Read Bugging Out for Free Online

time, almost under my breath, the word seeming the only true reaction I could muster at the moment.
    Quickly I went to the kitchen and turned on the small radio I kept there, the channel permanently fixed to the sports talk station that was my company while I cooked late night suppers for myself. Sound rose from its small speaker. A sound that was not the chatter of voices. Wasn’t the replay of some earlier show to fill the overnight hours. All there was was a single word, repeating over and over in a woman’s monotone voice.
    “Red... Red... Red...”
    A second of silence filled the pause between each utterance of the word. The color.
    The signal.
    Here, too, I tried more channels. Each and every one spat the same three words at me.
    “Red... Red... Red...”
    I turned away from the radio and stared into the great room at television’s screen, still blazing red. For a while I didn’t move. More sirens screamed. A helicopter raced low overhead. Then another. And another.
    “Red... Red... Red...”
    The radio droned on.
    You’ve gotta move.
    I told myself that. The time had actually come. This life, whatever it was now, would not be that when the sun came up.
    “Red... Red... Re—”
    I switched the radio off, then returned to the great room and powered the television down.
    Go .
    The directive came again from within. Yet I felt no urgency nearer the surface where my thoughts were swimming. Just as I hadn’t wanted to abandon the business I’d built as soon as I’d readied myself to bug out, here, in my home, I didn’t want to disappear into the night. Maybe it was fear working on me. The desire to remain anchored to the familiar.
    Or maybe there was that last bit of lingering hope that, if not a bad dream, all that was transpiring would, in short order, work itself out. The powers that be would actually function as they should and protect the populace. Life would go on.
    A second train of sirens racing out of the city convinced me otherwise.
    I dressed and slipped my pistol into the holster inside my waistband. The Springfield 1911 was condition one—cocked and locked. A flick of my thumb when drawing it would take the safety off and bring it to condition zero, ready to fire, something I sincerely hoped would not be necessary. I slipped into my coat and filled an ice chest with all the fresh and frozen food I could fit from the fridge, then grabbed the keys to my pickup and walked quickly to the door that led from the house to the garage. While it might have seemed logical to linger here for a moment, even more so than the time I’d taken at the business I’d built, I did not. The door to the house closed behind me and a minute later I was on my way. Leaving my old life behind.
    *  *  *
    T he radio in my pickup droned the same signal.
    “Red... Red... Red...”
    I scanned the stations, every single one up and down both AM and FM bands, but nothing was being broadcast but those three words. It was clear to me that not every broadcaster had conspired to spread the signal. Some larger entity had stepped in and seized the ability to do so, as they had with the cell phones, and the television stations. A behemoth. NSA, CIA, DoD, it could have been any of them. Or none. Perhaps some blacker than black government agency was making this possible. Had been conceived years earlier to be ready for just such an eventuality. Just such a need.
    And people had thrown fits about some functionary reading their text messages. They should have looked deeper. Representatives should have demanded accountability. Journalists should have exposed the whole truth. People should have done their jobs.
    Now the fruits of invasive secrecy were plain as day. To me, at least. They were being used so that the few might survive, at the expense of the many. Rather than being straight with the country as a whole, lies and misdirections had allowed the elite to see to their own preparations. For their own purposes. The ordinary American had