Black Autumn: A Post Apocalyptic Saga

by Jeff Kirkham

  The NASDAQ and the NYSE stock exchanges were barely running; they would come alive only to have their automated emergency algorithms shut them back down, triggered by massive sell-offs of stock.

  Of the top twenty property and casualty insurance companies insuring California, only two hadn’t gone into free fall in the brief moments when the stock exchanges were operating. Several of the massive reinsurance companies that backed those insurance companies had tanked in the international stock markets. An unimaginable quantity of capital had gone to “money heaven” overnight because of the Los Angeles nuclear attack. The markets were anticipating trillions of dollars of loss due to the fires and civil disorder appearing on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Most property insurance didn’t cover a nuclear attack, but almost all property and casualty insurance covered rioting and fire. The markets were betting that insurance companies wouldn’t get out of Los Angeles alive.

  Nobody could guess the actual damage, but the sheer magnitude of the civil unrest and firestorm in Los Angeles made one wonder if L.A. wasn’t a total loss. Could the national economy suffer the complete loss of Los Angeles? In 2007, the loss of a single insurance company almost triggered the collapse of the world economy. What might happen if twenty insurance companies and several reinsurance companies went bankrupt all at the same time?

  The answer to that question seemed to be playing out across America. All banks had closed due to massive runs on accounts. Nobody could get their cash out, not through the banks and not through ATMs.

  The stock market holds and the bank closures sent everyone rushing to stores to get whatever they could with their cash. Within hours, every shelf on the East and West coasts was empty. Then rioting began in earnest.

  The president had authorized the military to step into the inner cities nationwide. Like California, the National Guard units would need some time to spin up. In that gap, whole city centers were being looted and burned to the ground.

  If people had stayed in their homes, the National Guard might have been able to help. In fact, the government had broadcast pleas for citizens to stay in their homes for the last twenty-four hours. Nobody listened. The roads were choked with refugees leaving the big cities to escape the violence and chaos of the inner cities. Every road coming out of a city was utterly packed with vehicles fleeing civil disorder. Most National Guard units turned back to their bases within a few miles, unable to get past thousands of angry and desperate refugees.

  No one in the Governor’s Working Group had solutions. California was even worse than the East Coast, since Los Angeles had already been imploding for forty-eight hours. The call ended with flimsy ideas and even flimsier orders from the governor. Robbie had little hope that anyone could turn back the chaos. Like a brushfire running wild, this crisis would have to burn itself out.

  Robbie’s view of Sacramento from the front yard of his uptown home belied the truth. Civil unrest consumed the guts out of the state capitol. He heard the firecracker pop of distant gunfire and smoke curled into the air from dozens of fires.

  Electric power still ran in Sacramento, at least for the time being. All infrastructure—transportation, internet, water, natural gas—continued to run. Yet downtown burned, undoubtedly as a result of rioting and looting.

  If utilities and services were running, they wouldn’t be for long. As morning dawned, every police officer, prison guard, military person, and civic leader would be looking at themselves in the mirror, asking the same question: “Do I do my job or do I protect my family?”

  This morning, Robbie could only pray that the California National Guard would be worth a damn, but the cynical side of him suspected that the Army had become as fragile as the rest of the government.

  He heard a loud roar and glanced up to see an unmuffled, late-model pickup truck race down the street perpendicular to his own. It blew past and he saw at least two men in the pickup bed. The roar of the engine faded in the distance.

  Robbie shook off his malaise and went back inside. He headed to his gun safe at the back of his office and spun the tumblers, struggling to remember the code. Finally, the safe opened and he pulled out his Remington 870 Express shotgun. He broke into a new box of double-ought buck shells and loaded the magazine and the shell holder on the stock. As he loaded, Robbie reminded himself that one mistake with a firearm, no matter how slight, would end his career in the State of California. This was not the state to play fast and loose with firearms.

