by Jason Ross
“We aren’t a threat to anyone.”
Mat offered a grim smile. “Being within walking distance of McKenzie makes you a threat.”
“We haven’t attacked you,“ Hauser said. “And we could just as easily be an asset as a threat.”
“Do you deny that some of the food your people are eating is stolen?” Mat pushed back to get the measure of the man.
“Scavenged, certainly,“ said Hauser. “Our campfire council made it clear to all our people that stealing from occupied structures will get them shunned.” It was a technical answer, but it made sense. This guy couldn’t deny his followers the chance to catch and eat loose pigs in the forest, even if the pigs had come from an illegal attack.
Mat changed direction. “Tell me more about your camp and its council. Have a bite of your sandwich first.”
Hauser looked to be in his late sixties; white, wispy hair, bespectacled and trim. While Hauser ate the sandwich, savoring each bite, he talked about Creek Camp.
After his wife died four years earlier, Hauser sold his medical practice in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky to be close to his daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter. When the American economy collapsed, Hauser convinced his daughter and son-in-law to pack their emergency supplies and run away from the city. Without a bug-out destination, they drove as deep into the countryside as they could. They ran out of gas on the outskirts of McKenzie with a month’s rations, nowhere to go and no way to get there.
“The camp was a cooperative accident. The Baylors and Smiths were traveling together and happened to run out of gas at the same place as us. Tom Baylor and his two teenage sons are eagle scouts, and I mean the real kind, like we had in Jackson. James and Linda Smith are avid hunters.”
Mat offered a platitude to keep him talking. “Good people to know these days.”
“Yes, they are. But mostly they’re just good, honest people. That’s proven to be the most important survival skill—being a good person. The selfish ones, they’re your enemies, Mr. Best.”
“Sergeant Best. I’m army, retired.”
“We could use combat veterans who’ve been ‘in the shit.’”
Mat laughed. “What makes you think I’ve been in the shit?”
Hauser looked pleased with himself. “I know I don’t carry myself as a veteran today, if I ever did, and I don’t blame you for not recognizing me as one. The Army sent me to medical school. I served in VA hospitals stateside for twelve years and retired with the rank of major. I never deployed in combat, but in Germany, I treated men back from the Global War on Terror. They looked just like you.”
“And your campfire council?“ Mat asked. “How did three families become Creek Camp?”
Hauser had finished his sandwich. “How about I show you?”
Matt nodded. “You’re free to go. Sorry about the rough treatment.”
Hauser tidied up his napkin and plate. Mat reached across the table and took them from him. “I’ll come by your camp to see you soon.”
Four days later, Mat met Dr. Hauser at Creek Camp. When he arrived, Beatrice Morgan, the sheriff’s wife, and another woman from town were there in the camp, standing in the mud, talking to Hauser. A boy from town unloaded empty fifty-five gallon metal drums from the back of the Morgan’s pickup truck. The drums had been torch-cut in half.
“Mrs. Morgan. A word please?” Mat called as he moved into camp with his security team. The sheriff’s wife should not be outside the HESCO. It was a security risk and totally unacceptable.
She paused her conversation with a touch on Hauser’s arm and followed Mat to one side of a large, dirty tent.
“Mrs. Morgan, are you trying to get yourself killed? What are you doing in the camps?”
“We’re delivering cook pots that the sheriff made in our garage. I can call him over if you like. He’s around here somewhere giving first aid. Living outdoors, even minor injuries can fester.”
Mat glanced around, but didn’t see the sheriff. He didn’t want to talk about post-apocalyptic first aid. He wanted them back inside the wire.
“I’ve got no problem with your charitable work, per se. Has the food committee signed off on this?” The look on her face told him she hadn’t checked with any committee, and she had no intention of doing so. Mat didn’t care about permission either, but if townspeople got kidnapped by refugees, it’d be Mat’s team called in to mount a hostage rescue. “You can’t be out here without security. My team and I could have delivered the pots for you.”
