Emergency , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Neil Strauss

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

213 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

With the economic downturn, the hysterical Swine Flu frenzy and the systemic corruption of our political system we need someone to guide us through these difficult times. Emergency tells how Strauss went from shivering the whole night through in a water-logged sleeping bag on a tracking course, with only his broken Blackberry for company, to being the well-trained and even better equipped survival expert he is today. Encountering a host of weird and hilarious characters along the way, Strauss's timely and wry look at the The End of the World As We Know It will make you glad you chose to be on his side.

Sujets

Humour

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	29 septembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847675804
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

N EIL S TRAUSS is the author of the No. 1 bestseller The Game and The Rules of the Game. He is also the co-author of three New York Times bestsellers Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star , Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt and Marilyn Manson’s The Long Hard Road Out of Hell as well as Dave Navarro’s Don’t Try This at Home , a Los Angeles Times bestseller. A writer for Rolling Stone , Strauss lives in Los Angeles and can be found at www.neilstrauss.com.
ALSO BY NEIL STRAUSS
The Rules of the Game

The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

The Dirt with Mötley Crüe

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star with Jenna Jameson

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell with Marilyn Manson

Don’t Try This at Home with Dave Navarro

How to Make Money Like a Porn Star with Bernard Chang

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition published in 2011 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Neil Strauss, 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States of America in 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
To protect the innocent, the names and identifying details of a small number of individuals have been changed and two characters are composites.
Photographic Credits and Permissions pagelink As published in the Chicago Sun-Times . Reprinted with permission. pagelink Prestel Publishing Ltd. pagelink Natalie Behring pagelink Keystone/Hutton Archive/Getty Images pagelink Book cover reprinted with the permission of the Sovereign Society. pagelink Tomas Skala pagelink and pagelink Kristine Harlan pagelink Courtesy of Sport Copter, Inc. All other photographs taken by the author.
The activities in this book involve the use of tools, resources, and materials that can be dangerous and require training, supervision, and practice in order to be used safely. Your safety is your responsibility, including the proper use of equipment and safety gear and determining whether you have the adequate skill and experience required for an activity. Please see contract for further details.
www.neilstrauss.com
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 760 0 eISBN 978 1 84767 580 4
Designed by Todd Gallopo and Jaime Putorti Illustrations by Bernard Chang
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
www.canongate.tv

TO DONALD BOOTH, WHO DIED WHEN A BLOCK OF ICE FELL FROM A BUILDING AND HIT HIS HEAD. AND TO ALL THOSE WHO NEVER SAW IT COMING.
M EMENTO MORI . . .
THERE IS NO CRIME
THAT A MAN WILL NOT COMMIT
IN ORDER TO SAVE HIMSELF.

T ADEUSZ B OROWSKI , "T HE J ANUARY O FFENSIVE "
CONTENTS
PART ONE
ORIENTATION
PART TWO
FIVE STEPS
PART THREE
ESCAPE
PART FOUR
SURVIVE
PART FIVE
RESCUE
EXTRA CREDIT
PART ONE
Notice the strong walls of our city . . .
Now examine the inner walls of our city.
Examine the fine brickwork.
These walls, too, surpass all others!
No human being, not even a king,
will ever be able to construct more impressive walls.

Gilgamesh, Tablet I, 2100 B.C .

