Prepper's Web

Crisp, brisk air and sparkling frost signal the start of the holiday season each year. But for local shop owners, preparing for their busiest months began well before the first holly was hung. Finding out the up-and-coming trends, purchasing the perfect holiday gifts and staging their stores is a year-long process to help make shoppers get in the holiday spirit while searching for the perfect gifts.

“Most of my income comes in November and December so I do have to do the prep work beforehand to make that happen,” The Farmer’s Wife owner Bonnie Terpstra said. “It is a lot of work and my storage is up the stairs but you have to do it to make the reward.”

Terpstra’s store on the northwest corner of Newton’s downtown is transformed into a holiday wonderland, a little bit of something for everyone’s taste. But she doesn’t wait until the end of summer work on the holidays, it’s a process that kicks off just as the last holiday season wraps up.

“For looking, it’s always right after Christmas. I’ll go to market in January and order most of it there,” Terpstra said. “You can kind of see what is trending in all of the show rooms. I have my favorites that I like to buy from. Also, what’s trending, what sold well for me the past Christmas. Things change and evolve and you’ve got to move with the new colors or whatever they come up with on the designs.”

Market can be in Dallas, Las Vegas, Atlanta or many other large cities across the country. Stacy Barney from Fine Things on the south side of downtown Newton said owner Julia Prendergast is always prepping for the holidays, finding different pieces throughout the year.

“She does go to market and she has companies that she uses,” Barney said. “Most shows for any store will be spring and winter.”

Along with purchasing items from outside companies, Stephanie Moran owner and designer at Silverado Jewelry, makes her own products, an ongoing project as the trends evolve.

“The year before, we will make notes of things we want to do differently for the following year, what we want to buy, what we want to look for. Then, a couple of months ago actually buying things and figuring out how we are going to decorate and position things,” Moran said. “We get inspiration from different influencers, trying to see what the market in going towards. We want to have the right colors, right fit, the right textures, that is all important to us.”

Once the products are secured, getting the store ready is the next big task. Shoppers who might want to start decorating their own house begin to look for pieces before the holidays start, giving shop owners the opportunity to begin teasing what is coming for the season.

“I always start decorating Oct. 1 because I have large store,” Terpstra said. “I start at the back and move forward. Each section has a different theme. We have the farmhouse, the kitchen area, a black, white and silver and the front is usually a lot of sparkle and glam that Christmas comes with.”

Terpstra hinted at trends flowing in a boho direction incorporating a lot of wood tones and naturals for the upcoming season. Of course, the traditional reds and greens can also be found through each store, too.

“We try to hold back a little bit … once we get into the first of November, within the next couple of weeks everything will be out,” Barney said. “We’ll be good and prepared by then.”

By mid-November, shops are completely transformed to winter wonderlands, filled with holiday cheer and plenty of goodies to keep patrons busy. With several shopping weekends offering specials and deals along with extra activities in the downtown, shop owners are eager to welcome the hundreds of shoppers looking to celebrate throughout the holiday months.

“It is so incredible the support we get from the community,” Moran said. “It is indescribable.”

The Black Friday weekend is traditionally one of the biggest of the year for online sales, but those sales hinge on the ability of retailers to keep their e-commerce sites going and to fend off threats from cybercriminals.

The stakes are undoubtedly high for retailers, as well as all kinds of companies, and so are the risks. Cybercriminals know that many IT security professionals will be home eating turkey instead of keeping an eye out for online attackers over the long weekend, making it a good time for them to launch an attack.

That’s why the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday reminded companies, especially those that involve critical infrastructure, to keep their guard up, reiterating guidance it issued last year.

The message isn’t lost on Jon Hocut, head of information security at Brooks Running, who plans to stay close to his laptop the entire weekend. He’s charged with protecting the personal information of the runners who buy his company’s products, as well as guarding Brooks’ overall corporate systems from online attackers.

In terms of sales, the “cyber five” stretch, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is a huge sales event for the 100-year-old company known for its running shoes and apparel. Its e-commerce team expects traffic on the company’s retail site to jump 30% to 50% over those peak days. 

If the site were to crash over the weekend, it could mean millions in lost sales and throngs of disappointed runners, but the Seattle, Washington-based company has more to worry about than that. Its computer systems also hold “shoe secrets” that need to be kept confidential, as well as the software that sends and tracks shipments to retailers.