The pots were brilliant, really—primitive tech he’d seen in the hinterlands of Iraq among the Kurds. Hauser had organized the Creek Camp into tent clans around campfires with ten to twenty people, and the big pots would become social pivot points for each clan.
The camp smelled of pork. The domesticated pigs they’d lost at the ambush a month back would avoid capture for a time, but all fifty of the escaped pigs would eventually end up in the stew pot—if the camps had stew pots.
Stewing meat in a big pot was far more efficient than roasting it over a fire, where most of the precious fat dripped away. The stew pots the Sheriff and his wife had crafted were a game-changer for the refugees. They could add bits of meat and handfuls of greens to the pot for weeks, or even months, so long as they kept the fire going. It was hard to find fault with Mrs. Morgan’s initiative.
The camp looked safe enough. Tetanus or cholera were probably bigger risks to the Morgans than being kidnapped. But even on that score, Mat noticed, each grouping of tents had a tidy pit latrine with a privacy curtain. Someone had taught Creek Camp proper sanitation. Probably their physician leader.
Mat sighed and Mrs. Morgan waited patiently.
“May I ask,” Mat hazarded the question, “whose idea was this? The stew pots?”
She didn’t answer directly. “Did you know that my husband is a deacon at First Presbyterian?”
“Indeed, I didn’t,” Mat admitted.
“He does what he must, for his job, you know,” she explained. “But before all, my husband’s a Christian.” She patted Mat on the forearm, just like she’d done to Hauser, then she turned back to her work with the refugees.
You think you know a guy, Mat thought to himself and shook his head.
The members of the Security and Food Committees sat on folding chairs in the foyer of McKenzie City Hall, taking advantage of the natural light streaming though the plate glass windows. It was cold outside, and raining again, but they kept the front and back doors propped open for a breeze to carry away the body odor.
The town was on one-day-in-three rationed water because it required electricity to pump water to the top of the cisterns. Electricity required a gas generator, or solar power, and solar was harder to move around where it was needed.
Every three days, a pickup truck with a propane generator drove around to each of the water towers and pumped them full of well water. When Black Autumn struck, there was a lot of propane in town. The outlying farmers used the gas for heating and cooking. A huge propane storage facility sat on the edge of town, and it’d just been topped off. Now that all the outlying farmers were crammed into town for protection, the propane could last for years if they were judicious.
Formerly, the town had placed a lot of hope in their stack of solar panels. In the weeks that followed the collapse, the town had been given a crash course in how hard it was to turn solar, DC power into “normal” AC power. It would’ve been fantastic to pump water into the town cisterns with solar power, but for love or money they couldn’t find the right DC water pumps, or big enough inverters to run AC.
Even with lots of propane, the generator struggled to run the huge water pumps—and there were only two large, propane gennies in town: one primary and one spare. The townspeople practiced volunteer water rationing so as not to burn them up. The old luxury of daily showers became the new social virtue of body odor. If you smelled bad, you were being a good citizen.
Mat arrived at the committee me
eting with a plan for blunting the threat of the refugees, but it wasn’t a simple plan. It was the kind of thing the CIA tried on-the-regular in Afghanistan—the kind of thing that sometimes ended with really pissed-off Afghans.
After the formalities, the sheriff turned the floor over to Mat.
“We can get the refugees to go look for food elsewhere, if we can convince them the grass is greener on the other side. We sow rumors of FEMA supply warehouses far enough away that they can’t make it back here.”
The committee stared back with confusion.
Confusion was never good.
“When their scouts follow our directions to the first food cache, about thirty miles north of here, they’ll find plenty of evidence to support the FEMA story. We’ll stock a warehouse with food and make it look legit.”
Benny Miles from the local hardware store interrupted. “I don’t see how a pile of our supplies is going to look like a FEMA supply depot.”
Mat repeated himself, “We use an empty warehouse outside of a town. We fill its shelves with dry food—the stuff we’ve been setting aside because it’s expired. We make a FEMA sign and hang it inside; really sell the idea that it’s a long lost supply depot. We leave clues pointing to another supply depot even farther away.”
The hardware guy shook his head. “If we give them our food, won’t the rats just come back to us for more?”
