Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  Gabriel considered the tent city, full of suffering families of every race and social standing. If his brother attacked this place, these families would pay a price in blood.

  Gabriel reminded himself of his duty to his family. He turned back to the barricade and the defenses, taking careful note of the number of men and where they were positioned. He would try to convince his brother to abandon his attack, but Francisco couldn’t usually be swayed once he set his foot to a plan.

  When Gabriel felt like he had seen enough, he stepped out of line and headed back to the car. His guards fell in behind him. They passed a pet store and a funeral home, and four men drifted out from behind the funeral home in their wake.

  Gabriel noticed the men immediately because he had been wary of being followed by the guards at the barricade. These men were not part of the rich peoples’ army. They were clearly gangsters like Gabriel and his bodyguards.

  Gabriel insisted when they left the fairgrounds that they wear no gang colors. His brother’s men had done the best they could, wearing brown and black work shirts. But one wore a baseball cap with an Arizona Cardinals’ logo, and the other guy stuffed a red handkerchief in his back pocket.

  Regular citizens wore whatever colors they wanted without much consideration. But a gangbanger paid close attention to the colors he wore. Any other gangbanger would notice; neither of Gabriel’s men wore even a shred of blue. Brown, black and white were “neutral” colors, indicating nothing about gang affiliation. The red handkerchief in the back pocket and the Cardinals cap were dead giveaways.

  In Salt Lake City, the gang colors weren’t really necessary. A gangbanger would automatically know; Gabriel and his men were Hispanic. The four men following them were Pacific Islanders, probably Tongan or Samoan. With few exceptions, Latinos affiliated with “Bloods” and Polynesians affiliated with “Crips.” The bangers that followed them now wore blue and that meant serious trouble. A few feet in front of them, two more bangers stepped out from behind a dumpster.

  “Hey, ese,” one of the men said ominously. “What’re you doing up here?”

  Gabriel’s guards reached for their knives, but didn’t pull them. They knew pulling knives or guns at this point would be a death sentence. Even in the old world, this confrontation stood a good chance of ending in blood. Today, with the cops all but dead, Gabriel and his companions would be very lucky to survive a fight with these “Polys.”

  “Step back here, ese,” the lead Polynesian gangbanger herded the three Hispanics back behind an equipment rental office. Gabriel had a knife in his back pocket, but fighting their way out of this wasn’t going to happen. Six on three, especially when the Polys had the initiative, wasn’t going to end well for the Latinos. For one thing, the Polys each had at least fifty pounds body weight on the three Mexicans.

  Latinos fought with numbers, guns and exceptional brutality. Being ambushed, unprepared, didn’t play to their strengths. And Gabriel wasn’t a gangbanger, anyway.

  Gabriel calculated that his best chance of survival was to play this with confidence. Fear meant death. “My brother wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh, yeah, brown boy? Who’s your brother?” The last word sounded like “braddah.”

  “Francisco Peña.” The Polynesians stared blankly. They didn’t recognize the name. “El Barbero. The Barber.” The nickname definitely rang a bell with the Polys.

  “So when we kill you, we kill the brother of The Barber?” The head Poly smiled.

  “You’re not going to kill anyone. You’re going to tell your bosses’ boss that Francisco Peña sent me to reach out for a meet-up. Los Latigos rolled up the Avenues yesterday—the entire neighborhood—and we have drugs, guns and booze to trade.”

  “Trade for what?”

  “My brother needs men. He’s got a big job coming up.”

  The Polynesian made a distasteful face. “What kinda job would a Blue take from a Red?”

  “The kind of job a foot soldier like you wouldn’t understand. You deliver the message. My brother will be at Warm Springs Park, neutral territory, at one o’clock tomorrow.”

  “And I’m supposed to let you walk away?”

  “See you tomorrow.” Gabriel nudged between two of the Polynesians, careful not to telegraph any aggression. Polynesians were the most easy-going race on the planet, right up until the moment they went full barbarian.

