by Ron Foster
The Ridiculously Simple Survival Book
Ron Foster
Alabama, USA
© 20017 by Ron Foster
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:
978-1542861687
ISBN-10:
1542861683
Printed in the United States of America.
Preface
Terrorists have taken down America's electrical grid in the simplest way possible, they shot holes in it. The same as they had previously tried on the Silicon Valley in 2013 that most people in the know said was a trial run to destroy America. The attack, which nearly took out power to parts of Silicon Valley, has been called "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" by the nation's top electrical utility regulator. The destruction continues and mayhem ensues as hackers use cyber-attacks to further destabilize the world and take down the Nation's infrastructure. Joe and Mary are just common citizens caught up in the chaos with their two teen age kids as society collapses. They don't have a clue how to survive the famine and the violence ahead except for a very brief survival manual a prepper friend gave them that has been languishing with the rest of the unwanted Christmas gifts of years past.
Could this small text containing nothing more than basic preparedness advice be their salvation? As terrorists both foreign and domestic play cops and robbers with the authorities by using snipers and small team military style raids against water, power and gas, the family reads what they should do to survive with no supplies. The government says the lights will be back on in eight weeks, but eight weeks of no food and water in the big cities will tip the scales toward eternity as the grim reaper sharpens his scythe. Millions will die by famine, disease and violence, the Jones family says, not them, but wish they had bought a gun before now.
1
Wishing for life as we knew it
Times were indeed wicked in Panama City Beach, Florida and it was devilishly hard trying to survive the daily grinding misery that the sun had imposed on humanity with a vengeance. The terrorists had sure thrown quite a spectacular tantrum and monkey wrench in the systems causing an off-the-charts chain reaction of electrical plants and nuclear reactors to go down worldwide.
Many people's worlds were forever shattered and they saw their lives shortened on that horrendous day. A great number of people were more impacted than others early on in this chaotic disaster and a great many deaths happened quickly, mostly in the now nonexistent hospitals. This is a story of a common man, a normal modern man who was skilled at making a living in the corporate world but had no experience with survival skills or mindsets in the disaster he and his family had now found themselves in.
His name was Joe, he wasn’t anything special; just your regular middle aged head of household fellow and we find him emotionally down and dejected sitting in the back room of his house sobbing softly to himself thinking that there was little chance of hope that he and his family could make it much longer. Famine now ruled the day and desperate people and violent death stalked the night. His hardships were not exceptional, they were the same kind of problems as millions of other desperate starving souls were experiencing and like most people he had no answers to relieve his plight.
Joe was not a religious man, he had never thought of much about it until now. It had never been a meaningful experience or a big part of his life other than he believed in a supreme being he called God. With no other hope than his own understanding of this divine being to see him through this disaster now, he turned to religion as his hope. At night he often caught himself praying, almost begging from the depths of his soul’s mute desperation for some kind of miraculous help to be bestowed on him and his family. He spent his days lamenting deeply for some kind of heavenly intervention from above to come relieve his and his family’s hunger pains and suffering; but nothing came. No food or manna from heaven, no supernatural signs or portents to guide him. No, all he saw and thought about was a whole lot more things that troubled him enough to make him want to pray even more.
He didn’t have much hope for himself personally that his prayers would be answered, but it was something to do. He was trying to do something for himself and his family; he was doing his best to be and appear strong, he wasn’t going to give up trying his hardest just yet. But he was out of options and soon he would be out of time.
He wished, he dreamed, he fervently prayed, but all this praying seemed somehow a futile effort to him. He had a hard time now to even allow himself to remotely think about anything beyond tomorrow, let alone believe in these fanciful wishes of his for things to be the way they used to be or just be better livable times now. However, it didn’t matter: he still did his spiritual pleading anyway and he took some solace in that simple act of faith trying to hang on to hope. This was something for him to do to at least try to change the situation or make peace with his maker and that was a good thing, he figured. He and his family were now quickly starving to death and in his opinion if prayers weren’t working, his only option was to go out and do something desperate.
He, like so many other heads of households these days, found themselves with no other option but to blindly go out foraging in this dangerous grid down world. Armed only with an improvised weapon for protection while seeking food that just wasn’t there anymore seemed like a fool’s game but he was now required to die playing the game or die at home from starvation.
The just in time shipments to the grocery stores were a thing of the past, an unimaginable haunting memory now of world food security and social safety nets that had been all lost and were quickly replaced with hunger, disease, mindless violence and fire. The smells of rotting bodies and putrid human waste dumped out on the streets practically anywhere there was a sewer drain hung heavy in the air and assailed Joe’s nostrils as he studied the deserted street for other survivors. People, all people now encountered, Joe considered competition and likely enemies now.
