by Jeff Kirkham
Jason sighed. “I hope you’re right. Otherwise, we’ll go to prison for this little caper of yours.”
“Three capers,” Jeff corrected.
“I assume you’ll be going with them on the assaults?”
“Of course.” Jeff smiled.
This mission did nothing to assuage Jason’s concerns about Jeff. He could see the logic in preserving local assets but, again, Jeff was proposing unlawful seizure of private property, plain and simple.
“Can you do your best to be diplomatic when you approach the people at those targets?” Jason pleaded. “Can you be more Bill Clinton than Joseph Stalin, please?”
“I’ll be nothing but sugar,” Jeff told him, “but I don’t think you can expect me to be Bill Clinton.”
“Yeah, probably not.” Jason and Jeff stood up and shook hands. “Good luck. Please don’t get us arrested.”
• • •
Federal Heights
Salt Lake City, Utah
It had been five days since his family had been able to shop for food, and already things felt desperate. Jimmy swallowed his pride and went door to door asking his neighbors for handouts. Some of them didn’t answer the door, even though Jimmy knew they were home. Others answered but claimed to already have given their extra food away. Once again, Jimmy felt caught behind the curve—unwilling to take care of business until it was too late. He shuffled home with two cans of sauerkraut and half a box of children’s cereal.
The day before, he and his wife had laid all their food out on the counter. At first, it looked like a lot. After just a day, Jimmy was startled at how quickly they had burned through it. As things stood, they were down to a day and a half of food, and most of it was virtually inedible. They would end up with a bunch of hard red winter wheat, but no way to grind it or bake it.
That morning, Jimmy’s wife made an uncharacteristic suggestion. “It might be time for you to take that rifle of yours and shoot a deer.”
She had always turned up her nose at game meat. In fact, she had wanted nothing to do with hunting since it had become a sore subject in their marriage—with Jimmy disobeying her wishes every time he hunted with his brother.
“You could do something useful with all that hunting knowledge you’ve been learning all these years.” She couldn’t help but take the poke.
She must have imagined that hunting one weekend a year made Jimmy an outdoorsman. He had only killed two deer in the last ten years, both of them small bucks. He had never risen above greenhorn status. The guys who knew what they were doing hunted many times a year, both in Utah and out of state. By comparison to them, Jimmy barely considered himself a novice.
“Hunting season doesn’t open for another month,” Jimmy argued out of reflex. Even as he said it, he asked himself if he really wanted to get caught behind the curve once again.
“I think you should risk it,” she said, suggesting he break the law for the first time since he had known her.
Jimmy thought of his commercial real estate license. Hunting out of season was probably a felony, and he knew that a felony would disqualify him for a real estate license when renewals came up next year.
What if he just wandered the mountains a little with his rifle? He could make the decision to shoot or not if he actually saw a buck.
Jimmy kicked those questions aside for a moment. He went downstairs to his vault and pulled out his rifle and a half-dozen shells. He dug around in his hunting bin and found camo pants, shirt and his hunting boots.
A shock went down his spine as he considered hunting in broad daylight. What if his neighbors saw him hunting out of season, even without shooting anything? Jimmy lived at the foot of the mountain, and he had seen plenty of deer over the years, pawing around their neighborhood. The safest thing for him to do, considering the risk of a hunting violation, was to walk up the mountain and hopefully drag a deer straight home. Best-case scenario, the neighbors wouldn’t call the wildlife people to report him—the phones weren’t working, and the wildlife police probably weren’t working, either.
But committing a crime in full view of the ward froze Jimmy in his tracks. How could the bishop give him a calling of responsibility if he was a known poacher? Jimmy didn’t aspire to be bishop or anything high up, but he could imagine being relegated to minor callings for years, like membership clerk or elders’ quorum secretary, until the stink of his poaching wore off.
Jimmy stuffed his boots and cammies to the bottom of his pack and then added a water bottle and the rifle shells on top. He walked out the back door, looked around, then made his way around out to the street with the rifle tucked along his leg, hoping a casual observer wouldn’t notice.
