Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

26. A Fair Share

After La Fuerza had cleaned out everything of use from the stores in Anahuac, they moved north. Their next target was the small town of Hankamer. It was so small that they were able to clean it out house-to-house. Once that process started, many of the town’s five hundred residents fled, most of them on foot.

It was in Hankamer that Garcia found Rodrigo Cruz. Garcia was about ready to order him killed, along with the others, when Cruz shouted, “Wait! You need me, man!”

“Why do I need you, pendejo?” Garcia questioned.

Pointing to the big M2 machinegun on a pintle mount atop a V-100, he said, “I seen your guys fiddling with that Browning .50. They could only get it to fire single-shot. The timing is screwed-up. I can fix that. I was an armorer in the Marines. I know how to set headspace and timing, all that stuff. I got a whole set of machine-gun manuals and some tools in my house.”

Ignacio snorted. “Show me and maybe I’ll let you live.”

After Hankamer, La Fuerza continued brazenly hitting small towns in east Texas. They first swung in a large arc north and then westward. They skipped Dayton but then hit Hardin and Moss Hill. In Moss Hill, Garcia found a full-length mink coat for his wife, who had chronically complained of being cold. That immediately became a status symbol for all the wives and girlfriends of the gang members. They all wanted a full-length fur coat, and eventually they got them-mostly mink, but some raccoon and fox skin. They wore them so often that the coats became a trademark of La Fuerza.

After losing one of their pickups in a spectacular fire, Garcia ordered that they replace their fleet of unarmored vehicles with diesel-engine equivalents as quickly as they could find them. They eventually standardized with pickups and vans with Ford Power Stroke 6.0-liter diesel engines. They systematically stole every one that they came across, gradually re-equipping their small army.

Their raiding methodology was simple: send one pickup ahead with a husband, wife, and two or three kids to scout, acting like innocent refugees. They would use a CB to relay the situation. Then the entire convoy would be timed to arrive at dawn. Any resistance was crushed. They took what they wanted: fuel, vehicles, tires, food, batteries, cutting torches, guns, ammunition, liquor, drugs, gold, and jewelry. Then they left.

In some of the smallest towns where they met any shooting opposition, they killed everyone that they could find. They stayed in those towns longer and stripped them to the bone. But typically they would just barge into a town, loot, and scoot. They very soon learned that it wasn’t safe to stay in a large town overnight after looting, so they spent most of their nights camped at parks, airports, and wildlife refuges-wherever they could find plentiful water. Their modus operandi was to hit a town, spend the day looting, and then travel at least twenty-five miles before dark to camp.

It was after losing two more vehicles in a gun battle in Livingston that Garcia acquired his first two civilian armored trucks. One of his scouts found these parked in a lot on the east side of College Station, Texas. They had been owned by an armored car company that specialized in servicing ATM machines. Getting the keys only took a few minutes of torture. Eventually they gathered more and more armored trucks and vans as they went, mainly from the Rochester and Garda armored car agencies. Garcia and his family soon traveled exclusively in one of the armored car company trucks. It was a two-and-a-half-ton, built on a 1998 Ford F-800 chassis, with a 5.9 Cummins diesel engine. Because of its boxlike shape, Ignacio jokingly called it his bread truck.

La Fuerza accumulated a large collection of young armed men in its wake. Wherever he went, Garcia recruited those he met who were smart, skilled, and ruthless. As it turned out, most of them were paroled convicts, recently escaped convicts, and members of the MS-13 gang, which had been a natural gathering place for hardened criminals. Ignacio wanted to build up La Fuerza rapidly so that he could have at least one hundred vehicles rolling into a town, all at once. Very few would defy that show of force, at least not for long.

Their casualties when raiding small towns were fairly light. They made a point of never hitting any town with a population more than two thousand. To Garcia’s surprise, most of their losses came when they were camped at night. Typically, in the dead of the night a shot or two would ring out, and one of their sentries would go down, often shot in the back from outside their perimeter. Then the camp would be in an uproar, and patrols would be sent out with night-vision goggles, but they’d usually find nothing. Sometimes they’d find just an accidentally dropped magazine or a piece of fired brass. Tony would say matter-of-factly, “Militia bastards.”

They had so many tires shot out-usually when they’d first arrive in a town-that they eventually settled on carrying six spares, mounted on rims, on the roof of every vehicle. Eventually it was the loss of tires that forced them to abandon the Saracen APCs one after the other as they went along. The Saracens used special “run-flat” tires with a hard rubber inner rim. This size tire was not one stocked by American truck tire dealers. According to files that his wife had saved on her laptop, there was a dealer on the East Coast that catered to MVPA members who had a pile of tires and wheels for Saracens, but to Garcia those might just as well be on the moon. Once the outer tire was punctured by gunfire, it shredded and came off within two hundred miles. Then the APCs’ top speed dropped to under twenty-five miles per hour, and they became more difficult to steer. La Fuerza’s convoys needed to travel at least forty miles an hour.

In contrast, they were able to keep the Caddy Gage V-100s on the road because they used fairly standard tires that were found on some front-end loaders. One of the V-100s did have its rear transaxle fail, but they were able to replace it with one salvaged from a ubiquitous M-35 “deuce-and-a-half” Army transport truck.

