Black Autumn: A Post Apocalyptic Saga

by Jeff Kirkham

  The doctor shook his head, “I hear you, Alena. That’s what we would’ve done last week, but I think the drive down to the hospital in town would be riskier than the infection. I took a look this morning, and there were half-a-dozen fires between here and the hospital.”

  “So what’re we going to do about antibiotics? Do we have any here? And what about anesthesia?”

  “You’re going to laugh,” Larsen said. “We do have antibiotics here, but they’re all fish antibiotics.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

  “Nope, I checked them out myself before Ross started buying them in bulk. They work just like the pharmaceutical-grade stuff. Maybe there’s a bit of fish food in there, too,” Larsen joked, but Alena wasn’t in a joking mood.

  “And the anesthesia? You guys didn’t buy fish-grade anesthesia, too, right?”

  “Sorry, no,” Larsen answered, put in his place by the nurse. “But let’s not use anesthesia, anyway. Not for sutures, not anymore. Old boy over there,” he motioned to the cobbled-together exam table with the unhappy gentleman holding his bloody hand, “can get his stitches the old-fashioned way, a shot of whiskey and a leather bite-strop.”

  “You’re joking again, right?”

  “Not a joke.” Larsen smiled. “Whiskey’s right over there on the shelf.”

  “Seriously, Doctor Larsen, we’re not giving a patient whiskey,” Alena said flatly. “It’s a diuretic.”

  “Why don’t we let him decide? You need me to do the stitches?”

  “I can do them just fine, thank you, Doctor Larsen.” Alena turned to the shelf, looking for sutures. She found them, a plastic tub full of assorted sutures, all of them expired. What kind of person stocked up on sutures?

  • • •

  “Mr. Ross,” Alena said, stepping through the door in the Homestead office, interrupting Jason while he studied paperwork of some kind.

  “Mrs. James, I’m so glad you came by. I saw you stitching up Rodney. How’s he doing?”

  “He didn’t like getting fifteen stitches without anesthetic, I can tell you that.”

  “Did you offer him some booze, at least, before stitching him up?”

  “I did not,” Alena replied.

  Jason shrugged. “I’ll bet he thinks twice before he whittles toward himself again. We’re going to have to tear the corner off his Totin’ Chip.”

  “Excuse me? Tear up his what?”

  “Totin’ Chip. It’s a Boy Scout thing. What can I help you with? How’s our little infirmary?”

  “We’re doing fine. I wish we had anesthesia and about a hundred other things, but I’m frankly amazed at what you stockpiled in the first place.”

  Jason looked pleased. Stockpiling odd survival stuff had been his passion for years. The slimmest silver lining to this whole, dark mess was that his friends and family were enjoying the fruits of his obsession with stockpiling. A dozen times a day, someone approached Jason with a problem, and most of the time he had the perfect thing, squirreled away for just that moment.

  “Narcotics of any kind were much harder to come by, especially if one fancied staying out of jail.” Jason glanced at the paper he had been working on and caught himself. People before things, he reminded himself as he looked up and pulled the folder closed.

  Alena didn’t wait for an invitation to get to her point. “I’m sure you’re aware that your guards are shooting at people who’re doing nothing more than passing by, hiking in the mountains.”

  “Yes, I’m aware.” Jason heard her out.

  “I’d like to strenuously object to the military nature of this compound.” Alena warmed to her protest. “I believe we have a moral obligation to use force only if and when necessary. And I don’t think it’ll become necessary unless we start a war against the world around us. Your men are inclined to start a war.”

  Jason didn’t respond right away. In his experience, listening was generally cheap while making pronouncements was generally expensive. Especially, with Nurse Alena, he would err on the side of listening.

  To his surprise, Alena waited him out, forcing him to speak first. Jason proceeded cautiously. “Who would you think would be the best person here to make the decision when to employ force and when not to employ force?”