The ransomware problem

The “worst nightmare” for many companies, Hocut said, would be a targeted ransomware attack, probably involving a Russian criminal gang staffed with cyberexperts, that would quietly infiltrate a company’s systems, then move through them without being detected.

The attackers would figure which systems are most critical, then find and compromise the company’s backed-up data. Everything would appear to be OK until around midnight on Thanksgiving, when the company’s incident response team is home, stuffed full of turkey and nearly asleep, he said.

“That’s when they start hitting all of your systems and taking them down,” Hocut said. “When you’re at your least ability to respond.

“That’s the nightmare, and that’s what we have to keep from happening.”

Ransomware really is nightmare stuff. The attacks, which have locked up entire computer systems at businesses, schools, hospitals and elsewhere, are getting more frequent, more successful and more expensive.

According to Sophos’ State of Ransomware report earlier this year, 66% of organizations surveyed said they were hit with a ransomware attack in 2021, up from 37% in 2020. And 6% of those attacks were successful in encrypting their victims’ data, up from 54% the year before. On top of that, the average ransom paid by organizations for their most significant ransomware attack grew by nearly five times, to just over $800,000, while the number of organizations that paid ransoms of $1 million or more tripled.

A big part of preventing that is making sure systems are locked down and there are enough people to respond if something does happen over the holiday weekend, Hocut said. At Brooks, the entire incident response team will be on call 24/7 over the holiday weekend.

The company also recently hired the cybersecurity company Illumio to help shore up its defenses. The idea is to segment off Brooks’ systems so that the damage is limited if a system is breached, said  PJ Kirner, Illumio’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

Kirner likened the company’s systems to the structure of a submarine, noting that subs are built in compartments, so that if one part of a sub is breached, it can be sealed off and stop the sub from sinking. If a company can quickly detect a breach and prevent the attackers from moving through its systems, it also can limit the damage, he said.

The idea isn’t a new one. The inability of companies to silo off their most precious data has long been blamed for some of history’s most massive data breaches. But segmenting massive computer systems is easier said than done, Kirner said.

That’s particularly true for Brooks, Hocut said. The century-old brand, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, has seen significant growth in recent years. In 2021, its revenue totaled $1.11 billion, marking its first year over the $1 billion mark.

The threats companies face have also changed, Kirner said. While the thought of a massive data breach might have kept security professionals awake at night just a few years ago, the major threat now is the kind of ransomware attack Hocut described.

“If you look at attacks maybe five years ago, they were data confidentiality issues,” Kirner said. “You got the customer list, you got emails, you got credit cards. They were about a breach of confidentiality.”

Ransomware, in comparison, is about a company’s operations.

“Why are we talking about retail now? Because Thanksgiving is the most impactful operational day of the year,” he said, adding that customer data is just as valuable to cybercriminals any other day of the year. 

It’s those operational threats that will keep Hocut and his staff on “maximum paranoia mode” at least through the end of the weekend. They’ll be taking a close look at any alerts that pop up and will be very grateful and happy when they turn out to be false positives, he said.

Other IT professionals may not be so lucky.

“I expect that 90% of my friends who do incident response as a specialty will probably be working on somebody’s painful experience this holiday weekend,” Hocut said.

Thousands of people expected for Thursday’s annual meal

DULUTH, Minn — It’s a job that some people may not like. For others it’s the exact opposite John McDonald, a chef at Mid Coast Catering is one person who enjoys potato peeling.

McDonald said, “There’s something Zen about peeling potatoes, you know, it just makes the time fly by.

So, if you enjoy peeling potatoes or enjoy helping others, the DECC kitchen was the place for you. Nearly 2,000 pounds of potatoes were peeled and sliced to make real, home-made mashed potatoes for the 6,000 to 7,000 people expected on Thursday.

The organizer of the DECC event is Monica Hendrickson from the College of St. Scholastica and she described the events of the day.

“Today, it’s potatoes, potatoes and stuffing and everything made with love, a lot of love and lots of butter. We’ve gone through a lot of butter, ” said Hendrickson.

More than two dozen volunteers, many from Minnesota Power and others from Mid Coast Catering were peeling the potatoes on Tuesday.

