The Preppers Lament Read Online Free Page B

food to the needy non preppers looking to him for a hand out.
     
    Oh, give him a little credit now. He had given away some basic foodstuffs away like a few pounds of rice and beans to assuage his conscience and other folks hunger and he use some goods to try to gain some time and allegiance with one set of not so savory neighbors, but he had judged this little bit of foodstuff loss as a necessary evil and not a total loss entirely.
     
    The old late seventies in age couple across from his property had taken in the grandkid and his girlfriend a year ago and the boy had walked over  about a week and half ago to ask David would he mind helping dig a grave for his grandmother that had just passed. She had been on a cord plug in oxygen generator and had bless her old heart, expired within a day of switching to bottled emergency oxygen. This tragic event had happened not to long after the grid was shut down and was a surprise to David just because he had not considered her fate or plight until then. Too many things affecting his own life and others made him remiss in his considerations of some neighbors he rarely saw.
     
    David didn’t really have to ask the surviving relatives exactly why they wanted to bury her on their homestead, but like an old goombah he was he asked them anyway. Sometimes you just don’t think things out. The boy said him and his grandpa had decided it was neither fitting nor proper to bury the old woman in the city mass graves that were filling up if they had their own land to pick a peaceful plot on. Said the old women would be happier that way in only the way the living can relate to last wishes.
     
    The radio had advised in no uncertain terms awhile back that the closest town’s community mortuaries were full up and that the morgues were way over capacity in the hospitals and with no fuel to run emergency generators for refrigeration that mass graves were a necessary sanitization issue and services were being held to bring out your dead for civil affairs disposal. The National Guard was setting up numerous grave registration rosters to try to keep up with the deceased so a record could be kept of those who had expired and gone to the great beyond, but the boy and his grandpa like many others of like minds or hearts chose not to waste the gas or energy notifying anyone of the women’s passing. They were just going to handle the laying of the woman to rest matter quietly themselves in a more meaningful manner.
    .
    David thought of the boy begrudgingly as an arrogant nare do well occasional hardcore druggie that under normal conditions he needed to avoid and not associate with. However, under these conditions he would not refuse anyone in there time of need and one thing lead to another and soon they were both digging the hole with a self serving passion while sweating profusely preparing to give the old woman’s bones back to the earth in a solitary respectable grave in a backyard clearing.
     
    David had allowed himself to cough up and donate to the surviving relatives a bit of food. He made the gesture stating it was to help stabilize the boy’s sick grandfather who was grieving for his wife. David by this act of generosity actually quietly hoped it would buy him some small space of time before he had to do the same kind of funerary duties again for the old gentleman. Old couples have been known to die a week or so from each other.
     
    The boy and his girlfriend acted grateful and friendly enough for David’s kind acts but he had rebuffed any of their efforts to befriend him any further or answer many questions about how he was getting by. He knew all too well that now was not the time for him to be evaluating or accumulating new friends and took on a persona of aloofness and icy suspicion in their regard.
     
    The boy’s (should say mans) name was Will for Willard and the girls or woman’s name was Sally and both had the tattoo freak thing going on that David despised somewhat. His