  Gabriel’s guards followed suit, turning out their hands as they passed.

  “Your brother better be there tomorrow,” the Poly shouted, “or next time I see you, your brains will be on the sidewalk, ese.”

  • • •

  Masterson Home

  Oakwood, Utah

  “Are they going to give you anything today?” Tim Masterson’s wife Melinda begged for the third time that afternoon.

  “I told you already,” he fired back, “I’ve been asked by the bishop to train the men as defense because of my military background. Once I get that going, I can ask the bishopric to take up a collection and compensate me for my time and expertise.”

  Melinda wiped her hands on her apron nervously and spoke. “The Bogens gave me a few cups of wheat and some dried milk this morning. I soaked the wheat in milk and the kids are eating, but they’re complaining a lot. We’re all real hungry, Tim,”

  “Don’t you think I know that? What more would you have me do? What do you think nagging is going to accomplish?”

  “You always tell me that you’re the head of the house and that I should listen to you. I’m just letting you know that the children and I are hungry. All I’m doing is reporting back to you as you asked. I’m trying to be a good wife. I know these are hard times for you right now.” Melinda reached out and rubbed her husband’s shoulder.

  He shook her off. “If you want to do something, go ask some of the neighbors outside our ward for help. Don’t let the ward members know we’re out of food. We can’t project weakness. I need to be seen as strong right now. Do you understand?”

  Melinda nodded her head.

  “Now, if you could, please leave me alone,” Tim said, turning back to his desk, leaving his wife standing behind him, “I have to prepare for the training exercise this afternoon. I need some peace and quiet.” Melinda faded back through his office door.

  Tim focused on the book on his desk, the “Combat Leader’s Field Guide.” The graphics with combat formations made some sense to him, but the text in the book made no sense at all. The intricacies of military planning might as well have been Chinese. Even though Tim Masterson failed to understand the checklists and procedures, the book gave him plenty of what he really needed: military jargon.

  When it came to training the men of the neighborhood, he knew he would need to inspire confidence. It was more important to inspire confidence than to possess skill. If a leader had bullet-proof confidence in himself, the men would get onboard. Once everyone had gotten behind a strong leader, anything was possible, even if that leader had little experience. A clear and confident plan was always better than no plan at all.

  Tim Masterson reasoned he probably had more military experience than any of the Mormon men in the neighborhood. He had been an Eagle Scout, like most Mormon boys, but he had also spent several months in the ROTC in high school. While he hadn’t made it to boot camp—he had chosen to go on a Mormon mission instead—he had experienced numerous training days at the Army ROTC camp above the university.

  How much more complicated could training be than that? And more to the point, as long as he kept the veterans from the compound away from “his” men, nobody would know the difference. Tim Masterson was the most military-experienced Mormon in the neighborhood as far as he knew. Virtually all the other Mormon men had gone on missions when they were at the age when they would otherwise have been serving in the military.

  While he searched the field guide for tidbits of military knowledge, Tim’s mind wandered, thinking about his father, long since passed. Tim’s dad had been a closet alcoholic and a p
hysically violent man, no doubt owing to the nightmare he had endured as an infantryman in the Viet Nam War.

  Without anyone in the Church ever finding out, Tim had been punched in the face by his father dozens of times. It was a dubious honor, but Tim felt like the beatings had given him strength. It set him apart from softer men. While the men of the ward dithered and debated, Tim saw himself as a man of action, a man suited for this season of hardship. Even though he hated the very memory of his father, he knew that the man had passed down a legacy of toughness to Tim.

  His dad built the home Tim lived in now with his own two hands, a hold-over in the neighborhood from before luxury homes. When Tim’s dad built the house, they’d had two hundred acres perched high above the valley. His father planted peach and apple orchards, raised chickens and even kept a few cows. Over the years, Tim had been forced to sell off all but the single acre of his dad’s land around their home in order to raise money for business ventures, none of which had been successful.

