Krulos - Apocalypse any day now: deep underground with Americas doomsday preppers

To Katemy zombie apocalypse survival partner

Copyright 2019 by Tea Krulos

All rights reserved

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

814 North Franklin Street

Chicago, Illinois 60610

ISBN 978-1-61373-641-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Is available from the Library of Congress.

Cover and interior design: Jonathan Hahn

Cover image: Redd Angelo/Unsplash

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

Introduction
Two Minutes to Midnight

Blood Moon Prophecy

When the SHTF

Rose

My Zombie Con Journal

Apocalypse Apple Pie

Monster Planet

Survival

Doomsday Bunkers of the Rich and Famous

The Sixth Extinction

Bugging Out

Wastelanders

One-Way Ticket to Mars

Epilogue
I Twisted My Ankle and Watched Four Documentaries on Nostradamus

T he Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was created in 1945 by scientists at the University of Chicago who had worked on the Manhattan Project. After the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the group realized that nuclear devices could not only easily destroy an entire city but, in an escalated firefight, the entire human race.

Two years later, the group created the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic clock face that gives a representation of how close we are ticking toward midnight, or the annihilation of the planet. Every year, the Bulletins Science and Security Board evaluates how itchy humanitys nuclear trigger fingers have become. The board members also now consider other factors like climate change, biotechnology, and emerging technologies, and update the Doomsday Clock accordingly. Is the big hand being sucked into the twelve at the top of the final hour, or is it slipping backward to give us a few more precious minutes?

The clock has rarely given us the comfort of being earlier than a quarter to twelve. In 1991, with the Cold War finally over, the clock spun back the furthest it ever hasto seventeen minutes to midnight. This was a huge improvement from 1984, the height of the mutually assured destruction days of the Cold War, when the Doomsday Clock hand hovered ominously at three minutes to midnight.

In January 2015 the Bulletin revealed that things werent looking so great. The minute hand had crept forward again to three to midnight, the first time since the 1984 Cold War days. It was, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted in 2016, with the clocks hands still poised at 180 seconds from the End, not good news.

Throughout 2015 and 2016 you could practically watch the minute hand twitch. During the bombastic 2016 presidential campaign, Republican candidates tried to outdo each other on how tough they would get on terrorist organizations. Future president Donald Trump told an audience during his campaign that he would go after ISIS-controlled oil fields to disable their finances.

I would bomb the shit out of em, he told a jubilant crowd in Iowa. I would just bomb those suckers. Thats right. I would blow up the pipes every single inch. There would be nothing left.

Not to be outdone, Republican candidate Ted Cruz said the United States should carpet bomb them into oblivion. I dont know if sand can glow in the dark, but were going to find out.

In 2017, with President Donald J. Trump in office just a few days, the Bulletin advanced the Doomsday Clock forward thirty seconds (the first time the clock has ever been set to a half minute) to 2.5 minutes to midnight. The board has decided to act, in part, based on the words of a single person: Donald Trump, the Bulletin stated. Although it noted Trumps loose use of language, it cautioned,

Just the same, words matter, and President Trump has had plenty to say over the last year. Both his statements and his actions as president-elect have broken with historical precedent in unsettling ways. He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the US nuclear arsenal. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security, including the conclusions of intelligence experts. And his nominees to head the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency dispute the basics of climate science.

In short, even though he has just taken office, the presidents intemperate statements, lack of openness to expert advice, and questionable cabinet nominations have already made a bad international security situation worse.

We are back to an age of great uncertainty, one of the Bulletin members said. They reminded us that President Trump had just been in office for six days, and unless things changed, we would continue to tick forward.

That prediction soon reflected reality. On January 25, 2018, I woke up early to watch the Bulletins announcement on a livestream from their press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. It had been a year the Bulletin described as perilous and chaotic. The clock, the Bulletin revealed, had now moved to two minutes to midnight. This is the closest the clock has ever been, tied with one other time in historythe clock was moved to two to midnight in 1953, the year the Soviets detonated their first H-bomb.

To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the dangerand its immediacy, the Bulletin reported in their 2018 Doomsday Clock statement. The clocks movement, they said, was an urgent warning of global danger. The statement, written by the Bulletins Science and Security Board, also said they were deeply concerned about the loss of public trust in political institutions, in the media, in science, and in facts themselvesa loss that the abuse of information technology has fostered.

But the statement concluded that it would still be possible to rewind the clock if citizens demand action from their governments: They can demand action to reduce the existential threat of nuclear war and unchecked climate change. They can seize the opportunity to make a safer and saner world.

Until that happens, tick tock.

How long, dear Lord, our Savior / Wilt thou remain away? / Our hearts are growing weary / Of thy so long delay

M ILLERITE H YMN

I t seems like the world is always about to end, doesnt it?

That was the thought on my mind the evening of September 27, 2015, as I hiked up a hill in Reservoir Park here in my hometown, Milwaukee, with a small group of friends. The top of the hill was soon scattered with people sitting on blankets and lawn chairs, armed with telescopes, binoculars, and cameras. This was the night of the blood moon, a rare alignment of the sun, moon, and Earth. At first, there was an air of disappointment as the sky was obscured with gray clouds. But then the clouds drifted away and there it was! A gigantic, magnificent deep orange of a moon suspended in the night sky.

Looking around the hilltop, I noticed that people seemed excited about the astronomical event, but in a calm, wonderstruck type of way, not in an Oh no, the sky is falling way. Not everyone on Earth was having such a casual evening, though, for this night had been predicted as the End. The blood moon prophecy, as it was referred to, had originated from calculations in 2008 by a pastor named Mark Biltz of El Shaddai Ministries in Washington State.

According to Biltzs calculations, the blood moon was the final sequence of a tetrad of total lunar eclipses that had begun on April 15, 2014. Piecing together clues from the books of Joel, Acts, and Revelation, he connected the lunar eclipses to a clear portent of the end times.