….. .....This may not seem a "Survival" story at first. However, I did just what I wanted to do, and no more, in the first chapter.
.....There is very little description of the outside World Bill lives in, in the first chapter--but trust me, it is ripe for a classic collapse, adding physical survival to Bill's other challenges.
FUGUE
Chapter One
Bill was far too heavy to weigh on a reasonably affordable home scale. The local health food store had a very nice electronic scale in the vestibule right outside the main entrance. A sales clerk had once told Bill that the electronic scale would weigh anything up to eight hundred and fifty pounds.
Bill wondered about that from time to time. Why eight-fifty? Eight-fifty wasn’t anything like a round number. Why not eight hundred? Or nine? Why not make it an even one thousand?
Maybe, Bill thought darkly, the scale had been originally designed around a metric number. The thought of the metric system caused his upper lip to start to curl into a sneer. He hated the metric system.
The thought of the metric system caused him to go over his short-list of things that Bill disapproved of.
He hated plastic Guns—and don’t try to tell him how cheap and reliable they might be. He had his doubts but felt it was completely irrelevant. Plastic Guns were just wrong. It was an open letter slandering Pistoleeros everywhere that such things existed.
He didn’t exactly hate soft drinks made from corn syrup and bottled in plastic. They still tasted better than the next-best beverage.
He thought of a friend who’d had gastric bypass surgery. Her Doctor had told her that she’d have to give up carbonated beverages for the rest of her life. No bypass for Bill! No sireea! He’d rather give up sex than give up carbonated beverages.
Still, the old soft drinks made with pure cane sugar and bottled in returnable glass bottles had tasted much better. Real buttermilk with flakes of butter had tasted better than the modern “low fat cultured” buttermilk too. Butter was superior to margarine and lard was a better cooking medium than vegetable oil.
The old Smith and Wessons—with their recessed chambers and pinned barrels—were better than the later ones. Smith had jumped the shark with their gay little security locks. He wouldn’t feel right about using a keyhole Smith, even as a trotline sinker, without some compelling necessity.
The old 1911A1s were far better than the abominations with firing pin blocks. Ditto the old Browning High Powers. The Ruger Security Six was a far better Gun than the GSP and SPs that replaced it. And the modern limp-wristed would-be Pistoleeros eschewed pinning their grip safeties.
Words, words—ugly truncated words! People said: “tarp” and “deli” and “sides” instead of “tarpaulin”; “Delicatessen” and “side-orders”.
There was the Hughes amendment and the Brady Bill—not to mention the ”Patriot Act.” You couldn’t buy catfish steaks anymore. Sometimes you could find fillets, but never steaks. You could hardly find a church that sang the old-time hymns anymore—and what passed for “music” amongst the young nowadays…
Bill cut his ruminations short. He was at the scale. He carefully climbed onto the platform and fed the machine two quarters. He was careful to insert both quarters face up. He always inserted coins into vending machine face-up, or if the slot was vertical, head facing right. Of course he knew it didn’t matter. Why would he go to all that trouble, if he thought it made a shred of difference?
He stood very still as he fed the scale his date of birth; height; build and gender. He liked that about the machine. For his fifty cents it not only weighed him—it gave him a card with all his vital stats on it, including his weight; what the machine thought was his ideal weight; and how many pounds he had to loose to get to his ideal weight.
Of course he already knew his height; gender; age and build. He thought the low-ball figure the scale gave, as his ideal weight was the consequence of someone doing lots of LSD somewhere. Nonetheless, the neat little two-by-two card made it all seem so clinical and official.
Bill started to put the neat little official looking card into his billfold. It would be safe from loss or damage there. Then he realized that he’d forgotten to check his weight first—which was the main purpose of the whole exercise…
The card told Bill that at a height of a smidgen over six feet, he weighed three hundred and sixty-three pounds. He stared at the numbers in semi-incomprehension for a few moments. He could not come up with any more plausible alternate number, so he tentatively accepted the number on the card.
He couldn’t recall how much he’d weighed the last time he’d visited the taciturn little scale—no matter how hard he tried. He vaguely felt that he was losing weight. He though that not too long ago, he’d been noticeably heavier. No matter how hard he tried though, he couldn’t dredge up specific past memories of weighing at the scale; or weights; or dates. He realized with a mild start, that he didn’t even know what season it was, much less the date. He took a quick look at the card to find the date.
