How to Survive Everything: A Novel

Dedication

For Theo and Frances

Epigraph

Man can live about forty days without food,

about three days without water,

about eight minutes without air,

but only for one second without hope.

Hal Lindsey

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

My Survival Guide

Plan A

How To Trap Kids In A Safe House

Plan B

How To Deal With Mother

How To Survive A Worst-Case Scenario

Plan G

How To Live In Lockdown

The Point Of No Return

How To Plan An Escape

Missing Person Protocol

How To Survive In A Wilderness

What To Do In A Massive Medical Emergency

To Amputate Or Not To Amputate

Home Surgery For Beginners

How To Heal After A Loss

How To Live in the Dark

How To Foretell Imminent Threat

How To Confront Your Enemy

How To Lie To Live

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for How to Survive Everything

Also by Ewan Morrison

Copyright

About the Publisher

My Survival Guide

I’m still alive, and if you’re reading this then that means you’re still alive, too.

That’s something.

My name is Haley Cooper Crowe and I’m in lockdown in a remote location I can’t tell you about because, if I do, then you and any people you come in contact with could endanger me and the ones I love, plus some of the ones I less than love.

When this shit began I was fifteen years, seven months, two weeks and one day old, but in the first year of lockdown we lost touch with the outside. Then we lost a day, then a week, then all sense of time, so I don’t actually know exactly how old I am now.

Hold on . . . If you’re reading this, it’s also possible I’m dead, because there’s no internet anymore, or so my dad said, and the only way you could get to read this is if you’ve broken into our safe house and found my cubbyhole in the bunker and discovered this notepad.

If you found me lying there dead, I hope I wasn’t too gross.

I told myself if I ever got through this crap alive, I’d spend my remaining days trying to set down how the hell we got here and to make my own non-boring survival guide, with actual practical tips for non-boring people and other teenagers abducted by crazy prepper parents. Actually, Dad’s survival manual is pretty much a how-to guide for the crap he put us through, so I’ll be using bits of that, too. I thought my own guide could be useful just in case we manage to somehow live through this and then have the next wave of the pandemic to get through, and because, like my dad said, we have to leave something behind for future survivors, so they can rebuild civilisation.

That’s kind of awesome, thinking about my little life story being that important, but maybe I should actually focus on actually living long enough to get this written and not being such an egotistical dick.

Actually, truth be told, when you’re in phase five of lockdown, things get pretty scary, and these little jokes are just the tears of a very nervous clown. I’m writing this every day because it takes my mind off waiting for death to find us. Anyway, I’m really sorry for the billion or so folk who’re probably starving and wheezing to death or being burned alive in the riots and all my old school chums (apart from Sharon Mackay) who’re getting generally brutally murdered for the sake of literally a can of peas or something, but I really should start my survival guide properly now.

How Not To React When Faced With A Wheezer

‘Wheezer’ is our name for a contaminated person and this is a very dangerous problem. First of all, if there’s a wall or a fence between you and the wheezer, try not to get in a panic and don’t forget to breathe. Holding your breath can make you pass out or hallucinate, and these are not useful things to do when you are carrying a loaded crossbow, which may even be pointing upwards towards your own actual face.

Move your weapon into a safe position and get your fingers the hell away from the trigger, then count your breaths and focus. This was how I tried to control the terror as I hid, crouching in the dirt behind the burned-out pick-up truck we use for target practice. I was on perimeter patrol and the wheezer was right there, just like we’d been warned about in our lockdown training, literally on the other side of the fence.

I counted to thirty-six, then I thought, shit, what am I going to do – stay here shivering and literally piss myself, or take another look? I edged up and tried to frame the contaminated asshole, but the telescopic sights were steamed with my stupid breath. He was maybe sixty feet away, and he wasn’t wearing a face mask, for sure.

Jesus, I thought, the day has come: when they plunder our food stash and slaughter the men and contaminate Mother and me and maybe even mad Meg, and then rape us and kill us. Because that’s what infected, starving mobs who are internally bleeding to death tend to do. According to Dad, anyway.

