Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

“Hmm, nothing.” What more could be said? Trust and ruthlessness danced a dangerous dance, especially now that the Ross Homestead might live or die based on Jeff’s judgment. If the stock markets stayed closed, the world that Jason knew—the world of win-win contracts and business-casual lunches—was about to morph into something far more primitive. If that happened, it would be a world Jeff knew from the ground up, and a world Jason knew not at all.

  Jeff headed back to the OHV and Jason followed. They drove down the hill toward the “Big House” but, halfway home, a lanky guy with long hair stepped to the edge of the OHV trail and waved them down. Teddy worked for Jason Ross, handling construction projects, landscape and heavy equipment work. Jason pulled over and Teddy propped his arms across the door of the vehicle.

  “Morning, gentlemen,” Teddy said, glancing from Jason to Jeff.

  “Jeff, this is Teddy, our head of facilities. He runs all the grounds and construction projects. He’ll be the guy digging your observation posts.”

  “Howdy do.” Teddy shook Jeff’s hand. “So, do you guys want to see the holding ponds? We’re filling them with water right now for the first time.”

  Jason blinked. The water project wasn’t something he wanted Jeff to see, but Teddy jumped the gun, more friendly than cautious. Jason and Teddy had agreed their water system would be top secret, but the cat was out of the bag now, so Jason went with it.

  He popped open his door and Jeff followed suit, stepping out of the OHV and following Teddy down a narrow trail. The oak brush opened into a small clearing with several large excavations, lined with a black plastic sheet covered in river rock.

  “Check out our secret reservoir, gentlemen,” Teddy said. “The ponds will hold eighty thousand gallons of spring water and they’ll be home to hundreds of trout and bluegill.” Teddy had tucked the reservoir into a tiny meadow encircled by a tangle of oaks, hidden from view everywhere but inside the clearing. No doubt it would become a refuge for deer, elk and turkeys.

  Once Teddy got going, he was hard to stop. He bragged about how he worked this project for the last two months so they could get the Homestead off municipal water. It would save a few thousand bucks a month and it would make the property self-sufficient, pulling water from a buried spring, stringing it across the mountainside beneath the maples, and dribbling it into this picture-perfect pond—much better than relying on the city for water.

  “I borrowed the design for the spring from Eivin Kilcher in the TV show, Alaska: the Last Frontier.” Teddy had watched the show several times, then dug a bigger version of Eivin’s spring-fed well. “I planted six huge plastic pipes standing on end, punched small holes in them, surrounded the whole shebang with gravel, then re-buried it.”

  Sticking his chest out, Teddy kept talking. “Natural spring water will irrigate the whole property starting tomorrow.”

  While Jason shifted from foot to foot, Jeff stood like a statue. Teddy waxed philosophical about his water project.

  “Most people don’t think about water pressure. They only think about getting water to their mouths. But ground water isn’t very helpful. A person can drink ground water with a purifier, but that’s about all they’re going to do. Gardening, washing clothes, showering―those tasks require water pressure. When a guy plans on carrying water to his garden by hand, he’s not thinking about how many calories he’ll burn carrying the water. He would have to eat every last plant, and then six times more, just to replace the calories spent hauling water.”

  “Thanks. Good work, Teddy.” Jason turned to walk back to the OHV.

  Teddy finally picked up on Jason’s cues. “Oh, yeah. Thanks, guys.” He reached over and shook hands with both men. “I just wanted you to see this. I thought you’d want to know we got it done, you know, especially with the problems going on in the stock market and all…”

  “Absolutely,” Jason said, “we’ll sleep better knowing we have our water situation figured out. Thanks. Great work. Let your guys know I said ‘thanks.’” Jason started back along the trail.

  “Cool. I’m going to get back to it.” Teddy awkwardly shook hands with Jeff again and returned to his Bobcat excavator.

  “So you have spring water and a reservoir?” Jeff asked as they climbed into the OHV.

