Just Trying To Stay Alive: A Prepper's Tale

by Michaels, Brian

  I picked up the stick Katie had been trying to toss up in the tree, threw it up at one of the higher branches and was rewarded by a half dozen apples bouncing on the ground around us.

  Emma and Logan came around the corner of the shed just in time to see the apples falling to the ground and excitedly ran out to get an apple.

  For the next few minutes we all tore into the apples like we hadn’t eaten in days, which we hadn’t.

  I tossed a few more sticks up into the tree until I wasn’t able to knock down any more apples.

  “Emma, Logan, why don’t you two collect the apples while Katie and I open the shed and build a fire.

  Logan pulled off his shirt and used it like a bag, as he and Emma scurried around collecting the apples.

  I told Katie to go collect some sticks, so we could build a fire. As she ran off to find sticks, I went to the truck to look for a hammer or a heavy wrench to break the lock on the door.

  I found a toolbox behind the seat that contained a set of pipe wrenches and picked out the largest wrench.

  It made fast work of the old rusty Master Lock hanging on the door, and I was able to get into the shed in only a few minutes.

  The inside of the shed was empty except for two lines that ran up from the corner, went over and connected to the top of a large blue tank. I walked over to the tank and turned the knob on the top of the tank to the right until it wouldn’t turn any more.

  I then took the bottle of ammonia that sat on the top of the tank and set it down next to the wall in the corner. If you breathed in chlorine, it would expand in your lungs and suffocate you, that was why the workers would always keep a bottle of ammonia in the sheds in case they accidently breathed in chlorine when they were changing the tanks. A good nose full of ammonia fumes would quickly clear out the chlorine so you could breathe again. I was tempted to throw the bottle of ammonia outside but decided against it. It would come in handy if any of the chlorine leaked into the shed during the night.

  When I stepped outside, Katie had collected a large pile of sticks and had set them up in the shape of a pyramid like I had taught her to do when we went camping.

  She looked up at me and smiled, “I even got a few sticks to make a spit to put over the fire to roast the rabbit,” she said. “But don’t you think spit is a funny word for something to cook meat on over a fire? Maybe they called it that because someone was cooking a rabbit one time and the rabbit caught fire and they didn’t have any water to put out the fire, so he had to spit on it. I wouldn’t want to eat a rabbit that someone spit on, would you?”

  “No I wouldn’t,” I replied and laughed to myself. Katie was starting to sound like her old self again. If she fully recovered from our ordeal before we made it to the mountains of Montana, I just might have to make her ride in the back of the truck for the rest of the trip.

  I started the fire and left Katie to keep it going while I went to finish skinning the rabbit. Then we all sat around the fire, enjoying the warmth and the feeling of safety and togetherness while the rabbit roasted.

  Thirty minutes later, we had the first cooked meal we had eaten in two months. After dinner, Katie suggest that if I saw any more rabbits when we were driving tomorrow, that I should feel free to hit them with the truck, but if possible, I should warn her first, so she could close her eyes.

  After double checking that the truck was locked, we headed for the shed to get settled in before we lost the last of the day’s light.

  We parked the truck on the crest of the hill, incase it wouldn’t start tomorrow, we would be able to push it down over the hill to jump start it in the event rocking it against the transmission wouldn’t work a second time. But I felt confident it would start in the morning because when I turned off the ignition the dinging chimed loudly indicating that the battery had recharged during our drive today.

  I held the door open to give us all a little light while we removed our wet pants, wrapped ourselves in our blankets which had dried in the open air of the truck bed, and claimed our place on the floor of the shed.

  Then I barred the door shut and felt my way to my blanket.

  Our usual order, which we found created the least amount of commotion, was Emma and I in the middle, Logan on the other side of Emma and the chatterbox on my side.

  I was hopeful that after our long day and with everything we hade been through, that sleep would quickly and quietly claim everyone.

  I closed my eyes and took a long weary breath.

  “Dad?” Katie asked. “Did your father like mom?”

  “He loved her,” I replied. “From the very first time he saw her, he liked her.”

  “I don’t understand why mom’s father didn’t like you at first?” Katie asked.

  “Well, because he knew I was going to take his little girl away from him,” I replied. “No father likes to think of his little girl being with some guy.”

  “Didn’t he want her to be happy?” Katie asked.

  “Of course he wanted her to be happy,” I replied. “But he didn’t want to see her taken advantage of or to get hurt. Us fathers are very protective.”

  “Sometimes fathers are too protective,” Katie said.

  “Maybe, but young guys have a reputation for being insensitive and until he got to know me, he was worried I might be one of those guys,” I replied. “I didn’t understand then, but I do now. For all he knew I could have been like those guys back at the safe zone.”

  “What would you do if I dated a guy like that?” Katie asked. “Accidently, of course.”

