by Finley, Zack
"All secure here, move up to the new base, bring our pickups."
"Roger that, we are on our way."
The farmhands would provide the needed intel. Stuffing them like sardines in a drafty trailer while the mansion sat mostly empty was no way to build loyalty.
We'd move the farmhands inside, eventually. After chatting with them. We split them up to question. After learning what we could, we'd compare notes. If the story was consistent, the men would join our other prisoners in the dining room.
I took the oldest looking farmhand to sit with me beside the firepit. He sat in the lawn chair, offering nothing as I stoked the fire.
"My name is Jeremy, what is yours?"
The pause was long enough to make me wonder whether this guy was going to talk. I wanted to do this without threats, if possible, to get the best intel. Coercion skewed the dialogue.
"I'm John. What are you guys?"
"Just neighbors who need some grain and soybeans," I answered. "We will be out of your hair as soon as we load up."
John relaxed slightly at my words. "You know they will come after you?"
"Who?" I asked.
"The militia. They don’t share. They killed a group trying to cross the railroad bridge from Adams last week. Mostly though, they want to keep out the 'riffraff' from the new interstate subdivisions."
"Riffraff?" I asked.
"Old man Johnson's word for them. I think they are just hungry and desperate people. Mind you, I've got enough to eat here and don't want them taking what I have," John said. "I'm afraid Johnson is right about that."
"Does Johnson own the seed exchange?" I asked.
"That is Junior's operation. He built it in 2016. Johnson is a major soybean farmer. If you can see it, he probably owns it. He limits his personal farming to the fields close by, leasing out the rest of his acreage. Junior was breeding strains of soybean and corn seeds on some of the leased acreage. We got the harvest in for him before the crash. He was going to make a killing in the spring, selling his local seed at a premium. Now everyone is happy we have some local seed."
"What happened here after the crash?" I asked.
"I think our militia got word about it before anyone else," John said.
"What makes you think that?"
"Johnson called me the day before the president spoke and demanded I move my trailer onto his property, immediately. I normally keep my trailer in the river park just outside of Adams. I used to move a lot more, but I've spent five seasons working for Johnson and his son, so it had been a while. His demand pissed me off, but there isn't much work during the winter. So I spent that Friday packing up and moving my trailer here. He kept talking about needing a caretaker for the property. I never heard the president speak; I was working with guys I never met staging car accidents on the local roads. I expected the cops to come and arrest us all. The cops came by but seemed okay with what we were doing."
I encouraged John to continue, "What happened after the lights died?"
"There was a weird gathering in front of some bigwig politician's mansion. They swore me into the militia, and then handed me an automatic rifle. I was worried until they assigned four men for my squad and sent us back to Johnson's place."
"It sounds like it was pretty calm here following the crash?"
"It was for two days. On the third day, things went crazy."
"How so?"
"Some people broke through the fence on Rossview Road and went around the roadblock. Johnson, Junior, and Pete ordered us into the back of their pickup and drove like hell to the strawberry ranch. It was chaos. We were shooting at cars trying to get through the fields. Cars were crashing, getting stuck, or driving into the ponds. People were crazy. I don't think I killed anybody, but there were a lot of bodies on the ground or in the cars after the shooting stopped. Eventually, the line of cars on the road blocked any other attempts to get through. I don't know what was driving them, but they must have been desperate to get out of Clarksville to try that."
"Was that the only shooting?"
"Pretty much, for the first month or so, my squad patrolled our area of responsibility. Word of what happened to people crossing our roadblocks must have gotten out because the vehicles stayed on their side and left us alone. The patrols stopped in January; we've been hunkered down since. Do you know when the lights are coming back on?"
"I don't think they are coming back on in our lifetime," I said. "This mess is global, and we are all on our own." This wasn't what John wanted or expected to hear. But, I needed him to answer a few more questions.
"Since you aren't patrolling anymore, what do you do every day?" I asked. "Do you work for Johnson or this militia?" After he didn't answer right away, I prodded. "John?"
He stared deep into the fire, then appeared to shake it off. "We mostly work for Johnson. We get our water from him, and he gives us permission to pull buckets of corn or soybeans out of the bins. Lately, we've been prepping for spring planting. Plus, the normal chores: splitting wood, taking care of the chickens, cooking soybeans and corn mush. Hauling water. None of the hired help is allowed in the main house, but that hasn't really been a problem since they don't have any heat. My trailer is crowded, but I'm used to it."
"How big is the militia?"
"Two- to three-hundred, I'd guess. It is a mix of farmers, ranchers, hired hands, and rich people. Everyone but the hired hands imagine they are in charge. I figure we are a lot better off than most of the country. Without the beans or corn, I'd have been hungry by the second week."
"Any radios or phones working?" I asked.