  “Yeah. I haven’t had time to catch you up on Homestead improvements since you got back from Afghanistan. I can brief you whenever you have a minute.”

  Jeff had only been invited as the newest member of the Homestead steering committee the week previous. Nobody on the committee knew Jeff particularly well, but there was no denying how useful he might be as a member of their preparedness community. Still, Jason had been careful not to tell any one person everything about the Homestead. Outside of family, trust only extended so far.

  Prior to Jeff’s last deployment to Afghanistan, Jason had given Jeff and Tara Kirkham a tour of the Homestead, launching into “The Conversation” with the couple. Many times before, and with many other couples, Jason had broached the conversation about survival and preparedness. He had even become pretty good at sneaking up on the big reveal―that they had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a survival compound, barely concealed behind the fancy architecture and the wrought iron gates of the Homestead.

  Ross knew from experience that “The Conversation” could take many interesting turns. Once, when talking to a young doctor and his wife, the couple had somehow gotten it in their heads that the awkward conversation was working its way toward an invitation to swing with Jason and his wife. When the truth finally emerged, the couple’s relief had been palpable. Being asked to join a survivalist group was apparently much less awkward than being asked to wife swap.

  With Jeff and Tara, “The Conversation” went a lot more smoothly. The couple had firsthand experience with the decrepitude of government, and Jeff had witnessed his share of post-apocalyptic suffering overseas. Considering their three children, Jeff and Tara didn’t take long to warm to the idea of contributing to a hardened facility near their suburban home. Plus, the work that had already been completed on the Homestead would have impressed anyone.

  The orchard covered dozens of acres and included over a hundred fruit trees, plus a small vineyard. Scattered around the property were seven greenhouses, all with LED grow lamps and solar back-up power. The greenhouses contained almost four thousand square feet of raised planter beds with year-round gardening capability.

  The summer garden was a work of art, with another two thousand square feet of raised grow space neatly laid out in square-foot garden plots and giant Grecian urns. The tomato garden was more than eighty feet in diameter and sat on a beautifully stacked-stone retaining wall, towering over the gated entrance to the property.

  Everywhere the Kirkhams looked, there were heavy groves of berries, fruit trees and vegetables. Wherever possible, Ross required the landscape to be fruit-bearing and edible.

  Nestled behind the orchard, the property played host to a small herd of livestock. Ross bought into partnerships with four local farms scattered around the neighboring valleys. Every so often, a farmer would come by with a horse trailer and drop off a few more goats, sheep, chickens or ducks, just to top off the Homestead herd.

  While they kept farm animals on the Ross property in small numbers, there was nothing small about their rabbit production. One of the finest buildings on the property was the rabbit warren. The entire building held dozens of stacked rabbit cages and feed systems.

  The Ross clan and their friends hunted wild game on the Homestead. Elk, deer and turkeys wandered the property in great abundance, with wild deer and gobblers meandering through the orchards daily. They had hunting and butchery down to a science and the only meat served on the family table was killed on their property or grown on one of their farms.

  Along the base of the woods that jutted from the east of the gardens, tens of thousands of bees browsed the gardens, turning out light, fragrant honey. As an avid gardener herself, Tara Kirkham had been openly impressed
by the gardens and the bees.

  The Kirkhams didn’t seem to have a better plan at the moment, and the Homestead offered an alternative to “riding it out” solo if things went sideways. Jeff and Tara tentatively agreed to help with the Homestead, at least until everyone had a chance to feel out the new friendships.

  That had been a few months back, and Jeff had spent most of those months overseas. He had barely returned home from his last deployment and, within weeks, a bomb went off in Saudi Arabia and the stock market started doing the herky-jerky.

  Sooner than anyone would have preferred, the world took a precarious turn and, as Jason Ross drove the OHV down the hill, he looked straight ahead, uneasy with the formidable presence of Jeff Kirkham beside him. Like it or not, circumstances had forced them into relying upon one another—like two lions caught in the same enclosure, circling, never quite comfortable enough to lie down.

