When the Power Is Gone: A Powerless World - Book 1 (3 page)

A waterBOB is a large bladder that will hold 100 gallons of water. You put it in the tub, fill it from the faucet, and it would keep water for up to three months. It comes with a hand pump to get the water out of the bladder. Once ours were full, we’d head to her house and fill theirs as well. Russ was right, computer chips kept the water moving. Those were fried with all the others. Welcome to the new world. It was going to suck. Did I already say that?

“After that, you need to go to the store on the corner. I hope you have some cash on you, because your credit cards are worthless pieces of plastic now. Buy all the food you can carry. Don’t buy stupid things like frozen dinners. You have no way to keep them frozen and no way to cook them, either. You can buy bread, but not a lot, not more than you could eat in a week. It will go bad after that. Buy peanut butter and crackers. Buy canned food you can eat cold if you have to. Buy tuna and ramen noodles. If you don’t have a way to cook other than your electric stove, I’ll help you build a rocket stove. It’s a small stove built out of a can that produces a lot of heat with just a few sticks. Water is the most important thing, then food. Understand?” He looked at Brian, who was still wide eyed, but slowly nodding his head. He didn’t speak, so Russ continued.

“Do you have a gun?” Russ looked him in the eye when he asked. Brian hesitated, but finally nodded in the affirmative. He still didn’t speak. Russ gave a slight nod himself, saying, “Good. You need to start keeping it with you at all times. Lock your doors, and don’t let anyone in – I was going to say unless you know them, but you shouldn’t let anyone in, period. People get desperate when they get hungry, and there are going to be a lot of hungry people out there in just a few days. Most people don’t have enough food in their homes to last a week, and this is going to last a lot longer than that. People with kids are even more dangerous, because parents will do anything to take care of their kids. Don’t fall for the ‘do you have a little something you can spare for my kids’ line. If they find out you have any food, they will come in to take it all. Yes, you will feel like a dick, but you’ll be a living dick.” Russ paused again. I think he was worried Brian would have a stroke or something from information overload. Brian just kept staring at him, but stayed quiet.

“I can’t give you all the information you need, Brian. I have to start getting my family prepared for the coming days. I will tell you this – do not come back here. In the next couple of days, we will be locking down our home and the Hopper’s, and no one will be allowed in. We will be responding to anyone who knocks on the door with a drawn gun in hand. It’s going to get bad, and it’s going to happen pretty fast. I would suggest that, if you manage to make it a couple of weeks, you try to walk out to somewhere with resources. I don’t know where that will be. I don’t care. We should be gone by then. I can’t stress to you enough how important it is that you keep your gun on you. There will be bad people out there soon. After the looters have cleaned out all the food in the stores, then they will go through apartments, houses, and condos in the city. After that, they’ll work their way out to the suburbs, then further and further, to places like this. They will be criminals who have no conscience, and there will be no consequences for their actions, since the police won’t be working either. They will kill you for a can of Spam and not think twice about it. If you have any questions, now is the time to ask them.” Russ waited to see if Brian would speak, now that he had been given permission.

Janet and I had come down, as we had some time while the water bladder filled. Brian looked like he might laugh or cry, I couldn’t tell which. He looked at Russ, and in almost a whisper, said, “Russ, are you sure about this? Is this really what happened? What’s happening? Could you be wrong? Dear God, is this for real?” Cry it was then. I was shocked. I thought Brian was too into himself and technology to believe it. Apparently not. He rose a few steps in my esteem that morning.

“Yes, it’s true. It’s the only explanation for everything going down at once. You need to go home now, change into some durable clothes and get busy. Do you want me to help you build a stove to cook on? You need to make plans for a toilet replacement too. If you have a five-gallon bucket, I can help you with that while I’m there.” So many people forget about the toilet. If there’s no water, there’s no flushing. Even if you can flush for a while, eventually the sewers back up and…yeah, that. Nasty, and dangerous. Disease and germ heaven, sanitation hell. I tried hard not to think about that particular item. I mean, the guys can go out back and pee on the fence. Us gals need to have a toilet option when the time comes.

Brian took a deep breath, stood up straight and replied, “That would be great, Russ. Let me get to the store at the corner and see what I can get my hands on food-wise. Come over when you get a minute. I’d really appreciate it. Thank you, for everything you’ve told me, and the instructions you gave. I know you think I’m just a pompous asshole, but I grew up dirt poor, and I actually have a good bit of non-perishable food at the house. When you’ve gone hungry, you don’t forget that, and you make sure it doesn’t happen again.  I’ll buy up whatever else I can, but if I can’t, I’ll still be good for a while. Since I love shooting, I have a few guns, and a few hundred rounds of ammo. I may be able to hold off the scumbags if they show up. I’ll go down fighting, that’s for damn sure. If you can help me with the stove and a toilet, I think I can handle the rest.”