  He kicked the hot potato back to Alena, trying to keep her talking. One of Jason’s business habits had been to let his leaders control their “ten acres” without meddling. Jason and the committee could dictate desired outcomes, but then they would step back and allow the leaders on the ground to do their jobs. Micro-managing was like herding goldfish with a chopstick—a fool’s errand. Using influence instead of control might seem weaker to the neophyte, but influence always trumped control in the end, in Jason’s experience. Influence ended the moment a leader used control.

  At this point, Jason doubted he could control the military boys, even if he wanted to. Jeff Kirkham had a clear idea of how to run security and, as long as Jason got behind them, they would be friends. Jason had long ago decided that the only thing more stupid than trying to control people was trying to control a bunch of control freaks. Jason listened to Alena, but he had no intention of meddling with Jeff Kirkham and his men, no matter what they were doing. For one thing, Jason was scared shitless by the security threat probably coming their way―one million hungry, angry residents of Salt Lake City, Utah. He would not be screwing with Jeff Kirkham, no matter who complained.

  “I suggest that lethal force decisions be made by a committee that represents all the members, not just the military-minded.” Alena had thought this through. She wasn’t leaving him any room to dance around the issue.

  Jason steeled himself, forfeiting diplomacy for the moment. “You know this is how it’s done in the military, right? Officers give the orders and men follow them. Any obstruction of that process risks the entire Homestead. We don’t have a lot of soldiers to sacrifice before we get overrun. We can’t afford delays and we can’t afford mistakes.”

  Alena hit back ferociously, intelligently. “I know how it works. My husband is in the Army. Soldiers have rules of engagement. Maybe our country has rules of engagement because soldiers can’t be trusted to act without civilian oversight. Civilian oversight sounds like ‘best practice’ to me. Why wouldn’t we do the same?”

  She had made a strong point, but it didn’t matter. Jason’s fear of seeing his children dead or starving trumped anything she could throw at him. He saw no alternative but to level with her.

  “Alena, I need to admit something to you, something I hope you’ll keep between the two of us.”

  She nodded.

  “I believe we’re facing a fifty-fifty chance that both of us and our children will be dead this time next month.”

  Alena’s eyes widened; it was clearly not what she expected to hear.

  “I pray that I’m wrong,” Jason continued, “but look around you. I wasn’t wrong about society collapsing. I prepared for something horrible, and I’m willing to bet you and Robert had conversations about what a whacko I was for setting this up and dedicating so much money to preparing for the Apocalypse.” Her face gave away nothing. “You don’t have to admit it. My next guess, Alena, is that we’re going to see thousands of starving people pounding at our gates and it’s going to be soon. It’ll begin as a trickle, then it’ll become a flood. Word will spread that we have electricity. Someone will see lights up on the hill. Rumors will fly that we have plenty of food and water. People with nowhere to go will come to our gates.” Jason paused for effect. “They’ll be angry, and that anger will be directed at us―you and me and our children.”

  “How does that impact my suggestion that we set up reasonable rules of engagement?” Alena was no fool. She knew genuine emotion and conviction when she saw it. But she would never give up a point without a fight.

  “I’m telling you all this because I want you to know that I take your feelings on the matter seriously,” Jason said. “I truly do. But I also want you to kno
w that I’m not going to interfere with the men responsible for our security. In fact, I’m going to give them all the support I can. I will not second-guess their judgment.”

  The blood rose in Alena’s face. Jason felt the need to follow up with some emotional salve. “When it comes to the infirmary, I likewise respect your judgment.”

  Alena had no interest in being appeased. “Thank you for taking the time. I think you are wrong. Dead wrong. And, before this is over, you will have carelessly wasted human life. God save us all from men and their guns.” She did an about-face and plowed out of the office, leaving behind her a wake of fury.

  • • •

  Twenty-year-old Emily Ross did an inventory of her life as she gazed at the muzzle end of her Glock handgun. She tried to think of another moment when she had felt such crippling malaise.

  Perhaps she’d been this bored long distance swimming or training to do a half-Ironman with her dad. Counting a thousand strokes in the pool with nothing more to look at than pool tile… that had been pretty boring.

