Black Autumn: A Post Apocalyptic Saga

by Jeff Kirkham

  Over the years, she had earned more than her fair share of the income. Tom treated her well. She couldn’t complain. But she felt like she was the smart one in the marriage. Most of the time, she felt like Tom had no idea what she even did during the day.

  Marrying him had been the right decision. Looking back, she loved the life they had cobbled together. But that was then, when the world made sense. Back then, when a kid was sick, the medical insurance would kick in. Back then, if they saw someone lurking in the neighborhood, they called the cops. Back then, if she and Tom weren’t getting along, she could go stay with her mother for a few days. Now all they had was each other.

  Tom walked around the truck, doing a last-minute mechanical check. When he reached the passenger door, he opened it.

  “You drive, please.” Jacquelyn slid across the bench seat and got behind the wheel. Before pulling the door closed, Tom laid his rifle across his lap, minding the muzzle and checking the kids in the back seat.

  Maybe in this new world, Tom was the ultimate breadwinner after all—a skilled protector and a man who understood how things worked. In any case, he was her man and she knew she could do a hell of a lot worse.

  She fired up the old truck and they rolled away from their family home of ten years. Tom had her go across town on side streets, and soon they began moving up the hill toward the Ross Homestead. They saw nothing more threatening in town than a few broken stop lights.

  • • •

  Ross Homestead

  Oakwood, Utah

  Jeff and Tara Kirkham arrived at the Homestead in their minivan, pulling a trailer stacked with supplies.

  As soon as he planted his family in the Homestead barracks, Jeff switched into full non-commissioned officer―“NCO” mode. He wasn’t going to wait around for a committee to decide the fate of his family. He would go to work and make it happen. At that moment, it meant burning up the phone lines.

  “Hey, Alec. What’s up, dude?”

  “Hey, Jeff. You ready for the end of the world?” Alec Hammer had spent the previous ten years as an Army Ranger and a CIA contractor.

  “Roger that,” Jeff replied. “I’m just waiting for you to get over here so we can spool up and get this party started.”

  “You at your place?”

  “Negative. I’ve got us set up in a hard point with a bunch of indigenous folks who we’ll need to run through their paces. Are you ready to get to work?”

  Alec took it in. “Are you serious? Do you really have a plan for this?”

  “Affirmative,” Jeff replied. “Why are we still talking about it? Grab your wife and your gear and get over here. I’ll text the address. Write it down in case comms go south.”

  Alec continued, “Yeah, I was just kitting up. I thought I’d call a few guys and maybe get together… figure out a nice little farm somewhere we could vacation for a few weeks.”

  “I got something like that going on up here in Oakwood. It’s a bunkered-up community of survival types with a shit-ton of food, water and solar. They’re welcoming Special Operations Forces guys with open arms. You bring the gun; they bring the grub sort of thing. Operators and their families. You in?”

  “Hell, yeah, I’m in. Let me call a few guys and I’ll put together some more dudes. You good with that?”

  “Yep. We’ll take all Tier One and Two operators plus anyone with legit combat experience. Combat-experienced Marines too. SEALs. Air Force Para-rescue. TACPs. Of course, Rangers and Green Berets. I’ll take as many shooters as you can muster.”

  “I’m on it. Text me the address and I’ll start sending you resumes.”

  “Don’t bother waiting for my say so. If you think they’re good, I’ll take them.”

  “Okay. I’ll come up with my wife tomorrow morning, hopefully with a bunch of other guys. I’ll see you tomorrow, Master Sergeant.”

  “See you then.” Jeff hung up.

  After a half-dozen calls like that, Jeff was satisfied that he could bring in at least a dozen SOF veterans. That would make up the core of what he wanted: a two-hundred-man army. Training the civilians would take some time and he would have to pull men from somewhere other than just the Homestead. The Homestead had some good enough shooters—they had been training for years—but they only had around a hundred people who were gun-capable and Jeff admitted to himself that a good chunk of them weren’t going to be worth a damn in combat, at least not at first.

