Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

18. Millennium Falcon

Bradfordsville, Kentucky

April, the Third Year

There was someone banging on the door downstairs. The bedside windup clock showed that it was 5:15 a.m. General store owner Sheila Randall quickly dressed and walked downstairs from the apartment to her store. A man from the Resistance whom she recognized was outside. He was shivering, standing in a heavy downpour with a dribble coming off the brim of his fishing hat. Sheila unlocked the door and the man stepped in. He was dressed in dark civilian clothes, with a brown North Face jacket. The rainwater dripping off of him made a spreading puddle on the floor.

“I’m sorry to arrive like this without any warning, but I need your help,” he said urgently. “We’ve got a man in our truck who’s been shot in the leg and in the shoulder. He’s stable, but we can’t get him to our field hospital in Russell Springs before daylight. Our intel says that there are Germans and Belgians patrolling the roads between here and there, there’s a temporary checkpoint on Highway 68, and there may be an ambush set up somewhere along Liberty Road. We’ve also heard that there might be a reconnaissance drone up later today, that they’ve been flying in daylight hours out of Fort Campbell. If we use a team on foot to carry him on a stretcher, it’ll take a full day, and he’s likely to go hypothermic. We’d rather wait until either tomorrow night or the night after and carry him by truck, even if we have to make a roundabout trip.”

Sheila nodded and said, “Okay, but the last time you came here, it was just that gal with the shrapnel. I don’t know how to take care of someone with major wounds.”

“Don’t fret, we’re also dropping off a medic named Brent, to take care of him.”

Sheila nodded again. “All right, let’s bring him in the side door, and help him up the stairs.”

As she swung open the side door, she saw her son, Tyree, descending the stairs behind her. He was wearing pajamas and carrying his shotgun. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I’m afraid that you’re going to have to give up your bed again.”

Tyree grinned and said, “No prob, Mom. I’m an early riser, anyway.”

The resistance fighter they carried up the stairs from the store to Sheila’s apartment was named Jedediah Peoples. He was nineteen years old. He wore a wispy beginner’s mustache and was from Westmoreland, Tennessee, near the Kentucky state line. He had been shot through the left buttock and thigh. These were large, ugly wounds, but not life-threatening. Sheila was impressed by Brent Danley, even though he wore a pair of eyeglasses that had comical-looking repairs to the bridge and one of the eyepieces. The repairs had been made with paper clips and surgical tape. Brent had thinning reddish brown hair. He was soft-spoken and competent.

Brent treated Jedediah’s wounds carefully, and he gave him pain medicine—Tylenol with codeine—only as needed, following a series of “On a scale of one to ten, how would you describe the pain…?” questions. Rather than attempting to stitch the wounds closed, Brent left them loosely covered with gauze to allow drainage. He explained that this was actually the safest way to treat them. “It’ll leave bigger scars, but this way there’s less chance of infection.”

As Brent was rebandaging one of the wounds, Jedediah winced with pain and said, “I always figured we’d get raptured before we’d ever go through anything like this.”

Brent shook his head slowly and replied, “You mean the collapse and the invasion? I believe that’s the same thing that some people were saying in Stalingrad during World War II.”

“You know,” Brent went on, “in Vermont I had a neighbor who lived down the road from me. He and his family starved and froze to death the first winter after the Crunch. He and his wife were totally convinced that they’d be raptured before any disaster would threaten them. He told me that he thought that storing food in anticipation of hard times was a display of a lack of faith in God’s providence. He used to give me a hard time for being a prepper.”

The young man nodded, and Brent continued, “A lot of well-meaning believers have the same sort of complacency. That dispensational pre-tribulation rapture nonsense was often combined with their bogus ‘Health, Wealth, and Prosperity’ preaching. They have a similar eschatological basis. It is the whole ‘Beam Me Up’ mind-set. It goes along with the ‘Feel Good, Jesus Is Your Buddy’ mentality. But if the history of the church has taught us anything, it is that the life of a Christian is fraught with peril. The world hates us, and everything that we stand for. They pound on us as often as they can. Being a Christian doesn’t exempt us from that. If anything, it actually means that we’ll get more pain and suffering inflicted on us than non-Christians. Just look at Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Have you read that?”