Hyperventilating can also make your hand tremble, and if you are using telescopic sights you won’t be able to see or aim at jack shit.

My crosshairs were jumping from the wheezer’s chest to his feet to the sky and the stupid turf. I was panting and furious and whispering, ‘Don’t you dare contaminate that fence with your poxy breath!’ It might have been wire-cutters in his hand or a gun, but totally not gloves – he was literally spreading the virus everywhere. I was whispering, ‘Please, for Christ sake, just turn round and go, don’t make me shoot my first human.’

Oh, another Survival Tip: In times when you have to remain totally hidden, your walkie-talkie may be your worst enemy.

My walkie-talkie made a crackling noise, and the wheezer turned sharply. I kept totally still, but my chest felt like I’d been hit and I was whispering, ‘Get a grip, Haley Cooper Crowe, use your fucking crossbow!’ I was lying low, but I could feel the guy’s eyes scanning No Man’s Land for me.

My eyes blurred and for some random reason I was thinking of me and Danny huddled together, hiding from the dying world, and how bad it was to feel good about that. Like, how totally romantic and stupid.

Survival Tip: When confronting an infected individual, it’s a very good idea to stop fantasising about snogging and to decide on whether you are actually going to shoot to maim or shoot to kill, and to assess the consequences if you shoot and miss.

My chest was pounding panicky and if I fired and missed the wheezer, he could run off and return with his starving mob. Also, if I got up to run for help then he’d know our safe house was there and he could shoot me in the back. But if I stayed still and did nothing, he’d just cut his way through the fence and find me shivering like a total asshole. What would I do when he pointed his weapon at me? Say, ‘Hey, wheezer, how’s this pandemic working out for you? Let’s be friends.’

Shoot or not? I am shit at choices and only slightly better at hitting targets. Choose, Haley, for the first time in your stupid life.

Dad’s voice was in my head, saying, ‘Contamination and starvation drive good people to do evil things. You’ve got to get stronger, Haley. If I die first, you’ll have to protect the others.’

The wheezer was fastening something to the fence, not cutting through it, and wearing some kind of outfit that wasn’t a hazmat.

I couldn’t decide, so I let the voices in my head decide for me.

Danny’s voice said, ‘They wouldn’t think twice about shooting us, they’re no more than animals now.’

OK, I had to shoot the contaminated idiot to protect my family. The guy was a long-goner anyway. God forgive me, and I don’t even believe in any kind of God that could have set this plague upon mankind.

I tried to do what Danny taught me. ‘Hold your breath and take aim, Haley. You’ve only got one shot and if you miss, you won’t have time to reload before they shoot back.’ I thought of Danny’s arms around mine, steadying the weapon, his mouth against my ear. ‘Hold steady, concentrate on your heartbeat, hear it, it’s a countdown to shoot. Count breaths with me now.’

I put my finger slowly round the hair trigger. I counted my breaths, down from ten, nine, eight, just like Danny showed me. Seven, six. I lined up the crosshairs with the wheezer’s chest. Five, four. I closed my eyes. ‘It’s them or us,’ Danny’s voice whispered. Three, two. I thought of Danny’s mouth on mine, our tongues circling. Wait, stop, don’t shoot the guy! I thought. But the air slashed and the crossbow kicked and I realised I must have pulled the trigger. I scrunched my eyes tight and waited in cringing silence for the thud of my arrow puncturing a human chest.

Wait. Rewind.

This happened about three or four months into lockdown and you have zero clue what any of this is about or how we even got here. Right?

Start again, Haley.

Like, on the day it began.

The day Dad started Plan A. The day he called Day One.

Plan A

How To Abduct Your Own Children

To abduct your own children from under the nose of your ex-wife on day one of a supposed pandemic, you will need the following:

A sturdy off-road vehicle full of gas, with extra fuel tanks prepared.

A well-planned and pre-rehearsed ‘get out of dodge’ road route.

A layered script of falsehoods to hide what’s actually going on.

It’s also super-handy if the abduction is on a ‘sleepover’ night.

