Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

8. Ankunft

Loosely translated: “We are drinking up our granny’s little house, Her little house, her little house. We are drinking up our granny’s little house, And the first and second mortgage!”

After what seemed like an eternity, Andy’s flight touched down at Rhein-Main air base. But the hurry-up-and-wait was far from over. He still had to travel to the Stryker Cavalry Regiment’s headquarters in Bavaria for his last few days of outprocessing.

He spent the next night holed up at an Air Force Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ), waiting for a flight to Ramstein Air Base-the base nearest to Vilseck with regularly scheduled flights.

The long-distance phone lines in the United States were “temporarily out of service,” so Andy was not able to call Kaylee. But he was able to e-mail her and get her e-mails in reply. They each sent dozens of notes during the two days and nights that Laine was stuck at Rhein-Main. For some reason the Skype voice and video service wasn’t working. He knew their headquarters were in Luxembourg, but he wondered where the Skype server was, and if that was causing the problem. He surmised that the server was probably in a fire-gutted building in some riot-ravaged city in the eastern United States.

It was while he was at Rhein-Main that the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) announced that all commercial flights to the United States had been suspended. Kaylee’s e-mails then took on a frantic tone. In one, she wrote:

Although he was just as concerned as Kaylee, Andy tried to make his replies as upbeat as possible. In one of his last e-mails before checking out of the BOQ, he wrote:

While waiting for his flight to Ramstein, Andy discovered that all of the ATMs on base were shut down. He also learned that the BX, commissary, and NAAFI store were all operating on a cash-only basis, with no checks, credit cards, EC Cards, or debit cards accepted. Only the Burger King was still taking credit cards, and because of this, it was deluged with customers.

The second evening that he was stranded, Andy stopped at the Burger King and ordered a Whopper Combo and a beer. The cashier said, “That will be ninety-six dollars, please.” Pulling out his VISA card, Laine muttered “That’s highway robbery.” A faceless voice behind him said, “Get used to it. It will be closer to two hundred bucks tomorrow.” He turned to see an Air Force major, dressed in an olive drab nomex flight suit, with his blue “p-cutter” cap tucked into one of his leg pockets. In a more distinct voice Laine replied, “Signs of the times, I suppose.”

Shadrach Phelps sat on his bunk in the Rio Arriba Youth Center dormitory, looking glum. He was seventeen, but the other two boys were both only sixteen, so that made him the leader. He summed up the situation to them succinctly, “Basically, we’re screwed.”

As the Crunch set in, the boys had been warned that their days at the center were numbered. The school was about to be shut down. The Rio Arriba Youth Center was originally established in the 1940s as The Phelps School for Orphan Boys. It was sixty miles north of Albuquerque, on the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, just north of the town of Gallina. Donations from churches had dwindled, so both the staff and the number of boys had been pared down substantially since their peaks in the early 1970s. When the Crunch started, there were just nineteen boys and three resident staff members remaining at the sprawling 160-acre center.

The orphans were given a sound education and taught the value of hard work-plenty of hard work. The center included eighty acres of irrigated hay fields, which provided some cash income for the school. It had two dormitories (one of them shuttered in the late 1980s), a classroom and multipurpose building, three staff residence buildings (one of which was unoccupied), a stable, and two large hay barns.

Shadrach Phelps was lanky, and dark-skinned-undoubtedly with at least half African-American blood-but his facial features showed some other, unidentified heritage. Like the other infants that had come to the orphanage without a name, he had been given the surname Phelps in honor of the school’s benefactor, a wealthy widow from Santa Fe. She had passed away in 1962. After her death, the school was supported by church donations from fifteen different churches in New Mexico and West Texas, and the annual sale of hay. The Rio Arriba County road department sporadically filled the school’s walk-in freezer with roadkill deer. All of the boys grew up accustomed to eating venison and learned how to field dress and butcher deer as taught by Diego Aguilar, who served as cook, wrangler, haying boss, and jack of all trades for the center.

Following the announcement of a school budget crisis and the planned closing of the school, fifteen of the nineteen boys had been claimed by family members. As they packed up and left, the remaining boys without any known relatives began to despair. The departures left just Aaron Phelps, who was the headmaster’s favorite student, and the trio of Shad, Reuben, and Matthew. The headmaster made it clear that he would be adopting Aaron, but his stony silence about the other boys was devastating. The evening after Aaron moved into the headmaster’s house, Shad, Reuben, and Matthew gathered to pray and talk.

