Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

23. Roll Out

Once the looting in Phoenix started spreading out into the suburbs, Ian and Blanca agreed that it would be very dangerous to stay in Buckeye much longer.

The next morning they wheeled the Larons out of their trailers. Working in the driveway and on the front lawn, they bolted on the wings. Assembly and preflight testing only took fifteen minutes per plane. But then it took nearly an hour to efficiently stow their gear, with the heavier items as close as possible to the planes’ center of gravity. As all this went on, a number of curious neighbors congregated to stare at the strange sight. Soon a few of them pitched in to help with the fueling process.

Ian handed his next-door neighbor the keys and the “pink slip” titles to his vehicles, and the keys to the house. He told him, “We won’t be back, so you can have anything you’d like inside the house. I don’t know what you should do with the trailers for the planes. I guess you can give these pink slips to my landlord, if you ever see him. He can apply that to our rent and keep the difference.”

Just before they started their engines, Ian asked for volunteers to halt any approaching cars on the adjoining avenue. After starting up and doing another radio check, Ian and Blanca taxied off the lawn and down the driveway. They then continued out the court and turned on to Hastings Avenue, with Ian in the lead. Their neighbors gathered to gawk. There was about two thousand feet of the broad avenue available, which was plenty of runway for the Larons, even in their overloaded condition. Blanca keyed her radio and said, “Be careful-light poles on the left.” Several neighbors stood at the ends of the avenue to watch for approaching cars and, if need be, to block traffic.

The planes staggered off the ground and climbed out eastward very slowly, into the smoky haze that hung over the entire Phoenix region. Ian did a 90-degree turn and slid in to form up alongside Blanca’s Laron. She gave him a thumbs-up.

They turned due north, still climbing. Gazing to the east, Blanca could see house fires burning out of control in Phoenix, Glendale, and even as close as Goodyear. She radioed Ian, “Ay, ay, ay, look at all those fires… over.”

“Yeah, it looks like we got out of Dodge just in time. After Goodyear, the looters are gonna hit Buckeye sure as anything. Climbing to 7,500, out.”

Ian again looked toward Phoenix. He remembered Charley Gordon and wondered aloud, without pressing the mic switch, “So, what’ll last longer: Charley or the thousand rounds of nine-milly?”

Their eighty-seven-mile flight to Prescott consumed just over seven gallons of avgas for each plane. At the midpoint of their flight, they practiced using Jackrabbit hand pumps in anticipation of longer flights. Refueling their fuel tanks in flight from their fuel bladders took only seven minutes.

After passing over some dramatic yellowish rocky hills on the east shore of Willow Lake, they landed their planes at Love Field, Prescott’s airport. Once on the ground, they taxied to the general aviation area. The fueling area had a large sign spray-painted on a four-by-eight-foot sheet of oriented strand board with a frown face and “No Fuel.” The phones were out, so Ian thought it was best to go directly to Alex’s house.

Ian wangled a ride from the airport-in exchange for twenty-five rounds of 9mm hollowpoints—while Blanca stayed behind to guard the planes. Alex was impressed with the country. Granite Mountain loomed large in the distance. There was obviously more water here than down in the Phoenix area, but this was still Arizona. There were lots of trees here-a scarcity in southern Arizona. The elevation of the town was about 5,500 feet. This gave it a much cooler climate than Buckeye.

There was no answer when Ian knocked on the door of Alex’s rental house on Oak Terrace Drive. Ian discovered that the door was unlocked, and inside there were signs that Alex had left hurriedly. Most of the furniture in the house was still there, but nearly all of Alex’s other personal possessions were missing. The kitchen smelled of sour milk. There was a knock on the door. It was Alex’s next-door neighbor, carrying a baseball bat.

After explaining who he was, Ian learned that Alex had just been hired on as a “full-time security consultant” for four families with adjoining properties in Conley Ranches, a fairly new gated community two miles north of town. Contacting Alex was a snap, once he knew how to do it: CB Channel 12. “They monitor it around the clock.” The neighbor, a former trucker, had a CB radio in his SUV. Alex responded immediately to Ian’s transmission and said that he’d be at his old house in less than half an hour to pick him up.

