Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse

by Rawles James Wesley

  Still saddle sore, he rode only another ten miles before leaving the road to make camp northwest of San Fernando. He had to camp farther off the road than before to be out of sight, because the clumps of trees were becoming thinner and more infrequent.

  Andy spent considerable time cleaning the bore and chamber of the AK. He wasn’t sure if the ammo he’d taken from the dead bandits—all with Cyrillic markings—was corrosively or noncorrosively primed, so he wasn’t taking any chances.

  In his Ordnance Corps officer basic course at Fort Lee, Virginia, Laine had been taught that the rule was to clean a gun’s bore, chamber, and bolt face for three successive days after shooting any suspected corrosive ammo. This was the only way to be sure that the corrosive priming salts were completely removed. Laine also took the time to unload all of the magazines and inspect each of them and every cartridge. He sorted the cartridges on his spread-out raincoat. Any cartridges that were dented or had loose bullets or corrosion were segregated and loaded into the “target and hunting only” magazine.

  The grazing was becoming sparse, so Andy hobbled Prieto more loosely. But the next morning he found the horse standing just fifteen feet away.

  Andy’s breakfast was dried fish and two oranges. Prieto ate the orange peels. Just an hour later Andy reached a long-awaited goal: the fork in the road near the tiny town of Ampi La Loma. If he continued ahead to the northeast, Highway 101 would take him to Brownsville, Texas. But if he turned northwest, Highway 97 would take him to Reynosa, which was less populous. He veered his horse to the left at the fork (skipping the paved cloverleaf loop) and let out a whoop. He brought Prieto’s pace up to a canter. Texas was so close that he could taste it.

  A hard day of riding brought Andy nearly to the city of Reynosa. Before looking for a place to camp, he made inquiries with some local women who were carrying bundles of firewood on their backs. They told him that the Pharr Bridge across the Rio Grande at Reynosa had been roadblocked and the border station had been shut down. A narcotraficante gang ruled the town, they warned. A sporadic crackle of gunfire in the distance confirmed their warning. But they also told Andy that twenty-five miles west, at Nuevo Progresso—just north of Camargo—and opposite Rio Grande City, the bridge was open, and that the border stations were unmanned.

  After a quiet ride to Camargo, Andy spent the next twenty-four hours quizzing the locals and reconnoitering the border crossing. From the woods on the south bank of the river, he used his binoculars to size up the situation on the Starr-Camargo Bridge. All through the day he saw people walking back and forth, over the pair of concrete bridges. Many people pushed wheelbarrows and carts filled with trade goods. There were no signs of anyone being impeded. He couldn’t get a clear view of the border-crossing complex on the far side of the river, but there were obviously people passing through. He only heard two gunshots during the day. Both of those were in the late morning, about twenty minutes apart, and the sound came from the American side of the river.

  Andy spent that night in the woods, a mile upriver. Seeing Texas on the other side of the river made it seem tantalizingly close. There were just a few small individual lights that he could see in the distance. Presumably they were candles and lanterns. The town of Rio Grande City, with fourteen thousand inhabitants before the Crunch, and now slightly less, was quiet and dark. He didn’t hear any vehicles or generators operating after sunset. The only noise came from a few barking dogs. He fretted and prayed through much of the night.

  The next morning he awoke to the sound of a dove cooing in a nearby tree. He bathed with buckets of water carried up from the river, and he shaved using one of his precious remaining scraps of soap. He combed his hair and tried to beat the grime out of his trousers. Then he brushed his teeth. Laine wanted to look presentable, just in case he was stopped. He said another prayer and saddled up. As he inserted Prieto’s bit, he said to the horse: “Well, fella, this is our big day. You only speak Spanish, so let me do the talking.”

  Andy was anxious as he crossed the upper bridge. With Prieto at a trot, he passed two pedestrians on the bridge, both pushing wheelbarrows full of corn on the cob. The brown-painted border crossing station building was deserted. It was eerie, seeing the inspection booths unmanned. Aside from one abandoned pickup (on blocks and minus its tires) and some new graffiti spray-painted on two of the booths, the station looked intact and unmolested. Andy kept Prieto at a trot. As he rode, Andy whistled the tune “God Bless America.”

  He soon rode into an open-air market that was set up in the border crossing parking lot. Most of the tables displayed seasonal produce. Some of it was simply spread out on tarps on the ground. The vendors were mostly Mexican, and the customers were mostly American. A few came in pickups, but there were plenty of horses and mountain bikes. Both were kept close at hand by their nervous owners. Nearly everyone seemed to be armed—either with holstered pistols or slung long guns, or both. Horses caused a few comical moments as the naughty animals snatched produce from the stalls unless their reins were held tightly.

  With a grin that never quit, Andy bought a large sack of oranges, a bag of carrots, two candy bars, a can of peanuts, and some horsemeat jerky. He paid in silver pesos. His change was in the form of U.S. silver dimes and two pie-slice-shaped silver bits that had been chiseled from a Morgan silver dollar. The prices at the market seemed greatly inflated, compared to what he’d experienced in Mexico. But at least his silver peso coins were readily accepted.