Bill also thought that he’d lost a bunch of weight at least once before in his life. Once again he couldn’t dredge up specifics.
He paused momentarily, when he got outside into the parking lot. He wondered if he had a car, and how that he might identify it. A brief pat down of his pockets revealed no car key. Also, walking just seemed right. Since he had no idea where he was going, he decided to let his feet and his intuition guide him. It would be good Zen.
*************** **************************** *****************
When his feet reached his home, he found that he lived in a reasonably large single room, on the third floor of a rooming house. It was like the old fashioned boarding houses—sleeping rooms with a common restroom on each floor—but they didn’t serve meals. Several of the other inmates greeted him with the casualness of long acquaintance. Many of the other boarders didn’t appear quite right.
To be fair, Bill supposed that he wasn’t quite with it either, with such gaping holes in his memory. He did remember a statement that he’d made on any number of occasions though. It made a good joke; because it sounded funny—even though Bill was firmly convinced of its truthfulness.
“There are many types of insanity,” Bill said. “Many of them don’t rule out a happy and productive life. Being classified as “Crazy”—or worse yet, being confined to a mental institution creates all sorts of all but insoluble complications. So if you suspect that you may be crazy—by their admittedly subjective criteria—be very careful what you reveal about yourself.”
Bill wasn’t going to ignore his own advice by quizzing everyone about the glitches in his hard drive. He was craftier than that. He did have his observing, and his deductive faculties in hype-drive though.
“Who am I? How did I come to be here?” Bill asked himself. A moment later he added, “Hey WOW Man! It is like: Really Man, be for Real! I like restated some of the Classical Questions of Philosophy. I’ll bet that Thoreau and Aristotle and Lao Tse didn’t wander around in a muddled fugue though. Heisenburg and Kant might have though…”
.....RVM45
.
..... Chapter Two
Steve was dressed in black BDUs, like always. He’d set up a plywood target at one end of the hallway, and was practicing throwing his stars again. He insisted upon calling the stars “Shuriken”; though Bill had told him several times that the stars were “Shaken”. Properly speaking, “Shuriken” were throwing spikes sharpened on one or both ends.
Bill couldn’t have told anyone where he came up with that piece of arcane trivia. Nonetheless, Steve’s improper terminology grated on Bill.
“Hold up, I want to go to my room now,” He told Steve.
He had a healthy respect for Steve. The man was a chucklehead. Such people could cause more death and destruction by accident, than most folks could achieve by design.
Shaken were illegal of course. Almost anything that could be considered a weapon was either illegal, or very tightly regulated. That’s why Steve took his target practice indoors—as if there weren’t more than enough snitches in the boarding house to keep the Laws fully informed.
The Laws were pretty busy tracking down all the illegal firearms—and shooting it out with the occasional die hard—to go too far out of their way to bust chuckleheads for possessing Shaken. That wouldn’t prevent them from busting Steve just for “Fits and giggles” if their business called them into the boarding house. The Laws were subject to come calling anytime; since for all practical purposes, the Fourth Amendment was dead.
Bill wondered absently, why Steve didn’t join one of the underground Dojos. All he ever seemed to do was waste large chunks of his disability on Shaken, Brass Knuckles, Nunchaku, and even more obscure weapons—and then he stood around in the hallway flailing away with them. Then again, if Bill were running an underground Dojo, he’d have been most reluctant to allow Steve to join.
Bill shut the door to his room. He was momentarily relieved to be out of easy reach of an errant Shaken. When he studied the magazines and newspapers though, he felt a vague but urgent uneasiness return and grow, deep down inside of himself. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he trusted his instincts.
He’d been researching diligently over the last couple weeks. Magazines and newspapers made the tacit assumption that one had been both conscious and making at least a token effort to stay reasonably up to date on current events for the last decade. Bill hadn’t. Things were more than a little confusing at first—even now, for that matter—but he’d persevered and gotten a reasonable idea of the state of the Union. It sucked!
NA was sweeping the country—or the world for that matter. No one knew what caused it. Most scientists thought that a virus caused it. Some thought it was caused by prions—similar, and perhaps based on the Mad Cow prions. Of course no one had even demonstrated that prions even existed; but that didn’t prevent wild speculation.
NA stood for Nouveau Alzheimer’s. No one was sure that NA was linked to classical Alzheimer’s. The symptoms appeared very much the same though. Three million people aged thirty and below, were currently in institutions with premature senility severe enough that they were completely incapable of taking care of themselves. There were seven million aged forty-five and younger.
