Just Trying To Stay Alive: A Prepper's Tale

by Michaels, Brian

  “It was just a matter of time,” Squirrel added. “The number of the dead that has been coming around has been growing every day, I knew the time would come when they would finally over power us.

  Everyone that I’ve talked to the last week is gone. While they were still on the air, they told me about how the dead were growing in numbers because as they killed the living, after a few hours the living became one of the walking dead.

  I didn’t want to believe it, but when it happened to my family, I knew it was true. With every passing day the situation becomes more and more hopeless. I believe that there is no way any of us are going to be able to survive.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “The first thing I’m going to do is go out and bury my family with what strength I have left. It’s that last decent thing I can still do for them. Thanks to Grizzly I learned how to put them out of their misery. One shot to the head will do it, I guess it destroys the brain so the body can no longer function,” Squirrel said sadly. “Then I am going to make sure that I will not be turning into one of those dead bastards. I saved one final bullet in my gun for me in case it happened to me.”

  “He isn’t going to shoot himself, is he?” Emma asked looking horrified.

  I just looked at Emma and nodded.

  “But…,” Emma started, but then stopped and was silent.

  “Good luck to you and if you still have a family, good luck to all of you. Squirrel over and out,” Squirrel said.

  “I hate to bother you at a time like this and I won’t keep you much longer,” I said. “But could you give me and my family any advice? We have been trying to figure this out, but honestly we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.”

  The air was silent for a long moment, then Squirrel’s weak voice came back over the radio.

  “Where are you located?” Squirrel asked. He didn’t bother to continue with CB etiquette by saying over.

  “Rapid City, South Dakota,” I replied.

  “The only advice I can give you that would be worth a damn is to get the hell away from the city,” Squirrel replied. “The cities were overrun within the first two days of the infection. The people in and around the cities were the first to go silent. All I can say is for you to get out of the city and head to the mountains. Someplace where there aren’t very many people, a place where you will have a chance. Don’t get me wrong, the dead are out in the countryside too, but you won’t have to deal with as many of them. But once the dead know you are there, they will keep coming until they find a way to get you.”

  “Where are you located?” I asked.

  “Sioux Falls,” Squirrel replied. “I am out in the countryside, but apparently not far enough away from the city. It’s also flat land out here without any mountains to stop them or to at least slow them down, the dead just kept coming out of the city in huge waves. I never anticipated that, I never anticipated any of this. I would say head for the mountains, someplace too difficult for the dead to follow. Now if you will excuse me, I have a few things to do while I still can, Squirrel over and out for the last time.”

  Then the air went silent.

  As far as anticipating any of this, I knew how Squirrel felt. No one could have anticipated this, at least us regular people could have never expected this all to happen. Maybe there was someone who knew this could happen, but I doubt they would be anywhere near us right now.

  I just looked at Emma, I could tell that both of us felt discouraged by what we had just heard.

  “Try some of the other channels,” Emma said. “See if you can find anyone else.”

  I tried each of the other channels, one by one, but all I was able to find was silence.

  I finally gave up and shut off the radio and removed the jumper cables.

  “I think that answers a lot of questions,” I finally said quietly.

  “In fact, it answered a few questions that I hadn’t even thought about yet.”

  What kind of questions?” Emma asked.

  “I had never given it any thought about leaving the house,” I replied. “I was just thinking we could ride it out here. But if Squirrel is right, we need to think about the possibility of getting away from Rapid City.”

  “And go where?” Emma asked.

  “To the mountains like he said,” I replied. “Maybe we could go to my dad’s place in Montana, you can’t get much more isolated than that.”

  “That’s a long drive,” Emma said hesitantly.

  “I know,” I replied. “But it’s something to think about. I think my original plan to ride this out at the house may still be the best thing. We have enough food to last us a long time. Out there we would have to fight our way through the dead, I’m hoping they won’t be able to last too much longer, each day when I look outside their bodies have looked worse, maybe we can just wait them out.”

  “I like that idea better than going out there with them,” Emma said.

  “So do I, for now,” I replied. “But that could change.”

  Our conversation was interrupted when Logan stepped into the garage doorway, “So here you are,” Logan smiled. “I was starting to worry.”

  “I’m glad you’re awake, I could use your help,” I said as I looked up at the doorway. “We need to reinforce our barricades and I could use some help.”

  “Sure Dad,” Logan replied. “As soon as I go to the bathroom.”

  I nodded, and Logan turned away from the doorway and disappeared into the living room.

  A minute later we knew that the whole family was awake.

  Bang, Bang, Bang.

  “Logan, what are you doing in there?” Katie growled. “I have to use the bathroom.”

  “Now you know what I feel like every morning,” Logan’s muffled voice replied from inside the bathroom.

  A second later the bathroom door opened.

