Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

CHAPTER 19 Hello

Todd set aside the entire afternoon for Ken and Terry’s debriefing. Ken told most of their story, with Terry filling in the spots that Ken glossed over. Ken began, “As I’m sure you all figured out long ago, Terry and I waited too long to ‘get out of Dodge.’ We thought that once they suspended trading on the stock market that the government would do as it promised and take steps to put things back in order. I guess we violated Rule Number One: Never trust anything the government says. Anyway, we tried leaving town the night after Dan and T.K. bugged out. Unfortunately, as I’ll explain, we didn’t get very far.

“We spent most of the last day packing up the Bronco and the Mustang. The power was out, so I couldn’t use my compressor to adjust the gas shocks on the Bronco for the heavier load. I ended up using a hand pump. We had everything loaded by about ten o’clock. Luckily we had pre-positioned most of our gear here at the retreat, so we didn’t have any trouble fitting in what we had to take with us. As we were packing we had heard a few shots. I told Terry that I thought it was just a few guys taking advantage of the blackout to settle some old scores. Actually, I was just trying to make her feel less nervous. As I look back on it all now, I think I was more nervous than she was. Terry led off in the Mustang and I followed right behind her.

“We had planned to take the Eisenhower expressway, but we ended up not even bothering trying to get on the on-ramp. It looked like a parking lot. I could also hear more shooting going on and even see some muzzle flashes. So, I clicked on the TRC-500 and told Terry we’d try getting out through the West Side, using the surface streets. We went along fine for about ten blocks. The only problem was that it was dark. I mean D-A-R-K dark. No streetlights, no house lights, nothing. Occasionally you’d see dim candlelight in a window, but that was about it.

“As we were approaching one corner we had to make a sudden stop, because just as we got there, somebody rolled out a big Dumpster from one side, and one of those giant metal wire spools like the phone company uses from the other. We both had to slam on the brakes. All of a sudden, the whole world exploded. There was almost continuous shooting going on. They shot out all of the windows on the Bronco, and I felt the passenger-side tires get blown out. I flopped down toward the driver’s side seat to get out of the line of fire, and in the process, I smacked my ribs against the Hurst floor shifter. It pretty well knocked the wind out of me.

“Just then,Wham!, the Mustang plowed into the front of the Bronk. Terry apparently didn’t realize that my tires were shot out, and assumed that I had backed out of the problem. Just as I would have done, she didn’t pop her head up to check first. From right there laying down on the seat, she just reached down to the selector lever of the automatic transmission, put it in reverse, and stomped on the gas. Too bad I was in the way. She probably would have made it.

“At this point, I yelled to her on the Trick Five Hundred, ‘If you can… bail!’ Whoever it was, they were still shooting up our vehicles pretty well. Luckily, nearly all of the shooting was coming from the passenger’s side of both vehicles, so we were able to snake out of the driver’s sides without getting ventilated. We both just grabbed our weapons and our ALICE packs. We had neither the time nor the inclination to try and carry anything else. Besides, our feet were moving too fast.

“Terry here—who I’ve learned has a cooler head in real shooting situations than I do—came over the headset radio as I bailed out. She said, ‘By bounds, follow me. I’ll fire, you move.’ I made my rush to the side of the street and squatted down behind a parked car.

“Then I radioed back to her, ‘Okay, Joe, I’ll fire, you move.’ Then I started the old H-and-K to work. I shot anywhere from four to six rounds with each of her rushes. It was amazing. Trasel’s training came right back. We just bounded down the street, back the way we had came, in three-to-five second rushes. Each time, I’d hear her say on the headset,‘Okay, Joe, I’ll fire, you move.’ Then I’d look for my next piece of cover and run like heck while she was popping away. We did that for about the first five rushes. We stopped shooting after that, once we realized that by then nobody was shooting back. I guess it was too dark for them to see us, aside from our muzzle flashes, so they didn’t bother wasting ammo.

“We linked up at the end of the block, and checked each other over for bullet holes, more by feel than anything else. Miraculously, neither of us was wounded. As I mentioned before, I had gotten a good smack in the ribs. Aside from that, I was okay. Terry just had a few scratches on her right hand and right cheek from broken glass. We hunched down behind somebody’s hedge at the end of the block for about three or four minutes. Like I say, we were checking each other for wounds.

