Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

23 MAD MINUTE

The morning of January 22nd dawned with clear skies. It would be a sunny day. As the sky in the east lightened, a stack of photocopied one-page flyers was passed down the line, with the whispered words, “Share these—just one copy for every five men, pass them down.”

The sheet read:

As full daylight came, a few men nibbled on food from their pockets. Jake could now see the billboard sign better. It had been painted black, and both sides said RENT THIS SIGN, along with a phone number—yet another victim of the economic decline that had preceded the Crunch. Jake and Tomas shared a granola bar. As they did so, Tomas said, “I wish I had a helmet. That would double my life expectancy.”

After a beat, Tomas continued. “I’ve been thinking about something. You know how you were teasing me about carrying too much gear? Well, one thing I’ve got in my ALICE pack is a couple of sandbags. When I was in the Marines, our battalion commander always insisted that each of us carry four sandbags. At first we hated that, since we were always humping around a ton of stuff, like we each also had to carry two mortar rounds. But those sandbags later turned out to be useful for a lot of things other than ballistic protection. For instance, we used them for packing speedballs.”

“What’s a speedball?” Jake asked.

Tomas explained. “That’s something that both the Army and Marines use, depending on the tactical situation or terrain, when part of a unit is under fire, and the rest of the guys are masked by terrain. When the guys up front, who are pinned down and doing most of the shooting, call back for a speedball, you take a sandbag and put in a couple of bandoleers of 5.56, a belt box of 7.62, and a few water bottles, and carry it forward.”

Jake looked incredulous. “You think we’re going to get pinned down?”

“No, no, no. I’m just explaining why amongst all my other gear I have three sandbags in the bottom of my rucksack. I say we fill them with soil here, and then we can lay them on the railroad track to give us a few more vertical inches of frontal protection. Hey, we’ve got the time, and it might give us a slight advantage.”

The man with the Mini-14 next to them chimed in. “I’ll take that third bag, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure, no prob.”

The three men spent the next fifteen minutes quietly scraping sandy soil into the olive drab nylon bags using Marichal’s canteen cup as an impromptu shovel. Once the bags were filled, they used some black plastic cable zip ties from Jake’s pack to close each of them.

More orders were passed down the line in a sporadic succession as the morning progressed:

“Don’t panic if we get flanked. Mass your firepower.”

“Looters are expected at ten thirty A.M.”

“Share your water.”

“Quiet.”

“Looters are expected at eleven A.M.”

“Pray for success.”

“Quit grumbling and be patient.”

“Keep your heads down or you’ll ruin this ambush.”

“Quiet.”

“Looters are expected at ten thirty A.M.”

“Keep your safeties on.”

“Keep quiet.”

“Looters have been sighted less than three quarters of a mile south.”

“Keep your heads down.”

It was now above seventy-five degrees and Jake was getting a headache. He continued to look in the direction of the highway. At 10:40, Jake heard the looter’s armored bulldozer as it chugged toward the roadblock. The clanking of its steel tracks was almost as loud as its engine. Tomas started looking anxious. He took off his MARPAT field jacket and stuffed it into the top of his ALICE pack.

Soon they could all hear the chants of the advancing looters in the distance. The bulldozer passed by, and the vanguard of the looter army approached. The amount of noise that came from the looters was surprising. As they got closer, Jake could hear shuffling feet, conversation, laughter, clanking metal, wobbling shopping cart wheels, and intermittent chanting.

Tomas half rolled over to Jake and whispered just inches from his ear, “Yep, there are lots of them, but this is amateur hour.”

Jake was also feeling warm, so he peeled off his field jacket, keeping his arms low. He quietly crept down to his rucksack and stowed the jacket. Then he pulled on the pack, trying to stay as close to the ground as possible. He handed Tomas his own pack, and he put it on. Once they were prone again, Tomas whispered, “Showtime, any moment.”

He had just finished speaking when the deep reports of a Barrett semiauto .50 from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department initiated the ambush. Just five shots from the Barrett aimed at the armored bulldozer’s engine brought it to a screeching halt, in a cloud of black smoke, just twenty-five feet short of the roadblock trailers.

There was a crackle of gunfire, as the looters probed the tree line to the west of the roadblock where they thought the Barrett .50 shooter might be hidden. Then a whispered order came. “Low crawl to the tracks. Stay prone. Keep as quiet as possible.” Jake crept forward up the berm, dragging his sandbag alongside him, in a leapfrogging motion. As he topped the railroad bed, he was startled by the sight of the huge number of looters, who were still ambling forward, nonchalantly. There were thousands of them. Then came an audible collective gasp from the looters, as the heads of the hundreds of ambushers came into view along the railroad tracks.

