Click here for a consolidated PDF version of all the Gonggong Gone posts.

I’m back, did you miss me?

If you’re foolish enough to follow this blog and even more foolish to care about its author, you may have wondered what I’ve been up to for the last umpteen months — even I’ve forgotten when I made my previous entry. I’ve been busy indulging myself writing long-form fiction.

Before the end of last year, I chanced upon, or rather the YouTube algorithm shoved in my face, a cute little video about the Kuiper belt object Gonggong. I think we can all agree “Gonggong” is the coolest dwarf planet name ever. As I motor-mouthed Gonggong, Gonggong Gone popped out. Sweet alliteration, John; you should write a story. I had a sweet title but nothing else. Then, maybe thinking about The Wandering Earth, a ridiculous Chinese science fiction movie about building millions of giant fusion thrusters on Earth, canceling Earth’s rotation, and propelling the entire planet out of the solar system (and you thought 2012 sucked). I wondered what it would be like if Earth suddenly stopped feeling solar gravity. Gonggong Gone got going.

While writing the story, I tried some new things. Most of my blog posts start as barely legible longhand scribbles. Despite a lifetime of writing, editing, and executing code online, I still write with pen and paper; it helps me get things out without pursuing typographic chimeras. I usually resort to longhand when I’m stuck, and the words will not come, but whenever I ink, I know I’ll soon face a big transcription and editing job. For Gonggong Gone, I wrote the whole thing, all 25,000 words, on my computer.

I use Word on both Windows and Mac systems mostly because I know it well enough to get on with writing and because Word hosts a variety of helpful writing aids. I found Grammarly and various AI chatbots helpful. Grammarly fixes spelling errors and does a good job of punctuating sentences. I am a piss poor punctuator. Grammarly also suggests alternate ways of laying out the clauses in your sentences. I sometimes take its suggestions and sometimes not. Grammarly doesn’t seem to pay a lot of attention to paragraph context.

AI chatbots are capable of spewing out entire stories when prompted. Unfortunately, their stories are deeply derivative and don’t sound like you. If you’re writing, use your own voice. Chatbots shine when responding to precise prompts like, “Rewrite this paragraph without the word ‘was.’” They will take your text and often find good context-sensitive alternatives, and even better when used surgically like this, they don’t change your voice.

While Word met most of my needs, Gonggong Gone’s length quickly exposed some shortcomings. Grammarly does not handle large documents. Word files, being binaries, do not “diff” and version well. This was a problem. Fortunately, your fearless correspondent is a longtime LaTeX user. LaTeX scales to absurdly huge and complex documents. It’s geared to academic and mathematical writing, so handling vanilla text is almost beneath it. I fixed my scale and diff problems with Pandoc, GitHub, and some custom J, bash, and batch scripts.

While Gonggong Gone turned out OK, I believe the best thing to come out of this project is my template for composing and managing very long text documents. I will use this J script to create working story directories.

Here are the first two sections of Gonggong Gone. I ripped off the idea of descriptive section titles from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Always steal from the best. The story sprawls over six blog posts. You can find the complete story by clicking the title and downloading the linked PDF. The PDF is better formatted to boot.

Gonggong Gone

an occultation

Alex Burdick arrived at his observing spot as the Sun dropped below the horizon. Stepping out of his old SUV, he studied the deep orange and wine-red sunset. Vivid horizon colors indicate superb air transparency, low relative humidity, and dust-free winds. Such signs augur excellent sky-watching conditions. He took a few minutes to enjoy the deepening dusk. To the northeast, the ever-darkening Owyhee mountains blocked the lights of Boise, Idaho, and its ever-expanding, light-polluting suburbs. He stood only 120 kilometers from Boise, not far enough to escape the city’s lights. From here, on new moon nights, he could see Boise’s light dome creeping about five degrees over the crests of the Owyhee’s. Boise was the only nearby city. The next closest source of light pollution, the small town of Winnemucca, Nevada, sat about two hundred kilometers to the southwest.

Tonight, the weather looked promising, but the bright half-crescent Moon did not. Alex usually skipped moonlit nights. He was a deep-sky guy. Alex enjoyed hunting down faint galaxies with his Dobsonian reflector telescope, and bright moonlit skies got in the way. Moonlight would not be a problem tonight. He came to see the Moon block or occult, the bright star Spica.

