would have convenience stores but the ones left standing were picked clean, so I walked on. There are no more big towns for awhile, so I will just have to hope. My next hope is Jackson, a blip on the map that I should reach sometime tomorrow. I have picked what berries I know are safe on the side of the road and took a chance on the ground being safe as well. It was mostly ti
lled and cultivated ground that was contaminated, but it’s hard to trust anything that’s grown, still most wild plants are safe. I killed a scrawny old jack rabbit yesterday that made the mistake of stepping out of the brush. Not much to eat, but I picked his bones clean last night and now I wished I had some left over. Left over…like I still have a refrigerator and Tupperware to keep it in……that all went away when the day turned dark.Imagine one day you’re sitting in your nice comfortable recliner watching TV and then the lights go out. No storm outside, but not to worry this has happened before so you pick up the phone to call the power company. No dial tone, so you pick up the cell, no service. Well it will be alright they will get to it eventually, but the power company never comes to fix the problem. Your cell never gets service back and now the batteries are dead and you can’t recharge it. No radio, no TV, you can’t get online, you're completely out of touch. You pull out an old battery radio but no one is on the air. This goes on for a day or so and people begin to venture out of their self absorbed cocoon of a life and you figure out this is more wide spread than thought. You begin to talk to your neighbors and find out they can not go to work because the power is out there and they were told to go back home. In fact now you’re hearing that the whole state maybe has no power. It’s now comes down to the only way you can get information is by word of mouth. And no one knows anything. You get in your car and ride around a little and find out that it is true there is no power any where in town. No gas pumps are running, no stores are open; in fact some stores even have chains on the doors. You go back home now and begin to think about survival. How much food do we have? How many batteries do we have? How much gas do we have for the camp stove? Oh no how much gas is left in the car and truck? You have family two states away….that’s when you look at each other and realize what you have lost; all of the sudden you're cut off. What used to be a several hour drive has now become a week or so away, if you could walk it. You just know this is temporary, it has to be. But the days turn into weeks……….you spend your days in a dark house with no air conditioner praying that something will
happen, that things will get back to normal. Your neighbors tell you about what’s going on in town. The National Guard starts to open up the stores and ration food. The lines are long and frustrated store employees are trying to handle transactions with pencil and paper. The Guard would only let you get the essentials, non perishable food, candles, only what you would need to survive. That’s when you find out that the whole country is with out power. How can this be? But suddenly the National Guard is called away to bigger cities where looting is rampant and marshal law has been put in place, so you find out very little more. You get some news from a neighbor that has an old hand held CB radio. It seems some kind of computer virus has knock out all power grids and all communications. People start to wonder if it was terrorists, are we under attack? But that is soon forgotten; because…… That’s when the screams started, those horrible screams……… 
I promised myself I would write all this down, I’m just trying to get it all out so it stops echoing in my brain. This is where I usually wad up the paper and throw it away. I used to tell happy, funny stories, my fam….. People used to love to hear me tell a funny story. I guess happy endings are no more. That’s it, I’m done depressing myself……………….Go to Day 970
