Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

28. Terminal Ballistics

In the April of the year after the Crunch began, Lars was summoned to the NAPI headquarters, seven miles south of Farmington, for some consulting work.

He was told that an isolated NAPI grain elevator had been taken over by an armed gang. One of the employees had been shot during the takeover and had died a day later.

Lars drove to meet the NAPI president at the company headquarters. He was a Navajo in his sixties. With him in the conference room were nine younger men, all tribal members.

Lars queried, “How many men were there?”

One of the employees raised his hand. “Hey. There was a bunch, maybe ten of ’em. They’re Mexicans. The drove up in three pea cups and a minivan. There was just three of us there, and only two of us had guns. They shot Alvin first thing, so we ran. We had to carry Alvin part of the way to our pea cups.”

One of the men asked Laine anxiously, “So, what do we do? Are we going to rush them?”

Lars shook his head. “No, no, no. Why risk taking any more casualties? Tell me, is there any really pressing need for any of that grain in the next few weeks?”

The NAPI president answered, “No, not really. We also got a tribal storehouse in town. Its got enough, I s’pose, even for the rest of the winter.”

“So we wait them out and engage them on our own terms. What is the water situation at the elevator?”

“A cistern, above ground. I think it’s five hundred gallons. We have to haul in the water for that. There’s a flush toilet in the building that we don’t use much, ’cuz it wastes water. Instead, we use a drop toilet about seventy-five yards out back, behind some Gambel oaks. But we don’t dare tell the health department about it: no permit, and it sure don’t meet no code.”

“Is the cistern a metal tank or masonry brick?”

“Neither. It’s one of the new blue poly ones.”

“No other source of water there?”

“Nope. Not for miles.”

Laine laughed and asked, “Who here is a good shot with a deer rifle?” Several men raised their hands. Lars said, “I’ve got a silver dollar for whoever can punch a hole in the side of that tank within three inches of the bottom.”

The men laughed uproariously, realizing that they could simply force the bandits out by depriving them of water.

Lars laid out the plan: “We’ll set up two-man teams with scoped rifles in shallow foxhole positions, 350 yards out. We’ll use three teams, with full coverage of the elevator buildings. We’ll make sure that they each have night-vision scopes or monoculars.”

One of the men protested, “Three hundred and fifty yards? That’s an awful long way to shoot.”

Lars asked the entire assembled group, “Have any of you heard of Simo Hayha?”

They gave him blank looks.

Laine continued, “He was a sniper from Finland in the Second World War. He was the world’s most successful sniper. I read that he had more than five hundred confirmed kills. My dad said that Simo Hayha was quoted as saying, ‘When you are shooting at wild game, never shoot from two hundred meters when you can shoot from twenty meters. But when you are in combat, never shoot from one hundred meters when you can shoot from three hundred meters. You’ll live longer.”

Each day that the Seed Lady store was open, Tyree stood guard in the back room with the shotgun leaning against the wall. He spent most of his days there, absorbed in reading by lantern light. The partition between the two rooms was just a single thickness of horizontal one-by-eight tongue-and-groove knotty pine boards supported by twenty-four studs. The many small knotholes in the pine boards provided ample opportunity for Tyree to peer through the wall. Under Grandmere Emily’s instruction, Tyree gently tapped out three large knots at shoulder level to give him the chance to shoot through the wall if need be. Each of these knots was replaced loosely and labeled with a piece of phosphorescent tape. These knot plugs could be easily popped out from behind the wall with just a forward thrust of the shotgun’s muzzle.

Whenever Tyree heard the bell at the store’s front door ring, he would spy through a knothole to observe the newcoming customer. By prearranged signal, if his mother rested her hands on the counter, that indicated all was well, and he could go back to his studies. But if she stood with arms akimbo or folded across her chest, then that meant that Tyree was to be vigilant and keep the shotgun in hand. And if Tyree ever heard his mother shout: “My husband is watching over me!” then that was the cue for Tyree to rack a shell into the chamber of the Remington. The first year that they were open for business, he had to do that only twice. Both times, that distinctive sound cleared everyone out of the store very rapidly.

