Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  “I’d rather train neighborhood men, and maybe give bread to the folks in the neighborhood who have no food storage,” Jason said. “That is, I’d rather do it if you’re comfortable with our veterans controlling all defensive efforts.”

  Masterson interrupted, eager to play his final chip in the big game. “Before we talk about ward members fighting for your army, we’re very concerned about reports that your men shot and killed someone yesterday.”

  “Yes,” Bishop Decker snapped back to life. “Did we hear that correctly?”

  There’s Masterson’s counterattack, Jason thought. To be expected.

  “Sadly, we were forced to shoot a man on the east boundary. He crossed our fence, ignored a warning shot, and then pointed his rifle at one of our men. The man who shot him is a professional soldier. I’m certain he had just cause.”

  The bishopric men looked uncomfortable.

  “How do we know it was justified? That seems very extreme,” Brother Ingram spoke for the first time.

  “I know what you mean. These are tough times. A shooting was inevitable. People attempt to trespass on our land many times a day. Almost everyone turns around after a warning shot. This man didn’t. And he aimed at our men with a long rifle.” Jason did his best to explain, but it wasn’t helping.

  “One question,” Bishop Decker held up his hand. “Was the man you shot a member?”

  In thinking through this meeting beforehand, Jason would have preferred to avoid this question above all others.

  “How would we know?” Jeff asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Was he wearing garments?” Masterson asked. Faithful Mormons almost always wore sacred undergarments, morning, noon and night. If the man wore garments, it would be proof-positive that he was an temple-attending member of the Church.

  Jason couldn’t do anything but forge ahead. “Yes, I believe he was wearing garments.”

  Masterson stood up abruptly and the bishopric followed suit.

  “Gentlemen, this is a problem,” Masterson gloated. “We may need some time to pray about this and talk more with the stake president. Maybe we should call Church headquarters.”

  As the men filed out, Masterson made sure he was last out the door. He turned back and quietly took at parting shot at Jason and Jeff.

  “You aren’t the only ones around here with guns, you know.”

  • • •

  “That man is a threat to everyone,” Jeff fumed, pointing a thick finger at the door.

  “This is my ‘ten acres.’ Let me handle it,” Jason argued.

  Jeff held up his hands, “So we’re not counting on the ward for anything, right? No men from them. Right?”

  “I think all we can expect for now is more hand-wringing,” Jason agreed. “Those guys are going to delay until it’s too late. Move the barricades down the hill and keep recruiting from outsiders.”

  “Started yesterday.” Jeff wasn’t a man to wait for anyone’s say-so.

  • • •

  Jeff stood on a bluff overlooking the main road, Vista View Boulevard, from the backyard of one of the McMansions. The owners had disappeared, probably staying with family or “bugging out” somewhere. He saw that more and more these days.

  Jeff considered this road the greatest likelihood of attack. It was one of three major roads climbing to the neighborhood around the Homestead. If you drew a line from the population centers of Salt Lake City directly to the Homestead, this road fell exactly on that line.

  There were six other streets that reached up to the Homestead, but those streets would force an attacker to fight through a mile or more of neighborhood—burning time and ammunition. Jeff ordered his men to set up permanent barricades on all six connecting streets, and he had three QRFs ready to pounce if anyone tried to advance up those residential streets. He could focus his main effort on Vista View Boulevard.

  Nine times out of ten, a soldier could count on people traveling established paths. Men felt somehow safer, more in control, when using the clearest and easiest route. Human psychology betrayed a man in numerous ways. The United States trained Jeff, over decades, to exploit them all.

  Capitalizing on lines of natural drift was Ambush 101, in the Encyclopedia of American Ass Kicking. From the bluff where he stood, Jeff could rake an attacking force with fire. He would have to design blocking positions and counter-flanking positions on the road itself. The more he looked at it, the happier he felt. This road served up strong advantages. He would have to sucker an attacking force into committing itself here if at all possible. Even then, no experienced military commander would fall for it.