  “Oh Gross! Logan, you didn’t flush!” Katie’s angry voice followed.

  “We don’t have any water,” Logan replied. “I couldn’t flush.”

  “Great!” Katie growled, followed by the sound of the bathroom door slamming.

  “Maybe you should make some breakfast,” I suggested to Emma. “To soothe the angry beasts.”

  “How about some coffee and chicken soup?” Emma replied.

  “Sounds great,” I smiled.

  After breakfast, Katie was still grumpy, but she would just have to deal with the conditions we found ourselves in.

  We had more important things to worry about than having our butt touching a dirty bucket.

  She would be able to handle it, she was a smart girl, teenage girls had to act offended by just about everything whether they really felt that way or not. As the father of a teenage girl, I knew it was the law as I had come to realize over the last few years. After she got her frustrations out, she would come to me and apologize for acting like a brat. The best way to deal with her moods was to just ignore them and she would come around.

  She settled down and became serious when we started to discuss what to expect next and what we should do, stay at the house or try to get out of the city.

  I told the kids what Emma and I had heard from Squirrel.

  The upside to leaving was that maybe we could go somewhere where there wouldn’t be as many of the dead and we could experience fresh air and sunshine again. Possibly we could find a place that wasn’t as cramped as the attic and we could move around safely outside again.

  The downside was we would probably have to fight our way through the dead to get away from Rapid City. If we were able to do that, there was no guarantee we would find a safe place that would be any different than what we had now. We would also have to consider the fact that we would only be able to carry a small amount of food with us when we left. We would soon have to hunt for food if we wanted to eat.

  The upside to staying home was that we didn’t have to do anything, we were already here, and we had plenty of food. If it worked out and we could wait out the dead, we
wouldn’t be starting out from scratch with nothing but the clothes on our backs.

  The downside was that even though we felt safe for now, we knew that could change. We also had no idea of how long we would be stuck here in the house and attic. There was the chance that the dead would be around longer than our food and water would last.

  There were no easy choices to be made, we felt like we were choosing blindly.

  In the end, we made our choice based on what we knew,

  We knew what we had.

  We didn’t want to gamble what we had based upon the word or advice of Squirrel.

  Emma, Logan and Katie asked me what I felt the best thing to do was and I said that I had planned long ago to be able to stay at the house and ride out a crisis, so I felt we should stay and give it a chance, but I wanted to give everyone a say because of how the decision would affect all of our lives.

  I knew they would all go along with whatever I suggested, but I needed to ask their opinion to make them feel they had a say in the matter, because whatever we did, I knew it was not going to be easy or pleasant.

  Deep down I also needed to know my family had confidence in what I did, because I wasn’t feeling all the confident about what to do.

  For better or worse, we all decided to stay at the house and try to wait out the dead.

  After our family meeting, Logan and I then reinforced our barricades while Katie and Emma carried more supplies up into the attic.

  The final battery pack for the drill gave out, so we had to do most of the work by hand.

  I had also stored a crate full of ammo for the rifles in the basement with the food.

  Logan and I carried the heavy box up to the attic along with the extra rifle.

  We left the shotgun in the bedroom for protection when we were down in the house, where we planned on spending most of our time. We wanted to take advantage of the open space while we could, we knew we could soon be forced to spend all out time in the cramped confines of the attic.

  My family and I had made our final plans to get through the invasion of the dead. Even though we had seen and heard a lot over the last week, we really had no idea of the scope of the problem we were facing.

  We were winging it and I knew it, I just hoped that we were doing the right thing.

  Only time would tell if we had made the right decision.

  Chapter 16

  It had been two days since we had made our choice to wait out the dead.

  We slept in the attic but spent most of the day down stairs in the house, trying to make life feel as close as we could to normal.

  Katie and Logan spent a lot of time in their rooms reading and sleeping. Emma and I spent our time in the living room talking.

  We soon found we were able to ignore the smell and the occasional pounding on the door and window barricades.

  Usually once each day we would get together to play Monopoly or one of the other family board games we had in the house.

  When we weren’t playing games, Katie was grilling me on what it was like growing up in the Stone Age. I guess she had come to the conclusion that life would not be returning to what we had all been used to and she was making plans to adapt to life without all the things she had come to take for granted.

  It was on the third day we discovered that whatever decision we would have made about staying at the house or leaving in the car, that neither answer was really a good choice. But after what happened next, we were glad we had made the decision to stay.

  “Dad, Dad,” Logan yelled as he came stumbling down the steps from the attic. “There is a car coming up the street.”

  Logan turned and climbed back up into the attic as Emma, Katie and I followed.

  We all ran over to the open vent at the far side of the attic.

  “I heard an engine roaring and I kept looking down at the corner, then I saw it. It’s someone in a red minivan,” Logan exclaimed excitedly.

