Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

35 THE NEW HIGHWAY PATROL

Their progress driving through Wyoming was good until they reached the town of Dubois. The roadblock there was very cleverly and covertly constructed. It was where Highway 26 passed through the city streets at the south end of Dubois. At the corner of South First Street and East Ramshorn Street, the highway made a sharp turn to the west at a stoplight that had been retrofitted with a stop sign.

As Joshua slowed and neared the stop sign, someone forward and to the left of his truck shouted, “Out of state!”

Horizontal half-inch steel barricade cables were simultaneously raised to a height of thirty inches ahead of them, to the left, right, and behind them, all within seconds. These cables were jerked up and pulled taut by teenagers spinning hand-cranked windlasses. Men swarmed out of buildings on both sides of the street. Joshua pivoted his head left and right to see that nine men had rifles of various vintages pointed at the cab of the truck.

A young man with a scraggly beard approached closer than the others, with a shouldered SKS rifle. He had it pointed at Joshua’s head. He shouted, “Shut it down!”

Joshua did as he was ordered.

Four more men appeared, three armed with ARs, and one with a Saiga-12 shotgun. A dozen teenagers, some of them armed, soon followed.

A gray-haired pudgy man holding an AR-10 and wearing a camouflage hunting jacket walked out of a nearby café. He ordered, “Hands on the dashboard and the backs of the seats, all of you! Driver, roll down your window.”

Joshua cranked the window down immediately.

They could now hear the man more clearly. “I’m Elder Josiah Wilson, and I’m in charge here. We cannot have hordes of easterners coming into our county.”

Joshua shook his head and said in a calm voice, “We’re not a ‘horde.’ As you can see, there are only five of us—and two are small children. We are God-fearing and law-abiding folks, and we’re just passing through your county on our way to live with a friend of mine up in northern Idaho, up near Moscow.”

“You are vagrants with no visible means of support.”

“I’m no vagrant. I am a traveler, exercising my right of way. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to drop that cable to my left.”

Wilson said, “You’re not going anywhere until after we’ve exacted our road tax and fine for vagrancy.”

The man with the SKS approached and pressed the muzzle of the rifle into Joshua’s temple, and ordered, “Flip that key forward, just one click. If you start that engine, I’ll shoot all of you.”

Joshua did as he was ordered. Then he put his right hand back on the dash.

The man glanced down at the gas gauge and shouted over his shoulder, “They’ve got a quarter tank.”

Joshua said, “I don’t believe this. I’m not—”

Wilson, looking angry, yelled, “No, no! You are going to pay the county a fine and tax consisting of any fuel that you have in cans. You may keep what is in your gas tank. Then you can decide whether you will press on, beyond the confines of Fremont County, or if you want to turn around and head back from whence you came.”

After a pause, Wilson ordered: “Search the vehicle.”

Six men swarmed the back of the truck. There were gleeful shouts when they dropped the tailgate and saw the ten Scepter fuel cans. In just a few minutes, they had removed all of the cans, the spout, and the lid wrench.

Wilson said consolingly, “We haven’t molested any of your other belongings. We’re civilized here.”

The man with the SKS pulled out a blue slip of paper and placed it on the dashboard between Joshua’s hands.

Wilson explained, “That is a pass, good for twenty-four hours. It’ll get you through the roadblocks on either side of Jackson Hole and all the way to the Idaho state line. You may proceed, but don’t stop anywhere in Fremont County. Once you’ve left Fremont County, you may not return, or you will be shot on sight. Have I made myself clear?”

“Perfectly.”

Wilson said snidely, “Have a nice day. You are free to go.”

The cable to the left was dropped, and Joshua started the engine.

After the pickup had cleared the barrier, Joshua asked, “Did you see any badges?”

Megan answered, “No. But what difference would that make in times like this? They’ve got the ultimate revenue scheme.”

Joshua, still livid, asked, “How many of them did you count?”

Megan answered, “There were at least twenty-two of them.”

Joshua shook his head and said, “If I was by myself, I’d sneak back there and wax as many of them as I could.”

“But you’re not traveling by yourself,” Megan chided. “You can’t take on a whole town. We have the boys to look after. We certainly can’t do that if we’re dead.”

When they were ten miles south of Driggs, Idaho, with Megan driving, the engine blew a head gasket and noticeably lost compression. The fuel gauge was pointed near E.

Malorie said dryly, “Do you suppose this is God’s second way of telling us that we need to start walking?”

Megan pressed on, wanting to squeeze another few miles out of their gas tank. With the fuel tank exhausted, the engine hesitated and finally died when they were two miles south of Driggs. Megan turned the wheel and coasted to park the pickup on the shoulder of the highway.

They reorganized their load onto the two deer carts. Malorie checked the tire inflation on the carts and found two tires were a few pounds low, so she topped them off with the hand pump. With the extra canned food that they’d brought from the house, this was by far the most that they had ever loaded on the deer carts. The heavy carts, along with backpacks that were quite full, made for slow going. Even Leo and Jean carried small loads in their rucksacks.

