Today she’s going to take her horse, Taxi, out east of her property. She lives high up on a ridge, where there are just two other homes, both long empty and for sale, as people abandoned the state. She is on the east side and if she keeps to the trails east of her home, it will take her in deep forest that eventually leads to an unnamed valley that goes down to the Nevada State line, a couple dozen miles away. It was rough, rugged country, but she was familiar with many of the trails, regularly taking the horse out on the trail rides they both love.
In keeping with what her distant neighbor told her, she didn’t take the horse along the trail that paralleled the road into town, and then up to the lake, she stayed back a few yards into the tree line. Needing a short break and a drink she tethered Taxi to a tree and got down to clear a limb that they had maneuvered around last time, but needed to be cleared from the trail. She thought for a moment she heard a car door but figured it was her imagination as she had not seen anyone on this road in weeks.
As she bent down to pick up the limb, a bullet whizzed over her head.
“He’s back there!” is all she heard as she took off running. She tripped, falling and breaking open the skin on the palm of her hand on a sharp rock. It wasn’t terribly deep but it is painful, and she bites her tongue to keep from crying out as she stumbles the last few feet to her horse.
Lisa wasn’t sure what “he” they were referring to, but with her long red hair under a baseball cap and clothing that would never land her on the cover of Cosmo Magazine on her tall frame, she figured the bullet was addressed to her.
She has two advantages — back in the trees, the sun’s rays are disoriented and dim. Although it pours down a leaden heat on the landscape, the light wavers and it will take whoever had fired the shot a minute or two to adjust to it. That should give her about one hundred yards. If they have a four-wheeler, she is toast, but they are likely were on foot, with the trail not being suited for a vehicle.
Other shots fly behind her, not as close now, as she deliberately heads away from her home. She hears another car door slam from the road and some shouting as she headed high up the next ridgeline.
She was far enough away from her home when that first shot rang out that it was unlikely they would find it on a search for her, but she needs to find her way back miles further away from the road. There are creeks with water for Taxi, and she has some protein bars, some tarp and rope, and a knife in her backpack should she need to spend the night outdoors before making her way home. Once she could no longer hear anyone else, she removed her bra and wound it around her bloody palm to help staunch the blood flow after washing it out with a bit of her bottled water and some iodine she keeps in her pack.
She thanks the Lord for the warning phone call from her neighbor. Without it, she would have likely come in direct contact with whoever fired upon her. Looters? Militia? She didn’t know. Above her, the crests of the peaks were shrouded in cloud, lying motionless upon the land as if an obstacle to her path. She rides deep up into the mist and finds a place to hide for the remainder of the day.
She’s been three days back at home and there have been no further signs of any humans near the little mountain on which her home is perched. She went to call her neighbor and let him know what happened to find the line dead, likely cut up near the road. She had a ham radio. She wasn’t too skilled in its use but she could manage the basics. It was one of those things her dad had taught her. She realized he had probably wanted a son as well as a daughter, but in lacking one, he taught her all of those tasks he would have taught a male offspring. She knew how to hunt, to fish, to put up a tent, to build a fire, and to talk on the ham radio
She had a transceiver, a power supply (for now), an antenna, an antenna tuner, and a microphone. She’d already set up her distant neighbor, from whom she purchased hay for Taxi, as a QSO (contact). She never really made other contacts further away, but she knows if she talked to John down the hill he’d clue her in on what he had heard was happening from his children who lived in the city.
Unlike many of her old friends, she can’t play a video game to any sort of level, but she understands from her dad’s lessons how most things “work” and can make simple repairs to things with multiple moving parts. She hopes she never has to give herself an appendectomy with a sharp pen and a bottle of Knob Creek, but she can tend to a wound and do the basics to keep things running around here.
She realizes if she was on one of those “Survivor-style” shows, she’d lose, but not from not having the skills to survive, but mainly because she’s not a big fan of most other people, and the games involved in interacting with them in such settings. She’s glad now, that what little socializing she’s done has been with her boyfriend and his family down in the Valley. Her grooming customers already likely having left Meadowvale for civilization, there is probably no one other than her hay supplier, a good Christian man, who knows she is out here alone.
For now, she’s hunkering down, hoping that one day she wakes up to reliable utilities and a stream of tourists heading up to the big lake northeast of her. Until then, she will be ready as she can be, not sitting there waiting for her human savior or a handout, hands hanging pale and useless. Sometimes when you are left with nothing you still have your will for the hope to grab on to.
She doesn’t understand why so many of her neighbors were willing to sacrifice their personal liberty for that illusion of safety that comes from living under the authority of some higher power? Even as the Highest Power of all has conveyed these words to man — “God helps those who help themselves”.
With a loaf of bread baking in the solar oven out in the clearing in front of the house, she curls up with a book. She’s glad she has a well-stocked bookshelf, as with the power becoming occasionally intermittent, and her TV having gone Tango Uniform as her dad liked to say, there wasn’t a lot to do. The books were like gold in the hand, comfortable and secure.
With the books are those things that remind her why she chose to live her life the way she does now. There’s a flag and a small cross, ceremonial shapes of mortality, reminders that some choices are everlasting. There’s a tail from a whitetail, taken in a hunt, food for a winter’s table. There’s some spent brass that either guarded or honored a life, a piece of old uniform fabric and the scents of sandalwood and gunpowder and freedom that soak into her skin and bones like ink, to stay with her to the end of days.
Being prepared is harder work than remorse, a lesson that, as individuals, is easier to learn than as a nation.
She sits down to have a nightcap, carefully rationing out her supply of whisky, knowing she is unlikely to find more. She was glad when there was first the noise of a “scotch shortage” back in 2016 that she filled up the gun safe not just with her hunting rifles, pocket pistol, and revolver, but as many bottles of single malt as she could afford. She didn’t even want to think of how many dog butts she had to clean or how many stalls she had to muck out to pay for them.
But she was determined to at least get quality stuff. If the SHTF, as it appears it has, she didn’t want to be drinking from a bottle of Nasty McLand or something.
She thinks back to college when she and her roommates made some horrible concoctions of soda and some cheap American whiskey that smelled like an uncapped magic marker and tasted of sharp heat, the taste equivalent of pulling a hot cast iron pan off of the stove with your bare hand. A slight shudder ran through her.
It’s not just the thought of the taste that made her react this way, it’s a reminder that a year ago, she would be sharing this drink with her boyfriend of the last two years, a man she met when she boarded Taxi her horse down in the Valley before one forecasted brutal snowstorm. He didn’t have a ham radio, not sharing her love for such things, and gently teased her for prepping, assured that the land of milk and honey was just around the corner. Her cell phone had never really worked well up here and there had not been the sound of a car coming up the mountain in quite a while. She had no idea if he was alive or dead but she couldn’t risk leaving her property to make the drive down, only to have her vehicle “redistributed” to someone without a source of income other than the taxpayers. She knew he loved her, but he also had a disabled mother to care for and she knew he would not abandon his mom to come to her.