Scorched Earth (Book 1): Good Fences Page 4

  “The HOA just served us papers. Apparently it’s against the covenants to park a work truck in the driveway or on the road. My cube van won’t fit in my garage.”

  “Landry,” I fumed.

  “Yeah, I think so. I think he blames me for telling you about the signatures.”

  “I’m sorry man, I didn’t mean for my squabble to—“

  “Brian, it’s cool, I just have to figure this out. I’m self-employed and I am going to have to rent someplace to park it and then worry if my supplies and tools get stolen,” he said glumly.

  “Well, head to my place. Help me get this barbed wire I just bought unloaded and we’ll see if we can figure something out,” I already had an idea forming in my head.

  * * *

  I used the fork attachments on my Kubota’s front bucket to pull the pallet off my truck and then unloaded the five pallets from Estes. The driver had beaten me there, but Randy had showed him where to park so I could unload easily. Five pallets, not four. I didn’t mind, but I was curious, because only four of the pallets were from Augason Farms, and the other one had Cyrillic writing on it and contained hard green boxes wrapped in shrink wrap.

  We signed off on the shipment and, as the truck pulled away I shot Randy a questioning look, hooking my thumb in the direction of the fifth pallet.

  He got a sheepish look on his face and smiled. “Dude, you’re never going to believe what I got!”

  He started to rip off the shrink wrap and open the green boxes one by one. Immediately I saw it was old radio gear, I knew that because my dad had an old set of it that was still in the farmhouse. That exact same setup. The green cases were metal on the outside, but foam inside, molded to keep the old electronics intact.

  “You plan on going into broadcasting?” I asked him. Randy was still bent over, mumbling and opening boxes and making a big mess in general.

  “Ah hah! Got it!” Randy exclaimed, holding up a smaller box in his hands.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s an EMP hardened security setup. Cameras with built in microphones and a little monitor in this case right here,” Randy’s foot nudged an unopened case.

  “So you got security and communications gear?” I asked him, wondering if he was starting to take this prepper stuff a bit too far.

  “Well, yeah.” Randy said, as if I was a kid asking a dumb question.

  “Isn’t that… I mean, it’s cool to have. I have a set like that, but what would you use it for?” I asked him, trying not to let my doubt about his sanity bubble forth from my words.

  “You got a radio rig like this?” he asked, excitedly.

  “Yeah, it was my dad’s. Old military surplus stuff he bought a long time ago. Used to have the antenna tower there hooked up,” I said pointing to the old TV/radio tower that had been behind the house ever since I was a little kid.

  “Yeah, I found this guy on eBay who was selling stuff. When I was out here last time your antenna is what got me thinking about communications and stuff if something ever happened. I wanted a way to reach out and talk to somebody with equipment that wouldn’t get fried out in an EMP or CME.”

  I nodded then mimed putting a microphone up to my lips, “Red rover, red rover, would you send Randy right over!”

  Randy laughed and restacked the boxes, leaving the security cameras and monitor on top of the pile.

  “I can pack this stuff up in my van if it’s too much for you to store…”

  “Naw, it’s not too much, but don’t keep adding to it.”

  “Hey, what’s… oh wow,” Randy said noticing my dry goods station and the stack of buckets that normally was under a tarp.

  “You aren’t playing around,” Randy said lovingly, running his hands across the buckets stacked up.

  What I’d done was rip a 4x8 sheet of ¾” plywood in half and I used that between every layer of buckets. That helped keep the lids intact, which were the weakest part of the food storage. I’d lay the buckets two deep, eight feet across, then put another layer of plywood on top and start stacking. It spread the weight out and, since my floor was level, I was pretty confident that everything wouldn’t collapse. Maybe. I had a ton of full buckets with piles of supplies to fill even more.

  “No, I just remember doing something like this with my parents. My mom was into canning and my dad used to do the meats. We never stored grains like this though; I figured out a system that works for me by listening to the survival podcast and watching Southernprepper1 on YouTube.” Most of the storage ideas were from the podcast, but Southernprepper1’s channel on YouTube was just darn cool.

