Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  Sage moved up to a large sagebrush and nestled into the heart of the branches, a hundred twigs jabbing his skin. He ignored them and arranged the execution of Justin and his companions with no chance of failure. The rifle was rock-steady, anchored against the trunk of the bush.

  Sage clicked off the safety, committing himself to the honesty of killing, the siren song of Mother Nature. He settled the crosshairs on the center of Justin’s back.

  Then he squeezed.

  Blaire Street, McKenzie, Tennessee

  Mat and William stood atop the crappiest HESCO barrier Mat had ever seen, the terrier alongside. Mat drank a mug of coffee, graciously supplied by the town to their newest favored sons. Two tides had flowed together in the currents of human bonding between Mat Best and the town of McKenzie: grief and gratitude. Mat was both a figure worthy of sympathy and a figure worthy of grace, as Mat held the military knowledge that might save them all. A dead girlfriend and a lethal threat turned Mat and William from intruders into honored guests.

  The coffee mug and the morning mist lulled Mat into thoughts of combat in Iraq. The low-lying mists of the late Kentucky fall enshrouded the rolling grasses, shooting skyward where distant refugee camps burned their morning fires, the tendrils of smoke punctuating the otherwise benign fog, slightly off-color and dangerous.

  He remembered Master Sergeant Menendez, the hardened warfighter who had taken Mat under his wing during Mat’s first deployment to Iraq. The sergeant had died in Mat’s arms on his second deployment, coughing blood onto Mat’s fatigues after a bullet slid underneath Menendez’s body armor and perforated both lungs.

  Over more deployments than Mat knew, Menendez fought Al Qaeda like a savage. At the same time, Menendez brewed beautiful coffee. The cup in Mat’s hand couldn’t compare with the slightly-fruity, Ethiopian blend Menendez would share with Mat and no one else. While delicious, the Ethiopian coffee hadn’t changed Mat’s life. It was Menendez’s stumpy warfighter’s hands on the plunger of the French press that Mat would never forget—the picture of those hands worked its way into Mat’s soul like yeast in bread.

  Each morning, with the mist still covering Mosul and their morning physical training behind them, Mat and Menendez would fade away from the team and drift back to a nook in the forward operating base where they kept their beans, grinder, and press. While Menendez hand-ground the beans, Mat—the bushido apprentice—fired up the stove and boiled water in a weather-worn aluminum camping pot that had long ago lost its percolator cap. With the water just north of boiling and the beans ground to shavings the precise width and breadth of a grain of sand on the beaches of the Euphrates River, Menendez poured hot water down the side of the press with sufficient velocity to churn the grounds without need of a spoon. After four minutes, the grinds would sufficiently engorge with water, allowing the screen of the press to pass through the darkening brew.

  Menendez’s hands cupped one another and cupped the plunger in turn, like a father blessing the head of an infant child. Patiently, he coaxed the screen downward through the press, taking more time than the operation probably required, enjoying the final moment before the coffee poured.

  Mat could see those hands, scarred, scraped, and veined from ten thousand hours wrapped around barbells, working explosives, and manipulating the unforgiving edges of weapons of war.

  When those two hands cupped one another and the plunger—the grace of power restrained—Mat understood the purpose of war in a way that would open like a flower over the years that he would spend killing men. Mat would awaken, petal by petal, to an understanding that killing without grace brought only death. Killing with bushido protected life.

  As he prepared to kill again, standing on a HESCO barrier in western Tennessee, Mat sipped his coffee and remembered Menendez.

  He and Will hadn’t had time to grieve Caroline. In war, one rarely does. The town needed Mat’s leadership, as the first groups of desperate refugees and vicious gangbangers had already begun to run up against the feeble defenses of McKenzie. If the town were to survive, he would have to set his grief aside and teach the people how to defend themselves.

  The town had cobbled together several miles of deer fence—wire mesh with four inch gaps. When wired together, they wouldn’t hold sand like a military HESCO bastion, but they would hold lumber. McKenzie had a lumber yard just outside of town, along with a fleet of front-end loaders and backhoes. At Mat’s direction, they filled the hasty HESCO cages—six feet thick and six feet tall—with trees, cut lumber and anything else they could throw in the HESCOs to give them weight and stopping-power. Mat doubted anything other than a tank could punch through. Climbing over would prove difficult, slowing any attack.

