Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

CHAPTER 2 Old Friends

The morning following the arrival of Dan and T.K., there was still no sign of Ken and Terry Layton, the last of the group members still in Illinois. Dan said that he was beginning to wonder if they would ever arrive. When Mary voiced the same concern to Todd, he smiled and declared, “Don’t worry, if I know them, they’ll get here even if they have to cover the whole distance in three-to-five second rushes.”

After his conversation with Mary, Todd went to see Mike, who was inventorying his equipment in his wall lockers in the Grays’ basement. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Todd told Mike, “It would be wise to start a round-the-clock guard mount, starting this morning. I’d like you to work up a duty schedule. We’ll use that sked until Ken and Terry arrive, then we’ll set a permanent watch.”

Mike raised an eyebrow and asked, “So you really think that they’ll make it here?You know, if they had a chance to make it out in a car, they’d be here by now. They could be on foot by now, or worse. You saw how Dan’s rig got shot up. That’s pretty strong evidence that we’re in a world of hurt.”

Todd gave Mike Nelson a glum look. “I know Mike, I know. At this point, though, all we can do is hope and pray. Care to join me?” They kneeled and bowed their heads. They prayed aloud, each beseeching protection and travel mercies for the Laytons.

Later that morning, Todd called for a formal debriefing of the Nelsons, Dan, and T.K. Everyone got together in the living room of the house, with the exception of Mary, who was up at the hillside listening post/observation post (LP/OP).

“The drive itself was a piece of cake, really,” Mike began. “Like I told Todd before, the hardest part was loading up all of our gear. We spent half a day putting everything into three heaps: ‘Essentials,’ ‘Second Priority,’ and ‘Nice to Have.’

“We thought that we had pre-positioned most of our gear here at the retreat, but once we started setting out everything that we still had at our house, we realized that we had seriously underestimated the weight and volume.”

Lisa interjected, “I suppose that we should have done a practice load-up a long time ago. It would have made our underestimation immediately apparent, and prevented having to consciously think through what we absolutely needed to take. Anyway, after prioritizing, we started loading. The guns got packed first. Then all of our ammo. Then our ALICE packs. Then twelve five-gallon gas cans. Those went on the rack on the tailgate and just inside it, so we could refuel without having to unload anything to get to the cans.

“Next we loaded our ‘tactical’ food supplies—you know—the MREs and various freeze-dried and retort packaged stuff. We are thankful that we brought most of our MREs here last year. Otherwise, we would have had to leave them behind. This got us through the ‘Essentials’ pile. The real headaches came with the ‘Second Priority’ pile: clothing, bulk foods, field gear, most of our medical supplies, the hand crank generator, and so on. We just didn’t have room to fit it all in, even with both the Bronco and the Mustang. I considered trying to get a rental trailer, but I figured that by then they’d all be long gone.

“The end result was that we had to leave behind half of our wheat, our generator, our kerosene lamps, all of our cans of kerosene, and half of our survival reference books. Before we took off, I left the extra gear along with a goodbye note on our next door neighbor’s back porch. I figured that there was no use in having them go to waste. Besides, I knew that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to come back for another load. The only thing that we took from the ‘Nice to Have’ pile was my old family Geneva Bible. It has been through floods, tornadoes, you name it. I’m glad it’s with us.”

“By the time we got everything packed, it was three a.m. We were going to coordinate, but the phone was dead. As it turned out, leaving in the middle of the night worked out for the best. There was not much traffic. Even still, we saw quite a few cars and pickups towing trailers. Mike drove ahead of me. We talked to each other on the CB. We didn’t chatter. It was just the occasional ‘slow down!’ or ‘watch out for this truck that’s coming up to pass!’ We had the CBs set to channel 27, upper sideband—the Get Out Of Dodge (G.O.O.D.) frequency—so Mike occasionally tried to reach the Laytons, or Dan or T.K., in case they were monitoring, but they either weren’t listening or were out of range. I was really nervous the whole way. I had the doors locked and kept my Colt Gold Cup tucked under my thigh on the seat of the car.”

Mike continued, “We didn’t want to use up any more of the gas in cans than we had to, so we stopped several times to fill up. One station was charging sixty-five dollars per gallon for all grades of fuel.”

Lisa interjected, “That was the station where we met this guy and his family stranded in their minivan. Because the gas station had started to refuse checks and credit cards the day before, they wouldn’t even accept their own franchise card. This guy had every credit card in the world—American Express,VISA, you name it—but only eighteen dollars in cash. Just as the guy was taking off his fancy gold wristwatch to offer the station manager in exchange for a tank of gas, Mike walks up to him and hands him nine one-hundred-dollar bills. He thanked him and offered to send the money back later. Mike said to him ‘No prob, keep it fella. Besides, by the time you’d get a chance to mail me the money, people will be kindling their fires with fifties, and wiping their behinds with hundreds.’”

