Page 1 of Fated to the Grizzly

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Scout

I’m sitting in the back of a battered old truck with screwed suspension. My dad is at the wheel, I’m blindfolded, and my two older brothers are sitting on either side of me.

This might make more sense if I explain that I was raised in a cult.

I know, I know. You’re probably thinking polygamy. Praying to some creepy dude in a toga. Extreme yoga. It’s notthatkind of cult.

My family are preppers. We belong to a whole community known asThe Emergency Preparedness Brotherhood, who are awaiting theFinal Fiasco.

Fifty percent of my dad’s conversation involves speculating over what the Final Fiasco might entail. Spoiler: some real bad, scary shit.

The other fifty percent is focused on how the heck we can protect ourselves from it.

I first figured out there was something “atypical” about my family when my bestie, Casey, and I were about eleven, and I took her down to my family’s basement.

“Dude, this is unreal,” she breathed, wandering among the rows of shelves stacked with every possible type of non-perishable item. Enough instant noodles to feed a small army; meticulously labeled bins of dried beans, rice, and grains; towering monoliths of canned ravioli, baked beans, tuna, Easy Mac. A fortress of energy drinks, and the pièce de resistance—a giant pyramid of toilet paper.

I shrugged. “It’s just our stock.”

She turned to me. “That’s a lot of stock, Scout.”

I planted my hands on my hips proudly. “We gotta be ready for the end of times.”

“The what?” I saw something new in her eyes then—a flicker of alarm.

“What doyoustore in your basement?”

She frowned. “You’ve seen our basement. It’s just a den. We have couches and a big TV.”

“But where’s yourstock?”

“On a couple of shelves in the kitchen, I guess.”

“And that’s all you have?”

“Uh huh.” Her gaze flickered to the door that led out of the basement.

My stomach turned over. My dad had warned me aboutThe Unprepared. They were going to be some of our biggest enemies when theFinal Fiascocame, because, having failed to protect themselves, they would try to steal all our stock.

I fixed her with a serious look. “Casey, it’s real important you stock up?—”

She frowned. “Quit being weird, Scout.”

She wasn’t getting it. I had to make her see. She was my best friend and I loved her. I grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’ll all starve to death, and it’s not gonna be pretty. At all,” I screamed, using one of my dad’s favorite expressions.

Her eyes filled with fear and she yanked herself out of my grasp. “I’ve gotta go help my mom out with some chores,” she said, fast-walking toward the exit. I watched her go, pulsating with pity and fear.

After that, things just got worse. At school, I volunteered to lead a fire drill, and instructed everyone to dive under their desks and “combat-crawl” to the nearest exit. Then I brought my hand-cranked emergency radio to show-and-tell. Everyone laughed their asses off when I accidentally picked up a truck driver’s karaoke sing-along, complete with a falsetto version ofI Will Survive. Then I set off the metal detectors at the entrance gates with the sheer number of safety pins in my emergency kit…

The list of humiliations goes on and on.

Honestly, it was a relief when my dad took my big brothers and me out of school and home schooled us instead.

But after a couple of years, prepping in an urban environment wasn’t enough for him, and he dragged us all off to live in the middle of a forest in an underground bunker. Off-grid of course, and a million miles from civilization.

And I hate it. It’s been eight long years of chopping firewood, wondering if those mushrooms I just foraged are gonna take us all out, and skinning and disemboweling small animals. I’m not cut out for wilderness life. At all.

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