Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  Not bad for a novice.

  Later that evening, Jimmy gnawed on a mule deer rib, his belly full. He found himself eating every last bit of meat, even the connective tissue. Heck, he had never even thought to eat the sinewy ribs of a deer. They’d barely seemed worth the effort. Now he couldn’t conceive of wasting meat of any kind.

  When he finished the rib, he looked at the bone, sure there was still nutrition there, but unsure of how to get it. The bone would go bad in a day, so he tossed it to a dog.

  Jimmy stood and joined a group of neighborhood men. He noticed his status had shifted. The real men stood with him now. The rest of the neighborhood guys, the ones still wearing loafers without socks or spotless tennis shoes, drifted among the women or pooled together in loose conversations of their own.

  Those other guys, drifting about, were like “satellite bulls” in an elk herd. Jimmy had hunted high country elk with his brother once and he learned a lot more than he had anticipated about breeding behavior. The satellite bulls were the males who couldn’t hold a herd of females because they were too young, unskilled or too unhealthy to fight off other males. Of course, the neighborhood hadn’t resorted to collecting harems of females, and that wasn’t going to happen for a hundred reasons. Besides, not even the horniest male would want more mouths to feed right now.

  Even so, Jimmy was beginning to see why the Lord might have commanded the Law of Plural Marriage back in the early days of the Latter-Day Saints. Strong men, like those he stood with, could support more women. They guaranteed survival in a harsh world. Not only could they support more women, but they would be driven—even entitled—to breed with them. After just two days of hunting and providing, that drive didn’t strike Jimmy as so alien anymore.

  Of course, he would never take another wife, not unless the Lord commanded it through His anointed leaders. Jimmy’s sex drive didn’t run toward womanizing. However, he had noticed a couple of the sisters from the ward looking at him differently.

  He had worn his camo and leather hunting boots all day. The rough clothes made more sense, since all he’d done that day was hunt and butcher. Plus, he had to admit, he liked the way the camo felt, pegging him as a provider. He earned the distinction.

  Standing with the “herd bulls,” Jimmy could feel the eyes of his wife. Something had turned inside her, too, altered with that first deer kill. She hadn’t henpecked him once today. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was looking at him with some primal respect, like she was fortunate to be with him. It had been a long time since he’d felt that sensation in his marriage.

  What a difference a day makes…

  Brother Campbell, standing next to him, gestured out to the valley. “Where’s all the gosh-darn food? What about the storehouses and distribution centers?”

  “You know,” Carl Redmund, a non-member, jumped on the question with his customary preamble. Carl had played football for the University of Utah twenty years back. “The stores these days practice just-in-time inventory. That means there aren’t any big warehouses full of food anymore. Everything’s controlled by computers. Every can of food you buy is replaced with one can of the exact same food, quick as a whistle, coming in on a semi from the distribution center down in southern Utah. Almost every bit of food in Salt Lake was already sitting on shelves when the market went to crap. Grocery stores don’t have stockrooms anymore.”

  “Yeah, but where’d all that food go?” Art Campbell followed up. “It couldn’t have just disappeared.”

  Jimmy jumped in. “I was at Costco the morning after the market halts began―the Costco over on Three Hundred West and Seventeen Hundred South. There were thousands of people in the parking lot. They were ready to storm the place. I’m sure they’ve stormed it by now.”

  “If all the food was evenly divided between every family in Salt Lake City, we would have had three, maybe four days’ worth of food for everyone.” Redmund was obviously pulling from something he’d read or heard. “Three days’ worth of food—that’s all any city really has on its shelves. But that food didn’t get divided evenly. It got hoarded.”

  Redmund paused for effect. “That food got hoarded by the sons of bitches who hit those markets first. They bought up everything they could. Probably stole it, in fact. Didn’t pay on their way out. Then they piled it in their minivans and to hell with the rest of us. That’s where the food is―hoarded by selfish sons of bitches. Forty-nine out of fifty families got nothing, and one out of fifty families is living high on the hog. That’s why folks are hungry just a week after the market goes to hell.”

  It was a lot of swearing for this crowd, and Jimmy could see the Mormon guys glancing about uncomfortably. Jimmy jumped in to smooth things over.

  “I’m guessing you’re right, Carl. In any case, I’m positive Costco is as empty as the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning. Right now, our best bet is to stick together and follow the Brethren.”

  Carl snorted, not offering a comeback. It had been a long time since he had given a darn about what the Brethren had to say. “Well, gents, I gotta go figure out how to get some water outta my kids’ swimming pool. It’s already turning green, and I’ve gotta find a way to clean it. Otherwise, we’ll all have the trots around the Redmund house. Thanks for the barbecue.” The former football player turned away from the group. Jimmy could feel the tension melt as Redmund left.

  Jimmy turned to Brandon Lister, his backyard neighbor. “So, Brother Lister, are we going hunting this evening?”

  “Sure thing. Where you want to try?”

  “Let’s hit the cemetery again. See if our luck holds.”

  “You got it, Jim. See you at three-thirty at the gates?”

  “Sounds good.” At that, the small knot of herd bulls broke up and headed back to their families.

