A Tale of Two Preppers

by Susan Gregersen

  “What are you talking about?” she asked him. He’d just finished explaining and was about to tell her about the prepping stuff he’d learned this week, when the room brightened with what can only be described as a long, hard flash of light.

  “Oh crap. I think that was a nuke,” Jeff said as they both closed their eyes and hunkered down away from the light.

  “No! No! No way! No! It can’t be!” Jeannie screamed in terror. “What do we do???”

  “This is all new to me, too, but we’ll figure it out,” he said, pulling her tightly into his arms. Inside he just kept thinking “oh crap, oh crap” over and over. Finally he said, “do you know if this building has a basement, or even better yet, a shelter?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. Maybe. There’s a fire exit map on the back of the door,” she told him. They stood up and looked at it. Jeff traced his fingers from their apartment to the stairwell and was looking for a basement when someone pounded on their door.

  Keeping Jeannie behind him he cracked the door open. People were running down the hallway, screaming in hysteria. The person at the door yelled “Nuclear war! Come on, we’re going to the basement! Bring blankets, and food if you have it” and off he ran to the next door.

  Jeff eased the door shut and looked at Jeannie. Within moments their floor was quiet as the last of the people who were going, had gone to the stairs.

  Jeff opened the box near him and said “look, I bought a camp stove. I was going to tell you to buy lots of food, for emergencies, when we went to the market tomorrow. Now it’s too late. I should have told you, but the last few days I’ve been reading up on this ‘preparing for emergencies’ thing. I never realized we were so close to something like this happening,” Jeff said forlornly.

  “It’s not too late. I’ve been reading up on it too. I didn’t think you’d like me buying as much as I was going to, so I went this morning and picked up some stuff. Food, mostly,” Jeannie said.

  “You did? Oh Jeannie, I wish I’d talked to you about it last night. I wanted to. I bought a shotgun today too, and here are some shells for it, and I have some gold coins,” he said, pulling the envelope out of his pocket.

  “But what are we going to do now? I don’t know how to be safe from radiation and nuclear war,” Jeannie said.

  “Well, I read a little bit about it on a website I found, but I didn’t study it much. I wasn’t expecting to need to know right now. We need to find a place with a lot of dirt, cement, water, or something between us and the radiation. And we need to be away from windows. A room with no windows, if we can find one.” Jeff turned back to the diagram of the building with the fire exits marked.

  He looked at Jeannie seriously. “I didn’t think to ask you. Do you want to go to the basement with the others?”

  Jeannie shook her head. “No. From what I read, and from what I know of the type of people in our building, most probably don’t have food or supplies, and there will be panic and probably disease. I’d rather take our chances on our own, for now.”

  Jeff gave a sigh of relief and said, “me too.”

  “Look here!” Jeff said with triumph. He pointed to a maintenance room in the center of their floor. It was surrounded by the water and sewer pipes for the building, and around that was the stairwells and elevators.

  The hallway made a square around that, and apartments lined the outer walls. “These walls are probably 1-ft thick concrete, and then there’s the outer walls. No windows. It’s perfect. If we can get in!

  He opened the door and looked both ways down the hall. They walked quietly down the hall to the discreet door they’d never paid any attention to. Jeff jiggled the handle. It was locked.

  Well, finally it pays off to have grown up the son of a locksmith!” he grinned. He went back to their apartment, dug around in a box in his closet, and came back with what looked like a key ring with weird gadgets on it.

  In moments he had the door unlocked. It had been years since he’d picked a lock, but it was a skill that had made him popular in college for helping with pranks!

  They stepped into the gloom. Only the security back-up lights were on in the hallway, but Jeff reached into his pocket for his key ring. He had a small LED flashlight on it, and he shined it around the room.

  The first thing he noticed was several flashlights on a shelf, so he picked one up and turned it on. The bright beam cut through the room, so he put away his small light.

  Shelves of tools were on two walls, and five-gallon buckets of paint were stacked hodge-podge around the room. A deep wash sink was on one wall, with a shelf of cleaning supplies overhead. Buckets and a mop wringer were underneath. Brooms and mops leaned against it’s side.

  “This looks good. Let’s start moving our stuff in here. Prep stuff, the emergency things we’ll need,” Jeff said. Jeannie nodded and they closed the door and started back to their apartment. Just then a door opened and two women came toward them.

  “What are you two up to? How come you didn’t go to the basement?” they asked Jeff and Jeannie suspiciously as they edged past.

  “What are YOU doing up here?” Jeff countered.