  Jeff knew to prepare for the most obvious attack first. Later today, he would figure out how he would assault this area if he were the enemy, and then he would concoct defensive plans against those assaults as well.

  Jeff climbed back aboard his OHV and drove down to the lower barricade at the bottom of the hill. He had ordered a tent erected and a dry erase board set up.

  “Will Trade Bread for Work as Security Guard.”

  “Looking for: former military, trained in firearms, tradesmen (wood, metal work, mechanical).”

  One of his men, an old Marine named Carl, interviewed potential soldiers from the tent city that had sprung up below the barricade. A line of men stretched over a hundred yards, waiting to be interviewed.

  Jeff popped into the back of the tent. Carl was in the middle of an interview. The old Marine sat facing a moderately fat man, balding, wearing dirty khaki pants and a filthy polo shirt.

  “Where did you receive your firearms training?” Carl sighed, apparently having the same conversation for the umpteenth time that day.

  The man pulled at his collar. “I’ve been a lifelong hunter and my brother-in-law is a highway patrolman. He took me out shooting many times.”

  “Okay,” Carl said. “Please clear and safe this.” He handed the man a beat-up Glock handgun.

  Sweat sprung from the man’s brow. He took the Glock from Carl, looked at it from a variety of angles, sweeping himself, Carl and Jeff with the barrel. He pressed the magazine release and dropped the mag into his lap. With his free hand, he picked up the mag.

  “It’s empty and safe.” The man looked at Carl and Jeff with obvious hope.

  “Thank you for waiting in line. I’m sorry. You’re not what we’re looking for.” Carl looked down at the clipboard in front of him, abandoning the man’s eyes.

  “I can learn. I can learn anything real fast. I managed people at the largest call center in the state. I was a senior director. Give me a chance,” he pleaded.

  “I’m sorry. Please respect my decision.” Carl looked up and shouted, “Next man, please.”

  Another man, younger than the first, but equally as unlikely, stepped into the tent.

  “Hold up,” Jeff interrupted. “Can you give us a minute?”

  The next interviewee stepped back outside and the bald man stood up, defeated. He handed Carl the empty Glock.

  “My family has nothing to eat. You’ve got to give me a chance. My kids are hungry.” The man switched from begging to anger in a split second. “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Give me some bread for my family.”

  Jeff and Carl looked at the man, and then at each other. Unless the man had a bomb under his polo shirt, he wasn’t a physical threat to either of them.

  “Stop,” Jeff warned. “Just leave before you earn yourself a broken arm.”

  The man’s shoulders slumped. He turned and walked out of the tent.

  “Jesus,” Jeff swore, turning back to Carl.

  “It’s been like that all day.” Carl looked down at his clipboard. “I’ve only found six guys out of maybe two hundred who could fight their way out of a Ziploc bag.”

  “Why are you asking for woodworkers, metal workers and mechanics?” Jeff pointed at the dry erase board outside.

  “I added that because I’ve talked to guys all morning and only found one guy who could clear and safe that gun
without looking like a goddamned Girl Scout. Hell, at this point, I’d take a Girl Scout. I added the wood and metalwork thing because I figured I could at least train someone who worked with their hands. All I’ve been getting are cubicle monkeys and human resource managers with expertise in the Equal Opportunity Employment Act.” Carl had to look down at his clipboard for that one. “So far, most of the guys I’ve had in here who are worth a damn don’t speak English.”

  Jeff thought about that for a second. “Most of the guys I’ve trained over my career didn’t speak English. I suppose I would need to speak Spanish, right?”

  “Si, Boss.”

  “No hablo Español,” Jeff said, still thinking. “Okay, let’s change your board. Get rid of ‘trained in firearms’ and add ‘farm work, welder, auto body, and mechanical maintenance.’ Getting rid of the firearms thing should cut down on creampuffs who think they’re outdoorsmen. Maybe add ‘law enforcement,’ too. I’ll send someone else down so two of you can interview at the same time.”

  Jeff’s radio crackled. “Crandall to Jeff, over.”