“No.”

“Well you should, if you can ever find a copy. All that bad doctrine from the new Emergent Church movement led a lot of deceived Christians to be complacent toward being prepared for themselves and their loved ones. Everyone got a rude awakening when the dollar crashed and the power grids went down. The proper Christian way to live is to stock up for your family, and that also gives you extra to dispense as charity.”

Sheila’s elderly grandmother Lily relayed messages about the care of Jedediah downstairs to Sheila, who was working at her store’s front counter most of the day. Sheila asked Lily to carry up extra food and some fresh cream that she took in trade on a barter transaction.

The Norwood Ranch, Newell, South Dakota

April, the Third Year

When Curt was hired, Ken and Terry decided that it was time to press on. They felt good departing, knowing that Curt would be there to fill the security role they had occupied. They were almost ready to leave at any time, except that Ken’s boots were worn out and starting to fall apart. With some inquiries via the local CB radio network, they found some tan suede military surplus boots that were snug, but his size. They were comfortable if he wore just one pair of socks, but not two as he had with his old boots. The boots were a gift from the Norwoods, who insisted that they buy them to compensate the Laytons for their many months of guard duty, manure hauling, and water hauling. They cost $2.25 in silver quarters.

Looking carefully at their maps, and after much consultation and debate, they decided that rather than trying to cross the Northern Rockies, it would be safer to veer south and get to north-central Idaho by way of the Great Basin. There were many rumors of banditry in eastern Montana. By taking a more southerly route, not only would they be traversing more sparsely populated country, but also the population would be predominantly Mormon. Given the Mormon proclivity for food storage preparedness, they anticipated they would probably be more hospitable to travelers. They also hoped that if they were able to get to Salt Lake City, they might find people with operating vehicles, as there was a large oil refinery just north of the city.

The Norwoods had cousins in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, the Bennet family. They were cousins on Cordelia’s side of the family. It was decided that Graham and the Laytons would ride horseback to Scottsbluff. From there, Ken and Terry would continue west on foot. Meanwhile, Graham would return to Newell with the horses.

For the trip, they selected the Norwoods’ three saddle horses, plus their old mare, Molly, to use as a packhorse. Molly was elderly, but their draft horse Andre was too valuable to the family to put at risk in a cross-country trip. Carrying a packsaddle holding the Laytons’ two ALICE packs and Graham’s bedroll, Molly’s load would be only 110 pounds. The packsaddle was of the modern frameless type, and made of red Cordura nylon. The bright red color made Ken and Terry cringe. The untactical color was remedied by strapping a woodland camouflage quilted poncho liner over the load. This worked perfectly, since the poncho liner already had grommet tie straps spaced around its perimeter, and some extra length was simply tucked between the packsaddle and the saddle pad.

The ride to Scottsbluff was uneventful, and the weather was fairly good, with a few showers. The grazing was sparse for the horses, with just a few patches of new growth. When the horses did pass over any new growth, they would play naughty and put their heads down and pause to graze. Urging them on took some effort. For the sake of their horses, they picked their campsites in areas where there was grass coming up. As was their habit, they made cold camps each night, not wanting to attract attention. With some pasture available, hobbling was all that was necessary to keep their horses in camp.

They averaged forty miles a day. They did their best to avoid towns and any terrain that looked like it would be advantageous for ambushes. After so many months of traveling on foot and at night, travel by horseback in daylight required some adjustment for the Laytons. For the horses, the biggest adjustment was getting used to riding widely spaced apart—typically fifteen to twenty yards when on level, open ground. For the first two days, the horses would invariably attempt to bunch up. It was Molly who proved to be the magnet to the other horses. “I say that we make Molly the caboose of this outfit,” Graham proposed. It was only with that resequencing and some consistent reining that the horses became accustomed to wider intervals.