He’d been sky-watching for decades but had never seen a bright star occultation. Unlike hunting for faint galaxies, bright star occultations are no-brainers. Look for the Moon, duh, and find the bright star near its disk. Wait and watch. If clouds don’t get in the way, you’ll see the star wink out. If the wink is on the dark side of the crescent, it’s dramatic. If the weather holds, you’ll see the same star wink back in. You don’t need any equipment. Your eyes will do. For tonight, Alex didn’t pack his Dobsonian; he brought two pairs of binoculars and his iPhone with its sky chart app. This evening would be a low-energy affair. He’d sit on his folding observing chair, watch the occultation, wait for the Moon to set, bathe in Milky Way light, and sleep in his car. In the morning, he would drive back to Boise to finalize his divorce.

Alex dragged his folding chair into a small circular patch of bare ground near his parked car. The patch was surrounded by tall sage plants, filling the air with their perfect odor. In addition to perfuming the air, the sage helped block car headlights. Alex shared his observing spot with other members of the Boise Astronomical Society. Most nights, he was alone, but sometimes, others would show up and blind him with their headlights. The first rule of naked eye observing is to protect your night-adapted eyes.

With his chair pointed toward the Moon, Alex returned to his car and dug out his graphene-heated jacket. When he first heard about battery-heated jackets, he thought they were scams, but online reviews were positive. Some of his fellow amateur astronomers said they worked, so Alex forked over a few hundred bucks and tried the best-reviewed one. It worked so well he spent another hundred bucks to get a second jacket battery. Alex had spent many long hours sitting in the dark watching stars. In Idaho, even summer nights could get chilly. With snow on the ground sitting in the dark beside his Dobsonian or astrograph could get damn unpleasant. The heated graphene jacket, especially its hand-warming pockets, which he used to warm eyepieces, turned cold nights into beach days. And, when Alex learned mid-20th century Mount Wilson astronomers used electrically heated flight jackets while sitting at the prime focus and manually guiding the 100-inch telescope, he didn’t even feel like a girly man for pussying it out in an electric jacket.

Slipping the jacket on, he returned to his chair and checked his location on his phone.

The phone’s GPS app coordinates did not match his previously recorded observing position.

“What the hell?”

The GPS app was about ten kilometers off. He took several GPS positions, and every single one of them differed from his stored position. The worse readings had him about a hundred kilometers away. It was probably Apple’s recent iPhone upgrade. It only takes one pooched parameter to wreck calculations. Somebody somewhere screwed up. No doubt Apple would soon push an emergency software patch along with profuse apologies. Let’s hope planes don’t fly into each other. Alex was tired of Apple’s bullshit, and he was considering divorcing his iPhone.

Unable to get a consistent GPS reading, Alex used his previously stored GPS coordinates to override the location settings on his phone’s sky chart app. He centered the app on the Moon and held up the dim red night vision sky chart to the sky. Comparing the sky to the iPhone screen, it seemed like Spica was farther from the Moon than it should have been. Humans don’t perceive small sky angles accurately. The apparent discrepancy didn’t bother Alex. It was two hours until the occultation. He would keep an eye on the Moon and Spica while sitting and watching the stars fill the sky.

While waiting, Alex traded text messages with The Occulters. The Occulters were a haphazardly organized online group of amateur astronomers trading real-time observations. Tonight, they were scattered all over western North America and waiting for Spica to disappear behind the Moon. Like Alex, many group members reported whacky GPS readings. The GPS problem was widespread. Observers east of Alex would see the event a few moments before him.

As the occultation time drew nearer, Alex texted, “Spica is too far from the Moon.”

Many seconded his observation. Nate, a well-equipped observer in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, measured the angular separation from the center of the Moon’s disk to Spica. The angle was significantly greater than it should have been. Alerted to the discrepancy, eastern observers prepared to precisely time Spica’s disappearance.

At the expected time of the occultation, Spica was still about half a moon diameter from the Moon’s limb. What?

Many observers sent frantic, “Are you seeing this?” messages.

The Occulters watched in disbelief as the expected occultation time came and went. The Moon never blocked Spica! This wasn’t a software problem. Some checked printed versions of the RASC Observers Handbook; sure enough, Spica should have been blocked. Something was out of whack with the heavens.

