Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2021 06:19:59 -0400 From: Eric Murphey Subject: The Premonition Part 1 Gay adult youth (Prolific Author) I really hadn't planned on posting any more stories. Didn't say I wasn't writing. I was sharing this with some friends and my editor well he edited it. So I can and will waste my time but not his. The few people I have sent this to say they really like it. I am posting two sections today. After this I will post one section per week. The story is nearly completed now. If you like it great. If not well you cant please everyone. I sincerely want to thank Zero for his help and fixing my ramblings. Without him you would still be reading my stories as if they were written by a 4th grader lacking any grammar capabilities. So thank you buddy. I do appreciate all the work you put into it. You should donate to Nifty. The Premonition Part 1 By Eric Murphey Edited By Zero M. One day, just out of the blue, I wake up from a sound sleep and realize that I need to get the fuck out of here. Not the specific place where I am per se, but the wider area I'm in. In my dream, I saw destruction and carnage like I had never seen before. I saw men dying, hanged in the streets by militias. I saw street gangs trying to take over cities; the murder and viciousness were horrid. Somehow, I know it will happen, and I know it will happen soon. I don't have much, just a few grand in the bank and an old pickup truck. I sell almost everything I own, and the grand total of my life's work amounts to just over $14,000 plus the truck, which I decide to keep. I don't know where I am going, but I know it needs to be far away from any major cities. I live on the east coast, so I drive west and stay to the north because I hate the oppressive heat of the south. I like snow and I like fall; summer and spring are nice too. So with that limited amount of information I drive west. I get to Iowa and quickly find a really nice RV for sale at a really cheap price. Apparently the lady who owns it and her husband had retired and traveled all over the country, pulling it behind their truck. Her husband had passed and she wants to get the RV into the hands of someone who will love it and use it like they had. I promise her I will cherish it, and I really will because it will be my home for the foreseeable future. I keep wondering if I am nuts like all those crazy guys on street corners preaching that the end is near so you should accept Jesus, Allah, or Whomever to save your soul. Well right now it is not my soul I am worried about, it's my ass. And my ass wants to find somewhere safe, and fast. So I hitch up the RV to my truck and pull it along. My truck may be old but he is doing pretty good. Yes, my truck is a boy. I know it's common to give trucks girl names, but I'm a boy lover and I love my truck, so therefore it must be a boy. Don't argue with my logic; you won't win. Hell, I'm not even sure if it's logic or insanity. I drive for another day, staying on old country roads and state highways as I don't want to travel on interstates. I don't know why; I just don't want to. As I am driving along, the truck starts getting hot from pulling the trailer in the heat and because I have the AC on, which I know is probably a foolish combination. I decide to pull over to let my baby cool down. I turn off onto a dirt road and drive along it for a bit because I can see a little spot where I can park and let him idle and cool down. I stop and put him in park, shut off the AC, and let the engine idle. I step out as I am pretty sore from all the driving. I walk up the road a bit more and see a sign half covered by weeds. All I can see is the "For" part of it. I walk over and sweep the weeds aside. The sign reads, "For Sale. 60 Acres. Call," and it has a phone number. I think that there is no way in the world I can afford to buy sixty acres. It looks so lush, and there is a river on the edge or at least close to the edge of it. On the property sits an old trailer house. I walk up the long drive and see that it looks like no one has lived there in a good long while. Most of the windows are gone, but it looked kind of OK. Not that you could move right in, but it could happen with some work and a few dollars. I walk up and there is a set of steps. I try the door and it opens, and I think that I must check this out. I walk in and it smells musty; I wrinkle my nose at the smell of it. I take a careful step forward, and as I suspected the floors are soft and will need to be replaced. I look up and shake my head. As if I can afford this. Sixty acres will cost a lot of money, for sure a lot more than I have, but I continue to look around. It was actually a pretty nice trailer at one time. It's got to be about16 feet by 80 feet, a lot bigger than the apartment I had back east. It has three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The bathrooms are in surprisingly good condition and won't need much in the way of repairs. So I think, "Fuck it. I need to end this delusion right now." I call the number from the sign, pretty certain that I remembered it right. "Hello?" says the person who answered. "Um, yes, my name is Rick Martin. I saw that you have some property for sale." "Yes, I sure do. My dad had it for years and he loved it out there. I can't stand it with all the bugs and shit. Dad didn't mind though. Me, I'm a city boy through and through." "So, um, just how much are you asking for it?" "Well, it's got a real nice trailer on it and it is sixty acres I'm looking to get around $75,000." "How long has it been since you've been out to the property?" "Oh, dad died about 8 years ago. So I guess about that long." "Yeah, I think you need to reevaluate the trailer part of it. I'm in it now, and well, if I were to buy it, I would probably haul it away as junk and build a house. The floors are rotted and the windows are mostly gone. I think a raccoon made one of the bedrooms his bathroom. So with that in mind, how much would you ask for the land?" I stretch the truth a bit because the guy is kind of a dick. I hate that. I figure he won't back down at