"Not that I know of. Once a week, someone from the militia comes by riding a horse or a bike to deliver or pick up messages. Everyone is conserving fuel."
"When was the last time a messenger showed up?" I asked.
"Two or three days ago."
"I'm sure you are getting cold, let's get you in the house," I said. I hated to waste the zip-tie, but carrying him inside wasn't happening without help.
After securing our charges in the dining room with the Johnsons, the interrogators quickly compared notes. The stories were pretty consistent, leaving us with the impression the militia would not take our arrival sitting down.
Once the scouts returned from the northern site, they would return to Port Royal to secure our line of retreat over the Red River.
There was an advantage to farm fields surrounding us, it would be hard for anyone to surprise us. Craig climbed on top of a grain bin, and Mike crawled out onto the residence roof to keep watch.
Soybeans or corn. In terms of seeds, corn won hands down, yielding 500 kernels per ear while we'd be lucky to get 150 soybeans per plant. On the other hand, soybeans contained more protein and don't need to soak in lye water to eat. Cattle and goats happily ate soybean leaves and stalks, as long as you didn't wait too long to harvest the pods.
We would start with corn and shift to soybeans.
While Joel wasn't thrilled about getting two bin augers operating, he was in his heyday. Especially after he determined that our generator could run the motor on the bucket grain elevator. The bad news was grain loading spouts were designed to load an open hopper or grain truck, not through little flap doors. To make that work, we needed a way to control the flow and narrow the spread. It was a good thing we brought lumber, plywood, tools, tarps, and duct tape.
That all assumed we could get the grain out of the bin. We had a crew working on that.
Joel sent one of the pickups to bring back the grain truck at the north site's entrance. Bringing it and the four scouts back was one of the top priorities. Joel wanted to load the grain trucks first, then we'd modify the fill chute.
All in the dark. While NVGs made attacking enemy lines in the dark better, they were inadequate for heavy-duty mechanical work. Knowing this, we brought several sets of work lights. That just made our presence obvious and screwed up everybody's night vision.
The snipers and those monitoring our surroundings were
warned. I just hated to lose the anonymity of stealth. The only question I had was whether the militia leaders would send people right away or wait until morning.
We sent all three grain-trucks to fill up at the mansion diesel tank. Tom and I strapped two seed bags with pallets onto the conveyor truck and stashed the third one inside one of the tandem trailers. Without a loading dock, we had to remove the short internal plywood dam to put it inside.
Joel and Eric made a lot of trips up to the top of the elevator to set the distributor's head. Since the automatic controls weren't working, they manually closed the slide gates to the main bins and opened the one to the load bin.
The grain elevator was a conveyor belt with buckets on a continuous loop. The buckets dipped into the grain sump, picked up the grain, moved it to the top of the loop, and then dumped it into the distributor's head. The head was near the highest part of the complex. The grain left the head through the open nozzle, and gravity dragged the grain through the pipes to the load bin. The load bin was a small cylindrical tank with a conical bottom. A hydraulic slide valve on the bottom of the small load bin was supposed to start and stop the flow of grain into the truck. With no hydraulics, one could hope a sledgehammer and crowbar provided ample persuasion for the valve in question.
Starting and stopping the elevator would also work, but too many cycles of the dirty power supplied by the generator might wreck the motor. Joel also planned to station someone on the top platform to open the distribution nozzle to the tank being emptied and close the one to the load bin below. It might be a belt and suspenders approach, but in my experience, Murphy always had something to say about any new project.
After more than an hour of trial and error, the crew on the bin auger got it turning in the correct direction, and the elevator sump slowly began to fill. That sent everyone to action stations. Joel had decided to open both the fill and the bin nozzles at the same time to avoid starting and stopping the bin elevator or the auger. A volunteer with a light sprawled on top of the grain bin, with his head inside the top hatch, monitoring the grain cycling back into it.
Loading the first grain truck was anticlimactic. Stopping the grain flow was a bit exciting, but the spillage was minimal. On the second truck, we discovered it was easier to close the lower slide gate than to open it. The panic was short-lived, and the loading commenced. By the third truck, the team had the process well in hand. The last truck took only 20 minutes from the start of loading until we shut down the bin auger to empty the sump. We collected the spillage in five-gallon buckets, planning to dump them into an empty seed sack and store it in the back of the bus. Although we had a lot of buckets, we only had a few lids.
We rotated our guard crew, sending some for a rest cycle in the mansion. The bin auger crew refused any relief, preferring to get the soybean bin’s auger working before stopping.
The first closed trailer pulled into place. The guys fabricated the make-shift grain chute from plywood with a tarp boot. C-clamps secured the chute to the slide gate’s bottom flange. Cables and ropes tied to I-bolts at the bottom of the chute stabilized it and connected it to the loading structure. Come-alongs provided tension to keep the chute from flopping around and weakening the flange connection.