Four months after they opened the store, Sheila bartered for two pieces of three-eighths-inch-thick plate steel. They both measured twenty-eight inches wide by four feet tall. To create some armored protection for Tyree, these two plates were stacked together and positioned below one of the pop-out knotholes. The heavy plates were held in place with two lengths of perforated plumber’s steel strapping tape nailed to the studs.

Most of Sheila Randall’s business was in bartering items of like value or for pre-1965 silver coins. She eagerly sought heirloom seeds for all vegetables. But when she traded her precious commercially packaged seeds for “saved” seed from family gardens, she did so at a one-to-five ratio, explaining, “I know my seeds are all fresh, and they are guaranteed to sprout, but I can’t say that about yours, so my trading ratio is firm and nonnegotiable.” She later resold the homegrown seeds at a substantial discount compared to what she charged for her commercially packed heirloom seeds. A large whiteboard on the wall behind the south display cases listed “Current Wants,” “Specials,” and “Freebies.” A corkboard was put up next to the whiteboard for customers to post their “For Sale” and “Wanted” items on three-by-five-inch cards.

It took hundreds of trades, but Sheila gradually built up a substantial inventory. Some overstock went in the back room. Eventually, a larger sign on a slab board above the front overhang dwarfed her original window signs. It read: “Bradfordsville General Store, S. Randall, Propr.” As her inventory grew, Sheila started trading for items of greater value.

One of her first major purchases was a .41 Colt Army double-action revolver. It was an ancient gun, with hardly any bluing left on it, and one of its grips was badly chipped at the bottom. But at least it was mechanically sound. It came with a holster and just thirty-four rounds of ammunition. The merchandise that she traded for it was worth the equivalent of three months’ wages for most folks.

Sheila had been warned that the revolver was chambered in an obsolete caliber, but it was the only handgun that she could afford. She carried the revolver on her hip every day, and oiled it frequently. The first year that she owned the gun, she fired just twelve cartridges practicing shooting it. By necessity, most of her practice with the gun was dry practice with the unloaded revolver in the upstairs apartment. She practiced drawing and dry firing the gun three nights a week. It was not until their second year in Bradfordsville that her frequent inquiries paid off, and she successfully bartered for two full boxes of .41 Long Colt ammunition. Those cost her $5.50 in silver coin each.

Two nights after the water cistern had been pierced by a bullet, the bandits tried to pack up their vehicles. Then the NAPI men started shooting. Lars coordinated their fire by GMRS radio. He had positioned himself with the team that had the best vantage point to observe the main road to the grain elevator. The first night they dropped four of the bandits. The next morning they shot out most of the tires on the bandits’ vehicles. In all, it took two days, but it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The final score was NAPI 9, Bandits 1. Lars was paid for his services in the form of a credit voucher for five hundred pounds of oats.

Other than the grain elevator episode, for many months Lars and Lisbeth led a quiet, mundane life. With the help of Kaylee and the Phelps boys, they raised chickens and took up large scale gardening, with mixed results. Some crops did well, while others failed completely. They were able to trade their excess produce, eggs, and pullets to fill in some of the shortfalls. Still, what they got from the poultry pen and the garden was not enough to feed the six of them. Thanks to the silver coins that Lars had inherited from his father, they ate fairly well. It was that silver that made up for the garden’s shortcomings.

Life in the Four Families compound continued in a fairly uniform routine. There were a couple of burglaries at some of the outlying houses in the neighborhood, but otherwise things were quiet. They could occasionally hear gunfire in downtown Prescott. This was later explained as having come from small roving gangs who crossed the line when they attempted armed robbery. Later they heard that the problem was disagreements on what to do with the cars, trucks, and guns that had belonged to the deceased robbers. Their corpses ended up in the potter’s field at Citizen’s Cemetery on East Sheldon Street, interspersed with the numbered graves of indigents and criminals dating back to the 1890s.