  Before leaving, Andy patted Prieto and praised him for being “un caballo caballeroso” (a “gentlemanly horse”) and fed him a carrot. Andy walked Prieto to the gate. Before climbing back up on the saddle, he unstrapped the inherited AK-47 from atop his pack, unwrapped it, and slung it over his shoulder. After swinging up into the saddle, Laine reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a full thirty-round magazine. He swung the AK around to his chest and inserted the curved magazine. He gave a sigh of relief and said, “Ahhh . . . back in the land of the free.”

  In the coming days, Laine would habitually carry the AK slung across his chest with the sling looped around his neck, ready for quick action. If a situation looked particularly dicey, Laine would halt his horse and rotate the AK’s stock to its extended position so that he’d be able to shoot accurately.

  34

  Reconnaissance

  “. . . vaults of the central banks and return to the pockets and purses of private individuals, for gold is the only really sound money with intrinsic value. The desire to return to gold is understandable, and we hope to see it realized some day, although the argument in favor of the gold standard is not always stated in a valid way. The distinctive function of gold money does not consist in its intrinsic value or in the constancy of that value, which fluctuates even in the absence of government intervention. The excellence of metallic money in free circulation consists in the fact that it renders impossible the abuse of power of the government to dispose of the possessions of its citizens by means of its monetary policy and thus serves as the solid foundation of economic liberty within each country and of free trade between one country and another.”

  —Faustino Ballve, Essentials of Economics (1963)

  Local commerce gradually began to expand in the Four Corners. For the first few years after the Crunch began, most of the local businesses were closed, due to lack of inventory. Others suffered from what Beth dubbed “buggy-whip syndrome.” In essence, their products or services didn’t translate well into the new economic reality. There was no more Internet. There was no more coffee being imported. And there was little need for weight-loss centers when so many people were going hungry. The few businesses that prospered were ones that specialized in repair and refurbishment.

  Just weeks after the Crunch began, an informal open-air flea market started to blossom at the San Juan County Fairgrounds, on Highway 64, between Farmington and Bloomfield. This was where people brought fresh produce, used cl
othing, toys, and assorted household goods to barter. A large hand-painted banner read: “Flee Market.” At first Beth thought that this was a misspelling, but then she realized that it was intentional.

  The fairgrounds worked well as a barter venue. There was plenty of room for vendors to camp, and the stable buildings were available for horses. As this was one of the few regions of the country with an intact power utility and an operating refinery, the local economy was surprisingly resilient, and crime was relatively low. There was merely a shortage of new goods to sell. Meanwhile, most other parts of the country barely had functioning economies. And wherever population densities were high, chaos reigned.

  The county fairgrounds were also considered a particularly safe place to conduct business, since there was an adjoining sheriff’s department substation. The vendors were largely self-policing, and they only rarely had to summon the sheriff’s deputies—mostly because of public drunkenness.

  When Lars Laine made his first trip to the barter fair, with Reuben Phelps, he was surprised to see one vendor that had two tables full of radio equipment. This included some CB, FRS, GMRS, and MURS-band radios. A large sign read: “Will trade for fresh co-ax wire!” The man behind the tables was a grizzled old retired engineer who lived in a single-wide trailer house out past Cortez. He was displaying some “J-pole” antennas that he had constructed with PVC pipe and scrap wire. He had them already tuned for various bands. Lars asked him about how to mount the antennas.

  The man answered: “If you want to talk to everybody, then you mount them vertically. But if you want to have your own private little network, then you mount them horizontally. Most people don’t think about that, but when you use a CB antenna with horizontal polarization, it can attenuate signals transmitted by a vertical antenna by 20 decibels. Every 3 decibels of attenuation cuts the signal by one half, so that would be one sixty-fourth or slightly less signal power! That means very low probability of intercept by anyone outside of your private group that uses a horizontal antenna network.”

  Lars was impressed with the old man’s knowledge. He nodded and said, “That’s brilliant. Where do you get all this gear?”

  “Oh, I go around to the little towns and ranches that are outside of the utility power grid. Out there, most folks got no juice, so they think of all these old radios as junk. I trade them gasoline, or corn, or charged car batteries for a lot of this.”

  With “ballistic wampum”—two hundred rounds of .22 Long Rifle ammo—Lars bought a pair of the J-pole antennas trimmed for the citizens band. Later that same day he and Reuben mounted them on the house—one vertically and one horizontally—so that with an antenna co-ax switch he could select them, at will.

  Prescott, Arizona

  September, the Third Year

  News came to Prescott via the Arizona CB radio relay network that the La Fuerza looter army was about to attack Wickenburg. Ian Doyle volunteered to recon the situation, flying his Star Streak. Just as with several other recon flights in the past few years, assembling, fueling, and preflight checking the plane took less than an hour. They rolled the Laron out to the street, and Blanca gave Ian a hug. Despite the gasoline’s age, the engine started easily. Ian taxied over to the street where he had first landed nearly four years before. It felt good to be back in the air. After several months of being ground-bound, it gave Doyle a rush to feel the sensation of speed and flight.

