In a die-off, death is a game of musical chairs that begins as an innocuous boil. An occasional power outage evolves into rolling blackouts, followed by assurances from government officials that oil reserves will last another thirty years, even as prices spike and the lines at your local gas station stretch for miles. The grocery store becomes a battle front as every nonperishable left on the shelf is fought over in hand-to-hand combat and customers with loaded carts, refusing to risk their precious bounty, charge out the doors without paying. These scenarios degenerate into civil disorder and mandatory curfews, the protests and street violence that follow unleashing the military.

Stop the music and remove the chair known as “personal freedom.”

Phase two is rationing. Oil, natural gas, coal, firewood … food. Communication fractures into weekly assurances that times are tough but things will be improving soon. These pep talks from politicians, also known as lies, are designed to buy time—time being the variable that allows the weak to perish, either with a whimper (starvation) or a bang (riot police with orders to shoot to kill).

For the lower classes, the music has stopped.

A long winter without heat strikes next. Add in diminishing water and food supplies, not to mention a cessation of hospital services—and there goes the middle class—first in the colder rural regions, followed closely by the urban areas. As we remove this chair, the government shuts down, society collapses, and now it is officially every family for itself.

Dying comes in many flavors. You can starve, freeze to death, die of heat exhaustion, thirst, physical ailments, or perhaps you’ll be shot attempting to get food to feed yourself or a starving child. In the last few years I had seen it all, and the images never went away … the nightmares and the anger stuck with me forever.

In the warmer states, suburbanites had lasted a season longer than their city-dwelling counterparts, but a die-off, like musical chairs, is a zero-sum game. Eventually every family, save the farmer with his own well-armed private army of migrant workers and the inaccessible survivalist community, was forced to abandon their powerless homes and their gasless vehicles to search for food and potable water, joining a nomadic exodus that defined the postapocalyptic landscape. Hunters still hunted and fisherman fished, but the competition for food turned neighbor against neighbor, no catch safe among the hordes of the wandering desperate. Parents pushed their starving children in shopping carts and wheelbarrows, leaving the elderly behind to die with the family pet they could no longer feed. Unyielding hunger could transform a populace into a mob of borderline psychopaths, and western nations do not go quietly into the night like an emaciated African born into hunger. They go out shooting.

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