Against the Grain

by Ian Daniels

  And it was the truth. Between still having a real job at a small local company that was on life support in what was left of the economy, building a house, and having to work harder and harder just to have food to eat, there wasn’t much free time left for me anymore. The calls for volunteers slowed down and eventually stopped when lost, missing or escaped people stopped being looked for.

  The country’s slide down was slow, the decline was happening, but life had gone on and we adapted as best we could. Jobs were lost and crime went up. Gasoline and oil prices rose and deliveries of food, along with everything else, started being less and less consistent. The power grid, along with all the other utilities, was old beyond its years, stretched by an exploding population and an outdated system with no money to make the needed upgrades. Patches in the water and sewer lines were made in the largest concentrations of urban centers in exchange for letting other systems that fed less inhabited areas fail altogether. There was no budget for road repair, and most utility companies didn’t have enough new and trained employees to replace their retiring workforce anyway.

  Medical care was only looked for in the most serious of cases as insurance companies dissolved. Doctors and hospitals started requiring payment prior to treatment. Simple aliments became deadly, and those unfortunate enough to require long term or maintenance type care or medications for things like diabetes, blood pressure and heart disease, they no longer had the options available to continue their treatment.

  Break-ins for living essentials by desperate, but still essentially good people just trying to feed their families, matched the number of drug and alcohol motivated robberies by addicts trying to find some tiny relief from their self induced toxic pain.

  Clint and I found ourselves slowly having to live more and more in the side life we once had enjoyed as a hobby. Being armed, well armed, every second of the day was a given. Having to quietly procure an extra meal from wild game was more and more common. Some people had stores of food, but they relied on them solely or too early, not using them to merely supplement a garden or what wild game could be harvested.

  What riots happened were quick and destructive, but ultimately futile. Hopeless people were driven to the streets as they called for reform and assistance, but there was none to be given. In their frustration, the mobs trashed the last bastions of those people that had held out through all the turmoil up to that point. Stores were looted only for people to find that there was nothing to take that would give them a chance to live more than one more day. The hopeless took their aggravation out on everything and everyone within reach. The chaos fumed, consumed, and then withered away once there was nothing left to destroy.

  Try as we did to avoid it, even in our own small town we were caught in the anarchy and bedlam. Clint lost his son, my best friend, and I lost my way. I retreated into solitude until I found myself time and again in a position where I not only had something to offer in a bad situation, but I was forced to act.

  Friends I had damn near forgotten about, like Breanne and Nick’s family, needed help, and by chance I was able to give some assistance. Situations unlooked for time and again popped up, putting me where I didn’t want to be. Mostly by blind, stupid, dumb luck, I kept coming out on top. During that time I found I had to adopt a certain persona for myself and others to rally around.

  It was a strange thing, finding that others needed some sort of a justification to go along with what I saw as simple and reasonable. People who had not been as exposed to the ways of this new, sad and hard world seemed to require credentials, qualifications or verification before they would then follow the lead of someone who obviously got it better than they did. Although if the roles had have been reversed, I can’t say as though I would have been any different.

  I did, hinted, and said what I had to. Not just for their own good, but for mine as well. They needed a pillar of strength and hope to rally around and I was determined to make them their own pillar. It was a slow building process though, and I had my own inner demons yet to be dealt with. I didn’t want to be or deserve to be an idol. I could nudge and steer, but I would resist leading others at all costs.

  I would like to say the choices I made were like consciously saying “I want to help people,” but my choices were usually victims of circumstance. More often than not, I was in the right place at the right time. Or wrong place and wrong time, depending on how you looked at it. To an extent, I could have sat back and watched everything crumble, but I had to live in this too and I was forward thinking enough to see that being alone did not have a high probability for survival.

  I was no hero and I sure as hell was no savior. I did want to see good people like the Harris’s outlast the chaos. I seemingly had what it was taking to survive in this world, but I was no leader, never wanted to be one. Truth be told, I didn’t even like being around people all that much. The Harris’s were good people and if what was needed for them to survive was for me to play a role, then I could do that.

  The example I thought back to was a movie called Crocodile Dundee. Dundee was a hard core outdoors man, but he played into the image a bit too. He would be shaving away with his nice disposable razor until someone was watching, then he whips out his big over sized knife to finish the “shave.” It suited his image well… and that was me. I could live in the bush okay, and hunted better than some maybe, but I missed drive thru fast food and not having to make decisions that meant if a group of people would live or die.

  And I was tired. The families still relied on me far too much, and as much and as I was trying to “teach them to fish,” instead of handing it all to them, it was a slow process. Living semi-primitively like this was just a step or two away from the way I previously had lived before the rest of the world crashed down around us. I might have had the nerves to stalk and kill both animals and men, but I was learning that those abilities were not easily transferred to or quickly learned by others.