Alex pulled into the driveway in his Ford Excursion. Ian was carrying no baggage, so he just hopped into the passenger seat and Alex immediately backed out of the driveway. There was a long-barreled Dan Wesson .44 Magnum revolver resting in the center console.

After a palm-slapping high five, Alex asked simply, “Airport?”

“Yep.”

As he drove, Alex explained rapidly, “I got hired as a security guy for a group of four families on contiguous one-acre lots, in a square, on the end of a block. Two of them are retired bankers from Tucson. Strictly a ‘room-and-board’ arrangement. There’s four hundred lots in the development, but less than half of them have houses built: it’s kind of a patchwork, with clusters of houses surrounded by empty lots. Its a bunch of half-million-dollar to million-plus houses there. A lot of retired executives with more money than brains. They watched it all go down on TV, and now they’re scared spitless and playing catch-up.”

Without allowing Ian time to comment, Alex went on: “I think we’ve got food and water covered, but they’re pretty darn light on fuel, and pitiful on security. Some of the families in Conley Ranches don’t even own a gun. And some of their ‘committees’ that meet at the clubhouse are a bit of a joke. But at least the most important one, Vegetable Gardening, is getting its act together. The plan is to haul in truckloads of manure and good topsoil to some of the empty lots with the least rocky soil. The water, thank God, is all gravity flow, from up in the mountains. The ‘private gated community’ aspect doesn’t mean jack now: since the power is out, they have to leave the gates wired wide open. I’m trying to organize things to get that situation changed, pronto.”

Ian nodded, and Alex went on: “The house where I bunk is 3,800 square feet, and it had just a couple living in it. They have room for at least two more full-timers, and believe you me, I need the help. We gotta get continuous 24/7 shifts going right away.”

Alex pulled into the general aviation gate at Love Field. After the formalities of getting through the inner gate, he was able to drive up to where the pair of Larons were tied down.

They all exchanged hugs and shared some tears about the death of Linda. But then they were all busy with their first concern: getting the planes unloaded. All of Ian and Blanca’s gear fit with ease in the back of the Excursion with its third-row seat folded down. Alex mentioned that he was impressed with how much Ian had been able to shoehorn into the planes. Ian explained almost apologetically: “I ran the weight and balance numbers, but they were marginal. Balance was decent, but gross weight was really pushing the envelope. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do and pray for the best.”

As Alex shut the back doors on the Ford, he said, “Judging from the guns that you brought, they will not say no to hiring you.” His prediction proved right. That evening, after some brief objections about extra mouths to feed, Ian and Blanca were hired by the four homeowners. Like Alex, Ian and Blanca would receive no pay but would be provided meals and a comfortable bedroom. Their room was in the 2,750-square-foot home that sat behind the one Alex was in. It belonged to Dr. Robert Karvalich, a widower who was a retired pediatrician. Everyone called him Doctor K. Many years before, he had served a stint as a Navy medical officer, but only in an office setting, never at sea or in combat. He carried a World War II-vintage Remington Rand Model 1911 in a full flap holster daily. The gun, he explained, had belonged to his father, who was also a Navy doctor, during the Korean War.

Unlike the other homeowners, who took several weeks to get accustomed to constantly carrying guns, Doctor K. took to it immediately. The difference was that he had been robbed at gunpoint once before. As he told it, six years before the Crunch, Doctor K. answered his door to find a drug addict with a pistol in his hand. The man was after narcotics. Fearing for his life, Doctor K. reluctantly complied, giving the robber his small supply of Tylenol with codeine, Vicodin, and an oral solution of morphine sulfate. The robber fled in a car with California license plates and was never caught by the local authorities. When Ian Doyle asked everyone in the compound to be armed at all times, Robert Karvalich was one of the first to do so.

