Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

30. The Samaritan’s Purse

It took four agonizing hours for Laine to crawl up the hill. His elbows and forearms were soon raw. Once he got near level ground, he realized that he still had several hundred yards to go. He doubted that his voice would carry through the dense jungle, so he didn’t bother to shout for help.

He remembered that he had been traveling due east when he was ambushed. And since he had headed south from the road, he needed to go back north to get back to it. The sun was heading toward the horizon. Andy found a loose branch and laid it down as a pointer, to indicate where he estimated that the sun would set. Now on level ground, he tried to stand again, but the pain was too much. He passed out.

Laine awoke sometime during the night to find mosquitos had been feasting on him. The pain in his leg had subsided slightly to an intense throbbing.

The buzzing of insects and the many strange noises of the jungle assaulted his ears. Gradually, he fell asleep.

He awoke to full daylight. His broken leg had started to swell. He spotted his sunset pointer stick and compared that to the current position of the sun, which filtered through the double canopy of the jungle. He adjusted his direction of travel accordingly and pressed on, crawling.

After an hour Laine could hear a truck pass by on the road. He shouted for help but realized that he was probably still too far away to be heard. But at least the sound of the truck confirmed that he was heading in the right direction. He picked out a distinctive-looking tree with a splayed top that was along his desired path and began crawling toward it. He had worked out the most comfortable crawling motion, so that he screamed in pain only occasionally.

As the day wore on, the sky clouded up, and Andrew was treated to an afternoon thunderstorm. The rain fell heavily for a few minutes. He reached up and dribbled water from the wet leaves into his mouth. He did this over and over throughout the rain shower until he estimated that he had drunk a liter. He thanked God and pressed on with his crawl over ground that was now muddy.

Late in the afternoon, he finally reached the road. He was sweaty and filthy. His upper leg had swollen to ten inches in diameter. He propped himself up with his back against a stump just ten feet from the road. He prayed that someone would pass by. Just before sunset, a Good Samaritan did.

Andy regained consciousness only briefly, as a doctor was setting his broken bone. But then he was unconscious for another three days. He awoke in a bed in Dangriga Hospital, bathed in sweat. An IV bag was hanging over his head.

The swelling of his leg had decreased noticeably, and it hurt only when he moved. After a few minutes a nurse came in. She was middle-aged and matronly.

“Ah, the sleeper awakens!” she said pleasantly.

“What day is it?”

“It’s Friday. You has been out for three days.”

Andy ask weakly, “Could I have some water, please?”

Two police officers from the “Dangriga Formation” arrived that afternoon. Laine described the ambush, robbery, and his crawl back to the road. He thought that it would be best if he didn’t mention his baggage at the cottages. The elder policeman described Belize as “overrun with Guatemalan refugees and robber gangs”-as well as some illegal border crossings from Mexico.

The words “I’m an American” and “They took my passport” were enough to assuage the police. They said that they’d have someone from the American consulate contact him. They didn’t seem too concerned with getting detailed descriptions of the bandits.

That afternoon, a young Belizean doctor gave Laine a morphine injection. He returned fifteen minutes later and set the broken bone. This was an odd experience for Andy. Because of the pain medication, he could observe the procedure with an almost detached clinical attitude. His main concern was that the bones were set correctly. Later, an older doctor with a Spanish surname but who spoke excellent British-accented English examined Laine. He declared, “Now that the swelling is down, we’ll need to double-check the position of the bone with an X-ray and then place a cast on your leg. We’ll then follow up with another X-ray, just to make sure we didn’t misalign the bones whilst casting.”

Andy slept very peacefully that night. As he was eating his breakfast, a hospital administrator came to visit. Andy mistakenly thought that he was a doctor at first but then realized that he was the hospital accountant. “There is one convalescent hospital nearby, but they are having trouble staying in operation with the recent currency fluctuations. I’ll see what can be done,” the administrator told him.

The next day he returned to Andy’s room and announced, “Your medical bill is being settled by the U.S. State Department under a reciprocal agreement. One of our vocational nurses just retired a few months ago. She and her husband have agreed to take you as a boarder, if you can either find a way to pay for that yourself or make some sort of additional payment arrangement through the American consulate.”

Andy improved rapidly and was released from the hospital after five days. He was taken by ambulance to the home of Darci Mora, a retired vocational nurse. Darci’s husband, Gabriel, was a semiretired logger and commercial hunter who had also worked as a hunting guide. Their flat-roofed cinder-block house was just outside Sarawiwa, six miles west of Dangriga. There, Andy occupied the second bedroom of the house. This bedroom had until recently been used by the Moras’ daughter, who had just married and moved to Nim Li Punit, a town in the southern end of Belize.

Darci was in her mid-fifties and overweight. Gabe was in his early sixties, and was lean and leathery, with a balding head. His skin was dark, but not just from his outdoor vocation. He had some Garifunan ancestry. The Moras were pleasant hosts. Darci was a great cook, and Gabe constantly cracked jokes and puns.

Andy missed his next Tuesday night ham radio contact night with Lars and Kaylee, but he had the strength for the next one. On that Tuesday afternoon, Gabe Mora helped Andy set up the radio. Following Andy’s directions, Gabe strung the antenna up to a tree outside the bedroom window. A cold-water pipe provided a good ground. The propagation was good, so Lars and Kaylee had no difficulty hearing Andy’s Morse tones. Lars, with a much more powerful transmitter, came in “Lima Charlie”-loud and clear. As Andy tapped out his messages, Gabe sat on the bedside chair wiping the sweat from his balding head with a handkerchief and sipping lime water. He was amazed that such a small radio could be used for two-way communication over such a long distance.