  In his youth, his father forced Tim to work like a slave, claiming to teach him a strong work ethic. The indentured servitude had the opposite effect. Since his father’s early death, Tim had avoided work at all costs. He had become adept at projecting confidence and insinuating himself into positions of authority such as city planning commissions, church callings, and his current position as part of the county emergency committee. Tim had chewed his father’s inheritance down to almost nothing, but everyone else in the area considered him one of the wealthy, old boy’s network, and he hung onto that advantage with deft machination.

  His efforts to craft his reputation in the neighborhood would now catapult him forward into leadership and control and ensure his family’s survival. He had been born for this moment, and he had every intention of seizing neighborhood leadership.

  Like his despised father, Tim would carry a gun into battle. Unlike his father, Tim would lead instead of follow. He pictured his father looking down from heaven, seeing his son take command like his father never had in Viet Nam.

  Tim smiled at the knowledge that seeing him lead men in battle would make his old man turn in his grave. His father had frequently railed on Tim about being a boy without talent or ambition—a complete disappointment. Now, with everything turning his way, Tim would finally prove to the dead alcoholic what a fool he had been.

  • • •

  Ross Homestead

  Oakwood, Utah

  Like a tick dug in deep, the private security guards still held the refinery. It felt like unfinished business to Jeff, but he knew better than to risk lives to tidy this up. The stalemate at the refinery nagged at him, and he decided to take a quick field trip to see if he could break the logjam.

  Jeff and Josh Myler grabbed a Chevy Suburban and drove outside the barricades. Jeff rode shotgun with his Robinson .308 poking out the window.

  Everything in town appeared to be looted out. Just eleven days after the fall of the stock market, people had resorted to pulling up the hardwood lanes at the bowling alley for firewood. Jeff watched as a father-and-son team carried a long bundle of maple out the double glass doors of the Excelsior Bowl.

  Fires burned everywhere, big and small, most of them in front yards where folks consumed any wood they could find—furniture, fencing, molding, even plastic and tires. It had taken a little more than a week to burn through everything that could be considered firewood. Now people were tearing up anything the slightest bit flammable. More than once on the four-mile drive, Jeff saw men attempting to ignite trees they had just cut down in their yards, green wood that only smoldered and smoked.

  The first thing to run out in the Apocalypse was firewood, something Jeff had never considered. The trees in the valley were too green to burn, and the trees in the mountains were too far away to collect. Heading to the mountains for firewood consumed more calories than anyone could afford. People were collecting and chopping firewood much of their day. America hadn’t seriously utilized wood as fuel for generations, so the realities of how much work firewood actually required shocked everyone and, because of America’s tidy landscaping, there had been precious little firewood to be found within walking distance of urban and suburban homes.

  Dirty water required a LOT of fire to boil. Open fires consumed an enormous amount of wood, with only a small transfer of heat energy. Very few people had the knowledge or equipment to burn wood with any level of efficiency. Dry firewood had run out in a matter of days, burned wastefully on open campfires.

  Now people were sick and dying right before Jeff’s eyes from an inability to boil water. One case of pool shock—easily-available chlorine tablets—could have saved whole neighborhoods, reducing the need for wood. Chlorine had been dirt cheap back in the days when factories turned out chemicals and drugs for next to nothing. Today, with Home Depot and Right Aid in shambles, those miracle chemicals might as well have been sitting on the moon.

  When Jeff looked down from the Homestead at the Valley, he imagined the fires he could see were cooking fires. This turned out to be untrue. Most of the tendrils of smoke Jeff had seen came from boiling water.

  They passed a number of canals carrying water from the Wasatch Mountains to the Great Salt Lake. People gravitated to those canals, schlepping water in buckets, pots and milk jugs. Half of everyone on the streets looked to Jeff like they were traveling to and from water.

  Little more than swamp water, the canals could ease the discomfort of thirst, but they brought the scourge of diarrhea. Jeff watched as one woman took an emergency squat on the dirt bank beside the canal. Jeff fretted about his men at the refinery drinking downstream from this pathogenic nightmare.

