Chapter 3

Proverbs 146:3 (KJV) - Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

Even before driving off, I did make the mental note to stop the next time I passed a Bubba’s Tricked-Out Truck Accessories store. I didn’t have to wait too long to find one while heading north in I-35 just awhile later. There’s one next door to every Tractor Supply, it seems. I bought the biggest, most expensive and most stupidly secure tool lockbox available for the back bed that they had and it was just early enough before closing time that they could mount it in securely for me less than twenty minutes after purchase, on my own credit card. That let me park that 55-gal storage tub of goodies that Gab had given me inside of it, very, very safe and securely. I was assured that it would take an industrial diamond-tipped cutting saw to cut their way in, or force the lock. Timmy the Thug and his window-licking buddy with a crowbar weren’t going to bash their way into it ... at least not in any practical or reasonable (or silent) amount of time. I did bring the tub inside with me, along with the go and gun bags, into the motel rooms at night, when I stopped to get my necessary and fully required four to six hours of nightly sleep, not to mention a couple of hot meals.

I learned while in the Rangers that I can easily do without sleep for several days in a row, even up to a week during training, but then I tended to crash for 16-24 hours straight afterwards for my body to catch-up again. Food ... not so much, but that’s why they invented candy bars and I kept pounds of them in my packs in those days. I just didn’t need to relive that sort of fun for this trip, so I didn’t push things. The world wasn’t ending tomorrow it seemed.

The first night I stopped for a motel rest I opened up Gab’s instructions for her prescribed pharma regimen up. It was exhaustive, and I needed to lay everything out onto the bed to sort into some reasonable order for use, leaving out just one smaller package of everything, for daily consumption. This select assortment, good I calculated for about a week’s worth of treatments, could be squeezed into my main go bag, up on top for easy daily access. That was a lot of scary-large horse pills and two different injections to deal with four times each day, but the alternative frankly scared me in finding religion and meekly obeying, or at least moderately obedient concerning taking my new meds religiously at precise regular daily intervals. This was going to get really old, really fast ... but a 90% chance of dying seemed like a far worse alternative.

It took the better part of three days to do the thousand or more miles to the ranch. Sure, I could have done this in two days for certain, or in about thirty hours spent non-stop behind the wheel, but I wanted this time to really think. My life as I knew it was over ... again, and this time I decided that I needed to make a plan. A real plan, probably something involving the 7-P’s, and not just ‘winging it’, like I’d done frankly for most of my life. Since I’d now quit my job and was technically homeless, everything from now on was a further step into the unknown and a rather dubious future ... especially if my chances of survival the next few months were perhaps only 10%, or optimistically double that at best, via the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals. The very uncertainty of all of this was making some of my prior life-choices look downright brilliant and more than anything right now I needed to work this uncertainty out of my system so that I could have a prayer of hitting the ground running once I got to the ranch. Yep, I thought, just like being out in the Big Sandbox on some operation ... again, and I had the strong feeling that this time it was going to be for keeps.

SSDD – Same Shit, Different Day.

When on the Interstate, I didn’t baby the gas pedal or goose it ever to full throttle either, but I kept the speed steady at usually 4mph over the posted highway speed limit. The new motor needed a good steady burn-in anyway. The weather frankly wasn’t good, with a lot of early spring heavy rain pounding me through most of central and north Texas, until the storm front finally pushed on past me. I couldn’t speed too aggressively anyway, as I also needed to learn the feel of a new truck, how the tires gripped, and how sensitive the steering wheel was to minor adjustments. This allowed me wait to find some real speed demon to play follow-the-leader behind and I’d let them zoom on past me doing 90+, and then I’d wait about twenty seconds and then accelerate just a bit more to let them draw out any the local county-mounties running radar ahead of me. I saw a few State Highway Patrol cars out and about and I always tried to make sure there was someone more obviously speeding well out in front of me to nab, if they were so inclined. Really the biggest issue for me wasn’t the need for sleep occasionally but for some regular hot meals that didn’t come from a big trucking gas station. Since hearing Joe’s report about the virus being deliberately released at major trucking stops, I made a point to avoid these, stopping for food, fuel or rest only in minor towns just off of the Interstate, the smaller in fact the better.