  “He would kill him, skin him and roast him over an open fire,” Emma said. “Katie, go to sleep.”

  “You wouldn’t do that would you Dad?” Katie whispered.

  “No, I would roast him alive,” I whispered back. “I would want to make him suffer.”

  Katie giggled into her blanket.

  It was quiet for a few minutes.

  “Was your dad like you?” Katie asked.

  “No, I don’t think he would have roasted your mother alive over an open fire no matter what she did,” I replied.

  This time I heard Emma snicker.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Katie said.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “When I look back, I have come to realize that my father was a very wise man, probably much wiser than I am. But in today’s world, at least in the world we knew before the dead arrived, people might have considered him to be a radical or a racist.”

  “Why would they say that?” Katie asked.

  “Well first of all it was because of him that I have always been suspicious of the government,” I replied. “He always tried to teach me that life isn’t fair, it never was and never will be, that’s just the way it is. My dad felt the government has always tried to fix things that couldn’t be fixed, to make an unfair world into a fair world, and ended up just making everything worse. When he saw the government trying to intervene in people’s lives, favoring one group of people over another group, it would make him mad because the government never seemed to think through what kind of problems their actions could cause. The government had a history of creating more problems than they solved.”

  “Like what?” Katie asked.

  “Well, there are a lot of examples, but I will give you just one, then we need to go to sleep because I’m tired,” I replied. “Many people believe that the government should tax the rich and spread the money around to the poor. It sounds good, right? Then everyone would have everything that they needed. But it just discourages the people that had earned that money from working harder to make more money because it isn’t worth the effort if the government is just going to take their money.

  Then on the other hand, people that are given everything without having to work for it soon start to feel that they are entitled to have what other people have, even if they don’t earn it.

  Did you ever hear the old saying, give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but teach a man how to fish and he will eat fo
r the rest of his life?” I asked.

  “No, I never heard that one,” Katie replied. “But I think I understand what it means.”

  “Well, apparently no one in the government ever head of it either, because all the government has ever done is give people free stuff to solve their problems instead of teaching them how to work for what they want and how to make their lives better.

  Now all half the country does is sit back and expect the government to give them everything they feel they are entitled to have, or they threaten to riot.

  The other half of the country doesn’t see why they should do any more than they have to do, because it is all just going to be taken by the government.

  Anyone who would dare to speak out against the government’s efforts to tax the rich to help the poor are called insensitive to the needs of the poor, racists or radicals. Everyone seems to hate everyone else because they all feel they are being cheated.

  There is a lot more to it, but that’s the basic idea. The government has a way of always ending up creating the opposite of what they are trying to accomplish.”

  “Well, we won’t have to worry about the government anymore,” Katie said.

  “But there will always be someone out there that will try to step in and tell you what you should do,” I replied.

  I listen for a second when I didn’t hear another question or comment from Katie, then I heard her breathing deeply, she had fallen asleep.

  Just like I had done when I was young, discussing deep philosophical subjects with my dad never held my attention for very long and tended to put me to sleep.

  But hopefully she had listened to me more over the years than I had listened to my dad and would be better prepared to deal with what was to come than I had been.

  I wonder if my dad had the same thoughts about me?

  I tried to let my mind shut down, tomorrow was another day, we had much to do before any of this would even matter again. For all I knew, all the lessons I had tried to teach Katie didn’t even apply to today’s world anymore.

  It was a new world, for better or worse, with new rules and new challenges. Hopefully we would be able to find a place in the death and destruction that remained.

  I guess I should just forget about what was and start to think about our future, about whether it was even possible for us to survive at all in what remained of our former world.

  I listened to the comforting sound of my family sleeping and I too soon fell asleep.

  Chapter 6

  I was awakened the next morning by the sound of a noise at our door.

  I opened my eyes, but wasn’t able to see anything, the water company never put windows in their chlorine stations. It would have made it too easy for the kids that roamed the hills on their mountain bikes to break into the sheds and end up suffocating themselves when they tried to steal the chlorine tanks. I’m sure a kid would have been considered some kind of hero if he was the first kid in his neighborhood to have one of these big blue tanks in his bedroom. Of course, if the chlorine wouldn’t have killed them, they would have killed themselves trying to haul one of the heavy tanks down off the hillside on their bikes, but that was the way kids were now days.

  Then of course the parents would have sued the water company for not securing the tanks better, blaming the water company for what happened to their kids.

  The government would have then fined the water company for not having enough ‘No Trespassing’ signs posted in the area, for not having large stickers on the tanks that said breathing chlorine could be dangerous to your health or saying that trying to carry large heavy chlorine tanks down over the hillside on mountain bikes could be hazardous. Then the mountain bike companies would have been sued because they didn’t have signs on the bikes stating that the bikes were not intended to carry heavy chlorine tanks.