  Mat had already improved the town’s roadblocks with Z-shaped concrete passages, using every concrete barrier in and around town. Mat placed overwatch shooters to back up the roadblocks. Then he started on the HESCOs, walling in the fields and forests around the town to give security to their flanks. Little by little, the defenses took the shape of an FOB, Forward Operating Base, like a walled city of the Dark Ages.

  They had been forced to divide their defenses, building another HESCO wall around the pig farm outside of town. McKenzie would keep a small garrison at the pig farm and swap men out every couple of days. Additionally, Mat spent a few hours each day training a Quick Reaction Force with their best weapons to respond to an attack anywhere along the wall or at the pig farm.

  The town pooled its firearms, and Mat figured he could field almost five hundred men and women with some sort of firearm in a pinch, more than half of them retirement-age men. The town had extremely limited ammunition, since nobody had stockpiled and because the town was too small for a gun shop. He would have to train them without live ammunition.

  Mat sipped his coffee, the morning chill and the dark aroma combining in existential perfection.

  Maybe tomorrow he would look for a French press in town. The boy should see Mat’s hands on the plunger. Like Caroline, Mat’s own life was anything but a foregone conclusion, especially with many weeks of killing still ahead. He might die and, if he did, he would like to leave William with something to remember him.

  Mat would kill Americans this time. He would kill criminals, but he would also kill desperate citizens, the kind of people who had paid taxes and registered to vote; the very people he had fought to protect by killing Al Qaeda. Mat would kill outside the HESCO walls of McKenzie, and maybe inside the HESCO walls as well. He would kill those Americans to protect the people of his town, but he would mostly kill them to protect the boy standing beside him.

  “Gallantly will I show the world that I am a specially selected and well-trained soldier.”

  After Mat had found a French press, and after many repetitions of the slow grinding and steeping ritual, he hoped to prove with his hands that it had mattered that Caroline had lived. Mat would wordlessly share that Will was Mat’s ultimate act of bushido, a warrior’s firm and gentle touch on another human soul, a stranger’s monument to a sister’s love.

  Gallantry. Maybe for the first time, Mat knew the word as more than a flourish.

  Mat put his free hand on Will’s shoulder, shucking the rifle around to his back, out of the way.

  “So what are we, you and me?” Mat asked with a smile in his voice. “Brothers? Father and son?”

  Will looked up at Mat with sadness dragging at the corners of his eyes, but with a smile spreading out from his mouth, reaching toward his eyes but not quite arriving. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe we could both be Army Rangers?”

  Mat grinned and sipped, slowing himself and enjoying both the coffee and the company of the boy.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself, tiger. You gotta make it through Ranger School first.”

  Dedication

  (by Jason Ross)

  I dedicate my part in this novel and its upcoming sequels to the operators of the United States Special Operations Forces, or SOF. I’ve had the privilege of working with many of them i
n entrepreneurial businesses as they’ve cycled out of long military service to the United States of America.

  Here’s what I’ve learned: they are our best and brightest and they have borne an inordinate amount of the work of death for our armed forces. They have carried this burden so the rest of us can enjoy the fruits of American freedom and American foreign policy. None of them have taken their missions lightly and they paid, and continue to pay, a high price for their service. Our tiny population of American operators carries a brutal load and they do so voluntarily and with professionalism. We owe them a debt, one I pray we do not forget. As a father with sons in the military, I take my hat off to our operators and thank them and their families for the risks they endure so other servicemen and women stand further behind the lines of conflict.

  The SOF boys of ReadyMan and Black Rifle Coffee have spent the bulk of their adult lives in parts of the world where the Apocalypse already happened: Kurdistan, Ramadi, Haiti, the Kandahar Province… In those places, the locals wouldn’t even know the Apocalypse had come. It would just be another day. Operators know the lines of drift taken by the human race when civility and technology vanish. They know the cadence of chaos and the stench of collapse. Perhaps nobody in our modern society knows better how lightly we retain the Rule of Law than they do.

