by Jeff Kirkham
“Fuck you,” Francisco countered, glossing over the threat. “I’ll give your men guns and ammunition, half a semi-load of food, and one hundred bottles of hard liquor. That’s my final offer.”
Aleki considered the deal, curling his lip. “Who’d we be fighting?”
“Do you really care?” Francisco challenged, knowing the Polys were a warrior clan and they would relish any chance to do battle.
“Not really,” Aleki chuckled. “I might want to know if we were going to fight the army or police or something.”
“We’ll be fighting white people—rich white people. Stupid people. Can you handle that?”
Aleki waved away the question. “Okay. Half a semi of food, guns for all hundred of my men and a hundred and fifty bottles of booze.” He stood up from the bench.
“Okay. Let’s do it.” The men shook hands, reaching across the bloodless body of Digger.
14
[Collapse Plus Thirteen - Sunday, Oct. 2nd]
Shortwave Radio 7150kHz 1:00am CST
“…KELLEY BARRACKS IN STUTTGART, GERMANY is still holding out. They killed a bunch of ISIS fighters trying to rush the base gate. But they’re running out of food now, so keep them in your prayers if you’re into that.
“Here’s a weird story: Jennifer Watts, a Drinkin’ Bro-ette off of Galveston, Texas radioed in from a flotilla of boats all tied together in the Gulf of Mexico. They can’t make landfall because of the gangs out of Houston, so they’re just drifting around, eating whatever fish they can catch. A cargo ship carrying produce out of Brazil called in yesterday and I think I’ve got it on a rendezvous course with the flotilla. I’m like the Tinder of hungry people now, using ham radio to hook up grub to girls and girls to grub.
“Strange days. This is not what I thought I’d be doing when I grew up…”
Ross Homestead
Oakwood, Utah
Jeff awoke from a dark dream to knocking at his door. He grappled with a maelstrom of emotion as the nightmare faded. It was one of those dreams that felt like a portent, heavy with apprehension and malignancy, a harbinger of ill fate.
In the nightmare, Jeff had been fighting a Norse battle with a shortsword in his hand. He was losing, surrounded by death, but still slashing and hacking his way through the enemy. He felt the deceptively painless sensation of razor-sharp cuts, draining him. Life slipped away with each slice. His consciousness ebbed. His family drifted farther and farther away. He grew slower, less able to parry the blades of the enemy. His feet mired in sludge. His arms hung heavy.
The knocking finally dragged him free from the nightmare. Rarely did anyone wake up earlier than Jeff. He and Tara had moved into a guest suite in the big house. They were finally getting some uninterrupted sleep.
Jeff grabbed a t-shirt from his cluttered nightstand and answered the door in his underwear. It was Walter Ross, another committee member. “Something’s up. There’s an emergency meeting in the office.”
“Hold on a moment.” Jeff closed the door, leaving Walter standing in the foyer. With a big gulp of air, Jeff realized he had been holding his breath, fearing bad news about his son. He figured the emergency meeting would wait for him to brush his teeth, so he made short work of it. He grabbed sweats, running socks and running shoes and headed out the door barefoot.
As soon as he exited the suite, closing the door softly so as not to wake Tara or the kids, Walter filled him in. “Tim Masterson is dead. Someone shot him in front of his house last night. Do you know anything about that?” Walter looked crosswise at Jeff as they walked down the gallery, heading for the office wing.
Obviously, Jeff would be the prime suspect. Killing Masterson made sense. Jeff probably should have killed him, but he hadn’t. “I didn’t kill him,” Jeff answered.
“Well, the assumption is that one of our men killed him. So the next question is, did you order it?”
“No, I did not.”
“Be prepared to answer those questions again…” Walter opened the office wing door and showed Jeff in. About three-quarters of the committee were already there, milling around, agitated.
“Let’s get started. Everyone please find a seat,” Jason Ross started the meeting. “Tim Masterson from the Cherry Harvest Ward is dead, shot in front of his house last night, apparently from a long-range rifle shot. I’m guessing the neighborhood suspects we had something to do with it.”