“The way I see it, everyone’s going to be starving here, inside a few weeks. The deer hunting has gone straight to la mierda since the mountain lion population explosion. And even if they wanted to grow row crops here instead of hay, the irrigation water will go away if the power goes out. This country is going back to a big desert, especially in the lower elevations.”

Reuben chimed in, “Diego says the grid will probably collapse in a few weeks.”

A voice from the hallway startled the boys, “That’s right, it’s going be a cold and hungry winter.” It was Diego Aguilar. Diego walked into the room and sat down on a wooden chair that faced the bunk beds where the boys sat. He folded his hands across his potbelly.

“You Phelps boys are, as they say, ‘in an unenviable position.’ You’ve got no familia. You are maybe just old enough to do a man’s job, but there are no jobs anyhow. You can maybe go beg for a place to stay, maybe with one of the churches that still send the support money. Or maybe you could ask for a job and bed and board on one of the reservations-”

Matthew interrupted. “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got a real last name. But we’re Indians who don’t even know what tribe we belong to! I was a baby that got left in a fruit box on the doorstep of the Lutheran church in Rio Rancho. All that they knew was my first name. ‘Please take good care of Matthew.’ That was all that the note said. Not even signed.”

Aguilar eyed the boys. Reuben Phelps and Matthew were obviously both American Indians, with round, fairly indistinct facial features that did not give a hint of a tribal connection. Hopi? Navajo? Zia? Mescalero? Probably not Apache.

The old Mexican said, “I’m sorry, you’re right. Forget the reservations. They’re practically starving there already. They been taking government handouts for too long.”

After a pause, Aguilar went on, “I talked with the headmaster. He says you are each welcome to take two good saddle-broke horses. Two apiece. I’ll get you all tacked up-each with one vaquero saddle and one pack saddle. The sleeping bags we got here are all cheapies, so you’ll each get two of them. That way you can put one inside the other so you can sleep warm.”

The boys looked at each other nervously and then turned toward Aguilar.

“I’ve got to warn you boys: Don’t go anywhere near Albuquerque or Santa Fe. There’s nothing but trouble in the cities these days. That’s where they’ll be hunting each other to eat. I’m not kidding. And stay away from the border. Hombres malos, there. And since winter is coming, you gotta stay out of the high country.”

The boys nodded.

Shad asked, “So which way do we go?”

“My mama told me, in lean times you head toward the bean pot. I think you should go right on through the Jicarilla Apache Res, and go up toward the northwest corner of the state. That’s pretty good country, and there, many places they have gravity-fed water-you know, from an irrigation ditch. Not like our water here, where water has gotta be pumped. You could stop at churches along the way and ask about finding work.”

Reuben offered, “Maybe we could get jobs as cowboys.”

“You’ve never roped a cow in your life,” Shad chided.

“I could learn.”

Diego Aguilar added: “He’s right. You could learn. So I’ll also give you boys las reatas. I still have several good lassos that your classmates never managed to destroy.” He stroked his chin. “But don’t forget, your main value is that you got strong backs. I’ll send you each with a pair of flat-forged hay hooks and a pair of heavy gloves. I know for sure you can move hay bales. I seen you do it. You boys all know how to shoot, too, so you’ll each get one of the school’s old .22 target rifles. They are single-shots and their barrels are heavier than an anvil. But at least you’ll be able to shoot rabbits. And from a long distance, seeing them, nobody will know that they’re just .22s, so hopefully they will leave you alone.”

Diego stroked his chin, and went on, “My plan is to send you boys with as much good camping gear as your pack horses can carry. Anything extra you can trade for food. Same for the .22 shells that I’m giving you. I won’t tell the headmaster how many bricks of .22 ammo you have until after you are long gone.”

The three boys nodded, and Diego continued, “The way I see it, he is treating you mean and sending you packing, so I have to balance it out by sending you out heavy, to give you the best chance possible.”

“We should be fine,” Shad added hopefully.

“I hate to see the headmaster cut you boys loose like this. But at least you’ve got some practical skills, and you’re hard workers, and you’ll have good horses under you.”

“Don’t worry about us, Diego,” Matthew assured him.

Shadrach stood up to shake Aguilar’s hand. “Thank you, sir. I promise you that we’ll look after each other. So, yeah, don’t worry about us. We’re Phelpses, and that means even though we aren’t brothers by blood, we’re still brothers in Christ.”

They spent the rest of the evening with Aguilar, packing.