all. "Yea, I figured that would happen. Can you text me a few pics? It's about an 80 mile drive for me to come see it in person." "Sure," I say. I take pictures of the absolute worst damage I can find and send him over about ten pictures. "Wow, it's worse than I thought it would be. Yeah, no one would live in that place now. My dad would be pissed I let it go to shit. Look, I will let it go for $30k." "Yeah, I figured it would still be too much. I thank you for your time. Have a nice day." I hang the phone up. I start walking back to my truck to check on it, hoping it has cooled down by now so I can get back to my hunt. I feel my pocket vibrate. "Huh?" I say and pull my phone out. It's the guy I just talked to. "Look, that's a starting price. I can negotiate some." "I will be honest, I got like 10 grand and that's it. I couldn't go any higher than that. So I don't see you meeting that price." I hear the guy sigh. "Look, I owe about five years of taxes on the place. I will make you a deal. I will sell it to you for ten grand but you will be liable for the taxes." Because I am used to living in the east where property taxes are outlandish, I am thinking the back taxes are $15,000 or maybe even $20,000. I sigh. "How much are the taxes?" "It's a lot, but not real bad because I had it deemed non-developed after dad died. So around $3,000 or $4,000." "Let me go down to the county tax office and check. if it's not too much, I will take you up on your offer," I tell him. "Sounds good. I hope to hear from you soon," he says, and we end the call. I get to the truck and, thinking this is almost my property, back the RV into the driveway and park it next to the trailer house. I unhook it from my truck, and punch in the county court house on my navigation app. Hell, I don't even know what state I'm, in let alone which county. Thank you, Waze, for being so awesome and telling me that information. I follow the route on Waze; the court house is about 20 miles from the property. The seller texted me all the information I would need. I get to the tax office and find out that the total tax bill is $2,511. I smile and call the seller. "We've got a deal. Where do you want to meet?" He gives me an address that is about 70 miles away. I tell him I will call when I get close. About an hour later I am pulling into a residential neighborhood. I continue up to the house number he gave me and call him. "I'm right outside. I meant to call before this but I didn't realize how close I was." "No problem; it's cool. I will be right out." A guy walks out and I instantly think he really is a dick. I get out of my truck. "I guess we need to call a lawyer to draw up some paperwork or something." "No need, my neighbor Bob is a lawyer. I called him after you said we had a deal. I had him draw up a contract for the sale. I followed him inside his air cooled house and it felt nice. "Want a water or something?" "Water would be great." He grabs me one as we walk into the kitchen. "I tell you the only reason I'm selling it so cheap is I hate the place. My old man, he was nuts and he loved it out there. He kept saying the end of the world was coming. He was one of those nut jobs. That and you are the first person to call in two years. So i figure a bird in the hand and all that." I look over the contract. Everything seems to be in order, so I sign it. He signs it as well, at which point I hand him 10 grand in cash. Fuck, that was hard to part with! But now I own some land. I saw at the county building that the land didn't go back to the river; instead it actually went up into the hills and the woods. I liked that better anyway. I am already thinking of pushing the trailer house up into the woods where there is better cover and where it will be cooler in the summer and give more protection from the wind in the winter. I drive back to the tax office, show proof of ownership, and pay the taxes which are now officially in my name. I head back to the property, which I could only find by reversing the GPS route; it's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, which I think is fantastic. When I arrive, I let the awning out on the RV. I get a can of kind-of-still-frozen lemonade from the freezer, which is the goal of keeping it there as I want to drink it cold. I make a pitcher of lemonade, turn on the solar panels, and the RV comes to life. I hear all the appliances kick on and I smile. I pour a glass of lemonade, grab a folding chair and pop it open, and have a seat. I look at my old truck and tell him, "Well, Alejandro, we are home." I take a sip of the lemonade as I sit and just look out over the horizon until the sun goes down. Then I take a quick shower from the small water tank I have. It's a quickie: get wet, turn the water off, soap up, and rinse off. It's not great but it beats feeling gross. It does take a long time for me to get my new property in order. I get a job 30 miles away working at a home improvement store so I can make money and get the employee discount on the supplies I need. I meet a lot of great contractors who sell me leftovers for pennies on the dollar, too. Well, maybe it isn't so much the contractor as the site managers making a few dollars off the books. It isn't exactly legal but what the fuck do I care? I need things, they sell them cheap, and I buy them. All told it takes me almost exactly two years to get the trailer house moved uphill and set up. I ran new septic and water lines. I have a cistern to collect water as well as a well. I have two wind turbines and several solar panels. I make money creating power every month. I'm not getting rich, but it's a lot better to get a check for $300 a month instead of a bill. I have a really nice garden now in its second year of growth. I have wood stacked up everywhere for when winter hits. I am very prepared for anything. I don't like guns but I did buy a 12 gauge and a 9mm, I figure just in case. I also bought a rifle for hunting. There's no reason to create a wonderland just for someone to come by, kill me, and take it. Not after I put in all this work. No, I will fight to keep it. I even built a little garage