#writing writingadvice apocalypse postapocalyptic

[theravencroft]

Towards A Less Sexy Apocalypse Or, Do 70 Million People Shit In The Woods?

I harbor a love of post-apocalyptic writing that dates back to The Cold War, because I came of age when dad books about Soviet tanks charging through The Fulda Gap were all the rage. The current wave of post-apocalyptic books inspire a sort of rough romance amidst the fantasy of prepping, imagining riding around in your modified dune buggy with an AK gunning down the zombie hordes or the undead or whatever other monsters are out there.

But where, dear friend, do you poop? 

Even Immortan Joe and his coterie of wives had to poop somewhere, and this is something we don’t often see portrayed in the literature. The truth of the matter is a lot less sexy: you’re less likely to die from the killer walking corpses than anything else out there. Millions of walking corpses shambling around and millions of dead corpses rotting create all matter of disease-ridden filth. 

One good rain shower washes all that into the rivers. 

You drink from the river downstream.

You die, eventually, shooting liquid from every orifice because you got cholera.

I am going to say “shit” a lot in the post, by the way. 

One of the most important--but decidedly unsexy--parts of modern civilization is readily available, clean, drinkable, fluoridated water, and we do take it for granted. 

A very general guideline can be 3-4 liters of water per day to stay alive, more if you’re, say, tilling the fields of your subsistence farm to try and carve out a living now that modern civilization has been destroyed by The Bomb. And consider all the other things we use water for. There’s all the cooking, the laundry, and the hygiene. 

Let’s talk about hygiene for a moment: Washing your hands is a very modern idea. In fact, it was in the late 1840s that the idea occurred to doctors that hey, maybe we should wash all this blood and stuff off our hands, and it took substantially longer to catch on. 

If you’ve been on a camping trip and don’t have access to a stream, you know you tend to get a little funky by the end. If you’re drinking from cantines and rainwater traps, you’re probably disinclined to waste water that could be saving your life or getting yourself through a post-apocalyptic wasteland on washing your hands, especially when they just get dirty anyway. 

Ah, but perhaps your raiders will just pillage the local supermarket and get all the bottled water there.

One of the problems I have with the theory of the supermarket as survival cache is supermarkets don’t actually have that much food in them. It seems like a lot when you’re doing your weekly shopping, but you’re actually at the end of a very long chain of suppliers. Most businesses today operate using a “just in time” chain of production, where they forecast demand and then get in what they think they’ll need, then put it out where it sells so they don’t have to keep it for long.

This is where I break some bad news to you: That’s why they never seem to have it “in the back” when you ask. There’s usually not much “in the back” unless they’ve just gotten a pallet in. Usually it’s a nice excuse to hang out and make fun of you with whoever else got sent back there. Sorry. 

As a child that grew up in the South, I can tell you that any weather stronger than a thunderstorm is preceded with dire warnings to BUY BREAD AND MILK. I never knew why. I don’t think anyone knows why. But you go into the supermarket and all the bread and milk is gone. Likewise, when a natural disaster like a hurricane or big storm is coming, the shelves are gone of anything tasty or even useful. Hope you like radioactive beets or those weird mixed vegetables we used to get in a grade school cafeteria.

To say nothing of the simple fact that literally everyone else is going to have the same idea of heading to the grocery store. And that’s without taking into account all the rotting perishables, themselves additional vectors of disease. If you haven’t smelled rotting chicken and spoiled milk together, I suggest you don’t. The linoleum floors are likely to be covered with the vomit of those that tried before. 

And that’s not even bringing up the biggest issue of all. 

Let’s talk about shitting: Where are you going to shit?

Imagine trying to find a public bathroom in any major city. A former work colleague and I used to play a game in the morning when we went to San Francisco. The game is “How far can we get before we see a pile of human shit on the sidewalk?” 3 blocks was the record.

Until recently, the public sewer was “the street when it rains” and if you lived in a modern utopia, they may have bothered to cut a ditch in the roadside so you weren’t knee deep in human filth. It’s still like that in many cities of the world and even if you have a pretense of a sewer system, the fallback if the sewer system backs up is just dumping it into the nearest body of water.

Imagine a rainstorm in a post-apocalyptic city with knee or waist-high water filled with dead bodies and all the effluences and leavings of human civilization. We already know what that looks like. It’s called Hurricane Katrina. And that’s with a FEMA and local effort to clean up the debris and chaos. What if it just hangs around? 

To say nothing of finding toilet paper or, like I said above, washing your hands. And you’re not going to use precious potable water cleaning out your butthole. C’mon now. We’re among friends here. 

Ah, but you’ll take to the woods, you say. Just bury it in a hole in the backyard. Perhaps you even have dreams of composting toilets in your tiny post-apocalyptic house. We can entertain that idea, certainly, and that may be a suitable solution for a small family in a remote area where a hole in the ground. But the estimated population of Europe in 1340 was close to 70 million. Can they all, dear reader, shit in the woods?

That’s not really a solution that scales. A few people can use an outhouse. But get yourself a proper raiding gang or even the beginnings of a post-apocalyptic cult, and that outhouse is going to start filling up fast. Even nutritionally deprived apocalypse survivors poop a lot, and that’s assuming you can dig a hole and bury it without hitting the water table you’re drinking from. And just a little bit of the wrong bacteria or virus in the wrong water going into your mouth means you spend what’s left of your life praying for the sweet release of death, because there’s something else we aren’t going to have.

Medicines.

It’s a New Age fantasy that all those herbs are waiting out there in the woods to be discovered and, even if they are, are you suddenly going to become an expert on herbal lore. The truth of the matter is you depend on antibiotics. Even if you’re not taking them yourself, they’re what keep that guy in the next cube that insists on coming in from coughing infectious bacteria into your face when he starts bragging about how he’s never missed a day.

Let’s not even mention vaccines because good god that is the stupidest debate of all time and isn’t even a debate.

But we can mention them for the sake of this: You step on a rusty nail in The Wasteland and you’re not getting a tetanus shot. 

Okay, and we can mention them for the sake of this: All those dogs and cats that survive us (my cats hide under the bed just for the sake of doing so, they’ll survive When The Nukes Drop) won’t be getting rabies shots anymore. Or any shots, really. So add tetanus and rabies to measles, mumps, whooping cough, and everything else coming back because Kale Smoothie Junior couldn’t get a stick in his precious arm.

And then there’s the less urgent drugs: Raise your hand if there’s a drug you take every day to survive. Think of mundane things beyond even antibiotics. Heart pills. Insulin injections. Vitamin supplements. Mood stabilizers. Imagine the entire drug supply chain has gone away. Grandpa doesn’t get his heart pills, you don’t get your insulin, there’s no blood transfusions, and if a limb gets infected you get a leather strap to bite and a shot of whiskey before a carpenter cuts your leg off with a saw.

Moving beyond the obvious medical issues, let’s discuss the one addiction pretty much everyone on the planet has: Caffeine. Imagine everyone that has soda, tea, and coffee going through withdrawals at once. Sure, if you’re lucky enough to live in Kenya or Colombia, you’ll be rolling in the stuff but it’s not like any of us know what a coca leaf looks like or how to synthesize caffeine. It’s not going to be the zombies that get you. It’s going to be the red-eyed zombie that didn’t get twelve lattes yesterday and is really trigger happy as a result. 

Let’s not even discuss smoking, good lord. Every smoker in the world suddenly going cold turkey. Think how pissy they are in our world. Imagine how pissy they’ll be in the Wasteland.

Now that’s the real horror show.