Bugging Out

Simon Beer has spent the past five years trying to convince himself that the Apocalypse will be fun. Not that he calls it the Apocalypse. His fellow survivalists call it TEOFTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) or the Long Emergency, the Collapse, the Shift or the Event, as in, “There may be marauding bands of cannibals post-Event.” But Simon doesn’t call it anything at all. “I guess I’d call it

In the back garden of a modest Blue Mountains home sit the remains of Simon’s meagre preparations for the Event. Even before he became seriously weakened by fibromyalgia, a condition with symptoms that include whole-body pain, he was never the kind of survivalist interested in having a bunker full of tinned food and weaponry. “Those can just be taken from you by force,” he says. “Skills, primitive skills, on the other hand, will be more valuable. If your value is in your head, they can’t take it from you – and they can’t kill you, because you’re too valuable.”

In the moist dirt is a collection of sticks and cord, half-buried. This is what’s left of a broken-down