But no single story could encapsulate the whole of what transpired after the collapse of the technological society. No one tale could make sense of a world turned upside down. Every story, in every place, was wholly different—unique to the people living in it. Sometimes all we get are snippets, vignettes, minor episodes, rather than epic tales. One such vignette took place in the Sangre de Christo Mountains of New Mexico.
Phillip looked through the scope and watched as the three gunmen cleared the edge of the burned-out pickup truck and peered cautiously up the mountainside.
I could kill them now, Phillip thought,but I’d prefer they just go on home.
Even as a warrior, trained to fight and ready to kill, he still had the ready understanding that death was permanent, and should be avoided if possible. He didn’t like to kill, and he certainly didn’t want to.
The morning was cool and brisk, and a breeze knifed upwards from the distant valley and occasionally blew little fits of snow off the roof, which then swirled around and reflected the bright sunlight in shiny little bursts. Phillip was sure that no bluer sky had ever appeared before the eyes of men than this New Mexico sky offered on this day. Drips of pure water formed along the bottoms of the icicles that clung doggedly to the steel roofing of the lodge and glistened in their primitive beauty.
From here it was hard to tell that the world was burning.
He heard the man next to him shift his weight. “Six hundred and fifty yards to black hat.”
Phillip turned the knob on the scope two clicks to adjust for elevation. “Six-fifty to black hat, check.”
His spotter seemed concerned. “The wind is swirling here, man… I don’t know what to make of it down there.”
“I’ve got it.”
“What do you think, Phil?” the man said. The spotter’s British accent emphasized the word think.
“I don’t think they have any intention of trying again,” Phillip replied. “I bet they’ve had enough. They just don’t know what to do now.”
Please go on home, boys, Phillip thought.
The three gunmen continued to stare up the mountain, but made no attempt to move forward. They alternated between squinting up into the distance and glaring at one another. After a few minutes, they crept slowly back down the mountain and disappeared around the bend in the private drive.
“That’s what I thought,” Phillip said.
The Englishman lowered his spotting scope. “Good, I’m tired of mucking around with these wankers.”
“Give peace a chance,” Phillip said with a smile. It was a mantra the four friends had shared every single day since the collapse. It had originated when Goffrey Byrd, their host, had spit out the words as a challenge to what he saw as Phillip’s warmongering opinions. All four of the men had broken out into uncontrollable laughter, and the phrase had since become a rallying cry. It didn’t even really mean what it said anymore, at least not to the four friends who were defending their redoubt in the mountains. Now it meant “We’re all in this together, so people should just quit being jerks.” Or something like that.
“Give peace a chance,” Nigel repeated. “Just give it a chance, you wankers!” he shouted down the mountain.
The three remaining assailants, who’d just abandoned their evident intention to attack again, were members of an armed raiding group—a group which had once been quite a bit larger than it was now. Phillip’s team had successfully thinned the attacking herd, and the three survivors had—wisely—done a quick cost-benefit analysis and determined that the cache of guns and ammo they were trying to steal would be useless to them if they were dead.
Obviously the gang had heard somewhere that Goffrey Byrd kept guns—lots of guns—and ammo in his mountain lodge. Guns and ammo. The currency of the post-apocalypse. Most brigands were seeking arms and bullets, because with them you could get the other needed things.
In each of the three previous attacks by the gang, the four men defending Goffrey’s home had been able to repel the attack without taking any losses. Phillip was convinced the bandits wouldn’t try again, but you never know what men will do when they’re hungry, frantic, covetous, or just plain crazy.
* * *
Five weeks after the collapse, things were starting to settle in to a bit of a routine on Goffrey’s mountaintop, but there was always the threat of an assault—it could happen at any time. Phillip didn’t allow anyone to get complacent or lazy.
The four companions were in a good location to hold fast against attacks. Prior to the end of the world, Goffrey Byrd (he didn’t care how you pronounced it, but the “G” was supposed to be a hard one) was a successful artist selling his paintings and sculptures for exorbitant prices to flatland tourists in Taos and Santa Fe galleries. Things had been going so well for him, and for so long, that he’d been able to afford the most remote home and studio he could find. He was no longer a struggling artist. People came from all over to buy his work, and that had translated into some pretty substantial creature comforts.
A single road ran through the gap between Angel Fire and Taos, and access was difficult, even by vehicle, for much of the year. In the winter, all travel was sketchy at best. The Byrd Studio was a mile up a private road, set on a high ridge, and backed up to the edge of a sheer cliff—with a drop of over two hundred feet down to a rocky valley below. The buildings in the little homestead couldn’t be approached from rear or the side: the only way to get to the studio was from the front. This made the site eminently defendable, but—and this was the only problem—if anyone ever did succeed in reaching the place, there was nowhere to hide and no escape route. Thus far, however, the four men had managed a very successful defense, and there were a lot of bodies down at the bottom of that road to prove it.