Holy cow. I was stunned at his statements, we all were. We did think he was a shallow, pompous asshole (he forgot the shallow part). Now, we had a whole new view of Brian. Hell, he could be one of us, with a little work. We’d keep that in mind. Another mouth to feed yes, but another defender as well? That could not be brushed aside. There is strength in numbers, and that was going to be even more true in the coming days, and after.

Brian thanked us again, apologized for taking up our time, and headed back to his house. I may have imagined it, but it looked like he was walking with a purpose. I was very proud of Russ. He could have blown Brian off and sent him on his way, but he tried to help him in the only way he had at the time – information. Instructions. It was the best we could offer for now. I hoped it was enough for Brian to survive.

As Russ closed the door, he turned to us with a look of determination. “We’ve got work to do, and we need to talk. I thought about something while I was talking to Brian. I think we need to bring Bob, Janet and Ben here. I think we should all be together in one place. We can protect one place better than two. We have a few more amenities here, and an extra bedroom and bath. If you guys are cool with that, we need to get busy moving them and their stuff here. What do you guys think?”

Bob was nodding his head slowly. Janet had a distinct look of disappointment, which I completely understood. No woman wants to leave her home, her stuff, her kitchen. I would feel the same way if the shoe were on the other foot. Ben and Rusty were happy as could be. Roommates! Bob looked at Janet. As much as she hated it, she knew Russ was right. We had more room, we had the chickens and rabbits inside a privacy fence they didn’t have. She forced a smile, nodded at her husband, and hugged me. She looked at Russ and said, “Good idea. Where do we start?”

It took the better part of the morning to get the supplies from Bob and Janet’s place back to ours. As I said, their preps were as deep as ours, and we had all of Bob’s protected electronics as well. When we were done, we had completely filled the prep room, with nothing more than a path through it for now. We had time to organize after we locked the place down. We couldn’t move Bob’s garage faraday cabinet, so we just had to hope and pray there were no subsequent events. We grabbed clothes, shoes, linens and some cooking implements I didn’t have.  We didn’t leave a crumb of food or a bottle of water. If some shit heels broke in looking for it, they were going to be disappointed. And probably pissed off. We did fill both tubs with waterBOBs. The shit heels could get water if they got to it before us. We probably wouldn’t come back for it, but it was nice to know there was a couple hundred gallons of water over here if we needed it.

Between the two families, now one, we had enough food and water to take care of us for six months to a year, much longer than that food-wise. If it came down to it, we could stretch that further with the chickens and rabbits in the backyard. Our long term plan did not require us to make it that long here. We only needed to bug in until the insanity that was coming peaked, and started to calm back down. We prepped for longer in case we couldn’t make that happen, for whatever reason.

I have always been a glass-is-half-f kind of gal, so I still held out hope that mankind would rise up and stand together in this crisis. Russ was the opposite, and expected the worst out of people, especially during a crisis. I pointed out how the country had come together after 9/11, and all the people who traveled to New Orleans after Katrina from all over the country to help, including donations of food, water, clothes – that was the America I was confident could survive an EOTWAWKI (End Of The World As We Know It) scenario. Then, Russ woke me from that dream. “Anne, 9/11, Katrina? Those were localized to a small section of the country. How loving and caring do you think those people will be when everybody is in the same boat? Nobody is going to be helping anybody else, because everybody – EVERYBODY – will be trying to survive themselves. It will be every man for himself. What would you do to protect and feed Rusty? Anything, right? Try to imagine millions of people in the same situation. Now, imagine how many of those people are in any way prepared for something like that to happen. My guess is less than 3% of the population. That means 97% are now looters, marauders, raiders, murderers, every slime bag imaginable, trying to survive off what they can get their hands on from robbing and killing those who have something. It’s going to be bad, it’s going to be ugly, and I want us to be as far from other people as we can get if and when it happens.”

As much as I hated to admit it, I could totally see his point. Mankind was only generous when it didn’t cost them much of anything to do so. When it came down to survival, we were all capable of things we would never consider doing in “polite” society. I would stand up to anyone who tried to hurt my family, and I wouldn’t think twice about using deadly force to do it. I didn’t know if I could kill someone to feed my son, but I also couldn’t completely rule that out. Anything is possible when you are talking about protecting and feeding your child.