Transporting the planes to Doctor K.’s house the next day at first seemed like it would be difficult, requiring borrowed trucks, but then it proved easy: they just flew them there. The street in front of the four-house “compound,” as Alex called it, was curving and on a slight slope, but there was a long, wide street a quarter mile away that was straight and nearly level. This street was in the new “Phase 2” portion of the Conley Ranches development, where the streets had been paved, but only a few lots had been sold and no houses had yet been built. In Phase 2, the streetlight poles had not yet been installed. The street made a very practical runway for the Larons. They were able to land there and then just taxi the planes to the street where Alex lived. The sight of this made quite a stir in the community.

Soon after they stopped the planes in the driveway, one of the neighbors from down the street came to threaten to file a complaint about the planes landing as “a safety nightmare,” and about the very presence of the planes. She shouted that the planes were “flagrantly against the association rules.” As she stood wagging her finger in Alex’s face, Blanca and Ian were already at work disassembling them. Once the wings were removed and the planes disappeared into one of the bays in Doctor K.’s capacious four-car garage alongside his RV, the neighbor quieted down. Alex talked some sense into her by emphasizing that she’d be the indirect beneficiary of the additional armed security at no cost. “Well, I suppose that’s okay,” she said quietly, and walked off.

The Doyles-Ian, Blanca, and Alex-agreed to each stand a daily eight-and-a-half-hour guard watch, thirteen days out of each two weeks. The intense guard duty schedule left them very little time for recreation-and hardly even enough time to hand-wash their laundry-but at least all of their meals were provided by the four families on a rotating schedule.

Blanca began to carry one of the M16s that Ian had taken in for safekeeping from Luke Air Force Base. Alex provided her some 5.56mm ammo, both for target practice and to keep in loaded magazines. She disliked the M16, mostly because of the odd twang sound that the buffer made in the buttstock when it was fired. She also considered the gun ugly but would not elaborate beyond saying, “I know a good-looking gun when I see one, and this one ain’t it. I like a gun with at least some wood. This thing is like a plastic toy.”

The Doyles wanted to construct a sandbagged fighting position inside each ground-floor exterior window, but they ran into a problem: a shortage of sandbags. There were no nearby Army or Marine Corps installations, so the local surplus store had no sandbags available. And because Prescott was not in a flood-prone area, the county had just a small supply of sandbags for use if a water main broke. The local feed store had had its supply of empty feed sacks wiped out by just a couple of customers long before the Doyles inquired.

It was Blanca who came up with the answer: sewing their own, using rolls of black polyester mesh road construction underlayment material. This material came in ten-foot-wide rolls. They were able to trade a local road contractor a box of .30-06 ammunition for two rolls of the material.

Because the power was out, electric sewing machines were not available, but Doctor K. put his late wife’s Singer treadle sewing machine table back into operation. The table’s sewing machine had been discarded years before, when the table became a decorator item. But Doctor K. was able to install a much later model Singer machine into the treadle table. This one sewing machine eventually served the families in all four homes in the compound, for everything from patching blue jeans to making ammunition bandoleers. It proved capable of sewing the sandbags as well.

They cut the material to yield completed sandbags of the same fourteen-by-twenty-six-inch dimensions that had been standardized for U.S. military sandbags for nearly a century. Each sack weighed about forty pounds when filled.

Once filled and stacked, to the casual observer, the stacked black sacks looked like dark shadows inside the windows. The sandbag-making-and-filling project went on for three weeks. Clean sand was available from a large pile at the development’s uncompleted golf course. When asked permission to use some of the sand, Cliff Conley replied, “You take what you need. I expect it’ll be a long time before that golf course ever gets finished. Just don’t ask me to help you fill ’em. I did my share of sandbag filling in Vietnam. I’ve now reached the ‘supervisory’ stage of life.”

By SOP, all wireless connections were turned off, for fear that they might be detected by passing looters.