“They won’t know it’s our food. The food cache will be thirty miles from here—a two or three day walk. It’ll look like a lot of food, but it’ll only be a couple days worth. Then we leave a map for them to find another location.”
The more Mat said it out loud, the more the plan sounded cockamamie even to him, but he was fully committed. And wasn’t this the kind of shit the CIA brewed up to destabilize indigenous populations?
“If there are FEMA supply warehouses, shouldn’t we go get the food and bring it back to town?” a woman asked. Her salt and pepper hair was piled on her head in a bun.
Mat stopped himself from groaning. “There aren’t any real FEMA supply warehouses. We’re just telling the rats that so they go someplace else. Once they walk far away, it’s unlikely they’ll walk back. The farther they walk, the better. They become another town’s problem.”
“So we lie to them?” she asked. Her face screwed up in a twist.
“In intelligence, we call it disinformation.” Mat had never been in intelligence. He’d been an assaulter. But he’d been around CIA shenanigans long enough to have a feel for the business. Still, he was doing a piss-poor job of pitching it to these hayseeds. Mat decided to punt.
“Here’s the vote: can I use 3,000 of our oldest, crappiest dried meals? The expired stuff?”
The last meeting, the hardware guy had given a report of their food stores. They had enough food to last the winter and the spring if they butchered half the pigs. By then, they could replace the butchered pigs with new, weaned piglets. In short, they were okay on food if they didn’t lose the pigs and if the town wasn’t overrun by rats.
Hardware Guy finally picked up on Mat’s plan and nodded. The other six food committee members glanced at him and a couple more appeared amenable, whether they understood the plan or not.
“If we don’t want to spend bullets on these people later, we need to spend a little expired food now.” Mat put the final shine on his argument. “Can I have the food?”
The food committee people voted in favor. Some of the security committee people voted for the idea too, even though it wasn’t their decision.
Slam!
Jim Jensen, the newest member of the security committee, slammed a glass jar on the table. Everyone startled at the dramatic gesture.
“This is mustard gas.”
“Good Lord in heaven,” bun lady exclaimed. Her hands flew to her mouth.
Mat hadn’t sat down yet, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d been caught off-guard and upstaged by Science Guy.
“Don’t worry folks, so long as I don’t crack this lid, we’re all one hundred percent safe.”
Mat doubted the yellow dust filling the jar was really a nerve agent, but given that Jensen was a scientist, it was possible.
“You brought that shit in here?” Mat asked.
Jensen smiled as though proud of himself. “I produced it with the sheriff’s permission to develop poison weapons for future use. We’re now in the future.”
Mat wondered if Jensen had a conversation with Sheriff Morgan other than the one he’d heard because the sheriff hadn’t given permission to do anything, and they had been talking about botulism at the time. Something about Science Guy’s white-knuckle grip on the jar made Mat withdraw any objection for the time being. Best to let things roll, he decided. No need to get in an argument with the dude using nerve gas as a gavel.
“Okay,” interrupted Sheriff Morgan.”That concludes this part of the meeting. Thank you very much, members of the food committee. We will take a short break. Security Committee Members please stay close by. Mr. Jensen, please stay as well.”
The sheriff handled the appearance of nerve gas as a procedural speed bump, not as an evacuation event. The guy really was great under pressure, Mat noted. Mat had almost drawn his Glock when the guy slammed down the jar, which in retrospect would’ve been the wrong response to mustard gas.
The members of the committees mulled around for a moment, everyone keeping an eye on the jar full of dirty, yellow dust. Back in the old days, threat of a chemical agent would’ve cleared the building in two minutes flat. These days, it barely raised eyebrows.
Mat thought through what might happen next. Sheriff Morgan had the security committee locked down pretty tight, with four of the seven members on his same page. Morgan had stopped Jensen’s drama train in order to get the question of poison gas under control and away from the emotionally-wobbly food committee. The smaller the group to vote on a charged topic, like WMDs, the better. Mat and Sheriff Morgan were two of the seven votes, and the trucking guy was a Viet Nam vet who probably wouldn’t vote for anything stupid.