He had tried before many times this attempting to sneak around scavenging, foraging, looting thing and he had narrowly avoided getting badly beaten by some other desperate thieves so he contemplated this next foray into the great unknown of the neighborhood outside streets with great trepidation.
He considered himself very lucky indeed that he had been one of the few smart ones that had some preparations before the terror and cyber-attacks had started, but it had soon run out. He had previously paid attention to and heeded the emergency management advisories before this dark day to keep emergency supplies on hand for disasters that FEMA had recommended. He had added to his preparations for them to last a little longer than the minimal recommendations from prior experience. He had always been amazed by the number of his neighbors who did not stock any supplies and do the same as he did on this hurricane prone Gulf coast.
He had told a few of them the last time a hurricane hit that they were indeed fools not to have charcoal, etc., put up already before the storm and not to look to him the next go round to provide any for their oversights. Seems most of them had forgotten his warning, hadn’t heeded the emergency management recommendations and they had asked him again anyway but he had plead poverty of not having anything on hand the same as they did and offered nothing from his stores.
His wife had almost a full food pantry neatly arranged for his family at the beginning of the month of May when the lights had first gone out, but it was now the third week of June and the cupboard was bear with only a few odd cans remaining. Not enough food he knew all too well left for today, let alone thinking about dividing up for but a taste in meals for tomorrow.
His wife was a stockpiler of sale items and a happy well experienced, mani
c coupon clipper under the best of circumstances so they had fared better than most people at the beginning of this disaster. They had thanked themselves for their astuteness and blessings over and over for having a lot more food on hand than the government suggested three days to two weeks’ worth of canned goods put back.
They were, however, more than desperately worried now because they had already cashed in their insurance policy of surplus food a week ago and replacing it now from the emptied and looted grocery store shelves wasn’t an option. Mary had built up a nice little backup food larder over time for her family before the terrorist inspired grid down situation had occurred. One of her favorite things to do was hunt for good two for one deals and practice coupon clipping and store comparisons. Joe and she also bought a little extra food each week beyond their normal reserve practices and reserved it for future hard times like an extended power outage or job loss but nothing like a disaster of the magnitude they faced now had ever crossed their minds.
Joe and his wife were now in a deep despair because even though they had stretched the pantry and rationed their food stores to the extremes, it now looked to them like they had done nothing more than just delay for themselves an inevitable death by starvation because their supplies had now all run out. It was hopeless, there were no other options. The wolf or worse was waiting hungrily at their door and they were out of options. They had gone over night from going to the grocery store for food to basically living in a desert with no resources available for anyone for a couple months now.
Joe still roundly cursed the government daily for not telling the public right off the bat just how bad this disaster situation already was when the Emergency Broadcast system got up and running. The government instead of telling people the full scope of the disaster optioned to begin instilling false hopes and trying to delay the inevitable societal collapse by hiding the full truth of the situation. If he and his family had known then what they knew now, they would have eaten far less in the beginning of the calamity and started their meal rationing much earlier if they knew all the food they had on hand was all they would be able to hope for with no emergency rations in sight. They might have also have thought about moving somewhere possibly more sustainable in regards to finding fresh water on their own.
Oh the government fumbled around: fired the deceiving, some said lying, original emergency management director and apologized later to the citizens after a week or two of meaningless emergency broadcasts that did nothing more than impose curfews and tell everyone to stay indoors and off the streets.
The powers that be had taken a moment before disappearing entirely themselves to safer places got around to saying that they were sorry about deceiving or hiding information from the public about the extent of the disaster and that they themselves as well as the country were unprepared to deal with it. Good luck and goodbye to the citizenry outside the bunkers was basically how it was being handled.
The bureaucrats had their excuses, they said that they had mistakenly or possibly ill-advisedly deceived all the people of the true magnitude of the emergency because they didn’t want to panic the populace with the full extent of the calamity. But that didn’t undo any of the problems that their hiding of pertinent facts of no National level grid re-startup plans or emergency water provision to assist the municipalities systems to come back on line had caused everyone but it was something. It officially started the great die off and left peoples on their own in a government mandate to handle for themselves the interpretation of law and disorder.
The damage was complete for now, forever done and couldn’t be undone for many years to come. The government didn’t have a plan to deal with anything of the size of this nationwide cataclysmic disaster and they just didn't basically have the supplies or the manpower to deal with it. Basically, the President tried to appeal to the citizens of America to remember all their forefather’s efforts to settle this great country and to try to copy their unfaltering perseverance because there was no such thing as any government handouts anymore. People were on their own to find something to eat, he suggested mindlessly Victory gardens but added in the next sentence that lawlessness would not be tolerated and the Army was standing by to help with that. He had said this apparently not knowing the likely uncontrollable riotous results and the disintegration of the military and police forces.