“It was then, too, that we reloaded again. Only then did I realize that my second magazine was bone dry. I had gone through forty rounds and Terry had burned up about fifty. She had accidentally dropped the magazine that she had used up while she was running, but I still had my empty that I had stuffed into one of the cargo pockets on my trouser leg, so I had Terry stick it into one of the outside pockets of my pack.

“Just as we were about ready to take off again, I saw somebody down at the other end of the block set off a road flare. Within a few minutes, they set up a bonfire. By the way it took off, they must have started the thing with gasoline.

“They started pulling the contents out of the car and the Bronk almost right away. They must have realized that they hit a lucrative target, because they started yelling and screaming. They were whooping it up like Indians on the warpath. I heard Terry say,‘Those heathen bastards.’ I said to her,‘What do you say we make ’em pay dearly for it?’ She answered me, ‘I don’t know. Do you think it’s right?’And I said, “It’s as right as anything could be. They just tried to kill us, and they’ve taken almost everything in the world that’s worth anything to us. I say we make ’em pay for it, with interest.’ She just reached out and clenched my hand, real tight.

“We lay down side by side on the sidewalk to the right of that hedge, and got into good prone positions. Terry says to me,‘I’ve got the guys to the right of the bonfire, you take the ones on the left.’ There was one guy who had what I think was my Remington riotgun and was holding it up at arm’s length over his head. Even from the end of the block, I could hear him quite distinctly yelling,‘I got the power! I got the power!’ He was silhouetted against the fire. I picked him for my first target. I waited till I could also see several other good targets, and then I whispered,‘One, Two, Three!’ and then I cut loose.

“We both burned off a full magazine apiece. I saw the first guy I was aiming at go down for sure, and I think I at least wounded two others. Terry was able to do a bit better, because she has a tritium front sight on her CAR-15. As it was, I could barely see my sights. That’s right, I didn’t have the tritium front sight on my H and K. I’d replaced it with standard front sight post for a high-power match that T.K., Terry, and I went to a few months before. Unfortunately, I never got around to putting the night sight back on. Pretty stupid of me. The darned thing is still probably in my desk drawer back at our house in Chicago. Heck of a lot of good it’s doing me there.”

Terry interjected, “I squeezed off two rounds at each guy. I know for sure that I nailed three of them, and got some fairly decent shots at two others. I couldn’t be sure. Even with their bonfire, it was pretty dark. I used up the rest of the magazine sort of randomly, shooting at places they might have taken cover.”

Ken resumed telling the story. “After we both emptied our guns, we beat feet around the corner, reloading our guns as we ran. This may sound hard to believe but we were laughing. Neither of us had ever so much as been in a fist-fight before this. We had probably killed half a dozen men, and we were laughing about it. Amazing how quickly times—or people, for that matter—change. Anyway, we stopped halfway down that block for a brief confab. We decided that to get around the riffraff that ambushed us, we’d cut south two more blocks, then turn to resume our bearing back west.

“After we had covered about eight blocks in short buddy rushes we were pretty well stressed out and exhausted. It was practically pitch black and we could have gotten blown away by some nervous citizen on any given rush. I said to Terry, ‘There’s got to be a better way. We’ll never get out of town by dawn doing it this way.’ So we sat down in some big bushes next to a church, and draped a poncho over ourselves so that we could look at a street map with a subdued flashlight without turning ourselves into a target.

“From where we sat, we had at least ten miles to traverse before we’d be out of the thickest part of the city and the suburbs. We looked, but there were no parks that we could cut through or creek bottoms that we could follow. It was just continuous blocks of city streets.

“We sat there giving each other dumb looks for maybe twenty seconds, and then Terry said,‘Why not go underground, down in the storm drains, just like we talked about for nuke scenarios.’ I whispered back, ‘I love you!’ Then she asked me, ‘How are we going to get down there?’ Then I reminded her about that thing in the book, Life After Doomsday by Bruce Clayton, where you take two hefty bolts and join them with a piece of wire, and then stick one down the pry hole on a manhole cover. In my pack I had some wire, but no bolts. I spent the next few minutes fishing through my pack looking for a reasonable substitute.

“What I came up with was my old Boy Scout knife-fork-spoon kit, you know the kind that all nest together? Anyway, I twisted the wire around the spoon and the knife. The knife ended up working just great, because it had a bottle-opening notch about halfway down it. That held the wire in place perfectly.