The economic consequences, the drain on the health care system and the general panic the disease inspired were enormous. Why plan for the future, when there was an excellent chance that you’d get NA?
Very few people seemed to get the disease ‘till their mid-to-late twenties. The percentage affected went up sharply each year of age until about thirty. Most folks who were going to contract the extremely early onset version had gotten it by the age of thirty. Once the symptoms became noticeable, the descent into total senility was very rapid.
The next big spike seemed to come when people approached their late thirties. The progression to total incapacity was noticeably slower with the later group, but still rapid by Classical Alzheimer’s standards. Once again, if someone didn’t get it by their mid-forties, then they were unlikely to get it until their sixties—when the rate of Alzheimer’s for people in their mid-sixties was three times higher than it had been. There was no way to distinguish the Nouveau Alzheimer’s from Classical Alzheimer’s at that age. No one was even positive that there was a difference. Either way, the results were the same.
There were over one-million-and-a-half cases of Tuberculosis that was immune to every known antibiotic. One in five people were reputed to test positive for HIV. To say “Antibiotic Resistant” Syphilis or Gonorrhea was a redundancy.
Gasoline was at seven dollars and thirty-five cents a gallon. Congress had passed an amendment canceling the Second Amendment. The President had passed martial law; and nationalized all the police forces under one central agency.
Droughts and famines were the order of business for much of the World. Although the US wasn’t exempt from drought, they had the technology and resources to largely cushion the impact—through irrigation; genetically engineered crops and other measures. The fact that much of the United State’s grain was used to produce ethanol for domestic fuel, worsened the impact of the crop failures in many third world countries; and incited more hate propaganda against America.
Bill’s hadn’t been keeping very good records of his own actions. There was enough documentation to show him that he’d been walking five miles per night, for some time. He was on a three-pints-of-milk-per-day diet; along with several multivitamins, and little else. He treated himself to a very occasional can of salmon; or Spam or corned beef. Every few days he ate an orange. He also bought himself three non-diet soft drinks each night, during the course of his walk. Three twelve-ounce cans had three hundred sixty calories. It was worth the calorie penalty, to keep himself motivated. The Cokes were a groovy carrot.
He’d been losing a bit over four pounds per week on his diet. He wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to prepare for, but his studies convinced him that he needed to speed up his schedule.
He added a mile-and-a-half in the early morning, and a bunch of calisthenics. He bought a set of push-up bars, and found that when raised high enough that his belly didn’t smack the floor, he could gut out five or six shaky push-ups. Astonishing for a man of his weight.
Bill bought an abdomen wheel; a set of spring grips; and a wrist-roller and a set of steel spring exercisers. Although he couldn’t have explained why, a strong grip became an obsession. He would squeeze the grips hundreds of times daily. Then he’d stick a quarter in between the grips, and see how long he could hold it. A very slight, imperceptible weakening of the grip would cause the quarter to drop to the floor. Then he’d turn the grips around, and work them with only his index fingers. He felt that he especially needed extra strength in those fingers—though he didn’t consciously realize that those were his trigger fingers.
He’d roll his wrist roller up and then roll it down dozens of times per day. While he did his wrist-roller exercises, he thought about an old movie that he’d watched once, called “Hannie Calder.” He remembered a man giving Hannie an improvised wrist-roller, and telling her to apply herself diligently.
He knew that he’d known about, and used wrist-rollers long before he’d seen the movie. He couldn’t have told anyone that Hannie was strengthening her fingers and wrists to be a gunfighter. His memory was very scattered and incomplete.
The springs weren’t good for much, except to work the rear deltoid. He wasn’t too disappointed, because he’d known that’s about all they were good for. Nonetheless, a strong rear deltoid is a very good thing, and it can be a difficult muscle to work.
He also managed to do a partial curl and a partial triceps extension with them. He figured that he was far enough out of condition; that even partial exercises had some value.
**************** ************************* *******************
Bill wracked his brain, trying to figure out his own situation. He didn’t have any form of Alzheimer’s. As Alzheimer’s robs someone of their memory, the disease also obscures the fact that their memory is failing. Someone who is aware that his or her memory is failing is not suffering from Alzheimer’s.
He remembered a movie called: “Memento”, about a man with brain damage. He lacked the ability to transfer his short-term memory into long-term memory. He’d largely had to start all over again every fifteen seconds.
