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  THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE

  NEIL STRAUSS

  To Donald Booth, who died when a block of ice fell from a building and hit his head.

  And to all those who never saw it coming.

  Memento Mori…

  There is no crime

  That a man will not commit

  In order to save himself.

  —Tadeusz Borowski, “The January Offensive”

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  EXTRA CREDIT

  BONUS CONTENT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER WORKS

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  Ring. Ring.

  The time was 7:40 A.M. I reached for the phone.

  “Do you have your axe?” came the voice on the other end. It was Mad Dog.

  “Yes.”

  “Is your axe sharp?”

  “No, but I can sharpen it while you’re driving here.”

  “How about your knife?”

  “Got it.”

  “Everything needs to be nice and sharp.”

  Fuck, I’m supposed to kill a goat today. And I couldn’t even kill the fly in my room last night. Really. Sadly. I just put a drinking glass over it, covered the opening with a saucer, then set it free outside. I’m a victim of my own empathy. I wouldn’t be too happy if someone squished me flat, so it seems cruel to do the same to another living thing.

  Fifteen minutes later, Mad Dog pulled up in a weathered blue Dodge Ram 3500 truck with skull-and-crossbones floor mats and a lone bumper sticker depicting a gun sight next to the words THIS IS MY PEACE SYMBOL.

  The goat peered curiously at me from a beige dog cage in the back of the truck. It was much cuter than I’d expected. It had a wide smile, silky white fur, and a gentle disposition. I began to feel sick.

  Symptoms: dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath.

  I turned away. I didn’t want to pet it, befriend it, name it, or grow attached to it in any way. If I did, there was no way I’d be able to go through with this.

  My girlfriend Katie, whom I’d brought along for moral support, felt the same way. “Oh my God—it just baa’d at me,” she squealed in delight and horror. “I can’t look. I’ll fall in love.”

  So much for moral support.

  “Is this wrong?” I asked Mad Dog as we drove into the forest in grim silence. “I need a moral justification for doing this.”

  “This is the circle of life,” he answered coldly, without sympathy. He was thin, with ropy muscles, a receding hairline, piercing blue eyes, and a brown handlebar mustache. His hat was emblazoned with the Revolutionary War slogan “Don’t tread on me,” and he wore a sleeveless T-shirt advertising his handmade knives.

  “Every steak you bought at Safeway started out looking like this,” he continued. “If you need a rationalization, you’re hungry and you need to eat today. And if you want to eat, something has to die.” Then he leaned forward, flipped on his stereo, and blasted AC/DC’s “Kicked in the Teeth.”

  Unlike me, Mad Dog was a real man. He could chop wood, make fire, forge weapons, kill his own food, and defend himself with his bare hands. In other words, he could survive on his own—without Con Edison, without AT&T, without Exxon, without McDonald’s, without Wal-Mart, without two and a half centuries of American civilization and industry.

  And that’s exactly why I was with him right now, crossing a moral boundary from which there was no return.

  “Help me look for a good hanging tree,” Mad Dog ordered as he stopped at a clearing deep in the woods and turned off the engine.

  Every moment, this felt more and more like a Mafia execution. In the distance, I saw a deer bound across a clearing and disappear into the forest. It was such a strong, beautiful, graceful animal. I didn’t think I could ever shoot one.

  Unless Mad Dog told me to.

  After finding the tree and throwing pigging string over a branch, we returned to the truck and stood at the rear bumper next to the goat cage. “This is your protein source,” Mad Dog began his lecture. “Right along its neck is its carotid artery. You’re going to straddle the goat, push your knife through from one side to the other, and cut out the throat. Then we’re going to hang it, skin it, and butcher it.”

  Symptoms: dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, self-disgust, guilt.

  He let the goat out of the cage and put a leash around its neck. It walked up to me and nuzzled its head against my leg. Then it stepped away and peed and shat on the ground.

  “The more waste it passes now,” Mad Dog said, “the better.”

  This was when reality set in. I felt, in that moment, like I was going to hell. The goat was able to handle a leash, and it waited until it was out of the cage to relieve itself. It was practically domesticated.

  I didn’t have to kill it. I could always ask Mad Dog if I could just keep it as a pet.

  “Don’t anthropomorphize your prey,” Mad Dog barked when I confided this to him. “Most animals won’t piss and shit where they lay down.”

  “I’ve been trying not to get attached,” I told him. “That’s why I haven’t given it a name.”

  “I have,” Katie blurted. “I named it Bettie. B-E-T-T-I-E.”

  “When did you do that?”

  “When she fluttered her little eyes at me.”

  That was the last thing I needed to hear.

  Symptoms: everything, nothing, complete and total panic.