“I put my pack together again, and then spent the next few minutes groping around the street looking for a manhole cover. After a few embarrassing minutes, we found one. I handed my rifle to Terry, and I popped the knife down the hole. When I pulled up on the spoon connected by the wire, the knife toggled around nicely, just like a darned moly bolt. Next, I squatted down and put all my weight into lifting the manhole cover. Those things are heavy! After some grunting and groaning, I got the thing up, and slid it off to the side. I sent Terry down first, then handed down her carbine, then her pack, then my pack, then my rifle. I positioned myself on the rungs that were set in the concrete, and slid the lid back in place. I swear, it took a lot of strength. It closed with a thud that really reverberated down there.

“Once we got down in the storm drain, we decided to continue west in this storm drain that paralleled the street. Walking in a storm drain is a real bitch, especially with a backpack. The inside diameter is only about five feet. Terry was able to move along a lot faster and easier because she’s shorter, and consequently didn’t have to hunch over as far as me.

“One weird thing about the storm drains. The air down there was actually warmer than up on the street. Must have been the effect of the ambient ground temperature. Try as we might, we couldn’t avoid walking in the rainwater in the bottom of the drainpipe. Our feet got soaking wet and ice cold pretty quickly. After a while, we didn’t even bother keeping our feet straddled so that they’d be up out of the water. We just slogged along.

“We traveled west in the drain for several hours, keeping rough track of where we were by the number of gutter drains and manholes we passed under.

“At one point, we heard a lot of commotion and shooting above us. It was really eerie, hearing it reverberate around down there. As we passed under one gutter drain, I could hear a guy sobbing. He must have been lying right next to the grill in the gutter. I shined the light up for a second and could see that there was blood pouring down from the grill. There was a lot of it. Talk about blood in the streets!

“By four a.m., we were exhausted. About that time we came to one of those big four-way storm drain intersections. As chance would have it, this was the type with the catwalk made out of expanded metal running across the two levels. We got up on the catwalk, and found that there was just enough room for us to lie down lengthwise, positioned with our feet touching. We hung our packs and rifles on the ends of the ladders at either end. That’s where we spent the next day. Stretched out on that catwalk. We just took off our boots and wrung out our socks and hung them up to dry. After only about half an hour we started getting chilly, so we broke out the sleeping bags.

“If anything, the chaos up above got worse all through the next day. The shooting was practically constant. There must have been a lot of buildings on fire because you could smell smoke, even down in the storm drains. Occasionally, we could hear the sirens of an emergency vehicle pass overhead. Surprisingly, we actually managed to get quite a bit of sleep. We must have been pretty well wiped out.

“At about five p.m., we got our boots and socks—they were still wet—back on and climbed back down to the east-west drain. We just kept going west most of that night. We stopped awhile to catch our breath and straighten-out our backs. I practically spaced out; a real troglodyte existence. All I could hear was the echoes of our breathing and the splashes of our footsteps. I thought it would never end. Then I saw dim light up ahead.

“We stepped out of the storm drain onto the banks of the Des Plaines River. It was about 6:00 in the morning. Just between nautical twilight and civil twilight, as Jeff would call it. Because the river bottom provided good concealment, we decided to stick to it. We followed the river bottom for about fifteen minutes before I found a good place to lay up for the day. It was a big clump of willows on the bank of the river. They were plenty thick, so I figured our chances of getting spotted there were about nil.

“By then, it was getting fairly light. We just rolled out our sleeping bags and took turns sleeping. About noon, we split an MRE. It was only then that I realized that we hadn’t had anything to eat, and darned little to drink in nearly thirty hours. We just devoured that MRE. Next, one at a time, we cleaned our rifles. I’m glad that I checked on our .45s, too. Mine was soaking wet. I even had to unload the magazine and towel-dry each cartridge.

“About two in the afternoon, Terry woke me up with her hand held over my mouth. A group of about twenty people were walking right toward us, the same direction that we’d been traveling. We just held still and they passed by. They didn’t have a clue that we were there. Most of them carried guns, but they carried them slung over their shoulders like they were out deer hunting or something. They were walking through all kinds of potential ambush zones, and they were at sling arms. Just plain stupid. They obviously chose the creek-bottom route to get out of Dodge just like we did. They had no tactical training, though. They were noisy. The idiots were talking out loud in a normal tone of voice. And they were walking in a clump, no interval whatsoever. No point man, either. They were just getting out of Dodge in a hurry, in broad daylight.

