said.

  “It was, but when we got back to base yesterday, the infected were overrunning the base,” the crewman replied. “So we had to move the survivors a few miles further out to another compound with better security. We started getting the other location prepared a few days ago when we began to notice the increased numbers of the dead coming east and decided that we needed a backup plan should the dead overrun Ellsworth. The new location is a lot smaller, but the physical barriers appeared to be a lot more secure and easier to defend.”

  “Better security than an Air Force base?” I asked.

  “Most of the security at Ellsworth was electronic,” the crewman replied. “Without electricity and when our generators gave out, we only had a lightweight mesh fence between us and the infected. The base relied on the fact that it was out in the desert, miles from anything. We only had a light fence barrier, but our electronic surveillance would normally detect anyone miles away before they could approach the base, so under those conditions a heavy physical barrier was not considered necessary. When the huge masses of the infected started to come through a few days back, the fence at Ellsworth started to give out. The new location is an older facility, but with a much heavier grade metal fence. It isn’t the ideal situation, but it should keep us all safe until we are able locate and to move everyone to something better.”

  “Have your efforts to slow down the infected back in Rapid City worked out?” I asked.

  “Not as well as we had hoped,” he replied. “A few days ago after the number of the infected coming out to the base drastically increased, we went out in the helicopter to find out where they were all coming from. We discovered that they are coming from somewhere west of Rapid City. We couldn’t go far enough to locate the source, but we could see that for some reason they were coming through Rapid City. We tried to create a blockade by blowing up a few blocks of houses and buildings, hoping that would divert them into going in another direction. After a few hours we found that the infected were still coming east by going over and around the obstacle we created. We don’t have enough explosives to create a larger obstacle, but even if we did, I don’t believe it would really make much o
f a difference.”

  “So you don’t have any idea why they are coming east and why they are still coming towards where you have set up the safe zone?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, we don’t know why they are coming this way,” he replied. “I can only hope that there isn’t too many more of them coming our way, or that they just pass us by and keep going somewhere else.”

  “My name is Hank by the way,” the crewman stretched out his arm and shook my hand.

  “I’m Brian, it’s good to meet you,” I replied then sat back next to the window.

  For the first time since getting on the helicopter I began to feel uncomfortable about our decision. The name “safe zone” had suggested a well-fortified structure were all the survivors of the nightmare we had witnesses could go for food and protection, a place where they could find a way to rebuild their lives. However, from what I just heard described to me, the safe zone sounded like we were going to place that had been quickly thrown together as a last resort when all else had failed.

  I just sat back, leaned my head against the inside of the helicopter and tried to relax and push out of my mind the visions of the safe zone that my imagination was suddenly conjuring up inside my head.

  I would know soon enough what we had gotten ourselves into and I decided to try and not assume anything.

  So far, our decision to go to the safe zone felt like the right decision, I would just try to stay optimistic until we arrived at our destination and I could see it with my own eyes.

  Chapter 2

  The helicopter flew over Ellsworth Air Force Base a few minutes later.