This is what my dad, the author of his own pandemic survival guide, rather turgidly entitled SURVIVE, had worked out.

It all began at 05:03, on the morning of October 12th. I’m crap with numbers but Dad is obsessed with them. Like: you can survive for three days without water and three weeks without food. Like: two hundred and twenty-three trillion was the size of the debt bubble in dollars and I don’t even want to get into that whole argument about the real number of humans who died during the last pandemic. And, like: the spread of virus is exponential and when you put it and the globalised economy together, you get a ‘mutually reinforcing positive feedback loop’, which means basically a ‘species-threatening event’.

Dad used to be a journalist, and he taught me all this stuff. ‘Stats can’t be trusted,’ he said, ‘like the people who use them.’ And that was the problem. No one believed him, or listened to his warnings – especially not Mother – and so that’s what made him do the things he did at 05:03 on that first morning.

You could say he lured us or placed us under extreme psychological pressure, but he didn’t hold us at gunpoint – that sort of came later, under Plan C. He definitely lied with the offer of a surprise, so we’d get up, dressed, out the door and into his crummy old SUV.

‘Hey, Haley-Boo,’ he whispered as he shook me awake, because being sentimental and waking us up at crazy hours is his thang. ‘Hurry, I’ve got a really cool surprise for you,’ he said. You know, the kind of cutesy Santa Claus crap you’d say to a little kid, like Ben – who’s my little brother, by the way.

So, me and Ben got up off Dad’s ‘blow-up camping mattresses’ – which Mother had of course condemned as unsanitary living conditions. Ben was already jumping around Dad’s crappy one-bedroom rental like a lardy space hopper, and I was doing my sleepy-best to cover my lady-bits with the duvet. I reached for my phoney-o, as it wasn’t even light yet, but Dad was giving it, ‘Don’t text your mother! No Snapchat either, get dressed. Quick!’

Six a.m. would have been normal-ish for Dad, but five was weird. Ben was already half-dressed and giving it, ‘Haley’s on her phoney, Haley’s on her phoney!’ The beloved blimp was fond of getting me into trouble, especially on the subject of my ‘anti-social phone habit’ – which was the only one thing my deeply divorced parents ever agreed on, though, ironically, never face-to-face and only over their own phones.

Don’t get me started. Seriously, eighty per cent or sixty per cent of all the kids at my school had divorced parents. I’d given up trying to mend it when I was ten. I’d put a total ban on ALL emotions by the time I was eleven. I was so over saying ‘I’m so over it.’ I’m pretty convinced their divorce made me the indecisive, choice-averse, two-faced, sarcastic, passive-aggressive, asthmatic, whining, overthinking, ADHD, Hamlet-ish brat everyone here in lockdown knows and loves.

Dad was dragging something out of the closet that looked like a cross between a small engine and a computer, and yelled, ‘Right this minute, kids! We’re leaving NOW!’

Ben gave me that look that said, c’mon Haley, we have to pretend to be excited for Dad’s sake! Because we have this secret agreement, me and the Benster, to always pretend everything we did in the twenty-three hours we saw Dad every week was fun, so he wouldn’t feel rejected.

It’s Better To Be One Year Too Early Than One Day Too Late

When you abduct your children, you will need a ‘grab bag’ with essential survival items. It should contain the following:

Multi-packs of climbing socks, mountain bars, pepper spray, antibiotics, a rope, a first aid kit, water sterilisation tablets, a compass, flint or some other flame-making device, and a hunting knife which may or may not be for hunting.

Dad had three such ‘grab bags’ – one each for Ben, me and himself – but we didn’t know that either. Neither did we know his old SUV and roof-rack was pre-stuffed with five plastic boxes containing eighty packets of dried peas, a Sundström pandemic respirator kit, twelve HEPA filters, three N95 gasmasks, three Mylar emergency blankets, three fake IDs, a bottle of chloroform, three four-litre gasoline tanks and an illegal weapon.

Just to show you how completely oblivious I was on that fateful 05:00am, while Dad was trying to rush us out the door, the most important thing in my world at that juncture was my choice of footwear.