  • • •

  Federal Heights

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  Jimmy McGavin fingered the bump on his throat for the ten thousandth time and, for the ten thousandth time, he told himself that he needed to get it checked by a doctor. He had sliced it off shaving more times than he could count, but it always came back, dark and ominous.

  Looking at himself in th

  e mirror, two conflicting emotions washed over him.

  First, he liked the way he looked in a suit and tie. He was a commercial realtor, respected by his friends. He had done a masterful job of providing for his family. Living in Federal Heights was no small feat. Financially, he had achieved more than almost anyone else in his high school graduating class.

  Second, even in the double-breasted suit, he made himself a little sick. There wasn’t much of a man left behind those hanging jowls and pasty white skin. He rarely got outside and he almost never exercised, short of the once-quarterly trip to the gym. With work, church and mowing the yard on the weekends, he felt like a beast of burden. The edgy young man who once stole a neighbor’s car for a joy ride was gone forever. He couldn’t even remember the last time a woman looked at him with lust.

  Other men treated him like he wasn’t the slightest bit dangerous. By smiling at everyone and doing whatever it took to keep other people happy, he had allowed the dangerous in him to erode to a point where he no longer carried the scent of a real man.

  In a Hail Mary attempt to restore some part of his virility, he insisted that his wife allow him to go deer hunting with his brothers each year. She always complained, citing the dozen things that needed to be done around the house. They never talked about it plainly, but anything that might vaguely threaten her dominance in their marriage, like owning guns, speeding on the freeway or deer hunting, she fought with a relentlessness that only a woman with an expanding waistline could understand.

  Jimmy knew that, if it weren’t for the four or five days hunting each year, he might actually kill himself, so deep was the silent despair of his life. So he made the hunting trip happen regardless of the crap his wife dished out.

  Occasionally, he would go down to the basement, open his gun safe and hold his Savage 30-06 rifle, working the bolt a couple of times to enjoy the feel of it, stirring up the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 bore cleaner. He knew he wasn’t much of a hunter, but those motions and smells restored something in him. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep him moving, enough to keep him plodding forward.

  Today there wasn’t time for a trip down to the basement. He noticed a worrisome number of messages on his cell phone, even before 8:00 a.m. That meant his investor clients were calling, trying to figure out how to manage their money during the shift in the markets. Because he was a commercial real estate professional, folks turned to him when stocks became unstable. With the dirty bomb attack last night in the Middle East, the market would be doing backflips, and that meant one thing for him as a commercial realtor: opportunity.

  On his drive into South Valley, Jimmy tuned to CNBC Radio, hoping to catch news of the stock market. Right away, it was obvious something big was going down, even bigger than the bomb.

  The SEC had executed a market-wide trading halt, something Jimmy didn’t remember ever happening. The Dow had dropped over twenty percent in two hours in response to the news of the nuclear attack on a major energy resource.

  According to the radio, the dirty bomb exploded near the city of Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, at the head of the East-West Pipeline, destroying the pumping station and raining radioactive fallout over a wide region, including the oil tanker pumping stations at Al Juaymah. The same pumping stations had been attacked with car bombs by Al Qaeda in 2006, but nobody could say for sure who was behind last night’s attack. There was no evidence of a missile launch. Suspicions, of course, ran toward Iran, but the Iranians emphatically denied responsibility.

  The actual damage to the world petroleum supply was unclear, especially since the Saudi royal family wasn’t providing much information. Even so, enough was known to trigger a reaction from the markets: a bomb had hit the East-West Oil Pipeline, and an unknown number of oil fields and docking facilities had been destroyed or otherwise closed due to radiation.

  The result was an overnight forty-three dollar increase in the price of a barrel of oil, more than three times the largest single-day jump ever recorded. Energy experts were screaming that such a price increase was unjustified—that new oil capacity in the United States and Canada would more than make up for the loss. But nobody was listening to the experts at this point.