  “You watch him too, huh? Good deal. We don’t go for dry goods quite so much at my house,” he said, inspecting buckets of rice, “but we have a ton of canned goods and freeze dried.”

  There would come a point where every prepper has to question his own sanity, or that of his best friend.

  “Do you think we’re overdoing it? This, I mean?” I motioned to the corner of the barn, where we literally had metric tons of food stored for ourselves.

  “You know, I got a couple links to share with you. I know you don’t care for Obama any more than I do, but what do you think will happen of a progressive liberal socialist gets elected, or a neurosurgeon?” Randy asked.

  “Or what about if Donald Trump gets elected?” I asked, ready for him to go off on another tangent.

  “See, that’s exactly right.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “There’s no good choices anymore. Trump’s popular because he speaks his mind and he threw out the politically correct rhetoric. He might be the worst thing for America, actually, but he is fun to watch and listen to.”

  “I’ll give you that, but I mean… Radio equipment? EMP proof security systems?”

  “Tell ya what, when I get home tonight, I’m going to send you a bunch of links and a couple YouTube videos. Promise me to at least watch them, would you?” Randy asked, seriously.

  “Sure, you know I like checking this stuff out. I mean, I was just wondering if we aren’t maybe going a little too far.” I was putting my concerns out in the open for the first time.

  “Did your grandparents call stocking up food for the winter prepping?” Randy asked me.

  “No, they just called it common sense.”

  “Is that root cellar behind the house up the hill still standing?”

  “Well, yeah.” I’d been storing my root veggies inside there all summer - and sometimes would take a nap in there as well.

  “So is that just common sense?”

  I thought about it, and I supposed I was starting to see where he was going with all of this. The times and technology had changed. Would my grandpa and grandma have stored grains the way I was? Probably not, because the only safe way to store a ton of grains back then and keep it pest and vermin free wouldn’t have been in plastic buckets, with Mylar and oxygen absorbers. It would have been in a drum, waxed shut or shut with a gasket. They didn’t do that though, because the farm up the road usually stored all the grain in silos.

  “I guess you’re right.” I conceded.

  “Check out those videos and links. It’s eye opening,”

  “I will.”

  Randy began picking up the errant pieces of shrink wrap; he hadn’t touched the Augason Farms stuff, so there wasn’t much trash from those. I wanted to broach the subject of the truck, but I wanted to see if Randy was feeling the same way as I did about the senior Landry.

  “Hey, before you go, what are you going to do about your truck?” I asked him after re-tarping the supplies and closing the barn door.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I really hate that the HOA can kick us out of our house if I don’t move my truck somewhere. I mean, I know I signed the covenant agreement, but I don’t remember all these stupid rules they are throwing at me,” Randy said, his voice moving in cadence as we both walked towards his parked cube van.

  “When do you have to get the truck out of there?�
� I asked him.

  “What do you mean?” He gave me a look.

  “Do you have 30 days?” I asked, figuring that would be the default.

  “Yeah, unless I want to fight it. Get signatures—“

  “Randy, I have a kind of evil thought.”

  “I’m good with evil thoughts,” the smile lit up his face.

  “So, having worked for Landry before I’m guessing the specific rule says you can’t leave a work truck parked there overnight? Right?”

  “Well yeah, actually,” he said, the smile gone as he looked confused.

  “So you park your truck at my house overnight and I park my truck at yours. In the morning one of us drives up and switch things out. On your off days, we leave your work truck parked there until night time. It’ll drive Landry insane.” I said, smiling.

  “And here I thought you were a good Christian,” he said solemnly and then broke out into laughter at my indignant expression.

  “I am,” I said, “I just think that it doesn’t hurt to put the screws into a guy who enjoys doing it to others. Besides, I think I leave for work earlier than you, so your truck will be sitting there in the morning when Landry wakes up.”