  If the Harris’s had have known more of the truth I don’t know if they would have laughed or cried. I didn’t even know what the real “truth” was sometimes. I worried that letting them in on just how much I was winging it everyday would just be a big let down and discredit everything we had built thus far. I wanted and they needed to keep things moving in the right direction, and so I kept the image alive.

  It was still before midnight when I crested the last ridge and reached my destination. The place I called “home” more or less was actually legitimately mine. Come to find out if they ever saw it, a few of the people at the Ranch would probably think that I had killed the owners and was now squatting in this place. I don’t know why I was holding onto the descriptions and guesses that I had overheard Breanne tell Megan. After all, I was the one that created that guise. Maybe I really was tired of being seen as my character. I needed to remember that a few of them knew that there was more to it than that. Whatever, I needed a break, that much was obvious.

  As much as I wanted to rush right on inside, throw my gear down, and fall asleep, I took my time and walked around the perimeter of the house. It was only smart just to be sure that everything was still in place and that there were no new tracks or signs that anyone else had been here while I was away. Ideally I should have gone out farther, but it was dark enough that the chances of me actually catching something out of place were slim anyway. I’d just have to trust to the seclusion that had kept this place safe for a long time now.

  This house, or what there was of it, was well over half way completed. The building process was interrupted when everything had gone south. The structure was intact and weather tight, but really it was just an empty shell. I had been living in a house in our small town while having this place built out here and even while unfinished and unfurnished, it was still a better spot than being in town. While incomplete, it did have everything I needed, and I really only lived in the walk out basement section anyway.

  When initially clearing the land, I had to cut a few trees down for the home site, eventual
shop site, and the driveway in. That had left me with a heck of a good amount of firewood that I had painstakingly cut, chopped, stacked and covered. In normal times it would have been good for an easy three years worth; now burning only sparingly, I was good to go for quite a while.

  Electrical line power I doubted would be back in my area for years at this point. Even when and if things started to get rebuilt, the crews that were left were not going to be worried about powering up a line on some old dirt road off the beaten track. I did have two big propane tanks for the house, plus all my little BBQ tanks. That, but mostly the wood stove in the basement, kept me warm and cooking. Heat was not really a big issue though with the majority of the basement being under ground. So a little bit of wood heat when it was needed went a long way.

  The septic to the house was in and it was a gravity-feed type system, so all I had had to do was install the toilet and keep the tank full of water, and I was able to have some resemblance of indoor plumbing. Of course with no power for the well pump, the water itself was a time consuming, heavy lifting, pain in the ass.

  When I originally bought the land there was a low marshy area on the property. When the earth movers were leveling out a build site for the house with their tractors and backhoe, I had them dig out a couple of ponds in that marshy area. An extra case of beer kept them from letting the EPA in on that little modification. The ponds would keep water year round now, but it was a hundred yard muddy hike with five gallon buckets up to the house to then filter, and finally use any water. Rain gutters had not yet gone on the house so a collection system was not going to be an easy set up.

  As I came around to the door and dug for my key, yes I locked the door when I left, a ridiculous habit I know, I began to think less of my own woes, and more of the country as a whole. Once things really had started spiraling, it had been obvious that the situation was going to get even more out of control in the bigger population areas. But that didn’t mean a whole lot in the smaller farm towns like ours. As far as martial law went, they inevitably tried it as last stop fix–all, but the government and military resources had been too decimated to be effective. What was left was spread too thin, trying to contain the larger urban areas to be able to see to the smaller outlying places.

  This did give the local authorities of our little town an opportunity to step up, which turned out to not necessarily be a good thing. The cops around here had always pretended to have more power than the populace gave them credit for. Along with being a farm town, it was a college town, which meant the population tripled during the school year. That also meant that during the summer, when us townies were the only ones around, there were three times as many cops as were warranted and they were bored out of their minds. A quick but legal turn would bring on a twenty minute traffic stop with full interrogation type questioning. It bread anti-authoritarianism in the life long local resident rednecks.

  I’m sure the cops were actually good guys back then. Having to deal with drunk and irritating college kids for half the year would take the humor out of any job. They just set their autopilot to serious mode all the time. But a new and different problem began cropping up with the guys that after a military tour or three overseas got out and then became police officers. Their entire professional background had been dealing with people through force; it was their way or the highway. They didn’t have a record of finding the friendly approach to a high school kid caught out after curfew. To the country boys, it just became a game of getting away with stuff without getting hounded by the bigwig pissant cops.

  Of course I didn’t think much of the town’s leadership either. I had gone to a couple of the town hall meetings to hear the “stability and recovery planning,” and I may have whispered a few ideas in a few ears, but I was really just doing what I did best when it came to other people; I would feel out the situation, then decide how to go about my own life from there.

