Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

34 SUSPICION

Dustin arrived at 3:00 P.M. on September 28, driving an old brown crew cab Chevy pickup with an extra-tall camper shell that Joshua had never seen before. It had CHEM-DRY CARPET CARE OF BOWLING GREEN painted on both sides, and a Chem-Dry logo painted on the back.

Obviously agitated, Dustin said, “Let’s talk inside.”

Immediately after the door had been closed, Dustin said, “A little bird told me that some MPs will be arriving in Bradfordsville sometime before noon tomorrow to put the bag on you and haul you to Fort Knox for questioning. Somehow, I don’t know how, you ended up on The List.”

Joshua, Megan, and Malorie were all wide-eyed.

As he handed Joshua an oversize Chevrolet logo key with door-lock remote buttons, he said, “I got a pickup from the county impound yard, which has rather lax paperwork. I picked it up during the lunch hour, and I didn’t sign it out. There are no security cameras there. I’d already earmarked this one because it had belonged to some looters who were planted in the Calvary Cemetery, and because there is a signed title in the glove box. Anyway, the tank is nearly full, plus I put ten full Scepter cans of gas in the back end—courtesy of Maynard Hutchings. There is also a skinny unleaded Scepter spout and a lollipop fuel-can lid wrench.”

Joshua nodded and sighed. “So no good-bye parties for us. We’ll roll out of here before 0200. I’m going to miss you, Dustin.”

Dustin gave Joshua a hug and said, “I’m going to miss you, too, bro. Give Ken and Terry my regards.”

“Will do. Thank you for all your help.”

Dustin bent down to shake hands with Leo and Jean, and said, “You boys are going on a big adventure with your mom, dad, and auntie Mal. Make me proud, and behave yourselves.”

Leo said gravely, “We will, sir.”

Dustin gave Malorie and Megan hugs, and then said, “Well, I’d better get back to the station before the shift change. I’ll be praying for you. Don’t blow OPSEC and try to contact me until Maynard Hutchings and his band of fools are in prison, where they belong.”

As they backed the pickup up to the garage, Joshua said to Megan, “We need to act fast. Sheila’s store closes in less than one hour.”

Joshua unloaded all of the gas cans into the garage while Megan and Malorie gathered all of the items that they had accumulated in the past seven months that they wouldn’t need or couldn’t carry on their upcoming trip. They loaded everything in the pickup, including a push lawn mower, a hibachi barbecue, a shovel, a hoe, a spading fork, a stiff-tined garden rake, a leaf rake, a wheelbarrow, a pressure canner, three cases of canning jars, two bicycles, a wood-splitting maul, some clothes and shoes that Jean had outgrown, two boxes of books, a wooden clothes-drying rack, a washtub, a washboard, and a four-gallon earthenware crock.

Megan and Joshua went to the store while Malorie stayed at home with the boys and continued to pack. She also pulled the guns, ammo, magazines, and false IDs out of the wall cache.

Joshua pulled the pickup up in front of the store at 4:52 P.M. They were relieved to see that Sheila had not yet closed the store. When they walked in, she was behind the counter working on her ledger. There was no one else in the store. Megan knew that Sheila was a resistance sympathizer, so she was direct. She said, “We’ve been told that we’re under suspicion, so we’ve got to get out of Dodge City tonight.”

Sheila nodded.

Megan asked, “Can we trade our heavier possessions for seeds and other compact, lighter-weight trade goods?”

“Yes, but it’ll have to be at a discount. You see, by taking trades like that, I’ll be violating one of the cardinal rules of barter, which is, ‘Don’t trade hard for soft.’”

Megan gave Sheila a puzzled look.

“Okay, let me explain,” Shelia said. “In barter, if what you’re offering in a trade is a compact, durable item that is in short supply, or something that is otherwise highly valued, then a savvy barterer doesn’t make the mistake of trading it away for items that are less durable or less desirable. That is trading hard for soft. Otherwise, at the end of the day, your counterpart will be going home with the better goods than you. The only exception to this rule would be if your counterpart is willing to trade a much greater quantity of his items and you know that you have a ready market for them. A corollary to this rule is that ‘it’s better to trade your bulky for his compact.’ Or, as one old gun show dealer I met said, ‘Don’t never trade away handguns for rifles or shotguns.’”

Megan said, “Okay. Understood. I’m willing to trade at a deep discount.”

“Go ahead and bring in what you have to trade.”

As Joshua started to unload the back of the pickup, Sheila flipped around the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED.

With three of them working, the pile of tools and other barter items rapidly grew in the middle of the store’s sales floor.

Sheila sized it up and said, “Okay, this is better than I had expected. We can negotiate swaps for each item individually, or we can expedite things by just calling all of this a $5.25 silver coin purchase credit.”