  “Genius,” he said smiling and climbed into the cab of his cube van.

  “While E Coyote, super genius,” I said holding a finger pointing at me.

  “Just don’t fall off any cliffs and you’ll be fine Mister Coyote, and look at those links! I’ll send them over to you in about ten minutes!” Randy said, yelling out the open window of his truck.

  “Will do!” I yelled back and went inside.

  “I need a beer,” I muttered to myself, but fired up my laptop instead and looked at the pile of mail I had brought in.

  Junk, junk more junk, bank statement and… I paused and ripped open the bank statement. It wasn’t my credit union bank, but the one where I deposited the settlement money from Cathy’s death. I fingered the envelope and then opened it up. The balance had gone up a small amount, despite being in a recession and the FED having everyone at a zero interest rate. I thought about all the toys I could buy with it, how much joy I could bring by giving it away to charity or church, using it for something somewhere. Not just sitting in an account, building interest.

  Maybe I could buy that old 70 horse tractor from Mr. Mathews now that he got the new combine. I could really put in a survival garden… My email pinged on my cell phone and I looked. Sure enough it was Randy. I went to the computer where I had a bigger screen and sat down. I wasn’t surprised to see direct links, but soon found his narrative in the text.

  Hey man, there’s this old show from the Twilight Zone (no sparkly vampires, I promise), you probably remember it. Called The Shelter - http://www.hulu.com/watch/440826 it gives a really good reason why you should keep your preps and shelter ideas to yourselves and why I think electronic security would be a good idea. I don’t want to lose my stuff to the zombies!

  As far as EMP and radios and security… Here it is right from the government - http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/security/has204000.000/has204000_0.HTM and then the actual EMP commission report from 2008 - http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf

  Medicine; we all know how expensive things got once free healthcare that costs you money is... http://www.doomandbloom.net/ is a great blog, I think I shared it with you before already… but I did score a good find on antibiotics. There’s this dude in Thailand that can buy you anything over the counter as long as it’s for veterinary use. I’ll have to dig his email address out to you, but you should really look it up. You can find that stuff on amazon and eBay also. It’s crazy that human medicine costs twice to four times as much as veterinary medicine when it’s the same thing in a lot of cases!

  The radios are a no brainer, but the security stuff… here’s another journal I read: http://theprepperproject.com/how-us-special-forces-would-secure-your-homes-perimeter-when-shtf/

  I’m not saying it’s going to happen Brian, but I’d rather be ready and raring to go if it does. If it doesn’t I have a serious question for you…. Would you play walkie talkies with me? Hahahahahahahahahahhaha

  I smiled. Randy had a way to cheer me up, and he was feeling pretty good. I figured I’d send him a copy of stuff I liked to watch in return, but I just gave him a list. We often did things like this, often re-sharing the same info over and over. Sometimes we gave each other new stuff to look at.

  Randy,

  https://www.youtube.com/user/southernprepper1

  http://www.clnf.org/ 7th day Adventist group. Oak Haven compound west side of the State. Where I buy all my bulk food to split up and put into buckets. All except for grains, rice, beans. Everything else comes from there and it’s mostly organic. Get an account, it’s free and worth it to buy in bulk and they ship!

  My Book where I get my bags and absorbers to pack in the buckets. Open 1 bag, not expose the other 4 to the air.

  My Book This is like the sealer I use. Mine is older and bigger, but it’s got to be close. If you want in on packing stuff with me one day, I have an order coming a week from Friday I think.

  Ps. I’ll play walkie talkies with you, but if your wife gets up and hears you talking dirty to me, she’s going to take away your crayons.

  I hit send and went to the freezer to get out a bag of frozen veggies. It was my own blend of summer squash, pre chopped red potatoes, diced onions, and thin sliced peppers. I dumped the frozen glob out of the Ziploc freezer bag into a waiting skillet and turned the stove on. I got half a stick of butter from the fridge, dumped it in and grabbed a beer from the fridge. I did some mental math. The butter had probably cost me about .40, the squash, onion, potatoes and peppers came out of my garden and I’d probably put it all on a wrap with a handful of cheese. Some Fajita seasoning and I had a meal big enough for dinner and tomorrow for under two dollars.

