Trace of Survival Trilogy Read online

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  About four years before the Collapse, I had decided that our country was on a path of internal destruction. The lifestyle Americans had been led to believe was their right, and that they desired, was rapidly coming to an end. I was in my mid-fifties at the time and had remarried a few years before. My boys were all grown and had families of their own. I had retired from the military about fifteen years before that, had bought some land near the Natchez Trace, and built my home. I had been Saved during that time and my wife and I had joined a local Baptist church. Life was good.

  But, like I said, I believed we were on a destructive course in this country. What was I to do to protect my family? I started during research, mainly on the Internet. It doesn’t exist anymore, but I think you remember it. At the time, many people spent almost all their time doing what was known as “surfing the web”. All those freeloaders getting their “free” stuff spent their time on the web, watching television, eating, and basically being lazy.

  Anyway, I was doing research. I found that I wasn’t alone. There were many people who believed as I did, and were getting ready. Some called these people “Survivalists”, but that wasn’t a true description. They were mostly “Preppers”. They were just getting prepared for whatever catastrophic event was to come. They, like me, didn’t know what it was to be, but we were convinced something bad was on the horizon.

  How was I to do it? There were companies that sold Long-Term Storage, LTS, food. These were usually buckets of dehydrated or freeze-dried foods that were in large quantities, and could be stored for years. I imagine there are some of those LTS foods still around and being used. I couldn’t afford to buy large quantities that way. They were expensive in those buckets, and my wife didn’t want us to buy any.

  We did come to an agreement to buy extra items when we bought groceries each week. We bought canned food items and dried items. We got rice, beans, peas, pasta, sauce mixes, canned vegetables, canned fruits, canned meats, hygiene items, and many other items that could be used in a stay-at-home survival situation. I had water sources nearby. I had built the house with flues for wood-burning stoves. I had a forest of trees around me. It was easy to cut dead wood to burn for heat in the winter, and to use for fuel to cook with.

  For years, we bought food items and other items for stockpiling. But that was only part of the prepping plan.

  Defense was a consideration. I had a number of firearms already. I got a few more and started stocking ammo for them. I was thinking of my sons and grandkids, also. If civilization did slide into collapse, I wanted my family to be able to defend itself.

  There some other precautions I took. I made some simple Faraday cages to store some electronic items in, just in case there was an EMP attack. I stocked firewood, medicines, and other necessities. One thing I did over the years was to build my prep manuals. While the internet still worked, I downloaded hundreds of documents. These were how-to’s and other survival information I thought would be useful. I also purchased many books, like Wildwood Wisdom and A Backwoods Home Anthology. Over the years after the Collapse, my prep library was instrumental in our survival. Just simple things to make everyday life easier if we had to be in survival mode.

  By the way, back then somebody somewhere had come up with names for a collapse. The first one I heard was SHTF. That means ‘S--t Hits the Fan’. Another was TEOTWAWKI. That means ‘The End Of The World As We Know It’. Another was TEOCAWKI, which means ‘The End Of Civilization As We Know It’. There were probably other terms. Those are the ones I remember. Oh, yeah…I do remember one from my military days. It was used as slang for a nuclear war. It was ‘When The Balloon Goes Up’.

  Anyway, I spent years prepping. There was so very much I felt needed to be accomplished and there just didn’t seem to be enough money or time. But I did everything I could, regardless of a lack of money and time, plus trying to convince a wife that thought I didn’t need to do everything that was needed. I wasn’t like a lot of the characters in PAW fiction that had millions of dollars to prepare.

  A couple of other things to help you understand: in 2005, a hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. It was named “Katrina”. Katrina mostly impacted the old states of Mississippi and Louisiana. The city of New Orleans took a direct hit, and was a testing ground for some of the executive orders. Guns were taken from the people. Good people could not defend themselves. People were forced into a detention camp in the dome stadium known as the Louisiana Superdome. People starved. People were murdered. Police and National Guard were ordered to evict people from their homes, and take their guns and their food. The Constitution was violated. A large part of the National Guard refused to violate the Constitution, thank God. There were a number of unarmed good citizens that were gunned down by over-zealous police.

  Within a few years after Katrina, a number of patriotic or Liberty groups, mainly composed of military veterans and law enforcement people, were formed with guidelines to uphold the Constitution in case unlawful orders were issued.

  Back during the Cold War, there was a three-year supply of grain stockpiled by the US government to provide for people in the country that might survive a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. It was called the Strategic Grain Reserve. By the time of the Collapse, this reserve no longer existed. But the government had been stockpiling processed food supplies for the DHS private army and those they wanted to survive.

