Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  Jeff let the guy cuff him, making sure his hands were in front, where Jeff could quickly snap the zip tie if necessary. Once the security guard had him trussed up, he steered Jeff into the trailer office along with Afternoon Napper.

  Jeff couldn’t believe his eyes. The place was packed with Mountain House, ammo cases and three big barrels of water. The office trailer looked like it had once been the security office of the refinery. Now it looked and smelled like an Apocalypse apartment for three single men.

  “What’s all this?” Jeff couldn’t help but ask.

  “What do you want, coming in here uninvited?” the older of the two asked, ignoring Jeff’s question.

  “I want to talk about joining forces. What’s your name?” Jeff reached out his cuffed hands to shake hands.

  The older guy, probably in his mid-fifties, made no move to return the handshake. “My name’s None-of-your-business. Why would we want to join up with anyone? We’re doing just fine.”

  Jeff could see a security uniform shirt draped over the chair in the corner. The embroidered name on it said, “Morgan.” Jeff walked across the room and sat down in the chair.

  “Are you Mister Morgan?” Neither guy responded.

  “Okay, Mister Morgan. I’m with the guys camped outside.” Jeff motioned with his head in the direction of his outpost. “We’re here to make sure this refinery doesn’t get burned down by the criminal element. We’d like a little gas for our trouble once things settle down.”

  “Does it look to you like this place is getting taken over by the criminal element?” the old guy sneered.

  “Nope, looks like you’re doing a fine job. In fact, we’d like to work with you. We can help you with food, information, good company, showers… we even have a few single ladies around our place.” Afternoon Napper’s head snapped around at the mention of single ladies.

  We might have something to offer them after all, Jeff thought. The old guy stood up and the smell of unwashed man wafted over Jeff.

  “We’re doing just fine. Screw off.” The old guy grabbed Jeff’s cuffed hands, levered him out of his chair and marched him down the steps from the trailer office and out to the chain link gate where he unceremoniously gave Jeff the boot in the ass.

  “If you come back, we’ll shoot you,” he said as a parting shot.

  Jeff walked back to the campsite, not happy about returning in cuffs, but unwilling to risk cutting his wrists to break free.

  “That go well, boss?” one of his guys asked while the others chuckled.

  “All part of the plan,” Jeff lied. “Cut me out of these things.”

  One of the guys had his Leatherman out and he cut the zip ties with the dikes.

  “You wouldn’t believe what they’ve got in there. It’s like they set that place up for Armageddon. I’ll bet they have six months of food and water in that damned office trailer. They must’ve made some kind of prepper pact and supplied the hell out of that refinery right before the world fell apart. There’s no other staff in the facility—just the three security guys. This is their Alamo.”

  “What are our orders, then?”

  Jeff scratched his bald head. “Just keep on doing what you’re doing. Bottle them up and help defend the place from marauders. I’ll think of something.”

  Jeff figured he would just leave the bolt cutters at the gate. They weren’t worth going back for and getting shot. He climbed into the Suburban, grabbed his rifle and said his goodbyes.

  • • •

  Two miles above the refinery, on the mountainside just below the Homestead, Emily Ross sat on a park bench watching women talk and children play. Several hours at a time, Emily could forget that everyone she knew, outside of her dad’s compound on the hill, probably lived in terror, if they weren’t dead already.

  But what could she do about it? Absolutely nothing. There was nothing she could do but pray for them. She didn’t know what to pray for. More food? Government relief? Protection from violence? It would be best not to think about it, especially since it made her feel guilty. Perversely, she loved the Homestead lifestyle, especially since the failure of civilization. Perhaps owing to the ever-present risk of dying, living inside the walls of the Homestead felt alive.

  As part of QRF Three, she no longer pulled guard duty. Emily spent most of the day training with her team. When they weren’t running react-to-contact drills, they trained on radio protocols. When they weren’t training on radio protocols, they were shooting on the dynamic target range. When they weren’t shooting on the dynamic target range, they were practicing bounding drills.