  Would anyone ever make music on iTunes again?

  She would kill for some Mumford and Sons right now. Like so many things in the Apocalypse, music was forbidden on guard duty. She would get in serious trouble if she didn’t pay absolute attention to the absolute nothing that was going on cross-canyon from her lookout post.

  They’d assigned her to watch the mountainside on the upper-north boundary of the Homestead. Every few minutes, she scanned the mountainside with her binoculars, looking for trespassers. She couldn’t put her tunes on because she had been ordered to listen for anyone sneaking up behind her, as though that was ever going to happen. She hadn’t seen a soul trespassing after many hours on duty.

  The edges of the Homestead were pocked with dank, little spider hole look-outs like the one she sat in now. At the onset of the collapse, before Emily made it home from med school, someone had dug these hidey-holes where two people could sit, spying for trespassers. She was assigned to “Position Eight North.” Someone had nailed a little sign on the lip of the six-by-six redwood shelf below the observation slit. The sign must have been there in case a guard forgot where he was. Since all the positions looked exactly the same, and since the guards were in the process of slowly going bonkers with boredom, such a precaution seemed sensible to Emily.

  Would anyone ever make a French macaroon again? Emily loved Paris. She had visited many times with her parents, basking in the precious neighborhoods of Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

  Emily shared Position Eight North with Don something-or-another. She didn’t know who decided it was a good idea to stick her in a dirt box with a guy as old as her dad. They couldn’t talk; that was also part of the rules, so the old man became a piece of background furniture to her, like the binoculars on the tripod or the shelf full of Meals Ready to Eat stacked in the corner.

  Right now, Don something-or-another snoozed in a camp chair against the dirt wall of the spider hole, his mouth gaping open. They alternated resting and scanning every thirty minutes for six endless hours until their shift change showed up. Their replacements would silently creep in the trenched backdoor of the hole, buried into the forest. The idea was to make it difficult for anyone to spot their location or observe the change of guard.

  Emily holstered her handgun, worried that Don Sleepyhead would crack an eye and see her looking down her gun barrel. It might freak him out.

  Amidst the boredom, Emily’s mind wandered to her friends. By her reckoning, every one of her friends right now must be living in terror. Either back east at Johns Hopkins or in Salt Lake City, every person she cared about outside her family must be facing a gut-wrenching doom. Most of her friends probably wouldn’t have begun to starve yet, but some would likely be hungry. More frightening, perhaps, would be the growing knowledge that their dreams for the future had, with the drop of a couple of bombs and the flip of a stock market, turned to ash.

  Why go on living in a world without a future?

  Emily didn’t consider herself the typical millennial. She’d listened to her dad carp on millennials for years—the same carping old men had done about young adults for eons of time. She begrudgingly admitted, though, that she and her peers had a problem with entitlement. They had grown up in a world that granted their every wish. They had felt loved and supported, winning shelves of participation trophies, and rarely experiencing the sting of their own failures.

  The new future, the one that loomed, demanded more work, more effort, and certainly more risk of failure than the world before. To say that this world demanded “more” effort was a gross understatement. If this Apocalypse stuck, millennials would be living in an alien environment, a world where they would die if they didn’t take care of their own needs.

  Like stock markets and housing markets had for centuries, the self-esteem market would also experience a correction. Emily could feel it happening at the Homestead itself; people were judged and esteemed based on the value they created. Nothing more; nothing less.

  Something about this new world scared Emily to death. And it excited her. She knew that she had always been an obsessive-compulsive value creator—a high achiever. After all, she had clawed her way into a top ten college for her undergrad degree and she had clawed her way into a top ten med school. Among entitled millennials, she stood out.

  None of her friends had been prepared for a world gone mad. They hadn’t run marathons like Emily, hardening their bodies and their minds. They hadn’t shadowed dozens of surgeries to prepare for med school. They hadn’t backpacked miles and miles in the backcountry, living out of their packs and summiting mountains. And they hadn’t gone to combat shooting schools to learn the oily charms of the AR-15 rifle.