Months ago, before this most recent spate of attacks, there’d been two unsuccessful attempts to rush the place using vehicles. Since then, all had been quiet—a peaceful lull during which Phillip took care not to allow his friends to descend into complacency—until just days ago, when this latest criminal gang had attempted their own vehicular assault. All of these attempts had been thwarted thanks to carefully placed directional claymores crafted from common chemicals found in the studio of any artist—especially one who worked in sculpture, as Goffrey did. Bomb efficiency and yield had been boosted with the addition of ample amounts of saltpeter that Phillip and his friends had made by distilling their own urine.
There was another important factor to their success that the attacking parties might have done well to know. Three of the four men were highly trained ex-military specialists. Phillip’s best friend and fellow Texan, Rob Fosse, had, like himself, received extensive Special Forces training early in his military career before moving into Army Intelligence. Nigel Kerr was an ex-SAS officer who’d fought alongside both Rob and Phillip in Afghanistan. All three had left the military after becoming disillusioned (for many of the same reasons) and they were all now happy to be civilians.
Ostensibly, the three friends had been “on vacation” in the mountains of New Mexico. To the outside world, it was a skiing holiday; but in reality, even though skiing was indeed on the agenda, Phillip and Rob were in New Mexico to recruit Nigel into the Central Texas Militia, a group of resistance fighters that Phillip had assembled to face the reality of what he’d known was coming—and what had since come to pass.
Goffrey Byrd was a different story altogether. Finding the artist and bunkering down in his mountaintop lodge had been the result of providence or fortune, not intent.
* * *
The three war buddies had met Goffrey at one of his studios in Taos as they were window-shopping in the “Old Town” area of the city not long before the collapse. Goffrey Byrd was one of those characters that was unique and opinionated and willing to talk at the drop of a hat. Unlike many modern Americans, though, his political and religious opinions were not all that he was, and he was capable of discussing those topics lightheartedly and with gusto, without forgetting that his debat
e opponents were also human beings and not automatically villainous just because they disagreed with him. Thus a sharp and humorous—but respectful—political disagreement between Goffrey, a self-avowed socialist and “free thinker,” and Phillip, who was fairly libertarian in his worldview, had led first to a cup of coffee at the World Cup coffee shop, and then to an invitation to travel up to Goffrey’s homestead and studio in the Carson National Forest just east of Taos.
On a whim, Phillip, Rob, and Nigel rented horses down in the valley for the trip up to Goffrey’s mountain hideout, and the leisurely, day-long ride up the mountainside on snow-covered roads was a nature-lover’s dream. By evening the four men were gathered comfortably in Goffrey’s cozy lodge, enjoying a few drinks, debating earnestly (especially Phillip and Goffrey, who seemed to be political opposites), and swapping stories of their lives and travels.
Both the drinks and the camaraderie flowed freely, and, somehow, four grown men soon found themselves engaged in a magnificent and glorious snowball fight. A snowball fight to end all snowball fights…
…And that’s what they were doing when it happened.
* * *
Everyone had known the world situation was tenuous, but no one expected the dominoes to fall so quickly. Things had been particularly bad for the last few weeks, but the world had gone through similar convulsions since at least as far back as the economic debacles of ’08, so—ever blinded by Pollyannish hopes—people just assumed the societal ship would right itself again after this latest series of rogue waves. Even a lifelong survival expert like Phillip was susceptible to the ceteris paribus fallacy, also known as normalcy bias. Normalcy bias is the condition where people come to believe that because things have continued in a certain way for a long time, they will necessarily revert back to that state after a shock or disaster. People assume that things will always “get back to normal,” but they do so without ever really defining what normal is. Perspective is a funny thing, and not merely because as humans we always have a limited perspective; it’s funny because even when we absolutely know something intellectually, until we experience it in a way that goes beyond the intellect, we still don’t know that thing aright.
What is “normal,” anyway?
In the weeks before the crash, all eyes had been on the situation in the northeast, especially after the hurricane and the subsequent nor’easter that ripped through that area. Then, after the election was postponed in the storm-stricken areas, riots began to break out in large cities all over America. Some were saying it was like ’65 or ’68 again, but unlike those riots—which had sparked brightly before fading away—these riots grew worse over time. And then, after the storms, and the election, and the riots, the stock markets went into freefall, and the world was busy speculating about just how bad things would get, even while assuming that things would soon return to normal.
And so there were four grown men throwing snowballs at one another on a mountaintop when the entire system flatlined.
Then came the phone call.
With everything going on in the world, service had been in and out, spotty, even in areas where there had usually been good service. That far up the mountain, Goffrey didn’t have great cell phone reception in the first place, but he could usually get by.
The Call (that’s what they’d come to call it), though full of static, informed the artist that something had indeed gone terribly wrong in the world. There weren’t many details yet, and for much of the world those details would never come. News organizations were scrambling for information, but at the end of the world one of the first casualties is instantaneous access to information. Answers often die first in a calamity. The gist of the story, as far as the friends could tell, was that all electronic communications for almost a third of the country had been severed.