  My God, how could anyone blame the kids? How were they supposed to know that they should not have trespassed, broken into water company property to steal a chlorine tank, or that their bikes, unknown to them, were not made to carry heavy stolen tanks down over the hillside?

  How could the water company been so thoughtless, they should shut that company down and let the government be in charge, that way everyone would get the water they were entitled to have, for free.

  How dare that damn greedy water company make a profit when that money could have been used to provide more food stamps to the fat, lazy, entitled, under privileged.

  I slowly woke up wondering where the hell that line of thought came from. I guess after I had finally gone to sleep last night that my subconscious mind was still carrying on the conversation I was having with Katie.

  My mind shifted back to the noise that had awakened me.

  As I remembered where I was, I began to get concerned because the only reason that jumped into my mind for the sound was, the dead.

  I tried to lay perfectly still and focus on the sound until I could determine how much trouble we were in.

  I listened and heard the noise at the door again, now being fully awake, I realized that the sound was coming from inside the door and not from the outside.

  This began to concern me even more, had something managed to get into the shed with us? Was the door open, but I couldn’t see what is was because it was still dark outside?

  Then I began to worry about my family.

  I slowly reached out my right hand until I felt Katie a few inches away from me.

  I shifted my attention and began to reach out with my left hand to find Emma.

  I moved my hand a few inches, expecting to touch her body, if she wasn’t curled up into my side, she was never more than a few inches away from me at night.

  My hand slid over Emma’s blanket, a few inches, then a foot, then I realized that my arm was fully extended, but there was no Emma.

  “Was something dragging Emma out through the door?” My mind raced as I imagined the worst-case scenarios.

  Clank!

  “Oh shit, that hurt!”

  The door swung open and the bight morning sunshine blinded me.

  “Emma?” I asked.

  “I’ll be back,” Emma said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Not without me,” I replied as I got up and started for the door.

  Emma had already disappeared out the door and I ran to catch up with her.

  “You shouldn’t go out here until I check out the area,” I said as I raced around the shed.

  “You definitely wouldn’t have wanted me to stay in the shed,” Emma replied as she stumbled along uncomfortably.

  I raced ahead of her and looked around behind the shed.

  I was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining bright and the green weeds swayed softly in the morning breeze.

  “OK, satisfied, now give me some privacy,” Emma said and motioned for me to go back to the front of the shed.

  I took a quick look around the area and walked back around the front of the shed.

  I was still a little up tight about being woken up, thinking our shed had been breached by the dead, but I had to smile at how cute Emma looked as she waddled around the side of the shed in her discomfort.

  “Wipe that smile off your face,” Emma joked as she walked back around the shed with that normal spring in her step.

  “What smile?” I asked then the smile on my face grew larger. “OK, I confess I’m smiling, what just happened?”

  “I think I ate too many apples last night,” Emma laughed.

  “OK, but you should have got me up to make sure it was safe to come out here,” I said.

  “Believe me, I didn’t have the time,” Emma smiled. “Besides, if one of the dead was out here and scared me, it would have had more to worry about than I did.”

  “You scared the hell out of me,” I sighed.

  Emma pushed in close to me, reached up and put her arms around my neck and smiled up at me, “Maybe I can help you relax and forget all about your bad experience.”

  “What bad expe
rience?” I asked as I leaned down and kissed her on the end of her nose.

  “So, this is the look that Grandpa was worried about,” Katie said with a smirk in her voice,” In fact, it looks like I got out here just in time.”

  Emma turned her head and laughed as she looked over at Katie, “Actually you’re about eighteen years too late.”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Katie smiled. “I have to go to the bathroom. Just pretend I was never here.”

  “Go that way,” Emma smiled pointing to the other side of the shed.

  “Thanks,” Katie replied and disappeared around the side of the shed.

  “Remember when we didn’t have any kids?” I asked.

  “No,” Emma laughed, which started me laughing again.

  Logan came stumbling out of the shed next.

  “Behind the truck,” I said so he wouldn’t go around where Katie had just gone, I didn’t want the loud screams to frighten the wildlife. I still had hopes that the rabbit we ate yesterday still had a friend in the area.

  “Thanks,” Logan mumbled as he headed towards the truck.

  “I know it’s only been a couple of days since we’ve left the safe zone, but it somehow feels like life is returning back to normal,” I said.

  “But it still is a little different,” Emma smiled. “Back home we only had one bathroom. Here, everyone has their own bathroom.”

  “What’s for breakfast?” Katie asked as she bounced around the side of the shed.

  “Bathrooms aside,” Emma said. “I think I have to agree with you.”

  “I’m glad we all were able to experience a little of our old life, but we have a long day ahead of us,” I said.

  “I know,” Emma said as her smile faded. “It was nice while it lasted.”

  We all collected our blankets, folded them and put them in the back of the truck, then we had breakfast.