  Jeff had his own assigned frequency. The hand-held radios pinged off the repeater at the Homestead so he could talk to his crew anywhere on the hill with perfect fidelity.

  “Jeff, over.”

  “Something odd’s going on here on the ridge. It looks like a deliberate push. Six to twelve men, and they’re ignoring our warning shots. Over.”

  “On my way. Follow the ROEs. Shoot them if they go over the line. Jeff out.”

  Jeff trotted to his OHV and raced up the hill.

  • • •

  “See how they’re taking cover. They keep moving, even though we’ve shot at them eight or ten times. I think we’ve hit two of them. Still, they keep coming.” Crandall pointed toward a clump of cover underneath the canopy of maples.

  Jeff kept the binoculars glued to a spot where he had seen two men drop down behind a log and some bushes.

  “Give me all their locations,” Jeff ordered.

  “I think there are three where you’re looking behind that log. Two more are up that same canyon just a bit. One guy is in the bottom of that canyon behind a rock, and three or four more are on the side of the canyon we can’t see from here.”

  “Okay,” Jeff said. “And where are your men?”

  Crandall thought about that for a second. “Several of them have fired and moved, so I don’t know their exact locations. I have two in a hide above us on the ridge, and two more displaced down canyon to get a better shot at the guys we’re looking at right now. They should be popping over that ridge soon.”

  Jeff ducked down into the sniper hide and keyed his radio. “Homestead. Send QRF One to Ridgeline Tango. We’re under attack. Please confirm.”

  The radio came to life. “Homestead, confirming. Send QRF One to Ridgeline Tango. Position is active. Over.”

  “Roger. Jeff out.” Jeff turned back to Crandall. “Crandall, call the team moving to the flank. I’m going to maneuver opposite their sector of fire down that other canyon and I don’t want them to shoot me. Okay? Can you make sure of that? It looks like none of the bad guys are wearing camo. It shouldn’t be hard to tell us apart.”

  Everyone on duty for the Homestead wore multi-cam camouflage. Wearing a uniform, Jeff figured, would make folks fear them more and screw with them less. For whatever reason, Jason Ross had stocked up on old, used multi-cam before the stock market crash.

  “Right. The trespassers are all wearing street clothes. They look like street thugs to me,” Crandall said. “What’re you going to do?”

  Jeff grabbed his rifle, a Robinson Arms XCR-M .308 with a Trijicon ACOG scope. If he had to pick any rifle for this particular shoot-em-up, he would take this exact one. The big .308 bullet pulverized virtually anything other than vehicular armor, far superior in performance to the pencil-thin .223 bullet most guys used. While fighting overseas with the military issue M4 rifle, Jeff lost respect for the diminutive .223. Far too often, a branch would tap the bullet off its path and, even with a solid hit, targets often failed to realize they had been shot. With the burly .308 rifle round, targets not only knew they had been hit, but they knew better than to stand up again. More importantly, Jeff could pierce wood, trees, rock and even some concrete. For post-Apocalypse survival work, Jeff had no idea why so many guys choose the AR-15 rifle and its .223 round.

  “I’m going to slide around the ridge and get a flank on these guys. Are you positive they’re all in this canyon?” Jeff asked.

  “Sure as can be… But I can’t see into the next canyon.”

  “Okay. Make sure our boys don’t shoot me.”

  Crandall made the call and confirmed that Jeff would be on a ridge opposite his teams and to double-check their targets.

  “Take it easy. And if it’s easy, take it twice.” Jeff waved and slid out of the sniper hide, double-timing it behind the ridge, making ground in leaps and bounds between clumps of maple trees. As soon as he was about half a mile from the hide, he slowed down. While everyone thought the entire opposing force was contained in the canyon, nobody could see down into the next canyon. Jeff would have to clear that one himself.

  Jeff pulled his binos out of his chest rig and visually picked apart the mountainside for his next leapfrog. Since it faced the summer sun, most of the foliage was stumpy and thin, so Jeff would probably see someone hiding on the slope. It was possible someone might be hiding in the canopy in the bottom of the canyon.