“Before sunset another group came through. This one only had about ten people; same modus operandi. Traveling in a gaggle like that, one grenade could have killed half of them. It was a pretty pitiful show. I doubt that they got very far in one piece, traveling like that.

“Just as it got dark, we powdered our feet, put on dry socks, packed up, and hit the trail. We followed the river west for two days, avoiding all contact, and laid up during daylight in clumps of brush or fields of harvested corn that had been left standing. By that point, the river was starting to curve around almost due south—not the direction that we wanted to go. About 8 o’clock the third evening on the river, we passed under a railroad trestle just north of Joliet. Voilà! The tracks ran east-west. We followed the tracks west for several nights without incident.

“Knowing we had a long way to go, we just split one MRE per day. We were constantly hungry. The only extra food that we got was an occasional sugar beet that we found on the railroad ballast. They were ones that had fallen out of hopper cars. We cut these up with Terry’s Swiss Army knife. We also gleaned a few dried-up ears of corn at the edges of fields. We didn’t turn up our noses, though. We gnawed on them like crazy. You hear people talk about being hungry, but let me tell you, missing a meal or two is nothing like being truly hungry. It’s the only thing you can think about. It’s about enough to drive you nuts. I figure that we were burning several thousand more calories a day than we were taking in. We both lost quite a bit of weight.

“At one point, we came across an abandoned railroad company high-railer pickup parked on a siding. I could have hot-wired it in a heartbeat, but unfortunately, someone had either siphoned all of the fuel out of it or run it dry. With that high railer, we could have been a few hundred miles closer to Idaho in just a day. Too bad. Anyway, we pressed on.

“As we approached each town of any appreciable size, we got off the tracks and cut around them. This took a lot of extra time, but I suppose it was worth the extra effort. We heard shooting and saw buildings on fire in some of the towns.”

Terry interrupted Ken again at this point. “We had one scary incident near the town of Mendota. On the outskirts of town, we passed a sort of refugee or hobo or looter camp. They didn’t have any fires lit, and most everyone must have been asleep. Anyway, it was dark and quiet, so we were practically in the midst of the camp before we realized it. Ken called me on the Trick and said, ‘Act brave and keep walking.’

“Just then, some guy with a pistol on his hip who was drunk staggered toward the tracks and started to take a leak. He looked up at us—we were traveling at about a twenty-foot interval on opposites sides of the track and he asks, ‘Who the hell are you?’ to Ken. Ken told him, ‘You don’t want to know, mister. Just leave us alone, and we won’t waste you.’ We kept our guns trained on him, walking backward, and disappeared into the night. I was scared to death that he’d call the alarm and we’d be in the middle of a firefight. Either we scared him, or he didn’t think we were worth hassling. Well, either way, he didn’t go gunning for us. I guess we just lucked out. There were at least fifty people in that camp.”

Ken picked up where Terry left off. “As we headed west, I realized that we were going to have to find some place to cross the ‘Mighty Mississip.’ The problem was that there were only a few bridges, and they were natural choke points—just about ideal for an ambush. The problem solved itself, however, when we got there. The night that we hit the banks of the Mississippi, it was in the middle of a heavy downpour. It was the first appreciable rain we had since we left Chicago. It was pitch dark, and pouring rain. Only some ex-Green Beret or LRRP would be lying in ambush on a night like that.”

Jeff chimed in, “You left out Force Recon.” Everyone laughed.

“We crossed on a long railroad trestle bridge just above East Moline. It was very scary. It was dark, the bridge was wet, and it wasn’t designed for foot traffic. It seemed like it took hours, walking along in our ponchos, carefully stepping from one tie to the next to get across. Also, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wondering if a train or high-railer might come barreling across.

Of course, the chance of that was slim, but nonetheless, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

“Once we were on the west bank of the Mississippi, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was one of the few natural barriers that we had to cross, and it also marks a change in demographics. The population density is far lower west of the Mississippi. Fewer people, fewer encounters, fewer problems.

“Once we were into Iowa, the weather took a turn for the worse. We ended up spending three miserable weeks there on the reverse slope of a pile of grain at a big grain elevator about three miles out of a town called Durant. First it poured down rain steadily for four days. Then it turned to sleet. Then it turned to snow. It snowed off and on for two weeks. We mainly ate corn soaked in water. We spent most of our time huddled up in our bags, sleeping in shifts.

Luckily, nobody came by during the entire three weeks.