big enough for my old truck. I have a massive greenhouse I built in the woods in the cleared area from which I got a lot of the wood for winter. I have a few weed plants in there. For some reason, weed's not legal here. Crazy people! I use some of the weed to kind of supplement my income. I only sell to people I know and trust, like a lot of the managers I buy shit from. What are they going to do, tell on me for selling some weed when they steal their bosses blind? Last year I canned enough from the garden that I had to turn one bedroom into a pantry. Now the second bedroom is filling up too. I keep store-bought supplies in there, such as several bags of sugar. I would buy a 50 pound bag and fill sandwich-size zip-close bags with it, then seal it so it stays fresh; each bag holds about a pound. I have about two cows' worth of frozen or canned meat. I need to build a new building connected to the trailer to store things better, I think. I go out and measure it off and call one of my guys to tell him what I need. He says it's not a problem and that I should come by tomorrow and he will have it at his house. He wants a pound of primo weed for it; I'm thinking "Hell, it's a bargain." The weed just cost me a little time. I go to the RV in which I have pretty much all the batteries for the solar and everything else I just don't know what to do with. I also store about 20 pounds of weed at a time. I grab a sealed one-pound bag and think, "Fuck it," and grab an extra half pound just to say thanks. The next day I go to his house to meet him and he is pretty excited about my gift of the extra. I figure I won't be needing anything else for a while, so his well is drying up. He helps me load the materials on the truck and the trailer I bought last year. "Hey, I got some bunk beds you can have if you want. They are almost brand new. The wife and I got them for the kids before we moved, By the time we moved, they all had their own room and no one wanted the bunk beds." "Sure," I say with a shrug, thinking that maybe I can sell them or something. We load them on too, and I head back home. In the mornings I work to build the extension onto the trailer. At night I go into town and work at the home improvement store. It takes a few weeks to get it done, the shelving built, and everything moved out to the new addition. The bunk beds are in my way in the living room, so decide that i will set them up so I can take pictures and sell them on Craigslist or something. Once I finish those tasks, I go to bed exhausted from a long day, hell, a long week, and I sleep really well. I wake up the next morning and check the news on my phone. The premonition has started to come true. When I was a kid we all were scared the Soviet Union would attack us. Then China. But what did it, what killed our country, was self interest. Self interest of the politicians in Washington. The same ones that created a massive debt that we had no choice but to default on. Hyper-inflation hit literally overnight. I saw the riots in the streets. I said to myself, well, it's happening. I guess I may never leave this place again. I cry for a good while at the senseless loss of so many lives. After six months, communications were gone. No more news, no more internet. No more mail or checks from the light company. Society as we know it has ended. I had been waiting for this and I had bought several motion detectors with cameras attached to them and little solar panels to power them. I started setting them up as far from the trailer as I could and still pick up the reception. I would put each camera on a tree out of sight, and shimmy up the tree to conceal the small solar panel, about the size of my palm. At the end of a few weeks, I have about thirty cameras set up. I should have bought a cow or a goat. I have the kind of milk you don't have to refrigerate until it's opened, and I do have about a hundred gallons gallons of it. It will last a long time, but probably not as long as I need it to; short-sighted I think. I hope I didn't make any other mistakes like that. Ones that could be detrimental to my survival. I get into a pretty good routine. Right after the crash, winter hit, and it is a long, hard winter with lots and lots of snow. I don't want to burn wood because the smoke may attract people, and that I definitely don't want, so I mostly use mostly the electric heating system. It works really well. I produce more power than I need, so I could keep it as warm as I want, which was about 70F. I like that temperature and I like sweaters; I was quite comfortable. All winter long I smoke a hell of a lot of weed and watch lots of media I have saved. Spring finally arrives and I start taking plants from the greenhouse to the garden and planting them. I have a privacy fence that completely surrounds the garden. I told people it was to keep deer out, which is partially true. But now I want it to prevent people from seeing the garden if they happen to drive by. On the other hand, no one has come by in months, so it's pretty bad out there, I figure. Now that it's springtime, I've got to work my ass off, so no more weed until I'm done working. Afterward I can act like I'm Snoop Dogg, or Cheech and Chong from years past. Smoke like Bob Marley, baby. Make Willy Nelson look like a beginner. OK, probably not that, but I will smoke some and relax. It keeps me calm because I'm on edge all the time, always worried someone is coming. I must be prepared. I go another month and think I am lonely as fuck out here. I should have gotten a dog or a cat or something. This may actually be my undoing. Am I going to become Tom Hanks and start talking to a volleyball? No, fuck all that noise. A few more months passed and it was nearly fall. I was done with my gardening for the day. I should have gotten some chickens, too. That's so obvious in fucking hindsight. I sit down and grab my weed pipe and load a bowl. Just as I fire it up, one of the cameras pings that it's been activated. I glance over expecting to see another deer when I'm shocked. I see three figures. One larger and two smaller. I zoom in. Oh my god, it's......