Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

11. Space Rifles

West Branch, Iowa

November, the First Year

As they entered the outskirts of West Branch, Iowa, it was dawn. They had walked slowly all night. Ken began to ask people they met if they knew of anyone looking for someone to hire for security for farms or ranches. Most seemed wary.

As they walked down 280th Street and reached Downey Street, they hailed a young man riding on a bicycle. He stopped and identified himself as a member of the Society of Friends church. In answer to Terry’s queries, he said that he indeed knew of someone who was looking for “security” for a farm. He pulled a scrap of paper from his wallet, and wrote on it: “D. Perkins Farm, North Charles Avenue. 2 mi. north of Main.”

The young man gave them directions to the farm. This required several hundred yards of backtracking. Before riding off, the man said, “I’ll let them know that you’re coming.”

The farmhouse sat just twenty yards back from Charles Avenue. It was far enough out of West Branch that it definitely didn’t feel “in town.” The farmhouses were fairly widely distanced apart, depending on the acreage. Most the farms appeared to be 80 to 160 acres. Many of the farms used traditional windmills. As with the other windmills that the Laytons had seen traversing the plains, their tails were painted with names like Aermotor, Woodmanse, Monitor, and Challenge. Terry mentioned that seeing windmill water pumps in operation was a good sign of self-sufficiency.

Ken sized up the farm as they approached it. It was 120 acres, mostly planted in corn and soybeans, now harvested. There was a large hay barn, grain storage silos, a cattle loafing shed, an Aermotor windmill, a water tower, and a dairy parlor with a low roof. There were about twenty brown cows in the pen adjoining the shed. Ken didn’t recognize the breed but he could see that there were several cow-calf pairs.

The white two-story house looked like it had been built in the 1930s or 1940s. The front porch sagged a bit, but otherwise it looked well maintained and recently painted.

There were both propane and home heating oil tanks on the south side of the house. The modern touches included a DISH TV satellite dish and a CB radio antenna.

An open-sided four-bay tractor shed sat to the east of the house. In addition to a Ford tractor and its implements, the tractor shed also housed a late-model Toyota Tacoma pickup, an older Toyota Corolla sedan, and a muddy ATV. Beyond were some assorted outbuildings, two small Butler brand galvanized steel grain silos, and one forty-foot silo that looked fairly new. They later learned that the silo was more than twenty-five years old, but it was still shiny because it was constructed mostly of stainless steel.

There was a pitifully small kitchen garden plot—now heaped with foot-deep straw mulch for winter—with a five-foot-tall fence that looked incapable of keeping out deer.

Ken and Terry reslung their rifles muzzle down so that they would look less hostile as they approached the house. Ken rapped on the frame of the front porch’s outer door.

A man armed with a scoped Remington Model 760 pump action deer rifle opened the door to the house and asked warily, “Who are you?”

Seeing the rifle pointed at his chest unnerved Ken.

“I’m Ken Layton and this is my wife, Terry.”

“Durward Perkins is my name. My friends call me D. We heard you were coming. Step on in.”

There was an uneasy moment as they appraised each other. Perkins lowered the rifle muzzle, but it was still uncomfortably pointed at Ken’s knees. As he later mentioned to Terry, he still felt like he was being “muzzled.”

Perkins was in his forties, with sandy-brown hair, slightly chubby, and starting to bald.

Ken offered, “We heard that you were looking for someone to provide security.”

Perkins nodded. “That’s right.” He lifted his free hand to his chin and asked, “Are you Christian folk?”

“Yes, we’re Catholic, and we attend Mass regularly.”

Perkins nodded. “We’re Quakers, but we don’t get to church very often.”

Ken said, “We’re trustworthy and we know how to use these guns. I’m also a light truck mechanic with seven years of experience—I’m ASE-certified A5, T6, and E3.”

“That’s all Greek to me. You’ve got no car?”

“We had a car and an older Bronco that I had restored and modified, but we got ambushed on our way out of Chicago. So what you see here is all of our worldly possessions.”

“Do you mean to stay around Iowa City? Long-term?”

“No sir. We plan to continue on out west, next spring. We’re looking for a place to spend the winter. There’s a group of our friends waiting for us in Idaho. We’re what you’d call preppers or survivalists.”