You see, Dad had got me these tomboy-ish mountain boots, and Mother had got me these girlie, sparkled hi-tops. The problem was how to choose one pair without making one parent feel I preferred the other. Dad was supposed to be dropping us back off at Mother’s later that day, as per always, and if I turned up wearing the shoes he’d bought me, it would hurt her feelings. Mother and Dad had both been having this unsaid competition to try to out-do each other with commodities in the battle for my affections, since I was a little divorceling.

Dad was yelling, ‘What’s keeping you, Halester?’

So, on the day Dad abducted us, I was fussing over the epic choice between mountain boots or femme fashion. Mother or Dad? Choose (a) or (b). Who will I reject today? Can’t I just make both sides happy? This is my basic problem – I just can’t make any choice, ever. I hate it. Screw it. It’s so unfair.

But Dad had that all figured out in advance and wasn’t going to let me or Ben have any choices at all. Nada.

Dad grabbed Ben by the hand and literally pulled him out the door, yelling back, ‘Haley, if you don’t come now, I’m going to leave you here to starve.’

Starve? Wow! I grabbed the first sneakers to hand and ran after Dad and Ben, into his filthy, ten-years-out-of-date, family-sized off-road vehicle. It was still dark outside and as I hopped into my shoes I bemoaned the utter randomness of my non-primary custodial caregiver.

Do Not Tell Your Abductees About The Evidence Or The Plan

It’s essential to map human pandemic behaviour data so you can time your escape perfectly. You don’t want to get the early-warning signs wrong, after all. Or to be caught too late when a city is put in lockdown with police roadblocks. Don’t waste any time explaining to your kids what you’re doing. Stick to Plan A.

It was like, five-twenty or something and the streetlights were casting eerie shadows of Dad’s speeding 4×4 on the empty roads. The streets started thinning out and trees popped up like adverts between the suburby bungalows. All the traffic lights were on green, like they were sneaking us through on some secret mission. We passed a play park and the kiddie swings and plastic hippos were empty, everything spookily still. A fox dashed across the road before us and hid in a hedge. It was that surreal hour before people get up, when all the secret animals scour the streets and everything looks like an abandoned film set.

Dad was more wired and tired than usual that morning. We didn’t know it then, but he’d been up all night on his computers mapping the spread of CHF-4, or what, he said, would later become known as Virus X.

If Mister Deadbeat-Dad Ed Crowe is to be believed, he’d watched the sunrise over China, as the first cases of an unexplained viral disease that caused your lungs to basically turn into purée, were reported in Hong Kong. Here’s what he later said he’d discovered:

Five hundred and four people had already died and the incubation period could be as long as a month.

Over the past four weeks, two hundred and eighty thousand people from all over the world had been in the infection-centre-city, and these happy tourists had all flown back to their home nations.

The info had been leaked late because the govt had hoped to contain it to stop precisely the viral and economic meltdown that we’d come so close to with the Covid pandemic five years ago.

The politicians were just so, so sorry, because they’d done it again, only worse, cos this virus killed little kids as well, and this time around they were deeply, deeply sorry that, yes, this virus had come from a laboratory.

Had I known Dad had been up all night gathering his scary data, I was under strict instructions to report his behaviour back to Mother. ‘Now, Haley, if you hear your father going on about anything weird from any fake news channels,’ she said, years back, ‘you must tell me immediately.’ But Ben and me had been blissfully asleep.

Dad, as he later claimed, watched the hysteria spread online through Asia and Australia, then Russia and India, as they each woke up to discover they too had people wheezing with unexplained symptoms. And so they struggled to shut down their borders to contain the contagion, before each economy went into panic and then into the aforementioned mutually reinforcing positive feedback loop that, according to Dad, would lead to global war, what with it already being too late to stop the virus. That would end the lives of one billion people for starters, and basically return us to the medieval plague era.

But if he’d told us any of this, it’s very doubtful that we’d have got into his 4×4, let alone stayed in it.