  I wasn’t sure I could go through with this.

  I was wearing an olive baseball cap, a matching army shirt, khaki cargo pants, and a gun belt with a Springfield Armory XD nine-millimeter on one side and a three-inch RAT knife on the other. This wasn’t me. Until a month ago, I’d rarely even worn cargo pants or baseball caps, let alone guns or knives.

  Why, I asked myself, was I about to do this?

  Because I wanted to survive. This is what people did for protein before there were farms and slaughterhouses and packing plants and refrigerated trucks and interstate highways and grocery stores and credit cards.

  I never thought the day would come when I’d have to make a backup plan.

  PART ONE

  Notice the strong walls of our city...

  Now examine the inner walls of our city.

  Examine the fine brickwork.

  These walls, too, surpass all others!

  No human being, not even a king,

  will ever be able to construct more impressive walls.

  –Gilgamesh, Tablet I, 2100 B.C.

  A BRIEF CONFESSION

  I’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes.

  It usually begins in airports. That’s when I get the first portent of doom. I imagine explosions, sirens, walls blown apart, bodies ripped from life.

  Then, as I gaze out of the taxi window after arriving in a new city, I see people bustling around on their daily routine, endless rows of office buildings and tenements teeming with activity, thousands of automobiles rushing somewhere important. And it all seems so solid, so permanent, so unmovable, so absolutely necessary.

  But all it would take is one war, one riot, one dirty bomb, one natural disaster, one marauding army, one economic catastrophe, one vial containing one virus to bring it all smashing down. We’ve seen it happen in Hiroshima. In Dresden. In Bosnia. In Rwanda. In Baghdad. In Halabja. In New Orleans.

  Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It’s an inevitabil
ity tourists can’t help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?

  That’s how the world looks through apocalypse eyes. You start filling in the blanks between a thriving city and a devastated one. You imagine how it could happen, what it would look like, and whether you and the people you love could escape.

  Of course I don’t want it to happen. Hopefully, it will never happen. But for the first time in my life, I feel there’s a possibility it will. And that’s enough to motivate me. To motivate me to save myself and my loved ones while there’s still time.

  I don’t want to be hiding in cellars, fighting old women for a scrap of bread, taking forced marches at gunpoint, dying of cholera in refugee camps, or anything else I’ve read about in history books. I want to be writing those history books on a beach far away from the mess that self-serving politicians, crooked CEOs, and committed madmen are making of the Western world.

  I want to be the one who gets away. The winner of the survival lottery.

  I didn’t always think like this. But then again, I was naive. I belong to the American generation that believed it was beyond history. Until this millennium, nothing bad had happened to us like it had to every generation before. Those who came of age in the first twenty years of the century had World War I. The next twenty years were marked by the Great Depression. The following twenty years began with World War II. The next generation inherited Vietnam.

  And then, from 1980 to the close of the century—nothing. Or at least no war, no national catastrophe, no defining event powerful enough to pull us outside our self-centered, solipsistic world, outside our preoccupation with ourselves and our financial and emotional well-being, outside our comfort zone.

  Of course, society wasn’t perfect, but to many Americans, it felt like we were just a cure for AIDS, a solution to the drug problem, and an effective campaign against urban gang violence away from getting as close as possible.

  But then, swiftly and without warning, it happened.

  History happened to us.

  Terrorist attacks. Domestic crackdowns. Flooded cities. Bank failures. Economic collapse.

  I can’t tell you the exact date along the way I lost faith in the system, because for me there were five of them, each chronicled in the section that follows. And over the course of this gradual awakening—which perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, covered the span of the Bush administration—I decided to equip myself with the tools necessary to survive whatever politics and history threw at me next.

  Preparing myself for hard times has been an incredibly challenging task, because some people were born tough. I wasn’t. My parents live on the forty-second floor of a seventy-two-story building in Chicago. They didn’t camp, hunt, farm, cook, or even fix things themselves.

  As for learning skills after leaving home, I spent most of my adult life as a music writer for the New York Times, so I could tell you anything you wanted to know about rock and hip-hop, but nothing about growing food or building fires or defending yourself. In fact, I’d never even been in a fight in my life, though I had been mugged twice.

  In short, if the system ever did break down, the only useful skill I really had was the ability to write about it. Perhaps, at best, I could talk someone with practical knowledge into helping me out. Or maybe they’d just mug me.

  But that wouldn’t happen anymore. Today I can draw a holstered pistol in 1.5 seconds, aim at a target seven yards away, and shoot it twice in the heart. I can start a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together. I can identify seven hundred types of footprints when tracking animals and humans. I can survive in the wild with nothing but a knife and the clothes on my back. I can find water in the desert, extract drinkable fluids from the ocean, deliver a baby, fly a plane, pick locks, hot-wire cars, build homes, set traps, evade bounty hunters, suture a wound, kill a man with my bare hands, and escape across the border with documents identifying me as the citizen of a small island republic.