The poor people who were normally subsisting on welfare and food stamps and such were the hardest hit at first in this disaster, of course, because the electrical shutdown had impacted the whole planet at the end of April. This was right before the government checks had come out and the EIB cards were recharged. No checks, no food stamps, no replacement trip to the grocery store for the diminished food in the fridge or cupboards that was always in short supply anyway before the end of the month.
This event caused these poor destitute souls to start these dying times with empty cupboards that were already being stretched past their very limits. Most people that were retired and who were also hard timing it on Social Security had not even been considering their next grocery buy until they got paid themselves on the 6th of the month and arranged to get to the store.
The elderly and disabled, whose daily lives were often in even worse shape than most other peoples because of their various ills and maladies, were also the first ones to feel the loss of their costly life giving or pain relieving medications.
Everyone in all conditions of life and economics rioted of course and law enforcement was overwhelmed day one. There was a hell of a lot more poor people with guns than cops as well as uncontrollable homeless youth that most people had not thought about until now. All these people started asking themselves in earnest and desperation after what basically turned out to be the Presidents farewell address message “what they were going to eat tomorrow” and they decided to go out to try to take what they could by any means necessary.
When you are really hungry now and you know that you will be literally starving tomorrow, you seem to have much better things to be doing than listening to the big Prez daddy saying to be calm and stay at home peaceably along with all the rest of the BS reports the government was putting out.
Perhaps what the government had done, in their stupidity or deception somehow, was an attempt to do a good service to the initially less affected and the economically more stable folks with their nonstop emergency broadcast propaganda. People of lesser financial or preparedness means took a little longer than they normally would have to think about playing firebug had they known the real truth at first although they ultimately decided to just generally and righteously (against the government) lose it all to go on full tilt looting stores and misguided murder sprees directed at more well-to-do folks.
As long as there was some small hope of government supplies coming, rule of law or legal retribution tended to be somewhat respected for a while as well as feared by the general population. Once it became generally known by everyone that no aid of any sort would be expected or was forthcoming, that was when the food riots and the fires started up in earnest. Smoke clouded the horizon worldwide. Of course by then martial law was already fully implemented way before the absolute total chaos starting with the curfew to curb the petty crime and escalating general lights out lawlessness and mayhem that was occurring.
The brutal clashes with police and protestors became overwhelmingly violent and desperate for both sides and they just sort of eventually died down and petered out and disintegrated into nothing more than occasional roving gangs and desperate people of any side shooting each other up without thought or reasoning. There was nothing more left anywhere for the police to guard because there was nothing worth looting anymore that hadn't already been looted or burned to the ground after a time. The now unemployed National Guardsman and cops went home to guard their own families and the fire fighters just let the cities burn and the doctors no longer show up to work. Nobody showed up to work anywhere, modern society was dead and societal collapse progressed to the depths never b
efore seen in history.
Oh sure, the allegedly overly represented and disenfranchised poor and opportunist criminals of society at first approached the disaster by taking advantage of the chaotic situation and having a free for all of stealing worthless electronics and such, but that didn’t last for very long. Even they smartened up on what had value these days and what did not.
People without food get weaker by the day and partying it up with stolen booze, fighting with cops and waking up to rotting food in the refrigerator with no canned goods to tide them over makes folks foolish enough to get themselves shot more easily it seemed. That for some can be considered a good thing.
It was for most surviving these first weeks that was a problem with active home invasions occurring regularly and stupid gang wars going on that spilled out of the inner cities to the more stable suburbs.
The place where Joe and his family lived was on a cul-de-sac a few miles from the beach in a retirement and local working class community. It fared so much better than the big cities which were burning from fire and malice but its location held its own dangers.
Joe wished again, for the thousandth time every day again and again since the poo had hit the fan that he had gotten around to buying himself a gun and learning how to use it earlier. Any kind of gun would do, he figured right now, that is if he had also thought to store enough bullets for it.
He wouldn’t know what in the world to do with a gun at the moment, of course; this was because of him never having owned one before or even being exposed to practicing with one. Other than point it, look bad ass if threatening someone with and if that didn’t do any good pulling the trigger was the best he could have managed, he reckoned. But even at that, at least he could seriously try to protect his family better. Being as defenseless as he was now in this world without rule of law (WROL) made his expected life span very short and his demise probably pretty painful. You can’t very well bring a stick to a gun fight, he was reminded.