“Well, did we?” Burke Ross interrupted.
Everyone looked at Jeff. “I didn’t kill him, and I didn’t order him killed.”
The faces in the room showed one of two reactions—either relief or doubt. Because of Jeff’s background with clandestine government activities, almost everyone believed Jeff played games with information, that he wasn’t to be trusted. The group saw him as something of a spook, and it showed in their expressions.
“I’m only going to say this one more time. I didn’t kill Masterson nor did I order it or even suggest it. I probably should have killed him because that asshole was well on his way to compromising our safety. But I didn’t.” The room sat in silence for a long minute.
“Well,” Jason broke the silence, “does anyone have anything they want to add to that?”
Nobody spoke. The relief in the room was palpable. Even if Jeff was lying, the murder wouldn’t be on their collective conscience. They could deny involvement.
“This is going to make it hard with the Elk Ridge Ward and the stake president,” Burke Ross spoke up. “They’re already dragging their feet about working with us. This will throw them into even more confusion. With all the guns on the mountain right now and in the streets, there’s no way they can pin this on us. But they will suspect us, and that’ll make them slow to cooperate.”
Jeff shook his head. “Right now they’re worth less than tits on a hog. Almost all their guys who we had been training left to train with Masterson. We’re not losing anything we haven’t already lost. We’re working around the problem as we speak.
“We’ve got bigger issues than those bozos,” Jeff continued. “Half of our own men are falling apart. I’ve got men pretending to be sick and staying in bed all day. I’ve got other men moping around barely doing their jobs. I have one guy who didn’t show up for drill yesterday because his dog got something in its eye. Yesterday, we were running react-to-contact drills in the forest, and we found Brad Townsend’s seventeen-year-old kid with his pistol in his mouth getting ready to blow his brains out. I’ve never had to deal with men suffering from a case of Blue Mondays like this before. Can somebody please fix this before I have to start shooting people for dereliction of duty?”
“They’re depressed,” Walter Ross interjected. “It’s a horrible world.”
“Of course they’re depressed,” Jeff fired back, “but I’m about fifty percent convinced that we’re being probed by a serious enemy force. If even one guy on perimeter duty misses someone sneaking across the line because he’s butt-hurt over God ordering up the Apocalypse, we’re all going to die.”
“What makes you think we’re being probed?” Walter Ross asked.
“That group of Hispanics we killed the other day. They had a couple of radios on them. And they weren’t using them to listen to AM 440 Mexican Radio.” The implication settled heavy on the group.
Jeff went on. “Morale is a serious issue. People have lost wars throughout history because men got in a funk. I’ll teach our men to defend this place, but you guys…” Jeff pointed his finger at everyone in the room, and his finger came to rest on Jason Ross, “you guys need to fix this problem. I need men who’ll do exactly what they’re told, no matter if their dog has something in its eye or not.”
Walter Ross spoke up first, “We’ll get on it.”
If anyone disagreed with Jeff, they weren’t saying it. The committee launched into solution mode. There were nine members plus spouses. Every committee member had an area of responsibility, but many of those areas, such as livestock, gardening or stored food, were non-critical at t
he moment. Right now, it would be all hands on deck. Whatever qualms the members had about Jeff’s warmongering were put aside for the time being, at least in the committee.
Rich Orton, the livestock guy, waded in. “I think we need to break out some booze. I know we’re hanging onto it for trade, but burned-out guys are probably more dangerous than drunk guys.”
“No way,” Jeff said. “Alcohol ain’t going to help.”
“Hear me out,” Rich fired back at Jeff. “The guys are worse off than you know. They’re talking a bunch of shit behind your back. They’re near their breaking point. Training, patrol and perimeter duty are exacting more of a toll than you know. You’re about to lose them. I’m hearing a lot of guys saying crap like, ‘I’d rather die than live like this.’”
“Fucking civilians…” Jeff was getting angrier by the second.