Ian and Blanca settled into an upstairs bedroom that sat above the living room, which was heated by a woodstove. A floor vent gave their bedroom sufficient heat. More important, the bedroom had a sliding glass door to a story deck with a commanding view of much of the compound and the neighborhood. A hot tub sat on the corner of the deck, already drained for winter. It was soon lined with sandbags, turning it into a soft-top pillbox. The hot tub’s plywood lid was covered with Naugahyde and had flaps that hung down six inches. Ian and Blanca constructed a C-shaped framework with five two-by-four legs to support the lid. This positioned the lid seven inches higher than normal, providing a 360-degree horizontal vision slit. To anyone walking by on the street below, the hot tub-cum-pillbox didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, just a covered hot tub. Ian also cut five blocks from a length of four-by-four. These blocks allowed them to raise the lid an additional three and a half inches to provide better vision and hearing at night.

Because his master bedroom in the north wing of the house was too cold after the grid power went down, Doctor K. moved a single bed to what had formerly been his den. The den was just off the living room, and thus it was well heated. He and the Doyles then closed off the hallways to nearly half of the house by nailing up blankets with batten boards, to confine the heat to just the kitchen, living room, and den.

The Four Families staged a coup at the Conley Ranches homeowners association (HOA) meeting just a few days after Ian and Blanca arrived. By prearrangement with their sympathizers, they ousted two “Pollyanna” members of the HOA board. Both of them had wanted to maintain the status quo in the development, because they were hoping for an economic recovery in the near future. They were replaced with down-to-earth pragmatists.

In a series of voice votes that began almost immediately after the change in HOA leadership, all of the Conley Ranches restrictions on landscaping, gardening, pets, livestock, fences, antennas, solar panels, fuel storage, and vehicles were eliminated. Once it became apparent that they were badly outnumbered and that they were getting no traction at the meeting, the two Pollyannas and their handful of supporters stormed out in protest.

Under the new HOA rules for Conley Ranches, large-scale gardening on any unsold lots was encouraged. A 5 percent share of the crops grown on unsold lots was assigned to Cliff Conley, the original landowner and developer of the community. Conley later said that he was more than satisfied with that arrangement. A new HOA security committee was formed. This committee was later jokingly called the “Neighborhood Watch on Steroids.”

After the Doyles arrived, security improvements for the Four Families compound accelerated. With some hired labor to help, they built stockade-style fences connecting the perimeter of the four houses.

Ted Nielsen, one of the compound’s bankers, had a degree in engineering and had worked for a telephone company on his summer vacations during college. He constructed a simple phone hot loop of four traditional rotary-dial telephones for the houses. It was powered by seven car batteries wired in series. This battery bank was connected to a solar panel trickle charger. The dials on the phones were inoperative. They were connected in a traditional party-line arrangement. Each phone had a momentary contact switch added. When any of these buttons were depressed, it put a ringing voltage through the circuit, and all four phones rang. Nielsen’s simple phone system provided the means to coordinate a defense of the compound from intruders.

The interior fences in the four-house compound were removed, leaving a large inner courtyard. Most of this area was converted into four vegetable gardens. Clearing rocks took several days of hard work. Then soil, compost, and manure were hauled in, to be ready for gardening when warm weather returned.

The first week at sea was miserable. It was common to see Yvonne and Yvette vomiting over the stern rail in stereo. After the week of seasickness, everyone aboard Durobrabis got into a regular daily routine. There was plenty of hard work, including countless hours of pulling the handle on the Katadyn Survivor 35 desalinator, a reverse-osmosis unit that turned salt water into drinking water. Carston Simms ran a tight ship and insisted on keeping the freshwater tanks full.

Until Andy and the Tafts got accustomed to navigating and handling the rigging, the sailing was mostly handled by Carston and Angie, who each put in grueling ten-hour watches. Angie piloted from 0500 to 1500, and Carston from 1500 to 0100. As the days passed, everyone else on the boat took on more and more responsibility in handling the rigging and, eventually, piloting. At the end of his watch, Carston Simms would either set the Simrad autopilot (in calm seas) or drop sail and set the sea anchor (in rougher seas). Andy’s topside security duty was nightly from 2100 to 0800.

