As a frigid dawn breaks across the winter sky, what’s left of my family huddles together in this wretchedly cold farmhouse trying to keep warm against another invasion of the incessant north wind. We knew for years there’d be a war, but few of us could have imagined the severity of it, especially for the few who survived the “war”, and especially this far out from a major city. This old house almost burned down, but we were able to save enough of it so that we can survive. If you want to call this survival.

For years it seems that people had been hearing of all the rich and connected folks who got busy building bunkers and stocking them with supplies intended to tide them over when the inevitable happened. They expected to go into their holes and sit tight watching movies and playing video games until such time as it would become safe to slither out and supposedly resume their entitled lives in which whatever few survivors would be waiting with adulation and fanfare to greet them. Yes, they were that deluded. Now that those few begin to see signs of their emergence, great fanfare isn’t exactly what the sick and hungry survivors have in mind.

Some of the larger refuges were intended to house government officials and their families, so they were excavated to facilitate relatively large numbers of people. Huge underground shelters made with reinforced concrete were designed to house any and all who might be required to provide for a preposterously planned continuity of government in a post-apocalyptic scenario. I personally believe they were all building their tombs.

When the bunkers were being built, multitudes of “commoners” were involved – truckers, construction hands, plumbers, electricians, welders, etc., who were never intended to be – nor did they become, part of the inhabitants of said shelters, just the labor used to build them. Were all of these people expected to forget where the bunkers were located? Where the entrances, water supplies, and air vents were, and how to excavate the holes they already dug once? Just what were those entitled individuals thinking?

As we try and patch up the holes in our crumbling walls and the ever-present hunger pangs gnaw at our very souls, we reflect on that somber autumn morning when the world turned upside-down. As I was outside tending the livestock, there were ominous rumblings, almost like the thunderous sonic booms some of us remember from back when technology reached the threshold where airplanes could fly faster than the speed of sound. I’m not sure they realized there would be window-shattering sonic booms until those fast jet planes started flying faster than sound. Anyways, when the big bombs started going off, that’s the first thing that came to mind, but only briefly. It didn’t take a lot of dot-connecting to realize what was afoot.

We always thought of times when the power would go out, but when it finally happened, the actuality of it hit home. Wow! Not only did it go out, but deep down we knew it would never come back on. When our enemies overseas finally got enough of the threats and pillaging by the western world and lit off the orbiting satellites containing EMP producing devices, we stepped through the door of destruction, our world caught on fire, power lines, automobiles, and just about everything with an electrical coil simply burst into flames. Huge conflagrations started everywhere there were wire fences, electrical power lines, transformers, substations, or anything made of wire kindled the near-complete destruction of developed nations. We ran inside and after frantically putting out the fires, we could only wait and wonder if we were about to be vaporized. Considering what our lives have devolved to, it would have been more merciful if we had. The cold nights are almost too much to bear.

The worst part of all this is the fact that no one knows the extent of the destruction. Did Washington DC get annihilated? How many of our big cities got wiped out? Communications are completely obliterated. There were a few folks around who everyone considered to be nuts that were known as preppers. Some of them kept CB radios, but most of them got fried in the EMP. A precious few survived, but it’s next to impossible to get to them to find out what they might know. Most information that does get through is of little help anyway. From the looks of our situation, it seems that our nation as we knew it is gone for good. I guess we “lost” the war, but our enemies devastated and contaminated the landscape to the extent that they won’t be sending a “conquering army” over here anytime soon. Nevertheless, the “preppers” have since become folk heroes everywhere there are survivors looking for a bowl of beans.

Radiation is everywhere and will be for a long time, it’s the primary concern for everyone who might have survived and is still breathing. Most of the living are – or have been – terribly sick from radiation poisoning, but a few seem to be immune to it. Maybe they’re the ones who pray – that’s the only explanation I can think of. I ran into one of these types who was among the very most prepared of the preppers. Before everything went south, he bought an old diesel pickup truck and completely gutted the electrical system. No battery, no starter. He parks it on a hill so he can start it by getting it rolling and popping the clutch. It works, but fuel is scarce, so he only uses it for essential things like hauling wood.

We only have a few chickens left, the goat got sick and died, and out of nine dogs on the farm, we have a couple left, but they’re sick a lot. We eat, and are thankful for, a lot of squirrels and rabbits. We’re fortunate enough to have a spring on the property, and what few neighbors we have left come over braving the outdoor air to fill bottles and jugs from it. So far, I guess the water’s ok, at least no one is getting sick from it so far. We were only marginal preppers, but we did have the foresight to stock up on a bit of extra food, but I really think we’re just postponing the inevitable. But then, who knows? We like to imagine that by some miracle we can be evacuated to a safe place, but in reality, we don’t even know if there are any safe places anywhere. Sort of like not so long ago when the people of Gaza undoubtedly imagined that some great nation would come to their rescue during their holocaust, but much to the shame of the world, that didn’t happen either.

For years, some scientists maintained that a nuclear exchange would precipitate what they called a nuclear winter. Even though as a result of the pandemic and green revolution and a lot of other nonsense, most of what passed for science came to be revealed as a bunch of malarkey, I guess they got the nuclear winter part right, because we are well into what should have been spring, but it’s desperately cold! I really miss having a weather forecast to look at, but there are none anymore, and there probably won’t be, especially the weather discussions that depended on satellites – they’ve obviously all been destroyed. We have to go back to the old way such as “red sky in morning…”

There’s no internet anymore, no microwave ovens, no running water. I saved every blanket and quilt I could get my hands on for years, and they are certainly coming in handy now. There’s no music, no television, no football games. No one knows how Kim Kardashian is doing, nor do they care. Much of our former life has been revealed for the useless nonsense it was. It’s hard to remember how we cared for things that really matter, or if we did at all. It was all about new cars, boats, flights to vacation spots, and a thousand other things that don’t mean squat now. We actually sat in front of CNN on the TV and believed all the lies they spoon fed everybody as if there would be no tomorrow with which to reckon.

There’s a tiny rivulet running from where our spring comes out of the ground. I watch it a lot these days, because if it dries up, we’re going to be in serious trouble. As I sit out here breathing what could be contaminated air (I’ve been so sick I really don’t even care anymore), watching that tiny trickle of life-giving water, I search my heart and continually ask myself, “What could I have done to help prevent this?” Hundreds of millions of human beings have been destroyed, killed, vaporized – with their bones strewn across the land. Huge cities, once thriving metropolises, now are no more than huge smoldering craters, with innumerable ghosts looking on, each and every one asking themselves, “What could I have done…?”