We Are Unprepared by Meg Little Reilly

else that would have signaled that something formal was occurring. I wondered how Pia knew about the meeting. The chairs were arranged in a circle that filled up quickly around us and stragglers had to drag new chairs over to form an outer ring. There were seven men and four women, most of them decades older than us. A bearded fiftysomething man wearing a faded denim vest greeted Pia warmly, as if they had met before, then he walked to a chair at the center that seemed designated for him.
    â€œThanks for coming everyone,” the bearded man said. He rolled up his sleeves and pulled a military dog tag out from beneath his shirt. “My name is Crow. Glad everyone found the place okay. I’m not big on email—because of the surveillance—so we will continue to rely on word-of-mouth for these meetings. Please do your part to let people know about them.”
    Several people nodded. An elderly woman I recognized from the local ski shop adjusted the position of her chair across the room. Then she patted the hand of a young man to her left who could barely keep his puffy eyes open and I felt a pang of jealousy at his freedom to be so unabashedly stoned.
    â€œWe have a lot of ground to cover over the next few weeks,” Crow continued, “so we’re going to dive right in tonight with a focus on energy. Later we’ll get to water safety, food supply, communication technology and, finally, personal protection.”
    In the corner of my eye, I saw Pia glance at me. This meeting didn’t feel as though it was going to be about what she had led me to believe it was about. But what was it?
    A middle-aged man in neat khakis and a plaid shirt cleared his throat. “Crow, what’s your advice on solar? It’s easier to set up than wind, but it’s too unreliable if you’re planning on unplugging from the grid.”
    â€œGood question.” Crow nodded. “The key here is to maintain a hybrid system. Ideally that would mean wind, solar and hydro. But you have to tailor that plan to the available natural resources on your land. I know you’ve got very little wind in your woods, Ron, but you do have that creek, so maybe look into hydro to supplement solar.”
    An obese woman to my right took frantic notes whenever Crow spoke. I leaned to my other side.
    â€œWhat is this?” I whispered to Pia.
    She pretended not to hear my question and instead jumped into the conversation that Crow and Ron were having. “What about gasifiers? I’ve been reading about that as a viable option,” she said.
    What did Pia know about gasifiers? The lady to my other side craned to see who had asked the question.
    â€œSuch a good point, Pia,” Crow said a little too enthusiastically. “Wood gas is a great option. It can be loud and a bit dirty—and I can’t speak to its legality around here—but if all hell breaks loose, that’s going to be the least of your problems.”
    A round of nods ensued. The stoned guy smirked in apparent response to Crow’s disdain for the law. What the hell was this, I wondered again. How did they know Pia?
    â€œ When all hell breaks loose,” a crouched older man corrected. He looked like Crow would in twenty more years. “And when hell breaks loose, it will be the preppers who survive.”
    Preppers. I’d read a New Yorker piece about them several months before. These weren’t concerned locals who needed advice on how to water-seal their windows. These were deranged weirdos fixated on the apocalypse. As I understood it, they were people like Crow whose minds hadn’t recovered from the damage of earlier wars, and antigovernment recluses who trusted no one, and angry bigots who relished the idea of a race war and religious fanatics who thought God was coming to punish the unsaved urban intellectuals. I wasn’t one of these people and neither was my wife.
    A ten-minute discussion about superior brands of