“By now, it was late November, and we didn’t see much of the sun. After the snow let up, we filled our backpacks with as much corn as we could carry. I left all of my paper money—about three hundred dollars—on top of the pile with a thank-you note to the owner of the elevator. It was there at the elevator that we realized that Terry had lost her TRC-500 somewhere along the way. Because one two-way radio is not much use, I salvaged the ni-cad out of mine, and left the radio there for the owner of the grain elevator. He probably thought it was pretty funny when he found the money, considering that by then it was damned near worthless. At least the TRC-500 would be worth something to him, at least for parts.

“We tried heading west again, but we didn’t make much progress. On average, the temperature was twenty or thirty degrees colder than when we first left Chicago. When we first left, the days were clear and chilly and the nights were bearably cold. Out on the plains, we practically froze to death. We knew we had to find a place to spend the winter, but where?

“We ended up finding a place to stay in a little town called West Branch. Kind of ironic, it was the hometown of Herbert Hoover, the guy they blamed for the last depression. I guess in the long run, history will be kinder to Hoover, once people realize that the 1930s weren’t all that bad. That so-called Great Depression was just a case of the sniffles compared to this one. Shoot, this one’s double pneumonia.”

Terry picked up the thread of the story. “We stayed at a farm just outside West Branch, which is about ten miles east of Iowa City. The farm was owned by a Quaker family called Perkins. They claimed that they were actually distant relatives of the Hoovers. I suppose they were telling the truth. There are probably hundreds of people in that area that are related. The Perkins were salt-of-the-earth country folk. They grew corn and soybeans mostly, on one-hundred-and-twenty acres. They had two small children. Because West Branch had had a lot of trouble with looters coming from Iowa City in recent weeks, we didn’t have any trouble at all convincing them to hire us on for security in exchange for room and board. Mr. Perkins was pretty funny. He introduced us to his neighbors as his ‘Night watchmen from Chicago with the space rifles.’

“The life there on the farm was pretty grueling. The weather was horrible, and the hours were lousy. We basically worked twelve-on, twelve-off shifts, rotating at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m. But we ate well. Mr. Perkins was incredibly hard working. He put in at least ten hours a day working on the farm. He’d often say,‘Work is life.’

“Early one morning in November, two vans pulled up to the front gate. I happened to be on duty, and Ken was asleep. I yelled down to Mr. Perkins, who was feeding hay to the cows, ‘Do you recognize those vans?’ He said, ‘Nope.’ So I screamed, ‘Get back in the house, and wake up Ken and then your wife, right now!’

“I was standing in my usual spot, on the platform just inside the top door of the silo. Once I saw them stop, I sat down and put my elbows on my knees to get a good rest position to shoot. One guy got out of the first van with a pair of bolt cutters. Just after he cut off the padlock, but before he could swing the gate open, I fired my first shot. I missed. I fired a few more times, and finally hit the guy. By now, they were shooting back at me. I could hear bullets pinging off the silo like crazy.

“The next thing I heard was Ken opening up from the kitchen window with his H-and-K, ‘Whump. Whump-whump. Whump-whump.’ Between the two of us shooting, I guess they figured they had bit off more than they could chew. By the time they had backed away from the gate, we had shot out both of their windshields. They left the guy with the bolt cutters dead on the ground. A few hours later, when we were fairly sure that they weren’t coming back, we went out to assess the damage. We had fired about seventy rounds between the two of us. All that we found was the dead guy, a cheap pair of Chinese-made twenty-four-inch bolt cutters, about fifty pieces of their fired brass, a lot of broken glass, and a lot of blood. Apparently, we hit more than one of them.”

Ken carried on. “I apologized to Mr. Perkins for having shot right through the kitchen window. He just said,‘Shucks, that what they make that clear sheet plastic fer, ain’t it?’ We counted twenty-five holes in the silo, and ten in the house. No really serious damage though. Mr. Perkins said, ‘Well, I guess I got my money’s worth for the security force. Those space rifles sure are something.

It sounded like World War Three.’ We buried the dead marauder out in the garden. He’s probably pushing up big healthy turnips by now.

“We made our goodbyes to the Perkinses in late April. We had our packs bulging with canned food, beef jerky, and pemmican. We also still had two MREs that we had saved. Traveling at night, mainly along railroad tracks and occasionally cross-country, we made it to western South Dakota that summer. In late September, realizing it was too late in the year to make it to Idaho, we started looking for a place to spend the winter.