Mike concluded, “Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we got here, and saw no serious disorder along the way. But, as Lisa told you, there were a lot of determined-looking people with very heavily loaded vehicles on the road.”

Dan and T.K.’s debriefing was next. T.K. began, “I was listening to my Cobra CB base station, set to the primary G.O.O.D. frequency, as I was packing up. All of a sudden, I heard this voice saying:‘Dude, are we getting out of here or what?’ It was the Fong-man. Boy, I was glad to hear him. I ‘rogered’ back, and he told me that he was all packed up and ready to go. I said,‘Great, come on over and help me load up.’ He showed up in about ten minutes. As it turned out, he was on ‘security’ while I packed. I made sure that I had a gun handy throughout the process as well. I had my Colt Commander cocked and locked in the inside pocket of that flyer’s jacket I bought last year.

“Basically, I packed while Dan sat in the cab of his Toyota, holding his old Model ’97 trench gun. I asked him why he wasn’t carrying his Remington 870. He says, ‘This gun is much more ominous….’ Then he whips out this bayonet about a mile long and snaps it on. ‘This oughta make any hungry neighbors think twice,’ he says. By the time I was done loading up, it was nearly midnight. I brought all I could think of, and got the old Bronco pretty well loaded down. Luckily, I just made a caching trip out here last summer, so I didn’t have to leave much behind that I would have wanted aside for some books and bed linens. When we took off, Dan was in the lead.”

Dan stood up and continued, “I started packing up a day before Tom. I couldn’t figure which of my guns to bring along, so I said to myself, ‘Aw shucks, I’ll just take all of them.’ Most of the guns are still wrapped up in blankets at the bottom of everything else in the back end of the Fong-mobile—all twenty-nine of them.

“Because I had my doubts, I worked the next three days after I got Todd’s

‘The sky is falling!, the sky is falling!’ call. My last afternoon at the cannery, the general manager gave me a list of fifteen employees that I was supposed to hand pink slips to at four o’clock. I told him,‘Sorry boss, can’t do that. These people depend on their jobs, and we depend on them. We can’t put out a safe-to-eat product without a minimum level of staffing on each shift.’ Then he says to me,‘If you refuse, I’ll have no choice but to let you go as well.’ Then I said,

‘You can’t fire me, because I just quit,’ and walked away. I didn’t even bother to clean out my desk. I just grabbed a few of my engineering reference books, and the Sykes-Fairbairn ‘letter opener’ that I kept in the top drawer. On my way out, I stopped by the employee’s thrift shop and bought sixteen cases of various late-date-of-pack canned fruit and vegetables. They were still tagged at the old employee price which is like two cents on the dollar from current prices.”

Fong scanned the room and then went on. “Soooo, that same evening I started packing up. By then the phones had been out for a couple of days. It took a lot longer than I thought to pack up. As T.K. told you, I spent the next few hours keeping a look out while he got his gear loaded. We left late, eleven o’clock—no, I guess it was after midnight.”

T.K. nodded in agreement.

Dan shrugged his shoulders and went on. “It didn’t seem that late. Any-hooo, we got ourselves on the road. On our way out of town we saw one house totally in flames, but not a single fire truck was in sight. We also saw two cars that had been gutted. The traffic on the freeway was nearly bumper-to-bumper, even at midnight. All of the gas stations were either closed or had big signs, mainly sheets of plywood spray painted with the words ‘NO GAS.’

“By the time we were an hour and a half out of Chicago, we started seeing cars that had run out of gas alongside the road. A couple of times I had to swerve around people trying to flag us down. They were really desperate. By that time, I figured that stopping to help anybody out would be far more dangerous than it was worth. By the time we crossed the state line there were cars out of gas on the shoulder every half a mile. It was at that point that I got on the radio to T.K. and suggested that we cut over to the older two-lane highway that parallels the interstate. Things were really starting to look hostile on the interstate, so we cut over as soon as we got the chance. By that time, T.K. and I were both low on fuel.

“My gauge read a quarter full, and T.K. radioed to say that he’d switched over to his reserve tank, so I started looking for a good place to refuel. I picked a side road that went out by a bunch of farms. There were no cars on it at all.

We stopped about a mile down this side road at a straight stretch where we could see both ways for quite a distance. I got out with my Model 97, and had my Beretta nine mil in a shoulder rig. T.K. got out with his CAR-15, and slung it across his back. I played security for him while he refueled, and then he did the same for me.

“Just as I was putting the last of a third jerry can into my rig, T.K. gave a whistle, and I saw a car’s headlights. Both of us got down on the far side of our rigs, trying to put as much engine block as we could between us and them.

When the lights got within about 150 yards, I could see it was a patrol car.