Andy was reassured to hear that Kaylee was safe and well, but he felt distressed, realizing that his broken leg would delay him by several months. He spent ten minutes summarizing what had happened since his last contact in stream-of-consciousness Morse code. Kaylee’s reply sounded as if she was overwhelmed. She keyed:

“BK RU AS SAD AS ME? WOE IS ME. WOE IS ME. I MISS YOU TONS ANDY. I WANT TO B THERE TO SIGN UR CAST. XOXOXOXOXOX. BT”

After three months of hobbling around on crutches, Andy finally had his cast cut off. He was horrified to see how the muscles in his right leg had wasted away. Clearly, it would take several more months to fully replenish the muscle mass of the atrophied leg.

He began walking more and more on the pair of crutches, then just one crutch, and eventually just a cane. He walked farther and farther each day, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion. His days started with dozens of sit-ups and push-ups. Eventually the length of the sets and the daily aggregate number of repetitions increased. He also started doing pull-ups, using the horizontal bar that held one end of the Moras’ clothesline in their side yard. Andy’s exercise time started to stretch into the evenings. Watching him do his pull-ups, Darci commented: “You’re a driven man, Andrew.”

As the first summer that Sheila ran the store began, there were increasing requests for soda pop, mainly from the men who manned the towns’ three roadblocks. Sheila began offering more and more in trade for the dwindling supply of bartered soda in cans and bottles, simply because the men were progressively willing to pay more-even as much as ten cents in silver per can of Coca-Cola or root beer.

As this strange price inflation developed, Grandmere Emily wisely began collecting used beer bottles. She also traded a considerable quantity of ammunition for a bottle-capping tool with a magnetic head and a ten-gross box of fresh bottle crown caps. These came from a maker of home-brewed beer who lived near Ellsburg. By June, she created her first batch of homemade root beer. She used spring water and locally grown birch bark, sarsaparilla root, ginger, burdock root, dandelion root, hops, wintergreen, and molasses, in her secret recipe.

Emily Voisin’s first batch of root beer was uncarbonated and attracted a good number of customers. But her second and subsequent batches were carbonated using a large cylinder of CO2 and a special seltzering apparatus. Hollan Combs had built this for Emily by scaling up the design from an old SodaStream machine and using some hardware from his moribund soil analysis laboratory. These later batches of root beer were a huge success-so much so that Emily eventually had to hire seasonal help to wash bottles and help her brew root beer in the erstwhile butcher room of the Superior Market building. “Grandma Emily’s Ol’ Timey Root Beer” attracted customers from as far away as Springfield and Munfordsville. She offered a discount to anyone who would return their bottles or sell her other brown glass bottles or who could provide fresh crown caps.

Sheila Randall could not believe the first descriptions of the Provisional Government when she heard them. At first she thought that they were wild exaggerations. Hollan Combs warned her: “Whenever you hear of a government agency that declares itself “Legitimate” in its own name, you gotta wonder about its legitimacy. Know what I mean? That gang of fools is about as legitimate as some Hollywood bimbo’s baby.”

More and more customers patronizing her store reported seeing and hearing the same things about the Fort Knox government. In April of the second year, the first of series of “peacekeeping” convoys passed through Bradfordsville. Most of these convoys stopped in town for less than a half hour. The soldiers were all Americans, as were their weapons and most of their vehicles. But something struck Sheila as odd when she overheard a radio conversation between the convoy’s commander and his battalion commander. The latter had a distinctly German accent. Later, there were reports of entire battalion-size foreign units deployed inside the ProvGov’s area of operations.

Other than their control of key industries, the Provisional Government’s authority seemed relatively benign in the first year. Then a new currency was issued. The small lime-green watermarked bills soon reached general circulation and by law had to be accepted for all transactions. But the full weight of the Provisional Government and the “guest” UN peacekeepers wasn’t felt until the third year after the crash, when firearms restrictions were enacted.

Sheila Randall’s first word of the new gun laws came when Brian Tompkins, an Armor Corps lieutenant, visited her store. One of the first things he said to her was “You gotta make that gun disappear or it’ll get confiscated as contraband.”

“Contraband?”

Tompkins answered, “Yeah, haven’t you heard? It sucks, but handguns have been banned for civilians, though you can still own some rifles and shotguns. It’ll all be explained in the poster that we’ll put up at your sheriff’s office and in some flyers the Civil Affairs guys will be handing out in town today.”

The next day Sheila saw two posters nailed up side by side on the wall in the main hall of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. A table beneath held a pile of flyers that duplicated the posters in a smaller format, printed on their front and back sides. As she stood reading the posters, Deputy Hodges walked up behind her and said softly, “Hi, Sheila.”

The poster on the left was a brief summary of the formation of the Provisional Government, a declaration of martial law, activation of the UN peacekeeping force, and nationalization of mass transportation and critical industries. The poster on the right read:

Sheila asked, “So what does that leave us?”

Deputy Hodges answered, “Not very much. I ’spose .22s, and antiques, and maybe thirty-thirty lever actions. But even those have gotta get registered. You know, that list won’t do diddly in stopping crime, since of course criminals never obey any laws. But it’s worded just right for squelching resistance. Notice how radio transmitters, military calibers, and night-vision scopes are banned? Maynard’s list would make Hitler or Stalin proud. This whole thing stinks.” Gesturing to the SIG 556 rifle on his shoulder, he pressed on, “Now, why is it legal for me to have this as a deputy but not you? That’s just plain unconstitutional. If and when they come into Marion County and try to enforce that load of hogwallop, they’d better be ready for one mighty big gunfight.”

That evening Sheila hid her revolver, ammo, and holster inside the bin of a hand-crank seed broadcaster. She hung it up on the wall near the ceiling, amidst the profusion of overstock items in the store’s back room. She explained to Tyree, “Sometimes its best to just hide things in plain sight. I want to be able to get to that in a hurry too.”