Chapter 1
Strange Times
“If God is watching us, we might as well be interesting.”
~Solomon Short~
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Working as a nurse in a hospital took a special kind of person. Jane Goodwin was this special type of person. She met the daily challenges she faced in her job with compassion and caring. It was hard, rewarding work that took a person from the highs of saving someone’s life to the lows of watching a child die and being unable to save him. Those intense moments when someone’s life hung in the balance was what it was all about. Meeting those challenges with skill and calmness was second nature to her. It was sometimes easy to forget they were people you were working on and not just bodies that required your services. She made a conscious decision to never forget they were people with feelings and loved ones waiting and praying for them to recover. It showed in everything she did. She was respected by both doctors and colleagues. Her patients loved her and she usually had a kind word for almost anyone.
She always thought of everyone’s needs and the little details that brightened even the most horrendous day for her charges and coworkers. Everyone said she was much too giving, and much too kind. They seemed to forget those quick stinging rebukes she could deal out if she caught you in a mistake.
Jane understood the stress everyone was under especially lately with all the new biological training they were doing. Since the anthrax scare of 2001-2002, this new training was mandatory at most hospitals. Jane and her coworkers were taught the guidelines and procedures that were set up to help lessen the impact of contamination. Containment, isolation and biological sterile procedures were for the protection of health care workers. They were taught that using these strict guidelines would stop the spread of a biological contaminant. Or so they said. It was all just a theory. It had not been proven yet. Still, it was better than nothing, Jane thought.
How little people truly understood was about to become painfully clear. The U. S. and the rest of the world were not ready for the devastating effects and the speed of infection a highly contagious virus would cause. Nor were they ready for the deadly results that would follow.
When people said how good she was she always laughed and said, “You have it all wrong. I am very selfish. I do it because it makes me feel good.” They would laugh and shake their heads at her, not quite understanding her meaning. They just didn’t get it at all, she thought. The running joke on her floor was “And who takes care of you?” She would always smile and say, “Joe does.” Joe was her husband.
Jane’s husband, Joe Goodwin, was a retired Army Sergeant. Joe and Jane had a small twenty-acre farmstead in southern Minnesota with chickens and a pig they raised for butchering every summer. It was a good life. Joe was a hard-working man and very good at his job. He was very down to earth and practical. Like most folks, he always concentrated on his job and daily living concerns. At home it seemed there were never enough hours in the day to complete everything that needed to be done that day. Running a farmstead was not an easy thing to do and organize when the two caretakers also had full-time jobs. You could make lists of what you planned on accomplishing in a day and were happy if you really had the time to do half on the list. It seemed every job that should take x amount of time ended up taking twice to three times as long as it should. He thought, Just like contact with the enemy. That is how long any plan really lasts. You do the best you can.
They loved the life they had even if at times it was pretty frustrating trying to get everything done when they wanted. The running joke between them was how long and what jobs were on the “List.” Things were running a lot smoother since Joe retired.
In 2009, Joe went on a survivalist tangent. It started with watching a movie called 2012. It got him thinking and contemplating things out in the world. He then found out about the militia and what they were doing. The more he read and listened to the information, the worse he got. He started talking about the New World Order plans for mass genocide, the dollar collapsing and the H1N1 flu virus and how the vaccine was meant to kill off the earth’s population.
Joe always joked about the environmentalist and animal rights folks. He felt they were just a bunch of dope smoking hippies that were stoned one night and figured out a plan to make a living without working by bilking money out of women and children. They used women and children’s caring nature for animals and the environment to evoke an emotional response from them measured in how much money they could donate to the causes and to pay themselves a high salary. The hippies cried about animals being mistreated, the trees being cut down, bad water or whatever they could think up. The donations flew in from suckers all across the nation and the free loading hippies got set up in a great lifestyle. Of course, it was non-profit, but the salaries and expense accounts of these people were right up there in the six figures for most of them. How these people slept at night having school kids donating their lunch money for their fake causes was beyond Joe. What really upset him was most of the people believed them with a religious zeal. They preached it and shunned anyone who had a different viewpoint. They often labeled those non believers as evil.
Joe was now turning into a full-time survivalist and he researched a lot of things on the internet. He worked on wind and solar power and bought bulk grains which he stored in fifty-five gallon drums. Before he became more survival minded, he used to collect some of the spilled over grain at the local grain mills to feed his chickens. He collected a few buckets each year and now he was collecting as many fifty-five gallon drums as he could get. Joe stored some gas with preservatives and switched their electric cook stove to a propane cook stove. A huge propane tank was purchased to store a few years’ worth of propane. Joe also stored some heating oil for the diesel generator he bought. He was buying up guns and ammo like mad and his reloading room for ammo looked like he could make enough bullets for an army. He bought some gold and silver to store for currency when the dollar finally collapsed.
Joe’s old Army buddy, Preston Riley, had just retired in Madison, Wisconsin. Preston and Joe stayed in touch with each other through emails when Preston couldn’t visit. Preston was a helicopter mechanic and was now working at a small airfield. His wife divorced him a few years ago and he was now living with a woman named Sharon who loved the bright lights, fancy restaurants, and parties. He should have known better than to get involved with another city woman after divorcing his first wife.