Perkins nodded. “Uh-huh.” Then he pointed to Ken’s HK clone and asked, “So those black space rifles you’ve got—hers looks like a short M16, and what’s that one you’ve got there?”

“It’s a Vector V91—that’s a clone of the German HK91 rifle. It shoots 7.62 NATO, same as .308 Winchester. Terry’s is what’s called an M4gery or what I still call a CAR-15. It shoots 5.56 NATO, like an M16. They’re both semiauto only.” After a pause, he added, “We’ve both put in a lot of trigger time with our rifles. We’ve shot competition and qualification high-power rifle matches—both CMP and Appleseed. We were also both trained by a former Force Recon Marine in our survival group—a staff sergeant named Jeff Trasel. He taught us all the tricks: perimeter security, patrolling, and small unit tactics.”

“So neither of you’re military veterans? Iraq, Afghanistan?”

“No sir.”

Perkins gave a slight groan and said, “Well, that’s what I was hoping for. But beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”

There was another long, uncomfortable pause.

Terry spoke up. “Sir, you’re just going to have to trust us. Some things you just have to do on faith.”

Perkins nodded deeply, and then said over his shoulder, “Karen! I think we’ve found our hired help!”

The door swung open to reveal a petite woman holding a 12-gauge Browning pump shotgun with a goose-length barrel. She said quietly, “Hi. I’m the backup.”

Durward gestured them toward the door and said, “Come on in the front room, and we’ll get you some coffee.”

Ken and Terry were surprised to see the top of the living room and hallway strung with dozens of wires held up by eyebolts. Hundreds of strips of brined beef were hung from the wires. Karen Perkins explained that for the past three weeks she and Durward had been converting all the beef from their chest freezer into jerky. The fat trimming, slicing, and brining was a labor-intensive operation that had begun even before the utility power had gone out. Karen Perkins described it. “After we brine the meat, the strips get blotted dry and then hung up over the kitchen sink or the laundry room sink for eight hours. Then, after we’re sure they’ve stopped dripping, we move them to the wires in the hall and the living room. It’s a big, ongoing process. It’ll be another week before we’re done.”

After more introductions, Perkins summarized his situation. “There’s only about 2,300 people in West Branch, but there’s about 70,000 in Iowa City, and they’re starting to starve. And there’s almost twice that much population in Cedar Rapids. And that ain’t to mention all the millions of hungry riffraff from around Chicago—ah, present company excepted, that is.”

Glancing again at Ken’s rifle, he said, “The trouble is, we’re just too close to Interstate 80. There are just way too many people still following that corridor. A lot of them are on foot or on bicycles now. Most are legitimate refugees, but a good portion of them are looters. I hear that the worst ones are in trucks and vans. They take gasoline at gunpoint wherever they go. They’re brutal. The looters that have been hitting Iowa City are bound to make their way here sooner or later.”

“So what exactly do you propose, D.?” Ken asked

“I’m offering you room and board, in exchange for you two being my security staff, twenty-four hours a day, regardless of the weather.”

“So, twelve on, twelve off?”

Perkins nodded and said, “Or six-hour, or eight-hour shifts, however you want to cover it. But I need to have someone watching the road and all around the house and outbuildings at all times. I can fill in if either of you catch a cold or something. Otherwise, you’re it. No pay, but we’ll feed you, and house you, and I’ll replace any ammo you use defending the place. Karen can wash your laundry.”

Ken turned to Terry and gave her a quizzical look. Then they both nodded.

Ken looked Durward in the eye, and said with a nod, “Okay, we’ll do it.”

They were provided a small bedroom in the back of the house that doubled as Karen’s sewing and craft room.

After surveying the property, they determined that the tallest silo had a commanding view and was in an advantageous position for a watch tower. The silo, built by the Boythorpe Company, was an unusual design. Like most steel silos, it had a caged ladder going up the side. But instead of just a typical cone-shaped roof, it had an almost flat roof and cupola structure with a five-foot-tall “Patented, All Weather” door that had a pair of hatch levers near the top and bottom. The cupola was designed to give access to the top of the silo’s unloader conveyor.