He walked across the street and slipped between two neighbors’ homes up onto the steep mountainside. He pushed hard up the hill, gasping for air, imagining the eyes of the neighbors on his back. When he couldn’t stand any more exertion, he headed across the slope toward a small fold in the hill.
Jimmy plunked down on a rock, undressed and traded out his street clothes for his hunting clothes. The south-facing slopes of the Wasatch Range were almost completely devoid of plant life. Geologically, Jimmy knew this had been an ancient beach when Lake Bonneville filled the northern third of Utah. About fifteen thousand years ago, the huge lake busted through the Snake River Valley in Idaho and dumped all but a fraction of its water into the Pacific Ocean.
What had been left behind on the foothills of Salt Lake City looked like the bottom of a lake—stony and devoid of topsoil. Over fifteen thousand years, only the shady sections sprouted enough brush to cultivate topsoil. The south-facing sides burned to a crisp every July when the sun blazed, leaving them as fertile as Mars.
Jimmy’s hillside definitely had more in common with Mars than he would have liked. Where deer hid in this terrain was anyone’s guess. Now dressed to hunt, Jimmy marched upward again, hoping to get some elevation so he could look up-canyon for deer.
He reached a high outcropping overlooking the bottom section of Tellers Canyon. His breath caught in his throat. Every direction he looked, he saw other hunters. While his gut sank, he did his best to take it all in. Across the entire canyon, he guessed he could see more than three hundred hunters milling about, even though hunting season was almost a month away.
Mule deer, Jimmy remembered vaguely, required about one square mile per deer. So that meant he was looking at probably ten hunters per deer—assuming the deer hadn’t headed for higher elevation at the first sign of a hundred stumbling foragers.
Once again, he found himself behind the curve.
Desperate to bring something home, Jimmy scoured the land for anything edible. Rabbits. Squirrels. Turkeys. Though his rifle was wrong for hunting small game, he would be happy with anything. His desperate hunter’s vibe went out before him, like a dark wave of warning to animals. He didn’t see so much as an ant.
Jimmy had no clue what kinds of wild plants might be edible. He knew that stinging nettle and cattails were edible, and the early Mormon pioneers had survived winters by eating sego lily bulbs. But either the plants weren’t there in Tellers Canyon, or Jimmy didn’t recognize them. He walked for three hours and found nothing.
Jimmy always imagined he could provide for his family, if absolutely necessary, by heading into the hills. When he bought his rifle at the sporting goods store twenty years ago, that had been part of his economic justification: the rifle was the back-up plan in case “times got tough.”
Here he was, times were definitely tough, and there wasn’t a bit of the romantic, man-against-nature struggle he had dreamed of when he bought the rifle. Jimmy knew failure was all but inevitable, the deck supremely stacked against him. Not only was he failing to bring home meat, but he was failing to perform as a man and a father.
Contemplating his failure as he stumbled down the rocky hillside, Jimmy admitted that he had been lulled to sleep by fantasies: the fantasy that his successful career made him a man. The fantasy that giving in to his wife m
ade life easier. The fantasy that he could live in the starch-and-plastic world of civilization, touching the wilds every so often, and Mother Earth would welcome him in his hour of need.
His hopelessness splashed over onto his faith. Even with his failures to follow the old commandment of food storage, how could God allow his family to suffer, even risk starvation, given his lifelong faithfulness? Had he not done almost everything he was commanded to do? He had served an honorable mission. He had married in the temple. He had served faithfully in the ward and always paid his tithe. How could this be the outcome of his hard work?
Jimmy’s thoughts were wrapped about him so tightly that he didn’t worry about what his neighbors might see as he crossed the street, dejected and confused. Dusk had come while he had wrestled with his soul.
He caught the smallest motion out of the corner of his eye and turned. Lo and behold, there stood a mule deer doe, eating his neighbor’s boxwood hedge. All the day’s frustration and self-doubt drew down to this single moment in time.