Preston was an outdoor person like Joe who liked to hunt and fish. Preston bought twenty acres of land right next to Joe and Jane when they bought their farmstead. He bought and set up a small two bedroom trailer for deer hunting. He came around once a month to visit and check on his property. Joe and Preston hand dug a well and they added a few solar panels to the trailer to run the lights and radio, but nothing fancy at all. Preston found a wood burning hot water heater on the internet and installed it. It was his one luxury for hunting season. Nothing beat a hot shower. A solar panel with a twelve volt water pump pressurized the plumbing. Joe joked it would have been easier to run three hundred-foot-long extension cords out to the trailer from his property. Preston always worried about security; he took down the solar panels and stored everything inside the trailer out of sight when he was gone. The trailer was grounded on two ends and the metal sides and roof provided plenty of protection from the elements.
After listening to all the information Joe picked up on about the things going on in the world, Preston decided to make this his SHTF (When the Shit Hits The Fan) retreat, too. Preston felt it couldn’t hurt to be prepared for a disaster or whatever. One thing the military taught him was to cover your ass. If nothing ever happened, he had a cool hunting camp. It was a win-win situation as far as he was concerned. Another thing the military taught him was to not trust politicians. Joe felt that with poli-ticians running the world, anything could happen. They didn’t always have the people’s best interest in mind.
Jane put up with these two, thinking of them as boys playing end of the world games kind of like a mild mid-life crisis. They weren’t city type people, so instead of flashy sports cars and fashionable clothes they played ‘what if it was the end of the world?’ When Preston came up once a month to visit, most of the time it was fun. They had good times and laughed a lot. But lately the talk had gotten out of hand, she thought. There was way too much talk about the New World Order and stuff
about the powers that be trying to crash the whole financial system and releasing a biological weapon to kill off 90% of humans on the planet. This kind of talk gave her the chills. She was recalling the recent biological training she had undergone. All of this was running through her mind, giving her lightning-like glimpses of the horrible pictures and video evidence she had been shown of the horrible results of biological attacks.
Joe started doing deep research into the top ecology people. Those no good hippie people were on a power trip. He wasn’t sure if they were really insane or started to believe their own press or what. They were openly calling for a mass genocide of people to save the planet for the animals. How insane was that? Even some people like Patrick Geryl in his book, How to Survive 2012, had really crazy stuff like that in it. In his book on page 184, a heroic battle for the wisdom cult had the legend of the rainbow warrior. Under the symbol of the rainbow all races and all religions of the world will unite. Together they will proclaim the great wisdom of living in harmony with each other and creations of the Earth. The ones who are teaching this will become known as the rainbow warriors. Although they are warriors, they will have loving hearts and carry with them the “Old Ones’” knowledge and spiritual way of living. And they will do no harm to any living creature. The legend tells they will be a FORCE of peace and harmony.
On page 185 in the author’s own words, it said: ‘We will conquer. We simply have to. ONLY WE WITH A WELL ORGANIZED VISION WILL BE ABLE TO RE-ESTABLISH CIVILIZATION. And like a phoenix, we will arise from our ashes, ruling the world in an ecological way with an essential message for all future generations.’ There is a lot more of the same kind of thing, but it was clear in his writing what he was saying. The eco-cult warriors will make everyone become vegetarians or they will kill you. That was the message, loud and clear.
This is some whacked out stuff, Joe thought. You have got to be kidding if anyone would really believe this crap. He found so many more books, articles and manifestos with the same kind of theme. They were about death to the humans and a worshipful idealistic attitude to the animals. There were thousands of them all over the place. This was some crazy, scary stuff. He did more research and found that this stuff was being taught in colleges. It was being taught in grade schools, too. Remember the kids giving up their lunch money to save the animals? Oh boy, he thought.
Joe shared all of his research with Jane and Preston. He wanted to believe this was just some ranting from a far left wing extremist, but these folks were organized, and may number in the millions. What was truly scary is that these people were so far out in left field that they hate their own species. How crazy are these lunatics? How much power do they really have? Are they collecting guns, ammo, and bomb making information? Are they studying bio weapons to release on the public? These were his concerns. And how serious were they, really?
Just how far out there were these crazy people? They truly were pathological human haters , and like the movie, The Body Snatchers, their madness spread around the world. How often do you hear people say that there are too many people in the world? Really? Who promoted them to God to say and judge when there are too many people? They say everything is mankind’s fault. We are in the middle of the fourth mass extinction. Well, that was a theory better known as a lie. You see, some academics with too much time on their hands and not enough brain power made up a computer model and said mankind was wiping out five thousand species a year. They were gone, completely extinct. A reporter back in the 1990s called up the “so called” experts and asked for a list of the top 100 animals that had gone extinct in the world. They said, “Sorry, we don’t have that list.” The reporter asked, “Okay, how about the top ten?” They replied, “Sorry, we don’t have that list.” The reporter was now getting desperate for facts to write the story. The reporter asked, “Can you name one species that has gone extinct in the last year because of mankind?” They answered, “No.” The reporter asked, “Why not?” They answered, “Because it is a computer model and not based on what is really happening in the world.”
Joe and Preston talked about this bio weapon that could wipe out 90% of the human population. How insane was that? The nutcases must surely be running the asylum in America. This comes right back to the bunny and tree hugger crowd, who openly bragged about wanting the same thing. Surely Homeland Security was watching these crazy academic communists in America, right?
No, they weren’t. The body snatchers have their own people in charge of Homeland Security. In a twist of irony, Homeland Security ignores the reality of real American haters. They are real people haters who target instead the so-called right wing extremists, like Christians, who homeschool their children, and our Veterans. It is like the Nazis’ final solution with America in charge instead of Germany. How crazy was that? Who would have thought this could ever happen here in America? The world had really gone truly insane.
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