Chapter 4,

Slate

The world went crazy. In the following weeks and months religious and race wars tore across the Middle East and Africa. Well, more than normal anyways. India and China, the world’s two most populous countries, finally went to war and an estimated 300 million people have been killed so far. The EU did ok for the most part, with only the occasional military coup taking place. Several South American governments were torn down and rebuilt, or just plain taken by cartels. Russia closed its borders and no one is really sure what is happening there. I am sure Putin was still riding grizzly bears shirtless while his photographer follows him around, but there was a media blackout from the country.

 America had its own problems. Riots and looters burned through almost every major city and a state of Martial Law was declared across the nation. With the amount of strife at home and abroad America ceased all overseas military activities and shipped all the troops back to protect the homeland from itself. After several months of strife and food shortages, people seemed to realize that the world was not actually ending. After about six months, America finally started returning to normal. The masses either forgot about or ignored the fact that the voice had ever spoke at all.

Jessica moved in during the strife and we rode most of it out at my house. There were some hard times, but we didn’t go hungry. I ended up poaching a couple of deer, enough that I got tired of hunting with a rifle and went out once with the crossbow. Walking home, I tripped and fell on the damn thing, breaking it. I thought about getting it replaced or fixed, but never got around to it.  Practicing with the compound bow became a fun diversion. I became able to accurately hit a stationary target at up to 40-50 yards with some consistency. Jessica and I would have competitions on who could shoot the best, the loser having to pay out in various ways. That usually ended up being pretty fun for both of us.

My job did not start up again until the unrest was over, but by then there were far more jobs out there than we could hope to complete. Jessica ended up moving back to her place after we started to have our regular fights and arguments. Funny how the fear of dying alone made us get along, but once it was gone the little shit that made up our daily lives pushed us back apart. Once she was gone, I needed a project to keep myself occupied and decided to turn my basement into a semi-fortified bunker in case the collapse happened again. Prepping had became a new fashion across the land, and I got caught up in it as well.

To be honest, the worst thing that happened to me throughout the entire crisis was that I was forced to take a roommate at the end of it. I had really been hoping that the credit companies would crash and burn, but since they didn’t I owed them big.

My new roommate, Seth Brian Eggleton, moved in a month or so later. Seth’s apartment had burned down during the upheaval and he had been forced to move in with his parents. Now that everything was settled down he was ready to get back out. Seth called himself a video blogger. I watched a few of his shows and thought he was more of a dick than anything else. He was the kind of guy you saw on YouTube treating others like crap and you immediately just hated. The general public seems to be a bunch of morons though, because Seth was insanely popular in some circles. The little bastard had about 200,000 subscribers watching his antics.

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I was eventually the star of his most viewed video and his first viral. Just having woken up after working an 18 hour shift, I was mostly asleep as I walked into the kitchen to make my morning coffee. I was wearing only boxers and a wife beater at the time. Without warning, my bare feet flew out from under me and fell on the floor hard. Seth popped up with a camera laughing. He cackled about how he had buttered the floor and had “got me good”.  All I saw for the next few moments was red as I went after him.  

Later I saw the video, and this is what it showed. First there is my fat ass hitting the floor like a ton of bricks with some annoying little shit in the background laughing. Then, like a pig wallowing in mud I slip and slide around until I am able to get back on my feet. Face flushed, with proverbial steam coming from my ears, I charged at the cameraman as he starts to run away. The camera goes flying and hits the ground to catch me and Seth at an angle. I then grabbed Seth like a cartoon bouncer would throw someone from a club and launched him through the air about 10 feet out into the yard. He hit the ground hard due to the three foot drop at the end of the porch and lay there sputtering.

I went back inside and Seth came in several minutes later. That asshole wasn’t even mad, he had a big smile on his face. He was holding his wrist like he had sprained it, but ignored the pain while talked about it being his best video yet. He was right, it got around three million hits over the next month.

With the extra money from Seth’s rent and what I was making working long hours, I was able to purchase and install a few things in the bunker. Heavy duty metal frames and solid metal doors were placed on the exterior and interior access the bunker. Both had slats for two by fours to drop behind the doors to reinforce them further. A decent generator and battery set up that could run on natural gas was hooked up to the electrical system. I built a cinderblock shed covering it outside and ran the wires through the ground and into the house to keep it secure.

Some cleaning and minor interior work was completed to rough out the living space. I hooked up an electric pump to run from an old ground well that was not used anymore and connected it to the downstairs plumbing. A small kitchenette with a medium sized faucet, a natural gas stove top, and a decent sized deep freezer rounded out the appliances in the basement. The rest of my money was spent on an old gun safe and a lot of ammunition for in .223, .40 and 12 guage. I kept up with the bow shooting because it was enjoyable, but didn’t replace any of the shafts that broke while during training.

I started loading up the basement with all the food I could afford. Most of it was dried long term food, or canned. I did not stock up on water because I figured that the well wouldn’t run out of water. An antenna on the roof allowed for basic TV in the basement. After I dragged a chair and an old full size bed down there, and connected my Xbox and PS3, I thought myself fairly well prepared.

Around the world there were a lot of groups preparing their own fortresses with provisions. Prepping had always been a thing, but it really took off among the rich and influential people now that they were shocked into believing that chaos could happen at any time. Entire compounds popped up in a surprisingly short amount of time. Many were in places that people knew about, but some were hidden away underground or in the mountains. There were websites dedicated to tracking doomsday hideouts and where they were, as well as sites dedicated to the best set ups.

I thought I was ready, as prepared as you could get without spending tons of money. I thought that the effort and planning put into my underground fortress would be enough. Sure there was more that could have been done, and if there had been more time many things would have been added to the basement, but the time ran out. When the event happened, I realized that I should have worked harder and prepared more. But no amount of preparation, physical or mental, can ever fully prepare you to watch the world burn.