Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

5 PLATEAU

One of the Altmillers’ full-time employees, Lisa Schoonover, worked as their ordering clerk and accountant. Because the store was independent, they didn’t have the advantage of the automated ordering systems that were common at chain hardware stores. This made Lisa indispensable to the smooth operation of the store. It came as a shock when Lisa announced her resignation just after the stock market crash. She explained that she and her family were “bugging out” to live with relatives in Oneida, Tennessee. The town was on the Cumberland Plateau, an area that Lisa had predicted would be safe, if times ever got desperately bad.

In recognition of her five years of faithful work, Lisa was given a store credit in lieu of her final paycheck for her choice of merchandise at twenty percent below cost. She carefully selected a shopping cart full of batteries, ammunition, nails, screws, garden hoses, gardening seed, and rolls of kerosene lantern wicking.

Altmiller’s Hardware was on a commercial street, but their house, at the back end of the same deep lot, faced onto the residential street of Magnolia Avenue. The house was bigger than they needed since they had only one child. The 2,500-square-foot one-story house had a very gently sloping roof, which was typical for Central Florida. It had been built in 1973 by Jake’s father on the site of the original 750-square-foot house, which his late mother had called the Swelter Shack.

When Janelle married Jake and they moved in, she learned to love the house’s breezy open-floor plan. Jake remodeled the house in 1998, and with his handyman’s flair continued to work on the interior, changing most of the major appliances and adding two zone air conditioners. Their home’s water supply came from a grandfathered shallow well that also supplied the store.

Soon after they were married, piles of lumber had begun encroaching farther and farther into Janelle’s garden in the backyard. After repeated requests to remedy the situation, she reached the breaking point—every husband knows when this has happened. She spent an hour moving lumber by herself and then insisted that Jake move the rest of it and construct a white picket fence to divide her yard from the store’s lumber storage area. This solution kept peace in the family, interrupted only occasionally, when the fence was smashed in forklift mishaps.

One afternoon, just as she was finishing up the comps for her client, Janelle’s son, Lance, came running into the room. He was eleven years old but had the intellect of a seven-year-old. The experts told her he would probably not advance any further, intellectually. In addition to his learning disability, Lance had difficulty conversing with both children and adults and rarely made eye contact. He spent many hours with a pencil or small felt-tip marking pen, endlessly repeating the same simple drawings and doodles.

Jake and Janelle loved their son very much and gave him lots of attention. They chose to homeschool him rather than send him to public school, an arrangement that gave him the best chance for full development while sparing him the agony of being teased and bullied by other students. Though he never said it, Jake was disappointed that Lance would never grow up to inherit the family business.

The media called the economic crisis the Crunch. It was a credit collapse and economic depression that made the Great Depression of the 1930s seem small by comparison. The global credit market had come unglued. All around the world, markets were in free fall. Credit had completely dried up. Cities, counties, states, and even national governments were in default. Consumer prices soared. Interest rates skyrocketed. Firearms, ammunition, and precious metals prices soared simply because they could not be printed. While Helicopter Ben was busy convincing the world that the Treasury goose could continue to lay golden eggs, bonds collapsed. Derivatives contracts cratered, leaving counterparties for trillions of dollars in contracts twisting in the wind. Corporations of all sizes announced huge layoffs. The crisis started in the United States, but it quickly spread to other countries and paralyzed the global economy.

As the world plunged into chaos, Janelle and Rhiannon found comfort in comparing their experiences of the economic crisis from their different vantage points in Florida and the Philippines.

One thing they had in common was the abundance of tropical fruit just outside their doors. Janelle’s backyard in Tavares had six large orange trees, two tangelos, and a forty-year-old avocado tree that had grown to overshadow nearly half of the yard. Meanwhile, in the vicinity of her nipa hut on Samar, Rhiannon could locally pick an abundance of durian fruit—a local favorite despite its strong odor—as well as lychee, pineapple, banana, santol, malunggay leaves, and guavas (bayabas).

Once the mass inflation started, Jake, Janelle, and José had a meeting. Jake realized that unless something changed quickly, their store shelves would be stripped clean, and they would be left holding nothing but worthless dollars. José suggested a “cash only” policy and regularly ratcheting up prices, but Janelle wanted to go a step further and post a “silver only” sales policy. The discussion was fairly brief. Janelle pointed out that their entire inventory would be irreplaceable until normal industry and transportation were reestablished. As Janelle put it, “We should think of what we currently have on the shelf as our legacy inventory. If we replace it with anything that we pick up in barter, it will mainly be used, secondhand stuff, and it should be priced accordingly. It would be foolish to sell what we have now cheap.”

The others agreed.

After a two-day period while they were “Closed for Inventory,” they reopened with a carefully hand-painted sign on a four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood displayed inside the front door, hanging from the ceiling on chains. It read:

The only items that had their prices recalculated and retagged before the Altmillers reopened the store were irreplaceable guns, ammunition, gun accessories, empty gas cans, cans of two-cycle mix and four-cycle TRUFUEL, and charged propane cylinders. Those prices were all tripled or quadrupled.

During one of their regular calls, Rhiannon and Janelle were discussing the Crunch and how things were obviously getting much worse in America’s big cities. The riots and looting were spreading. After recounting a long list of cities where riots had occurred, Janelle moaned, “I’m really worried, Rhi.”

She took an audible breath, and continued, “On Fox News they’re saying that in a lot of cities, the police and firemen aren’t showing up for work because they’re too worried about their own families to leave their homes. There’s also reporting that some of the telephone and power utility workers are staying home, too. Nobody knows how much longer the power will stay on.”

Not wanting to upset her sister even more, Rhiannon adopted a reassuring tone. “Well, just know that we’ll be praying for y’all and—”

Their connection unexpectedly went dead. They both made dozens of attempts to reach each other in the days and weeks that followed. At first Janelle got “All circuits are busy now” automated messages. But a week later, there wasn’t even a dial tone. It was then that Janelle feared it might be years before she’d be able to speak to her sister again.