The afternoon was cold, and the dark sky threatened snow. They started walking, singing hymns to raise their sprits.

Driggs was an interesting town. For many years it had been considered the poor man’s version of Jackson Hole. Like Jackson, it had a wonderful view of the Grand Teton peaks—but as seen from the west side, rather than the east. The town was unpretentious and had only the basic amenities. Not surprisingly, most of the businesses were closed.

One of the few open businesses was a Big R farm and ranch supply store. The cavernous store was unheated and now had a pitifully small inventory. It obviously was in the process of becoming a secondhand goods store.

While Malorie watched the boys and guarded the carts, Megan and Joshua went in and struck up a conversation with a sales clerk, who was dressed in heavily insulated mechanic’s coveralls, gloves, and a fluorescent orange pile cap.

Hearing of their plight, the clerk said, “Those bastards in Dubois have been doing that ever since the Crunch. And the deputy sheriff and city council in Jackson are complicit, since they get a percentage of the gasoline. The County Board of Supervisors and the sheriff up in Lander claim that they can’t do anything about the organized highway robbery down in Dubois. The sheriff’s deputies in Dubois and Jackson have officially been fired, but they’re still wearing their uniforms and badges. The police in Jackson haven’t done anything about it, either. They’re also still on the job, and also on the take. It’s a lot like back when the federal government used to hand out free cheese. Nobody speaks up about it when they get a piece of the action.”

Megan noted that the clerk pronounced Dubois “Dew-Boyce,” rather than the French style, and that made her cringe.

The man continued, “You’ve got to understand that Fremont County is about the size of Vermont, but it isn’t unified. Mormons control some of the towns. Here in Driggs, like in the rest of southern Idaho, the majority of us are Latter-day Saints, but we respect other people’s property and the law. I’d say that’s true for the majority of Mormons. But just like with any other group, there are a few bad apples. In Dubois they started out just trying to defend their town from outsiders, but they pretty quickly slipped into their gasoline banditry. It is basically no different from what national governments do, on a grander scale, even in normal times. They systematically rob you, but they call it a tax, and they have the police to back them up.”

Megan asked, “So folks are law-abiding here?”

“Yes, indeed. You will find that Driggs is a world apart from Dubois. There’s a famous retired actress who is the mayor here. She now has the nickname Mayor Furiosa. But that’s kind of a joke since she believes in constitutional government.”

Joshua asked, “With winter coming on, there’s no way that we can make it all the way to northern Idaho on foot. Is there anywhere near here where we could find work?”

“What are your skills?”

“I’m a former Air Force security cop and NSA security officer, my wife is a former Marine and NSA intelligence analyst, and her sister was a millwright and mechanic.”

“Do you folks know how to shoot?”

“Yes, quite well.”

“Well, there are some big ranches up the valley that might need a mechanic and a security guard or two.”

“Where should we ask?”

“Up in Alta. That’s about six miles east of here. There are a lot of wealthy ranchers and retirees up that way. But for tonight, I can put you folks up at my house. I wouldn’t want you camping out in weather like this.”

The small town of Alta was just across the Wyoming state line. Alta was preferred by some of the more wealthy residents of the Teton Valley because Wyoming had no personal income tax. Many of these families had been preparedness-minded before the Crunch, and hence were well stocked.

They learned that there was only one church in Alta: St. Francis of the Tetons Episcopal Church. An Adventist church used the same building on Saturdays. (People from around Alta who were of other religious affiliations attended various churches in Driggs, up until gasoline became unavailable.)

The elevation in Alta was 6,400 feet, making it a slightly colder, snowier climate than Driggs, which was at 6,100 feet. Driggs had a population of 1,675, while Alta had just under 400. Driggs was the county seat of Teton County, Idaho, while Alta, Wyoming, was ostensibly still policed by the Fremont County Sheriff’s Department. With the deep rift between Lander, Wyoming (the county seat), and the outlying sheriff’s offices in Jackson and Dubois, the residents of Alta considered themselves self-policing. As one resident put it, “We’re a libertarian enclave, sort of like Galt’s Gulch.” If a Fremont County Sheriff’s Department vehicle were to drive through Alta, Joshua surmised it would probably be engaged with rifle fire.

There seemed to be very little commerce going on in Alta. There was a sign up in one disused parking lot that read, FARMERS MARKET & SWAP MEET 10:00 A.M. TO DARK ON SATURDAYS. But that wasn’t much help since it was Tuesday, so they made inquiries at the Alta Branch Library. The librarian suggested that they look for work at the Sommers ranch, which was less than three miles north of town. The librarian said, “They’ve lost two of their sons so they’re short-handed.”

The walk to the Sommers ranch was memorable. The ranch was on Alta North Road. It started to snow as they trudged down the road. They began praying aloud as they walked. There was a burst of sunlight just before they reached the mailbox. They decided that it would be Megan who would approach the ranch house alone, since she was the savviest negotiator. They didn’t want to alarm the residents by arriving as a group. While the others waited at the mailbox, Megan walked up the house, which was nine hundred yards away.