That wasn’t Bill’s problem. He could remember everything since his awakening several weeks ago, at the scale, in considerable detail. Everything before that was a grand muddle though.
He’d considered that maybe his memory got swept clean every so often, but he didn’t think so. He’d started keeping a very detailed daily journal, in an old cipher that had been used since the time of the War Between the States. It wouldn’t frustrate a cryptologist for long. It did prevent a casual snooper from learning anything.
What fascinated Bill was that he’d used the old cipher long enough, that he could write it as easy as he’d print regular letters by hand. He’d probably been in the habit of keeping such a coded journal for years.
************ *********************** ********************
As Bill went about dieting; doing his exercises; researching and keeping his journals, a vague concept kept nagging at the back of his mind. The concept was a “Bug-out Bag.” He wasn’t sure exactly what a Bug-out Bag was; but he felt a strong urge to put one together.
Steve turned him on to the nearest Army Surplus Store. His first trip there, Bill had bought a medium-sized ALICE Pack; a couple quart canteens and canteen cups; a couple of ponchos; a poncho liner and an old fashioned entrenching tool. He knew somehow, that he didn’t like the folding delta handles.
On subsequent trips, Bill bought a Kabar knife and a couple whetstones; a couple Buck folders; a couple wool blankets; several magnesium fire starters and a miniature pick. He also picked up a small double-edged Marbles axe—though he thought the price was rather extravagant.
Money didn’t seem to be much of a problem. Apparently he’d been squirreling away big chunks of his disability for years. His intuition led him to a loose piece of molding in his room, with a clever little cache with a nice big stack of twenty-dollar bills in it.
He picked up some of his other Bug-out gear other places. He got an eight-by-ten foot tarpaulin at Harbor Freight. He bought three two-inch by eleven-inch long pieces of PVC at True Value, along with enough hardware and pipe-dope to put a screw-on cap on each end. He filled them with long spaghetti pasta. He liked his noodles long, and didn’t want them broken.
Bill stored a number of high protein and/or high-energy foods into his BOB as the spirit moved him. He collected a set of nested cans, to make a hobo cooking set.
*********** ****************************** **************
Seven weeks after his awakening, and five weeks after radically increasing his exercise routine, Bill was down to three hundred and twenty-seven pounds. He could do a dozen push-ups on his bars—much stricter than his early attempts had been. He was starting to feel some of his muscle tone and flexibility returning. He was almost satisfied with the contents of his BOB—though he couldn’t say what it yet lacked.
Progress had been made, but he felt that he wasn’t progressing quickly enough. Two things would speed his progress—gym time, and some anabolic steroids. Gyms were still legal, but steroids weren’t. Bill picked his gym carefully. By the third week, he’d talked one of the muscle-heads into introducing him to his supplier.
Long term, steroids were a bad risk. For someone in Bill’s condition, trying desperately to get into shape for the imminent End Of The World As We Know It, a few weeks use was a fairly good risk—at least Bill thought so…
Wait a moment. Did he just think that? TEOTWAWKI? He’d better keep his mouth firmly closed on that thought. Survivalists of any variety were strictly Persona Non Grata with the powers that be.
Now how did he know that? Five minutes earlier, he couldn’t have told someone what a Survivalist was, let alone that the Hobnails didn’t like them. Now he realized that he was a Survivalist and that he’d been preparing for TEOTWAWKI.
***************** ******************** ******************
Ten weeks of fairly heavy steroid use, and some frantic iron-pumping had seen Bill’s weight drop to two ninety-seven; while his strength had more than doubled. There had been a price though. His face and back was covered with acne, and his joints ached almost constantly.
One of the dangers of steroid use was that muscle strength could grow much faster than the strength of the tendons and ligaments—leaving one injury prone. Bill was reasonably sure that he’d never used steroids before. He was also fairly sure that he’d done years of heavy lifting.
Regaining levels that one had already attained is generally much faster and easier than building up to new levels. Also there was at least some residual strength in the ligaments and tendons. That had partially protected him from the consequences of working up to a four hundred and fifty pound bench for a single and four-fifty on the Squat for twenty repetitions.
Nonetheless, ten weeks was a long run on the steroids. Time to cycle off, and try to keep the consequences of coming down to a bare minimum.