PROLOGUE
R ing. Ring.
The time was 7:40 A.M . I reached for the phone.
"Do you have your axe?" came the voice on the other end. It was Mad Dog.
"Yes."
"Is your axe sharp?"
"No, but I can sharpen it while you’re driving here."
"How about your knife?"
"Got it."
"Everything needs to be nice and sharp."
Fuck, I’m supposed to kill a goat today. And I couldn’t even kill the fly in my room last night. Really. Sadly. I just put a drinking glass over it, covered the opening with a saucer, then set it free outside. I’m a victim of my own empathy. I wouldn’t be too happy if someone squished me flat, so it seems cruel to do the same to another living thing.
Fifteen minutes later, Mad Dog pulled up in a weathered blue Dodge Ram 3500 truck with skull-and-crossbones floor mats and a lone bumper sticker depicting a gun sight next to the words THIS IS MY PEACE SYMBOL .
The goat peered curiously at me from a beige dog cage in the back of the truck. It was much cuter than I’d expected. It had a wide smile, silky white fur, and a gentle disposition. I began to feel sick.
Symptoms: dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath.
I turned away. I didn’t want to pet it, befriend it, name it, or grow attached to it in any way. If I did, there was no way I’d be able to go through with this.
My girlfriend Katie, whom I’d brought along for moral support, felt the same way. "Oh my God it just baa ’d at me," she squealed in delight and horror. "I can’t look. I’ll fall in love."
So much for moral support.
"Is this wrong?" I asked Mad Dog as we drove into the forest in grim silence. "I need a moral justification for doing this."
"This is the circle of life," he answered coldly, without sympathy. He was thin, with ropy muscles, a receding hairline, piercing blue eyes, and a brown handlebar mustache. His hat was emblazoned with the Revolutionary War slogan "Don’t tread on me," and he wore a sleeveless T-shirt advertising his handmade knives.
"Every steak you bought at Safeway started out looking like this," he continued. "If you need a rationalization, you’re hungry and you need to eat today. And if you want to eat, something has to die." Then he leaned forward, flipped on his stereo, and blasted AC/DC’s "Kicked in the Teeth."
Unlike me, Mad Dog was a real man. He could chop wood, make fire, forge weapons, kill his own food, and defend himself with his bare hands. In other words, he could survive on his own without Con Edison, without AT&T, without Exxon, without McDonald’s, without Wal-Mart, without two and a half centuries of American civilization and industry.
And that’s exactly why I was with him right now, crossing a moral boundary from which there was no return.
"Help me look for a good hanging tree," Mad Dog ordered as he stopped at a clearing deep in the woods and turned off the engine.
Every moment, this felt more and more like a Mafia execution. In the distance, I saw a deer bound across a clearing and disappear into the forest. It was such a strong, beautiful, graceful animal. I didn’t think I could ever shoot one.
Unless Mad Dog told me to.
After finding the tree and throwing pigging string over a branch, we returned to the truck and stood at the rear bumper next to the goat cage. "This is your protein source," Mad Dog began his lecture. "Right along its neck is its carotid artery. You’re going to straddle the goat, push your knife through from one side to the other, and cut out the throat. Then we’re going to hang it, skin it, and butcher it."
Symptoms: dizziness, nausea, shortness of breath, self-disgust, guilt.
He let the goat out of the cage and put a leash around its neck. It walked up to me and nuzzled its head against my leg. Then it stepped away and peed and shat on the ground.
"The more waste it passes now," Mad Dog said, "the better."
This was when reality set in. I felt, in that moment, like I was going to hell. The goat was able to handle a leash, and it waited until it was out of the cage to relieve itself. It was practically domesticated.
I didn’t have to kill it. I could always ask Mad Dog if I could just keep it as a pet.
"Don’t anthropomorphize your prey," Mad Dog barked when I confided this to him. "Most animals won’t piss and shit where they lay down."
"I’ve been trying not to get attached," I told him. "That’s why I haven’t given it a name."
"I have," Katie blurted. "I named it Bettie. B-E-T-T-I-E."
"When did you do that?"
"When she fluttered her little eyes at me."
That was the last thing I needed to hear.
Symptoms: everything, nothing, complete and total panic.
I wasn’t sure I could go through with this.
I was wearing an olive baseball cap, a matching army shirt, khaki cargo pants, and a gun belt with a Springfield Armory XD nine-millimeter on one side and a three-inch RAT knife on the other. This wasn’t me. Until a month ago, I’d rarely even worn cargo pants or baseball caps, let alone guns or knives.
Why, I asked myself, was I about to do this?
Because I wanted to survive. This is what people did for protein before there were farms and slaughterhouses and packing plants and refrigerated trucks and interstate highways and grocery stores and credit cards.
I never thought the day would come when I’d have to make a backup plan.
A BRIEF CONFESSION
I ’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes.
It usually begins in airports. That’s when I get the first portent of doom. I imagine explosions, sirens, walls blown apart, bodies ripped from life.
Then, as I gaze out of the taxi window after arriving in a new city, I see people bustling around on their daily routine, endless rows of office buildings and tenements teeming with activity, thousands of automobiles rushing somewhere important. And it all seems so solid, so permanent, so unmovable, so absolutely necessary.
But all it would take is one war, one riot, one dirty bomb, one natural disaster, one marauding army, one economic catastrophe, one vial containing one virus to bring it all smashing down. We’ve seen it happen in Hiroshima. In Dresden. In Bosnia. In Rwanda. In Baghdad. In Halabja. In New Orleans.
Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It’s an inevitability tourists can’t help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?
That’s how the world looks through apocalypse eyes. You start filling in the blanks between a thriving city and a devastated one. You imagine how it could happen, what it would look like, and whether you and the people you love could escape.
Of course I don’t wan