It’s cold out – very cold! Unfortunately, it looks like those scientists who suggested that a “nuclear winter” would follow a strategic nuclear exchange were right. Here it is late in May and another hard freeze is finishing off the few leaves and grasses that are left from nature’s feeble attempt at springtime. So much dust and smoke got kicked up into the atmosphere that the sun hasn’t been visible since the catastrophe several months ago.

My propane tank is getting low and I have to use my wood stove for heat, which is okay – I used it during normal winters and it heats up this old farmhouse – or what’s left of it – fairly well. One of the worst aspects of life now is the absence of light, even in the daytime you can barely see. All the preppers built up solar arrays for power when the grid went down, but most of them are useless with no sunlight. All those rechargeable batteries I bought aren’t much good without a way to recharge them.

We kept several cans of gas full for just in case, but by now we are getting low. The generator uses more gas than we really expected, so we only use it when we need to run the well pump. When we crank it up, we search the internet for information – any information – but there’s nothing. The satellites were the first things to go when the big war started. We turn on a few lights, glorious lights! At least for the few minutes of electricity we indulge ourselves, but just knowing the horrid darkness will return too soon takes away any real joy in the brief moments of light.

It’s no use to try and charge the phones anymore. They don’t work – nothing works. A few people show up coming down the driveway once in a while. I’ll leave it up to the reader at this point to decide what to do when a stranger comes up. You have to consider first and foremost, what kind of a threat he/she brings. At this point of existence, survival has become the pre-eminent occupation of our lives. Sometimes a hungry youngster shows up and the natural inclination for a normal human being would be to render whatever help we can offer, but there are grownups in the shadows waiting for us to drop our guard, even for a moment, and then that survival instinct kicks in.

During those brief moments of having lights on, we have to be careful to cover all the windows so no one can see our precious light. We use candles too. We have a hastily constructed outhouse. That would have been a no-brainer for any thoughtful prepper, and we should have had a good one on standby, but some things just get overlooked. Talk about a freezing experience! Nobody reads or works crosswords while on the pot.

There are some, very few, good aspects of this existence though. We don’t worry about the government spying on us anymore. It looks like we will never need to run air conditioners again. We haven’t had traffic on our local roads in a while, and there are no more chem trails. Well, I’m guessing there are no more, because we couldn’t see them if there were. Maybe when the skies finally clear, nature will once more begin to right itself and God will take control again.

Once in a while we get some information from people on CB radios, and we heard that one of the first places to get destroyed, even before the pentagon, was Langley, VA. That’s where the snake den we knew as the CIA was located. Supposedly the Russians hit the place with several hypersonic missiles and destroyed everything several hundred feet down into the ground. Washing DC itself has been a huge smoking crater for a while now. All of the big cities in the US have been obliterated as far as we know.

The Russians hit the east coast up near New York City with one of those Poseidon torpedoes they were chomping at the bit to fire off, and yes there was a huge radioactive tsunami that leveled the city and another hit in Norfolk, VA. There were others on the West Coast near San Diego and LA. We saw trails in the sky where missiles were flying from all directions – some were ours but most of the ones we saw were Russian, Chinese, and North Korean. The sounds of the explosions were like thunder, even the ones far away. We could see the upper parts of the mushroom clouds up toward St Louis and south toward Little Rock. At least the folks in those places, and many others, were quickly vaporized and never knew what hit them. Then came the darkness…

We have a little food left, but it won’t last long. The hardest part for me so far was losing my dogs. There was just no way we could work things so they could survive. Since this could happen in real life, it’s too painful for me to elaborate on, so I’ll talk about other things.

We decided early on to start using our spring out back for drinking water. Actually, we had little choice, but so far none of us have gotten sick or irradiated from it. The pools it feeds haven’t frozen over – in fact they hadn’t ever frozen even during normal winters. There are a few scraggly raccoons and deer that drink from it too, and we harvest some of them as needed. I spent several hours back prior to the war building a big smoker so we could preserve meat and it has come in handy. I suppose we could theoretically last as long as the firewood is available, and of course, assuming there is a supply of meat, but lacking any plants or vegetables, we can’t live healthily for very long.

The EMP from high-altitude weapons took out almost everything electrical. We were lucky that one of our generators survived, but with the gas supply dwindling, the generator is just prolonging our agony. Our refrigerators and freezers couldn’t avail us due to the lack of power, so we gorged ourselves on the rapidly thawing foodstuffs while it was still good. It was a shame to lose that much food – we frantically canned what we could and managed to save a good bit of it, but even though none of us ever learned much about canning things, somehow we managed to work it out.

As things stand right now, we don’t have a functioning government at any level, local, state, or federal. There is no more US government, no more FBI, IRS, DHS, etc. The people and organizations who write government checks are history. All banks are gone, obliterated. Those who enjoyed lots of money during the good times are either dead or in holes in the ground. All military organizations are finished. We don’t have any idea how many survivors there are, nor where they might be. We are at a threadbare primeval existence, and we presume the rest of the world is in the same condition. Though the African nations weren’t hit as hard as Europe, Asia, and America, the extreme cold has taken a devastating toll on those nations who were used to warm climates.

Our suspicion is that there are pockets of bedraggled survivors, probably many of them deathly sick from radiation and disease such as typhus and other maladies that accompany mass death. Will any of humanity survive this apocalypse? Who knows? If humans do survive, they’ll be in a primitive world where food is extremely scarce. There’ll undoubtedly be cannibalism, it’s happened before. They’ll eat grass, roots, or whatever else they can scavenge. They’ll live in a world where an infection from a minor injury can kill them with no medicine which we’ve come to take for granted.

Survivors will live in a world where a human life may be of no more value than a candle or a bar of soap. Education will have diminished to a point where children – if there are children – will primarily be taught what kind of wild plants are edible and maybe how to hunt with primitive weapons and traps. Animal hides and edible nuts will be the currency of civilizations – which won’t be civilized at all. There will be no law enforcement, no protection for the underprivileged, if they can’t run with the big dogs, they’ll have to stay on the porch, but there won’t be any food on the porch, people will become savage, a must for survival.

It won’t be a pretty world.

MK