When possible, he observed the Rule of Three. To every imaginable problem, he planned three possible solutions. Water jugs, filtration tabs, charcoal filters. Rifle, pistol, semiautomatic.
At ten minutes to midnight, on the final night of the millennium, he filled the bathtubs. When the lights went out, Victor Prine would be ready. He wore a halogen headlamp, an updated version of the light his father had worn underground. His night-vision goggles waited next to the door.
But at the stroke of midnight, the lights stayed on. The TV didn’t even flicker. Victor stepped outside and saw, in the distance, his stepbrother’s porch light. The night sky was clear and cold.
The initial disappointment was crushing. Later he saw the experience for what it was, the world’s most elaborate dress rehearsal. The real collapse was coming. It was only a matter of time until Shit Hit The Fan (SHTF).
America had been built on self-sufficiency, but modern man had forgotten those lessons. To the average flabby, pampered American, water came from plastic bottles. Food came from the drive-thru window. Take away his cell phone and internet and he’d be helpless as a child. After three days he’d strangle his own mother to get a piece of bread.
Mankind had been given fair warning. For those who chose not to hear it, Victor had no sympathy. There were people in town who’d made serious money on their mineral rights, and blew it on foolishness. A local jagoff named Wally Fetterson had quit his mail-carrying job, bought a new truck and a motorboat. In his backyard he’d dug a goddamn swimming pool. When SHTF, he’d run crying to the government begging for a handout. And this was a White man! The country was so far gone that even the White people had that freeloader mentality, like the government owed them something.
When SHTF, Wally Fetterson would be banging on Victor’s door.
The collapse was coming. Forget Y2K and natural disasters and nuclear Armageddon. In the end it would come down to numbers: the White race at the mercy of all others, the immense and cresting brown wave.
Organized society was nine meals away from anarchy.
When SHTF, Victor would be just fine.
He lingered a moment, looking around him with satisfaction. It always soothed him to visit his preps. He shut off the light and climbed the stairs.
IT ALL CAME DOWN TO NUMBERS.
This was the organizing principle of democracy, a truth baked into the system: The majority owned the minority. In a well-functioning democracy, the minority was the majority’s bitch.
The Blacks understood this better than anyone, having spent hundreds of years on the wrong side of the equation. And Black people were no fools. For centuries, now, they’d been growing their numbers, industriously fucking and birthing, and their efforts had paid off. Already they dominated professional sports; they’d taken over colleges and universities, and infiltrated the military. They had elected their very own president.
You had to hand it to them.
Blaming the Blacks was too easy. The fault—Victor knew this—lay with his own race, which had squandered its advantage. The White heroes who’d tamed the vast wilderness of North America, who’d built the greatest civilization in human history, were an endangered species—slated for extinction, their numbers dwindling. The White race had surrendered its majority with no thought to the consequences, no appreciation of what would be lost.
If you looked at historical birth rates, as Victor had done, the roots of the problem were clear.
A Black female born in 1950—the same year as Victor Prine—produced, on average, four viable offspring. A White female born that year produced only two. Since then, the situation had only worsened. Today’s underachieving White female produced only one precious Caucasian child.
The numbers were abysmal.
The numbers came directly from Doug Straight, his only trusted source.
A change was coming. White people, if they knew this, bore the knowledge lightly. They stumbled through life like oversized children, spending and consuming and giggling at sitcoms, a tribe of obese dimwits in NFL-licensed sportswear. As far as Victor could tell, White people didn’t have a clue.
One viable offspring. This was the White female’s pathetic output—even after the so-called sexual revolution of the 1970s, which Victor did not experience personally. In the 1970s people were going at it like rabbits, sex in groups, among strangers, sex in every wild permutation. And yet, despite all that fucking, birth rates had dropped precipitously—but only among White women.
Victor did not experience it personally, having spent most of that decade in the joint, but he was aware of it happening. He read about it in the magazines of the day.
One viable offspring. He chalked it up to laziness. A pregnancy took only nine months, and females were living longer and longer. A healthy one could squeeze out an entire baseball team with decades to spare. But the White female, for whatever reason, refused to see this. Nature had entrusted her with an awesome power she was incompetent to manage. The White female lacked the focus and discipline, the practical intelligence, to understand what her life was for.
AT SUPPERTIME HE WANDERED OVER TO RANDY’S, LURED BY THE smell of fried meat. His stepbrother lived in a tin-roof shack at the bottom of the hill, a square box with half its shingles missing. He lived exactly as he always had, though he was sitting on a pile of frack money big enough to tear down all of Bakerton and rebuild it from scratch.
They were as close as brothers, though they were not blood-related. Childhood had sealed them together, their two parents careening into each other like drunken motorists, skid marks and squealing tires, the sky raining broken glass. The two boys grew up in the wreckage, or maybe they were the wreckage. And here they were sixty years on, two odd, lonely men growing older and now old.
Victor was blood-related to no living person he knew.
Randy was sitting in the kitchen, at an old card table draped with a vinyl cloth. At his elbow was his dinner, a gristly pork chop spread with ketchup. As always, he was staring at his laptop.
“You hungry?” he asked. “I can make you a chop.”
“I can’t eat,” Victor grumbled. “My fucking tooth.”
Randy’s laptop was old and monstrously large, so heavy that it caused the card table to bow in the middle. He could afford a new computer, he could afford it many hundred thousand times over, but he was not the sort of person to replace a thing that still worked. The computer was slow, but fast enough for his purposes, buying junk on Craigslist and jerking off to internet porn.
“Luther is selling his generator. I seen it on Craigslist,” said Randy. “Same model as our one. You might could take a look.”