  Today, the SOF boys of ReadyMan and Black Rifle Coffee Company (BRCC) live stateside, teaching American citizens the hardscrabble reality that lurks beneath the chrome of modern society. Between training American civilians and experiencing dozens of global war zones, most scenes in this novel derived from personal experience. Even stateside, our SOF instructors have seen American gun owners and survivalists crumple, time and again, when faced with the mind-shattering specter of mayhem. We have a long way to go before we can honestly consider ourselves “prepared” for a true collapse and the ReadyMan/BRCC vets, along with thousands of other SOF vets, would like to see people trained and hardened to the reality that might suddenly punch through this wonderland of comfort. Jeff Kirkham, among others, would love to meet, train and share perspective with the readers of this novel and every preparedness-minded American.

  Check out Jeff’s hundreds of instructional videos and his dozens of life-saving inventions at Readyman.com. Even better, log in to ReadyMan’s Plan2Survive for a computer app that will guide you through the process of improving your families’ preparedness one step at a time.

  In this post-modern epoch of the American Empire, we run the risk of being blissfully unprepared for the rise of chaos and a resurgence of Mother Nature. It is safe to say that none of us is as prepared as we would like to think. Go to www.readyman.com for outstanding resources that will help you get started or go next level.

  A Word From Jeff and Jason

  Thank you for reading Black Autumn Travelers and we hope you had as much fun reading it as we had writing it.

  If you know Mat Best (from Black Rifle Coffee and Art15 Clothing), then you can guess how much fun we had telling his story. We’re betting Mat won’t read this—we’re not sure he knows how to read—but we wrote a post-apocalyptic version of Mat’s personal journey, going from Army Ranger playboy to a husband and a man of impeccable honor. The Mat we know today is the Mat who stands with young Will, sipping coffee, at the end of the novel. Mat’s own non-fiction book, Thank You For My Service, is available on Amazon and it’s a hilarious ride through the scandalous worst moments of Mister Best. It tells Mat’s gritty true story with all the action and hijinks you might imagine. Not suitable for children or pastors, mind you. You’ll notice that we stole liberally from his book to inspire the post-apoc version.

  Sage and Cameron are real life men as well—and they’re men on the same soul journey we depicted in Travelers. Both are well on their way to finding a path of honor in this man-shaming, modern world, just like their namesakes. Following winds, brothers. We love you both.

  Travelers will have a sequel, probably in 2020, but no need to wait. The fictional two-and-a-half weeks of the Black Autumn collapse sends more lives to the brink than just Sage, Cameron and Mat.

  Jeff Kirkham, Jason Ross and their band of family and friends fight the tidal wave of chaos from a precarious redoubt too close to Salt Lake City in Black Autumn, the original novel. Get it on Amazon and enjoy the epic novel that started the series.

  Meanwhile, in Black Autumn Conquistadors, a genius cartel overlord pours into the gap left by the collapse, amassing invincible weapons in a push to rule Southwest America. But no matter how powerful his tanks and machine guns, no weapon can force trust with the people closest to him. Nor can military force alone exterminate the relentless spirit of America, which is anything but dead.

  And where is the President of the United States as the economy takes a blistering nose dive? The Last Air Force One reveals the desperate struggle of Dutch McAdams, President of the United States, as he fights the forces of destruction massed against the U.S.A. in its moment of weakness. During the death struggle of the largest empire ever seen on Earth, Dutch must confront his responsibilities as a father as well, pitting the needs of the millions against the life-or-death of his beloved wife and children.

  The fun is just starting, if you can call reveling in the apocalypse your kind of fun.

  Tap the links below to grab the other books in the series from Amazon:

  BLACK AUTUMN, BOOK 1

  BLACK AUTUMN, BOOK 2: CONQUISTADORS

  BLACK AUTUMN BOOK 4: THE LAST AIR FORCE ONE

  GET EXCLUSIVE BLACK AUTUMN MATERIAL

  (And help us write our books a bit.)

  Our favorite part of this whole novel-writing-thing is becoming brothers and friends with our readers.

  Our dirty secret: we don’t write these novels ourselves. We collaborate with scores of experts and fans and we get many of our juiciest ideas from readers.

  Join our newsletter for info on new books and deals—with the understanding that we will occasionally pump you for ideas about The End Of The World As We Know It. We might also throw in a ReadyMan gear deal or two.

  Join today and we’ll send you How to Survive a Black Swan Event at no charge. It’s the leanest, meanest preparedness primer ever written and it’ll help you and your family prepare for job loss, local disaster or even The Big Enchilada (for less money than the cost of homeowners insurance.)

  Join our email list here.