“We can fix this,” Rich recovered the conversation. “Just let me handle it. We’ll get them a little drunk tonight. We’ll play some music. We’ll eat some meat… I’ll kill a goat today and we’ll roast it up. We’re almost ready to supply hot water to the outdoor showers. Let’s bust out some shampoo and maybe even hand out some condoms. Nobody’s doing bam-bam in the ham. Did you know that? Everyone’s so jacked in the head, it’s like we’re living in a labor camp some days. We need to remind everyone what we’re fighting for, that life’s worth the stretch.”
“So, Jeff,” Jason interjected, “are these guys—the ones who’re dragging ass—are they going to come around? Are they going to pull it together eventually?”
“Most of them will, yes, if we aren’t killed first.”
The meeting ended soon thereafter. Jeff doubled back to Jason’s office. When he poked his head in the door, Jason was staring out the French doors, looking over the neighborhood.
“Jason,” Jeff interrupted. “Seriously. Between you and me, I didn’t have Masterson smoked.”
“I believe you,” Jason said.
“So did you order him shot?” Jeff asked the question and cocked his head. As unlikely as it seemed, he had to ask.
Jason looked straight in Jeff’s eyes. “No.” The pause lingered.
“Okay, then.” Jeff said, “I guess we can chalk it up to the gods of Olympus smiling upon us. I’m heading to check on Leif.”
Jason turned back to the window.
• • •
Holiday Inn
Rawlins, Wyoming
Chad held Samantha’s little hand so she wouldn’t trip down the rough-scrabble stairs of the Holiday Inn. It felt like holding on to the last bit of clean and pure in this jacked-up world. Chad knew he could live with this dirty feeling he was packing around inside. He had done it before. It hadn’t been the first pile of human bodies he’d seen.
Now that he had successfully raided the distribution center, his family supposedly had an airplane ride to Salt Lake. The price for four plane tickets had been seven human lives.
The deal he’d made with the devil had put Chad very close to making good on his promise to his father-in-law: to get Audrey and Sam to safety. For all he knew, Audrey’s dad, Robert, moldered somewhere in Omaha, dead and discarded by the onward slog of the vicious.
Ain’t that just like life: do something noble and get repaid with a shit sandwich. Well, at least Chad wasn’t buried in a shallow grave in the sand of Wyoming like those seven folks from the Walmart. At least he had won the contest, like always.
His little group looked like a family―Chad, Audrey and Samantha. To keep matters simple and civil, they had left it at that. Nobody needed to know that Audrey had divorced him.
The town of Rawlins served daily breakfast in the town square around the Carbon County Courthouse. Chad guessed the population of Rawlins fell just under ten thousand. Rock Springs numbered two-and-a-half times that, which might actually make it harder for Rock Springs to regroup and counter-attack. Once a city hit a certain number of souls, maintaining organization and civil order became impossible, the big town unable to feed everyone and maintain the peace. Say what you want about Mayor Spears, he had kept this town in one piece. By the look of things at the community breakfast, the town had marshaled resources and pulled together. If Chad had parachuted into the scene, he would have thought it was a town holiday.
His family needed to eat breakfast, otherwise Chad would have avoided the townspeople altogether. Picturing a bunch of people slapping him on the back for the Walmart massacre sent chills down his spine.
He needed to firm up plans with the mayor for his flight out. Hopefully, Mayor Spears hadn’t sold him a load of crap. That would be the height of stupidity, considering what he had hired Chad to do. Only a fool double-crossed a mercenary. Chad saw the mayor across the lawn and made a beeline for him. Along the way, he awkwardly took in a dozen back slaps and hoo-rahs. It made Chad want to climb out of his skin.
“The man of the hour.” Mayor Spears met Chad half-way across the lawn and shook his hand.
“Thank you,” Chad said. “I wish it’d gone down better than it did.”
“We won, didn’t we?”
“That depends on whether you wanted to start a war with Rock Springs. I’m afraid you’ve got one now.”