This is the 33rd year for this meal and there is a lot of food to cook.  Hendrickson said, “We cook for three days straight and everyone pitches in.”

The effort is led by the College of St. Scholastica with donations of cash, time and food coming from throughout the community to make Thanksgiving a little better for a lot of people.

Hendrickson summed up the reason for the effort that’s put into this one meal, “for us it’s getting kind of back to our roots, of really having that home-cooked meal like if you went to your grandmas or your moms.”

SOUTHINGTON, CT (WFSB) – As temperatures go downhill into the winter months, ski and snowboarding resorts are ready to thrive.

Eyewitness News stopped by Mt. Southington to see how they’re getting ready.

“It’s just really fun in the snow but I don’t like being cold but I don’t feel cold when I ski,” said Ella Stratton, skier.

“I was excited and surprised that there’s already snow because it’s early,” said Paige Straub, skier.

Mt. Southington isn’t open yet but usually opens in mid-December.

“This year we have both new and used with every seasonal rental kids come in and purchase we give them two lift tickets worth $68 a piece,” Monti Montana, Seasonal Rentals and Social Media.

General Manager Jay Dougherty said they are working hard. They already tested out their first blast of snow.

“Last night we had some temperatures that allowed us to test fire our snow gums pump some water up the hill we did a lot of work to our snow making system over the summer and it’s good to see it all come out great so we’re happy,” said Jay.

Now they’re looking ahead to a busy season. Usually thousands visit and they’ve got about 100 snow making machines ready to go.

“Planning for every season starts at the close if the previous season so it’s a lot of work all through the summer we have a lot of crew that does it we are working on our chair lift we’re working on our rental equipment we’re working on our snow making system but it all comes together in November so it’s a really exciting time of year,” Jay said.

Copyright 2022 WFSB. All rights reserved.

SHREVEPORT, La. (KSLA) – The Salvation Army of Northwest Louisiana is preparing to feed at least 1,200 people this Thanksgiving.

The organization is asking for donations of ingredients or premade side dishes in order to make this meal successful. Organizers are asking for mac n’ cheese, dressing, sweet potatoes, green beans, and rolls. Meals will be given out on a first come, first-served basis.

Donations will be accepted Tuesday, Nov. 22 and Wednesday, Nov. 23 from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. at the front desk of the central office. Officials say if it’s after 4 p.m., donations can be left at the shelter with a note attached indicating the donations are for the Thanksgiving meal.

The Salvation Army will also deliver meals to seniors or those who can’t leave home. Simply submit the person’s name and address before 12 p.m. Monday, Nov. 21.

For more information, contact Chef Melvin Nelson at 318-424-3200 ext. 19, or email melvin.nelson@uss.salvationarmy.org.

Copyright 2022 KSLA. All rights reserved.

CHOCOWINITY, N.C. (WITN) – WITN hosted a booth at a high school career fair and was told by students, that they feel the pressure more now, more than ever when it comes to thinking about their future.

Southside High School gave students an opportunity to ask employees in various professions questions so students could have a better understanding of what life would be like in that career.

The career fair in Chocowinity was open to all grades. Students could be seen with a pen and paper ready to ask questions, and ready to take notes on what professionals said their day-to-day was like.

Adair Cisneros, a tenth-grade student, says he’s already thinking about his career at a young age because he wants to help his parents.

“My parents there – they migrated from Mexico. They are immigrants and they’ve worked hard ever since I was younger,” said Cisneros. ” I wanna retire them, get a good job. Take them out of working, make them happy.”

Students were motivated to get a jump start on their prospective careers for many reasons.

Freshman Taylor McRoy is hoping to go into the medical field. She plans to take college classes while completing her high school education because she can do so for free.

“A lot of people try to do it so that can be more prepared and not have to take certain classes while they’re in college,” said McRoy.

Amoz Gardner, a junior, says being around determined people has instilled a personal goal to be the best in his career.

“Simply because I want to be able to be successful in the future. I want to be able to retire young. I want to be able to basically, with all the money I have left, invest. And I want to be able to basically be a front runner,” said Gardner.

Copyright 2022 WITN. All rights reserved.

In 2013/14, my wife and I became fearful of a phenomenon that might have led to a civilizational collapse, and so we started ‘prepping’.