Graham turned seventeen on the third day of the trip to Scottsbluff. That evening, as they made camp, Ken presented him a cloth sack containing twenty-five rounds of .45 automatic ammunition as a thank-you for escorting them, and in recognition of his birthday.

They avoided the city of Scottsbluff itself, angling in from the northeast, through ranching country. The Bennets lived on Henry Road, northwest of Scottsbluff, a stone’s throw from the Wyoming state line. Arriving saddle sore late in the afternoon of the sixth day, they were warmly greeted. The Bennets lived in an older ranch-style house on four acres. Before the economic collapse, Dale Bennet had been a full-time grassland botanist with the state of Nebraska, and did the same part-time under contract for the state of Wyoming. His specialty was introduced grasses and weeds. He was also involved in a planned decades-long program to reintroduce native grasses. The Bennets had survived since the Crunch by breeding New Zealand and Rex rabbits. The acreage behind their house was dotted with cobbled-together sheds built out of scrap lumber, pallets, and recycled corrugated steel roofing from barns. The sheds held dozens of homemade wire rabbit cages.

They turned their horses out into a fenced field that Dale Bennet used for growing feed for his rabbits. Part of it was seeded in an early-sprouting grass variety, so the horses starting eating with gusto, even before they had been unsaddled.

The Bennets were overjoyed to see Graham, and thrilled to receive two lengthy letters from his mother. Graham’s four cousins, ages six to thirteen, were whooping and hollering. The younger ones jumped onto his back for piggyback rides.

The Bennets celebrated the arrival and Graham’s birthday by barbequing five rabbits. The barbeque party went on until late in the evening, as everyone traded stories about their lives since the Crunch.

In relating their tale, Terry mentioned that they planned to continue their journey to their group retreat by way of Montpelier, Idaho. Dale interjected, “Well, you need to talk with my friend Cliff. He’s planning on taking a drive out to northern Utah, real soon.”

Ken was speechless. He asked, incredulously, “Taking a drive?”

Dale nodded. “Yeah! We’ll walk over to Cliff’s house tomorrow morning, and I’ll introduce you.”

After a night of fitful sleep, they awoke to the smell of pancakes. The Bennets were using some of their precious supplies to make a large breakfast for Graham and the Laytons. After breakfast, just as promised, Dale escorted Ken and Terry on a half mile walk to the trailer home of his friend Cliff.

A 2009 crew cab Ford pickup sat in front of the trailer house. The house was a single-wide that appeared to be at least thirty years old. Old tires held down a blue tarp at one end of the roof.

A man answered the knock on his door with a .455 Webley revolver in his hand.

“Hey, Cliff, how are you doing?” Dale said warmly. “These are friends of my brother-in-law. Meet Ken and Terry.”

Cliff invited Dale and the Laytons into the house, saying, “Pardon the mess—I’ve been packing.” He laughed and kicked a cardboard box out of the way so that Dale and the Laytons could get to the couch.

Cliff immediately struck Ken and Terry as an odd but jovial character.

After just a few more minutes of introductions and assurances of their trustworthiness, Dale joined them as they folded out their maps on Cliff’s kitchen table. “It’s time to talk strategy,” Cliff declared.

They calculated that the distance to Coalville, Utah, was 410 miles. Between his pickup’s main and auxiliary tanks and the gas he had available in cans, Cliff estimated that he had enough fuel to travel 850 miles. Ever the optimist, he said, “So I can make it back here, even if I don’t find a drop of gas around Coalville.”

Cliff explained that he had been a heating and air-conditioning technician before the Crunch. Never married and living frugally, he had dabbled in energy stocks and silver, starting soon after the turn of the century. Cliff was in his late thirties, slightly overweight, and had thinning red hair and a wispy red beard. He lived alone in the sparsely furnished trailer. Neither Ken nor Terry could determine how he’d made a living since the Crunch.

