by Jason Offutt
• Mix in salt and vegetable oil.
• Mix in flour.
• Knead dough on a floured surface for six to eight minutes.
• Put dough in a bowl coated with vegetable oil. Turn dough to coat with oil. Cover with a damp cloth and let rise an hour.
• Punch down dough (mash your fist into the dough ball then fold the sides up to reform the ball).
• Knead again for two minutes.
• Divide dough in half and shape into loaves.
• Put dough into two greased 9x5-inch loaf pans.
• Let rise for 30 minutes.
• Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
Now, cut the bread and fix yourself a sandwich. It only takes one hand to eat a sandwich. You’ll need the other hand to shoot things.
How to Make Fire Without Matches
At some point after the downfall of man, you’re going to need fire, whether for heat, protection, cooking, or for romancing that cutie you’ve discovered lives in a cave down by the river. However, one day you may need fire and discover you’re out of matches. Can you, like our Cro-Magnon ancestors, successfully create fire? Yes, because Cro-Magnons were idiots. They never discovered the important things in life, like metallurgy, the light bulb, or Zooey Deschanel.
Things you need to start a fire are:
1) Tinder. Tinder is any sort of easily flammable material, such as dried grass, leaves, wood shavings, lint, shredded paper, or a mummy. Form the tinder into a loose bird’s nest.
2) Kindling. Kindling is a pile of sticks and other small combustibles you will hopefully set fire to with the tinder. Add larger and larger sticks as the fire takes hold.
3) Friction. This method—rubbing sticks together—is as much fun as churning butter, by which I mean it’s not. Ask any Amish and they’ll tell you, “Oh, yah. Butter churnin’. If I had my druthers, I’d build a barn.” We’ve all seen actors make fire with friction in old movies, except in the real world it takes forever. Yes, eventually the wood will heat enough to ignite the tinder, but vampires or the growing wolf population will have eaten you before you ever see smoke.
4) Magnifying glass. Although this method only works on a sunny day, it’s a lot more fun holding a magnifying glass over the tinder than rubbing sticks together. As soon as the tinder starts to smoke, blow on it softly to get that oxygen flowing.
5) Science fun. You can create a fire with a 6-volt battery and some fine steel wool. Tear the wool to loosen it, and touch it to both ends of the battery. This creates a circuit and will heat the steel wool enough to catch the tinder on fire. It will also make you feel like MacGyver.
Communication
When the world comes to an end, when humanity is breathing its last, when people need to cling together for the continuation of the species, you still can’t trust anyone. Any surviving human being is going to be on edge, tired, and ready to kill anything that moves. However, you have to try to find someone; how else will the species continue? Telephones will eventually die, as will the Internet. To give yourself the best chance of communicating with your fellow man, turn to radio:
• FM: This is line-of-sight transmission, and you can monitor whether someone’s transmitting anywhere in your region in just a few minutes. Unless you’re on the run, frequency modulation radio won’t change. Downfall: If you actually hear an FM transmission, whoever’s transmitting can talk to you, but you can’t talk to them.
• AM: Amplitude modulation radio is more far-reaching than FM. At night, a lone monster hunter sitting in a barricaded home outside Kansas City, Missouri, scanning the AM dial can pick up signals from as far away as San Antonio and Chicago. Downfall: They can talk to you from even farther away, and you still can’t talk to them.
• Police scanner: With a police scanner, you can monitor police, sheriff, and fire department signals. If there’s some semblance of authority still operating, you’ll find it here. Downfall: You still can’t talk with them, which might be all right in this case. If you pick up police or fire transmissions, these guys are probably knee-deep in zombies.
• CB: Unlike FM and AM radio, Citizens Band radio offers two-way communication on forty channels you can monitor from a home base or vehicle. Downfall: Trucker’s lingo. CBer 1: “What’s your twenty?” CBer 2:“I’m jetting my rollerskate from Armpit to Barf City staying off the big road. Kinda wary of bogies, good buddy.” Do you know what that means? I don’t; and I even wrote it. One positive: Interestingly enough, rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot is an avid CBer. If Mix-a-Lot’s still alive, you can talk about big butts.
How to Stay Sane in a World Infested With Monsters
Staying sane? Are you kidding me? The world’s overrun with the walking dead, the walking undead, or Jurassic Park. How can you stay sane? Just worry about staying alive. If human beings survive this mess, you’ll have plenty of time to straighten your head out later. This is why you asked your doctor about Valium.
Afterword
The idea for this book came slowly, not quite glacier slowly, more like “waiting for pudding to thicken” slowly. After a lifetime of watching movies where monsters attack humanity and humanity does a sometimes brilliant but mostly terrible job at defending itself, I started thinking, what would I do if (insert monster) walked down a hallway in my house and tried to eat me? Seriously, what would I do? That question rolled around my head for about as long as it takes pudding to go from liquid, to solid, to nasty skin on top while my brain went through bloody but fun scenarios. What I realized is 1) don’t eat the pudding, and 2) that if the monster apocalypse occurred, I’d be okay, because in the average American home—my home—weapons are everywhere. Sure, the obvious weapons are knives in the kitchen, but an average person might think that’s all the protection they have.
It’s not.
I stepped into the bathroom, rummaged through the closet and under the sink. Hmm, a can of Lysol. You know, a can of Lysol and a Bic lighter can do a lot of damage. Garage? A shovel has the skull-crushing potential of a baseball bat or sledgehammer. Laundry room? The blinding power of bleach. Basement? A stack of old Playboys that can … uh … well, when dumped over, they can get in the way and might give you time to grab a lead pipe. Yeah, these are all weapons I could use against a nasty beast coming into my home without a dinner invitation.
That’s something else that bothered me. What kind of nasty beast might strut into my home ready to kill me? It could be anything, vampire, killer robot, Jurassic Park reject that was really ticked off. Yes, I had to be ready for everything. This led me to write How to Kill Monsters Using Common Household Items. Really, why should you care what type of evil creature wanders into you living room? It’s evil, it’s a creature, and it’s in your living room—quite possibly when you’re eating popcorn and watching Modern Family. Enough said. After reading this book, you’re now prepared to kill every type of evil demon beast there is, especially ones that interrupt your favorite TV show. Oh, and gnomes. I hate those guys.
Good luck.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to give special thanks to L. Boden for her pizza shop dark alley artwork. I’d also like to thank Marcus Benzel, James Berry, Brady and Micaela Cummings, Aaron Luckert, and Justin “Mac” McClure for giving this project their educated thumbs up. Each one of them has successfully defended their homes from a monster invasion using simple household objects. They are protecting us from the apocalypse.
About the Author
Jason Offutt’s books include the novel, “A Funeral Story,” four non-fiction paranormal titles, and the humorous travelogue “Through a Corn-Swept Land: An epic beer run through the Upper Midwest.”
Jason lives with his family in Northwest Missouri where he teaches college journalism, and considers everything a potential threat. Seriously. Didn’t you just read this book?
Everything.
Endnotes
[1] Statistics may be inaccurate.
[2] Even Kansas, although the Kansas law also includes shoot
ing people walking down the street as long as they’re Methodists, Democrats, or anyone advocating the theory of evolution.
[3] If you’ve had a vasectomy or tubal ligation which has, essentially, taken you out of the gene pool, remember this: if you meet a human, a really, really cute human who agrees you need to work together to repopulate the planet—lie. Lie to them like they’re the IRS.