NOTE: Fair warning - you will have to read through a long stretch of story development getting to the sex. If you feel you need to get right to the meat of things, this story may not be for you.
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Megan watched the entrance to the shelter carefully for over 3 hours, watching for signs of life, waiting to see if anyone returned, making sure it was safe to explore. She hadn't stayed alive over the last 3 years by being impetuous. As her father always told her, slow and steady won the race.
While watching for inhabitants in the bunker, she let her mind wander back to when the lights and power just died; the lights went out, computers failed to work even on emergency backup power, and appliances had been destroyed as the power system overloaded and then crashed. When the family went out to start up the families SUV, it refused to start.
She still wasn't sure what caused the power loss to happen, her father had said something about EMP, Electro Magnetic Pulse, or something like that. Megan and her family, led by her father, left the City of Indianapolis where they had lived all her life. Her dad told the family that the cities would become death traps. But it was out on the road where her mom and dad met their demise.
Ever since the lights went out, every day had been a battle to survive. Over the years, Megan had stooped so low as to dine on rats, mice, woodworms, and a host of other less than desirable food items. The secret to rats and mice was to cook them well done to kill off the diseases they carried.
One of the best treats was when she discovered a log with carpenter ants. She thought they tasted like star burst fruit chews. The nest had been huge and she feasted on the larger than normal ants for days.
Early on, some her staples had been tree bark, cat tail roots, and earthworms. Unfortunately, over the first year, the cat tail roots had been picked over pretty badly.
Megan remembered back to the early days when someone might shoot you over a can of peas. Megan hated canned peas, she would starve before she ate them. She remembered coming across a stash of can goods out behind an old farm house and she chowed down on the beets, corn, green beans, and especially the canned hominy. In addition, the farm family had squirreled away cans of fruit: peaches, pears, cherry filling, and fruit cocktail. Megan ate everything but the canned peas over the course of three weeks.
She had been on the verge of starvation when she stumbled upon the freshly dug up earth. On a hunch, she dug down to see why someone had been digging in the middle of the brush. She fully expected to find a body, but found the food instead. That's when Megan decided to look for caches where ever she traveled.
Initially, after the lights went off, people started dying off in droves as the city people's supplies of food dwindled almost overnight. Her dad said something about stores having only 3 days' worth of food and 'stuff' available due to a just in time delivery system. Only due to the looting, the food in the stores only lasted hours, not days. The majority of city dwellers that remained in their urban homes died off within the first 6 months.
Initially, people started to hunt, but soon, cows, chickens, pigs, horses, and finally wildlife were hunted to near extinction. The animals left learned to lay low or die. The only place where people and animals continued to thrive was low population areas like Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. High population states like California, Texas and New York were the first to die off. Los Angeles and New York City were particularly gruesome as the food ran out.
Rural inhabitants fared much better; until the roving bands of armed gangs started roaming the country sides, stripping away any food left, killing anybody or anything in their path. To protect themselves, people started to ban together, forming small fiefdoms, where the meanest, toughest, most ruthless people lorded over their surfs. Only then could the gangs be fought and driven away.
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After sitting and watching for 6 hours give or take, her only way to tell time was the sun. Megan figured it was safe to make her move. She was going to go in and see if there was anything left inside of any use. She figured that it probably had already been overrun by a gang and plundered, but they normally left something behind that would be useful. After exploring the main bunker, she would stay in the area for a week or so looking for hidden hoards of food and supplies.
Megan left her 30/30 and her heavy backpack in the brush a good 100 yards from the concrete entrance to the hidden shelter. The rifle had saved her ass a number of occasions and she actually used it to shoot a deer the previous fall. Their population was starting to recover after the great hunt. One of the things she thanked heaven for was her dad teaching her how to shoot.
Megan stealthily approached the entrance to the shelter. This one had been one of the best she had seen. She only discovered its entrance by almost falling into it. That would have been a deadly mistake if the den would have been inhabited. Usually, if the survivors were still alive, they came out shooting if invaded by an unknown person or persons.
The bunker was well concealed and located in a place with access to the basics: A food growing area; a creek for water; and a large forest for firewood. This part of Southern Missouri had been loaded with survivalist types, who liked to keep their survival rations and equipment in hidden caches out and away from their shelters. Judging by the air vents she had scoped out while waiting to see if someone was still was still occupying it, she knew that this underground shelter must be huge.
There was evidence of a garden from the previous growing season. It was March and just about time for it to be planted again, given the southern Missouri growing season. Megan had drifted into the area because it seemed to be relatively free of fiefdoms and gangs. It was kind of like a large Sherwood Forest. But, mostly, it was the food caches that kept her in the area.
The cold season really sucked, without an accumulation of food one could easily starve. Fortunately, during the last fall, she hazarded upon a huge cache about 30 miles north of her current location. After moving the supplies a good 5 miles away from the discovery point, in a direction she picked at random, she built a shelter to winter over in. She still had half the contents of the cache squirreled away, available to fall back on if her summer foraging didn't fare so well.
Megan had ghosted up to the entrance and stopped again so she could cautiously listen for sounds of other living entities. What she heard was absolutely nothing. The absence of noise had her spooked. Normally, the woods chittered away both day and night. Quiet was a sign that something was in the area, something that scared the native fauna into silence. The only sound she could hear was a gentle breeze in the branches of the trees that were just starting to bud out with their spring leaves.
Megan attributed the silence to her presence. She thought she had been as quiet as a mole in its hole, but she knew that even a snap of a twig could shut down the normal cacophony that was standard inside a forest. She couldn't remember breaking a single branch, but she had been concentrating on the shelter, it might have gone unnoticed as she concentrated on the target.
Megan quietly slipped down the cement stairs, going lower and lower underground. One of the more unusual aspects of this particular shelter was it was built in an area that deep enough soil to bury it completely at ground level. This area of the Ozarks was notorious for having bed rock within a foot or two of the surface and most survival shelters were built at least halfway out of the ground, looking more like mounds.