Every morning after being relieved by Simone Taft (their day watch, eyeballs-only security), Andy would carefully oil the SIG and its magazines. He was very conscious of the depredations of damp, salty air on gunmetal. Then he’d do his best to sleep in the darkness of the sail locker.

One of Laine’s top priorities was familiarizing the adults on the yacht with safe gun handling. He did this in one-on-one classes held late in the afternoons. He taught them how to load, fire, and reload the pistol. Jules got an abbreviated version of the same instruction. The Tafts’ eleven-year-old twins weren’t taught gun handling out of fear that one of them might accidentally drop the precious gun overboard. But they were taught how to refill magazines, which they practiced regularly.

Most of the training consisted of dry practice with an unloaded gun, and with all of the gun’s ammunition safely in another compartment. But after a week of that, Andy gave Jules and all the adults the chance to actually shoot the SIG. Their targets were sealed empty bottles that were thrown off the bow. In all, they shot just twenty-eight cartridges.

After every lesson, Andy said, “If I go down, then you pick this gun up and you continue the fight until the threat is vanquished. You do not quit. Do you understand?”

After the first phase of firearms training, Andy moved on to hand-to-hand combatives and knife fighting, using his own amalgam of tae kwon do, pistol handling, and Krav Maga, which Laine dubbed “SIG kwon do.” Adding to the standard katas, Andy taught how to use a pistol that had been shot dry as a club and as a pressure-point tool. For the latter, he used the barrel protruding from the pistol with its slide locked to the rear. The small surface area of the muzzle, he showed, could deliver tremendous force in strikes to the solar plexus, groin, kidneys, or neck of an opponent.

Each morning from ten to noon, Alan Taft taught everyone Spanish. Sailing instruction-also for everyone-took up most of each afternoon. Nearly every night after the dinner dishes were washed, there were endless games of cards, mostly cribbage.

Andy was having trouble getting to sleep. They were 250 miles west of Portugal. It was a Tuesday, and his contact was scheduled for that night, so he felt anxious. He was hoping for good propagation.

Andy set his radio’s alarm for 0315. As he set up the dipole antenna along the rail, he was surprised to see Carston standing in the open hatchway. In a soft voice Andy explained what he was doing. Simms nodded. Andy sat down and completed hooking up the transceiver. Then he said, “Well, five minutes, and then I’ll know if we’ve got good propagation.”

Carston offered, “That can be tricky on shortwave.”

Andy replied, “Yeah.”

The silence was overwhelming. Andy watched Carston Simms still standing in the doorway. Still in a whisper, he asked, “Tell me, how did this boat get the name Durobrabis?”

Carston sighed and explained: “She’s named after some old Celt ruins somewhere. You see, before I bought her, this boat belonged to an archaeology professor from the western end of Kent. He only rarely sailed her.” After a pause he added, “I didn’t particularly like the name, but being an old salt, I consider it bad luck to change a boat’s name.”

At 0329, at Andy’s request, Simms tacked to put Durobrabis on a southwesterly heading. This left the dipole antenna roughly facing the Great Circle line of bearing to the western United States. Precisely at 0330 GMT, Andy heard a strong cadence in Morse, with Lars’s distinctive stuttering “fist” on his preferred traditional Morse key:

“K5CLA DE K5CLB BT

“K5CLA DE K5CLB BT”

Andy replied: “K5CLB DE K5CLA BT”

Lars hammered back, “HOT DANG, GOT YOU AT S3. R-U AT SEA?”

“YES, MAKING GOOD TIME, FB, NOW IN DEEP OCEAN. NO WORRIES. HOW IS KL?”

“SHES FINE, LEARNING M-MORSE N WANTS 2 CHAT”

“PLZ PUT KL ON THE KEY”

Then, in a ponderously slow Morse rate of six words per minute, Andy heard: “I LOVE YOUU DRLING, 88, 88, 88. DYING TO SEE YOU. ANY ETA? BR”

How could he even begin to explain to her that it might be many months before he got home?