  The US government was spending billions of dollars on stored food, ammunition, armored vehicles, and weapons for DHS, selected police and elite liberals and socialists. It was spending nothing on food for the majority of the people. They were preparing to control and contain us, and to shoot us, but not preparing to feed us.

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  When you add up all the things that were going wrong in the US or against it, the straw that finally broke it and caused the final collapse was the economy. There were so many things wrong with our economy, there was no way the country could survive as it was.

  You must remember -- the US was basically a service nation in which a person worked at a job that serviced another person and vice-versa. When the services started failing, it had a domino effect….

  Collapse!

  The economy was in such a weak state that an economic collapse could have been intentionally triggered at any time. Because of the lack of a food reserve, and because few Americans stored food on their own, such a collapse would lead to mass starvation, just like in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.

  The average taxpayer was too busy with daily life to notice everything going on, and main-stream media, with its biased and liberal reporting, hid how bad the problem was until it was too late. The government was good at using the liberal media to saturate the people with its lies.

  One of the most critical items in the survival of the American family was their home. Houses were expensive. Most people had to borrow money to purchase a house, and then spend the rest of their lives paying the mortgage off. If you couldn’t pay your monthly payment, eventually the banks and mortgage companies foreclosed and you lost your home. So many people lost their homes right before the Collapse, the homeless population was staggering. It wasn’t unusual to see entire families living in cardboard boxes under a bridge. These people were some of the first to die when our country collapsed.

  Now let’s consider the unions and the mercenary companies. They were a large part of the economic problem. Unions demanded higher and higher wages and the cost of products kept going up. Manufacturers started opening plants in other countries so labor costs could be reduced, but costs to the people of our country for the products did not go down. Workers got put out of work because the manufacturers went out-of-country, and it took them months, years or never to find other jobs. Unemployment was over forty percent, even though the government said it was much lower. The government falsified the numbers by not counting people who took themselves off the actively-seeking-employment rolls, or took part time jobs not making enough to survive.
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  All this did was make the already large Welfare system into a massive, uncontrollable Social Welfare system. Years before, the socialist liberals in the government had created a welfare program to keep the unemployed, poor, and deadbeats fed and housed. They issued Food Stamps so the so-called needy could get free food. There were programs that gave them monetary assistance for housing and other needs. An example of some of these government programs were Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program; Earned Income Tax Credit; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps); and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

  How were these programs funded? Taxes, to start. The cost to run the US was already too large. Income taxes had been instituted some years before. Over the years, the taxing of the people kept getting worse and worse.

  The Social Welfare programs were so abused that it became a cruel joke to the people that worked and paid taxes to pay for the Welfare programs. These Social Welfare programs only prolonged the endless poverty and suppression of the overwhelming minority populations of the inner cities. Not only that, but many bums used the Welfare system to buy expensive cars and homes, and even illegal drugs. When the Collapse did come, Welfare recipients outnumbered full-time and part-time workers.

  But, guess what? Taxing the people wasn’t enough. Our federal government had to start borrowing money from other countries to meet its budget needs. China was the largest owner of US debt. Every year, the country went more and more trillions of dollars in debt.

  Finally, other countries said “No more” to the borrowing. China dumped US treasuries, and refused to trade with US dollars. The country was financially broke and couldn’t repay its debt! The international banks were happy. They wanted our economy dismantled and our Constitution suspended so they could install a new global economy with only one monetary system.

  Before the Collapse, our society had a serious addiction -- Oil and Electricity. We were hooked on them like a druggie gets hooked on his or her drug of choice.

  Oil! Our country was so dependent on crude oil. It was the primary source of power for transportation in the US. In one form or another it fueled automobiles, transport trucks, trains, and aircraft. The oil-rich countries in the Middle East provided most of it for many years, and they made sure the price kept going up over several decades. The US had a lot of oil in the ground. A process called Hydraulic Fracturing, or “fracking”, started bringing much more oil out of the ground in the US. Prices started going down a few cents every few months.

  Then the terrorists struck a devastating blow. Oil refineries were attacked by more radical Islamic terrorists. They took a page from the playbook of the 9/11 terrorists. Suicide pilots flew small aircraft loaded with high explosives into refineries along the coasts of Texas, California and Louisiana. The exact number of aircraft was not known, but it had to have been several dozen. Oil fires burned for weeks. Most of the refining capability of the US was destroyed within a half hour’s time. We had a very serious shortage of fuel without these refineries to process the oil. The shortage started the domino effect.

  Gasoline and diesel were the primary fuels produced from crude oil. After the attack on the refineries, the price skyrocketed. From 1970 until the Collapse less than fifty years later, fuel prices went from thirty cents per gallon to over fifteen dollars per gallon. The most producing people in the country could no longer afford to buy the gasoline to get them to their places of employment. Transportation companies couldn’t afford the fuel to transport food and products. Over the years, there had been an attempt to convert to solar and wind energy, but it was too late. This and other new energy attempts were called “Alternate Energy” and “Green Technology”. What a farce!