  In a field tucked between a row of bungalows, another woman harvested weeds with a kitchen knife, probably to feed her family. Down another street, Jeff did a double take when he saw a guy chasing a dog, trying to kill it with a roofing hammer.

  When they had almost reached the refinery, Jeff spotted a man walking across the wetlands carrying a dead crow by the feet, its wings flopping open like some sort of inverted firebird.

  I wonder what crow tastes like. Jeff shook his head.

  More than anything, Jeff was amazed at how listless people had become; they shuffled about like zombies. Almost everyone in the valley had dropped from three thousand calories a day to less than one thousand calories a day, and many of them blew those calories out of their bodies a few minutes later, from one end or the other.

  The view from the Homestead lulled Jeff into thinking that people down in the valley were hanging in there, perhaps roughing it. From ground level, he could see they hovered on the brink of death, as though one good flu could wipe out the entire town.

  As they approached the refinery, Jeff shook off what he had witnessed. No matter how haunting, the valley couldn’t become his concern. The townspeople might as well be living in Africa. There was nothing he could do about their situation, so why torture himself worrying about them?

  Jeff spotted his campsite a couple hundred yards from the fence of the refinery, and he directed Josh toward it. Six men had been rotating in and out of guard duty, keeping the refinery bottled up and denying the guards access to ground water. Jeff rolled out of the Suburban and shook hands with the off-duty fighters hanging out at camp. Somewhere in the folds of the swampy wetlands surrounding the refinery, the rest of his garrison stood guard.

  “They getting thirsty in there yet?” Jeff couldn’t believe the security guards hadn’t reached out to make a deal. It had been three days since his team surrounded the refinery.

  “Nope. Not a peep. Nobody has stepped so much as a pinkie toe outside those gates.”

  “Unbelievable.” Jeff shaded his eyes and gazed at the buildings, tanks and smokestacks of the refinery. Someone handed him a pair of binoculars. Jeff could see one guard behind some kind of sandbag bunker on top of one of the big fuel storage tanks, watching him back.

  “Okay.” Jeff handed back the binos. “Radio your men and let them know I’m go
ing in.”

  “Roger.” One of the guys jumped on his radio and made the call.

  Jeff reached in the SUV and grabbed the pair of bolt cutters he’d brought with him. He left his handgun and rifle on the front seat of the Suburban and walked to the gate.

  “Hello! I’m coming in.” Without waiting for a reply, Jeff cut the chain on the gate, stepped inside and walked down the middle of the refinery.

  “Don’t shoot. I’m unarmed. I just want to talk.”

  As he sauntered into the jumble of pipes and valves at the heart of the facility, a man burst out of an office trailer, whipping his assault rifle toward Jeff. The man looked like he had been taking an afternoon nap.

  “Stop!” the guy yelled. Jeff didn’t have to be told twice. He already had his hands in the air.

  “I just want to talk,” Jeff repeated.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “I cut your chain. Sorry, I’ll buy you a new one.” Jeff smiled.

  Afternoon Napper held his sights on Jeff, waiting. Soon, another man came around the corner, his rifle pointing at Jeff, too.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” one of the men demanded.

  Jeff turned slowly. “I came in for a parlay. How about it?”

  Nap-hair guy held his rifle on Jeff while the other guy walked closer. The new arrival slung his rifle and pulled a big zip tie from a pocket in his vest. Both guys wore chest-rigs with six or seven rifle magazines, plus mags for the handguns on their waists. These security guards looked ready for World War III. Of the five refineries in Davis County, Jeff had inadvertently selected the one guarded by the Mall Ninjas from Hell.

  Jeff could have pulled some Taekwondo on the guard as he approached with the cuffs, but even if he shot both men with their own guns, which was something he thought he could pull off, he would still have to deal with the shooter on top of the fuel storage tank.