I had forgotten Mangetout’s location, but when his shopping list didn’t include any sort of firearm I knew he wasn’t from the US.
Dude, seriously, in that situation you’ve really got to figure out a way to get yourself a gun. I don’t know how you’d go about that in a post-apocalyptic Britain, but it would be worth a lot of effort to get one. Maybe you could just walk into an abandoned police station or army base?
The first time you run across a pack of starving feral dogs you’ll wish you had a firearm. Even if you’ve never used one in your life, you should get one and figure out how to use it. This is life and death, here. Not just for protection from dogs and escaped tigers from the zoo, but also the deranged nutters one inevitably encounters in such situations.
You know, I have no idea where I would get a gun from. There must be hunting supply stores in Auckland, but not that I’ve ever seen, and not near me. So I guess the first thing I do do when the Apocalypse hits is grab my Yellow Pages.
Yes, I am in the UK; there’s actually a gun shop in the high street of the village where I live (does this shock you?); I could take a JCB (I think you call that a backhoe) from a local contractor’s yard and break the door in. There will be shotguns and .22 rifles in there, plus ammo.
That would actually be phase 2 of my plan (the initial shopping spree above is intended mostly to see me through the first few hours; possibly the first night).
I’d be going to conquer the place, not the people. It just means more room for my own horde to repopulate. (And it’s still easier than trying to conquer postapocalyptic Texas.)
My mid-term strategy involves hacking a generator to run off a waterwheel (there’s actually an 18th century watermill in my village and the millpond, race and sluices are all perfectly usable; the main reason for this would not be lighting, but running a freezer or two. Ice may actually be a more valuable commodity than salt in the post-apocalyptic world; certainly the ability to preserve food by freezing it would be a massive boon.
I’m not sure why I’d go anywhere. What I’d probably do is pick out a home that is going to be more-or-less comfortable even without electricity and go from there. My parents’ home, for example, has gravity flow springwater and a woodstove to supplement their gas heat. Similar set ups are common all over this area.
Next, I dedicate an awful lot of time and effort to properly stockpiling goods so as to minimize losses. Perishable meat and produce is, of course, a complete loss; but canned goods, dried foods, clothing, drugs, and so on can be stored for very long periods under proper conditions. So, instead of looting Wal Mart, I’ll be storing Wal Mart.
This’d be much easier with some help, of course. As Stephen King noted in The Stand, with all this stuff laying around, civilization will begin rebuilding almost immediately and even 0.1% of the population is still 250000 people just in CONUS. Obviously, most of them will be in the areas where population is concentrated now, so they’ll hook up pretty fast.
In this scenario though, you don’t know whether you’ll be able to do that; you don’t know why everyone has gone; it may just be a one-off blip in spacetime, or they may have been abducted by aliens (i.e. you don’t know whether you’ll be able to settle when you walk out of the store, or whether you will have to take flight)
I’m not familiar enough with the qualitites of propane to be able to answer that, but I’m sure she’d run into problems with supply over the long term-- where’s she going to keep getting refills? You need a high-pressure pump to fill a cylinder, and that requires electricity. Nor do I think a lone woman without previous experience would be capapble of moving one of those huge house-sized cylinders and hooking it up without getting hurt.
She’s better off, if she wants to be realistic, to ecschew reliance on modern technology at all. Too many things could go wrong. (Actually, it might be a cool plot device for her to set up the generator and think she’s all set and then have her food go bad and have to start over.)
I wouldn’t trust it. If one part breaks, all of your food could spoil, and you’d starve. Ice might be a valuable trade commodity-- especially for those with an insane craving for some ice cream-- but it’s not reliable enough to depend on in a situation of true survival.
Really, the best bet is to can, salt, smoke-- preserve foods in the old-fashioned way. Use the time until the electricty stops for trial-and-error.
Secondly, without salt, you die. Didn’t Alas, Babylon teach you anything? Once the survivors eat their way through the pre-packaged food stores, it’s going to be very hard to find salt in nature, especially if their diet is primarily vegetables because they don’t know how to store meat.
Salt can be made, of course. Salt springs exist-- you can often just look on a map for places with names like that, but boiling brine to turn it into salt is a laborious process, and you have to know how to remove impurities.
It would seem to me that personal protection would be the most important goal, more than food, water, backpacks, boots, or anything else.
Assuming that the unspecified apocalypse has just happened and 99.9% of people are gone, there’s no more law enforcement, there’s no more army, it’s just you. If you spend your hour picking through the clothing department, someone else will spend their hour picking through the gun store, and then take your clothes from you at gunpoint.
Save time. Get the gun, let other people do the shopping. If you join up with them, perfect! If they aren’t too keen on joining, well…
Well MY first trip is going to be to get me a serious 4 wheel drive diesel (.50 caliber mounts optional) because I call bullshit on the whole notion of needing to ride a frickin’ bike in your post apoc situation (downtown Manhattan and some California bridges being the possible exceptions). Where I need to go, and where I want to end up are all accessible with some good military transport. There may be some serious damage to the landscaping at the entrance to the sporting goods store when I stop for ammo, and maybe I have to park on top of some guy’s beamer, but hey, nobody is going to be writting tickets anyway. And on my trips for supplies, I’d rather be able to transport quantities in the range of “case” instead of fanny-pack’s worth.
-rainy
Oh yeah, and just drop by a large equipment contruction cite and grab a hand crank fuel pump like they fill the dozers from the truck mounted tanks with. Then every gas station is at your disposal.
Doing something seems like a better option, but it’s up to you; my choice was to assemble what I considered to be a useful, but portable kit; works if I have to break into a building and sleep there, works if I have to go on the run in the woods.
Really? I did not know that. What if she made it a propane generator?
Once the survivors eat their way through the pre-packaged food stores, it’s going to be very hard to find salt in nature, especially if their diet is primarily vegetables because they don’t know how to store meat.