The field of view from the silo’s doorway included the house, and nearly all of the barnyard. It also had a sweeping view of Charles Avenue. It took only a few hours to set up the cupola as a guard post. They first laid down a forty-inch octagon that was hand-sawn from a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. This covered the twenty-eight-inch-diameter loading port. Because of the confines of the caged ladder, the plywood was hoisted up with a rope. They then hoisted up an upholstered chair that fit nicely through the door of the cupola.

After the first day, they added a bronze Japanese brazier, in which they burned wood scraps and dried corn kernels. The Meiji-era brazier had been brought home at the end of World War II by Durward’s grandfather, who had fought in the Pacific Theater. Just ten inches high, the tubular hibachi was a fairly plain design, with a light etching of an ancient castle on one side. For many years it had just been used by the Perkins family to hold potted plants. The brazier kept the cupola warm enough to be bearable all through the winter. A crude wire rack on top of the brazier could be topped with a teapot or a small fry pan for reheating foods.

After the chair was in place, Durward asked, “What’ll we use for an alarm?”

Ken answered his question with one of his own: “Tell me, D.: Do you have any scrap steel pipe?”

“Sure do, depending on the diameter.”

They soon found a thirty-inch length of four-inch-diameter steel pipe. This was hung by a wire from the top of the ladder’s extended top handrail loop to serve as an alarm bell. The clapper was simply a ball-peen hammer, which was kept just inside the door of the cupola. The pipe alarm bell could be heard quite distinctly from inside the house or anywhere within 100 yards.

Ken summarized the alarm bell procedure. “If it is friendly visitors, we’ll ring the bell with three sets of double-taps, spaced a few seconds apart. If it is an unidentified stranger, we’ll bang on it in a continuous clamor. Beyond that, let’s keep it simple and ballistic: If you hear one shot, that serves as a warning to whoever might be approaching, and as an alarm to anyone who is in the house.”

The routine of manning the OP (observation post) was grueling. They soon discovered that Ken preferred nights and Terry preferred days. The couple traded off at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. The individual coming on duty would carry up a lunch, which consisted of a Tupperware container of parched corn, a one-pint canning jar half filled with cream (to agitate into butter, which was then used to top the parched corn), and either a large carrot or a turnip. Occasionally there would be a treat, like sweetened homemade tofu, or a piece of beef jerky.

Since they had binoculars close at hand, Terry developed the hobby of bird-watching while on duty. She kept a birding notebook and the Perkins family’s copy of an Audubon Society bird identification book in the cupola at all times. So that there would be no risk of any lengthy distractions, no other reading materials were allowed at the OP. There were many boring hours of duty, with nothing more to do than clean pistols and trim fingernails.

A few days of each week, Ken or Terry would also churn butter with a large hand churn while standing guard. Carefully hauling the completed churn full of butter—ready for washing—down the side of the silo with a rope required someone to be standing by below, to ensure that the ceramic churn didn’t hit the ground.

A 10-liter water can as well as a teakettle that fit on the brazier’s wire rack were soon provided. The store-bought tea soon ran out, so they switched to willow bark to make a weak tea. There was always plenty of cream available to sweeten the tea.

The guard shifts were monotonous. There was little to do other than churn butter, so Ken and Terry often composed love letters and poems to each other, which they would leave behind when their shifts were over.

The Perkinses had eight Brown Swiss cows that were producing. Without electricity, they reverted to hand milking their cows. This turned what had been a forty-minute job (twice a day) into a two-hour job. The raw milk and cream were bartered to families in West Branch for nearly all of the Perkins family’s outside needs—everything from sugar and honey to homemade washable cotton menstrual pads.

Because the front forty acres of the property were perimeter-fenced and cross-fenced for cattle, it was easy enough to simply keep the front gate chained shut and padlocked.

A great source of fear and confusion was when strangers would approach the farm, hoping to barter. Since the Laytons were new to the farm and didn’t recognize neighbors and acquaintances of the Perkinses, this caused a number of false alarms. By December, this problem was largely resolved by Durward bartering only through two trusted middlemen.

The Perkinses had two young daughters, ages three and five. Out of diapers, but not yet school age, their lives was relatively carefree, concerned only with dolls, coloring books, and “helping Mommy” in the kitchen.