  Sometimes, living frugal gets addictive, but I doesn’t have to be tasteless.

  5

  I hadn’t read the EMP commission report before, but it was sobering. I’d always taken at face value how horrible an EMP would be to our lives but this was worse, much worse. I knew I was sitting on a prepper’s paradise of land, even though I only used a third of it. I had a house, wells, barn and livestock. I even had stored food and little money to play with, so I set about getting myself ready. The first thing I did was use my tractor after work to first dig deep post holes and set in new posts that were eight feet high. I did this for the entire length of the subdivision and then ended up needing one bigger roll of barbed wire to make sure Landry’s kid didn’t get back through.

  I got a ton of curious visitors at the back fence, some I was meeting for the first time. One lady asked me about the reasoning for putting such a tall and preventative fence if all I was raising was sheep and alpacas. I had to laugh.

  “Ma’am, it’s goats, pigs and chickens,” I told her with a smile.

  She wasn’t a bad looking woman and she had a cute kid on her hip who sucked his thumb and kept staring at me.

  “Then why so high?” she asked, noticing I gave her the once over.

  “The Landry’s kid got hurt, so I’m putting up a bigger fence so kids don’t climb it anymore. I got a lot of property here and if somebody got hurt and hurt bad, I may not run into them for a long time. I figure Robert Frost had it right; good fences do make good neighbors.”

  The boy had blonde hair and blue-green eyes. He pulled his thumb out of his mouth and gave me a wave, and small streamers of spittle flew with his chubby hand.

  “Hey bud, my name’s Brian, what’s yours?” I asked him.

  The kid suddenly got shy and buried his face under his mom’s arm and I laughed.

  “That’s Spencer, he’s named after his dad, and I’m Lucy.”

  “Well hello Miss Lucy, I’m Brian and I hope my tractor work hasn’t disturbed you, and Mister Spencer, I hope you and your daddy don’t get into this barbed wire here. It’s ugly bad stuff, and these bottom wires
are hot!”

  “Hot?” The little boy asked, one eye now peeking out.

  “Hot, like it will zap you.” I told him.

  He now was looking at me from five feet away with both eyes on me.

  “It won’t electrocute him, will it?” Lucy asked, sounding a bit nervous with some other emotion tugging at her.

  “No, it’ll give him a good zap though. My fence is about three feet from the edge of the property line, so if you’re worried he’ll touch it you can always build—“

  “Spencer was the builder and tinkerer. Now I’m just…”

  She started to cry. For all the things in the world to have happened, I didn’t know what to make of this. If there were no fence there, I’d know what to do, what was expected, but I couldn’t. The toddler who was probably two going on three looked up at her and touched her face with his clean hand.

  “Mommy, you said someday we can see Daddy again when we go home to God. Don’t be sad, Mommy.”

  I choked up and looked away. Apparently some dust blew into my eyes, because they watered when little Spencer said that. I wiped the moisture away and turned to look at her and reached through the barbed wire up top. She took my hand and little Spencer reached out and placed his little hand on to top of the pile.

  “Have you found a church home since you moved here?” I asked her.

  “No, not yet. We’re one of the last houses on this side…”

  I backed up and went to the tractor and found my notepad with my math and estimates on it and wrote down the address to my church. I scribbled some more down and walked back and slid the piece of paper through. She read it then looked at me funny.

  “Your phone number?” she raised an eyebrow at me, her lip quivering in anger.

  “Yeah. Listen, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m a widower too. If you ever want to talk, I figure you might like to talk to somebody who went through the same thing. If you don’t, hopefully I’ll see you at church.” I told her.

  That calmed her and she took a deep cleansing breath, re-adjusting Spencer to the other side and getting a better grip. She wiped the tears away with her free hand.