  QRF shooters burned at least five hundred rounds of ammo per week. Emily couldn’t figure out how they could afford the ammo. To support this training tempo, her dad would have had to stockpile a million or more rounds before the collapse. Who would ever have thought that much ammunition would be necessary?

  Besides training, Emily spent her day helping in the infirmary, working in the cook shed, tending animals, picking fruit, and canning. Working with her hands, surrounded by family, making food and handling survival needs—something about this life felt profoundly right to her.

  Contrary to popular belief, throughout six million years of human development, women had provided most of the calories to the human race. Men had occasionally brought home a shank of woolly mammoth or a dead rabbit. Anthropologically, though, humankind had survived on the labor of females. Most of the calories fueling the rise of man came from collecting roots, nuts and seeds, with men nowhere in sight.

  A man’s role, across eons, had been to fight and die on the battlefield, securing peace that would last until the next batch of men was old enough to fight and die on the battlefield. Men were designed to solve a problem created by men. That, and they were nice to look at, Emily admitted.

  Just two weeks back, Emily would have argued that the cycle of warfare had ended—that new, modern gender roles would last forever, setting the stage for a peaceful, utopian future. But everything had gone primitive literally within a matter of days. Women were back in the kitchen, producing the bulk of calories and men were back on the battlefield, fighting and dying. She would never have believed it possible for the foundation of society to transform so quickly.

  But not everything had reverted to the bad, old days of gender inequality. She’d been tapped to fight in one of the elite units of the Homestead.

  I guess that’s progress, she thought.

  The other women liked her, even the anti-gun ladies. Regardless of how they felt about guns, the women enjoyed seeing one of their own matching the ability of the men. Emily wasn’t the only woman who carried a gun—many carried sidearms—but she was the only woman on a QRF.

  Even more than working in the infirmary, Emily loved to bake bread. At any given moment, two massive cooking operations were underway at the Homestead: cooking the next meal and baking bread.

  As the closest thing to money these days, fresh-baked bread had become currency between the Homestead and the world. Whenever any salvage was needed from the valley, they’d slap the notice on a dry erase board at the tent city below the barricades, list a value of the item in loaves of bread, and pretty soon somebody would show up with that item. Mattresses, water filters, grass seed, Romex wire. Anything that hadn’t been eaten or burned down in the valley could be had for a few loaves of bread. Jeff Kirkham paid new recruits in fresh loaves, feeding their families in exchange for providing security. Every day, the four Pioneer Princess wood-burning stoves of the Homestead pumped out loaf after loaf of bread, feeding scores of families. The Homestead forest contained hundreds of cords of dried wood, since it was located far up the mountain, nested in the oak and maple forests. The stoves could run for years on the dried wood provided by Mother Nature within a short walk of the cook stoves. A troop of ladies and children went out every day with chainsaws and axes and brought back a half-cord of wood, feeding the roaring maws of the Pioneer Princesses.

  Emily’s favorite job was kneading
the dough. Her forearms burned after kneading for fifteen minutes, but it was good work, honest work. She could picture the yeast bubbling inside the dough, bulking up the loaves, filling them with an earthy aroma. Maybe none of that mystique mattered to the families surviving on this bread; maybe calories were calories to them. But Emily liked to think it mattered. Maybe she was doing something to alleviate suffering after all.

  Down the hill, near the bottom of Vista View Boulevard, a small park had been set aside for the families of the “hired guns.” That had been the unfortunate name given to the defense force hired by Jeff Kirkham. A work crew had thrown together the shanty town in Vista Park, complete with a fresh water tank.

  Burke Ross, Emily’s granddad, had located and bought six surplus FEMA-made, solar-powered poop processing plants. Somehow, these big fiberglass vats took a bit of solar power, tons of poo, and turned it all into fertilizer soup. The shanty town had been loaned two of the solar poop processing plants.