‘Preppers’ or ‘Doomsday Preppers’ are essentially any people who take it into their own hands to prepare for the survival of their group or family in the face of a predicted life-threatening catastrophic event.

We were amateurs, but nonetheless, with prepper manuals in hand, we bought a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere and tried to grow food we could eat so that we wouldn’t have to rely on stores, aka civilisation. After a year our garden failed to become self-sustaining but the novel How to Survive Everything was born and we learned a lot about the Prepper lifestyle and philosophy along the way.

Here’s what we discovered.

1. Preppers are not who you think are – they are a multitude. “We are all Preppers Now” said the New York Times during the Covid-19 pandemic, while the BBC declared ‘Preppers are going mainstream’.

Since Covid 19 has been a 50% increase in the number of Canadians joining ‘Preppers & Survivalists of Canada’, while Australia has reported a ‘Doom Boom’ with hundreds of thousands fleeing cities in ‘Covid flight’ to live ‘off-grid’. In the UK there’s been city-flight to rural Scotland and a boom in people learning ‘survival bushcraft.’

Since Covid 19 Preppers have become a much larger group than the ‘Survivalists’ of old. Survivalism was historically associated with gun-toting, right wing American militias, whereas today’s Preppers include ecologists, left-leaning ‘home schooling’ families, zero growthers, homesteaders, and everyday’ self-sufficiency’ couples, growing their own organic or macrobiotic food to become less dependent upon corporate food supply chains.  Some preppers turn holiday homes into safe houses, while others create fortified city homes. Some invent scientific systems to give themselves self-sustaining cycles of crops and fish, while others hoard year’s worth of food and medical supplies in hidden bunkers.

The new preppers include billionaires building apartment sized apocalypse bunkers with swimming pools and city-dwelling ‘fitness and self-defence preppers’ who are learning martial arts. Prepper websites list from seven to eighteen different varieties of Preppers, including hoarders, suburban preppers, weekend bug-out preppers and minimalist bug-in preppers – along with your regular old-school conspiracy theorist and religious apocalypse preppers who are still out there.

They all share a common belief, that in an extreme emergency, you can’t trust the government, so you’d better make your own plans.

2. It’s not only Preppers who are preparing for the end of civilization – your government is too!

Our time prepping started with a big and terrifying download of Government data.

It all started back in 2013 when my wife and I were commissioned to write the script for the TV feature ‘American Blackout’ for National Geographic. The show was made to launch the second season of the popular TV series ‘Doomsday Preppers’ and to introduce a wider audience to a wide variety of ‘Preppers’ who were preparing for a range of disasters in advance (Sea Level Rise, Meteor Strike, Civil War, Super Volcano Eruption, Pandemic, Economic Collapse, Nuclear War).

Fusing documentary footage of past disasters with dramatized sections featuring everyday people, our 90-minute docu-drama, revealed ‘in gritty detail the impact of what happens when a cyber attack on the United States takes down the power grid.’ (It has gone on to become one of the top ten films in the ‘prepper cannon’.)

What amazed and terrified my wife and I, when making American Blackout, was the specialist research that National Geographic passed to us from FEMA, the CDC, the NSA, Professors of National Security Strategy and the Department of Public Health at Columbia University – and other ‘Collapse Studies’ departments.

B – there are an alarming number of Govt. funded ‘Centres for Disaster Research and Planning’ in US universities.

These studies demonstrated ‘tipping points’ that had occurred during previous disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy and two blackouts in different parts of the US. They showed how ‘positive feedback loops’ escalate into multi-faceted crisis situations.

For example: one feedback loop is caused by people lighting fires to stay warm during a power outage. This then causes an increase in buildings going up in flames which increases call-outs for emergency services. In turn this leads to looters and criminals starting fires so as to distract the police, and so an increase in fire and looting leads to hospitals and police being overrun. Shut-down hospitals lead to escalating panic, more looting and more fires.

A positive feedback loop is the opposite of a negative one and a good example of a negative one is a thermostat – it turns the heat off. A positive one, turns it up.

These govt. and university studies also had modelled timelines for the collapse of civilization, from Day 1 to Day 30, and pinpointed the exact moment at which the military has to take over and enforce martial law. These were case studies from nations around the world

It was all very convincing and damn scary.