Cliff summed up his desire to travel to Utah, saying, “I got word that they’re alive, but I haven’t seen my cousins or my aunt and uncle since before the stock market melted down. So I’d like to look in on them to see if they’re all right. I’m taking all my stuff with me. Who knows? I might find work there—maybe at a mine, and maybe I’ll even find a wife.”

Dale reiterated that he had heard that there were limited supplies of newly refined gasoline available in northern Utah. He and Cliff agreed that the trip was worth the gamble.

Ken spent most of the day checking on the mechanical condition of Cliff’s pickup. They had access to the inventory of an auto parts store, which had been moved to the owner’s workshop for safekeeping just a mile away. At the shop, he checked the four mounted tires and the spare, adding air to two of them with a hand pump. He replaced the fuel filter and set aside an identical spare. Checking all the hoses, he noticed that the lower radiator hose felt soft. He was fortunate to find a new correct spare in the enormous pile of belts and hoses in the corner of the shop. He checked the belt tensioner and then all the fluids. He added some window washer fluid and coolant. He set aside one more full gallon of coolant to take along with them. Then he lubed the two points of the chassis that could take grease. The rest, he explained, were all “lubeless joints.” Finally, noting the motor oil looked dark, he changed the oil and filter. He kept the old hose and fuel filters to carry as spares. After checking both of the pickup’s fuse boxes, he also set aside an assortment of spare fuses with various current ratings.

Amid the many shelves of mostly disorganized parts, Ken found a spare serpentine belt for the pickup. “This belt runs all the auxiliaries. If this belt ever breaks, you’re totally out of luck,” he explained.

In all, the belt, fluids, fuses, filters, and motor oil cost Cliff just two ounces of silver and some gardening hand tools in barter. Clinching the deal, he promised the auto parts store owner, “If I’m not back here in a month, then you are welcome to my trailer house and everything left in it.” He handed him an extra door key.

After the maintenance on the pickup truck was complete, they headed back to Cliff’s trailer, where they ate a light dinner: three small cans of tuna and a loaf of homemade whole wheat bread that Cliff said he often bought from a neighbor. The paper labels had been removed from the cans and they had been painted in varnish, to protect them from rust. Cliff explained, “That’s a trick that I picked up from a guy I knew that spent four months crewing a yacht in the Bahamas.”

Looking closely at the cans before they were opened, Terry could see that their lids had “Tuna, 11/2012” written in Magic Marker, just visible through the varnish.

Cliff asked Ken and Terry to help him pack for the trip. He had remarkably few clothes, which all fit into just two large cardboard boxes. He also packed a large Tupperware box that he explained contained some photocopies of family history and genealogy documents that his late mother had made before the Crunch.

Then they started digging. Using a rusty shovel with a broken tip, they dug up three hidden caches in the yard. The first was very shallow. A sheet of plywood, a thin layer of soil, and a large pile of used wooden pallets covered it. This cache contained seventeen 5-gallon gas cans painted various colors, mostly red. The cans had been positioned on top of an odd assortment of scrap wood blocks to keep their bottoms from rusting. All the gas, Cliff said, had been treated with PRI-G gasoline stabilizer.

As they pulled the cans up out of the hole, Cliff said, “You know, this gas was the fruit of four months of hard dickering and bartering. I’m hoping that there’ll be gasoline back in production soon. I heard there’s some sort of ‘Provisional’ national government, headquartered at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and that they’re getting things straightened out.”

The second cache, deeper than the first, held more than twenty military surplus .30 caliber, .50 caliber, and 20mm ammo cans containing various ammunition and some hand tools. Atop the ammo cans, there were some canned foods, stowed in two Sterilite brand plastic tote bins. All had been varnished and hand-labeled, just like the tuna cans.