  He anticipated that a lot of the Homestead men would crumple at the sudden change of lifestyle. Going from cushy modern society to living in the dirt and eating weird food would flip the “depression switch” on a lot of folks. For some, it would be permanent. Other guys would fold under combat stress, and the vast majority would struggle at the moment of pulling the trigger, if it came to that. But all that was de rigueur for a Green Beret. He had trained indigenous fighters all around the world and the same factors applied to men everywhere.

  Jeff recalled his earliest training as a Green Beret—learning that all animals have a strong aversion to killing their own kind. Even rattlesnakes and piranha elect to posture when fighting rather than killing members of their own species. Likewise, all men have a deep-seated resistance to aiming their rifles at one another and pulling the trigger. In his book, On Killing, the author collected data from wars throughout history and less than fifteen percent of soldiers would fire their weapons at the enemy in the heat of battle. That resistance to killing could be trained out of men, but it would take time and ammo. At the end of the day, Jeff figured he would be lucky if he could get thirty actual shooters out of the hundred or so citizen gun owners of the Homestead.

  With ten or fifteen SOF guys, he would multiply his ability to train men. Green Berets would be ideal, since they had been trained to train local fighters—but he would take any military operator. At the very least, the operators could lead platoons.

  Jeff watched a fat guy in a stretched-tight polo shirt make a beeline for him across the Homestead lawn. It wasn’t anyone Jeff had met before. The guy walked up, his hand thrust out.

  “Hello. I’m Doctor Frank Hodges.”

  “Hey, I’m Jeff Kirkham.”

  “Good to meetcha. I take it you’re part of the club thing they’ve got going here, right? What do you do for a living?”

  Doctor Hodges was working hard on making conversation. Jeff wasn’t up for “making friends and influencing people” right then, but he didn’t want to be rude, either. “I used to shoot people for a living. Now I just think about it a lot.” Okay, maybe he was willing to be a little rude.

  “Really?” The doctor laughed nervously. “Were you in the military?”

  “Yeah, I’m a former Green Beret.”

  The doctor laughed, coughing like a sputtering two-stroke engine. “Well, I’m a physician. More of a plastic surgeon, to be honest. I actually spend more time selling creams and ointments than I do slicing people up. But a doctor’s a doctor, I guess, and they invited us here. I live right down the street. Heck, maybe you can teach me to shoot sometime.”

  Jeff noted the man’s loose skin and his willowy arms before answering. “Yeah, we’ll see what comes up when we have some time to work on shooting. Won’t you be needed in the infirmary?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” The doctor deflated a little. “I’ve always meant to learn to shoot. I have a couple of Sig Sauer handguns, but I haven’t had a chance to shoot them yet. I’m guessing now, without work, we’ll have a lot of time for stuff like that.”

  Jeff thought the exact opposite. He thought they would be working harder than ever before, scraping for every minute of sleep they could scrounge. This doctor guy must figure the collapse would be like an extended camping trip, roasting marshmallows over a campfire singing Boom Chicka Boom and other Boy Scout favorites. If this was the kind of guy he’d be making into a fighter, he’d rather work with Iraqi teenagers. At least they knew enough to be scared.

  “Well, Doc, I got to get going. The Apocalypse isn’t going to
un-fuck itself.”

  The doctor cut loose with the two-stroke-engine laugh again. “Okay, Mister-Sergeant Kirkham,” he shot Jeff a mock salute, “we’ll be seeing you around the compound.”

  “Yeah.” Jeff turned and walked toward the office wing of the big house. Doctor Hodges glanced about, looking to find someone else to glad-hand.

  • • •

  Ross Homestead Ham Shack

  Oakwood, Utah

  Jason Ross stopped by the Ham Shack, tucked into the forest by the new ponds. A simplex ham radio call was scheduled with his brother-in-law Tommy, and Jason was dying to put some worries to rest.

