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in their normal spots where I’d know where to find them, even in the dark. I had plenty of other guns here, but all of them were hidden away in the safe. I laid the new Saiga along with my AK on the work bench along the wall, and I put the Glock on the table by the couch that I slept on as a bed, everything else would have to wait. Then without much trouble, I easily drifted off to sleep.
    The next morning, or in reality the next afternoon, after waking up I knew I should have eaten something the night before prior to virtually passing out. My day’s scheduled activities consisted of eating and cleaning. After lighting a small fire in the stove, smoke signature be damned, I put a big pot of water on to use to re-hydrate some food and to take a not so cold sponge bath. My first priority was to eat and replace the calories I’d burned over the last few days.  
    Opening up the door to the utility closet I used as a pantry, I did a quick scan of the food I had stored away and made my selection. I wasn’t what I would have called a “survivalist” although I now knew some that would paint me with that brush. I lived where even in town, when we lost power from a good winter storm of the kind we got once or twice a year; it might stay out for a week or more. You had to have some wood, water, and food in the cupboards. I may have taken that to a bit of a higher level, but besides believing that things in the world could not continue as they had been going, thinking that something was going to have to give at some point, I grew up reading books about the frontier settlers and Indians, and watching movies that romanticized the end of the world. It had all just kind of fallen into place for me, to say nothing of Clint’s influence.  
    And then there were the guns, oh so many guns. Again though, I came by it honestly. Shooting was my golf. It was my hobby. I generally didn’t collect for the value of the guns, I collected to learn and to shoot. I liked pushing myself to be more accurate, or faster, or able to transition better… it was fun for me. Sure I concentrated on military style stuff, but I had a few trap shotguns and a couple dedicated hunting rifles… even a black powder musket, but these days none of those saw as much time as my “working guns.” Those were the AK’s, the M1, or any of the other various high capacity “assault rifles”.  
    After eating, bathing and brushing my teeth I nearly felt human again. The rest of the evening was spent half-heartedly unpacking, cleaning, and restocking my pack. Later that night I sat out on a blanket in front of the wood stove, sipping from my small allotment of scotch, and listening to the fire crackle. I was remembering what it was like to relax indoors. From the amount of time I spent in the woods, I was relaxed out there too, but it wasn’t the same as having a roof and four walls. I never had the same issue that guys coming back from Vietnam had had with not being able to sleep indoors or on a bed after being out in the bush and sleeping on the ground for so long.
    All in all I had a decent little setup for myself. I slept on a nice couch, read by solar lights at night and stayed pretty comfortable. The trick was not letting anyone know how comfortable I was.  
    I was a hermit and I liked it that way, even knowing that seclusion was unsustainable. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to just sit back and watch the destruction, but I couldn’t make it on my own either. That was the selfish part of why I did what I did for the families around me. I didn’t believe I needed the psychological side of human interaction, but it did give me something to do. I had a few skills and a bit of a background so if I could help my friends and their families, and they could cook a better meal than me, why not? They really were some of the best friends I had before the collapse, but with the way everything went down, keeping my distance kind of fell into place