  Emily had hung around Zach and the Ham Shack enough to know that the last couple of days had been brutal on the eastern seaboard. Even if her friends made it back to their hometowns, spread across the east and the south of the U.S., those populations were turning on themselves, going savage within mere days of the stock market crash.

  The big cities had reverted to barbarism with rampant murder, rape and looting. Emily felt certain that her friends from the big cities―Atlanta, D.C., New York and Philly―had made it out to their summer homes and family farms in the countryside. But the shortwave radio told of masses of desperate people flooding into rural areas, devouring everything in their path.

  Emily’s mind recalled pictures from the space station, where the city lights of the U.S. looked so beautiful, so festive from two-hundred-fifty miles in the sky. She remembered how the lights in the western U.S. spread apart, like a gauzy spider web. Back east, though, the lights crammed together, clumping into a solid blot of population, brighter and denser around the big cities and filling in almost every millimeter except for the Appalachian Mountains and a small spot over Maine. From the Mississippi River to the shores of the Atlantic, Americans lived tightly packed.

  Emily feared, if things kept devolving from order to chaos, Americans would die tightly packed as well. They were probably dying already. She wondered if any of her friends had died yet, and the thought sent a chill down her spine. She imagined Dotty, her vivacious roommate at Johns Hopkins, dead on the lawn of her parents’ summer home outside Baton Rouge. The terrifying thought made her reach for the reassuring heft of her Glock, as though the gun could put distance between herself and horror.

  The news from Europe, when it skipped across the ionosphere and fluttered down upon the huge antennas of the Homestead, could not be imagined. The horrors were too great. Europe had imploded into a charnel house. With the stutter-step of world markets, and the twin blasts of nuclear bombs, hard-core Muslims had gone berserk, overtaking helpless populations of city dwellers. All major cities in Western Europe were being overrun. Reports from Europe claimed that people were eating people. ISIS rose as the only surviving organization once government power vanished. Religious organizations in Europe had dissipated over the last twenty years, all except fo
r Islam. Now that a social gap appeared where any organized group had tremendous leverage, Islam became a powerhouse. ISIS was the organizational arm of Islam, and ISIS had been sitting on a plan for this moment for decades.

  Emily couldn’t accept the injustice. Europe had been so accommodating, so kind to Islamic refugees. Without exception, she and her friends considered Europe the front line of compassion, social welfare and forward thinking. But Europe had been the first to be consumed by savagery. How could that be?

  Emily shuddered and pushed the thoughts away. She pulled up her binoculars and began her scan of the dips and rises of the mountainside facing Position Eight North.

  Scan left to right. Bump down five degrees. Scan right to left. Bump down five degrees. Scan left to right.

  She settled into a rhythm. Thoughts of death and horror receded into her subconscious, gathering into a dark cloud that had no intention of abating.

  • • •

  The Avenues Cemetery

  Federal Heights, Salt Lake City, Utah

  “Woompf!” the Remington 30-06 thundered for the fourth time that morning.

  Four shots and three deer down. Jimmy couldn’t be more pleased with the results, even as he knew it couldn’t go on forever.

  After killing the doe in his neighborhood the night before, he had remembered the small deer herd living in the cemetery a few blocks up the street. With help from a couple of buddies from his ward elder’s quorum, Jimmy mounted an expedition to harvest as many deer as possible before the cemetery herd was killed off or headed for high ground. The herd of deer had probably lived in the local cemetery their whole lives, but Jimmy felt certain being hunted daily would send them to higher altitudes.

  He and his buddies returned home with three deer, enough to feed the neighborhood fresh meat at least for a couple of days. His previous concerns about the ward judging him for poaching had dissipated as other men jumped on board. Hunting made sense, and all thoughts of game laws and poaching disappeared like tales of old. In the eyes of the neighborhood, Jimmy rose to the level of a mythical figure. There would be another street barbecue this evening, and he would receive dozens of back slaps and high fives.