  When the shit hits the fan, you’re going to want to find me. And you’ll want to be doing whatever I’m doing. Because I’ve learned from the best.

  You can call me crazy if you want.

  Or you can listen to the story of the eight years it took to open my eyes, realize my country can’t protect me, and do something about it.

  It just may save your life.

  PART TWO

  Only the gods can dwell forever with the Sun.

  As for the human beings, their days are numbered.

  And it is no more than blustery weather,

  No matter what they try to achieve.

  —Gilgamesh, Tablet II, 2100 B.C.

  STEP 1: DECEMBER 31, 1999

  You need to pick a group that won’t kill you.”

  The voice on the phone was that of Jo Thomas. A fellow New York Times reporter, she was on the cult and terrorism beat. She’d interviewed Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma City bombing, covered the Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland at the height of their reign of terror, and investigated the aftermath of David Koresh and his bloody last stand against the FBI in Waco.

  I had just volunteered to spend New Year’s Eve 1999 with a death cult. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But, just to be safe, I’d called Jo for advice.

  The newspaper was sending reporters to different locations to prepare a package of features on the millennial moment. And I wanted to take part in it. I envisioned a group of middle-aged men and women on a remote hillside, clasping hands and awaiting the apocalypse. And I wanted to see the look on their faces when the world didn’t end at the stroke of midnight. I wanted to hear how they would rationalize it afterward.

  Back then, I had no idea that I’d ever feel unsafe in America or be preparing for disaster myself. We seemed to stand monolithic and invulnerable at the center of the political, cultural, and moral universe, unchallenged as the world’s lone superpower. For all the headlines screaming doomsday and worldwide computer shutdown, no sane person really believed life was going to come to an end just because a calendar year was changing. We’d survived the last millennium well enough.

  But there were some very panicked people out there who truly didn’t think we’d make it to January 1. And those people, Jo warned, were not just likable kooks.

  “I don’t think anyone in New York knows how scary these groups are,” she explained. “A lot of them are nuts who stockpile guns. And most of them consider the media the enemy … especially the New York Times.”

  She then gave concrete examples of just how dangerous these groups could be. One antigovernment militia group in Sacramento had just been busted for planning to incinerate two twelve-million-gallon propane tanks to start a revolution for the New Year. And a second group, calling itself the Southeastern States Alliance, had been caught three days earlier trying to blow up energy plants in Florida and Georgia.

  “That’s crazy,” I thanked her for the advice. “I’ll definitely be careful with this.”

  That didn’t satisfy her. “I don’t know how old you are,” she warned before hanging up, “but however old you are, you’re not ready to leave this world.”

  Death isn’t something we’re born afraid of. It’s something we learn to fear. According to studies, children have little conception of death up to age five. From five to eight, they have a vague understanding of the finality of death. Only at nine do they begin to understand that death is something that one day may happen to them.

  My awakening came at the age of nine, thanks to the copy of the Chicago Sun-Times that my parents left on the kitchen table every day. One morning, this caught my eye:

  I sat down and read the story. Dozens of bodies of young boys, many of them close to my age, had been found buried in a basement and yard in the northwest section of Chicago, my hometown. A birthday clown named John Wayne Gacy had tortured, molested, and killed them. From that day forward, I realized I was no longer the master of my own safety. It wasn’t just cli
mbing trees and running with scissors that could harm me—it was other people.

  Before making my decision about the millennium, I called a friend of Jo’s at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks cults and hate groups, and asked him to recommend a few relatively safe sects to celebrate with.

  “There’s a very anti-Semitic fascist group called the Society of St. Pius X in Kansas you might want to look into,” suggested Mike Reynolds, one of the center’s militia task force investigators. “They’re probably not going to do anything to you.”

  “Probably?”

  “Well, there’s also William Cooper, who heads a militia group in Arizona. He’s training them to go to war after New Year, when Satan is supposed to appear. Or you can try Tom Chittum, who’s looking to start a race riot, which he calls Civil War II. Maybe that would be too dark for you. Then there are the Black Hebrew Israelites in Chicago…”

  Clearly Mike didn’t care if I survived the New Year.

  Despite the Oklahoma City bombing five years earlier, I had no idea there were so many networks actively trying to destroy America from within. Where reading about John Wayne Gacy had woken me up to the danger lone madmen posed to my safety, talking with Reynolds opened my eyes to the existence of organized groups of them. So in light of this information, I decided to narrow my search to more friendly, unarmed, cuddly doomsday groups.