Even though he’d been caught off guard, Phillip knew immediately what it was. In fact, he’d been quite expecting an attack to come at some point. He was a survivalist, so he liked to consider himself better informed than most people. Still, no amount of expectation can totally eliminate the shock when the long-awaited end finally does arrive.
* * *
After The Call, the four men decided to go visit one of Goffrey’s neighbors. Maybe someone else had more information? Neighbors weren’t exactly close or easy to get to up in those rugged mountains, but they did have televisions, most of them anyway, which Goffrey did not. As Goffrey drove them down the private road, and then a few miles back up the mountain to the home of Goffrey’s nearest neighbor, Phillip filled the other three men in on his suspicion: that there had been an EMP attack on the eastern seaboard.
For the next week at the neighbor’s house, at least one of them was watching the television at all times. The other three scouted, stood watch, and made preparations and plans for what they were now calling “the end of the world.” Of course, it wasn’t the end of the world, only the end of the world as they’d known it.
At the end of the week, they lost the television signal, the phone, all outside communications—and it never came back. That’s when they started to understand that what they’d once called “normal” was never coming back.
A day later, when the power went out for good, Leland Hamil, Goffrey’s middle-aged neighbor, their host, packed up his stuff and announced that he intended to hike out of the mountains and back into Taos.
“I’m not going to die out here in the wilderness like an animal!” Leland said.
They never saw Leland again. Perhaps he died in town like an animal. If they had to guess based on what they learned later, he probably did. It was hard to know.
* * *
With the power out for good, it was pure survival time. Back at Goffrey’s lodge they trained and worked, and worked and trained. Goffrey, like most rural folks in New Mexico, not only had plenty of guns and ammo, he had the right guns, too. He said jokingly that he’d been waiting to join the inevitable communist revolution in America, but by this time Phillip and his friends had come to believe that Goffrey wasn’t a communist at all. He just liked to be different, which was ironic, since he chose to live among and around the leftists in a hipster art community. Conformity abounds everywhere.
The more Phillip got to know Goffrey, the more he began to suspect that the artist had very few real philosophical dogmas at all. He was a “live and let live” kind of guy, who had just cultivated an outsider, radical image in order to fit in better with the pretentious art crowd that made him his living. Goffrey really just loved being around and talking to people, and he was intelligent and helpful. He was more of a conformist and a follower than he would ever have been willing to admit.
When it came down to it, Phillip thought,Goffrey was a good guy to have on your team. I mean, if the world came to an end or anything like that.
There were worse friends to have, even among his own peers in the ostensibly right-wing mercenary community. The end of the world, it seems, makes for strange bedfellows.
There’d been a few early moments of tension. When the crash first started, and Phillip informed the group that he believed that there’d been an EMP attack, perhaps by an old guard of hard-core communists in Russia, maybe with help from North Korea, all eyes had turned to Goffrey.
“Maybe this is the revolution you’ve been waiting for, Goffrey?” Phillip asked pointedly.
“What? No… No. Absolutely not,” Goffrey replied. “I do not support this one bit. This is an attack against my country!”
Rob glared at Goffrey. “I thought you were ‘waiting for the revolution’?”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting anything like this! I don’t believe in imposing any ideology on any people, and I’d absolutely never agree to anything like this.”
“How libertarian of you,” Nigel had said, his voice dripping with irony.
There had been an awkward moment of silence before Goffrey added, “You don’t think I’d possibly support an attack on innocent people… do you?”
“I d
on’t,” Phillip said with a smile. “But maybe they do,” he said, gesturing with his thumb toward the other two men.
The other men all laughed and set Goffrey at ease again. It turned out that Goffrey was only a theoretical communist, meaning that he wasn’t really one at all. Maybe he was a socialist, but Phillip wasn’t sure if he even believed that. Silently, and maybe cynically, he concluded that Goffrey was more of a salesman and an oddball than an ideologue.
Truth be told, most people would not be comfortable if they had to live permanently where their opinions and worldview naturally led.
* * *
Time and time again Phillip had planned to head out from Goffrey’s place and back to Texas to be with his men, but each time his plans had been thwarted by some necessity, some attack, or some other reality that conspired to keep him away from where he needed to be.
The day after the nuke went off in Albuquerque, however, he decided he was leaving no matter what. They’d watched the mushroom cloud climb into a previously blue and unmarked sky. That was when they knew for sure that their new reality was permanent.
On the morning after the bomb, Phillip woke to the sounds of Nigel making coffee. Rob was on scout duty and Goffrey was standing his post on the front deck with the sniper rifle. Phillip rolled out of his rack and saw that Nigel was just pouring the first cup of the morning. It was at that moment that Goffrey gave the signal that someone was approaching. The double-thump on the wall was followed by a long whistle that indicated the visitor was a friend and not a foe.
Twenty minutes later the men were all gathered on the front deck around Sam Gustavson, an artist friend of Goffrey’s who lived down in the valley. Rob manned the rifle and the watch, but he listened in as the men discussed the new reality in the world, and the latest news passing through the valley from Taos.
From the Indie Side Page 24