I’d never been badly injured in my tours (plural) in the Big Sandbox, but I’d slipped and tumbled down at least my share of hillsides and mountains before, pulling and wrenched every muscle group I had at least twice. If you fall down a hill and crack two ribs or rip most of the tendons in an ankle, you gut it out, so you don’t imperil the mission or endanger your buddies by being medevac’d ... especially if you’re the unit medic. Now, often my back and right ankle especially will tighten up if I sit for too long. Really, my limit now for driving hunched behind a steering wheel is about two hours at a time. About like clockwork then my back muscles will all start to lock up and I’d have to stop at the nearest rest stop and walk around for at least five minutes, stretching. Really ten minutes was usually much better. Then, sort of relieved, if not quite refreshed, I’d be good for another two hours of driving. Then I’d take a longer stop as soon as was practical for a real hot meal.

I’d just turned thirty a year or so back, and wasn’t feeling venerable enough yet to need to stop for the early senior’s dinner at Denny’s, but I decided pretty quickly that late night driving in an unfamiliar vehicle through constant thunderstorms was unnecessarily hazardous. Especially that first night driving for 3+ hours during that heavy central Texas downpour. I had my own cash and credit cards and I kept using them. Why not? From what Gabriela had told me, the likelihood of any late-payment billing notice reaching me outside my home state during the middle of an EotW pandemic, was ridiculously small.

When civilization falls, the odds are that no one is going miss the demise of any multinational corporation, especially credit card companies, one iota!

That big white envelope looked quite interesting but I resisted the urge to open it up while out on the highway. I already had a fairly good idea of what was inside. Joe was the genius in the family but he was far from being the primary wage earner of the family. Gabriela, being a very important regional sales director for a major top ten pharma company, made a salary that made her husband’s Air Force colonel’s pay look like petty cash, even after TDY pay, missed meals credit, and other benefits. After bonuses and other corporate financial shenanigans related to her absurd compensation package, she pulled in an annual salary solidly into seven figures. Even after taxes (and I’m sure Gabby had a very good financial tax advisor) there was a lot of the green stuff left to throw at building their secure 2500-acre dream ranch in the lower hill country near Boerne, and then almost as an afterthought, next buy and start upgrading another remote mountain ranch in the back-ass of fuck-all. Her business Amex card was the very elite ‘Centurion Black Card’, the kind with no spending limits of any sort and that boldly stated that she was most certainly was NOT a peasant of the lower classes, unlike me. And I was also pretty sure that her own personal VISA card for everyday spending was the elite Sapphire Reserve one, with a similar lack of spending limits for the 1%-ers. It appeared that she had added me to at least one, if not both of these highbrow accounts, and inside that package there would be new cards with my name on them that she’d prepared for well in advance of my needing them. Gab really didn’t like me that much, but I was family and very much included in their long-term disaster preparedness preparations long before now. In a SHTF situation, it’s family first and foremost that you need to rely upon. Still, I was pretty sure that she felt that my urgent assistance in this affair was merely ‘Needs must when the devil drives.’

I needed less guess work to feel out the shapes of several thick bundles of cash, even through the plastic bubblewrap. Probably stacked 100 Benjamin’s to the bundle, or $10k each ... and at least four bundles, maybe six or even eight inside. That was $40k, at the bare minimum. That was actually going to be handy, and soon. That was petty cash for Gabriela, just what she’d keep on-hand in the house safe in case of a sudden emergency. Their safe at the Boerne ranch probably held at least five times this amount, so I wasn’t depriving her of any last-minute shopping money.