Without thinking, Jimmy threw his rifle to his shoulder and fired. The unexpected recoil jerked the scope up and away from the animal and, when Jimmy returned to look at where the deer had stood, it was gone. The shot rang up and down the street. A couple at a time, the neighbors peeked out their doors, then stepped out onto their lawns.
Jimmy had no idea what to do, so he went with his first instinct; he checked his kill. Sure enough, the doe lay dead in Brother Thompson’s bushes, blood spattered on his air conditioning unit and onto the stucco siding of his house.
Jimmy grabbed the back legs of the doe and dragged her toward his garage, leaving an accusing red streak behind the carcass. The neighbors stood awestruck, as though he was a sideshow freak, or maybe a hero.
Half-a-dozen worries hit Jimmy all at once: had he checked his back-stop before firing? What would Brother Thompson say about Jimmy killing a deer in his yard? What would the neighbors say to the bishop about the poached deer?
But the worries came through muted, diminished as he looked down and smelled the coppery blood bubbling out of the doe’s mouth.
He had killed a deer and he would feed his family, at least tonight. What the neighbors thought and what his bishop might think? Those worries suddenly seemed less significant in the shadow of death and providence. As he pulled the doe across the street, Jimmy straightened his back and slowed his rush.
Like manna in the desert, God had provided.
• • •
Road 216
Outside Albin, Wyoming
According to Chad, he was badass at everything.
In less arrogant moments, he would admit that he almost washed out of the SEALs because he sucked at land navigation.
In the Teams, new SEALs are put through a map-and-compass challenge where they’re given twenty-five waypoints and challenged to cover twenty miles in two days in a single-man overland scramble.
There were two ways to do the challenge: using brains or using brawn. Guys with brains marked the waypoints on their map, read the terrain and plotted the easiest route. Guys with brawn plotted a direct path from one point to another, then bulldozed their way through whatever terrain stood in their way.
While Chad undoubtedly scored in the genius range on IQ tests, he had chosen the “bulldozer path” because he knew he would otherwise fail the land navigation. Badass or not, he had to admit he couldn’t find his butt with both hands when it came to land nav. He was the guy constantly getting lost. He was the kind of person who could live in the same place for a year and still take the long way home every time. A map and compass might as well have been a duck and blowtorch to him.
In the end, he’d made it through the SEAL navigation course with just twenty minutes to spare—out of forty-eight hours. He almost dropped from hypothermia in the process.
Chad sometimes wondered if God gave everyone talents from a fixed budget—everyone with the same amount of talent, just in a different distribution. Some guys raged on the guitar, but they couldn’t do a single pull-up. Other guys benched three hundred, but they had zero game with the ladies. A Navy SEAL like Chad was supposedly “badass at everything,” except he couldn’t navigate his way out of a paper bag. And he couldn’t win for losing when it came to women.
Chad previously believed a woman couldn’t stay angry for more than a couple of hours. He’d been with Audrey for two days, and she’d been furious for forty-eight hours straight—even sleeping furiously. Chad looked over at his ex in the passenger seat, eyes closed, her head against a pillow against the window, and her face still appeared pissed off.
Tonight would be their first night of traveling “blacked out.” Chad wasn’t looking forward to the migraine that would come from driving with his NVGs.
Everything needed several names and at least two acronyms in the military. Apparently, there were half-a-dozen officers working ’round the clock in the Office of Redundancy Office coming up with better, more technical names for everything. His NVGs, or NODs, were also known as PVS-7s. Three acronyms for the same damned piece of kit.
Chad eventually figured out that the high-tech acronyms were just there to fuck with people who weren’t in “The Mil.” On a philosophical level, he was cool with that.
Tonight, there had been good news and bad news when it came to crossing the North Platte River. The bad news was that he couldn’t find a way to cross that wasn’t also roadblocked or a likely ambush. He had checked more than a dozen possible crossings.
