Black Autumn

by Jeff Kirkham

  Chad felt the old familiar rage rising, like a tide of acid in his belly. Once again, he had done battle at the behest of old men, men with enough testosterone to want to kill something but not enough testosterone to do it themselves.

  Only part of his anger pointed at the politicians of the world. The larger part focused anger on himself. Once again he had allowed his talents to be manipulated by men whose only virtue was an ability to trick people into voting for them.

  As soon as he confirmed that all the defenders were dead, Chad walked out of the building, cleared his rifle and handgun, and walked across the parking lot to the Chevy Blazer he and Pacheco had stolen from the first roadblock. He left no instructions with the men of Rawlins. His job was done and the dickweeds who had hired him could figure out the rest.

  “Pacheco, Chad. Over.”

  “Go ahead, Chad.”

  “Walk out to the freeway. I’m coming to pick you up.”

  “Okay, Chad.”

  • • •

  Ross Homestead

  Oakwood, Utah

  Jason and Jeff stood once again on the colonnade, waiting for their daily meeting with the bishopric. The bishop was late.

  “How’s your boy?” Jason asked, already knowing the answer.

  “He’s resting. His temperature is running hot and he’s breathing shallow. They don’t know if he’ll pull through without antivenin. It’s been a long time since any of the doctors have seen a snakebite that wasn’t treated with antivenin.”

  Jeff gave the update but the truth was that he hadn’t been to see his son this morning. Visiting his son in the infirmary rattled Jeff so badly that he wasn’t sure if he could visit his boy daily and remain operational. Nobody else at the Homestead could do Jeff’s job. Nobody else could guarantee the safety of all the families. Jeff felt guilty as hell for not going to see Leif, but he had to put the mission first.

  There wasn’t anything more for Jason to say. “Have you noticed the chill this morning?”

  Jeff thought about it for a second and did his best to stop churning through worry about his son.

  “Is the winter going to help us or hurt us?” Jeff asked Jason.

  Taking it as permission to change the subject, Jason replied, “We’re not planting anything right now, not even in the greenhouses. The winter will take a lot of lives down in the city unless the government or the Church comes in with some big shipment of grain. We should be okay up here; we have around fifteen thousand pounds of grain and another ten thousand pounds of dried food. But the people down there… the winter will definitely hurt them. And that may become a serious problem for us up here.”

  “Yesterday, I drove through the valley,” Jeff said. “It’s gotten bad fast. People are sick from drinking surface water and they’re about out of firewood. Everyone I saw looked like they had diarrhea.”

  Jason exhaled. “I can’t afford to worry about the people in the city. If they’re already sick, and if the wood’s already gone, almost everyone down there is going to die in the next two months. God help them.”

  Jeff turned the subject to defense. “We need to survive until the people down there are no longer a threat. We could be attacked at any moment. Starvation turns good men into vicious animals. At least some of the people in that valley are starting to look at their guns and ammunition and ask themselves, ‘how can I turn this into food?’ We are an obvious answer to that question.”

  Jason looked at his wristwatch. He had started wearing a watch as soon as cell service died, since his phone had become just one more weight in his pocket. The Homestead could produce about forty thousand kilowatts per hour with its solar arrays, even in October, so keeping their phones charged wasn’t an issue, but a manual wristwatch was a better solution now that phones were obsolete. “I don’t think the bishopric is going to show. Yesterday, one of the neighbors told me that families are starting to go hungry in the neighborhood. The bishop might be working out a way to keep them fed. I also heard that they’re planting gardens in some of the yards.”

  “How’s that supposed to work?” Jeff looked up. “Will stuff grow this late in the fall?”

  “It’s not going to work at all. By the time they have starts, it’ll freeze and kill them, even in cold frames. Plus the photo period is going to go down each day over the next two months. Any planting now is futile, at least without grow lamps.”

  Jeff looked at his own watch. “I need to get to work. Today we’re setting up a second layer of roadblocks and concertina wire on the streets in the neighborhood.”

  “Thank you. I know you’d rather be with your son right now. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do unless you can go back in time and stock antivenin.”

  Jason’s face fell. Not wanting to leave things on a sour note, Jeff gathered himself to leave. “I need to focus on things we can control. Right now, the best thing I can do is to keep this camp from being overrun by zombies.”

  Jason turned to Jeff, apparently at a loss for what to say next. “That’s got to be hard.”

  “The only easy day was yesterday,” Jeff replied, a shallow attempt to escape the conversation. He took his mug and walked away with a nod.

  • • •

  People were lining up at the Homestead’s water spigot two streets below the Homestead.

  At least we’re able to get our neighbors clean water. I wonder if they appreciate it. Jason watched a group of men doing marching drills on Masterson’s yard. He didn’t know much about military training, but he doubted the value of what he was seeing.