The Perkinses were members of a Society of Friends church that met on North 6th Street. The local church’s “Yearly Meeting” doctrine remained conservative and relatively pacifistic. But the Laytons were not surprised to see that the Perkinses and the other Quakers they met always had guns close at hand. Following the Crunch, the local church clarified that their stand on pacifism mainly involved foreign wars, rather than self-defense, which they declared “a matter of personal conscience.”

Once a month, weather permitting, Durward filled in for the Laytons so that they could attend Mass at the St. Bernadette Parish in West Branch, on East Orange Street. It was a two-and-a-half-mile walk, so the “Mass trips” were a six-hour exercise. Ken and Terry treated these as very special occasions. On the preceding Saturdays, Terry would give Ken a haircut and beard trim. The long walks to and from church were the only times that they had to talk with each other at length, aside from lingering together at the change of each OP shift.

Even with the combined membership of St. Joseph church in West Liberty, only about thirty people attended on average. For most, it was simply too far to travel in a world without gasoline, or people didn’t want to risk leaving their houses unguarded.

At first it seemed odd seeing nearly all of the adults armed with rifles, handguns, or shotguns. One congregant regularly carried a Saiga 12 shotgun in a Kushnapup bullpup stock with a ten-round detachable magazine. Another had a Kel-Tec RFB .308 rifle—also a bullpup. Those were considered status symbols. And some of the congregants assumed that Ken and Terry were wealthy because they carried both black rifles and Colt .45 automatics.

They soon learned the new norm of sitting widely spaced apart, to leave room for guns on the pews. Ken joked that the new order of worship was “Sit, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, and sling arms.” The church was very dimly lit—the only light came in through the stained glass windows. Without enough light to read by except on sunny days, the hymns were sung by memory, rather than from reading the Novus Ordo Modern Missal. They often remarked that this lighting made the services seem medieval. Ken and Terry missed the Latin Mass, but Terry quipped, “Perhaps that would make it seem too medieval, now that we’re back in the Dark Ages.”

Radcliff, Kentucky

November, the First Year

It was common knowledge that Washington, D.C., was in ruins. The ProvGov filled the power vacuum left when the East Coast had a massive die-off, in part due to an influenza pandemic that particularly struck the eastern seaboard from New York to Charleston in the first winter of the Crunch. The new government rapidly spread out, “pacifying” territory in all directions. Any towns that resisted were quickly crushed. The mere sight of dozens of tanks or APCs was enough to make most townspeople cower in fear. What it couldn’t accomplish through intimidation, the ProvGov accomplished with bribes.

The ProvGov soon began issuing a new currency. Hutchings administration cronies spent the new bills lavishly. Covertly, some criminal gangs were hired as security contractors and used as enforcers of the administration’s nationalization schemes. Some of these gangs were given military vehicles and weapons and promised booty derived from eliminating other gangs that were not as cooperative. Hit squads were formed to stifle any dissent. These did so through abductions, arson, and murder. Nobody was ever able to prove a link, but an inordinately large number of conservative, pro-sovereignty members of Congress from the old government disappeared or were reported killed by bandits.

Some foreign troops were clothed in U.S. ACU digital or OCP camouflage. But most foreign troops stayed in their national uniforms, and were used as shock troops to eliminate any pockets of resistance. Disaffection with the new government smoldered everywhere they went to pacify.

Within the first three months of launching the new government, Hutchings was in contact via satellite with the UN’s new headquarters in Brussels to request peacekeeping assistance. (The old UN Building in New York had burned, and the entire New York metropolitan region was nine-tenths depopulated and controlled by hostile gangs.) Hutchings had at first naively assumed that the UN’s assistance would be altruistic, with no strings attached. It was only after the first UN troops started to arrive in large numbers that it became clear that UN officers would control the operation. Eventually, Hutchings became little more than a figurehead. The UN administrators held the real power in the country. They had their own chain of command that bypassed the Hutchings administration, and they had direct control over the military.

One closely guarded secret was that Maynard Hutchings had signed an agreement that promised a payment of thirty metric tons of gold from the Fort Knox Depository to defray the costs of transporting and maintaining a mixed contingent of UN peacekeepers, mostly from Germany, Holland, and Belgium. The gold was shuttled out of the country in half-ton increments in flights from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. There had also been the offer of Chinese peacekeeping troops, but Hutchings insisted that no Asian or African troops be used on American soil, saying, “I want it to be all white fellas that’ll blend in.”