  Many years back, when Robbie was still a union representative for the iron workers, he had taken a shooting class. Even then, he kept his guns secret. He hadn’t practiced much because it would be too easy for someone to recognize him at a shooting range and make political hay out of it. But he knew how to use the shotgun, and it gave him some comfort. Politico or not, Robbie was willing to kill someone to protect his wife and property. More so than at any other moment in his sixty years, he thought it might come to that.

  Robbie placed the loaded shotgun next to the front door and went upstairs to check on his wife. She would ask some tough questions. He wished he had better answers.

  Sometime during the long, tear-punctuated conversation between Robbie and his wife, the dog began barking like mad.

  Robbie had originally hated that dog—a Shinu-imu or some such breed. He counted it as another useless trapping of the showcase life they lived.

  The more he watched the dog, the more he thought of it as a fox. The thing displayed almost-inconceivable athleticism, able to hop around on its hind legs and make incredible jumps from a dead stop.

  A fox, Robbie could respect. He came to love that dog, and it was clear the dog preferred him over the lady of the house, despite Robbie’s God-awful travel schedule.

  He could hear the dog going berserk at the back sliding glass door. Robbie detoured by the front door and grabbed his 870 Express. He slid into the kitchen and looked around the edge of the glass door, using the wall as cover.

  He couldn’t see anyone in the backyard. Even with Robbie standing beside him, the dog wouldn’t take his eyes off the back lawn and wouldn’t stop barking. Somebody was definitely out there.

  Robbie found himself in a quandary. He knew the gun laws of California and, worse yet, he knew the judicial record of the state dealing with armed homeowners who shot intruders. In a nutshell, if you shot someone on your property, you would be lucky to keep your freedom or your home. You might lawyer your way out of trouble if you shot someone inside your house, but shooting someone in your yard was inexcusable in the eyes of California law. It would definitely land you in deep shit.

  Robbie leaned the 870 Express just inside the glass door, let it go, reached over to the door lock and flipped it up.

  He considered calling the police, but he knew they had their hands full and they wouldn’t respond in under an hour, if ever. Robbie took a few steps into the backyard and looked around. The dog hesitated at his leg then flew past him, running around the corner of the house.

  The dog flew backward into the yard, yelping, obviously kicked. Two men came around the corner fast and moved straight for Robbie. Both carried revolvers and both revolvers were aimed at his chest.

  “Hey, old man,” said one of the men. He shot Robbie twice in the chest before Robbie could take a single step toward his shotgun.

  • • •

  Highway 6 Roadblock

  Delta, Utah

  Dale Trenton, commander of the Delta Desert Patriots militia, looked out at the endless column of semi-trucks stretching beyond the horizon on Highway 6.

  Dale had spent his morning talking with his prisoner, the commander of the small detachment of what he now understood were California National Guardsmen. Looking at the semis, he actually believed the commander’s story. The men he had captured were California engineers coming to get the power plant back online.

  But Dale didn’t think the new information changed things. He realized the power plant was offline and that it was causing outages in California.
Half the guys in his militia worked at that plant.

  He also knew that the world was going straight to hell. The Delta Desert Patriots ran their own ham radio repeater, and reports were coming to him outside the control of the Feds and the American oligarchy.

  Los Angeles burned, as well as all the rest of the big cities in California. As of this morning, racial tensions had also erupted in the big, rotted-out cities of dying America: Detroit, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. Most of Utah had gone dark, probably because the railroads weren’t moving enough coal to cover Utah power plants. With only natural gas power, Utah couldn’t feed the million air conditioners that flipped on the instant power resumed.

  Like an old truck with a bad carburetor, the stock market kept firing up, then getting shut down by the bureaucrats as soon as the Wall Street corporate thieves started selling everything they could. In the last three days, the stock market had spent a grand total of twenty-three minutes up and running.