  Oil prices had previously reached historic lows and the global economy had been building a bubble on the back of cheap gas. With cheap energy becoming expensive energy overnight, nobody could predict how it would impact anything, from the price of feed corn to the value of Apple Computer stock. The confusion had only one direction to go―panic.

  The SEC pulled the plug on all stock trades in the United States, and the other stock exchanges quickly followed suit. The markets went dark.

  Jimmy knew enough about markets to know this was bad—really bad. He considered turning his car around and heading back home. He shook off the rumble in the pit of his gut and kept heading toward the office. His boss wanted him there to help put out fires. Jimmy was working a $4.2 million property deal that was supposed to close tomorrow. It was anyone’s guess how the bank was going to respond to the market closures.

  Things would be fine, Jimmy told himself. He stared out his car window as he drove south along the Interstate 215 belt route looking out over the Salt Lake Valley. It was a gorgeous day. The fall-dressed mountains towered over the freeway, fresh and pristine. The valley below bustled with activity, its inhabitants going about life like any other day.

  It was hard to picture the number of people living in the Salt Lake metropolitan area. He knew the number—more than one million people—but he couldn’t imagine what a million people actually looked like. From the freeway, high on the bench, he could see businesses, parks, homes, and office buildings stretching out all the way to the Oquirrh Mountains on the west side of the valley. A shallow bowl cradled Salt Lake City, rimmed by granite-capped mountains, ten miles wide by twenty-five miles long—and it held that multitude of people, all going about their business.

  How unfathomable would it be if a single bomb eight thousand miles away could disrupt the lives of a million souls in Salt Lake City on this perfect day? The idea seemed ludicrous.

  Something tickled the back of Jimmy’s mind—a book he had read when he was in college. More accurately, it was a book he’d skimmed. Jimmy had taken an upper-level economics class and his professor recommended a book as extra credit—The Coming Dark Age, by an Italian economist, Roberto Vacca.

  Jimmy needed the extra credit, so he’d bounced around the book barely well enough to sound knowledgeable. It had been an awful read, but the main idea suddenly reappeared, in the mystical calculus of memory, twenty-five years later.

  The author had argued that the post-industrial world was actually more fragile than the pre
-industrial world—that relatively small disturbances could push complex, modern society off the edge of a socio-economic cliff. The old economy, where people grew their own food and fixed their own cars, was capable of absorbing bigger hiccups, much like Third World countries do every day, but because each person in Western civilization only knew how to do his or her specialized job, and because they demanded an extraordinarily high standard of living, the author argued that people would freak out and burn society to the ground if a big enough “black swan event” shocked the system.

  The example that came to Jimmy’s mind was trucking. He had heard somewhere that stores held only three days of food on hand at any given moment. If an interruption occurred in finance, and a truck driver wasn’t convinced that a paycheck awaited him at the end of his run, he wouldn’t make the drive. He would go home instead. If a lot of truck drivers shared the same lack of confidence at the same moment, grocery stores would run short of food and people would panic, hoarding whatever they could find and leaving stores wiped out. Along with hoarding would come rioting and, with rioting, would come even greater fear. After a big enough surge of fear, all the systems of modern society would crash.

  Jimmy looked over the valley and thought again about those million people. What would they look like jammed into a stadium? He tried to picture it.

  He had heard statistics at a Rotary Club meeting last winter: the million people of Salt Lake City required about twenty million gallons of clean water each day. They consumed over two thousand megawatts of electricity. They each ate two thousand calories of food per day. Almost all of that food came from far away—a good portion from Mexico and Brazil, some five thousand miles over water and rails.

  What if the threads of finance, food and electricity all broke at once? Could the spider web of modern society crash to the ground?

  This idea defied Jimmy’s imagination. Modern society had always made it possible for more and more people to live healthy, abundant lives. The old economist had written his doom-and-gloom book back in the seventies. But the prosperity of the United States since then had utterly disproved his warnings. Things had continued better than ever.