“This time it took three weeks and a couple of run-ins with nervous ranchers with shotguns before we found someone who would take us in as ‘security consultants’ for room and board. We stayed outside a little town called Newell, in Butte County, with a family called Norwood. Real nice people. Cattle ranchers. We ate so much beef that winter, that we almost got sick of it. Both of us learned how to ride and care for horses that winter. We also learned the basics of horse shoeing.

“In all, it was a good winter. Because the Norwood’s oldest boy, Graham, was also pulling security, we had the relative luxury of only eight-hour shifts. Graham carried an M1 Garand and an old Smith and Wesson Model 1917 revolver, chambered in .45 automatic. He was pretty good with both guns, and even better after we gave him a few pointers on combat shooting. The kid was incredibly fast at reloading the revolver using full moon clips. I swear, he could reload that gun faster than anyone I’ve ever seen reload a revolver using a speed loader.

“Fortunately, we didn’t have any encounters with marauders that winter. We did hear that Belle Fourche, which was about twenty-five miles away, had got shot up pretty badly by a whole army of bikers before they were finally driven off.

“We left the Norwoods in late March. We rode out on horseback with Graham. He rode with us as far as Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where they had relatives. There, after delivering a few letters and renewing acquaintances, Graham had to head on back to the ranch.

“He, of course, took the two horses that we had borrowed, plus his own horse and the packhorse, back with him. We gave Graham a half a box of .45 automatic for his Model 1917 as a thank you and as a birthday present. He turned seventeen while we were on our ride to Scottsbluff.

“We stayed overnight at the Norwoods’ relatives’ place. It was there that we heard tremendous news. They had heard that their neighbor, named Cliff, was planning on taking a drive out to northern Utah. I was just dumbfounded. ‘Taking a drive?’ I asked. They said,‘Sure. We can go talk with him tomorrow.’

“The neighbor, Cliff, was indeed ‘taking a drive’ in a real live internal com-bustion engine automobile—a crew cab Ford pickup, no less—from Scottsbluff to Coalville, Utah. He was going there to visit relatives, and perhaps to stay. We couldn’t believe it. This guy, Cliff, we never found out his last name, was a real lunatic. He had most of the back end of his truck filled with gas cans. He said that he hadn’t heard from his cousins since before the stock-market meltdown, and wanted to look in on them to see if they were all right. He also said he had extra copies of a lot of genealogy and family history documents that he wanted to deliver to them. We didn’t question his judgment, though, at least not to his face. He was happy to have someone well-armed along to ‘ride shotgun.’

“I spent a day checking on the mechanical condition of Cliff’s pickup, to be sure it would get us there in one piece. I replaced the fuel filter, replaced the lower radiator hose, adjusted the belt tensioner—it had one of the later type serpentine belts—and then I lubed the chassis, and changed the oil. Oh yeah, and I tracked down a spare belt for Cliff before we left, just in case it broke. If one of those serpentine belts breaks, you are totally out of luck, because that one belt drives just about everything under the hood.

“We left before dawn the next day. Most of the way, Terry sat in the back and I sat directly behind Cliff in the jockey seat of the cab. Compared to walking or riding horseback, as we’d been doing for the past two years, it seemed like we were flying in a spaceship. The landscape just roared by. Most of it was real lonely unpopulated basin and range country. Cliff played a Hank Williams Jr. tape—I think it was his only tape—over and over again. I don’t know how many times we heard ‘Tennessee Stud,’‘The Coalition to Ban Coalitions,’ and ‘A Country Boy Can Survive.’ I was singing along with ol’ Cliff after a while.

“Surprisingly, we didn’t run into any trouble in all that distance. I suppose that the Good Lord was looking out after poor naive Cliff. The only signs of disorder that we saw were a few burned down houses and a lot of cars that looked like they’d been stripped to the bone.

“When we got to Coalville, we thanked Cliff dozens of times, and gave him twenty rounds of .223 ball to use in the folding stock Mini-14 Ranch Rifle that he carried in his pickup. He just yelled, ‘Thanks for the amma-nishun pardner!’ and roared off up the road. What a lunatic.

“Once we got to Coalville we were on foot again. We were just outside Morgan City when I developed a bad blister on my left foot. We decided to rest up for a couple of weeks, using our usual modus operandi as security guards.

It was there that Terry fell off the ladder and broke her kneecap. It just didn’t want to heal properly, so we had no choice but to ask to stay on. That’s when we started sending you letters via any means possible. I guess that you know all the rest.”