  Trucks were not running, so food, fuel, and other needed products were not being delivered. Whatever people had at home was all they had. It didn’t matter if you had money in your possession. It wasn’t worth much, and there was no food or other products to buy. Whatever had been on the shelves was gone within hours of when the trucks stopped running.

  The Grid! For over a century, electricity had been a necessity for survival. It was used in our homes to run nearly everything: lights, refrigeration, television, computers, you name it. Generating plants used coal, oil, water to a small extent, and nuclear energy to produce electricity. A massive grid of plants, substations, transformers, and wire lines sent it over almost the entire country. The ‘Communist’ declared war on the coal industry. He said it was not “clean” energy. Plants started shutting down, and the system became overloaded with usage. “Brownouts” and “blackouts” started occurring. Finally, the employees at the few power plants still operating (nuclear and hydro mostly) couldn’t afford the fuel to get to work. They just quit coming to work and tried to survive at home. Power plants were shut down without employees to operate them, so electricity was gone.

  Water stopped flowing through the pipes. The sewer systems started backing up and overflowing. Law enforcement became almost non-existent. What few police stayed at work holed up in their stations and only went out when they absolutely had to. They would only protect government buildings and powerful officials. Private citizens were on their own. Some cops were staying near their families to protect them and provide for them if they could. Some became part of the DHS troops.

  Probably the service that was lost and hurt the most was medical. Hospitals and clinics were shut down. Doctors tried to practice out of their homes or wherever they could set up. The manufacture of medications shut down. The loss of medications was a massive blow. Millions died without their long-term meds, without antibiotics, and without treatments for diseases and surgeries for ailments.

  The cities became war zones. The thugs were stealing and killing. Good people in the cities became desperate. They were starving and dying. Some of them became part of the gangs of thugs. Apocalyptic fiction used to spout stories of armies of outlaws. The only outlaw army we had to deal with was DHS’s storm troopers. The rest were just small groups of idiots and scum that wanted to take advantage because there was no police protection. Sometimes they tried to band together, but mostly fought each other for turf when they weren’t trying to murder, rape, and pillage the good folks.

  In there somewhere, that fictitious place where most money was supposed to be -- The Stock Market -- collapsed. When that happened, the value of the dollar went to zero. All those people with paper wealth suddenly became un-wealthy. Of course, for years the government had been printing more and more paper money so the dollar wasn’t really worth much by the time the Collapse came. Real gold and silver still had lots of value, though.

  People couldn’t get to work, they received no pay, no taxes could be collected from them, the government couldn’t borrow money from other countries anymore, criminals and terrorists were an everyday threat, banks started shutting down by government order or because of default, the massive government employee system couldn’t be paid, Social Security and government retirees couldn’t be paid, and finally the Welfare system was shut down.

  The country had economically collapsed!

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  This was what the socialists and liberals wanted. Take a look at what happened to Russia during World War I and right after. It was time for the US’s predominately socialist government to step in and execute their plan.

  The national economic collapse was like a “national Katrina” but lasting far longer, and because it was nationwide, it was far more intense. The cities were imploding, and the government contained the people in the cities so the situation could only worsen. In the midst of that chaos, they also tried to do a decapitation strike on the leaders of the Liberty movement, but other than that, “They” just sat back and waited to be sure the people were at a high level of starvation, weakness, and chaos, and then:

  Executive order 13603 was invoked.

  Martial law was declared and the ruling document of the country, the Constitution, was suspended along with all the freedoms it guarante
ed. The communists were going to take control, and we were going to have a Dictator running everything.

  They told the American people that the evil Chinese were to blame for the death of the dollar, and anyone who resisted the “emergency measures” enacted by the US government would be accused of aiding the enemy. They said “domestic extremists took advantage of the Chinese economic attack on us to push their own racist and extremist anti-government agenda, making the Collapse worse by attacking peace-keepers and international relief volunteers, and by attacking and resisting US officials who were trying to restore law and order.”

  Somewhere during all this, an international organization known as the United Nations or UN tried to step in and get control of the US. The US had been instrumental in getting this organization started back in the late 1940s. It even had its headquarters in New York City. Some group -- it’s still not known exactly whom, but possibly the international banks -- was controlling the UN and wanted a one-world government.

  The US was the keystone for having a one-world government. If the Constitution could be replaced by the UN’s World Court it could get control of the US. If the UN could establish itself as the ruling government in the US, it believed the rest of the world’s countries would allow themselves to be part of the one-world government. All they did was make the world chaos worse.