  “Well! We’re headed to the basement now. We came back for our purses and make-up bags. Still have to look nice, you know!” They disappeared through the door to the stairs. Jeannie noticed they were both wearing some of the scarves she’d left in the bags in the stairwell, but it didn’t bother her. She’d disposed of them not caring who got them.

  After they were gone Jeff said, “We need to listen carefully and make sure no one is coming on each trip we make to the maintenance room!”

  They had a quick discussion on where to start, and Jeannie started by pulling out the food she had stashed. She had disposed of all the empty grocery bags and was wondering how to transport the food. First she thought of laying it in the center of a sheet or blanket and carrying it by the corners.

  Then she thought of pillow cases. She grabbed a handful from the hall closet and started shoving food into them. Jeff grabbed armloads of clothes and blankets, gave a quick look and listen in the hallway, and ran over, dumped them in there, closed the door, leaving it unlocked, and went back for more stuff.

  He was surprised when he opened the utility closet in the kitchen and saw all the packages of paper towels and toilet paper, but he didn’t say anything, he just carried them over there.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jeannie shoving food into pillow cases, and he came over and picked up the ones that were full. Grunting under the weight he got them to the maintenance room.

  Jeannie pulled all the juice and wine out of the fridge, and grabbed silverware, paper plates, and paper cups and handed them to Jeff.

  When he came back again she asked “What about water?”

  Jeff didn’t know. The building’s water was off. Then Jeannie remembered the bath she was about to take.

  “Jeff! The bathtub is full! I was going to have a bath to relax, right before all this happened!”

  They ran into the bathroom and looked at all the water, sparkling in the dim light. “In fact,” Jeannie added, “I was just about to pour the bath oil in when the phone rang. As I was going to answer it, the power went out. I still don’t know who tried to call! But this water is clean. Maybe not clean enough to drink the way it is.”

  “Yeah, we can haul what we can in some of the buckets from the maintenance room, but they might use pretty strong cleaners and chemicals in there. Do we have anything in the kitchen that we can use too, something that might be safer for drinking from?” Jeff asked.

  She went to look, and Jeff went to get some of the buckets from the maintenance room. Jeannie found three empty wine bottles in the “glass” recycling bin, and one of the juice bottles that she’d emptied and set on the counter.

  She took the bottles to the bathroom and dipped them in the tub. Jeff came in as she finished, and he dipped out three 5-gallon buckets of water. He carried two of them and she brought the bottles. He went back f
or the last one.

  While he was leaving the apartment for the last time, the building shook again and a bright light filled the hallway. He pulled the door shut and hurried to the maintenance room. Jeannie slammed the door after him and they stood there, trembling.

  “What if one hits our building?” she asked.

  “We die,” he said matter-of-factly. “If one hits that close, we probably want to have it over quick anyway.”

  Jeannie began weeping, and Jeff set the bucket of water down and led her over to the pile of blankets. He turned off the flashlight and they sat in the dark, holding each other and not speaking.

  Several hours later Jeff woke up in the dark and stretched, being careful not to jostle Jeannie more than he had to. He pushed the button on his watch to illuminate the time. It was 2:37 AM. They’d been asleep for hours.

  Jeannie lifted her head and asked, “what time is it.” Jeff told her and she settled her head back against him. He could tell she was still awake, but he didn’t know what to say.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” said Jeannie. “What do we do about that?”

  Jeff gave her shoulders a squeeze so she knew he heard her, and he thought about it for a minute. “Well, let’s look at all the buckets in here and see what we have.”

  He turned the flashlight on and looked at the buckets of paint sitting around them. The only ones that had been empty were the three that now had water in them. He wished he’d thought to plug the sink and fill it too, but then remembered the last blast had come just as he was bringing the last bucket.

  He looked at some of the buckets that were paint splattered and lifted one. It was almost empty. In the beam of the flashlight he could see it was the off-white paint they used in all the hallways. He checked the other splattered buckets to see how much “storage” space they’d have. Two other buckets were partially full, too. That didn’t give them a lot of space for waste.

  “It’s gross, I know, but we could pee in the sink and it would run down the drain. We could cover the sink with one of these plastic drop clothes to keep the smell down in between. And we can…you know, do the other stuff in these partly empty paint buckets and keep the lids on them. We’ve got toilet paper, and it should be enough to last a while,” he said, pointing the beam of the flashlight on the four 24-roll packs of toilet paper.

  “I guess we gotta do what we gotta do when we gotta do what we gotta do!” Jeannnie said gamely. She went over to the sink. “I think that would be okay.”

  She went first, then he took care of his own business. He unfolded one of the plastic drop cloths and spread it over the sink and smoothed it down against the outer sides.