Alex didn’t know what to think. It was probably some longstanding systematic error in occultation prediction math. Hell, it may be Spica-specific! How else could astute editors of ephemeris tables miss such a boner? There would be mea culpas aplenty tomorrow, along with numerous snide X posts about trusting the settled science. Others were equally puzzled, and some started checking the positions of other objects. Nate, in Cloudcroft, claimed Mars’s position was slightly off. Oh, come on! Alex didn’t want to get into it; he gave up and retreated to a sleeping bag in his car.

Before going to sleep, his son Doug called.

“Hey, Dad, Mom called. She wanted me to remind you about the meeting tomorrow.”

Annoyed, Alex said, “I haven’t forgotten.”

“How did the sky watching go?”

“The occultation didn’t happen.”

“What? How’s that possible? Did you get the date wrong?”

“No. It wasn’t just me. It’s got to be some stupid mistake. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to turn off my phone. I don’t want it pinging all night long. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Alex worried about Doug. Life had been kicking them both around. Two years ago, Alex’s father died of prostate cancer. Alex sat by his side, watching kids play on a cracked sidewalk outside his father’s hospice room, when his dad, doped up on strong painkillers but still in agony, breathed his last. Six months after his dad’s death, Alice, his wife of twenty-nine years, left him because she was, in her words, “tired of his bullshit.” While absorbing these shocks, the worst landed like a trebuchet boulder. An illegal alien running a red light slammed into the passenger side of Doug’s car. Doug suffered minor injuries, but his pregnant wife Ellen was severely injured. She lived long enough to ride an expensive screaming ambulance to a nearby hospital, where she and her unborn baby perished. The illegal alien who killed Ellen and her baby didn’t have a license or insurance. Immigration authorities arrested him but inexplicably released him within days. He was never seen again.

Doug, numb with grief, exploded when unbelievable hospital and ambulance bills arrived. He had started a new job, and his benefits had not vested. Making things worse, Ellen had recently aged out of her parents’ useless “Obongocare” plan. Doug, a formidable 6-foot 5-inch muscular man, foolishly confronted his new employer about his insurance. Alarmed, they immediately fired him, citing his probationary status. Doug got stuck paying many thousands of dollars in medical and funeral expenses. Alex and Ellen’s parents helped, but it was a major blow to all and devastating for Doug.

Doug, depressed, unemployed, and bankrupt after paying Ellen’s medical and funeral expenses, moved back in with his father. For a few weeks Doug looked for jobs but slowly gave up and spent his days sequestered in his childhood bedroom playing X-Box games.

Alex encouraged him as much as he could, but he also boiled with repressed rage. He was mad at Doug’s shitty ex-employer, mad at immigration authorities, mad at his ex-wife, mad at Doug for moping about, and mad at himself for resenting the many thousands of dollars he contributed to Doug’s bills.

In the morning, Alex returned to Boise. Along the way, he saw many cars parked in roadside turnouts. People were out of their cars and talking to each other. Weird. Nobody willingly talks to strangers. At 10 Mile and McMillan, the Walmart parking lot was almost filled. It was a weekend, but it wasn’t a holiday. He would have stopped, but he had a meeting with his ex-wife and her dickhead lawyer, so he went home to take a shower and get dressed. Alex didn’t have to dress up and play the role of responsible caregiver. He would show up in a ketchup-stained MAGA hoody because it annoyed his ex and her soy-boy faggot California lawyer.

He wasn’t home ten minutes before his ex-wife called and told him their meeting was off. “Turn on your TV,” she commanded. Alex turned on the TV. All the local channels were doing breaking news.

Tides had ceased worldwide!

Numerous reporters from beaches, ports, and sea fronts all around the globe were reporting tides didn’t go out or come in as expected. The most panicky report came from a frightened New Brunswick, Canada weather lady. The famous Bay of Fundy tides had rolled out but only weakly returned, only to immediately go out again and settle neither in nor out.

Not only had the tides stopped, but communications with various spacecraft were also lost. The James Webb Space Telescope, The Parker Solar Probe, the Martian rovers, the Voyagers, and many others were incommunicado. Even more damaging, all GPS satellite constellations were reporting erroneous positions. The errors plagued American, Chinese, Russian, and European systems. Also, internet satellites were misbehaving. Ground connections were coming and going. TV news is dominated by smug, supercilious imbeciles promenading their holier-than-thou condescension to the world. Alex delighted in the white fear on their faces.