Anyhow, as we learned from the last pandemic, divorce and shared custody don’t go at all well with lockdown, cos the parents have to decide who gets to keep the kids, and kids don’t get to see their other parent anymore till the virus all-clear is given. Like ninety per cent of the time divorced mums win this argument. And Mother did and that’s why we didn’t see Dad for a whole six months last time this pandemic shit hit the fan.

Actually, when you think about it, Dad was pretty lucky that the end of civilisation coincided with the October school-break, because it meant we had a double sleepover with him, for two nights in a row. If it’d been just one night, like usual, then the end of civilisation would have started on the wrong day and he’d have had to come and snatch us from Mother’s house. She’d have resisted and accused him of having a paranoid delusion so he’d have had to use a gun or something, and that would’ve been pretty embarrassing.

Secretly Prepare Your Children For Years In Advance

To avoid arousing suspicion, and so that you don’t terrify your kids when you abduct them, prepare your kids with weird and secret adventures over many years.

OK, you’d think that being sped out of the city at 05:30am, by a father who looks like what Kurt Cobain would have looked like if he’d joined the Marines, would set off alarm bells. Not with us. Dad had been prepping me and Ben for years, only we hadn’t realised it.

Dad always took us on little outings called ‘vaventures’. The word came from a cute mispronunciation Ben made when he was three, based on va-va-voom or something. Vaventures usually meant something ‘exciting’ Dad was sneaking into the schedule before he had to drive us back to Mother’s.

Vaventures from the past included:

Dad turning off all the power in his flat and us having eat ‘blackout breakfast’ at 04:00am with candles.

A trip to the shingle beach to catch so-called ‘edible molluscs’.

A trip to the nearest snow-covered hill forest to hack down branches to make a bivouac – and all before breakfast.

One time he even dragged us out to hunt for copper wires from the rubble remains of a freshly demolished tower block, and we had to sneak past the DANGER – DO NOT ENTER signs.

Ben, of course, thought all this was awesome, and I whined and moaned but gave up asking Dad why, why, why because he always said the same thing: ‘I know you’re kicking and screaming now, but in the end you’ll thank me!’

Dad asked us to keep these vaventures secret from Mother. ‘Most people get scared by the truth,’ he said, ‘and your mother has a particular aversion to it.’ And I, of course, told him that asking kids to keep secrets from their primary custodial caregiver is a form of psychological abuse. He patted my head for being ‘older than my years’, which meant, don’t be such a smart-ass, Haley. The upshot was that Mother never knew about Dad’s secret vaventures and if she had, she would’ve most likely legally ended the ‘unsupervised visits from your father’ malarkey.

They had one of those really nasty divorces. I mean, I used to get these flashbacks to them screaming at each other. He’d done a pretty amazing job actually of getting Mother to trust him again, through doing years of therapy, or at least that’s what we’d thought.

We were on this totally empty road winding out of the city. We didn’t know it but Dad had rehearsed and timed his ‘city escape route’ at least twenty times – as he instructs all preppers to do in his manual – so that on the day of our abduction he could drive at speed, pre-aware of any possible blockages, without encountering excessive panic-traffic or police.

Dad sped past the big mall near the edge of the burbs. Usually when we drove past such things, he would deliver one of his borderline rants. Classics like: ‘The masses just assume there’ll be food on the shelves, fuel in the pumps, money in the banks. The masses have been taught to love their servitude, and they have no idea how this house of cards could fall.’ One time he even yelled out his window at these random passing shoppers: ‘Wake up, Sheeple!’ Yeah, he was always telling Ben and me to ‘wake up’ and be aware of the world.

‘Sheeple’ means people who are like sheep, FYI.

But that morning he was spookily silent, and he said, ‘Shh, the radio!’ The news said, ‘. . . reports of deaths have yet to be confirmed . . . have broken off diplomatic relations over rumours of a cover-up, meanwhile the World Health Organization . . .’ and Dad turned it down low, smiled to himself and hummed along to a tune in only his head.

In retrospect, this was a massive telltale sign, but I was, as always, giving less than zero fucks, having what Dad’s survivalist manual calls ‘no contextual awareness’.