  Built inside a pimped-out shipping container, the Ham Shack barely fit a pair of desks, two guys and the rack of radio equipment. Zach, the head radio operator for the Homestead, was listening to a pirate radio news show that had sprung up on the shortwave bands. Never before had either of them heard anyone “hack” shortwave radio with a pirate broadcast. Fear of the Federal Communications Commission always halted such mischief, but things were slipping all across the gamut of government.

  “What the heck is this?” Jason cocked his head as the pirate radio announcer cussed up a storm over the airwaves.

  “Oh, hey, Jason.” Zach turned the radio volume down a notch. “This guy apparently stole an Army Humvee radio rig from Fort Bliss in El Paso and he’s running around the Southwest broadcasting the truth about the collapse. He says he’s gathering info from military personnel that are part of an online community called ‘Drinkin’ Bros’.”

  “Okay, let’s keep track of this guy. Are you set for the simplex call with my brother-in-law?”

  “Sure. I’ve got it all set up right here.” Zach turned off the shortwave receiver and fired up his ham set.

  With any luck, tonight they would confirm Tommy’s location—hopefully somewhere far away from Phoenix where Tommy and his family lived. Jason’s last phone call with him painted a bleak picture of Phoenix, as though three million people had awakened that morning in a panic and realized there wasn’t any water.

  The shelves of the Ham Shack were loaded up like gizmo heaven. Black boxes, digital read-outs, big knobs and red LEDs all bounced a weird glow off Zach. With cell networks now teetering on the brink of oblivion, these ancient ham technologies would be the only threads holding the modern world together.

  Reaching out to Jason’s brother-in-law was job one today. The cell phone networks had already begun to collapse in rural pockets and now they were showing signs of strain, even in suburban Salt Lake City. Jason could still make a cell connection in the Valley, but his son traveling through Washington and his brother-in-law in northern Arizona had both fallen off the cell network.

  Over years of preparation, ham radio had taken over Homestead communications. Security teams operating for the Homestead needed a bullet-proof way to communicate. Consumer radios weren’t reliable in the mountains, so Jason had prepared a more powerful option: ham radio handsets.

  The Homestead sat within walking distance of over a million people, most of whom would grow hungry, then angry, in a collapse. Locating a bug-out location in the suburbs penciled out to a tremendous risk and it worried Jason sick. But the advantages of staying close to the city had been considerable: a distant bug-out location might have been impossible to reach in a crisis. The freeway coursing across the Salt Lake Valley already looked like a serpentine parking lot with cars barely moving. How would people with ranches in the mountains reach them without roads?

  In the collapse of Argentina in 1998, the remote farms and ranches had seen the worst criminal atrocities anywhere. Marauders had known they could subjugate isolated homesteads at their leisure and that’s exactly what they had done, with rape and atrocities becoming commonplace in the Argentine countryside.

  In many ways, bugging in instead of bugging out made sense near a city the size of Salt Lake. The Homestead had amassed a couple of hundred members, including the warfighters, doctors, solar experts, gardeners, beekeepers and mechanics. Being close to town had its advantages and the easy-to-reach location made it possible to build a well-staffed hard target. Still, Jason had to wonder: would the gamble pay off?

  Jason listened while Zach called to Tommy on the ham. “KF7UCL is monitoring and listening for a call.”

  Immediately, Tommy responded on the first pre-arranged frequency for that day. “KF7UCL, this is W2ADL mobile near Gray Mountain, north of Flagstaff returning. This is Tommy. Back to you, KF7UCL.”

  They had made contact via UHF, even though Tommy’s automotive ham radio was relatively small. At the Ross Homestead, they were pounding out two thousand watts on a multi-band beam antenna. Even so, the ionosphere had to be just right to make the simplex connection, especially on the first try.

  Earlier, Jason tried a cell call to both Tommy and Cameron and got no love. That came as no surprise because Tommy was driving the “back way” into central Utah across the east side of the Wasatch Mountain Range. There were more dead spots there than the dark side of the Moon, even in the best of times.

  “W2ADL, this is Zach, Oakwood, Utah. Reading you four by nine. Location received. Cameron’s location is Cajon Pass, California. Relay travel conditions. Back to you.”