“You dumb twats don’t have a clue.”

He flipped over to YouTube and started doomscrolling X. Oh boy! His X astronomy boys were hyped way up. The lost occultation had triggered a tsunami of X posts. It wasn’t just amateurs who noticed; many major observatories also did. Reports asserted the positions of Venus and Mars relative to Earth were off. Even more alarming, lunar laser ranging experiments failed. Fortunately, some clever astronomers at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas succeeded in retargeting their lunar ranging laser after it stopped working. The new laser returns showed the Moon rapidly receding from the Earth.

The McDonald Hack, as it quickly became known on X, was simple. Go into your favorite solar system simulator program and set the Earth’s mass to zero while maintaining its orbital speed and angular momentum. Of course, this made no goddamn sense! It’s arbitrarily flattening spacetime around Earth and somehow insulating the entire planet from the rest of the solar system. The net effect is deadly simple. It’s like a planet-slinging God, whipping the Earth around the Sun on an invisible rope, had mysteriously let go.

Alex clicked around YouTube and saw Dr. Rebecca had posted a short video. Dr. Rebecca, his favorite science YouTuber, was a young British astrophysicist who cultivated an enormous YouTube following with her excellent videos. Dr. Rebecca’s typically cheerful demeanor was very subdued. Her evident concern alarmed Alex more than the predictable unhinged prattle of mainstream media morons. Dr. Rebecca quickly summarized the situation. About sixteen hours ago, the Earth departed from its solar orbit. The best-fixed star observations and repeated radar ranging of the receding Moon indicated that the Earth no longer orbited the Sun, and the Moon no longer orbited the Earth. Many observers reported seeing previously hidden regions on the backside of the Moon. And, as far as anyone could determine, Earth was flying straight out of the solar system. Solar system gravity no longer interacted with Earth. The gravity distortion extended at least as far as geosynchronous satellites. Geosynchronous satellites were still circling the Earth, but their orbits, as well as those of many other satellites, were perturbed by the sudden absence of the Sun and Moon’s gravity. Dr. Rebecca reiterated she and her colleagues had no explanation for this unprecedented suspension of the laws of gravity. Alex admired Dr. Rebecca’s analytic calm. He knew she knew how bad this was. Alex’s favorite X Meme, of a stupid cartoon dog sitting in a burning room, thinking, “This is Fine,” accurately summed things up.

After listening to Dr. Rebecca, he flipped the TV back to the news. Cable channels were, for once, correctly obsessing on runaway Earth. Fake news morons had a story worth covering. Runaway Earth preempted everything, but even now, hours into the end of the world, disparate impactor talking heads, as he contemptuously called them, were chasing the this is so much worse for gay, trans, black, indigenous, bipolar, obese, and vegan folks. Incredibly, it was a civilization ends and degenerates hardest hit, spin.

Thinking Doug needed to see this, he knocked on his son’s bedroom door, “Doug, get out here; you must see this!”

Doug grumbled but opened his bedroom door. Towering over his father, Doug rubbed his hands through his long, unkempt blond hair and said, “What?”

“Look at the tube.”

Doug watched the endlessly repeated news.

Two minutes later, he said, “This can’t be real; somebody is punking hard.”

“I wouldn’t have believed it either, but I’ve seen it. Last night’s occultation didn’t happen because the Earth wasn’t where it should have been.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Apparently not.’

“If this is for real, what’s going to happen?”

Alex hadn’t seriously considered this until Doug’s question. “If things don’t change, we’ll all freeze to death.”

Saying it out loud settled Alex’s mind; he knew what to do. This would be his last and greatest observing session. He turned off the TV. You don’t listen to idiots in a crisis.

Turning to Doug, Alex said, “We have to get out of here —pronto.”

“Where would we go? Isn’t the entire world screwed?”

“Remember the old mine in Grampa’s valley? We can hole up there.”

The expression on Doug’s face mixed calm alarm and suppressed excitement, like he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“What about mom?”

“She’s made her choice. I’m asking you.”

Doug took a long look at his dad before saying, “OK.”

“Good, we’ve got to pack as much as we can right away.”

