Running Since the Pigs and Poppies

When you have an incurable disease, like I do, your illness is a part of who you are and while it may not always be something that you're actively thinking about it's an omnipresent fact that you're always aware of. Much like the rest of your body you don't really think about your disease unless you have a reason to. Take your arm for example; you don't usually pay too much attention to it, but the moment you realize there's an issue, resolving it jumps right to the top of your list of things to do immediately. In the days before the internet had crashed, there were signs that things were eventually going to get bad and somewhere, in the back of my mind, I began to think "How will I survive in this potential crisis if the medical supply chain breaks?" Calamities don't happen in a vacuum after all and I'm sure at some point you too saw that everything was headed for an inevitable collapse. It was around then that I started to plan with Deno, my father-in-law, who is also an incurable, how we would manage to survive in a societal collapse, post-apocalypse type situation and so, about a week into the dawning crisis, once it had become clear that we were at the beginning of a long, downward spiral my father-in-law, my wife, and I began to execute the first step of our plan: rob a local pharmacy.

We went in looking for two main things; opioids and insulin. I'm a type one diabetic and Deno was afflicted with D.I.S.H. which is the acronym for Diffuse Idiopathic Skeletal Hyperostosis. Both conditions are incurable, sure, but until this particular moment in time both were easily treatable. He required lots of pain pills so that he could get up and move around like a normal person as the calcium that was supposed to build his bones was deposited in the tissues surrounding them, slowly turning him into a literal living fossil whereas I required one of a variety of manmade hormones designed to replace the one that my pancreas stopped making after my body decided to destroy that organs ability to function.

Those various encroaching infirmitudes and minor issues aside, both me and Deno had been leading relatively healthy and productive lives as upstanding members of society till then. Still, society doesn't always function in a flawless manner, and we had both previously gone through periods where we had found ourselves incapable of getting our necessary medications. As either of us could attest, all it took was an interruption of a few short hours until we wished we were dead, fighting with maximum effort just to keep it together until we could manage to acquire our next dose. Sitting and waiting for the clock to creep forwards in these horrible scenarios we both felt like junkies, and only a semantic argument could be made that we weren't. We both needed our drugs badly and neither of us could live without them for long.

It was experiences like this where we had been put through the literal hell of drug withdrawal which led us to actually act on our plan before everything started falling apart instead of sitting and waiting until it was too late. Knowing what we knew we figured that once things really started to get bad there would undoubtedly be others like us, other unfortunate individuals riddled with illness who would have the same basic idea: rob a pharmacy to ensure that you have enough medical supplies until you could make your way to a medical warehouse or depot somewhere and make off with everything you could fit in a truck. The only way to be sure that the medications we needed would be waiting for us at our chosen targets would be to hit them before anyone else did, and so we made our move while we were still uncomfortable with the idea of becoming robbers, but before it seemed that anybody else would be willing to make theirs. Though not elaborate, we did have a plan to minimize risk to ourselves as well as the staff. No one was supposed to get hurt....

Our target was one of those corporate big box stores you used to see all over the place with the pharmacies hours posted right on the door. We rolled up right before they were supposed to shut down for the night, figuring that there were likely to be less people working then. To create a distraction, Hope, my wife, set fire to the gas tank of one of the uninhabited cars in the parking lot shortly after we entered the store. We were walking towards the pharmacy when we heard the car explode. The staff that were up front ran outside to see what the hell had happened and we pulled out our pistols and rushed towards the pharmacy. We started to scream for everyone to get down and then we heard a gunshot from the other side of the counter.