Wait, you still don’t really know about my dad.

OK, Dad must’ve been at least kind of normal when he was married to Mother, but when he started living alone he became like the mad inventor dad in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He ran his SUV on this homemade diesel fuel that was one-part ammonia and nine parts recycled frying fat and urine, or something. He had these huge industrial coffee filters in his kitchen, to drain out all the bits of batter and onion rings. This was essential because the ‘fuel’ came from all the cafes we used to drive round late at night – after they closed. It wasn’t stealing, Dad told us, but ‘creative recycling’. ‘One man’s crap is another man’s gold!’ he said.

One time Mother smelled fish and chips on me and Ben and accused Dad of feeding us junk food, and I had to make Ben promise never to tell her the truth because Mother could use Dad’s illegal manufacturing of potentially explosive materials as leverage to put a restraining order on him. I told Ben it wasn’t really lying because sometimes you had to protect people you love from the truth. Which is basically what we all do to Ben, 24/7.

I guess Dad had normalised his weirdness to us, so, for example, when my foot hit the disassembled crossbow under Ben’s car seat that morning as we sped out of civilisation, I just went, ‘Yup, that’s just Dad being Dad again!’

I checked the speedo and we were doing five miles over the speed limit, just like normal. We passed the sixties housing estates with boarded-up windows and all the other ruined places on the outskirts Dad had taken us to teach us his philosophy of life. We sailed right past, accelerating obliviously into Dad’s Abduction Plan A. He was later forced to use Plan B, Plan C and even Plan G, but we had no idea such things even existed at that particular junction or juncture, or whatever.

Confiscate The Phones Of Your Abductees Through Some Simple Ruse

Taking the phones from your abductees is essential, as one simple text message can be enough to scupper your entire plan. Teenagers and tweenagers very rarely part from their phones for more than a few minutes so you will need well-planned strategies to nab those telecommunication devices.

Ben asked Dad where the fabulous vaventure was going to be, and I reminded Dad that we had to be back at Mother’s at twelve, due to me meeting up with Shanna, who was my new bestie.

You see, I’d fallen out with Beth, Stace, Lana, Scoobs and Eva, on account of them private group-chatting without me because they thought I’m weird cos of my asthma and ADHD, or some shit. So I was supposed to go to the mall with Shanna for the sale in Blitz. But that was just an alibi, cos really we wanted to spy on Jason in Vodafone – he’d recently dumped me, telling me he was gay, but he still gave me the major moists.

These were my plans for that day.

I waited for the right moment to sneak out my phone, half listening as the radio said that someone who was head of something had become suddenly ill. My phone screen had a seven per cent power warning.

‘Damn it, Dad, you total doofus!’ I shouted. ‘You promised you’d charge it for me last night!’

‘Sorry, Hale-Bopp. But hey, who needs a phone when you can speak to real humanoids, huh? Try it sometime.’ Dad called me Hale-Bopp sometimes after some goofy comet that comes round every seventy years. Kind of ironic, given that we only saw him one night a week.

Anyway, so Dad had actually drained our phone batteries deliberately in the night, then topped them up by one or two per cent to hide his subterfuge.

I mumbled that he was as bad as Mother and rummaged in the glove box for his charger. Weirdly enough, there was a brand new pack of my asthma inhalers in there, but I gave zero fucks and thought only about getting back online. ‘Where’s your cable for the cigarette lighter charger thingy, Dad?’ I moaned at him. ‘It’s not here! Why can’t you have a proper phone charging socket like every other human being!’

He put his hand out. ‘Give it to me.’

I refused.

‘OK, if you hand it over, I promise I’ll charge it for you,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we see how long you can live without it, anyway? See it as a character-building exercise, Haley. I’ll bet you can’t go half an hour without it. Prove me wrong.’

So, I handed my phoney over with a sigh. ‘You’ll really charge it?’

‘Sure, when we get to our destination,’ he added, with a grin, and he switched off my phone and set it on the dash, where I couldn’t reach it.

‘Heinous,’ I muttered, ‘abhorrent, grievous, monstrous!’

