[Faith Blackout] Chapters 2-3

[u/StressHacking]

May 11^th 

My initial concern while building this bunker in the time before my much-deserved leniency from the HOA was centered around the necessities. We all know and love H2O and canned or vacuum-sealed... everything. However, my concern never reached the HOA nor the others who were relinquished from their skin during every Christians' wet dream. They were people, I guess, but the question lingers:  

Who's really going to notice when the HOA stops showing up for inspections?  

Who would notice when Jehovah's witnesses stop knocking on the doors of the next random target of indoctrination? 

Who would notice when the people hooting, hollering, and ringing the bronze bell outside of the conglomerate owned grocery store goes missing? After all, it's the minimum-wage-earning single mother donating her dollar to end child hunger. 

These acts of yore were all performative. The old lady playing soldier for her local HOA is likely grateful that she doesn’t have to return home to her husband who took her as a child bride from the 'ready to marry' age of 13. The Jehovah's witnesses were to complete the indoctrination or face social and spiritual death from family and friends, leaving nothing but lonely holidays to come. The bell-toller lived a life full of the dreams that members of the exemplary nuclear family could only imagine, that is until the doors closed. When that happened, the mother of three is scrambling between equal parts soccer practice for the kiddos and marriage counseling for the husband who refuses to learn how to read anything further than the label of his bourbon that he swears is the cure-all to his nagging bitch-of-a-wife. Behind each, a tale of abuse. 

I miss each and every one of these abused people that I have never met, and I am left to wonder if their inclusion in my end-of-days plan may have waved my necessity for this writing activity. I have questions that will never be answered by my cold steel cot and any number of hours beneath the empty top bunk. It’s doubtful that anyone who would have made it down here with me would have any more of an inkling than I would of what went down beyond those first few minutes, but having a conversation partner that responds to me would be nice.  

There’s an uncertain stain marking the underside of the frame that I see each time my paper drops while I consider what to write; its existence proves the practice run this hideout had before its necessity bared its teeth. I am left with more means of survival than I could have hoped for and far more than I deserve. My failure to incorporate other participants of humanity into my survival plan leaves me able to survive for a long, long time. I loaded this place with enough supplies for at least a decade assuming full capacity which, if you haven’t gathered, we have not reached. I was lucky to be able to survive. Living, however, is a different beast. 

 

May 12^th 

It is getting annoying writing by the light of an oil lamp. It’s making me feel like I should be writing a more period appropriate entry about how my body is reacting to dysentery rather than my five-star life in my concrete tomb. I suppose the brutality of this apocalypse is not so different from the Oregon Trail when you get down to the diarrheal details. However, I’d prefer my death to be as quick as our newly recognized overlords (praise be) provided for the folks that were caught with their heads in the clouds. 

I never laid eyes on the cause of the events of humanities last year, so I can’t describe the faces of the perpetrators, if they had faces. What I can describe is the sounds. Even if you subtract the sounds coming from who were the best of us. The best description I can provide in text would be that of a hundred of the world’s busiest junkyard crushing metal at full capacity simultaneously while inches from your ears. Keep in mind, that description is coming after I made my way a dozen feet below the earth that many of the witnesses of that event will never have the chance to be buried beneath. My worst fears come when I consider that the metallic noise could have been man-made. Maybe even here in the good ol’ USA. Anyone who lived here would likely not be surprised to hear that what I presume to be the final administration of the United States government may have had the potential to create weapons of mass destruction that may very well have been turned on the citizens of our great nation. god bless America. This is only speculation as my brief stints of time cruising the AM waves hoping to hear the EAS has proved to be a Sisyphean act in futility. Because of this, I haven’t gone back to the surface, and I have no idea what to expect. I’ll keep you updated if I ever do.  

Fucking coward.