While he still had full strength, and the rather arrogant assertiveness that the drugs brought, there was something else Bill needed to attend to. Time to find a black market Gun dealer—not that there was any other kind of Gun dealer nowadays…
.....RVM45
.....There is very little description of the outside World Bill lives in, in the first chapter--but trust me, it is ripe for a classic collapse, adding physical survival to Bill's other challenges.
FUGUE
Chapter One
Bill was far too heavy to weigh on a reasonably affordable home scale. The local health food store had a very nice electronic scale in the vestibule right outside the main entrance. A sales clerk had once told Bill that the electronic scale would weigh anything up to eight hundred and fifty pounds.
Bill wondered about that from time to time. Why eight-fifty? Eight-fifty wasn’t anything like a round number. Why not eight hundred? Or nine? Why not make it an even one thousand?
Maybe, Bill thought darkly, the scale had been originally designed around a metric number. The thought of the metric system caused his upper lip to start to curl into a sneer. He hated the metric system.
The thought of the metric system caused him to go over his short-list of things that Bill disapproved of.
He hated plastic Guns—and don’t try to tell him how cheap and reliable they might be. He had his doubts but felt it was completely irrelevant. Plastic Guns were just wrong. It was an open letter slandering Pistoleeros everywhere that such things existed.
He didn’t exactly hate soft drinks made from corn syrup and bottled in plastic. They still tasted better than the next-best beverage.
He thought of a friend who’d had gastric bypass surgery. Her Doctor had told her that she’d have to give up carbonated beverages for the rest of her life. No bypass for Bill! No sireea! He’d rather give up sex than give up carbonated beverages.
Still, the old soft drinks made with pure cane sugar and bottled in returnable glass bottles had tasted much better. Real buttermilk with flakes of butter had tasted better than the modern “low fat cultured” buttermilk too. Butter was superior to margarine and lard was a better cooking medium than vegetable oil.
The old Smith and Wessons—with their recessed chambers and pinned barrels—were better than the later ones. Smith had jumped the shark with their gay little security locks. He wouldn’t feel right about using a keyhole Smith, even as a trotline sinker, without some compelling necessity.
The old 1911A1s were far better than the abominations with firing pin blocks. Ditto the old Browning High Powers. The Ruger Security Six was a far better Gun than the GSP and SPs that replaced it. And the modern limp-wristed would-be Pistoleeros eschewed pinning their grip safeties.
Words, words—ugly truncated words! People said: “tarp” and “deli” and “sides” instead of “tarpaulin”; “Delicatessen” and “side-orders”.
There was the Hughes amendment and the Brady Bill—not to mention the ”Patriot Act.” You couldn’t buy catfish steaks anymore. Sometimes you could find fillets, but never steaks. You could hardly find a church that sang the old-time hymns anymore—and what passed for “music” amongst the young nowadays…
Bill cut his ruminations short. He was at the scale. He carefully climbed onto the platform and fed the machine two quarters. He was careful to insert both quarters face up. He always inserted coins into vending machine face-up, or if the slot was vertical, head facing right. Of course he knew it didn’t matter. Why would he go to all that trouble, if he thought it made a shred of difference?
He stood very still as he fed the scale his date of birth; height; build and gender. He liked that about the machine. For his fifty cents it not only weighed him—it gave him a card with all his vital stats on it, including his weight; what the machine thought was his ideal weight; and how many pounds he had to loose to get to his ideal weight.
Of course he already knew his height; gender; age and build. He thought the low-ball figure the scale gave, as his ideal weight was the consequence of someone doing lots of LSD somewhere. Nonetheless, the neat little two-by-two card made it all seem so clinical and official.
Bill started to put the neat little official looking card into his billfold. It would be safe from loss or damage there. Then he realized that he’d forgotten to check his weight first—which was the main purpose of the whole exercise…
The card told Bill that at a height of a smidgen over six feet, he weighed three hundred and sixty-three pounds. He stared at the numbers in semi-incomprehension for a few moments. He could not come up with any more plausible alternate number, so he tentatively accepted the number on the card.
He couldn’t recall how much he’d weighed the last time he’d visited the taciturn little scale—no matter how hard he tried. He vaguely felt that he was losing weight. He though that not too long ago, he’d been noticeably heavier. No matter how hard he tried though, he couldn’t dredge up specific past memories of weighing at the scale; or weights; or dates. He realized with a mild start, that he didn’t even know what season it was, much less the date. He took a quick look at the card to find the date.