  The fifty families in the shanty town had mashed all the grass around their tents into a muddy hard pack but, otherwise, the tent town was clean and disease-free. They even had a garden going behind the poo-processing plant, watered by the “compost tea” coming out the back of the poop pods. Emily wasn’t sure she would eat that lettuce, but her grandpa assured her the compost tea was “clean as a whistle.”

  Around the shanty town, Emily watched the children play in the playground and the women laugh around the park benches, cobbling together whatever they could for a meal in addition to their daily bread.

  Life goes on, she realized. People love and laugh and make stew out of weeds.

  At least here, behind a wall of guns, people had a chance at a life worth living. Maybe someday, if they all did their jobs and kept hope alive, the pall of doom would roll back across the valley and people would live without fear once again.

  • • •

  “A month ago, I’d never feed my kids this carbohydrate crap,” Jacquelyn complained to Jenna Ross as they ladled soup and handed out bread to the long line.

  Protein and fats were scarce during the collapse, even with the Homestead’s outstanding food storage. Feeding two hundred members, and another hundred and fifty families in the shanty town, required a remarkable amount of food. Even at an average of fifteen hundred calories a day per person, that meant half-a-million calories per day.

  One pound of wheat flour came in at about fifteen hundred calories, which meant that wheat carbohydrates went further than anything else, consuming four hundred pounds of wheat per day. At that rate, they would run out of wheat within a year.

  All food isn’t necessarily good food, Jacquelyn and Jenna knew. Carbohydrates provided bulk calories, but they were arguably the worst kind of calories, giving energy but little else. Fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, dairy and lean meats would be critical for long-term survival. Carbs wouldn’t do much more than keep people from starving.

  Carbs were mostly what they had. It was the Gordian Knot of food storage. Carbs kept well. Proteins and fat went bad fast. Wheat, rice, sugar and other carbohydrates would keep in an oxygen-free bucket for thirty years or more. Vegetable oils wouldn’t keep past a year, with virgin olive oil lasting just two years. Animal fats went bad within a week or less. Fresh fruits and veggies, even in cold storage, would struggle to keep over a winter.

  The Homestead had freeze-dried food, too—where proteins and fats could be better preserved—but freeze-dried food for two hundred people would have cost millions, and it would have had to be rotated out every thirty years, same as dried food.

  The realities of growing fresh food presented a vexing set of problems. The Homestead had seven glass greenhouses, two three-thousand-square-foot grow houses, and kept over a hundred livestock: dozens of chickens, four fish ponds and a hundred rabbits. Even so, those resources required careful shepherding—not killing any animals required for future breeding. And the greenhouses needed two months to spin up production, assuming perfect fortune from the gods of agriculture. Even at full tilt, the livestock and grow operations of the Homestead could produce only about a quarter of the caloric needs of the group, which left them eating mostly dried carbohydrates.

  Any way they sliced it, the people of the Homestead would experience a seventy-five percent reduction in fats and proteins from their pre-collapse diets. Compared to early American Indians, that would still be a big step up in the quality of the menu. Compared to pre-collapse society, it was a woefully unappetizing proposition.

  Just ten days after the collapse of the stock market, folks at the Homestead were already sick to death of the food. Flavorful food had vanished like a hooker after church. Without meat, butter, cheese, cream, and fresh vegetables, the cooks could only do so much with salt and spices to make the food interesting.

  Fresh meat required waiting for breed stock to get breeding. Dairy required waiting for the female goats and cows to give birth. Fresh vegetables required waiting for the greenhouses to kick in. Ramp-up time would take as long as six months, especially to get dairy running. It required breeding cows, dropping calves, and then continuing to milk them to maintain lactation. Since Homestead farmers didn’t have time to milk dozens of cows prior to the sudden collapse, most of the cows were dry when the shit hit the fan.