  “KF7UCL, you are five nine. Copy that: Cameron location Cajon Pass. Travel conditions very heavy but steady. Proceeding on Highway 89 to your location. Give my love to Jenna. Over.”

  There was no need to extend the conversation, especially since the ham frequencies had been bursting with traffic over the last day. The traffic would definitely slow down as repeaters went offline and batteries began to die, but that might take weeks or even months.

  “Thank you and safe travels, W2ADL. KF7UCL over and QRT.” Zach finished the transmission with Jason standing over his shoulder.

  Jason patted Zach on the shoulder and headed back into the sunshine. At least one worry could be crossed off his list.

  • • •

  It had taken Jeff Kirkham about an hour to find the Beringer camp. In the end, it was the sound of human voices that pegged their location. Just as Jason described, the Beringers had set up a wilderness camp that looked like a junkyard—tents surrounded by ramshackle structures made out of pallets covered with rotting tarps.

  Glassing through the trees with his binoculars, it was hard to tell how many people inhabited the camp. Jeff figured eight families had holed up in the canyon bottom. The place crawled with women and children.

  With that many dependents, he needed to rethink his strategy. Without a doubt, the Beringers couldn’t be allowed to remain this close to the Homestead. Conflict would be unavoidable, especially after the Homestead solidified its defensive perimeter. These yokels would be chasing game all over the mountain, leading to his guys shooting at them, and then all-out war. If war was inevitable, Jeff wanted to strike first.

  Before he had gone to Laos with the Green Berets, Jeff attended a school taught by the CIA on “Asymmetrical Warfare,” which he discovered was a military euphemism for “fighting dirty.”

  One of the things he had been taught was how to weaken an enemy encampment through the use of necrotic matter, either human or animal. Surprisingly, decomposing corpses aren’t particularly lethal, since the natural process of decomposition generates few pathogens. A rotting intestine, however, carries pathogens that can manifest similar to the stomach flu, especially in young people.

  Jeff ran his binos along the Beringers’ apparent water supply. A small creek ran within spitting distance of the encampment. Likely, they were filtering their water to some degree, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop a steady exposure to coliform bacteria.

  Ross and the rest of the civilians would never approve of using a pathogen to remove a rival group, especially considering these people were camping on their own land. But Jeff wouldn’t tolerate a threat this close to his family.

  He had seen a dead porcupine on his way to recon the Beringer camp. Thirty minutes later, Jeff returned and dumped the co
rpse of the porcupine in the creek about a half-mile above the Beringers. He carefully cut the bloated stomach cavity, making a small slit in the lowest section of the intestine. The contents of the gut would dribble out for days. He carefully covered the dead animal with rocks and branches, hiding it from all but the most careful search.

  After Jeff felt satisfied that his “biological weapon” was well-concealed and faithfully leaking pathogens into the creek, he policed up the tarp he had used to carry the stinking animal, wadded it into a ball and stuffed it into his kit.

  As he climbed out of the canyon, returning silently to Homestead land, Jeff smiled at his subterfuge. The dead animal wasn’t the perfect weapon—careful water purification would defeat even the nastiest bacteria. But his observation of the camp convinced Jeff these folks weren’t the tight-and-tidy types. If their water purification was anything like their sloppy camp craft, a lot of E.coli would make it into their food and water supply. With a little luck, an onslaught of mysterious diarrhea would convince the group to relocate their camp elsewhere.

  Jeff liked winning a fight “the easy way” and he smiled all the way back to the Homestead.

  • • •

  Highway 275

  Norfolk, Nebraska

  Chad Wade, former Navy SEAL, was nine-hundred-twenty miles from his home in Salt Lake City when the power went out. He had been traveling the Midwest, visiting ReadyMan members and checking on his little girl in Omaha.

  A restless soul, Chad enjoyed wandering the Earth in his Jeep doing good deeds. He was like David Carradine in the show Kung Fu. The endless cornfields of the American middle country gave him time to think and rest his frenetic mind.