Bill also thought that he’d lost a bunch of weight at least once before in his life. Once again he couldn’t dredge up specifics.
He paused momentarily, when he got outside into the parking lot. He wondered if he had a car, and how that he might identify it. A brief pat down of his pockets revealed no car key. Also, walking just seemed right. Since he had no idea where he was going, he decided to let his feet and his intuition guide him. It would be good Zen.
*************** **************************** *****************
When his feet reached his home, he found that he lived in a reasonably large single room, on the third floor of a rooming house. It was like the old fashioned boarding houses—sleeping rooms with a common restroom on each floor—but they didn’t serve meals. Several of the other inmates greeted him with the casualness of long acquaintance. Many of the other boarders didn’t appear quite right.
To be fair, Bill supposed that he wasn’t quite with it either, with such gaping holes in his memory. He did remember a statement that he’d made on any number of occasions though. It made a good joke; because it sounded funny—even though Bill was firmly convinced of its truthfulness.
“There are many types of insanity,” Bill said. “Many of them don’t rule out a happy and productive life. Being classified as “Crazy”—or worse yet, being confined to a mental institution creates all sorts of all but insoluble complications. So if you suspect that you may be crazy—by their admittedly subjective criteria—be very careful what you reveal about yourself.”
Bill wasn’t going to ignore his own advice by quizzing everyone about the glitches in his hard drive. He was craftier than that. He did have his observing, and his deductive faculties in hype-drive though.
“Who am I? How did I come to be here?” Bill asked himself. A moment later he added, “Hey WOW Man! It is like: Really Man, be for Real! I like restated some of the Classical Questions of Philosophy. I’ll bet that Thoreau and Aristotle and Lao Tse didn’t wander around in a muddled fugue though. Heisenburg and Kant might have though…”
.....RVM45
.
..... Chapter Two
Steve was dressed in black BDUs, like always. He’d set up a plywood target at one end of the hallway, and was practicing throwing his stars again. He insisted upon calling the stars “Shuriken”; though Bill had told him several times that the stars were “Shaken”. Properly speaking, “Shuriken” were throwing spikes sharpened on one or both ends.
Bill couldn’t have told anyone where he came up with that piece of arcane trivia. Nonetheless, Steve’s improper terminology grated on Bill.
“Hold up, I want to go to my room now,” He told Steve.
He had a healthy respect for Steve. The man was a chucklehead. Such people could cause more death and destruction by accident, than most folks could achieve by design.
Shaken were illegal of course. Almost anything that could be considered a weapon was either illegal, or very tightly regulated. That’s why Steve took his target practice indoors—as if there weren’t more than enough snitches in the boarding house to keep the Laws fully informed.
The Laws were pretty busy tracking down all the illegal firearms—and shooting it out with the occasional die hard—to go too far out of their way to bust chuckleheads for possessing Shaken. That wouldn’t prevent them from busting Steve just for “Fits and giggles” if their business called them into the boarding house. The Laws were subject to come calling anytime; since for all practical purposes, the Fourth Amendment was dead.
Bill wondered absently, why Steve didn’t join one of the underground Dojos. All he ever seemed to do was waste large chunks of his disability on Shaken, Brass Knuckles, Nunchaku, and even more obscure weapons—and then he stood around in the hallway flailing away with them. Then again, if Bill were running an underground Dojo, he’d have been most reluctant to allow Steve to join.
Bill shut the door to his room. He was momentarily relieved to be out of easy reach of an errant Shaken. When he studied the magazines and newspapers though, he felt a vague but urgent uneasiness return and grow, deep down inside of himself. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he trusted his instincts.
He’d been researching diligently over the last couple weeks. Magazines and newspapers made the tacit assumption that one had been both conscious and making at least a token effort to stay reasonably up to date on current events for the last decade. Bill hadn’t. Things were more than a little confusing at first—even now, for that matter—but he’d persevered and gotten a reasonable idea of the state of the Union. It sucked!
NA was sweeping the country—or the world for that matter. No one knew what caused it. Most scientists thought that a virus caused it. Some thought it was caused by prions—similar, and perhaps based on the Mad Cow prions. Of course no one had even demonstrated that prions even existed; but that didn’t prevent wild speculation.
NA stood for Nouveau Alzheimer’s. No one was sure that NA was linked to classical Alzheimer’s. The symptoms appeared very much the same though. Three million people aged thirty and below, were currently in institutions with premature senility severe enough that they were completely incapable of taking care of themselves. There were seven million aged forty-five and younger.