The good news was that he might not have to cross the river at all. The closer he got to Wyoming, the more the North Platte River veered north, taking him away from the I-80 Interstate. He had been trying to parallel the I-80, staying alongside it but coming no closer than ten miles. Big roads, he figured, violated his First Rule of Post-Apocalypse Travel: no interaction with human beings.
The other good news was that Nebraska and eastern Wyoming had more dirt roads than people. The endless flats were interrupted only by the countless dirt roads, which made it ideal for overland travel during Zombie times.
In the back of Chad’s mind, he worried that all those dirt roads would eventually funnel down to just a couple of roads as Wyoming became more mountainous and less agricultural. For now, he had dozens of east-west dirt roads to choose from, and no town could barricade more than a couple of them.
First on the agenda tonight would be gasoline. While he wasn’t out of fuel, he was the kind of guy who pulled over immediately when the “low gas” light came on. He didn’t like to run low on fuel. It was the single area in life where Chad was meticulous.
As he cruised steadily west, he reacquainted himself with his NVGs and picked up speed. At the same time, he searched for a farmhouse to rob.
Part of him hated it—that he would take something that wasn’t his. The other part of him relished the breakdown of the Rule of Law. When overseas on deployment, he had gotten hooked on living outside the law, like an addict to heroin. Once he saw behind the curtain and realized he could break with civilized norms at will, assuming he was sufficiently badass, it was hard to go back.
Taking gas from a farmer, though disturbing to Chad’s sense of honor, pumped him up. He had already decided that he would leave the farmer a couple of hundred bucks. That tipped the scales decidedly in favor of taking a walk on the wild side. Luckily, Audrey was asleep, or she’d definitely have an opinion about his plan. Not surprisingly, she had big opinions about Chad’s personal morality.
Chad quietly kitted up with his AR-15, plate carrier and ceramic plates—they had “disappeared” with him when he left the SEALs—a few mags, his Sig Sauer 9mm, two five-gallon gas cans and the GasTapper. He wore his NVGs on his bump helmet.
It was just after midnight.
Chad parked a quarter mile from a likely looking farmhouse and went in on foot. As he approached, moving behind one grain silo at a time, he closed on the house. Two late model trucks were parked in front, along with an old tractor.
&n
bsp; Chad wasn’t sure if the tractor ran on diesel or unleaded, so he worked his way toward the trucks. Between the grain silos and the trucks was a forty-yard gap of gravel and he covered it in a sprint.
A dog started barking. Chad power-slid behind the first truck, juggling options in his mind. Technically, he should disengage. On any other assault, the dog would probably be a deal killer. He’d lost surprise and he needed at least ten or fifteen minutes to siphon the tank. That felt like a lot of time with a dog barking its fool head off. Someone was bound to come investigate.
But who would come? There wasn’t another farmhouse for several miles, so he would be dealing with some old farmer and maybe his dog. Chad didn’t want to shoot the dog or anyone, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t come to that. He figured he could probably talk the farmer through the transaction and disengage if necessary.
On cue, the screen door creaked open. Chad didn’t like the sound of things because the farmer didn’t yell at the dog. That meant the farmer knew something was up—maybe the tone of the hound dog’s barking, which sounded a lot like a crow being beaten with a whiffle bat. Chad had to assume the farmer knew there was a real threat in his yard.
Oh, well, Chad thought, I suppose my ninja skills might be a little rusty.
“Hello,” Chad called out. The screen door creaked again, presumably the farmer ducking back inside behind cover.
“Who’s there?” the farmer bellowed.
Yep, Chad thought, old guy. “I’m just driving through and I’d like to buy some gas.”
“This look like a service station to you, son? Why don’t you head on down the road toward Albin? There’s a service station there. Opens in the mornin’.”
“They selling gas?” Chad asked, already knowing the answer, but hoping to talk the farmer into sharing some of his.
“Nope.”
“Then why would I go there?”
“Why would you come here?” the farmer countered.