When he returned home, he described the village to his wife, Rebecca, and they committed the issue to prayer. As Jewish believers in Jesus, they had an active prayer life and believed in heeding God’s guidance in how, when, and where they should live.
Shortly after first seeing Overton County, and after much prayer, Ben felt led to shift to a body of law that would enable him to work from home. He transitioned to wills, trusts, and estates law. A year later he was able to quit the firm and go into practice for himself, working from home. His law practice was ideal for this. His clientele grew by word of mouth, and eventually he had clients from all over the nation. Eight years before the Crunch, he bought a forty-acre farm near Muddy Pond and soon moved Rebecca and their five children there.
Muddy Pond was a ninety-mile drive east of Nashville and an eighty-mile drive west of Knoxville. The town, located on the Upper Cumberland Plateau, was several turns off of any major road, so only local traffic passed through. Aside from a few bed-and-breakfast yuppie tourists who sought out “plain people” quaintness, few Tennesseans had ever heard of Muddy Pond. The village had a general store and just one summer tourist attraction: a horse-powered sorghum press.
Without planning it or, as Ben said, “By Ha-shem’s providence,” the Fieldings were in the right place at the right time when the Crunch occurred. His 1960s Mennonite-built farmhouse had a good well that produced twenty-two gallons per minute. A water tower above it was kept filled by a very reliable Dempster windmill. The house lights were propane, and he heated the house with wood and coal. Their only modern conveniences, necessitated by Ben’s law practice, were two phone lines and a wind-powered alternative energy system, with a 2.4-kilowatt Skystream windmill and six Sharp Solar photovoltaic panels.
The Fielding family did most of their cooking with a propane range. There was also a propane engine backup generator for the battery bank, but they only rarely had to run it. Right after they’d purchased the farm, Ben was shocked with an estimate of $18,500 to have the Cookeville Electric Department extend the power lines to his farm. After doing some pricing, he concluded that it would be less expensive to simply make his own power. He hired Lightwave Solar Electric in Nashville to install the PV panels, and Ready Made Resources in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, to install the Skystream wind generator.
As the Crunch set in, Ben assessed his situation. He concluded that his family’s greatest need would be more propane storage, so he replaced their existing 250-gallon leased tank with an 1,800-gallon tank that he purchased. He also ordered an extra two tons of coal. This exceeded the capacity of their basement coal bin, so they stored the rest in the pallet boxes in the barn. There was still a bit of gasoline available (for $18.99 per gallon) but no cans for sale. Ben filled the tanks on all of his vehicles, including his ATV, and his four five-gallon gas cans, but that still left him feeling woefully short of gasoline for an extended emergency. By the time that Rebecca suggested filling some steel milk cans with gasoline, all of the gas stations had closed.
Ben did his best to stock up on ammunition for his rifle and pistol, but he found very little available. Altogether, he had less than seven hundred rounds. But by scouring the Internet, he did manage to find some exorbitantly priced spare magazines for his pistol, an HK USP Compact .45, and his rifle, a Galil ARM .308.
After hearing the news about the riots spreading all over America’s cities, Ben gathered his family for an evening of devotional study. His wife and children gathered on the two living room couches. That night he had selected Proverbs 1:24–33 for their reading. He thought it was particularly fitting, given the news headlines.
He read aloud, “Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me: For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the LORD: They would none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof. Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices. For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them. But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.”
28
Terminal Ballistics
“There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading, a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC)
South of Farmington, New Mexico
April, the Second Year
In the April of the year after the Crunch began, Lars was summoned to the NAPI headquarters, seven miles south of Farmington, for some consulting work.
He was told that an isolated NAPI grain elevator had been taken over by an armed gang. One of the employees had been shot during the takeover and had died a day later.
Lars drove to meet the NAPI president at the company headquarters. He was a Navajo in his sixties. With him in the conference room were nine younger men, all tribal members.
Lars queried, “How many men were there?”
One of the employees raised his hand. “Hey. There was a bunch, maybe ten of ’em. They’re Mexicans. The drove up in three pea cups and a minivan. There was just three of us there, and only two of us had guns. They shot Alvin first thing, so we ran. We had to carry Alvin part of the way to our pea cups.”
One of the men asked Laine anxiously, “So, what do we do? Are we going to rush them?”
Lars shook his head. “No, no, no. Why risk taking any more casualties? Tell me, is there any really pressing need for any of that grain in the next few weeks?”
The NAPI president answered, “No, not really. We also got a tribal storehouse in town. Its got enough, I s’pose, even for the rest of the winter.”
“So we wait them out and engage them on our own terms. What is the water situation at the elevator?”
“A cistern, above ground. I think it’s five hundred gallons. We have to haul in the water for that. There’s a flush toilet in the building that we don’t use much, ’cuz it wastes water. Instead, we use a drop toilet about seventy-five yards out back, behind some Gambel oaks. But we don’t dare tell the health department about it: no permit, and it sure don’t meet no code.”