  Flying to Wickenburg took only twenty-five minutes, which made the looters seem uncomfortably close to Prescott. Doyle first made a low pass over the Wickenburg Airport, just west of town. It appeared abandoned. There were four semi truck trailers parked perpendicular across the main runway at wide intervals. That looked very odd to Ian.

  Still at low altitude, he approached the town from the west. Ian could see La Fuerza swarming through the town of Wickenburg en masse. He had heard on the CB that he would be seeing many houses that were already abandoned by their owners, who fled after hearing that the looters were coming.

  Ian circled the town watching the calamitous events unfold beneath him. Several houses were on fire. The looters moved from house to house, taking anything of value. Ian held the stick with one hand and a pair of binoculars with the other. He did his best to tally and categorize the looters’ vehicles. He was sickened to see women and girls dragged out of houses, kicking and thrashing, only to be beaten, stripped naked, and raped. He felt powerless to stop what he saw.

  As he turned northwest on his third low orbit of the town, he was startled to see several tracer bullets flash up past his left wing. Suddenly he no longer felt like just a detached observer. Recognizing his peril, he stomped on the plane’s right rudder pedal, throttled up, and climbed to higher altitude. He departed westward, intentionally choosing a long, circuitous route back to Prescott, to conceal his point of origin.

  When he landed at Conley Ranches, his neighbors came running. He gave them a quick summary of what he’d seen and then a dire warning: “We need to get ready, folks. There’s a world of hurt coming our way!”

  Ian was thankful that they found no bullet holes in the Laron when they disassembled it.

  35

  Cut to Size, File to Fit, and Paint to Match

  “I fully understand the primary function of guns in the human condition: to protect oneself against the aggression of others. If other people are going to use them for the purpose of aggression, why, that’s all the more reason for me to own one (or in my case, considerably more than one).”

  —Kim du Toit

  Many years before the Crunch, Ian Doyle was a college senior, majoring in business at the University of Chicago. He was enrolled in the Air Force ROTC program. One day at the cafeteria, as he ate lunch with his friend Todd Gray, Doyle was introduced to Dan Fong, a freshman who was majoring in industrial engineering. Gray mentioned that Ian and Dan shared a common interest in guns. So it wasn’t long before Ian and Dan became shooting buddies. They took frequent trips to local gun ranges, both indoors and outdoors.

  Although he did a surprising amount of surreptitious gunsmithing in the Industrial Arts Building’s metal shop, Fong lacked a workshop where he could work on guns with any expectation of privacy. It was 215 miles from Doyle’s home in Plymouth, Michigan, to Chicago, so other than on some occasional weekends spent at home, Doyle was also without a private workshop.

  Their need for workshop space was solved by Todd Gray. Todd’s father had owned three hardware stores. Just a year after Phil Gray retired, he died of a heart attack. This was when Todd was a college sophomore. Phil Gray left behind a wonderfully equipped home carpentry and machine shop in a detached garage that sat behind the Grays’ house. Most of the equipment was later willed to Phil’s brother (Todd’s uncle Pete). But while Todd was in college the shop sat idle and available for Todd to use. His father had amassed a large assortment of shop equipment, including a Unimat lathe, a small Bridgeport milling machine, a band saw, a radial arm saw, a power jigsaw, and a huge assortment of hand tools.

  One evening Ian was invited to a pizza feed at Dan Fong’s dorm room. Also there were Todd Gray, and his roommate Tom “T.K.” Kennedy. After hearing about the shop, Doyle asked, “Have you got a welding rig?”

  “Actually, I’ve got three: A basic oxyacetylene with small tanks, a 220-volt arc welder, and a wire-feed.” He took a bite of pizza and added, “But I’m not very good with them.”

  “Well, I’m a welder!” Dan declared. “When I was in high school I spent half my time in the metal shop, faaab-ricating! Mostly it was various Rube Goldberg contraptions and even some metal sculptures. I’m pretty good with a torch. So if you don’t mind, we’d like to come over for a Saturday or two—”

  Doyle interrupted: “Or maybe three or four.”

  Fong continued: “—and do a couple of welding projects that the BAT-Fags wouldn’t approve of, like . . .”

  Todd grinned, but T.K. clam
ped his palms over his own ears, and half shouted in his Sergeant Schultz voice, “I know noth-think. I hear noth-think!” After a pause, in which he gave the others a stern look, T.K. said, “Look, what you choose to do is up to you guys. But I don’t want to know what you are doing, understand? It’s better that way. You guys can go and play ‘Mad Scientist Takes Up Welding,’ but count me out.”

  Ian soon rented a private mailbox at a Ship-It store on the west side of Chicago, using the name of Ian’s cousin, who had died of a congenital heart defect at just two months of age. When he was seventeen years old, Ian had stumbled upon the dead boy’s birth certificate, after having been asked to shred some of his mother’s old papers. Since the deceased cousin was born three years earlier than Ian, Doyle’s plan had been to have a fake ID so that he could buy beer before he turned twenty-one. But eventually it was just used for buying machine gun parts sub rosa.

  The owner of the Ship-It shop was a shady character. In exchange for an extra thirty-dollar “processing fee,” he didn’t ask for anything more than the birth certificate and a dance club photo ID as proof of the identity of “Randall Stallings.”