The economic consequences, the drain on the health care system and the general panic the disease inspired were enormous. Why plan for the future, when there was an excellent chance that you’d get NA?
Very few people seemed to get the disease ‘till their mid-to-late twenties. The percentage affected went up sharply each year of age until about thirty. Most folks who were going to contract the extremely early onset version had gotten it by the age of thirty. Once the symptoms became noticeable, the descent into total senility was very rapid.
The next big spike seemed to come when people approached their late thirties. The progression to total incapacity was noticeably slower with the later group, but still rapid by Classical Alzheimer’s standards. Once again, if someone didn’t get it by their mid-forties, then they were unlikely to get it until their sixties—when the rate of Alzheimer’s for people in their mid-sixties was three times higher than it had been. There was no way to distinguish the Nouveau Alzheimer’s from Classical Alzheimer’s at that age. No one was even positive that there was a difference. Either way, the results were the same.
There were over one-million-and-a-half cases of Tuberculosis that was immune to every known antibiotic. One in five people were reputed to test positive for HIV. To say “Antibiotic Resistant” Syphilis or Gonorrhea was a redundancy.
Gasoline was at seven dollars and thirty-five cents a gallon. Congress had passed an amendment canceling the Second Amendment. The President had passed martial law; and nationalized all the police forces under one central agency.
Droughts and famines were the order of business for much of the World. Although the US wasn’t exempt from drought, they had the technology and resources to largely cushion the impact—through irrigation; genetically engineered crops and other measures. The fact that much of the United State’s grain was used to produce ethanol for domestic fuel, worsened the impact of the crop failures in many third world countries; and incited more hate propaganda against America.
Bill’s hadn’t been keeping very good records of his own actions. There was enough documentation to show him that he’d been walking five miles per night, for some time. He was on a three-pints-of-milk-per-day diet; along with several multivitamins, and little else. He treated himself to a very occasional can of salmon; or Spam or corned beef. Every few days he ate an orange. He also bought himself three non-diet soft drinks each night, during the course of his walk. Three twelve-ounce cans had three hundred sixty calories. It was worth the calorie penalty, to keep himself motivated. The Cokes were a groovy carrot.
He’d been losing a bit over four pounds per week on his diet. He wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to prepare for, but his studies convinced him that he needed to speed up his schedule.
He added a mile-and-a-half in the early morning, and a bunch of calisthenics. He bought a set of push-up bars, and found that when raised high enough that his belly didn’t smack the floor, he could gut out five or six shaky push-ups. Astonishing for a man of his weight.
Bill bought an abdomen wheel; a set of spring grips; and a wrist-roller and a set of steel spring exercisers. Although he couldn’t have explained why, a strong grip became an obsession. He would squeeze the grips hundreds of times daily. Then he’d stick a quarter in between the grips, and see how long he could hold it. A very slight, imperceptible weakening of the grip would cause the quarter to drop to the floor. Then he’d turn the grips around, and work them with only his index fingers. He felt that he especially needed extra strength in those fingers—though he didn’t consciously realize that those were his trigger fingers.
He’d roll his wrist roller up and then roll it down dozens of times per day. While he did his wrist-roller exercises, he thought about an old movie that he’d watched once, called “Hannie Calder.” He remembered a man giving Hannie an improvised wrist-roller, and telling her to apply herself diligently.
He knew that he’d known about, and used wrist-rollers long before he’d seen the movie. He couldn’t have told anyone that Hannie was strengthening her fingers and wrists to be a gunfighter. His memory was very scattered and incomplete.
The springs weren’t good for much, except to work the rear deltoid. He wasn’t too disappointed, because he’d known that’s about all they were good for. Nonetheless, a strong rear deltoid is a very good thing, and it can be a difficult muscle to work.
He also managed to do a partial curl and a partial triceps extension with them. He figured that he was far enough out of condition; that even partial exercises had some value.
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Bill wracked his brain, trying to figure out his own situation. He didn’t have any form of Alzheimer’s. As Alzheimer’s robs someone of their memory, the disease also obscures the fact that their memory is failing. Someone who is aware that his or her memory is failing is not suffering from Alzheimer’s.
He remembered a movie called: “Memento”, about a man with brain damage. He lacked the ability to transfer his short-term memory into long-term memory. He’d largely had to start all over again every fifteen seconds.