  Jeannie dug around in one of the boxes she’d grabbed from her closet and pulled out a couple of candy bars. She handed one to Jeff, who was pleasantly surprised.

  “Wow, you DID do some stocking up, didn’t you! This is great!” He ate with enthusiasm. They each took a sip of water. “We can make hot food, too. I have the camp stove and the fuel. I even have a lighter that I grabbed from the kitchen. It’s the one I used to light the barbeque grill at our old place, where we had that little porch. I noticed we still had the lighter and I grabbed it.”

  “I’m glad you did! But I thought about something else we don’t have. Pans. How will we cook the food?” Jeannie said. “We didn’t have a can opener, and I got one of those at the market. Actually, I thought of it at the last minute, after I’d paid, and the shopkeeper just gave it to me because I’d spent so much money.”

  Jeff worried for a minute about how much money she spent, then dismissed it. Money was of no consequence now. “Well, if it’s something we really have to cook, I guess we’ll try and cook it in the cans. We’ll just be careful.”

  Time passed in silence again. Presently Jeannie said “I wish there was a way we could have had light, and some books or magazines to read.”

  “We could play a game. Let’s each think of the earliest memory we have. I know mine!” Jeff said, and he related a memory so old it was brown and fuzzy in his mind. She did the same, and before long they were laughing and telling childhood stories. It had been years since they’d had time to talk like this.

  Jeff was telling a story about a time he was visiting his Grandpa in the country and his Dad was there and they were skinning a deer his Grandpa had shot. He hadn’t thought about that in so long he’d forgotten about it.

  He stopped talking and stared into the darkness, but in his mind he could see clear as day, watching his Grandpa’s knife carefully working along between the hide and the meat. They’d had a roast and home-grown mashed potatoes for dinner. He must have eaten the roast but he really didn’t remember it.

  What stood out to him was the wonderful rich, buttery taste of the mashed potatoes! All the vegetables were richer in flavor than any he ate nowadays, and he wondered why. He shrugged and figured it was the rose-colored glasses people tend to use when looking at the past.

  “What? Tell me what you’re thinking!” Jeannie prodded him, and he continued with the story, then spent time musing to Jeannie about the vegetables and how he thought food tasted better there.

  “Maybe it was that fresh country air! I’ve heard that it makes you hungry, and that everything is better, even sleep, when you’re in the country!” Jeannie said.

  After a time they both admitted they were hungry for a “real” meal. Jeannie dug through the cans and laid out a selection. They decided to heat a can of Asian stew and eat crackers with it. Jeannie used the can opener while Jeff set up the stove. When she was ready he lit the burner and turned down the flame.

  “Just like the gas stove in the apartment, only smaller!” he said. They carefully balanced the can on the burner. Jeannie used a plastic spoon to carefully pull food up from the bottom so it would heat all the way through. The can got hot, and she reached for a rag from what looked like the ‘clean rag’ pile on a nearby shelf.

  “Let’s eat out of the can to save the paper bowls and plates,” Jeannie suggested. She handed Jeff a plastic fork and they started eating. Both were being generous to the other by taking only small bites.

  Jeannie scooped up a big bite and looked at Jeff, then reached over and poked it in his mouth! It caught him by surprise but he opened his mouth. Grinning, he did the same to Jeannie. They fed the rest of the can to each other, laughing the whole time!

  When they were done Jeannie wiped out as much as she could from the can with a finger. “Don’t want it to start smelling in here, and anyway, we might be able to use the can for something else.”

  They sat there restlessly for a while.

  “I’m going to go nuts. I need to move around. Get some exercise!” Jeannie said. She stood up and started doing jumping jacks in the dark. Jeff got up too, but just stood there.

  “Wait, Jeannie, stop. You shouldn’t do that. We need to conserve air, and you don’t want to get all sweaty and need more water. I think we should do isometric exercises to keep our muscles toned,” he said.

  “Oh, you mean those exercises you do on long air flights? That’s a good idea. How do you do them?” Jeannie asked eagerly.

  “You tighten groups of muscles and hold it for a certain length of count. I usually count to ten. Then you release them to a completely relaxed state for a count slightly more than half of what you counted when they were tight.

  “So for me, that would be to the count of six. Then you tighten them up for another count of ten, and so forth. You can do just certain muscles, like lower leg muscles or arms and shoulders, or you can tense your whole body as tight as you can, then release it. You need to really relax on the released time. Wanna try it?” he asked.

  She said, “Yeah, I want to start with my legs. My calf muscles feel jumpy.”