“At that point, both T.K. and I played it cool, and we slipped our long guns under my pickup, lengthwise, so they were out of sight. Turned out it was a sheriff’s deputy. When he stopped his patrol car behind our rigs, T.K. walked back to talk with him. Needless to say, he was very curious about us, and wasn’t taking any chances. He had a big Glock 21, and it was out of the holster.

“T.K. explained to him that we were on our way to stay with friends in Idaho and had just stopped to refuel. He had already figured that out, and pointed his flashlight at the jerry can sitting by my rig. At first, he thought we’d both been riding in my Toyota, and that we had stopped to siphon somebody’s Bronco. It wasn’t until we showed him our driver’s licenses and the registration for both vehicles that he started to relax.

“Boy, was I scared. The last thing that we needed was to get locked up in some county jail in Iowa just as the shit was hitting the fan. As it turned out, the dude was pretty cool after all. We shot the breeze for a bit while I finished gassing up, and cramming the cans back in the rigs. Just before he left, he said, ‘Well, I hope you make it to your hidey-hole in Ide-ho in one piece.’ He sure had us pegged. Anyway, we waited ’til he was well out of sight before we picked up our guns. He never spotted them. Jeez, that would have taken even more explaining.”

After a brief pause, T.K. spoke. “I was scared to death, too. After the deputy left, we praised God for his protection, and got turned around and headed back for the highway. We tooled along just fine. In fact, Dan kept picking up speed.

Sometimes he got up to about seventy-five. I had to get on the CB and yell at him to slow down. We made another refueling stop using the same method just before dawn in eastern South Dakota, and then again about ten in the morning. After that stop, I took the lead. By then, there were virtually no cars on the road at all.

“Not long after we crossed into Montana we had to slow down because there was a pair of wrecked cars almost blocking both lanes. At first, it looked like just another accident, two cars smashed together, typical fender bender.

Then I realized, hey, there aren’t any intersecting roads there, so how could they have been in a fender bender unless one car had rear-ended the other? I knew that couldn’t be the case, because one of the cars was practically perpendicular to the road. By the time I had figured that out, we were practically on top of them. Luckily, the shoulder was pretty wide. I didn’t have time to call Dan on the CB to warn him. I just hit the gas and swerved around onto the shoulder around the wreck. All I could do was hope that Dan would catch on and do just the same thing. Luckily, he did.”

Dan picked up the thread of the story, “I saw the munched cars up ahead, and then I saw a puff from T.K.’s tailpipe when he hit the gas. A second later, I did likewise. I followed right behind. As we went around the two wrecked cars, I saw two guys with shotguns stand up behind the car on the right-hand side.

They weren’t riotguns either, just regular old pump action birdguns. When that happened, I just ducked, and kept on going. They got about three or four shots off at me.

“The first shot took out my windshield and passenger’s side window. The second and third pretty well peppered my camper shell. Needless to say, it took out the back window of the camper, as well. Nothing inside got wasted except my sleeping bag. It’s leaking goose down like crazy now. Some pellets also hit two of my gas cans, but luckily they were empties. Otherwise, the back end would have been swimming in gas.

“Judging by the holes, they must have been using shells loaded with good-sized buckshot. Probably number four buck, possibly a bit larger. It went through my camper shell and just kept on going. Anyway, after we got about ten more miles down the road, we pulled off along a straight stretch. T.K. pulled security while I assessed the damage. The windshield was shattered. I could hardly see through it. The passenger’s side window had disintegrated into chunks.

“I spent the next ten minutes kicking out the windshield and sweeping out the majority of the broken glass. It was pretty cold, and I didn’t want to freeze my tail off driving without a windshield, so had to spend another five minutes pulling gear out of the back of my rig until I found the box with all my cold weather clothes. I bundled up in my field pants with the cold weather liners, a woolly pully, my down jacket, and then my DPM camouflage smock. I also put on my army gloves with liners and one of those navy watch caps that we got at Ruvel’s Surplus. Even with all that, I felt cold, but at least I didn’t freeze. That was the only exciting thing that happened on the way here. The last part of the trip was rather anticlimactic. Saw some nice looking deer and elk, though.”

With the formal debriefing over, the newcomers continued their tales over lunch. To everyone’s surprise, it was a hearty spread, with fresh meat, cheese, and vegetables. T.K. asked Todd, “Hey, what’s with wasting all this fresh food? I thought you’d be starting on the storage food by now.”

“Savor it while you can, T.K. We’re just in the process of using up all the food from the refrigerator and freezer. We don’t know how much longer we’ll have power.”

T.K. looked glum. He moaned, “We’ll be eating wheat berries for breakfast tomorrow, I suppose.” They all laughed.

After concerted study, Todd and Mary Gray had chosen the Palouse Hills region of north central Idaho as a place to look for their retreat. It fit all of their criteria. It had a low population density. It was more than six hours’ drive from the nearest major metropolitan area, Seattle. The entire region had deep, rich topsoil and diverse agriculture. Most importantly, it had precipitation through most of the year, eliminating the one weak link in most modern agriculture in America—water. The region did not need electrically pumped irrigation water to grow crops.