The second phase of the ambush began with an overwhelming roar of gunfire. This was the proverbial Mad Minute that Jake had often heard José and Tomas talking about. With the ambushers almost shoulder to shoulder, the brass and fired shotshells came down like hailstones. The firing started as a continuous roar. The looters immediately began to run, mostly to the rear and toward the field of tree stumps on the far side of the highway. Just a few of them had the discipline to drop to the ground in the grassy median between two stretches of the highway pavement and return fire. But these men were all quickly targeted and shot.

Despite their numerical superiority, the looters were overwhelmed by the ambush. Most of them were in absolute panic. They ran, only to be cut down by the withering rifle and shotgun fire. Many of the looters were trampled by the weight of the sheer number of their fellows trying to flee.

Only a few looters ran toward their ambushers. Tomas later commented to Janelle, “Those were probably the handful that had military training and had been taught to charge an ambush. But they couldn’t get through our wall of lead. Talk about a target-rich environment.”

In a later conversation with Jake and José, Tomas also mentioned that the ambush had been “at least a full order of magnitude larger than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. It was devastating. And to see it all pulled off so well by a bunch of civilians was even more amazing.”

The tempo of the firing gradually died down. The casualties among the ambushers were light. Only fifteen men were wounded and seven killed. Most of these were head, neck, arm, or shoulder wounds. Four of the head wounds were instantly fatal. Three men accidentally injured themselves with ricocheted bullet jacket fragments. By resting their scoped rifles’ forends on the railroad track, they unwittingly put their rifle bores in alignment with the second track. Because the scopes were mounted parallel but two to three inches higher than the axis of their rifle bores, it appeared that they had clear shots, but some of their low-angle shots actually hit the track just an arm’s length forward of their muzzles.

Jake and Tomas were virtually unscathed. Jake, however, did have a hot piece of .223 brass go down the collar of his shirt. It left a painful nearly horizontal red burn at the base of his neck in the perfect shape of the brass that would become a distinctive scar.

The ambush was a lopsided success. Dead looters were scattered across the highway lanes, the median, and in the adjoining fields in huge numbers. As the ambushers’ rate of fire dropped to just sporadic shots, Jake could hear screams and moans from wounded looters.

The man next to Jake had a 3-9-power variable scope mounted on his Mini-14. He turned the ring of the scope to 9-power and then began deliberately scanning the bodies of the looters. He rested the forend of his Ruger on the sandbag that Tomas had given him for a steady aim. Whenever he saw a chest rising and falling, or any other sign of life, he would take a head shot. He continued this for fifteen minutes. After most men had finished shooting and busied themselves with reloading, the man in the Realtree cap shot another fifty rounds, changing magazines twice. During the second magazine swap, he muttered, “There are still a lot of them playing possum.” The occasional rifle fire sounded up and down the line as others were taking similar coup de grâce shots.

About twenty minutes after the most intense firing of the ambush, an order was passed down the line: “Reload before the order to advance.” Very few men needed this reminder. But there was still the clatter of many rifle actions as nervous men double-checked that their guns were fully loaded. Jake still had five loaded magazines, and Tomas had four. They deliberately shifted their empty magazines to the rearmost pouches on their web gear to avoid confusion.

A few yards down the line, a man shouted, “I’m down to two rounds. Any y’all got a spare M14 magazine for my M1A?” A loaded magazine was quickly passed down the line to him, with the proviso, “You owe me, big-time. Make every shot count.”

Jake heard two similar requests made in rapid succession—one for .30-30 ammunition and one for .243 Winchester ammunition. Both requests were filled. Then a man just fifteen feet down from Jake and Tomas shouted, “I need some .25-06.” After a pause, he said with greater urgency, “Does anyone have any .25-06, please? I’ve got zero rounds!”

Someone heckled. “You gotta be kidding. This ain’t the wide-open prairie. You should have bought a .308.”

A whistle was blown and the captains relayed the order down the line. “Forward!”

Nearly everyone stood up, many of them unsteady after so many hours in a prone position. A few stayed behind to tend the wounded. The ambushers pressed forward in an uneven skirmish line. There were sporadic shots as men shot at looters suspected of playing dead.

