Bugging Out Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought from work was loaded by Eddie and another worker, forklift positioning the pallets and boxes, ties securing the load. I paid for the items, totaling just over $27,000, with a card that drew on my business credit line. If I was going all-in, there was no sense pretending there’d be a bill to pay come next month.
    From Bunker Bo’s I swung by an electrical supply house and purchased eight solar panels, spare inverter, wiring, and the hardware to mount the additional equipment alongside the eight panels I already had at my getaway. Two dozen deep cycle batteries completed my order and put another sizable dent in my credit line. I wasn’t done gathering what I needed, but what I’d filled the truck with was the bulk of what I believed I’d need.
    Fully loaded, I drove north from Missoula, skirting Flathead Lake, passing through Kalispell and turning west off the highway several miles past Whitefish. Nearly five hours it had taken me just to reach the driveway of my property. Next I had to break down what I’d bought so it could be unloaded by hand, my only option. An hour into the endeavor I began to wish for a forklift. By the second hour, though, the strain, both mental and physical, began to morph into some sort of drive I’d never known. Some energy that allowed me to carry and cart most of the food into my house, and the mechanical items into the barn. After six hours, with midnight approaching, I finally finished, sore but satisfied, the steps I’d taken toward my own survival adding meaning to the endeavor. I was reliant on myself. I wondered how many others would be able to say the same in the coming weeks and months.
    I also wondered how many would be left.
    Giving in to exhaustion I spent the night at my getaway, and rose early the next morning to return to Missoula. Over the next two days I made more trips, transporting what I believed would become essentials, including my ATV on a small flatbed trailer, and a half-dozen full five gallon gas cans with fuel stabilizers added. And, on my final trip, the tank trailer loaded with five hundred gallons of diesel fuel. Its absence was noted by my chief foreman, as was my own.
    *  *  *
    “Y ou’re not leveling with me,” Marco said.
    He stood just inside my office, the hum of activity from workers in the break room down the hall filtering in. They were laughing over some idiotic joke that I would normally chuckle at. But with my foreman of eight years staring at me, clearly worried, the humor landed flat.
    “I’m not following you, Marco,” I told him, feigning composure as best I could.
    He stepped further into my office and closed the door behind.
    “It’s Thursday,” Marco said. “Monday you get a visit from some old friend and the next thing I know the truck I need for the Peyton job is gone, and you’re the one who took it. Two days later the truck’s back, but the fueling trailer is gone. And it’s still gone. But now you’re here, and I’m left trying to figure out what the hell’s going on.”
    Marco was no idiot. He was also a friend. A friend who deserved to know not only what I was doing, but why, and to what end. But if I opened my mouth to him, there was no telling where it would go from there. The information. The warning.
    A warning whose origin could be traced back to Neil. Would a government willing to shoot down citizens at checkpoints hesitate to bring some wrath upon an employee who’d leaked a vital secret? Yes, I knew. They would. I couldn’t risk his life for the sake of satisfying my foreman’s worry.
    Then again, he might not buy it at all. He could just as easily conclude that I’d gone slightly crazy. But with what we’d witnessed, both in person and in news reports, I had to think he might very well accept what I was relaying as gospel.
    But what if it wasn’t? There was still that slight chance that nothing of the magnitude I feared was going to happen. A chance that it would not all come tumbling down. I