As our plan had always been to go out to the farm for the long haul, we would stay put as long as we felt we could do it without dealing with hordes of starving, desperate people. If what Russ told Brian was true, we had two to four weeks we could stay where we were. After that, the survivors would be working their way out of town and the burbs, and heading our way. We intended to be gone by then. In case we had been mistaken about the timeline, and got caught up in any bad situations, we had done some reinforcing around the house.

Russ replaced all the screws in the deadbolt strike plates. The ones that came with them were no more than an inch long. Russ removed them and replaced them with three-inch screws. The logic was sound: a three-inch screw was in the stud, not just the door frame, so we were pretty much assured no one was going to kick in those doors at the deadbolt.

I had seen a picture on a decorating website of what looked like barn doors in rails as a window covering. While the poster labeled it as “country charm”, I saw inside shutters that could be bolted shut. Russ installed them over the big picture window in the living room. To visitors it was quaint; to us, it was reinforcements for a weak defense point. There was some ammo out there that could easily pierce the window glass and shutter, but most people only bought what was considered target ammo. We were gambling that any shooters would have used up the personal defense rounds in town, and would be down to the FMJ (full metal jacket) target bullets. We hoped we wouldn’t have to find out.

That left regular single windows for the rest of the downstairs. Russ had sheets of plywood in the garage ready to go up quickly, with pre-drilled holes for the screws he would use to attach them to the wall. Using the three-inch screws again, he was relatively confident they would hold up to some level of forced entry. We hadn’t planned much for upstairs, because if we were forced to run upstairs by intruders, we were pretty much done. Russ had installed a doorway at the top of the stairs, which would give us a bit of a cushion if all else failed. We did not put up the plywood yet. The windows were natural light during the day, which kept us from burning the kerosene lamps or candles. Upside was we could attach them to the walls quickly. The guys brought them in and had them sitting against the wall by each window, ready to go.

With both bathtubs full of water in the waterBOBs, we would be forced to shower in the half bath, as long as the water held out. Once that was gone, we had an outside shower rigged with a sun shower setup. Basically, a sun shower is a black bag you fill with water, set in the sun and let the sun heat the water in the bag. You hang it up and let gravity do the rest. Very rustic, but beggars can’t be choosers, and a little shower was better than no shower. We had a couple, and Bob and Janet had a couple, so we should be able to keep enough water hot for short rinses. The water in the waterBOBs was to be used for drinking and cooking. We had rain barrels outside under every gutter downspout, so we had a few hundred gallons there we could use for flushing toilets, and possibly washing clothes. We couldn’t drink what came off the roof, because of pollution, bird droppings, and pieces of asphalt from the shingles, unless it was a completely dire emergency. Even then, it would have to be filtered and boiled – and I still wasn’t sure I could get past bird poop in the water. We did have a 200-gallon cistern sitting in the corner of the back yard to catch rainwater for the livestock and the small garden. We could use that for drinking and cooking if we boiled it first. We had 20 seven-gallon water jugs between us full of water. Each one would provide enough water for one person for a week, for drinking and cooking. That gave us about three and a half weeks of water for six people, if we had to stretch it, not counting the 200 gallons in the tubs. Altogether, we felt pretty confident about our water stores. Water was the number one, most important thing to have planned out.

Food was the next item of importance. Between us, we had enough food to last us a year, possibly 18 months, without having to butcher the chickens and rabbits. That seems like a lot, if we weren’t planning to stay that long, but any we hadn’t used by the time we headed to the farm would be going with us. Russ had a big box trailer out back, which had been fitted with shelving and strapping to carry what we had left to the farm. Bob had one as well, along with an old Chevy Blazer that was pre-1980. Both of those were brought over and put in the backyard. For now, we would eat what was going to spoil first, emptying the freezers from both houses. Russ brought out the big generator, fired it up and set it on the patio outside the sun room in the backyard. We had bought the quietest one we could find, but none of them are silent. We figured now was the best time to use it, since everyone who might hear it would just be wishing they had one, rather than trying to take it. We pulled out all the dehydrators. None of them had chips in them thank goodness, so they were still working. We sliced up the beef, venison, and pork that we had as roasts or loins as they thawed. We started making jerky out of everything we thought we’d lose without power. Russ wanted us to be done with it by the end of the third day. It would be close, but we were pretty sure we could meet that deadline.