  The Homestead food crew had to rack their brains to come up with acceptable food options. Every day they burned deeper into their store of freeze-dried and every day they listened to good-natured complaints from the folks in the food line. It would be a losing battle until the greenhouses kicked in and the animals got knocked up and, even then, they would eventually run out of wheat.

  • • •

  “You’re doing a crappy job with the politics around here,” Jeff complained to Jason Ross as evening descended on the Homestead.

  The two leaders of the Homestead stood on the colonnade looking over the neighborhood. From where they stood, they could see Tim Masterson on his front lawn, a quarter mile down the hill, leading fifteen men in combat drills. To Jeff, it looked like blind porcupines having sex.

  Jason took a sip of tea. “Yes, indeed. I’m about ready to give myself a negative performance review. In my defense, my job description did not include managing megalomaniac neighborhood control freaks.”

  “I wasn’t even talking about that Masterson dipshit. I meant you’re doing a crappy job with the Love and Light crowd here.” Jeff pointed down at the courtyard, bustling with people. All fifteen acres of the Homestead grounds were packed with survivors going about the business of the Apocalypse.

  “Why? What’s happened now?” Jason prayed he already knew all the bad news.

  “By my estimation,” Jeff told him, “the anti-war group here is about a third of your two hundred people, and that includes about a third of our men-in-arms. A good chunk of the men of this group can’t be counted on to carry out orders because they’re of two minds about shooting trespassers under any rules of engagement.”

  Jeff took a breath, then continued. “The wives resist the idea that their husbands should be pulled away to train, patrol and work guard duty. Half of the people here are depressed as hell. Another bunch are experiencing culture shock that’s nearly debilitating. A growing number are mildly sick, slightly injured or are otherwise hampered by little things that might have been a big deal to an office worker back in the old world, like a pulled muscle, a cough or achy knees. A bunch of your guys are being crybabies and are hanging back with the womenfolk.”

  Jason thought about it for a second. “Basically, you’re saying that our men are wussies.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff replied, “but being a wussy these days has consequences.”

  “Okay. I’m on it. Do you have any good news? I could use some good news right now.”

  “All I’ve got are good news/bad news combos. We still haven’t taken the refinery, but it hasn’t burned down yet. We’re getting the Homestead guys up to speed on firearms training, but I’m not sure we can count on them in
a fight. We recruited eighty guys from the barricade, and we’re training them. Their families have been moved to the shanty town just above the barricades. That’s costing us eighty loaves of bread per day, plus we’re burning about a thousand rounds of ammo per guy we train—and that’s with us being miserly with the ammo. It’s not anywhere close to the best training I’ve conducted. Even so, we’re burning through our .223 and 9mm stockpile fast. We still hold the hospital and the two pharmacies, but that pulls about fifteen of the Homestead troops off the line every day. So we have eighty recruits, sixty Homesteaders and just about every one of the neighborhood men is now training with Dewey Dumbass down there on his lawn.” Jeff pointed at Masterson’s house.

  “Here’s my biggest worry.” Jeff handed Jason a hand-held radio.

  “Is this one of our radios?” Jason asked.

  “Nope, we pulled it off a dead Hispanic kid in that gunfight yesterday on top of the mountain.”

  “This is a ham radio,” Jason said, considering the implications.

  “I believe we are being probed.”

  Jason’s face fell. “I think I know, but please tell me what that means.”

  “That means someone is thinking about making a move on us. You don’t use radios unless you’re communicating. You don’t communicate unless you’re coordinating. You don’t coordinate unless you’re thinking. Whoever is on the other end of this radio is thinking. They’re thinking about us, and they’re not thinking about inviting us to a neighborhood picnic.”

  “God help us. This soon?” Jason set his tea down on the limestone railing.

  “We killed every last one of those guys from their recon patrol, so maybe they got the idea we’re a hard target. Maybe they’ll look for greener pastures elsewhere.”

  “It’s ironic,” Jason mused. “You killing those Hispanic kids…”