A woman named Tracy Sommers answered the knock on the door. Megan and Tracy spoke with each other for ten minutes through the intercom before Tracy opened the door, with a big Colt Anaconda .44 Magnum in her hand. Ron Sommers was behind her, holding an M2 Carbine. Their conversation continued through the open door as it started to snow again.

It was not until after they had made eye contact, and after Megan had spoken the magic words former Marine, that she was invited inside. They talked for another twenty minutes before Tracy said, “Your husband, sister, and sons must be freezing their tails off. Go fetch them.”

The deer carts were soon dripping dry in the garage, and Joshua’s party was warming themselves near the Sommerses’ big Hearthstone Equinox woodstove.

The Sommerses were in their late fifties. They had one adopted grandson who was living at home. His name was Chad, and he was nine years old. (Their estranged daughter, who was a drug addict living in Dallas, Texas, had dropped off the roly-poly grandson with them six years earlier, and they had not heard from her since. Chad formally became their ward just before the Crunch.) Ron Sommers tearfully described how one of his two sons had died of a burst appendix at age twenty-six, six months after the Crunch. His other son had never returned from college at Norwich University, Vermont, where he was in his junior year. With no word from him, he was presumed dead.

As they continued talking, Chad brought out a plastic tote bin and was quietly building Legos with Leo and Jean. Tracy apologized for not having any coffee or sugar, but she did have some tea bags. She brought out mugs to fill with hot water from the teapot that was constantly on the woodstove.

Oddly, there was no formal interview or job offer for Joshua’s party. Their three-hour conversation with the Sommerses just gradually shifted toward their new responsibilities at the ranch and what bedrooms they would be sleeping in. They were hired.

The ranch was a 320-acre rectangular half section. They raised registered Black Angus. They had no bull of their own (they had used artificial insemination for breeding before the Crunch), but they now had the use of a loaner Angus bull from the other side of Driggs to cover their twenty-five cows, in exchange for one weaned calf per year—with steer calves and heifers in alternating years. Although it would have been better to have their own unrelated bull to ensure that every cow was bred, they lacked a bullpen. Building a bullpen was on Ron’s lengthy to-do list.

Ron was a former Marine Corps 3002 ground supply officer, who after leaving the service worked agricultural credit and later in investment banking. Their move to the ranch in 2011 was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

The Sommerses’ ranch house sat on a bench that had been cut on a shallow slope. The main barn sat on another terrace slightly above and beyond it, and the open-sided hay barn, beyond that. The elevation of the ranch was 6,420 feet at the west end, and nearly 7,000 feet at the heavily timbered east end. They had sixty acres of cultivated hay ground, and the rest was in pasture and timber.

West of the house was a six-hundred-square-foot hand-built greenhouse that had been constructed over a framework that was originally designed for a small pole barn. Ron called their greenhouse the Monstrosity. Ron had built it just after the Crunch began, using dozens of used windows that had come from condemned buildings—mostly old trailer houses. The roof was covered in corrugated translucent roofing plastic. The west, east, and south walls of the building were covered in an odd assortment of old window units with various-color frames. Very few of the window panes matched and they were pieced together like a quilt work, with four-by-fours and scraps of corrugated translucent roofing plastic in between. Only the north wall of the greenhouse was solid and insulated. The greenhouse was drafty and leaked badly whenever the snow and ice melted, but it had kept them well fed since the Crunch. Tracy kept the greenhouse garden going year-round. A rusty old woodstove in the center of the greenhouse was kept burning continuously from November to April of each year.

The water for the house and barn was gravity fed. The only electricity was provided by a pair of fifty-five-watt PV panels, which charged a bank of eight golf-cart batteries, cabled together series-parallel in a system that Ron had crafted after the Crunch. Because it had no proper charge controller, the system had to be watched closely in the summer months to prevent overcharging the batteries and boiling off their distilled water. This battery bank was used primarily for charging smaller batteries, powering the intercom, and charging Ron’s assortment of DeWalt power tools. It also provided power for intermittent use of their CB radio, which was their only link to the outside world.

The Sommers ranch would be Joshua, Megan, Malorie, and the boys’ home for the next one and a half years. With the ProvGov stretching its tentacles westward, they started to feel as if they were living the lives of NOC clandestine agents. Their false IDs were flimsy, since they had no other documentation. Once UNPROFOR troops passed through Driggs for the first time, Megan explained their situation to Ron Sommers, and he was sympathetic. It was decided that henceforth, only Ron or Tracy would make trips into Alta or Driggs.

Their two summers at the ranch were frenetically busy with moving cattle, hay cutting, wood cutting, constructing a henhouse, building a bullpen (with stout cedar posts buried at three-foot intervals), and gardening. Joshua’s party more than earned their keep all through the year. Their main security problems at the ranch were four-legged, rather than two-legged. Their war with the mountain lions, bears, coyotes, and wolves was endless. With the help of Joshua, Megan, and Malorie, only two calves were lost to predators, and none were lost to rustlers.