The bodies of many of the looters were in tangled clumps. Most of them were in the grassy median between the two paved lanes of the highway or in the field beyond. The smell of the blood and the smell of the feces were overpowering—as many of the looters had been shot through the intestines or had involuntarily soiled themselves. There was blood everywhere—far more than Jake Altmiller had expected. In places where the bodies were closest together, the ground was flooded with blood, collecting in bright red, half-inch-deep puddles that were already starting to turn black around their edges. A few of the ambushers vomited at the horrific sight.

As they walked forward, Tomas commented, “Christo. I seen a lot on my deployments, but never anything quite like this.”

What surprised Jake the most was seeing all the stray shoes. Nearly everywhere he looked, there were shoes and sandals that the looters had lost in the panic of the ambush, especially in the tightly packed groups where they had trampled each other.

Less than a hundred of the looters had escaped into the woods at the southeast end of the ambush zone. The ambushers first checked all of the bodies for signs of life. There were many coup de grâce shots, mostly using pistols and revolvers since rifle ammunition was considered precious. Two unarmed black teenagers were found playing possum near the southeast of the ambush. The leaders of the ambush let them live so they could deliver a message. “You run back to Tampa and tell them what happened here, and warn them what happens to any looters who head up this-a-way.”

Thousands of weapons and more than a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition were collected. A few of the guns had been rendered inoperable by bullet hits, but most of them were still serviceable, albeit sticky with blood. Others had been ruined—like shotguns with their barrels pierced by rifle bullets—but they could still be salvaged for valuable parts. Since the looters had outnumbered the ambushers so heavily, most of the men each went home with between one and four captured guns. Tomas picked up a parkerized Ithaca Model 37 Military and Police shotgun with an 8-round magazine. Aside from one notch in the bottom of the buttstock where a bullet had grazed it, the shotgun was in good working order. Jake got a Springfield Armory XD 40 pistol and three extra magazines. He also found a Kel-Tec SU-16 rifle beneath one of the bodies.

Seeing the Kel-Tec, Tomas declared, “Not the best, but at least those take standard AR or M16 magazines. That’ll be good for barter.” Tomas showed Jake how to unload the rifle and fold its stock. Once it was folded, the gun fit easily in Jake’s rucksack with room to spare.

Stripping the guns, magazines, ammunition, and holsters from the looters turned into a chaotic grabfest. Tomas commented that it was like some giant piñata had burst and rained down guns and magazines. The nicest gun they saw recovered was a Tavor TAR-21—a bullpup configuration .223 rifle designed in Israel. The gun’s new owner was ecstatic. The rapid-pace gun snatching was followed by countless impromptu barter transactions. One ambusher took the initiative to shout, “I got two AKs and a Glock .40 here. I’ll trade all three of them for a FAL or an M1A.” Everywhere around them, trades were being made. It looked incongruous to see this trading going on, as everyone was walking amidst so many lifeless bodies. As Jake later recounted the scene to Janelle, “It was like some strange flashback of the aftermath of a medieval battle, with the peasants stripping the swords and bows and armor from the bodies of the defeated army. It was just surreal.”

Several uniformed police officers from Mount Dora and Tavares filled shopping carts with the less desirable guns that had been passed over. There were mostly single- and double-barreled shotguns and .22 rifles. Jake wondered whether the policemen had been ordered to do this, or whether they were just taking advantage of the situation for their own gain. In either case, no looters would have these weapons now.

Jake noticed that the man who had just been asking for .25-06 ammunition had found himself a CETME .308 rifle. The rifle looked a lot like an HK91, but it had a wooden stock and forend. Jake nodded to the man, and said, “That’ll do. Scrounge as much .308 ball ammo as you can.”

Tomas added his own advice. “You may have heard that CETME will also take G3 or HK91 magazines, but you might have to file on the mags a bit, depending on the receiver’s tolerances.” Jake always marveled at the depth and breadth of firearms knowledge that Tomas possessed.

After most of the ambushers had started walking homeward, a pair of D6 bulldozers were started and walked around the north end of the roadblock. With many successive passes, they cut a four-foot-deep trench for a length of 350 yards for a mass grave. A few of the most widely scattered bodies were dragged in by hand, but most of them were simply pushed into the grave with the bulldozer blades. Before the grave was refilled with earth, a Catholic minister gave a funeral oration.

Jake and Tomas didn’t talk much as they walked home. Their elation at the success of the ambush was tempered by its bloody aftermath. Jake summed it up when he resignedly said, “It had to be done.” He didn’t sleep well for a month.