The boot was long enough; we could switch trailers without moving the chute. Dawn arrived before we started loading the first closed trailer. It was nearly 10:00 before the beans flowed smoothly.
The contraption actually worked, but loading was slow. Not as slow as a bucket brigade, but a fraction of the fill rate for the open grain trucks. The beans weren't water, they refused to spread out evenly. After the initial rapid fill, we had to stop frequently using rakes and shovels to push the built-up soybean away from the hatch. Each time we shut off the flow, it took at least 15- to 20-minutes to restart it. We only had two hatches per trailer to disperse the beans through, and we probably needed four or five to spread the load out. None of us considered the angle of repose for soybeans or corn when we converted the trailers.
After looking inside the barely filled first trailer, four people volunteered to crawl inside to distribute the soybeans. They wore the disposable dust masks and goggles Buzzer found in the seed cleaning building. How much the safety gear actually helped was a matter of some conjecture. Four energetic people with scoops spread a lot of beans, quickly. Unfortunately, they had to come out with four feet left to fill as the beans threatened to bury them. They came out covered in tan dust and coughing like crazy. Despite that, there was no lack of volunteers to go into the next three trailers to speed up the loading.
After all four trailers were half loaded, several even volunteered to go back in on ropes, to finish the fill. I nixed that idea, not willing to risk getting someone smothered by beans. I heard enough dire tales of grain bin accidents when I was a kid.
I wanted to call it done, but the trailers were still barely half full as we shifted back to using rakes and shovels from the outside. The crew's morale remained high, as they kept reminding each other that this was so much better than filling with buckets. As true as that was, I was itching to get on the road.
By trial and error, the crew developed a new fill plan. Fill one hatch until it overflowed, then drive forward to fill the next. Workers stayed on top of the trailers at each hatch, pushing the beans away from the fill site.
That allowed most of the available manpower to continually work the problem, while the loading trucks drove around in a circle. By the time a hatch was back under the fill chute, that hatch's team had already flattened out the bean cone. Close coordination between the distributor operator and the fill valve operator eliminated most of the starting and stopping.
It was working, but it was still slow. As antsy as I was to leave, I reminded myself that for every gallon of beans we loaded, meant 20 gallons of food by fall. While I could imagine returning to pick up another load of grain, I doubted the risk-versus-reward calculus would favor it.
By 15:00, the four-trailer daisy chain stopped only 10 minutes at each hatch to load. We were reaching the point of diminishing returns. Our fuel tanks were full, and everything was loaded that wasn't needed to complete the fill operation. A large part of the group was on a rest break. I warned everyone we were moving out by 16:00.
I was resting my eyes when I heard, "Sniper One to Bossman."
"Go for Boss." It was 15:13. I crawled out of the bus, where I'd been resting out of the wind.
"We have contact. Pickup with six-to-eight Tangoes moving slowly in our direction on McGregor Road. Scratch that. Two pickups with 12-to-16 Tangoes same location and direction."
"Boss confirming, two pickups with up to 16 Tangoes moving our direction on McGregor Road."
"Sniper confirms."
The designated six-man quick response force scrambled into the ready pickup with Buzzer driving. Seconds after the location was confirmed, it peeled off to get to the copse of trees overlooking Port Royal Road.
"Mansion on alert, reinforcing Sniper Two."
"Boss to Joel."
"Go for Joel."
"Get ready to move out."
"I'd like to finish this cycle then load up," Joel radioed.
"Okay, but minimize your personnel, send the rest to Zeke for assignment."
"Moving to comply," Joel radioed.
The loading operation was now a secondary concern.
Zeke gathered the remaining crew at the corner of the warehouse while I assessed the battlefield. I sent three to the old barn on the main road.
"Boss to Mansion."
"Go for Mansion."
"Keep watch west and north, just in case."
"Mansion assigning monitors north and west. The rest of us are ready to engage incoming forces."
"Roger Mansion, engage if they fire, but hold up if they don't. If they choose to retreat, we will bug out."
"Mansion acknowledges, hold fire unless they shoot."
"Sniper One, hold fire, await orders."
"Buzzer to Boss."
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"Go for Boss."
"QRF in place, monitoring Port Royal Road. No contact," Buzzer radioed.
If Buzzer couldn't see them, were they moving to check the Port Royal bridge? Had we been outplayed?
"Boss to Sniper One, do you have a visual on the Tangoes?"
"Sniper One to Boss, negative. I lost visual soon after my original alert."
"Buzzer to Boss, we can hear the pickups. Moving slow. No visual, yet."
"Roger, Buzzer. Let me know when you have a visual."
"Boss to Sniper One."
"Go for Sniper One."
"We need a full 360, just in case."
"Sniper acknowledges. Wait 10."
"Buzzer to Boss, no visual, and they turned off their engines. I want to move closer to get a look."