“Is the cistern a metal tank or masonry brick?”
“Neither. It’s one of the new blue poly ones.”
“No other source of water there?”
“Nope. Not for miles.”
Laine laughed and asked, “Who here is a good shot with a deer rifle?” Several men raised their hands. Lars said, “I’ve got a silver dollar for whoever can punch a hole in the side of that tank within three inches of the bottom.”
The men laughed uproariously, realizing that they could simply force the bandits out by depriving them of water.
Lars laid out the plan: “We’ll set up two-man teams with scoped rifles in shallow foxhole positions, 350 yards out. We’ll use three teams, with full coverage of the elevator buildings. We’ll make sure that they each have night-vision scopes or monoculars.”
One of the men protested, “Three hundred and fifty yards? That’s an awful long way to shoot.”
Lars asked the entire assembled group, “Have any of you heard of Simo Häyhä?”
They gave him blank looks.
Laine continued, “He was a sniper from Finland in the
Second World War. He was the world’s most successful sniper. I read that he had more than five hundred confirmed kills. My dad said that Simo Häyhä was quoted as saying, ‘When you are shooting at wild game, never shoot from two hundred meters when you can shoot from twenty meters. But when you are in combat, never shoot from one hundred meters when you can shoot from three hundred meters. You’ll live longer.”
Bradfordsville, Kentucky
February, the Second Year
Each day that the Seed Lady store was open, Tyree stood guard in the back room with the shotgun leaning against the wall. He spent most of his days there, absorbed in reading by lantern light. The partition between the two rooms was just a single thickness of horizontal one-by-eight tongue-and-groove knotty pine boards supported by twenty-four studs. The many small knotholes in the pine boards provided ample opportunity for Tyree to peer through the wall. Under Grandmère Emily’s instruction, Tyree gently tapped out three large knots at shoulder level to give him the chance to shoot through the wall if need be. Each of these knots was replaced loosely and labeled with a piece of phosphorescent tape. These knot plugs could be easily popped out from behind the wall with just a forward thrust of the shotgun’s muzzle.
Whenever Tyree heard the bell at the store’s front door ring, he would spy through a knothole to observe the newcoming customer. By prearranged signal, if his mother rested her hands on the counter, that indicated all was well, and he could go back to his studies. But if she stood with arms akimbo or folded across her chest, then that meant that Tyree was to be vigilant and keep the shotgun in hand. And if Tyree ever heard his mother shout: “My husband is watching over me!” then that was the cue for Tyree to rack a shell into the chamber of the Remington. The first year that they were open for business, he had to do that only twice. Both times, that distinctive sound cleared everyone out of the store very rapidly.
Four months after they opened the store, Sheila bartered for two pieces of three-eighths-inch-thick plate steel. They both measured twenty-eight inches wide by four feet tall. To create some armored protection for Tyree, these two plates were stacked together and positioned below one of the pop-out knotholes. The heavy plates were held in place with two lengths of perforated plumber’s steel strapping tape nailed to the studs.
Most of Sheila Randall’s business was in bartering items of like value or for pre-1965 silver coins. She eagerly sought heirloom seeds for all vegetables. But when she traded her precious commercially packaged seeds for “saved” seed from family gardens, she did so at a one-to-five ratio, explaining, “I know my seeds are all fresh, and they are guaranteed to sprout, but I can’t say that about yours, so my trading ratio is firm and nonnegotiable.” She later resold the homegrown seeds at a substantial discount compared to what she charged for her commercially packed heirloom seeds. A large whiteboard on the wall behind the south display cases listed “Current Wants,” “Specials,” and “Freebies.” A corkboard was put up next to the whiteboard for customers to post their “For Sale” and “Wanted” items on three-by-five-inch cards.
It took hundreds of trades, but Sheila gradually built up a substantial inventory. Some overstock went in the back room. Eventually, a larger sign on a slab board above the front overhang dwarfed her original window signs. It read: “Bradfordsville General Store, S. Randall, Propr.” As her inventory grew, Sheila started trading for items of greater value.
One of her first major purchases was a .41 Colt Army double-action revolver. It was an ancient gun, with hardly any bluing left on it, and one of its grips was badly chipped at the bottom. But at least it was mechanically sound. It came with a holster and just thirty-four rounds of ammunition. The merchandise that she traded for it was worth the equivalent of three months’ wages for most folks.
Sheila had been warned that the revolver was chambered in an obsolete caliber, but it was the only handgun that she could afford. She carried the revolver on her hip every day, and oiled it frequently. The first year that she owned the gun, she fired just twelve cartridges practicing shooting it. By necessity, most of her practice with the gun was dry practice with the unloaded revolver in the upstairs apartment. She practiced drawing and dry firing the gun three nights a week. It was not until their second year in Bradfordsville that her frequent inquiries paid off, and she successfully bartered for two full boxes of .41 Long Colt ammunition. Those cost her $5.50 in silver coin each.
