Trev paused in the entryway to look around. As always when he really stopped to look, he felt equal parts pride and disbelief that they’d created all this with their own two hands. Of course Lewis had done the lion’s share of the work in planning, purchasing materials, and working on the finishing touches, but Trev still felt a fair bit of satisfaction.
Lewis tossed him a towel. “It’s a weak water stream and you’re not going to like the temperature, but that should encourage you to hurry up so we can catch up.”
Trev nodded and made his way over to his bunk in the living space, which was made of a board and mattress sitting on top of food buckets for a base. Beside it was a trunk where he’d stored a lot of things he’d need if he ended up living here long term like clothes and blankets, as well as the rest of his ammunition sitting on the bottom. Since he’d been forced to ditch half of what he’d had up in Orem he now had 900 rounds of .45 ACP and .223 each. That had seemed like a lot at the time, but now he wondered.
Sometime soon he wanted to check and make sure the ammo hadn’t gotten damp, but for the moment he pulled out a pair of boxers from an unopened 12-pack as well as a T-shirt from an unopened 6-pack, both of which he’d bought extra of while clothes shopping and had tossed in there in a rare fit of inspiration. He also grabbed an old but clean pair of jeans.
For all of Lewis’s warnings the shower was equal parts unpleasant and glorious, although Trev was quick to soap and rinse and get out of the cold stream before he started shivering uncontrollably. Once he dried off and got dressed he felt like a human being again. The outdoor carpet Lewis had used for the floor, which could be swept if necessary, felt a bit uneven and gritty under his feet as if it hadn’t been swept any time recently. That or the fact that it was in a shed buried underground with a dirt ramp leading up to a dirt clearing made it hard to keep clean. He’d either have to start wearing socks or slippers indoors or get used to the feeling.
Lewis was in the small kitchen space at the back of the shelter, but since the solar panels were working just fine Trev made his way over to the electronics array near the desk that served as his cousin’s “office” and plugged in his phone, then gave his parents a quick call to check in and briefly explain what had happened and his hike down.
He also got news from them about how they and his younger brother and sister were doing. They were worried about things but optimistic, with the food storage he and Lewis had pestered them into getting as a strong buffer against the winter. Before he could mention heading up to Michigan to meet up with them, or urge them to come down to Aspen Hill and stay in the shelter, his dad beat him to the punch by insisting Trev stay there until things settled down, if they ever did.
“We’ll be fine,” he promised. “You just worry about yourself for now.” And with a few final goodbyes and well wishes they hung up.
Not long after that Lewis came back into the living area and offered him a bowl. It was just canned chili heated over a camp stove, but after a week of jerky and trail mix the hot meal could’ve easily counted as one of the better ones Trev had ever had. He gulped it down as quickly as he could without seriously burning his mouth, and as he did Lewis filled him in on what had been happening in the outside world.
The news wasn’t good. Trev had been expecting to hear about riots and looting, but the sheer breadth of the chaos still left him stunned. Especially when Lewis mentioned that the turning cogs of the Federal government had essentially abandoned Washington D.C. to the rioters. The nation’s Capitol was tearing itself apart in a wave of mindless destruction and unchecked fires while the President and his staff had fled to the all-but impregnable Presidential command bunker. Meanwhile congressmen, senators, and various Federal agencies had all either hunkered down in their buildings behind security cordons manned by guards with serious crowd control measures who used them on anyone who came close, returned home to their own states, or fled to prepared fallback locations to continue desperately trying to keep the nation running as order and authority disintegrated around them.
FETF was becoming more and more of a presence, the only way cities were getting any sort of relief in the form of food and other much needed supplies, and more importantly taking over a lot of the crowd control duties that city governments depleted of fuel and in disarray in the chaos simply couldn’t handle themselves.
Surprisingly the Utah and Salt Lake valleys were among the few dense population clusters left in the nation that hadn’t reported any major chaos, but from the sounds of it they weren’t far off. Trev could hardly believe that he’d left things relatively normal, and then while hiking incommunicado through sparsely populated areas the nation had fallen apart without him seeing a single sign of it.
As they talked Lewis naturally gravitated over to the back of the shelter and his most recent preparations, like he tended to do during conversations, and Trev followed. It looked as if his cousin still had about the same number of buckets he’d had when Trev was last around, roughly enough food storage to live four years on, but he’d added other things too.
Trev noticed a dozen bags of protein powder slung across the stack, and mentally cursed himself for not thinking of that himself. He had plenty of rice and beans, and he’d heard they were a decent replacement, but in the absence of meat and dairy that powder could really do a lot.
That reminded him of something else he should’ve worried about. “Have you checked my food storage lately?” He now had about 18 months’ worth for himself, since a good chunk of it had been up in Orem with him and was currently buried 50 miles away, but the food in here was all he had left and he couldn’t afford to lose any of it.
Lewis nodded. “Of course. I checked everything just after the attack a week ago. Your stuff is in good shape, no humidity or anything. It’s a shame about what you had in your car but you’ll get by.”
“Better than the people who came into this with nothing, thanks to your constant nagging to get prepared.”
Trev had meant that as a joke, but it wasn’t really a subject for levity and his cousin just gave him a sober look. “After the Middle East Crisis a year’s worth of struggling to stay financially afloat as food got more and more pricey strangled most people. They were barely buying enough to get them by to the next paycheck with no extra to fall back on. And that compounded the problem since with the decreased demand stores and restaurants brought in smaller shipments, meaning the cities had less food on hand.
“Pretty much the worst conditions for the attacks and the fuel cutting off completely. For most people what they have is it. The rest is all gone and there won’t be any more. Food prices skyrocketed within the first forty-eight hours, for those stores quick enough to react, and a lot of riots began at stores or around government structures when people discovered there was no food to be found and went to demand a solution.”
“Yeah, although even this last year bulk prices for wheat, rice, beans, and other staples have been low enough that anyone with two cents to rub together could’ve stocked up at least a little,” Trev argued, thinking of his roommates and Matt and especially Nelson. “But it seems like as everyone watched food prices rise they started buying less food, day to day practically, as if some part of them couldn’t justify purchasing at an increased cost and they were holding out for prices to go down again.”
He shook his head, looking at his cousin’s huge stockpile and his own more modest pile alongside it. “It’s almost like everyone was blindly going with the “buy low, sell high” policy for essentials with a disaster looming on the horizon. They should’ve seen where a steeply rising slope of fuel and gas prices could potentially lead and prepared for it however they could, but instead just about everyone I knew up at school seemed to double down on the hope that things would get better or at least stay where they were, and no collapse could possibly happen.”