Knife to the Brain

When it seemed like Vlad wasn’t going to continue past that cryptic statement, Dany arched an eyebrow and parrotted. “Coming?” 

Vlad was still quiet. He sat there, drumming his fingers against his knees, staring blankly forward.

Danny waited, and waited, and waited, until his admittedly thin patience ran out. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in several days, school had been particularly annoying today, and the extremely unfair afterschool detention he’d just been released from had stolen almost everything he’d had left. “Are you just going to sit there and take a nap? Can I leave?”

Vlad scowled at him. “They are coming. And you can feel it too - I can see that you haven’t been sleeping either.”

“Great,” Danny said, his voice full of fake enthusiasm. “They. Thanks for the clarification. Really clears everything up. Can I go now?”

“They are a group of people that are like us. Human-ghost hybrids.”

“There isn’t anybody else like us,” Danny retorted instantly. “Other than the clones you made, I guess.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid, Daniel.”

“I’m not stupid, Vladdie,” Danny snapped. “Just how many other people do you think have stumbled into my parents’ ghost portals? I’m fairly certain they only made the two.”

Vlad froze, seemingly caught off guard by the statement. “I… was unaware you hadn’t thought this through,” the man said slowly, “just that you hadn’t met any of them.”

Danny felt energy flicker into his eyes, momentarily twisting the colors of the limo into lurid swirls. “They. Them. You’re doing a stellar job explaining this whole thing. You either need to step up and cut the insults, or let me out.”

“Daniel-”

“I’m serious Vlad. You have about twenty more seconds before I blast my way out of your car.”

Vlad made a chopping motion with his hand. “Oh, grow up a smidge, would you? I’ve done nothing here to harm you. I’m attempting to help-”

“You don’t seem like you’re attempting to help!” Danny scowled and crossed his arms. “They’re coming! They’re coming! You sound like someone forecasting the end of the world. Or the sky falling.” 

Vlad met Danny’s scowl with one of his own. “You make it very hard to help you,” Vlad said through his teeth. “Leave then, if you so desire.” The limo came to a stop and Vlad gestured towards the door. “Face the future on your own. I won’t stop you.”

Danny glanced at the door, then at the pale and sleep-deprived Vlad. Danny swallowed his frustration and ran a hand over his face. “You make it very hard to believe you want to help anyone other than yourself,” he grumbled, settling in to hear whatever the man had to say. “So who’s they?” he asked.

“People like us.”

“Yeah, so you said. But… where would more of us come from?”

“You are aware that ghost portals open all the time.” Vlad paused, arching a pale eyebrow, seemingly waiting for some sort of response from Danny. When Danny refused to respond to such a stupid statement, Vlad eventually continued. “A decently predictable number of portals are open at any given time, and they last a somewhat predictable amount of time.”

Danny nodded again. “I read my mom’s research paper too, you know. You gonna say anything new?”

Vlad glared at him. “There is approximately 130 million square kilometers of habitable land on this planet, about 2 square meters of which are covered in ghost portals on any given day, and human bodies cover about 0.0015% of our planet, so over the course of a normal human lifespan, one can expect a statistical number of humans to be caught in naturally opening portals.”

Danny blinked. “And how many would that be?”

Vlad scoffed. “It’s quite simple math, Little Badger.”

All good will vanished from Danny’s brain. “Simple for you, since you stole it from my parents,” he said under his breath, but just loudly enough to ensure that Vlad heard each word clearly.

Vlad’s teeth clicked together, his mouth pursing and his back straightening. “I’ve been trying to remain civil due to my… our… current lack of sleep. But listen, and listen closely, child, because I am at the end of my patience. I’ve dealt with these beings several times, and I’ve learned to stay out of their way. They will offer you whatever you want - they are sirens, able to pluck your desires out of your mind - and they will seem like they are your friends. But like Odysseus, you can’t listen to them. They will drag you into the depths and feast from your tears.”

“That’s foreboding.” Danny looked at Vlad’s exhausted eyes and the pale, tired way he held his shoulders. “So you think I’m going to trust you enough that when you say to stay away, I will.”

There was a long silence as Vlad stared at him. “If I’ve learned anything this last year, it’s that you’ll do what you want no matter what I have to say about it,” he said. “I tried.”

Danny arched an eyebrow. There was an odd note to Vlad’s voice that made him wonder, just for a moment, if he should listen to what Vlad was saying. 

“Get out now.” The limo stopped by the side of the road and the door opened, seemingly of it’s own accord.

“But what if I-” Danny started, but a very dangerous red flashed into Vlad’s eyes. “Yeah-okay. Bye V-man.” He slipped out of the limo and found himself standing on the sidewalk nearly back to the school - the place he’d been walking away from when Vlad had picked him up. “What the…” He spun in a circle, blinking in surprise. “You drove me back to school? I just finished with this place!” 

There was a light cackling from inside the limo as the door closed. 

Danny scowled as the limo drove off down the street. “Fruitloop,” he grumbled, starting to walk towards home for a second time. He was tired, he certainly didn’t need to do this walk twice.