Megan said, “I vote for expediting things.” Joshua nodded in agreement. Megan stepped forward to shake Sheila’s hand, and said firmly, “Deal.”

To use their purchase credit, they settled on eight AA rechargeable Sanyo Eneloop batteries, a 12V DC AA battery charger with a cigarette lighter plug, two cans of dark brown spray paint, a large roll of masking tape, a U.S. road atlas, and a box of fifty .22 LR cartridges. Together, those purchases came to $4.75 in silver coin. They used the rest of their purchase credit on some packets of nonhybrid carrot, squash, lettuce, and celery seeds. These were all varieties that would grow well in northern climates.

Once they were back at the house, they packed everything that they had originally brought with them to Bradfordsville, including the deer carts, in case they might have to abandon the pickup at some point and continue on foot.

As Megan and Joshua filled all of their canteens and laid out items to pack by the door that connected the living room to the garage, Malorie checked out the pickup and took it on a short test drive.

She returned and started looking under the hood. Meanwhile, Joshua used some 409 spray cleaner and rags to carefully wash the portions of the door panels that had the painted advertising text and logos. He then neatly masked off rectangles around them, backed with scrap paper left over from Jean and Leo’s homeschooling, to protect from overspray. Two coats of paint, with a twenty-five-minute delay between the first and second coats, made the Chem-Dry logos and the area code 270-prefix phone numbers disappear. The rectangles were a full shade darker than the rest of the truck, but at least the truck now looked much less distinctive. Once the paint was dry, Joshua peeled off the masking tape and scrap paper and put them in a paper bag, along with the empty spray-paint cans. Megan was about to toss this in the trash can, when Joshua snatched it away, and said, “We can’t leave clues like that around for the MPs.” He stowed the bag next to the gas cans in the bed of the pickup.

As they positioned a sheet of scrap cardboard over the two rows of gas cans, Malorie rattled off a report on her inspection of the pickup. “There’s no time to drop the transmission pan, but the color of the transmission fluid on the dipstick looks decent, and it shifts smoothly. The oil was one quart low, and with a hundred and ninety-two thousand miles on the clock, I suspect that it’s starting to burn some oil. The oil didn’t look dark. The tires are in fair shape and their pressure was fine except the left rear, which I brought up with the hand pump. The engine compression seems decent, and the serpentine belt should be good for several thousand more miles. The body is in fair shape but the rear wheel wells are rusted out. The shocks are iffy, but with the load we’ll be carrying, they should suffice. The gas gauge reads seven-eighths full, if that can be trusted. I checked the owner’s manual, and that shows this rig has a twenty-eight-gallon tank. Conservatively assuming fifteen miles per gallon on the highway, that gives us a four-hundred-twenty-mile range. Those five-gallon cans will provide another seven hundred fifty miles. Not bad. The power steering fluid is a bit on the dark side, but the power-steering pump itself doesn’t sound noisy. No noise from the water pump, either. There is a little slop in the steering wheel, but it’ll do. The brakes seem firm, and while I’d prefer to pull the hubs to do an inspection, there’s not enough time. The battery has full cells, but the terminals look a little snowy. Hoses look good and feel supple, but you never know with a vehicle that’s been parked for a long time. In summary, I’d say that whoever owned this pickup must’ve taken pretty good care of it—at least mechanically. Too bad that it isn’t four-wheel drive, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

Joshua and Malorie took one last look around the house while Megan wrote a note to their landlord. At the last minute, Malorie tossed in the tire pump, alongside the deer carts. They left at 11:30 P.M., just after saying prayers and bedding down Jean and Leo in sleeping bags in the back of the crew cab. Leo asked, “We’re going on an adventure, aren’t we, Mommy?”

Megan stroked his hair and answered, “Yes, we are. It’s time to go to sleep now.”

Picking a route that would avoid UNPROFOR checkpoints, they headed west on Highway 733 to Elizabethtown. As he drove, Joshua started simulating interrogations of Megan and Malorie on the details of their Georgia driver’s licenses, to be sure that they still had the details memorized. They did the same for him. Joshua cut north to Owensboro. From there, they took a succession of small highways through Henderson, Waverly, and Morganfield. Since they had mainly been walking for the past six months, their progress seemed lightning fast. Near 3:30 A.M., they crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. They stopped on a side road to refuel. Six hours and another refueling later, they were in Havana, Illinois. There, they found one gas station that was open. Spending almost all of their ProvGov Blue Bucks, they refilled the tank and all of the gas cans.