The third cache, nearly three feet down, contained three guns in a capped piece of eight-inch-diameter PVC pipe, and two more .30 caliber ammo cans. The latter, Cliff said, held what he called his “silver trove.”

They spent that night in their sleeping bags on the floor of Cliff’s living room. Ken and Terry were so excited that they were scarcely able to sleep. Cliff roused them an hour before dawn. The gas cans had already been loaded in the back of the pickup the night before and covered with a tarp. They quickly loaded all the ammo cans and the rest of the gear. The heap filled up the entire bed of the pickup truck, most of the rear seat, and nearly all the passenger-side front seat and floor.

Terry opted to be tail gunner, sitting on top of the backpacks just behind the cab, but forward of the gas cans. She bundled herself up with both her unrolled sleeping bag and Ken’s sleeping bag. She wore gloves, a muffler, and a pile cap to keep her head warm. She sat facing rearward, with her CAR-15 in her lap.

Ken, meanwhile, sat in the seat directly behind Cliff. Remembering how all the windows of their Mustang and Bronco had been shot out, Ken ordered, “At the first sign of trouble, you hit all four buttons to roll the windows down. We don’t want them getting shot out, and besides, the way this HK ejects brass, it’s a window smasher.”

“You got it!” Cliff replied.

On the seat next to him, Cliff carried a folding-stock Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with a thirty-round magazine. Two spare-loaded twenty-round magazines were placed within reach in the center console, along with Cliff’s ancient Webley revolver. Beside it were four full-moon clips of .45 ACP ammunition. Seeing this, Ken surmised that Cliff’s revolver had been converted to .45 ACP.

Ken positioned his HK butt down on the floor between his legs, and both his pack and web gear were next to him on the seat. He debated removing his M1911 pistol from its holster, but then, remembering an account that he’d read of the FBI’s 1986 Miami shootout, he decided that the pistol might get misplaced if they came to a sudden stop.

Cliff started the engine and shouted, “Y’all ready?”

Ken and Terry both shouted back, “Yes!”

Cliff turned on the headlights, and they started down Henry Road toward the freeway. Cliff popped a cassette tape into the pickup’s tape and CD player. The voice of Hank Williams Jr. came from the speakers, singing “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Ken laughed uproariously. The situation seemed so surreal.

After Cliff turned west on State Highway 26, the sky behind them was starting to lighten. Cliff set the pickup’s cruise control to fifty miles per hour. He said forthrightly, “I’m keeping it under fifty-two, for fuel economy. I read somewhere that’s the magic number.” The sensation of speed was overwhelming to both Ken and Terry. They had spent so many months on foot that fifty miles per hour seemed alarmingly fast. Ken laughed and exclaimed, “Woo-hoo! I feel like we’re in the Millennium Falcon, and you just shouted ‘Punch it, Chewie!’”

Recognizing the reference to the movie Star Wars, Cliff retorted, “Well, we both got red hair, so doesn’t that make us both Wookies?”

Ken laughed again and yelled, “Wookie suiters of the world, unite!”

The landscape of Wyoming raced by as the daylight grew. At Torrington, they turned south onto Highway 85. At this junction and south of it, they saw dozens of burned-out hulks of cars on the shoulder. As they approached the cars, Cliff slowed to twenty miles an hour and sounded serious for the first time. “I gotta watch for any scrap metal in the road. There was a looter roadblock here last year. It cost us five men’s lives to clean those looters out.”

Beyond the destroyed cars, Cliff sped up and again set the cruise control to fifty. Terry tapped on the back window and grinned at Ken. She gave an exaggerated thumbs-up.

Ken sat in silence, listening to “Tennessee Stud,” “The Coalition to Ban Coalitions,” and other songs that were unfamiliar to him. The tape began playing “A Country Boy Can Survive” for the second time. Looking in the center console box and in the glove box, Ken searched for other tapes or CDs, but he found none. He realized that not only was the audio system set to repeat, but also that Cliff had only one cassette tape in the vehicle. Ken shook his head and grinned. Cliff was a bona fide character.