It’s not just ‘preppers’ who are paranoid, your government is also planning for all worst-case disaster scenarios, and calculating the degree to which you, and all other average members of the public could become a problem within its crisis-management plan.

You don’t want to be trapped in a positive feedback loop, you want to be outside the loop completely.

3. You will always miss one thing on your prep list.

‘How to Survive…’ Prepper manuals are obsessed with lists. Most preppers are preparing to cut themselves off from civilisation for a long period of time – ‘getting out of dodge’ when the ‘SHTF’ (Shit Hits The Fan), bugging-out into the wilds or hiding in an underground bunker to sit out a crisis.

Prep lists include essential foodstuffs you will need to hoard or grow in case the ‘just-in-time’ consumer food supply chain breaks down and lists of medical supplies you will need if the health system collapses. After all, before the discovery of antibiotics in 1928, the number one cause of death in the world was simple bacterial infection and the average life expectancy at birth was only 47 years.

You’re going to want antibiotics on your list. A lot of them.

Every single thing you and your loved ones will need for a long stay away from civilisation has to be on that prep list, in advance, and your stash needs to be complete before the collapse begins. When the unprepared population become desperate, contaminated, hungry and lawless, there is no possibility of ‘nipping out to the shops’ for say milk powder or tampons, a phone charger or something else you forgot to put on your list.

The dangers of being caught outdoors were demonstrated by the Martial Law rules during Hurricane Katrina, under which any person caught within ‘evacuated areas’ was rounded-up at gun-point and arrested as a looter – even if they were holding onto their own possessions in their own homes.

Preppers we interviewed and who had done ‘crisis rehearsals’ told us they’d overlooked three main things from their prep lists:

Books and magazines. In most situations where our access to ‘the media and the internet’ is shut down, we have to do something with ourselves in the moments when we’re not hiding, farming, or patrolling the perimeter fence with a cross-bow. This is where reading comes in. It’s at the peak of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but it gets pretty essential when a group of media-addicted people get stuck together in lockdown with no TV and internet. People need space from each other in tightly packed environments and reading let’s them do that.

Also, if civilisation is collapsing for good, and you’re the only survivors, you may wish you’d stocked up a good library of classics like Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, Thomas Paine, Virginia Woolf and Harry Potter to build your new civilisation upon.

A guitar or musical instrument. In a bunker or hideaway home it’s a really good idea for social bonding, to have some time together that is not just ‘survival talk’. It’s also important to keep your own traditions alive and your spirits up. So sharing songs and even learning and instrument is a way to pass culture on and to help bond and motivate the group. Group sing-alongs to Bowie and Abba classics are also a really good way of preventing ‘bunker madness’.

Birth control. Perhaps because it embarrassing to talk about in groups, or because sex tends to be seen as a luxury in the survival hierarchy, a surprising number of preppers forget to pack birth control. This is a real problem – as was proven nine months after the Covid lockdowns with the emergence of a whole generation of ‘Lockdown babies’.  People forced into enclosed spaces, facing boredom and a lot of time ‘stuck together’ tend to become intimate; people facing fear of death also seem to have a primeval switch that clicks-on in their brains that says ‘death and fear is everywhere, quick, make more babies!’

A secondary problem with forgetting birth control during a prep is then failure to prep for what a baby will need on its arrival in a sustained lockdown or bunker hold-out. So the two tons of formula milk and diapers required are not on the list, and again, you can’t pop back out to Duane Reader for these if there’s been a nuclear war or airborne Lyssavirus (Rabies) pandemic

4. Beware of ‘apocalypse swapping’.

One of the strangest things about Prepping is that it can give you a feeling of being really special. You hold secret knowledge that the un-enlightened masses don’t. You know that the world is going to collapse for X, Y or Z reason and this makes you one of the few smart ones who will survive. This means you get to look down at everyday people – and call them ‘The Sheeple’ or ‘the normies’. When the SHTF, the sheeple are all going to starve or become infected, and you can shout ‘We told you so – but you wouldn’t listen!’ along the depopulated streets.

