Bugging Out Read Online Free PDF

knew I couldn’t bank on that, however. And I couldn’t count on Marco keeping close what every instinct would tell him to share, just as it was telling me to.
    “Just some things I have to deal with, Marco. One thing where my personal life and professional life have come together.”
    He eyed me skeptically.
    “And the fuel trailer is essential to fixing whatever this issue is?”
    “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense to you,” I told him, the statement only partially a lie. “But it makes sense to me. And it is my fuel trailer.”
    That statement of rank, something I’d rarely, if ever, used before, seem to trouble him more than the uncertainty my actions had caused.
    “Okay,” Marco said, and left my office, leaving the door open as he headed down the hallway, more laughter drifting in. Raucous laughter. It was sound of people without a care in the world.
    *  *  *
    I stayed late at the end of the day. When the last dispatcher left just after seven I was still at my desk, sitting, thinking, and wondering if this was the last time I would see the business I’d built. The business I’d struggled and sacrificed to nurture from a one-man contracting enterprise to a multimillion dollar powerhouse that allowed eighty workers to put food on the table for their families. Would the need for my business even exist in a month, a week, or the next morning? I didn’t know, but I also didn’t want to leave without taking in the feel of the place one last time.
    In case this was the last time.

Four
    I was ready to bug out.
    I’d gathered and stored everything I could at my getaway. Whether that was everything I would need only time would tell. In the bed of my pickup, secured under the shell, I had the final boxes of clothing, medicine, and other items ready to go with me on my run to what I hoped would be a safe place. If safety was not what it offered in full, I was prepared for that eventuality with a selection of weapons and ammunition alongside the more mundane necessities. Pistols, rifles, and shotguns to complement what was already stashed on my property.
    The only thing left to decide was when. When I would leave this world and this life behind. I’d continued to go to work each day. To play at living. Business continued. My workers demolished old buildings and put new ones up.
    But enough ominous signs had appeared on the news since Neil’s warning to me just over a week ago to convince me that what he feared was coming to pass. A complete quarantine of the nation was in effect. The borders, both North and South by land, and East and West by sea, were closed, patrolled now not by shifts of Border Patrol agents, but by units of the military that had been hardened by battles in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a daily occurrence now to hear of fighter jets chasing away stray aircraft approaching the border, either accidentally or by design. Two more had been shot down, if what was being reported told the entire story. It could have been ten, or twenty. The press, whose freedom had been enshrined in the Constitution, seemed, at every turn, to be actively embracing anything the government said, and repeating it to a populace seeking assurances.
    Assurances that, more and more, were ringing hollow.
    But the news, the truth, or some semblance of it, was getting out. Between the rumors filling every corner of the internet, incidents were getting play. A news crew from an Alabama station had been shot by contract security while attempting to record the transfer of food from a supermarket chain warehouse to Blackhawk helicopters. Three journalists lay dead in a parking lot beneath the wash of rotor blades, but nowhere did that appear on national, or even local news. The video, captured by a frightened jogger in the right place at the wrong time, became the hottest topic on nearly every social media platform.
    Until it disappeared.
    For days afterword, those who had downloaded it attempted to post it again, only to have