While waiting for my to-go sandwich, I saw her looking outside. She probably noticed me playing with her pet. I felt kind of embarrassed touching her dog without asking her permission, so I decided to start a conversation and hoped that she was okay with it.
“I think he already misses you,” I said.
She turned her head to me and smiled, revealing friendly eyes and dimples on her cheeks. “I know. He is overly attached to me.”
“Mom is almost there, buddy, stay strong!” I said while watching the Samoyed sniff the ground. He raised his head and looked at us like he knew what we were talking about.
Since that day, I saw Kathleen almost every week in our lobby, elevator, and gym. Soon after, we connected on social media and became friends.
The last post she had posted before the cell phone coverage went away was about three weeks ago. She wrote about how difficult it was to keep her dog inside. He frequently barks, especially during the daytime when Saviors are patrolling the streets more often. I am afraid that they will hear him one day and decide to break into her apartment for supplies. It won’t be too hard to get in her apartment with help from Steven.
I am thinking about inviting her to join me bugging out from this building.
While eating an energy bar, I review my plan for leaving the city. I have canned food, rice, energy bars, and water—enough to stay in my place for two more months. If I get fewer calories per day and if it rains during these spring months, I can survive at home for probably one more month.
The survival books I read in the last few years say an average person needs 1,200 calories of food and a half-gallon of water per day. I don’t want to go lower than these recommendations because I will need all the energy I can have when I leave my apartment and run away from the city.
My bug-out bag has been ready for an escape since the outbreak first started, and I have enough emergency food and water packed inside to last me a week. I don’t think I will need that many supplies because my safe location is within a three-day walking distance from my home.
I first saw this location while we were looking for a cabin to spend a weekend with two colleagues. It’s a dense forest on the way to Mount Mitchell.
The establishment has six one-room cabins spread across the area. The owners are an elderly couple who post their rentals through newspaper ads. They don’t even have a website. I was lucky to have found a mention of their cabins on a local newspaper website. We had ended up booking a ski resort for that weekend, but these cabins have been on my mind since then.
When the outbreak hit the headlines and the world transitioned into a new reality, I quickly realized the importance of a safe location outside of the population centers. I then ventured on a hiking trip to one of the cabins to check out the area’s survival odds. High elevation, tall trees all around the forest, and a creek in less than a mile from the cabin were all signs of a perfect bug-out location.
Before locking myself at home four months ago, I made a few more trips to the cabin to drop off gallons of water, canned food, dried fruits, water purification filters, and seeds to grow crops. I also stockpiled on lights, matches, clothes, candles, knives, pans, plates, toilet paper, and several other necessities that will help me to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. I buried my stash in wood boxes and waterproof bags about 50 feet from the cabin.
Even if I don’t resupply it, my stash should be enough for a year. With the purified water from the creek, plants I am planning to grow, and rabbits I am hoping to hunt, I should be able to hide there long enough until the government is reestablished. They say it takes about two years for essential facilities to become functional again and social order to be restored after a nationwide catastrophic event. I should be able to stay alive that long once I manage to get to the cabin.
A long time ago, I heard a podcaster say that five minutes before the prom is not the time to learn how to dance. I am glad that I have been studying post-apocalyptic life for years.
During my research, I noticed that almost every survival book I read and every video I watched mentioned the importance of having a group instead of being a lone wolf when the stuff hits the fan. None of my friends were going to invest time and money on having a safe location because they were too aloof to the idea of survivalism and deemed it to be a waste of time. They believed society would return back to normal soon. So I didn’t even bother discussing this idea with them.
I wish my family weren’t on the other side of the country. We would have been a perfect prepper family, especially with my father’s homestead skills and my brother’s military training.
Knowing that I won’t be able to start a survival group with family or friends, I began searching online for like-minded people. I found a forum for doomsday preppers. I posted a topic hoping to find a partner to increase our survival odds by joining forces. If things go south, it would be beneficial for both of us to look after each other.
That’s how I met Leyton Fowler online.
He works in his family’s barbeque restaurant nearby. He used to be a prison guard until an incident occurred with a prisoner. I didn’t want to ask too many questions about his past. He seemed to be a logical