Every few hundred feet he found himself glancing off to the west. There was no denying that the feeling Vlad had mentioned was getting stronger and stronger. The source of it was over there somewhere, and getting closer with every passing hour.

I was meeting with a couple friends (one of which is responsible for the recent dump of stories that hopefully will continue) for coffee and the topic of my strange relationship with groceries came up. I’ll admit that me and food have a slightly different association than most people - but ‘prepper’??

So to explain how food works in my house:

Veggies: I have a nice garden. A big one. I grow about 90% of our ‘storage veggies’ we eat in a year. Things like carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, etc. We tend to run out in the late spring or summer, which to me feels okay because I can still buy local at the farmer’s market. This way, I can control the use of pesticides and herbicides, making my food as organic and natural as possible. The past two years, I’ve only had to spray for aphids, because holy-hell they were getting out of control. I blame the walnut tree. We still have to purchase ‘fresh’ veggies in the winter (lettuce, for example), but I got an indoor garden setup for the holidays so I’m hopeful we can get something going inside beyond the anemic herb garden in the window and cut that down somewhat. 

Fruit: I also have fruit growing in my garden. :) We grow and preserve about 75% of the fruit we eat throughout the year. We grow strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb (fruit??), blueberries, currants, gooseberries, apples, etc. We’d grow and preserve more, but sometimes you just want the fresh fruit, and we do live in an era where fresh fruit is available in the winter, and bananas and oranges are things I can’t grow in the snow.

Dairy: We raise chickens, so we get all the eggs we could possibly eat and then some, and we get most of our dairy products from the co-op down the road. They process the milk into butter and basic cheese, so we get our dairy from within a fifty-mile radius of home, which is nice. And since yogurt and mozzarella are so easy to make at home, we tend to do that a lot. Like every other weekend. My son is trying to talk me into some dairy goats, but I’m still too worried about the havoc they would bring to my garden to let them on the property.

Meat: We raise the aforementioned chickens and also meat rabbits. We also have a hobby farmer that lives nearby that raises a steer and a hog for us to butcher each fall. So if you dig into my freezer and pull out a steak or a pound of hamburger, I can usually tell you the name of the steer it came from. Not the pork, though; I don’t think the guy names his hogs. My husband is also an avid hunter and fisher, so we have plenty of wild protein sources as well.

Breads: Processed grains are the one thing we can’t get locally, but we do buy in bulk from as reputable a source as possible. We have enough oats, flour, sugar, and the like to make the Widow of Zarephath happy. I don’t have the time to regularly make bread, but we can and do sometimes. Breadsticks, especially, because I just… can’t… make myself pay almost fifty cents each for frozen (bad-tasting) breadsticks. Not when I can make them for a nickel of flour and a bit of my time. We help out with ricing each fall, so we get a good supply of local wild rice.

So if you come to my house at the end of harvest, you will be greeted with what some people (including my friends, I guess) think is a bizarre sight. I have jars and jars and jars of preserved foods on top of my kitchen cabinets. I have not one, but two stand-alone freezers full of food in the basement. I have a pantry with enough baking and cooking supplies I could make almost any recipe you’d like at a moment’s notice. I have bins of homegrown potatoes (lots of small potatoes this year, sadly. don’t know why. I’m inwardly blaming the aphids.) and onions and braids of garlic and I can make you a wonderful peppermint tea any time of the year. If you get through the two locked doors in the basement, my husband will show you how to reload precision shells for hunting, how to precisely aim to make sure death is as quick and painless as possible, and how to create the best lures and decoys for fishing. 

I don’t personally believe in the coming apocalypse - I’m not doing this because I think the world is ending, I’m doing this because this is what humans do and it makes you feel good and you can sit, surrounded by cold and ice, secure and warm and knowing your kids will be well fed with good food you can be confident were raised properly. Also, a lack of grocery bills. That’s nice too.

But there’s nothing nicer than eating a meal of smothered pork with root veggies and knowing where every bit of this meal came from. Or picking pounds of strawberries with your kids, knowing they’re feeling connected to the Earth rather than trapped on it. Or helping your kids filet and cook the fish they caught, making sure they understand the gift the fish is giving us and what it meant for the fish to be healthy and happy up until it’s caught. That the lake is healthy. That the land is healthy. That we compost and return the nutrients to the ground so that the soil is healthy so that our garden grows better food. 

To me, this isn’t the thought process of a prepper. It’s the thought process of a human. My ancestors did these things. There are thousands of generations of people that came before me, who also felt the same way and did the same things (although maybe without the freezer space?). 

…also, yes. I guess we do have solar panels, a generator, a hand-pump personal well, and a literal bomb shelter (don’t ask - we didn’t build it) under our house. We have a reloading room with plenty of supplies for keeping ourselves alive. We have crafting supplies for making clothes and weaving textiles, including everything needed to turn raw wool into yarn and fabric. We have a year’s worth of food at any given moment and know how to make more on our own. I have a seed cabinet where I store seeds from the previous year, including those of an odd squash variant I managed to cross-breed and you can’t buy anywhere on the planet. My husband is a paramedic with medical training and access to supplies.