They had to act quickly before the authorities made things worse. How dipshits like FEMA could make things worse than a runaway planet would require Herculean levels of fuck-ti-tude, but Alex figured the deep administrative state would rise to the occasion. Three things were clear: farming was over, famine was coming, and it wouldn’t be possible to shelter everyone from the punishing cold. They rushed through the house, grabbing suitcases and stuffing them with all their warm-weather clothes. Looting closets, they packed their bedsheets, pillows, blankets, and towels. Their clothes weren’t up to cryogenic temperatures, but it was too late for Amazon. They’d grab more clothes later. On the last run-through they packed the little electric ceramic heater on Doug’s bedroom windowsill; it might help where they were going. They stashed their suitcases, camping equipment, kitchen pots and pans, and toolboxes in the SUV.

While Doug loaded the car, Alex entered his mancave/office bedroom and gathered all his blank notebooks, pens, and pencils. Alex kept diaries. They were filled with inconsequential day-to-day drivel. For years, he had daydreamed about writing a Pepys diary: a magnum opus informing future generations about life in early 21st-century America. Alex knew his odds of winning Power Ball were better. Still, diaries would get a lot more interesting with the world ending! Maybe he’d write a Pepys diary after all. Too bad there would be no future generations to read it.

It didn’t matter now. Before doing anything else, Alex opened a blank notebook, wrote the date and time, and quickly scribbled a list of things to get. Knowing his list was incomplete, he left a few blank pages before writing. Life is over for everyone now!

Closing the notebook, Alex piled it with the others and fetched his wheeled carry-on bag. He loaded the carry-on with notebooks, pens, pencils, and his laptop. Running around, Alex added flashlights and rechargeable batteries to his carry-on. After filling the carry-on, he got out his small refracting telescope with its lightweight carbon fiber tripod and its CCD astro cam. The small telescope was a high-quality astrograph, a refractor optimized for imaging. It had cost thousands of dollars, and he bought it right after his wife left. No more budgeting for the bitch. The little telescope and its accessories fit in a neat backpack. The sky would be fascinating as Earth died, and Alex resolved to see as much of it as possible. He put his telescope backpack and carry-on bag in the back seat of the SUV.

In a final flourish, they emptied the house of paper, mostly printer paper, but, in a nod to past hysteria, a big bag of toilet paper, too. In their frenzy, they almost forgot about toothbrushes, razor blades, floss, and deodorant. Personal hygiene was over: more bad news for gay hairdressers and lesbian snatch waxers. The last few things they took were books. What do you read when the world freezes? It would have made an excellent writer’s group discussion topic, but there was no time. Doug stuffed a pile of old Manga in the SUV. At the same time, Alex packed The Ultimate Survival Medicine Guide, an old CRC Engineering Handbook, Moby Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, two cookbooks, his Tirion Sky Atlas 2000.0, a stack of old Royal Astronomical Society Observer’s Handbooks, and because he was currently reading it, Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges.

With the car loaded, Alex and Doug squeezed into the front seats.

“Now what?” Doug asked.

“We need to do a little shopping.”

apocalypse shopping

Alex and Doug drove straight to a truck rental dealer. Alex hoped the astronomically ill-informed public had not connected the dots. Once they did, he expected complete shopping bedlam. It wouldn’t be like the comical COVID toilet paper runs of a few years ago or typical Black Friday ghetto riots. No, this would be serious, shoot-to-kill shit. Alex figured they had about a week. After a week, the missing tides, the runaway moon, and the noticeably smaller solar disk would drive it home to even the dumbest shits on the planet; this wasn’t a lefty, right-wing, or Zionist plot. That billionaires weren’t conniving to rob you. That commies, nazis, transphobes, Trump voters, or World Economic Forum stooges weren’t responsible for the sudden annulment of solar gravity. That everyone on Earth, every poor, rich, smart, or stupid son-of-a-bitch was trapped on runaway spaceship Earth.

They rented a big king cab pickup and a large trailer to drag behind it for a month. As a sick joke, Alex took out the deluxe rental insurance package. Not only was farming over, but credit would soon follow. This month, he wouldn’t pay his credit card bills, and it was unlikely the banks or anyone would care. By the end of the month, everyone would have bigger problems. After hitching up the trailer and transferring their gear from the car to the truck, Alex returned to the rental office and asked the salesman if he could leave his car outside for the day. He told the salesman they’d return and gave him his cell phone number. With their rides sorted, they drove the truck and trailer straight to Alex’s bank near Fairview and Meridian Avenue.