  God only knew what was happening with that bomb over in the sandbox. Short-wave information came through a lot thinner about stuff happening worldwide. The few tidbits they had picked up made it sound like World War III was heating up; Russians, Turks, Iranians, Egyptians, and probably Americans were squaring off, and Dale couldn’t even begin to understand who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. Considering the nuke that had hit Los Angeles, Dale figured the whole shebang was just another false flag operation launched by the Soros/Clinton oligarchs trying to gain control of the world.

  It all boiled down to this: the world was going to hell, and the only thing that really mattered was home and family.

  If Dale let those trucks into Delta, it wasn’t going to change a damned thing. His boys from the plant told him the Intermountain plant wasn’t going to fire back up again, even if they refilled the coal field to overflowing. There were bigger problems in the world than one broken power plant.

  More than half of the plant’s staff hadn’t shown up that morning. There were strict policies handed down from the muckety-mucks in California that dictated when the plant could run and when it couldn’t.

  The list of “Turbine Spin-up Critical Personnel” included a bunch of engineers, as well as safety monitors, environmental oversight folks and even union monitors. Every single one of those positions had to be staffed before the turbines could turn. All of those positions had back-ups and redundancies, but with half the staff unable to get to work because of road blockages or because they were scared, there was no way in hell that list of critical personnel was getting filled.

  Even if Dale let the coal pass, it wasn’t going to matter. He would be allowing strangers into Delta at the worst possible time. He couldn’t save California even if he wanted to, but he could save Delta.

  • • •

  Reynolds Residence

  Oakwood, Utah

  Tom and Jacquelyn Reynolds had always been true-blue preppers. Being a prepper didn’t mark a person as a freak in Utah, like in many areas of the United States. Thanks to rural living and the Mormon Church, Utah had been chock-full of preppers since Brigham Young fought off the United States Army in the 1850s.

  Neither Jacquelyn nor Tom considered themselves Mormon, but both their names appeared on the rolls of the Mormon Church because they had been baptized by their parents when they were eight years old. Jack-Mormons though they were, both inadvertently carried on the pioneer and anti-government sensibilities of Brigham Young, the second Mormon prophet. Pretty much the entire state, outside the urbane neighborhood surrounding the University of Utah, felt the same way.

  In 1857, Brigham Young had received word that the United States Army was coming to kick his ass. The Mormons had been practicing polygamy in Utah for decades, much to the chagrin of the rest of America. Also, the threat of rebellion within the U.S. had become a hot topic for President Buchanan, with the southern states teetering on the brink of pre-Civil War secession. Smacking down the Mormons would provide an inexpensive object lesson in the realities of rebelling against the United States government. So Buchanan sent troops to Utah to bring Brigham Young to heel.

  But no one on either side relished the thought of a shooting war. Over the next two years, the clever Mormons leveraged their courage and craftiness to harry the approaching troops—running off the Army mules, starving their pack animals, and eventually wearing them down without ever firing a shot. The Mormons won the conflict by stalling and by letting the harsh Rocky Mountain winter erode the Army’s resolve.

  The distrust of government had lingered in Utah, even as the memory of the “Utah War” faded. Tom and Jacquelyn hewed to the conventional prepper rhetoric: constitutionalism, local governance, and individualism should stand iron-clad. They would have made Brigham Young proud.

  But the couple wanted nothing to do with either Mormonism nor the Christian faith that inspired many preppers. The “prepper movement,” post-Y2K, had split into two factions: those who saw the Apocalypse as an act of divine retribution and those who saw the Apocalypse as a result of bad government. Both sides of prepperdom were companionable enough. They simply arrived at their belief in the Apocalypse from two different angles.

  Now that the Apocalypse was upon them, Tom and Jacquelyn didn’t waste time arguing why. Instead, they executed on their plan. They set to work packing the old Chevy truck Tom had restored and got ready to head up to the Ross Homestead.

  As Tom cleared out his gun safe, Jacquelyn sat down beside him at his reloading bench. She wanted to talk. Tom wanted to keep working. After twelve years of marriage, they had figured out this dance. She started by perching herself on his bench, wooing him with her short-cut hair and almond eyes. Tom stopped what he was doing.

