Quoth the raven: Don’t kill me

Jan. 16, 008
Black Rockalypse

Coffee. Mmmmmmm.

We only had instant coffee for a couple months, and then nothing. Also no meat for quite a while. Everyone’s lost their caffeine addictions as well as a good-to-disturbing amount of weight, just like on that Survivor TV show where they eat nothing but rice and bugs. Most folks in here are pleased with the results — except some of the bigger boys and girls, who were hilariously, melodramatically weakened by the hippie/broke artist diet that some of the rest of us are plenty used to. Sorry, no cheese with that whine.

We had literally been starving, at least since Christmas. This somehow led to us getting serious about survival training. Otto set up a maze-style course at the Ranch where we could run through and do target practice like a video game, and we’ve also got a stationary range where we shoot toward the massive wall outside by the welding shop where people used to break for lunch. We use BBs exclusively, and pick them up off the ground and knife them out of the wood and recycle them if they’re still spherical. No way will we take chances with actual, explosive ammunition — not when the properties of the Not-Dome include a boi-oi-oing effect of equal projectile speeds both coming and going.

This is how we think the Not-Suits function. They seem to be fabricated “inside-out,” to where the goons’ bullets ricocheted off them like they would inside here, and the Not-Suit’s wearer is in fact trapped inside the outside, where the rest of the world is. Bullets passing through the wearer’s body at that close range could be fatal if the helicopters buffered by a much thicker Not-Dome barrier are any indication.

now if we could just get a couple o’ these. Huh, Barton? Please?

Oh yeah, and we ran out of booze at Thanksgiving. The alcohol supplies had dwindled to shitty Republican beer and liqueur when we met about planning our late November feast, and we voted to just go all out and drink the rest of it that night.

That was a fun party. The last one, methinks, for a long while. Yes, there was some beer on the truck shipment … the one we received this past weekend as people on the outside lost their lives. So, though we will certainly drink the beer, we don’t quite feel like partying.

Since Thanksgiving, we’ve all been terrifyingly sober — all looking at each other with new eyes, with no substances left to haze us up … walking around with a desert predator’s sense of keen awareness. For a passel of career boozers, this is a lot to say. And we would all be bitching about it even more, if we didn’t know with certainty that this heightened state is extremely called-for right now. Bruno knows it, too — my dog won’t leave my side. I’ve always known he’s part coyote, but now … he’s behaving like a fully-trained wild dog, if that makes any sense.

Things got weird when we were putting in our requested lists of supplies to Hazmatt and I said I wanted to order a gun, one of my own, to keep in my trailer with me and my dog. A very high average of my comrades out here own guns. I didn’t get a chance to buy one in the hyperworld … but now I want one too.

I always say in the South, where I’m from, everybody’s genteel and polite because nobody knows who’s packing heat. Gun ownership is a personal choice, sure … but things are going to get heated in America real soon, so it’s better train yourself at least to know how to handle a gun. To avoid doing so out of liberal prejudice is to potentially endanger your own life and the lives of those around you, should you find yourself in a situation with a firearm in your hand. And with a private mercenary military force doing much of the current administration’s dirty work, and concentration camps springing up in America … well, let’s just say it’s best to have a gun when they begin to tell you you can’t have one.

Anyhoo. They told me it wasn’t in the budget. Smith & Wesson, care to make a generous donation to us poor dirtbags out here trapped in isolation with a handful of magical beings who still won’t tell us who they are?

——

Animals are allowed safe passage across dimensions and into the Not-Dome. We found that out early when we saw ravens flying overhead, and praying mantises getting blown down off the mountain into our camp. Nobody knows how high the Not-Dome goes, because the helicopters and planes disappear above us, no matter how high they’re flying.

We’ve been so hungry we’ve taken to actually praying before dinner — our one meal a day, for the past 3 or 4 weeks — for a stray cow to wander into the Not-Dome. Even though they’ve all been rustled away for the winter. Some of us also tried to hunt the birds. Just for a little protein, even though it’s got to be some sort of bad luck to kill a raven. We only “hunted” in deep playa, and only with the (real) rifles and shotguns pointed away from our camp. If the boi-oi-oing happened, it’d ricochet thataway.

Haven’t shot a bird yet. Nobody. Shot at some, but missed. There aren’t many to choose from. However, Combustible Russ, for one, is proud of us for our new survival-skinned selves. At BB-gun practice the other day, when Arwen beaned a human target in the eye area five times in a row, Russ looked on, scratching his belly with a self-satisfied smile.

“Go DPW,” he bellowed. “I was beginning to feel like we couldn’t take over a small country anymore. Maybe go to a museum together all politely.”