Relieved to find the bank open, Alex withdrew twenty-three thousand dollars in twenties and hundreds. He had to wipe out his savings and max out his line of credit. As usual, the bank made you feel guilty for cashing out your own damn money. An annoyance they compounded by insisting he sign the idiotic IRS — I am not in the minor sex trafficking and fentanyl smuggling business — tax forms. Alex despised the toady little deep-state dick-fellating fools in banks, but they needed cash. How long would the credit-based economy last? Besides, using cash for sensitive purchases is always a good idea, and today, everything is sensitive.

Before leaving the bank’s parking lot, Alex amended the shopping list he started in his bedroom and asked Doug to check it.

“Anything missing?”

“There are no sewing supplies. Sewing is an underappreciated survival skill.”

“Really, OK. Trouble is I can’t sew shit.”

“I can.”

“Since when?”

“Ellen taught me before …” Doug looked away, but Alex saw his eyes tear up.

“OK then. We’ll follow Ellen’s lead here.”

Satisfied with their list, they drove to the restaurant supply wholesaler, US Foods CHEF’STORE, on North Hickory Avenue. Wholesalers were more likely to have bulk nonperishable foods than ordinary grocery stores. They filled the truck bed with 50-pound bags of beans, rice, flour, sugar, and cases of canned meats, vegetables, and fruits. At two pounds per day per person, they had a four-year supply.

From US Foods, they drove to Scheels on Wayfinder.

Pulling into the parking lot, Alex handed Doug five thousand dollars and said, “I’m looking for a specialty item in the gun shop. Take this and stock up on the warmest cold-weather outfits you can find. Get at least three complete outfits for each of us: boots, parkas, mittens, heavily insulated ski pants, super warm base layers, everything. Keeping dry is easier if you have many outfits.”

Scheels has an excellent gun shop. Alex wasn’t loading up on firearms and ammo like brain-dead head-for-the-hills preppers. Preppers are clueless dolts who think they’ll prevail in firefights against roving bands of post-apocalypse vampire scavengers because every dumb-ass Netflix end-times series says they will. Some people are too stupid to live, and soon, due to the Earth’s sudden release, preppers wouldn’t have to.

Alex sought large silica gel canisters. He grabbed all the display canisters and a small gauge hygrometer to measure humidity. Wanting more, Alex asked a salesman if they had additional canisters in storage. While the salesman fetched a large case of two dozen kilogram canisters, Alex browsed rifle scopes. As an astronomical telescope man, they impressed him with their edge-to-edge sharpness; hunters have high refractor standards. He almost bought a rifle but knew it would be of limited utility; he wasn’t planning on getting into prepper firefights. He picked up two 9mm pistols and, almost as an afterthought, just enough bullets to deter maybe one post-apocalypse zombie.

To buy the pistols, Alex needed an instant Idaho background check. Approvals were automatic if you didn’t have outstanding warrants or restraining orders. Both he and the salesman exchanged this is annoying commie government bullshit eye rolls while waiting for the approval. Once approved, he paid in cash and ferried the pistols and silica gel canisters to the trailer, where he found Doug stacking his clothing purchases.

“I got extra mittens, boot liners, and some ski masks. Oh, I also grabbed half a dozen nylon down-filled comforters. With alterations, we can wear them over parkas.”

“Looks like Ellen’s sewing lessons will be handy. Good thinking.”

Returning to the store, they got six cold-weather sleeping bags, twelve large four-liter steel thermos jugs, two propane camp stoves, and scores of these might be useful items. Among the items that might be useful, Doug got four bicycle helmets.

When Alex gave him a what look, Doug said, “I’m not hitting my head on my shafts.”

After storing their second haul, they returned and filled six shopping carts with freeze-dried camping food, dozens of yoga mats, and multicolored pool noodles. On the way to the checkout, Doug picked up three trail cameras.

“Sweet!” Alex approved.

The trail cameras recorded time-lapse video unless triggered by movement. Movement switched them to normal speed. At normal speed, the cameras also recorded sound. Nifty gadgets. The trail cameras would help them keep tabs on their surroundings. The cameras came with memory cards, but they also picked up spares. The checkout lady gave them a wary look as she scanned their items.

