Episode One:
“I tried to tell them this would happen… But no body ever listens…”
You’d think with all the TV we all watch all the time we’d have seen the similarity in plotlines. but… it’s like… it’s done the opposite!
Turned us into wolf bait without us even knowin’ it… I can’t tell you how often I heard things like.. “don’t be crazy, you’ve been watchin’ too much TV…” Yeah, well… I’d say just enough to bridge the gap between my comparison and the ‘fiction’ they were spinnin’. I been human long enough to know… We ain’t that creative the more we get at our fingertips it’s like… the more spoonfed we git.
I imagine the folks spinnin’ up a storm behind those blockbusters we all binge. I imagine by the time they git there, they’re a bit spoonfed. They can only write what they heard or stole from something older and wiser.
In any case, I might say the folks around here who called me crazy for doin’ what I been doin’. Maybe They hadn’t been watchin’ enough…
*huh*
Or, maybe the case was they weren’t watching enough of the right stuff. Seems more appropriate, since I been social media friends with gals like Linda Sue and Debbie Dalton long enough to have turned off their Twitter feeds and constant Facebook updates…
I’ve known ‘um long enough in real life to know they didn’t practice much of the kindness they preached to everybody ’round ‘um come Sunday, when they were sittin’ in the front seats of the Lord’s house…
I have never gone much myself. Figured I’d leave the fancy stuff to the fancier folk. I like my prayers quiet and then explosive all at once, like my firearms, ain’t that a funny little irony.
I guess what it all comes down to is, I don’t see Him hanging out in such a hoity-toity place. I reckon any time I needed a clean slate in my mind I headed into the forests and walked some hills and valleys as his good book told me too.
Don’t ever remember the reverend quotin’ anything ‘long the lines of “come sit in this pew and repeat things over and over. Seems a little redundant for somethin’ infinite if ya ask me. But whatever, maybe that’s just my justification cause it ain’t for me and I’m bout done explainin’ the same thing to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that live down the street.
Funny cause those three do live just down the way from here… not in the same house of course but so as I can see all their houses from one view of a deer scope I have set out. Long story. Maybe I’ll get there through this. I tend to stray off from the point at times, but some of them rants is pearls to someone so… There it is.
At any rate, back to Linda and Debbie Dalton… I know they spent their time watchin’ some of the wrong-est stuff, stuff full of nothin useful for a time like this anyhow. But then again, what we found ourselves wrapped up and revved into is a little unprecedented.
I ain’t seen nothin’ like it at any rate. And I watched a lot of science fiction in my day. Read a lot a books and watched a lot a news, listened to podcasts, you know, stuff to expand my understandin’ of the way of things… kept me from gettin’ locked up in the racket of small talk that riddled this town.
Gossip shared is boredom spared… The golden rule.
I imagine from the moment the first settlers established this place they built that unspoken rule into its foundations… It was the only thing that made sense since they’d all but patented the art of talkin’ out the side of their mouths by this point.
Pretty sure between the two of them, Linda and Debbie and their cliches of followers and friends, I was able to read the Real House Wives season nine hundred thousand, or whatever… in posted recaps without ever clicking on the virus myself.
And they spun up all kinds of stories about my bein’ a weirdo doomer… a crazy reclusive prepper’ that came straight out of my cameras audio and from the horses mouth. Through my web of visuals I got the bigger picture in my pocket.
If I hadn’ta put them up out of the kindness of my heart, I’da never heard the words she wouldn’t ever say to my face… Felt liberatin’ to get to know the snake behind the sweet wave she offered me in the grocery store each time we met.
I might have felt bad for the fate that found Miss Debbie if I didn’t understand the greater irony of her teeth being bashed from her head by a pleasure toy she was takin’ to one of them lady parties she made a pretty penny throwin’ ’round the town and in surrounding counties even.
Well… Who’s laughing now…
This guy, from His ten-foot underground bunker with a full visual of an entire town’s meltdown. And through the cameras, he accidentally posted perfectly for completely different reasons than what they got to be useful for!
All I have to do is keep ’em charged without being seen every so often.
Yeah, that gets a little hairy at times, but it’s what I been preparin’ for the last twenty years of my life.
These little live-feeds have become somethin’ of my bread and butter while I sit in this underground bunker I built with my own two hands.
Without them for entertainment, I might get lonely, but, somehow seein’ the place that ain’t been to kind to my kind… is a little liberating I must say, and in a strange way, I finally get the appeal of Reality TV.
Just yesterday I watched Pastor Dillon smash Betty Wilkins in the face… more than was necessary to accomplish what he’d set out to… with a praise and worship songbook. All the while screaming it was the will of the Lord… I don’t know what Lord he serves but… mine told me to build a bunker, not smash a past front row perishers brain out the back of her head…
But, what do I know…
What I do know… Is that it started, like this…
In a quiet town nestled in rolling hills, surrounded in the best fishing outlets this side of the country. It brought in fishermen, and want-to-be’s from far and near because the water was so abundant, even a baby could catch something from it.
That actually happened once. Randy Joe’s baby fell out the back of a canoe, lucky she was wearing a baby life jacket and when they scooped her out of the current, there was a largemouth bass flailing from the back end of her diaper. That was a hot button talk subject over the next weeks following.
The natural beauty and quiet of the area was only ever polluted by the gossip. Little rumors shared between each-to-his-own favorite neighbors with a long-standing tradition of hanging over each other’s porches to swap juicy details they’d scrapped of their shoe from under the window ledges of the town’s current black sheep… whoever they might be.
They were mostly all goats, these residences, and they loved nothing better than to chew on other goat’s life scrapes so long as they weren’t the neck on the chopping block each bit was up for grabs.
The trick was to not be the scape piece set to be slaughtered for the town to feast over in order to stave off the inevitable boredom of NOT having every entertainment at their fingertips. I wouldn’t have believed the hoops these people were willing to jump through to lead their double lives if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes… Pack so many secret ingredients into one stew it gets to be a little too much.
‘Specially when the ingredients in question are sour, spicy, or synthetically sweet. Like that aspartame junk, they keep repackaging like we’re dumb or somethin’.
Funny to think… this whole murderin’ mess that now got us cut off from all the world around us. Except for me, of course, cause we preppers ain’t called ‘prepared’ for nothin’…
Still blows my gourd to think the whole thing started with a little white lie no one saw coming… no one but me… Now, it’s shaping up to endin’ in a full-blown quarantine of whatever gotten into the people I lived my whole life with… I don’t think what’s locked us in is gonna let a single soul escape. I think they’re plannin’ on keeping us here until the last citizen of Hill Valley has fallen victim to themselves.
On a plus side, since it all seems inevitable at this point. It’s a good thing they’re droppin’ like flies, I only got six months worth of supplies left at best. I’m a light eater most days but at night… when I can’t sleep and I hear them makin’ their nightmare noises… that’s a different story.
I get the nervous munchies sometimes. Wanna just run out and join in the fight… find myself reachin’ for the chocolates those times. Have to fight off them cravin’s or I’m gonna run low on sweet-stuff motivation before the end of the week!
Anyway, I’m just hoppin’ to outlast even the last of the folk keepin’ us here. The only thing I can really do is relay what I’m seein’ and hope it gets to ya’ll before it’s too late.
To be continued…