  • • •

  Utah State Prison

  Bluffdale, Utah

  Ole man trouble, leave me lonely.

  Go find you someone else to pick on.

  Without thinking about it, Tom Comstock had been humming the Otis Redding tune all day. In fact, he’d been humming it all week—a habit he’d picked up from his old man. His dad had also been in law enforcement. He would have been proud to see how far Tom had risen.

  Prison warden.

  Yes, his dad would have been proud, had the cancer not taken him first.

  The back-up generators still ran, thank God. Even so, a hundred other gargantuan issues drove his prison down a path to oblivion.

  Ole man trouble. He had come to Tom’s world and made himself at home.

  The 3,653 incarcerated men and women had nothing to eat, and they were dipping their drinking water out of buckets, just like in the fifties. Tom suspected the water wasn’t even sanitary anymore. His men had pulled it from open cisterns meant for watering the greenhouses where minimum security inmates did work release.

  Out of three-hundred-seventy-five corrections officers, at last count, only eighty-two of them showed up for work this morning.

  As one might expect, without stringent cleanliness procedures, diarrhea and flu skipped its way through the prison like a three-year-old on amphetamines.

  At this point, Tom had almost no medical staff. Almost no cleaning staff. Exactly zero cooks. He didn’t have a single pharmacist to issue the drugs that prevented his inmates from going berserk. God himself knew when resupply would arrive.

  The situation was almost beyond resupply already, Tom admitted to himself. Even if resupply showed up, he didn’t think he could placate the inmates before they rioted. There were too many exceptions to the rules right now, and the rules were the only thing keeping the animals in their cages. A prison guard started making exceptions, and it was one hundred percent guaranteed that he would get his hand bitten off.

  Tom Comstock guessed he ranked as the highest prison authority in the state, given that the Division of Utah Correctional Industries had stopped answering its main phone number. Calling any of his bosses by cell phone proved equally
pointless.

  Amazingly, cell service seemed to be working, with terrible reception and a lot of busy signals, but the cell phone system itself appeared to be up and running between him and downtown. Tom vaguely remembered that most of the cell towers had about a week of back-up power.

  All the corrections division directors were briefed on emergency communications as part of the big disaster response field day the division held every three years. He had been bored to tears by the egghead communications guy droning on and on about the cell system and how the network would be reliable in case of disaster.

  Yeah, right.

  Anyone who worked around technical types knew that all those tech systems were supposedly bulletproof right up until they broke, which happened about every three days. The tech guy would then swoop in and show everyone just how easy it was to fix things. Of course, nobody but the tech guy could ever fix it. Everyone got used to the reality that all systems broke, pretty much constantly, and that the tech guy was a permanent addition to any team.

  The cell phone communications dork at the field day had gone on and on with his PowerPoint presentation. Tom tried for about five minutes to figure out what the guy’s diagram meant before he gave up and went back to daydreaming.

  He remembered that most cell towers had back-up power and generators that would run for less than a week. Every cell tower had to send signal back to the central computer at the cell phone company. There were these long lines of fiber optic cable that had to be amplified every mile or two. He remembered thinking that each one of those amplifiers also required power, and not all of them had back-up power. So the chain would be as strong as its weakest link and who knew which link it was? Tom guessed it depended on the coverage area and the network.

  As far as Tom could tell, cell phones were still working seven days after the collapse. But hardly anyone was answering. Apparently the “weakest link” was the cell phone owner himself. Without power to electrical sockets, charging a cell phone became a big hassle. Tom had to run out to his truck and plug in his phone just to get a little juice. As fate would have it, that’s when one of his bosses called him back—while his phone sat charging on the seat of his truck.

  Tom stewed in his juices inside his concrete office on the prison complex. He was about ten miles from the state capital. That’s where his superiors should be right now—at the Office of Corrections, working out his problems.

  That ten miles had become a thousand miles in the last three days. He’d sent three of his corrections officers to the capital in person. Only one had returned, and that guy reported that the state correctional offices were vacant, the doors flapping in the breeze.

  The funny thing, Tom realized, was that this was one of the most common questions regular citizens asked him when they found out he was a prison warden.

  What would you do if the power went out?

  Such a dumb question… The anti-government types sat around dreaming about ways the system might crash and how convicts might run loose in the streets. The thought used to make him laugh. Policies and procedures for prison systems were excruciatingly well thought out. Every possible scenario had been documented and there was a step-by-step plan to handle each and every possible event. The prison industry employed an army of people whose only job was to think of what could go wrong and plan for it.

  So when someone asked him what he would do if the power went out, he would laugh. “I wouldn’t notice if the power went out because the back-up generators would kick on before the lights even flickered.”

  They would follow up with, “Yeah. But what if the power went out and then you ran out of gas?”

  He would shake his head and think of the two-week fuel supply in bunkers under the Olympus wing of the prison, as well as the back-up fuel resupply that came by tanker truck to top them off every three days.

  If that failed, he was to load up his prisoners and shuttle them to the Central Utah Prison in Gunnison, Utah. They drilled the prisoner transfer routine every four years. It would take him two days of shuttling to move all the prisoners to Gunnison Penitentiary.