After Scheels, they went to Walmart on Fairview. Before going in, they rechecked Alex’s list. In the store, they split up. Doug headed to the grocery section and loaded four carts with canned and nonperishable food items. Alex headed to hardware and grabbed hammers, saws, bump lights, duct tape (lots and lots of duct tape), twelve strings of small battery-powered fans, spools of polypropene rope, four plastic wash tubs, matches, fire starters, a dozen Velcro rolls, garbage bags, a dozen 100-foot heavy-duty extension cords, a few cases of aluminum foil, Vitamin C and D (let’s not die of scurvy or rickets before we freeze), floor mops, brooms, two hand-held battery powered vacuum cleaners, two dozen big rolls of bubble wrap, and twenty large plastic tarps.

Meeting at the truck, they packed their supplies in the trailer and headed back in to clear out Walmart’s large four-gallon water bottles. By their fourth Walmart run, Alex saw they weren’t alone in bulk buying. Mob panic buying hadn’t started yet, but others were clueing in. They finished at Walmart by getting “medical” supplies: bandages, gauze, rubbing alcohol, and painkillers. They also grabbed a few first-aid kits without inspecting their contents.

Leaving the pharmacy aisles, Alex dumped eight face mask cartons in a shopping cart. Doug couldn’t resist teasing.

“I thought you were anti-mask.”

“Mines are dusty. And they’ll help keep your face warm in -80 weather. And, most importantly, they keep your breath off cold eyepieces.”

“You’re enjoying this. Admit it.”

Next, they hit sporting goods and outdoor stores. They snapped up more cold weather sleeping bags, water purification kits, two folding camping cots, and a costly image-intensifying night vision monocular. At Home Goods, they picked up electric blankets, three large turkey baster oven pans, and — honoring Ellen, a sewing machine with extra needles and a few dozen large spools of thread. At Best Buy, they bought two top-of-the-line short-wave radios, two pairs of long-range walkie-talkies, and six infrared motion detector alarms. They also purchased wired security webcams and a few spools of active USB cables. In Dicks they picked up half a dozen axes, knives, drink coolers, more large steel thermoses, small camping butane canisters, and two small butane hiking stoves.

Checking and updating their shopping list again Alex and Doug went to Lowes on Eagle and Ustick, where they bought two dozen cinder blocks, three dozen large sheets of plywood, a pallet of two-by-fours, a big stack of six-by-one fence planks, a dozen Styrofoam sheets, a power staple gun, power drills, a power saw with half a dozen blades, and plenty of nails, screws, bolts, staples, and drill hooks. They also purchased two dozen eight-foot by 8-inch metal duct pipes, two hundred feet of flexible PVC tubing, rolls of vapor barrier wrap, and as many batts of rockwool insulation as they could pack in the trailer. Lastly, they picked up half a dozen 200-foot spools of various grades of electrical wiring along with electrician supplies: multimeters, propane soldering torches, a handful of resistors, capacitors, switches, strings of 12V DC lights, and a mixed bag of wire stripping and cutting tools.

Their last stop was at D&B, a ranch supply store on Fairview. At D&B, they bought four XXL size coveralls, a dozen pairs of thick work gloves, six sets of red Santa Claus woolen underwear, metal pails, shovels, picks, crowbars, sledgehammers, two dozen steel pike bars, a propane chain saw, two propane-powered electrical generators, seventeen 30-pound propane tanks, and three 100-pound propane tanks. It was all the propane they had. Alex also got a small wheelbarrow to ferry the heavy propane tanks to the trailer. After securing the tanks in the trailer, they returned and bought two large rechargeable 1500-watt-hour powerpacks. The powerpacks had nifty programmable built-in timers to turn things on and off. They were pricey, and typically, Alex would have shopped around, but bargain hunting was over.

Their last purchase was perhaps the best of the entire shopping run: two rugged stainless steel hot tent stoves. The stoves came with all the vents needed to install them. When set up in a hot tent, you could comfortably camp in -40 Celsius weather. No hot tents were on sale, but Doug found an insulated winter tunnel tent made by the same outfit.

It was insane. Who keeps end-of-the-world shopping lists? Even the most die-hard preppers and billionaires in their luxury nuke-proof bunkers weren’t ready for this. Still, Alex had to smile. Who knew apocalypse shopping would perfectly suit bitter and grieving men who had given up.