Mat had mixed feelings about the nasty-looking jar. This wasn’t Iraq and they weren’t engaged in symmetrical warfare. The math of the apocalypse was rather rudimentary, when seen through the lens of a jar filled with poison gas: there were several times more people than there was food to feed them. The back-of-napkin solution was to reduce the number of people to match the supply.
Mat didn’t pretend to be that rational. He wasn’t a numbers guy, nor could he claim to understand chemical weapons systems. He’d never thought of them as anything other than bad. But that jar on the plastic table could very well be the key to him getting out of this town and away from this job. Maybe, if he combined his skills and that jar, this hashed-up mess could take a turn toward victory.
After ten minutes of back slapping and goodbyes, the food committee members were gone and the security committee settled into their plastic seats.
Sheriff Morgan stood and said, “As you know, Jim Jensen would like to share something he’s been working on. But first let’s have a conversation about discretion, and what it means to be part of the security committee. For starters, we keep our damned mouths shut.” He drilled Jensen with a reproachful stare. The six men and one woman of the committee looked around, scenting the butt-whooping on the wind. “We don’t talk about plans, strategies or weapons outside of this committee. Jim, you crossed a line putting a weapon in front of the food committee. If you do that again, you’re off this committee.”
Jensen nodded, but Mat got the sense that he didn’t really care, and that the mustard gas dog-and-pony show had been entirely intentional.
The sheriff went on to impress upon all present the importance of not discussing meetings with friends and family, and he requested a raise of hands from all members indicating their promise to keep the committee’s confidences.
As soon as the sheriff paused in his exhortations, Jim Jensen stood up and went straight into his schtick. “We all
appreciate what Mat has done to secure McKenzie, but we have to acknowledge a difficult truth: what we’ve asked of him isn’t really possible, not so long as we’re surrounded by thousands of starving refugees. It’s only a matter of time before we’re overrun, our food taken and our loved ones murdered.” Jensen flicked a look at Chris Jackson. Jackson was definitely NOT one of the committee members the sheriff had on-lock.
Jackson’s house, on the outskirts of town, had been raided by refugees. They’d taken everything edible and raped his daughter. Young Nancy Jackson hung herself the next day. After that, Chris Jackson asked to move from the food committee to the security committee and, despite the sheriff’s reluctance, the committee had voted to do it. Jackson hadn’t said much since joining.
After a perfectly-timed pause, Jensen continued. “Even an Army Ranger can’t prevent attacks like the Jackson house and Reedy Grove, so long as desperate people surround us. The numbers are simply too great—by an order of magnitude or more.”
Mat didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded like a lot.
“While Mat’s plan to draw refugees away might temporarily remove ten or fifteen percent of the threat, that still leaves ten thousand or more refugees poised to invade our town. Fighting them hand-to-hand and one-bullet-at-a-time isn’t possible given the sheer numbers. Even with the HESCO barrier finished—which is at least three months out—we’ll still be threatened from every point of the compass.” He swept his hand around the inside of city hall, casting the specter of rats surrounding them, even here and now.
“We must employ science to protect our town. That or die.”
Jensen banged two more glass jars on the table. Bang. Bang.
The one jar, with dark, yellow dust, Jensen had already identified as mustard gas. Another jar was full of mud—brown and viscous. The third looked like it contained a cloud; white and fluffy. Jensen had everyone’s undivided attention.
“I propose we encourage the organic processes of Mother Nature to reduce the refugee numbers. Even without our involvement, bacteria will fester in the camps. Whenever thousands of people gather without meticulous sanitation, nature counter-attacks with a one-two punch of bacteria and disease. Cholera. Dysentery. Botulism...” He tapped the lid of the jar that looked like mud. “Even anthrax from the hides of the animals they’re hunting in the fields.” He flicked the jar filled with white. “Nature is our greatest ally. Nature resists man when we gather in the thousands, without civil sanitation systems. Nature marshals its microscopic armies against humankind. We can help that process along—give those bacteria a nudge in the right direction. But we must do it before the refugees invade our town.”