The mayor raised his red Solo cup of orange juice. “That is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. We need someone like you to help us defend our town and our food supply.”
Chad exhaled loudly. This was what he had dreaded. If Rawlins had been willing to screw Rock Springs, they could be willing to screw Chad Wade. “Mr. Mayor, are you able to fly us to Salt Lake City?”
“Of course. Of course we’re able. But I wanted you to take a day or two to think about my offer. You stay here and run the defense of our town―military training, building fortifications, and helping us keep the Walmart warehouse. In exchange, your family will be well-fed and protected. It’s a win-win deal.”
“Okay,” Chad replied after thinking for a moment, “I’ll consider it. But I want to know you’re dealing in good faith. I’d like to see the plane and meet the pilot.”
“Certainly.” The mayor thrust out his hand. “You can’t blame us for falling in love with you and your little family.”
Chad accepted the handshake. Just touching the mayor’s hand felt like consenting to a communicable disease. Damned politicians. It was always a mind-fuck with those guys.
• • •
Salt Lake County Fairgrounds
Salt Lake City, Utah
Francisco stared out the window of his luxury motorhome. A Latino woman, probably Mexican, carried two buckets of brown water from the Jordan River. A little boy followed, stopping occasionally to squat down to look at rocks or bugs, then scampering to catch up.
This could be a scene from Ciudad Juarez in the early eighteen hundreds. We have regressed more than a hundred years in two weeks, Francisco thought, watching the woman.
The history of the moment weighed on him. This land, which he had begun to think of as “Northern Mexico,” would be defined by great men who rode a wave of power to justice.
Francisco didn’t think of his father very often. His papa had died before Francisco became a man—taken by an industrial accident at the recycling center where he worked. When Francisco became a great man—a great revolutionary—his father would be proud.
Again, it felt like the Fates touched the chords of his mind. The import of this moment resonated in his soul. Francisco had been placed here, with an army at his command, like Francisco Pancho Villa. He knew he possessed the vision and the intellect to accomplish something historical. The decisions he made now would make history, perhaps for all time.
Someone knocked, the RV door rattling.
“Come in.”
Bastardo, the lieutenant he had placed over the fairgrounds, entered the RV with another man behind him. “Buenos dias, Jefe. This is Alberto Romero. He’s a maintenance manager for the Jordan Valley Water Company.”
The men shook hands, an interesting exchange because, two weeks ag
o, a respected man like Romero probably wouldn’t have been caught dead with a felon like Francisco.
“Señor Romero brought me some ideas about what we can do to improve the conditions for our people. We have some problems that are causing people to leave.”
“What kind of problems?” Francisco grew impatient. How could minor problems with the camp compete with planning the upcoming offensive against Oakwood? But Francisco respected Bastardo’s opinion, and he owed him consideration.
Alberto Romero answered, “The Jordan River collects almost all the surface pollutants from the Salt Lake Valley. People here are drinking the raw sewage of everyone defecating near every stream, river and canal in all of Salt Lake. Almost everyone drinking water out of the Jordan River is sick here, no matter how much we filter or boil it, because the water is heavily polluted. We would have to fully distill it to make it close to safe, and distillation requires an enormous amount of fuel and effort.”
Bastardo chimed in because he could see Francisco becoming frustrated with the bad news.
“Francisco, we’re also running out of wood to boil water or cook food. We’ve torn down every wood building on the fairgrounds and all the homes around us. I’ve done an inventory of our food and we have about two weeks’ supply of food. We’re feeding about three thousand people right now. So far, the caca still goes down the toilets, but I don’t know how long the toilets will keep working. Mister Romero says the sewage will soon start to back up and overflow.”
Romero, used to being the expert, continued with the thought without allowing Francisco to comment. “The sewage is already backing up in parts of the city, and that’s partially why the Jordan River’s more polluted than normal.”
“So what do you suggest?” Francisco interrupted. He wanted solutions, not problems.
“I recommend you abandon this camp,” Romero said.
“Hijo de puta,” Francisco swore. “Where would we go?”