Such a mindset, with its sense of moral superiority and its secret conspiracy ethos can be highly addictive, and it has parallels with religious cult mindset. Even atheist preppers are in this way like ‘the chosen’ or ‘the elect of God’. There is a good deal of fantastical vanity involved in thinking of oneselves as ‘the only survivors’ and  a fair amount of apocalyptic revenge-fantasy in this too.

This ‘looking forward to the end of the world’ mindset, can lead to a strange Prepper behaviour that I call ‘apocalypse swapping’. In apocalypse swapping, a prepper who believed say in Nuclear War, shifts their believed in apocalypse to an entirely different one – say Meteor Strike, after their belief in impending Nuclear War collapses. Normally a person who believed in impending Nuclear War would cease to believe in the end of the world, after their fear of such a war diminished, however the apocalypse addict simply moves to another apocalypse so they can keep their prepper behaviors and belief in the end of the civilisation intact.

One prepper I know has, over twenty years, moved from a passionate belief in imminent nuclear apocalypse, to imminent asteroid strike, to imminent ‘Artificial Intelligence takeover’. It doesn’t matter to her if the reason for stocking up her cellar or practicing karate have changed completely. She seems only to be contented when she has an apocalypse to believe in. She has in the past become depressed and demotivated during her brief transitions from apocalypse type to the next. She needs the end of the world to give herself a sense of identity, purpose and self-esteem. In this sense, whichever apocalypse she believes in doesn’t really matter, what does matter is the discipline and focus of the prepping life. A daily routine of ‘being ready to face the end.’ She is, I should add, one of the happiest and most energetic people I’ve ever met.

5. You can spot a Prepper because they buy…

During Covid 19 when people became hoarders and panic-buyers, the must-have pandemic panic-purchase was toilet roll. Tens of thousands stuffed their cars and homes with it, they pulled each others hair in supermarkets over it.

Real preppers don’t fight over toilet roll, they have their own stashes already or they have other more sophisticated sanitary arrangements.

In autumn of 2022, in a Europe with 200% increase in fuel prices and facing fuel crises and blackouts, the next hoarding panic-object is firewood. We’re already seeing people hoarding and fighting over it. We are hearing that in France, the inhabitants are felling forests and gathering fallen wood from parks.

Preppers won’t be fighting over firewood. Most preppers aim to be ‘energy self-sufficient’. What you will see a rush on with preppers is something quite unexpected.

Preppers buy chickens.

Since Covid 19, the American Poultry Association reported an ‘exploding… resurgence in raising backyard poultry.’ Fear of scarce eggs and further lockdown has led many to start prepping for food self-sufficiency. The New York Times even reported ‘People are panic-buying chickens like they did toilet paper.’

Chickens however are a long-term investment. If someone has a batch of chickens you can bet they have a whole crop rotation survival system they’re not telling you about.

Which takes us to my final point.

6. Preppers are secretive, and have to be.

Prepping is a bit like ‘Fight Club’ – you know, ‘The first Rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club, the second rule is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.’

Every Prepper and Survivalist manual tells you that secrecy is tantamount. The reason is very simple: in any situation where the food supply chain breaks down, people in your vicinity will begin to starve and they will look to their neighbour’s homes for food once they’ve exhausted their own. And when law and order breaks down, and when all the stores have been looted and thousands are starving, then the last thing you need is for these people to know that you have a three-year stash of beans, pulses and canned meat in your not-so secret sub-basement.

The manuals warn you that formerly friendly neighbours can become desperate when food and safe fresh water runs out – after all people start dying of dehydration after three days without water. Preppers are trained to say no to neighbours and outsiders, and to scare them away. ‘Pity can be your weakest link’ the manuals warn. ‘Just say no.’ Saying ‘No’, may involve razor wire, a baseball bat, or worse.

Just to prove how secretive Preppers are, a few years ago, when my wife and I were making our pantry stash of canned goods, we were talking to a family member on the phone on the other side of the world,  and due to a couple of little tell-tale signs – in this case the purchase of chickens! My wife and I worked out that our relatives had started prepping too. It turns out they were prepping for a different catastrophe than we were. We were getting ready for the end of oil (Peak Oil) and they were studiously preparing for a global economic catastrophe. It also turns out that they were way more advanced than we were, and much more like the bunker-digging, supply-hoarding, high-security, hard-core apocalypse preppers in my novel How To Survive Everything.

‘Your secret is safe with us,’ we said.

***