A “vacation” trip in the summer of 2001 proved out their hopes about the region. Everyone they met was friendly, there was no traffic, and most of the pickups had gun racks and N.R. A. stickers. Aside from the occasional double-wide mobile home or satellite TV dish, it looked more like the 1960s than the “Aughts.” To Todd and Mary, who had both grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, the price of land and houses seemed absurdly low. The price of a three-bedroom house on twenty acres ranged from $140,000 to $300,000.

After three subsequent trips looking at real estate, they finally found a forty-acre farm that they wanted to buy. It was a mile out of Bovill, a small town thirty miles east of Moscow, Idaho. Bovill was situated at the eastern fringe of the Palouse Hills farming region. The town was a bit colder than much of the surrounding area, but that also meant that the price of land was lower. Further, the economy of the area had a mix of both agriculture and timber to support it. Todd also liked the prospect of being close to the Clearwater National Forest. As he put it, the 1.9 million acre forest would make “a big backyard.”

The brick farmhouse was built in 1930. It needed some work, but it met all of their needs. It had a full basement, three small but adequate bedrooms, a wood cook stove that also looked 1930s vintage, and a metal roof. There was also a garage/shop, a barn, a woodshed, a meat house, a large orchard of fruit and nut trees, and a spring house a hundred yards up the hill behind the house. Unlike most of their neighbors, who were on well water, they had a five-gallon-per-minute spring gravity fed to the house. Because the current owners were retiring and moving to Arizona, a seven-year-old John Deere tractor also went with the house. The owners had asked $178,000 for the place. The Grays offered $125,000. After two counteroffers, they finally settled on $155,500.

They paid cash.

The path that led Todd and Mary Gray to the Palouse Hills began one evening in October, 2006, as Todd and his college roommate Tom “T.K.” Kennedy walked back to their dorm. They had just watched a DVD of the Australian film The Road Warrior at a mutual friend’s apartment. Todd commented, “Pretty good movie, T.K., but not too believable. Personally, I think that in a situation like that, the gasoline would be gone long before the ammunition, not the other way around.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing myself,” T.K. said. “Also, the best way to survive something like that wouldn’t be to zoom around from place to place.

That just increases contact with other people. Consequently, that increases the chance of trouble. Mel Gibson’s character should have set up some sort of retreat or stronghold.”After a few moments of silence he asked, “Do you think a scenario like that—total collapse of society—could ever really happen?

“I think all this talk about ‘The Y2K Bug’ is overblown. But given the complexity of society, and the interdependence of systems on other systems, it probably could. In fact, all it might take would be economic trouble of the same magnitude as the Great Depression of the 1930s to set something like that off. That could be all it would take, and the whole house of cards would collapse. Our economy, our transportation system, communications systems—everything, really—is so much more complex and vulnerable than back in the 1930s. And our society is not nearly so well-behaved.”

T.K. suddenly stopped on the sidewalk and cocked his head. He looked Todd in the eyes and proclaimed, “If something like that is truly possible, even on an outside chance, then I think it might be prudent to make some preparations.”

Back at their dorm room, their conversation on the subject went on with great intensity until three a.m. Without knowing it at the time, Todd and T.K. had formed the nucleus of an organization that eventually would have more than twenty members, regular meetings, logistics standards, a set of tactical standard operating procedures (SOPs), and a chain of command. Oddly, despite its formal organization, their survival group was not given a name for many years. It was simply referred to as “the Group.”

When they recruited new members, Todd and T.K. described “the Group” as a “mutual aid” organization. Members could depend on help from each other, both in good times and in bad. If a member had their car break down, or got into a financial bind, for example, the other group members were sworn to give immediate aid to the best of their ability—no excuses, and no questions asked. The group’s major benefit was that in truly hard times it would provide strength in numbers and a solid logistics base, allowing the members a greater chance of pulling through a crisis unscathed.

Within a few months Todd and T.K. had gathered a number of friends into the Group. Most of them were fellow students at the University of Chicago.

Since nearly all of them were short on cash, they didn’t get far beyond a lot of talk until most of the members had graduated from college, and started making decent salaries.

For the first few years following its inception, Todd and his fellow group members talked, argued, and reasoned their way into a formal organization.

Todd held the overall leadership and guiding role. He was simply called either “boss” or jokingly, “head honcho.”

T.K. became the group’s personnel specialist. He counseled group members and ironed out wrinkles in interpersonal relations. In addition, T.K. emerged as the organization’s main recruiter. He carefully sized up each prospective group member, weighed their strengths and weaknesses, and did his best to judge how each would react to a prolonged period of high stress.