  “I’m worried about my clients,” Jacquelyn began. She worked as an “LMHC,” or Licensed Mental Health Counselor. She had finished her advanced degree two years back when their youngest child went into first grade. She now managed a small client load of twenty people in need of talk therapy, mostly adult women.

  Tom knew better than to wade in with solutions this early in the conversation. “How so?”

  “How can I just dump them and head to Jason and Jenna’s compound? My clients are going to need me now more than ever.”

  Tom made a “hmmm” sound and waited.

  “And what about our families? Laura’s in Galveston and they’re not prepared for this.” They both knew that Tom couldn’t do anything about his own family. They had parted ways many years back. But Jacquelyn and her sister were close.

  “Jacquelyn,” Tom said. She hated it when people called her “Jackie.” As was often his role, Tom spoke the hard truths they both were thinking. “We knew it would come to this someday and we did everything we could to educate our friends and family. With all we’ve done to support the Homestead over the years, we can request that Laura and Paul be allowed into the community. But they’ll never make it to Salt Lake in time. They probably wouldn’t even agree to come. They’re pretty stubborn about how much they trust the government. Right?”

  Jacquelyn sighed heavily, knowing he was right.

  “And about your clients… There is not one damned thing you can do. It would have been unprofessional if you’d tried to get them to prepare.”

  “I know.” She slumped. “Of course, you’re right. But I’m worried for them.”

  “Sure. That’s who you are, but our kids are top priority now.”

  She sighed again, getting up off the stool. Tom continued, “That means getting out of here before things get too dangerous in the valley.”

  “All right. I’m on it. Thanks for listening.” She grabbed the list the Homestead had sent them. They needed to pack their food storage, guns, medicine, clothing and a hundred little things easily forgotten. The list went on for three tightly packed pages, but the task wasn’t overwhelming. Tom and Jacquelyn had gone over the list half-a-dozen times during their marriage and a lot of the stuff on the list was pre-packed and ready in black plastic t
otes.

  It took them half the day to get the truck and camper loaded. Jacquelyn hoped the list had been complete. Looking at her home, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she would never see it again. Tom came trudging out of the house in full military kit: gun belt, chest rig, bump helmet, magazines, handgun, and an AR-15 rifle in his hands. He scanned for threats as he crossed the front yard.

  Jacquelyn almost laughed, thinking that it was a little early for her neighborhood to be considered a “threat zone.”

  “Look who’s a badass now,” she joked. Tom was a member of the Homestead Quick Reaction Force, or QRF, and that meant he had done hundreds of hours of firearms training. Guns were a big part of Tom’s life, but Jacquelyn had never seen him in full kit. The part of her brain that clung to the world of parent-teacher conferences and talk therapy recoiled at his ultra-macho outfit. The other part of her brain, the one that had prepared for a disaster, and learned how to make cheese and to bottle apricots, pushed back, reminding her the stock market had crashed, two nukes had exploded, and big cities around the country had dissolved into chaos.

  Seeing Tom like this brought up all kinds of feelings. She knew her husband to be a competent man, repairing things around the house, fixing cars, building parts for his guns in his garage machine shop. She also knew him to be a dork. He rarely remembered to take out the trash on Wednesdays. He sang badly to the radio, usually screwing up the lyrics, and his personal hygiene left something to be desired. Unless she insisted, he neglected to cut his toenails, pluck his ear hairs and wear deodorant. In some ways, she thought of him as another one of her children.

  Soon, this man might be the only thing standing between her children and starvation. The thought sent a shiver down her spine. It wasn’t that Tom couldn’t protect them; she had it on good authority he was an excellent shooter. What terrified her was the slim margin between life and death that real calamity might bring. All her money was on Tom. He was Plan A, B and C. Never before had she been forced to so completely rely on her husband.