Leaving Havana, they ran into a UNPROFOR roadblock. There was just a cursory ID check, where they handed the bored MPs their “inherited” Georgia driver’s licenses. Megan offered a story about how they had been promised work at a food-processing plant in western Illinois. There were lots of people moving long distances within UNPROFOR territory to find work, so this sounded plausible to the sentry. They were greatly relieved that they weren’t searched (since their guns were hard to hide), and that their IDs were not scanned—as UNPROFOR had started to do in Kentucky. (They didn’t want to end up in a database.)

It took all of them a couple of hours to calm down from the tension of the roadblock stop. Megan later asked Joshua about his impressions of the incident. He said, “My mind was mainly on reminding myself not to take chest shots, since they were wearing Interceptor Body Armor. My mind got caught in a loop: ‘They’re wearing IBA, so aim for the ocular window…’”

At the same time that they were pulling away from that checkpoint, an MRAP pulled up in front of their former house in Bradfordsville, Kentucky. A team of German Bundeswehr soldiers armed with G36 rifles and carrying a battering ram trotted to the door. Finding the door unlocked, they rushed in to find the house deserted. The officer in charge called in the two Soldats who had been covering the rear of the house. Disgusted with finding their prey missing, the officer snorted, “Ekelhaft.”

They found an envelope on the kitchen table, addressed to the landlord. Inside was four dollars in pre-1965 half dollars and a handwritten note that read:

Joshua’s party continued to switch drivers once every two or three hours as they zigzagged west and slightly north, on smaller highways. At 1:15 P.M. in Osceola, Iowa, they made inquiries about how to avoid UNPROFOR checkpoints around Omaha, doing their best to sound casual. They were told to cross into Nebraska on Highway 138.

There was gas available in Osceola, but the station took only silver in payment. They again completely refueled and also bought two quarts of oil, since the engine was obviously burning some. They crossed into Nebraska at 4:30 P. M., feeling exhausted. Even sleeping in shifts, fatigue was catching up to them. They stopped at the parking lot of the abandoned Tecumseh Country Club to make sandwiches and to get some sleep.

Megan, Malorie, and the boys squeezed into the back of the pickup after pulling out the deer carts and the tent bags so that there’d be room to sleep in the camper shell. The Scepter cans sealed exceptionally well, so there was just a faint aroma of gasoline. Joshua did his best to sleep in the pickup’s rear seat, but it was too short for him and had some uncomfortable bumps. He awoke at 3:00 A.M. with a backache. He spent some time stretching his back before waking the others. Using his flashlight, Joshua checked the radiator, the radiator hoses, and the serpentine belt. Then he checked the tires with a pressure gauge. They had everything reloaded and were back on the road within ten minutes.

Eight hours later, with Malorie doing most of the driving across the broad prairie expanses of Nebraska, they arrived in the town of Gering, just south of Scottsbluff, across the river. There was gas available at a station in Gering, but the price there was forty cents in silver per gallon—twice as much as they had paid farther east.

In Gering, they got confirmation that a point twenty miles west of Scottsbluff was still the farthest western outpost of UN troops. Beyond the Wyoming state line, they would be outside UNPROFOR-controlled territory. It would also mean that they probably wouldn’t be able to buy gasoline. They were warned of a large UNPROFOR contingent in Scottsbluff and at the state line on Highway 26. However, a state line crossing point on the much smaller Highway 88—only a dozen miles south—was said to be unguarded.

They said some prayers asking for protection before turning west on Highway 88. The crossing was indeed unguarded, and Joshua breathed a sigh of relief. They stopped short of La Grange, Wyoming, to make sandwiches, using the last of their bread and some peanut butter that was made in Oklahoma under the post-Crunch trade name of “Glop.” Over lunch, they scrutinized the Rand McNally road atlas and did some mileage calculations.

The more direct route would have taken them through Casper, Billings, Butte, and Missoula. Taking that route, they might make it all the way to Bovill, Idaho, with the fuel that they had available. But on that route, there were recent reports of heavy looter activity, and gangs controlling several cities and highways.

The alternate route—about 140 miles longer—would take them looping south, though Idaho’s “Banana Belt.” They would pass through Jackson, Wyoming; Rexburg, Idaho; and then through Pocatello, Twin Falls, Boise, Lewiston, and Moscow, Idaho.

Joshua said, “Okay, from here on, we set the cruise control at just thirty-five miles per hour, for maximum gas mileage. We took a huge risk rushing out of UNPROFOR territory the way that we did. From now on we’ll plan on logging just two hundred fifty miles a day. We go slower, and move much more cautiously. We’ve successfully escaped the clutches of Maynard Hutchings, so we can relax a bit. Proverbs twenty-eight teaches us rightly that only the wicked flee when no one pursues.”