They hadn’t seen a vehicle heading in either direction all morning. The barren plains of eastern Wyoming were now in full daylight. The engine was running smoothly.

Ken said, “Say, Cliff, you never mentioned your family name.”

Cliff answered ambiguously, “That’s right.”

“Well, I noticed the mailbox there was marked ‘Larson.’ So is that your name?”

Cliff answered with a laugh, “Well, it might be.”

Ken laughed and shook his head. “Oh well… How about them Cubs?”

“I’m a Red Sox fan, personally, but I don’t think there’s going to be a baseball season next summer. Folks are using their baseball bats for other purposes these days.”

Cliff seemed distracted, and didn’t continue. He slowed and turned west onto County Road 218.

Cliff was looking anxious and he regularly scanned the sides of the road and his rearview mirrors. Finally, Cliff explained, “This route that we’re taking will bypass Cheyenne.” Then he gestured over his left shoulder, and said, “You do not want to go through Cheyenne. Last I heard, that city was in the hands of the bad guys, and they will eat you for breakfast.” After loudly drawing a breath, he added, “Literally.”

Cliff took several more turns on small roads, some of them gravel, for the next hour. Several times, Cliff stopped and consulted his maps to be certain of his route. They finally got back on the Interstate just east of Laramie. “From what I’ve heard, it should be smooth sailing from here on,” he reassured Ken.

They stayed on I-80, heading west, transiting the Rockies. In places the mountains loomed above them. There were a couple of places where rocks had rolled into the road, and there was one small slide two miles west of Green River that partially blocked the right lane. Otherwise, the highway was in remarkably good condition, considering that it had gone through two winters without any maintenance.

They pulled off the road just past Green River to check on Terry. Cliff left the engine running. Ken handed everyone strips of jerky and bottles of water. Terry had rosy cheeks, but seemed exuberant. “Why did we get off the highway onto all those small roads back there?” she asked.

“Just a shortcut,” Ken told her, not wanting to darken her mood. “Don’t sweat it. Say, do you want to switch places?”

She shook her head and said, “Nah. I want to do the whole width of Wyoming out in the open, soaking it all in. I’m in a big, happy dream right now.”

They continued their descent from the western slope of the Rockies. The air was now comfortably warm. Other than abandoned cars on the shoulder that had run out of fuel in the midst of the Crunch and a few tumbleweeds, the Interstate was clear of any obstructions. But they could see the recent ruins of some ranch houses near the freeway. With most of these, there was little more than a stone chimney and a blackened patch of earth left as a silent testament to the chaos that had reigned over the past year and a half.

As they crossed the Utah state line, Ken did some math in his head. In just over eight hours, they had covered more distance than they could have traveled by foot in more than two months.

Late in the day, they reached the junction of Interstate 80 and Interstate 84. In the distance, they could see the odd blue color of Echo Reservoir to the south.

“Well, here you are,” Cliff announced.

He slowly brought the pickup to a stop in the right lane of the freeway, not bothering to pull onto the shoulder. They had still not seen another vehicle in motion all day long. Cliff turned off the engine.

Ken and Terry thanked Cliff repeatedly. After pulling out their packs, they helped him refill the pickup’s main fuel tank, emptying six of the 5-gallon cans. Ken dug into his backpack and pulled out a brown twenty-round box of Federal 5.56mm ball ammunition and handed it to Cliff, saying, “This is just a token for all the gas that you burned today. Thanks.”

Cliff nodded, accepting the gift, and said, “Don’t mention it.”

Ken and Terry shouldered their packs. Cliff started the pickup’s engine and shouted, “Thanks for the ammunition, pardner!” He gave a wave, and drove away.

“What a lunatic,” Ken said with a laugh.

“Well. Let’s thank God for the kindness of the lunatics in our lives,” Terry said.