Some of La Fuerza’s favorite targets were firehouses, for two reasons: First, their kitchens often had well-stocked pantries with large containers of staple foods like pasta, rice, and beans. Second, and more important, they almost always had their selection of tools intact. These included Halligan pry bars, large traditional crowbars, fire axes, and gas-engine-powered, automated, prying Jaws of Life (or, as Ignacio called them, Jaws of Loot). All of these tools proved invaluable to the gang when they needed to break into a building or a home gun vault. The Halligans were particularly useful in prying doors away from their door frames. They found that once door frames were separated, the doors could be easily kicked open.

In West Texas, La Fuerza crossed paths with a gang that was affiliated with MS-13. Calling themselves Los Lobos (“The Wolves”), the gang was headed by Adolfo Cantares. This gang numbered 120 and, like La Fuerza, they had been skipping from town to town. They were less sophisticated than La Fuerza, but they were just as ruthless. Rather than fighting them or competing with them, Ignacio decided to assimilate Los Lobos. He called for a meeting with their leader and proposed that they work together to loot Floydada, Texas. This was agreeable, since the town was too large for either gang to take independently.

After they had taken Floydada, Ignacio called for a celebratory feast and rape party. The gangs met at the Floydada Inn for the party. Ignacio made arrangements in advance to have one of his men poison the drinks of Cantares, his girlfriend, and his second in command. He did this late in the evening, after everyone was well liquored and high on various drugs. The next morning Garcia blamed the three deaths on drug overdoses. He then declared, “We are heading to New Mexico. Anyone from Los Lobos is welcome to join us, but you will be under my command.” Everyone joined.

Garcia’s now greatly enlarged gang cut a swath through southern New Mexico and southern Arizona. As the gang continued to grow, they could hit towns as large as twenty thousand people with relative impunity.

The Durobrabis was making steady progress down the coast of Guinea-Bissau. The plan was to work their way far enough south, following the Canary Current on the old Clipper route, with the goal of catching the northeast trade winds, to sail west across the Atlantic. Carston Simms warned: “We must stay out of the South Atlantic High. We musn’t get out in the Doldrums. On paper our planned course looks like a longer route, but in actuality, it is the fastest and safest route to Central America. The alternative is sailing the North Atlantic, but we daren’t do that in winter.”

During Taft’s afternoon watch, Andy was awoken by a shout: “Could be trouble! Speedboat, coming up from behind.”

Andy rolled out of the sail locker and trotted down the length of the cabin, blinking in the sudden transition to daylight. He could see that Taft’s family and Donna Simms were seated at the saloon table, wide-eyed. The twins were both still holding hands of playing cards. Andy popped out the hatch to the aft deck and was handed a pair of binoculars by Taft. He focused on the boat, which was four hundred yards astern and gaining quickly. The Durobrabis was under full sail, one-quarter into the wind. Laine reckoned that even if they turned for full wind, they’d still be outrun by the speedboat.

“Break out the Airsofts!” Andy ordered.

Simms complied, pulling the two fake submachine guns from a locker beneath one of the forward cabin V-berths. The seat cushions were hastily tossed aside and the locker lid was swung open.

No one was on the low forward deck of the speedboat, but there were a couple of heads that could be seen through the windshield. Laine set down the binoculars and unholstered his pistol.

Donna took the wheel while Carston, Andy, and Alan positioned themselves kneeling on the deck with their elbows on the aft bench and their guns held below the stern rail, making a show of force, just as they had practiced. Carston shouted to his wife: “Hold that course!”

When the speedboat was within sixty yards, two men with AKMs popped up from prone positions on the foredeck seats and pointed their guns toward the Durobrabis. But before they could shoot, Andy took three well-aimed shots. A bullet struck one of the gunmen in the chest and he collapsed, dropping out of sight. Simultaneously, the other gunman let loose a wild burst of full-auto fire, aimed much too high to be effective. Andy fired four more times, with one bullet hitting the man in the neck. He, too, dropped out of sight.

Now just fifteen yards astern, the speedboat veered off sharply, and Andy rapidly emptied his pistol into the exposed side of the boat, concentrating his fire on the cockpit and just forward of it. Laine did a quick reload, tossed his empty twenty-round magazine through the hatch, and shouted, “Refill that, Jules!”

The speedboat made a run for the coast, with no sign of turning back toward them. Alan Taft looked pale. He stuttered, “Di-di-did you see the, the blood spraying up from those men-the men on the front deck?”

Laine nodded gravely, but then he turned and said calmly to Angie, “You can go back to your card game now.”

After that incident, Simms changed their course to take them farther offshore. They found seven bullet holes in the canvas near the top of the mainsail. Patching the holes took less than an hour.

The trip across the Atlantic was surprisingly uneventful. With favorable winds and currents, they averaged 140 miles per day for most the journey. The cramped quarters on the Durobrabis led to a few arguments, but overall everyone got along fairly well. Simone Taft never had much harmony with Andy. She had been born in Paris but raised in London. She had a universally condescending attitude, even toward her husband. One day, in the midst of a disagreement about where and when hand-washed clothes should be hung up to dry, Simone got belligerent with Laine. She chided, “I don’t like you, Andrew, and I don’t like guns. If it weren’t for your, your pistol, you’d still be in England.”

“Correction: If it weren’t for my pistol, we’d all be shark food right now. Ma’am, you need to get used to how the real world operates.”

She shut up after that.