From what I could recall from my visit last summer, the Marston Lake ranch was nowhere near ready for full time occupation except for the main residence being close to 98% done, and Gab had warned me that probably there was an awful lot left to do now, in far too much of a hurry. Many (most jobs) would require urgently hired help and when the world started to turn sick on them and the health shutdowns began (again), most hired hands or contractors were going to become understandably reluctant to risk their health or labor for a check mailed out sometime after a 30-day invoice is sent, lol. Even before things started to get too rotten, I was going to need to dangle cash (and at above market rates) to get a significant pool labor to get anything done there in time.

When corpses start being dumped out into the lawns and the man in the cart starts calling out ‘Bring out your dead’, it would all be too late.

I’d need a plan before my boots hit the ground at the ranch, a real good plan that hit all of the 7-P’s ... and then enact it, and then start pissing excellence – every single day thereafter from now on. That was beyond terrifying and this dominated my thoughts in an unhappy and unhelpful way for most of the next one hundred or so miles the following morning, the second day of the trip, until I took a long walk outside of a Buc-ee’s while munching a bag of junk food to try to totally clear out my head. If anything, my sense of unease just grew.

This was the worst day of my long solo one-thousand-mile drive, being all alone with my thoughts. I spent it wondering, much like Tolkien’s King Theodin of Rohan, ‘How did it come to this?’

Part of my very real problem, right from the start, was that I could ‘second-guess’ myself for an Olympic team, and I’d wondered for at least half of my life if I’d made the right choices. I’d been a medic in the Army Rangers, not a shooter. I’d carried a sidearm (actually two) but never fired off a round in anger at anyone, deliberately anyway ... that wasn’t my job. I’d never directly killed or hurt anyone in my entire life, but indirectly, I’d gotten several people killed ... but mostly without any significant lasting regrets.

I’d had more than enough regret issues of own, long before I watched buddies lose a leg to hidden land mines, or while I tried in vain to stop a gushing chest or gut wound, all while ordinance was being exchanged feverishly by both dance partners on different parts of the same (or nearby) hills.

I think I was a bit messed up in the head even before I visited extensively the shittier parts of the Big Sandbox, and the years of experience there didn’t help heal older issues in the least. We all knew what PTSD was and could see it plainly in most of the faces of my Ranger unit ... but for us it was always the ‘other guy’ whose shit was more fucked up than our own. Especially my own shit. I’d finally said ‘enough’ and declined another reenlistment and I became a civilian again, admitting that my shit was well and truly fucked, and I’d eventually decided, vaguely, that I ought to do something about it.

Really, for these last few years back home as a civilian, I just tried to keep myself relatively sane and employable. I avoided people and didn’t make friends at my jobs simply because I didn’t think anyone had any common grounds with my experiences that we could relate to, together. As guy friends just watching a football game, or a gal friend who could somewhat relate to guy that sometimes woke up in the night screaming, or muttering in my sleep about a girl named Patty.

So, I had been keeping my head down and tried not to talk to myself more than absolutely necessary (or at least never answer myself back using a different voice), kept out of trouble at work, and stayed mostly at home and cultivated a deep personal relationship with books. Books and computer games, (including every zombie shooter variety), I could handle just fine and neither asked too much from me. A cat or even a goldfish was frankly a bit beyond my ability to feel responsibility for that first year or two back home. Strange women would instinctually fear and avoid me at first sight. I’d give out creepy vibes, a gal coworker once told me, so I’d try to avoid making eye contact with anyone. The gals at work, always on hunt for males, since the females outnumbered the guys by a lot, eventually just figured out that I was just ‘mysterious’, sort of like a brooding Colin Firth sort of gothic or regency rogue hero just waiting to be tamed and mastered. Women do like that sort of guy, but I don’t quite fit the rest of that mold. Unlike nearly all natural-born Texans, I’m neither tall, tanned or handsome particularly. The smarter sort of gals there that had known me for a while, like my would-be conquest Becky from IT, were smart enough to figure out that my personal issues didn’t (probably) include physical assault, extreme rape and torture, followed by my skinning her corpse and making a dressing gown from their flayed skins. I’m just quiet and shy, and socially conflict phobic to near the point of mania. Well, some (strange) women like that sort of guy too ... and I’d been hoping that Becky was one of them.