  The city council seemed to have been more worried about the regulation of resources instead of the rebuilding of the infrastructure. Some said it was hard to blame them, as no one was prepared for this. I disagreed to an extent thinking that it was specifically their job to be prepared for this. They didn’t plan on getting draconian; they were just trying to prolong the lifestyle we had known. The problem was, it was a new world now, and they needed to usher in the proper changes to help people most comfortably cope with their new lives, not preserve the old ones that no longer were relevant.

  Early on, there was an influx of people moving in, out, and through even our own small town. All over the country people from the big cities thought they could escape to the smaller outlying towns. Those places were always safe and had food and were accepting of everyone right? Wrong. The few towns that didn’t close their borders off to non-locals, or people with no good reason to be there, were overrun like locusts through fields. Indignant outsiders demanded food, housing, medical care and all other manners of entitlements, whether the residents had them to give or not. More often than not, when the outsiders were not satisfied with the people they were attempting to beg from, or if they didn’t get more and more handed to them continually, they rebelled against everything and everyone near them until there was nothing left for anyone.

  After a while a military unit or two were freed up to check a couple of the outlying towns. When they showed up, the local cops thought they finally had the big guns to back them up. The power trips of the bad cops clashed with the few remaining good ones, and then with the rest of the town. The military presence never stayed though, and when they left, it seemed that a last false hope would go with them.

  I had kept a low profile the whole time but once I saw that it was going to come to a head one way or another, I decided to become even more scarce. To my reckoning, until the city came to the same conclusions that I had, or at least until they were willing to hear those conclusions and actually try to do something about it, it was time to take a step back and scale down my little world even more. That was when I found myself living out in a half built house with no power.

  I had quietly transferred belongings from my house in town to this place. Besides the travel trailer parked under cover, there was a roof overhead and siding on the house. It wasn’t completely plumbed or wired, and it was basically just a weatherproof skin around a concrete floored and wood framed space, but I had been building with self sufficiency in mind and had already transferred a lot of my “stuff’ here, so I knew I could make do.

  It had taken a couple of trips from the town house with my truck, and I had had to seal up some things that I just didn’t get to, hoping maybe I could go back and finish the move some day. So far, I had only gone back on foot. My out of town property was miles away from my friends and any other neighbors too, that in itself made it a better (and worse) choice. I couldn’t do it alone, I knew that, but there were definitely benefits of having my own place, now being a perfect example.

  Even being out of the way from anything and everything, I still took provisions to keep it hidden. I had dug a ditch through the driveway where it met the dirt road to blend in with the rest of the area. I continued the barbed wire fencing that was common in this area for people running livestock across the front of the property and replanted trees and bushes and rocks, all to make the driveway disappear as much as possible. You couldn’t see the house from the road by a long shot anyway, but I still wanted to avoid attracting any extra attention.

  Hiding from the random road hunters or anyone else that stumbled onto the house was a harder problem to solve, and I eventually concluded that the best answer was the hide in plain sight approach. I wasn’t there every second of the day and even if I was, I couldn’t stop everyone. It was only a matter of time before I knew my luck would run out. The best I could do to extend that time was to not make it any easier for others to find me. I tried to only burn in the fireplace late at night to keep the smell and sight of the smoke from giving me away. I was always very aware of any noise I made while working at t
he house, and I would go deeper into the woods with a suppressor in place to do any shooting.

  Walking inside, I lit a lantern and began to strip my pack and other gear and clothes off. I was at that point where you are so tired that your stomach hurts and your head is swimming. I pulled my guns and flashlight from my gear and set them in their normal spots where I’d know where to find them, even in the dark. I had plenty of other guns here, but all of them were hidden away in the safe. I laid the new Saiga along with my AK on the work bench along the wall, and I put the Glock on the table by the couch that I slept on as a bed, everything else would have to wait. Then without much trouble, I easily drifted off to sleep.

  The next morning, or in reality the next afternoon, after waking up I knew I should have eaten something the night before prior to virtually passing out. My day’s scheduled activities consisted of eating and cleaning. After lighting a small fire in the stove, smoke signature be damned, I put a big pot of water on to use to re-hydrate some food and to take a not so cold sponge bath. My first priority was to eat and replace the calories I’d burned over the last few days.

  Opening up the door to the utility closet I used as a pantry, I did a quick scan of the food I had stored away and made my selection. I wasn’t what I would have called a “survivalist” although I now knew some that would paint me with that brush. I lived where even in town, when we lost power from a good winter storm of the kind we got once or twice a year; it might stay out for a week or more. You had to have some wood, water, and food in the cupboards. I may have taken that to a bit of a higher level, but besides believing that things in the world could not continue as they had been going, thinking that something was going to have to give at some point, I grew up reading books about the frontier settlers and Indians, and watching movies that romanticized the end of the world. It had all just kind of fallen into place for me, to say nothing of Clint’s influence.