Are
You Ready for the End of the World?
Or Are
You the Walking Dead?
Guest
Post by Richard Cox
Originally
posted December 2019, to Medium.com
At 9:29 AM CT tomorrow, every unshielded
electronic device on Earth stops working, including the microchips and
transistors and power transformers that manage your vehicle and your home and
the entire electrical grid.
You may be stranded on the highway or at
work or at home. Your children may be at school, miles away, and now there’s no
way to call them or reach them in a timely manner. Maybe they’re at Grandma’s
house, who lives in the small town where you grew up, a six-hour drive away in
your car that won’t start. At this point your kids might as well be on another
continent.
Unless you’ve already prepared for such an
event, you might be confused by what’s happened. You may not realize your fate
is already sealed. Your first instinct may be to gather your family, even if it
takes hours. You may rush to the grocery store, where you find an anxious mob
of shoppers trying to buy food and supplies with debit and credit cards that
would carry no value even if the self-checkout registers weren’t dark.
In minutes or hours, the perishables in
your refrigerator will begin to spoil. The food in your pantry will survive
longer, but not much, because you never bothered to supply yourself for months
when grocery pickup was always minutes away.
Even if you carry cash and manage to load
up on dry goods, your first visit to the store will probably be your last,
because the trucks that deliver food to your local grocer are stuck on the
highway somewhere. The aisles are ghostly, you can barely see anything, because
grocery stores do not typically invest in windows. Most of the supplied light
comes from candles that will soon be purchased or stolen.
Maybe worst of all, you’re not even sure
what’s happened. Was it a military attack? A celestial event? Unless you own a
battery-operated ham radio, unless it was shielded or runs on tubes, how will
you ever find out? Does it even matter at this point?
Does anything?
Because let’s face it, the water taps are
going to dry up in hours or days, and you live in a metropolitan area along
with two million other people, and pretty much all of them will be on the hunt
for drinking water, same as you. And almost none of them are prepared to purify
raw water. And without pressure, there are no more flushing toilets, no way to
carry waste of any kind out of the city. Which means it’s time to leave.
But where will you go? Maybe you own a
gun, and maybe you think you’ll hunt for food. But the other two (or five or
seven or fifteen) million people have the same idea, they’re headed out of town
in all directions, on roads not built to convey so much traffic, and by the way
there is no longer a real or implied police presence. You’re on your own. The
air is choked with smoke from impact sites of airliners that crashed minutes
after the event. Pharmacies have been looted for opiates and insulin and
antibiotics. Whole city blocks are ablaze. Everyone is on foot or on bicycles or
basic motorbikes. Occasionally you hear the engine of an old pickup or VW bus,
vintage vehicles not dependent on computers to run. Maybe you own one of these suddenly
valuable vehicles. What do you do when the gas tank runs dry? How do you stop
someone with a gun from stealing it?
Besides, you probably don’t own one of
these cars. You’re the walking dead. Because even if you survive the initial
journey, if you get away from the city, there’s not enough game to feed your
family. You’re not a very good shot and waste most of your rounds not killing
the rabbit you happened to spot behind that clump of weeds. Your mouth is
parched. Your children are desperate. They can’t walk any farther. You sit down
and make camp and then, miraculously, rain begins to fall. You’re so thirsty.
Only you have no way to capture all those precious drops that don’t fall into
your hands or your mouth. And now your book of matches is ruined.
Want
more? Continue reading on Medium.com.
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Excited to kick off the new year of blog tours with this book. Sounds EXCELLENT. Spooky, but excellent. Thanks for the post!
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