South of Farmington, New Mexico
April, the Second Year
Two nights after the water cistern had been pierced by a bullet, the bandits tried to pack up their vehicles. Then the NAPI men started shooting. Lars coordinated their fire by GMRS radio. He had positioned himself with the team that had the best vantage point to observe the main road to the grain elevator. The first night they dropped four of the bandits. The next morning they shot out most of the tires on the bandits’ vehicles. In all, it took two days, but it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The final score was NAPI 9, Bandits 1. Lars was paid for his services in the form of a credit voucher for five hundred pounds of oats.
Other than the grain elevator episode, for many months Lars and Lisbeth led a quiet, mundane life. With the help of Kaylee and the Phelps boys, they raised chickens and took up large scale gardening, with mixed results. Some crops did well, while others failed completely. They were able to trade their excess produce, eggs, and pullets to fill in some of the shortfalls. Still, what they got from the poultry pen and the garden was not enough to feed the six of them. Thanks to the silver coins that Lars had inherited from his father, they ate fairly well. It was that silver that made up for the garden’s shortcomings.
Prescott, Arizona
February, the Second Year
Life in the Four Families compound continued in a fairly uniform routine. There were a couple of burglaries at some of the outlying houses in the neighborhood, but otherwise things were quiet. They could occasionally hear gunfire in downtown Prescott. This was later explained as having come from small roving gangs who crossed the line when they attempted armed robbery. Later they heard that the problem was disagreements on what to do with the cars, trucks, and guns that had belonged to the deceased robbers. Their corpses ended up in the potter’s field at Citizen’s Cemetery on East Sheldon Street, interspersed with the numbered graves of indigents and criminals dating back to the 1890s.
29
La Casa de la Mañana Grande
“Belize was founded by British pirates . . . Legend relates that the city was built in a swamp on a foundation of gin pots and mahogany chips. If this is so, it would have been better if the city’s fathers had thrown in a few more pots and chips, for Belize is only a few inches above sea level.”
—Time magazine, September 21, 1931
The GPS receiver showed the Durobrabis was forty miles east of the Belize Cays chain just before sunset on March 26. Four months after first setting sail, they were anxious to come ashore. The depth finder showed they were in three hundred feet of water, but fearing that they would approach reefs and shallows, Carston dropped all the canvas and set both sea anchors in order to wait overnight. He had nautical charts for Belize, but they were several years old. Knowing that profiles of sandbars could change in just one year, Simms decided to proceed with great caution. He said wisely, “I wouldn’t want to make it this far only to end up aground on some sandbar.”
They spent the evening excitedly listing to Wamalali Radio, an AM station in Punta Gorda. The city was most often mentioned by its nickname “PG.” There were also a number of FM stations broadcasting, but they were mostly playing music.
Proceeding cautiously, Simms piloted his boat though the Cays late the next afternoon. Not knowing what sort of passport controls might have been enacted under the current state of emergency, they thought it best to wait at anchor on the far side of Lark Cay until after dark. They could see lights dotted up and down the coastline. Then, as the next high
tide approached, they motored quietly to the nearby point, past the Creole fishing towns of Placentia on the point and Big Creek opposite, on the mainland side. As they entered the twelve-mile-long Placentia lagoon, Simms was pleased to note that the local electricity was still on. “A good sign, that,” he told Angie.
The skipper ran the diesel engine at low revolutions for a quiet three knots as they progressed up the lagoon. Carston kept Angie constantly watching the depth finder. They passed by an odd mix of well-lit luxury homes—mostly at Seine Bight—and completely dark tin-roofed Creole and Garifuna shanties. They set anchor again just before dawn at the north end of the lagoon, near the village of Blair Atholl.
This end of the lagoon was very quiet. Just two other yachts were anchored nearby, with their sails covered and bright blue canvases snugged down over their stern piloting areas. From their stern markings, they could see that one was from Dunedin, Florida, and the other from Freeport, Texas. They soon learned that both of these yachts were under the protection of a paid “watchie man” from Blair Atholl. The black man, armed with a single-barrel shotgun, motored up in an ancient skiff with a round-topped outboard engine that looked like something from the 1950s. It used a hand-wound spin starting rope rather than a recoil starter. The man’s shotgun had a well-worn stock and had all of its metal parts covered with thick white grease that looked almost like wax. Andy surmised that it was for protection from salt water.
The watchie man, who spoke in a curious Belizean singsong voice, told them that the recently arrived owners of the boats had moved into houses nearby, one on South Stann Creek and one in the village of Georgetown. Neither of the owners, he said, had any plans to sail back to the United States. He also had been told to relay that neither boat was available for sale or rent.
Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse Page 24