Dad accelerated and ignored my moaning for a whole five minutes, so I said: ‘Er, are we just going to drive around for miles and miles and then turn round and go back to Mother’s? Because, sorry, that’s not much of a vaventure. Plus, we should be watching the time because I seriously have to be back at twelve to meet Shanna.’

I thought I’d better text Mother, just to warn her that things had gone awry. I asked Dad for the phone again, but he said, ‘Haley, you’re not calling your mother, it’s way too early, and your phone’s dead anyway. I told you, I’ll charge it when we get there. Trust me for once, would you?’

We passed a petrol station. It was empty and I recalled that time, during the last pandemic, when Dad had seen ten cars in a line waiting for gas and he’d said, ‘You see that, in three hours’ time they’ll be paying a hundred for a gallon. They’ll be queuing for miles. When that ring road gets blocked it’ll turn into a stranglehold – no one’ll get in or out. The biggest nose-to-tail in history, the last one.’

Of course he was wrong, and things like this were why Mother called Dad ‘paranoid obsessive’. There was something else about a personality disorder, but he’d done a shit ton of therapy and had convinced Mother he was now more-or-less fine.

After the petrol station we’d officially ‘left the county’. But I still didn’t suspect anything was up – Dad, with his many vaventures over the years, had trained us to not be alarmed when he deviated from the map.

He’d also managed to keep it secret that he’d been preparing for this day for the last five years since the last pandemic. His motto, we later found out, was: ‘It’s better to be one year too early than one day too late.’ Or maybe it was ‘hour’. In the years when we hardly saw Dad at all, he had been a very busy chap indeed, and all that money he’d not given Mother in child support payments . . . well, it had gone to something much bigger.

Have A Fake Narrative Prepared For Your Abductees To Buy More Time

Vague promises of rewards buy time, and give greedy teenagers and kids motivation while also creating disorientation.

We passed the sign that said NORTH and Dad accelerated way past legal speed and I decided it was game over. ‘Very amusing, Dad, but actually, I’m getting too old for this. To be perfectly honest I’d rather you just took us back to Mother. Like, now, OK, thank you very much, danke, merci beaucoup.’

He raised an eyebrow and squinted into the rear-view mirror, checking out Ben, who was dozing in the back, cute sibling-style, his little spherical face smooshed against the glass. I say Ben is my little brother – he’d just turned six a month before this began – but he weighs about the same as a nine-year-old on account of his eating disorder. Mother blamed Ben’s egregious eating on the divorce and Dad blamed it on Mother’s ‘unsustainable consumerist lifestyle’. Classic divorce shit.

Anyway, as we headed into the deeply sheep-filled countryside, I asked the question that had started growing on me over the last few miles.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t happen to be, you know, abducting us, would ya?’ I said it as a kind of joke so as not to offend him. ‘Just checking, cos if you are, I might have to make a few calls.’

He laughed. But not like an evil cackle. More like he’d been elsewhere and just tuned back in. He checked out the snoozing Benster again, and with lowered voice he said, ‘Haley, can you keep a secret?’

And I thought, oh crap, he really is abducting us, for real!

But this was him cueing up his fake narrative. Note: an effective fake narrative should contain an element of truth in it, so as to not be out-of-the-blue.

‘What if I told you,’ he said, ‘that I just made a lot of money, Haley?’

This was pretty improbable. Dad never had any cash and I knew that he’d recently stopped paying his child support payments, and Mother was officially ‘concerned’, alluding to his ‘mental health issues’ and his ‘need to just buckle down and get a proper job’.

‘Well, how much money we talking?’ I asked, thinking it’s most likely a measly hundred or something.

Then he says, ‘Well, I finally sold an invention.’

And I’m like, ‘What? You mean like your bike-powered TV?’ Poor old doofus Dad had actually made one such object, though he told us not to tell Mother.

He shook his head. ‘Guess again, Hale Storm!’

So, then I’m staring at the random cows speeding by and saying, ‘What? The wind-up hairdryer?’ and he’s laughing but quietly so as not to wake Ben and