  Jason turned and watched as one of the Homestead Pinzgauer trucks rumbled up a dirt road on the mountain, taking a group of replacement guards to change shifts. Luckily he had purchased a small snowcat right before the collapse. They would be able to shuttle troops up to guard duty during the winter, too. Walking all the way up the mountain would burn calories they didn’t have to spare.

  Jason looked out at the Salt Lake Valley. He couldn’t see the entire valley from his point of view, but he could see enough to get a mental picture of the millions of people drinking filthy water, running out of food, and burning the last of their firewood.

  Jason could barely imagine their suffering. He felt a great disturbance coming from the thousands of tiny fires burning in yards, parks and streets. He wanted to connect to their suffering, to give them full regard. But another sensation took precedence, blotting out the tragedy before his eyes.

  Those people in the valley felt like a mortal threat―a hungry, crazed, burgeoning cyst that could explode any day, dragging his family into horror. The dying people had become objects to him despite all his Christian ideals. The sullen waves of menace radiating off the dead and dying nibbled at Jason’s commitment to humanity, chewing it down to a fundamental terror: that he might watch his children die in the weeks to come.

  Something drew Jason’s eye to Tim Masterson, standing on his front lawn giving orders. Jason’s fear focused on the man, drawing that fear into a red-hot point of rage. One petty, egomaniacal man became the incarnation of the evil that hunted Jason’s children.

  The entire clusterfuck of an Apocalypse could be placed at the feet of people like Masterson—men with shallow, selfish myopia; men who ignored the lifeblood of a nation in order to advance their dingy ambitions. Politicians, bureaucrats, the power-hungry, the greedy, the self-absorbed; America had become a nation of narcissists and now millions of children would suffer terror, pain and then death.

  As he weighed the cost of the nation America had become, Jason didn’t even feel a ghost of his old drive to be a better man. Instead, his heart did a hard one-eighty from morality, turning toward another, more ancient emotion.

  Rage.

  • • •

  “Jeff, hold on.” Teddy ran up to Jeff with a square piece of material about the size of a phone book. The square had been shot to hell. “Check it out, dude. Armor for the OHVs. We’ve got door armor a
nd it’ll stop a rifle round.”

  The interruption irritated Jeff. He had been worrying about his son. He stared at the weird, black chunk of material and struggled to catch up with what the hippie guy was saying.

  “What is it?” Jeff took the black panel and turned it over in his hands.

  “It’s armor. For the OHVs,” Teddy repeated.

  “It’s not going to work.” Jeff said, still trying to grasp what it was he was holding in his hands. He had tried a million materials as experimental armor back in Afghanistan for his Afghani troops, and the only thing that worked to stop bullets was heavy AR500 steel.

  Teddy shook his head with a crooked smile, knowing Jeff was wrong. “When I woke up this morning, I thought maybe I’d get the chance to show you something new. I think we did it.”

  Jeff examined the panel again closely. Teddy had bonded several layers of fiberglass, making a thick back plate. Then, he had glued a bunch of glass marbles to the face and slathered black truck liner paint over it, sticking the marbles to the fiberglass. Rifle rounds had hit the test plate and marbles were blown away in two-inch circles. True to Teddy’s claim, the rifle rounds hadn’t penetrated the fiberglass. Jeff looked at the back and couldn’t find any exit holes.

  “Where’d you get this idea?” Jeff asked, astonished. How could this young longhair invent effective armor out of marbles and truck liner when multi-million-dollar defense contractors had failed to accomplish the same thing?

  “I dunno,” Teddy shrugged. “I thought it might be cool if we had some bullet-proofing for the OHVs. Maybe save some lives. Your QRF dudes could get to battle a lot faster with armored OHVs. The marble thing… I started thinking about what we had around the Homestead in big quantities. The marbles came from Jason’s daughter’s wedding two years ago. He bought a zillion marbles to fill up glass lanterns and never threw them away. We probably have three hundred pounds of marbles. And we have at least three gallons of bed liner. I had the fiberglass fabric set aside for a pond liner we were going to make, but then decided to buy a rubberized liner instead. Bro, I think I can armor all the OHVs in the next couple of days: it would just be the doors and a little front shielding, but it’d be something.”

  Jeff handed the panel back to Teddy. “Very cool. Do it.” Teddy took the panel back and smiled. “Right on.”

  Jeff walked toward the ham shack by the bunkhouse. He wanted to check on his buddy Evan again. Since the day Evan left for the National Guard Armory, he had only checked in twice. The last time was four days ago. Jeff knew Evan’s team had made it to the Army Depot in Tooele, but he had no idea what had happened since. Ham radio could be finicky, and it was possible that the ham repeater up on Oquirrh Mountain had run out of battery and died. The repeater stood between the Army Depot and the Homestead. If the battery backup on the repeater had crapped out, Evan’s comm link would be dead, too.

  Before he reached the ham shack, Alena cornered him. Jeff’s blood turned to ice, anticipating bad news about his son.