  Policies and procedures―two false gods of the Modern Age.

  Ole man trouble, leave me lonely.

  Tom tried to picture executing on the contingency plan to move prisoners to Gunnison. First off, if he so much as cracked those jail cells, there would be a riot, and he would lose control of the prison.

  Inmates were like dogs. They could smell fear. They knew something was wrong and they were the kind of animals who thrived on stuff going wrong. He could see Interstate 15 from his office and it looked like a damned used car lot. His big white prison buses wouldn’t make it to Provo, much less Gunnison.

  Power wasn’t the problem. They had plenty of fuel for the generator. What they didn’t have was guards, cooks, pharmacists and water. They had spent so much time worrying about the back-up generators that they forgot the hundred other things required to keep human beasts locked in cages.

  That brought Tom full circle in his thinking, right back to where he had started.

  Ole man trouble.

  He would be forced to make up some new policies and procedures right here, right now. Tom imagined firing up his computer and banging out a memo.

  Prison Policy for a Complete Fuck-stick Mess

  I. Should everything go completely tits-up in the world, Warden and Corrections staff shall execute the following procedures:

  a. Leave the maximum security inmates in Uinta Building to die like the mutts they are. Shut down the mag-locks and do whatever you can to permanently disable the manual override. Sorry, folks. Thirst and starvation is what you get—you rapists, pedophiles and murdering shit bags.

  b. Throw open all the cages in the other buildings beside Uinta and instruct the corrections officers to run like hell.

  It ain’t pretty, thought Tom, but it’ll do.

  He grabbed his bull horn and headed out of his office to call the last staff meeting he would ever call.

  • • •

  By the sound of the uproar, Francisco could tell his boys were taking over the prison. Even the roaring noise sounded Latino.

  He wondered why that was. Why did white people and black people sound different from brown people when it was just a roar of a crowd?

  Francisco loved everything about being Latino. He had grown up in Los Angeles—so close to Mexico you could almost smell the tortillerias. All Latino pride aside, though, he thought Mexico sucked ass. For whatever reason, the people there lived like sheep. They had nothing in common with great Mexicans like his namesake: Francisco “Pancho” Villa.

  Francisco harbored a personal belief that most Mexicans with cojones had emigrated to the U.S. over the last twenty years, leaving Mexico alone with the spineless cowards. The cartels stood out as the last shining hope against American imperialism. He and his gang family, Los Latigos al Norteños, did whatever they could to help the cartels and the cartels paid them well for their loyalty.

  Pancho, short for “Francisco,” had dedicated his life to La Revolución, and crime had paved his way. During several sabbaticals in prison, he had studied the life of Pancho Villa, particularly the way Villa set up his own estate. Bucking the trend in Mexico, Villa eschewed the hacienda system of lords and laborers and made his own lands into idyllic social experiments, the common soldier elevated, children educated, and respect given to all.

  Francisco’s own vision borrowed from Villa’s, bringing it into modern times. He dreamed of being an aristocrat who labored alongside his soldiers, educating their children and respecting them as men. Noble Mexicans, enjoying their birthright of self-respect and self-determination.

  Other than his stops in prison, Francisco lived the dream. He had risen through the ranks of the Norteños gang, achieving lieutenant rank at only twenty-five and now captain at thirty-six. He was the top-ranked Mexican Mafioso in the State of Utah.

  With each act of crime, he struck at the heart of the American system, feedi
ng the gringos their drugs and taking advantage of their moral decrepitude. He didn’t know what had gone wrong with the prison over the last week, though he knew it was serious. In his revolutionary heart, he dreamed that the concrete world of the whites had cracked open. He would flow into that crack, hard and strong, breaking the whites’ hold on this prison and even this state.

  He didn’t bother getting off his bunk to look out his cell through the grating. His men would come get him when they defeated the mag locks. If he stood at the bars, he would look weak. Pancho Villa never looked weak.

  Francisco laid back on his bunk, confident he would see freedom soon enough.

  • • •

  Ross Homestead

  Oakwood, Utah

  Jacquelyn roamed around the Homestead with a shirt full of potatoes. It seemed like she spent a lot of time doing this—walking around looking for a particular person. She had even started developing a route.

  Start at the kitchen, head toward the clotheslines, loop over to the showers, then walk to the big greenhouses, then the small greenhouses. Head up the drive to the big house. Check the office. Go by the infirmary. Finish at the bunkhouse. If that failed, start over again at the kitchen.

  The simple truth was, as much as everyone bitched about cell phones, life sucked without them. She ached to send a simple text and locate Amanda, the gardener. She spent half her day looking for people, even though the Homestead proper only occupied about five acres and fifteen buildings.

  Finally, Jacquelyn saw Amanda off in the distance, carrying trays of vegetable starts.

  “Hold up…” Jacquelyn trotted over to Amanda, awkwardly cradling the potatoes in her shirt and trying not to let her ample boobs peek out the bottom.

  “Hey, Jackie.” Amanda stopped. She didn’t know Jacquelyn well enough to realize she hated being called “Jackie.”