  Unlikely, he thought, but not impossible.

  Even though he was pushing fifty, Jeff hadn’t let his cardio go downhill. Sure, he packed a bit of a beer belly, but he got away with it in a t-shirt because of his ape-sized upper body. Jeff ran the occasional endurance race along the Wasatch Front and he always did pretty well. If he paced himself, he could run all over this mountain. Very few men could do the same at any age.

  Cashing in on his cardio, Jeff took the long route. He dropped down into the canyon bottom one over from the intruders and trotted along, rifle at the high-ready. If someone was waiting for him down in this dark mess, he would be running into an ambush. Still, when you flanked, you rolled the dice. You couldn’t flank all the way to the moon and back. You had to take your chances at some point.

  As he guessed, nobody lay in ambush in this canyon. Setting a counter-flank so far from the enemy force would have required near-professional levels of military discipline, and there wasn’t anything about these guys that implied military discipline. Jeff worked his way half a mile down the canyon without a snag.

  He stopped to catch his breath. He figured he was parallel to the bad guys. Ideally, he could scale this hillside and be above them, their flank exposed to his Robinson .308. The other team of snipers should be on the ridge directly across from him. Crandall and the third team would serve as a blocking force. If everything worked as planned, they would have the dirtbags in a pocket, surrounded, with all the high ground owned by Jeff’s men.

  Jeff tried to remember, had anything like this ever gone exactly as planned? He could remember a few times… a few times out of a couple of hundred. He took a last drag from his camelback and sprinted up the sunward slope, knowing he had jack-shit for cover until he reached the top. Everything was going great until about three-quarters of the way up the slope.

  “Thwack!” Something slapped the ground twenty feet to his right. “Bam, bam, bam, bam.” Somebody was shooting, dumping a mag on him.

  Jeff’s legs pumped like a motorcycle engine, pounding up the hillside. He closed on the trees on the ridge, taking what seemed like an eternity to get there. Along the way, his adrenaline-drenched brain went into tactical mode. It wouldn’t make any sense to stop and return fire, especially since Jeff would have to find the shooter first and since the shooter, apparently, knew exactly where to find him. The shooting wasn’t coming from a rifle, thank God. The numb-nut shooter was trying to hit Jeff with a handgun from a long ways away. Still, Jeff didn’t want to get shot, even with a handgun.
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  Finally, Jeff made it to the ridge and dove into a thicket of oak brush. The guy must have changed mags because he started shooting again. None of the fire seemed effective; Jeff couldn’t even tell for sure what the guy was trying to hit.

  “Booooom.” A single rifle shot rang out, but it came from the next canyon, probably his own team. The handgun fire ceased.

  Jeff keyed his mic. “Report.”

  “Crandall here. Our team on the far ridge thinks they downed the guy shooting at you.”

  “Copy. Jeff out.”

  Low-crawling through the oak brush, Jeff popped up with a hundred new scratches and a brand-new position. He scanned all possible shooting lanes and saw nothing.

  Finally, after searching for a full minute, he spied a leg sticking straight up in the air, snagged on an oak limb. The enemy shooter must have been on the same ridge as Jeff. More likely than not, the dude had been dragging ass, unable to keep up with his buddies.

  With his binos, Jeff checked to make sure the guy was truly out of the fight. All he could see was a blunt-nosed Nike shoe and black socks. The pants leg had slipped down, almost out of sight in the brush. Definitely not a hunter. More likely a gangbanger.

  “This is Jeff. Report in, all teams.”

  “This is Crandall. All enemy in approximately the same positions as before.”

  “This is Wali. I’m on the ridge across from Jeff. Just killed that gangster with the pistol. I’ve got four guys in the bottom and one on the north-facing slope. Maybe two. All tangos are within our boundary now.”

  “This is Ron. I’m not seeing anything else.”

  “Jeff. Copy. All teams: begin firing on all targets of opportunity. Unless they fly a white flag or run outside the boundary, keep up fire.”

  Almost immediately, the big rifle across from him boomed and the team reported another hit.