  I slid over to the vent and looked down the street.

  I saw the red minivan surrounded by a mob of the dead, the van was trying to push its way through the crowd.

  It slowly moved up the street until it was in front of our house where it seemed to get bogged down.

  The engine roared as the front wheels spun, no longer able to get any traction, throwing blood and body parts up in the air and against the side of the vehicle.

  “I see another car coming,” Katie said.

  I looked back down the street and saw a blue Kia trying to fight its way up the street.

  The Kia, being a much smaller car, bogged down in the middle of the road a half block behind the minivan.

  Now the two vehicles were stuck in the middle of the street as the mobs of the dead completely surrounded the cars.

  “They must have been traveling together,” I said as I watched the cars struggling to get moving again.

  “I’m glad we aren’t in one of those cars,” Emma said. “I thought those cars would have been able to just knock the dead out of their way.”

  “Once they started to knock the dead over, the cars ran over the bodies crushing them into mangled piles of bloody flesh, it looks like they are trying to drive through a mud pit,” I replied. “There is no way those cars can get any traction and with all those bodies pushing against the cars, they won’t be going anywhere.”

  “Did you know that would happen when we were deciding whether or not to stay here or leave in the car?” Emma asked.

  “No,” I replied. “The possibility that the car could get stuck like that honestly never crossed my mind until now.”

  We watched the dead ramming their heads into the sides of the cars. Blood smeared across the windows until we could no longer see the people that were trapped inside.

  Suddenly the windshield collapsed inside the front of the red minivan leaving the people inside the car exposed.

  Emma gasped when the hands of the dead locked onto the driver and they began to drag him out over the dashboard.

  The sharp edges of the shattered windshield glass shredded the man’s skin and clothing, leaving a trail of blood as he was dragged out of the car and down over the hood.

  The moaning of the dead had grown so loud that we were barely able to hear the man’s desperate screams of pain.

  The woman passenger’s screaming became louder when the side windows in the car gave out and the dead began to drag her out through the passenger’s window.

  “Oh God,” Katie groaned then she turned her head from the window when the woman’s arm was torn from her body, followed by a gushing stream of blood.

  As two gruesome bodies bit into the dismembered arm, other dead bodies moved in and dragged the rest of the woman’s limp body out of the car.

  We were about to turn our attention to the Kia, but when we saw the dead fighting to crawl through the windows of the minivan to get into the car, we knew there must still be someone else in the car.

  It made me feel sick when I saw them drag two small bodies from the backseat and out through the driver’s side window. It was horrifying to watch the two small mangled bodies disappear as the dead dove to that side of the car to devour the small bodies.

  “Oh God, they were just little kids,” I said in a low voice. “What a hell of a way to die.”

  “They were probably terrified,” Emma added. “First seeing what happened to their parents, then being dragged out of the car themselves by those monsters.”

  “It makes me sick having to watch this and not be able to do anything to help them,” I replied. “I’d like to get my hands on the bastards that caused this. I’d feed them to the dead and let them see what it’s like.”

  The mob of bodies around the minivan soon thinned out as they began to move back towards the Kia.

  The Kia was already covered in bloody streaks and the car rocked back and forth from the barrage of bodies crashing into it as the dead tried to get to the passengers inside the car.

  “Dad,” Logan shouted, “there is someone e
lse getting out of the minivan!”

  We quickly looked back at the minivan and our hearts began to race as a young girl crawled out onto the hood, jumped to the ground in front of the car and started running down the street in our direction.

  Most of the dead had started to move towards the Kia, but there were still dozens of staggering bodies around the minivan.

  The girl landed on the street and started trying to dodge the dead that were reaching for her with outstretched arms.

  Her small body was knocked around as the hands of the dead grabbed at her, tearing her dress, but the terrified little girl managed to miraculously stay on her feet and kept moving through the dead.

  “Can we do something to help her?” Emma asked urgently.

  “I’ll try,” I replied as I grabbed the Winchester, briefly wondering if the sound of the rifle would stir up the dead again as it did the other day. My thoughts focused on helping the little girl and I lined up the cross hairs in the scope on the closest body to the girl and pulled the trigger.

  The head on the body that had just grabbed the girl’s arm, exploded as my bullet struck the front of the skull.

  The girl turned to the right to get away from the falling body and looked around frantically for an opening to run through, but the mob was beginning to surround her again.

  I fired my gun again, dropping two more of the dead and quickly ejected the shells as I tried to create an opening for the little girl to run through.

  When she saw the gap in the wall of bodies, she ran.

  I yelled out the vent, “Run over this way, go to the garage door!”

  The girl must have heard my voice as she darted around two staggering bodies and turned towards the house.

  “Logan, use the other rifle and try to open a pathway to the house,” I yelled as I got up, “I’m going down and see if I can pull her in through the garage door.”