“Why three days, Dad? What’s the deal?” Rusty asked his dad while he was getting the smoker ready for a pork butt and a venison shoulder. Smoked meat lasted longer, too.

Russ looked at his son with a sad smile. “Rusty, have you heard of the rule of threes?” Rusty shook his head. Russ continued. “The rule of threes is this: you can last three minutes without air; three days without water; three weeks without food. In three days, people will likely be out of food and water. Most people don’t have enough food in their house to last a week. The grocery store only has enough food on the shelves for about 72 hours’ worth to feed the immediate surrounding community. And there won’t be any trucks bringing any more. In three days, people will start leaving their homes, looking for food sources. They will have figured out the government is not coming to rescue them, or at least that it’s going to take longer than they first thought. They will start to get desperate to find food and water for themselves and their families. We don’t have a lot of neighbors out here, but that doesn’t make us safe. The scent of food cooking carries a long way when there are no other smells, like exhaust, filling the air. People will follow their noses, especially if they are already hungry. We don’t want to lead them here. Understand?” Rusty looked at his dad and nodded.

“What do we do if they come here anyway, Dad? What if they try to take our food and water?” There was a slight quiver to his voice, though he was trying hard to hide it.

Russ looked him in the eye and said, “We stop them, Son. We have to stop them. This is our food and water, our supplies. We bought them, we stored them, we planned for something like this. It is not our fault if they didn’t, and it is not our responsibility to take care of them now. The people in this house, and Monroe and Millie, are the only ones we are taking care of now. If that sounds harsh, or greedy, or inhumane, it is what it is. I’m not sorry for feeling this way. This is it. Everything you have known in life is changing, right now, in ways you can’t imagine yet. We have to be willing to do whatever is necessary to survive.” With that said, Russ fired up the smoker and put the meat on to cure.

****

Russ looked around, smiled and tried to lighten the mood. “Gang, it looks like we are pretty much on the way to completing stage one, which was setting up for round one. Does anybody have any questions?” We all looked at each other, shook our heads, and let a little bit of the tension seep out of our bodies. It was after noon, and I realized we had missed breakfast and lunch. Great wife and mother I was – the first day of the apocalypse, and I was already forgetting to feed the family.

Just as I was heading back into the kitchen to figure out what to fix, I smelled the delicious aroma of chicken. Janet had snuck inside and put on a pot of chicken soup. She was standing at the stove, stirring and tasting, like any cook worth her salt. She looked at me with a big grin and said, “I found this chicken in the freezer, along with some veggies and noodles. You said pull it and cook it, so lunch is ready!”

I called the guys in, and they all headed for the table. Like a traffic cop, I stood in the way, one hand on my hip, the other held up in a “stop right there” motion. “Ok, gentlemen, let’s get one thing straight right now. NOBODY eats without washing his hands. For that matter, let me give you a quick rundown of the new sanitation rules. Wash your hands EVERY TIME you go to the bathroom. I don’t care why you went, wash. At the very least, if you only peed, use the anti-bacterial gel. The other, wash your hands, with soap. No exceptions. If you touch anything outside the house, wash before you come in. There is not going to be any minor emergency clinics, or doctor’s offices, or hospitals we can count on, so we have to be diligent in keeping things as clean as we can. In emergency situations, as many people die from disease as anything else. We’re going to set up a wash tub on the patio, with a pitcher of clean water this afternoon, but for now, we still have water coming from the faucets, so march.” Man, I was Betty Bad Ass. Cool.

Russ grinned, the one that said, “That’s MY bitch.” He walked into the kitchen, smacked me on the ass, and kissed me on the cheek. He looked at Rusty and Ben, and said, “Mom’s right. Let’s get washed up.” They headed to the sink, while Janet covered her mouth to hide the laughter. We got some food in us, and I for one felt much more energetic after lunch. We had talked while we ate about what else we needed to get done.

Russ looked around with a satisfied smile. “I think we can slow down a little for now. We’ve gotten pretty much all the preliminary chores done. I’d say take it a little easier for the rest of the day. We are going to need to get a good night’s sleep, because after tonight, we will be posting a watch around the clock. The longer this situation goes on the worse things will get. We need to be ready for whatever may come.” Nice, Russ. Way to bring us down off our food high. But he was right, and we all knew it.

He looked at Rusty, and said, “Son, I’m going over to check on Brian. I want you to come with me. Go out to the shed and grab a five-gallon bucket. Grab an empty number 10 can, with its lid, an empty soup can, and a pair of tin snips. Drop them all in the bucket, get your pistol, and let’s go. I want to get back here before dark.”