That wasn’t Bill’s problem. He could remember everything since his awakening several weeks ago, at the scale, in considerable detail. Everything before that was a grand muddle though.
He’d considered that maybe his memory got swept clean every so often, but he didn’t think so. He’d started keeping a very detailed daily journal, in an old cipher that had been used since the time of the War Between the States. It wouldn’t frustrate a cryptologist for long. It did prevent a casual snooper from learning anything.
What fascinated Bill was that he’d used the old cipher long enough, that he could write it as easy as he’d print regular letters by hand. He’d probably been in the habit of keeping such a coded journal for years.
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As Bill went about dieting; doing his exercises; researching and keeping his journals, a vague concept kept nagging at the back of his mind. The concept was a “Bug-out Bag.” He wasn’t sure exactly what a Bug-out Bag was; but he felt a strong urge to put one together.
Steve turned him on to the nearest Army Surplus Store. His first trip there, Bill had bought a medium-sized ALICE Pack; a couple quart canteens and canteen cups; a couple of ponchos; a poncho liner and an old fashioned entrenching tool. He knew somehow, that he didn’t like the folding delta handles.
On subsequent trips, Bill bought a Kabar knife and a couple whetstones; a couple Buck folders; a couple wool blankets; several magnesium fire starters and a miniature pick. He also picked up a small double-edged Marbles axe—though he thought the price was rather extravagant.
Money didn’t seem to be much of a problem. Apparently he’d been squirreling away big chunks of his disability for years. His intuition led him to a loose piece of molding in his room, with a clever little cache with a nice big stack of twenty-dollar bills in it.
He picked up some of his other Bug-out gear other places. He got an eight-by-ten foot tarpaulin at Harbor Freight. He bought three two-inch by eleven-inch long pieces of PVC at True Value, along with enough hardware and pipe-dope to put a screw-on cap on each end. He filled them with long spaghetti pasta. He liked his noodles long, and didn’t want them broken.
Bill stored a number of high protein and/or high-energy foods into his BOB as the spirit moved him. He collected a set of nested cans, to make a hobo cooking set.
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Seven weeks after his awakening, and five weeks after radically increasing his exercise routine, Bill was down to three hundred and twenty-seven pounds. He could do a dozen push-ups on his bars—much stricter than his early attempts had been. He was starting to feel some of his muscle tone and flexibility returning. He was almost satisfied with the contents of his BOB—though he couldn’t say what it yet lacked.
Progress had been made, but he felt that he wasn’t progressing quickly enough. Two things would speed his progress—gym time, and some anabolic steroids. Gyms were still legal, but steroids weren’t. Bill picked his gym carefully. By the third week, he’d talked one of the muscle-heads into introducing him to his supplier.
Long term, steroids were a bad risk. For someone in Bill’s condition, trying desperately to get into shape for the imminent End Of The World As We Know It, a few weeks use was a fairly good risk—at least Bill thought so…
Wait a moment. Did he just think that? TEOTWAWKI? He’d better keep his mouth firmly closed on that thought. Survivalists of any variety were strictly Persona Non Grata with the powers that be.
Now how did he know that? Five minutes earlier, he couldn’t have told someone what a Survivalist was, let alone that the Hobnails didn’t like them. Now he realized that he was a Survivalist and that he’d been preparing for TEOTWAWKI.
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Ten weeks of fairly heavy steroid use, and some frantic iron-pumping had seen Bill’s weight drop to two ninety-seven; while his strength had more than doubled. There had been a price though. His face and back was covered with acne, and his joints ached almost constantly.
One of the dangers of steroid use was that muscle strength could grow much faster than the strength of the tendons and ligaments—leaving one injury prone. Bill was reasonably sure that he’d never used steroids before. He was also fairly sure that he’d done years of heavy lifting.
Regaining levels that one had already attained is generally much faster and easier than building up to new levels. Also there was at least some residual strength in the ligaments and tendons. That had partially protected him from the consequences of working up to a four hundred and fifty pound bench for a single and four-fifty on the Squat for twenty repetitions.
Nonetheless, ten weeks was a long run on the steroids. Time to cycle off, and try to keep the consequences of coming down to a bare minimum.
While he still had full strength, and the rather arrogant assertiveness that the drugs brought, there was something else Bill needed to attend to. Time to find a black market Gun dealer—not that there was any other kind of Gun dealer nowadays…
.....RVM45