  “Jeff, can you hold on a second?”

  “Sure, Alena. Is everything okay?” Jeff asked, frigidity in his voice.

  “Leif is the same. He’s resting and he’s got a fever. Can I please talk to you about something else?” Jeff nodded, his neck muscles going slack. “Robert is hell-bent on serving in your army.”

  It required a moment for Jeff to understand what she was saying. His body had steeled itself to get news that his son was dead. He took a big breath and regathered himself like a spilled bag of leaves.

  Jeff did his best to answer her. “Robert wants to do his part to protect his family. Any man would do the same.” He was beginning to see where she was going, and part of him wanted to scream at her. Why aren’t you in the infirmary taking care of my son! Stop being such a controlling bitch and do your fucking job!

  Alena went on, oblivious to Jeff’s internal struggle. “Robert knows nothing about guns and he’s going to get himself killed.”

  Jeff’s eyes narrowed. “Robert’s a grown man and he’s an Army specialist. He knows what he’s getting into. We’ll train him as quickly as we can. That’s all I can promise you.” Jeff went to walk way, but Alena pressed the issue.

  “That won’t be good enough. I know my husband, and he’s not cut out for this kind of thing. Can you give him clerical duty or messenger duty or something like that?”

  “I could do that, Alena, and he’d know you interfered. If he asks me, I won’t lie to him. I realize you think I’m some kind of mindless soldier, but men who serve… we have an agreement to treat one another like men. I’d never insult him by treating him differently than any other man, unless he can’t physically do the job. Does that make sense?”

  Alena didn’t want it to make sense. “No. It doesn’t make sense.” She started to tear up. “I can’t raise a family without Robert and, by putting him out there to fight, you’re putting our children at risk. Please don’t do this to us.”

  Jeff softened and actually felt a little sympathy for the woman. He could see her for what she was: a strong woman fighting to survive in a strange and dangerous world. The strategies she had used to navigate her past life—hard charging and strong words—they weren’t getting her what they once had. This wasn’t a world she could control with her practiced tongue and iron will. The dangers in this world would have to be met with a more physical response.

  “Here’s what I’ll promise you,” Jeff held up his hands, conceding as much as he could. “I’ll train him myself, and I’ll do my best to give him duty that’s suited to his ability. That’s all I can promise.”

  Jeff didn’t wait for a reply, assuming she would keep mounting new arguments until she got her way, and Jeff knew that wasn’t going to happen. Today, he didn’t have that kind of patience. If he kept arguing with her, he knew he would get angry―really angry. Given his state of mind, he wasn’t sure he could control that kind of anger. He turned, heading toward the ham shack, before she could speak again.

  • • •

  Warm Springs Park

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  There was something ludicrous about two tattooed criminals sitting together on a picnic bench. Watching from a distance, Gabriel thought it was an honest illustration of thug life. For all their violence and posturing, the two gangster captains sitting on the bench were just two confused little boys at a park—his brother Francisco and Aleki Tapu’o, the captain of the Tongan Crips.

  The two gang leaders did their best to look tough, each man straddling his picnic seat with one arm on the table, sitting on opposite sides, glaring at one another.

  “Why should I trust a Mexican?” Aleki challenged Francisco, raising his chin. The Tongan was a massive man, his arms easily the size of Gabriel’s legs, with tribal tattoos covering his biceps, back and legs.

  Francisco refused to answer. “This is just business. Either you want to make some money or you don’t.”

  The Tongan smirked. “That’s the problem with you greasers. You don’t understand family.”

  With that chilling comment, Gabriel knew they had misjudged the meeting. Gabriel had called the meeting as a way to save his own skin, but the Pacific Islanders had used it to set a trap.

  Gabriel looked around, his anxiety spiking. In the distance, as he had feared, men filtered into the park from every direction; all Pacific Islanders. Many of them didn’t look like gangbangers; some of the men were in their fifties.

  Aleki continued to talk, not glancing at the men he knew were moving in to surround the meeting. “When your man Digger here ass-raped my wife’s cousin in Oxbow Jail last year, MY family didn’t get a chance to have a funeral. Our little cousin hung himself in his cell from shame. We thought maybe we could have the funeral right here, today, hermano. Maybe we’d have a little potluck dinner, Island-style. Maybe we’d roast a pig in a pit. Problem is, with all the shit going down, we couldn’t find a pig. We figured maybe it’d be just as good to roast a Mexican. I’ve never eaten a burned-al
ive Mexican before.”

  With over a hundred Tongans converging on the park, Gabriel saw no way out of the trap. Francisco ignored the threat and the hundred hulking men slowly surrounding him. “You’re saying Digger here raped a Poly boy in jail?… Come here, Digger.”

  Digger walked over to Francisco, the fear of imminent death dancing in his eyes. In a flash, Francisco whipped his straight razor out of his back pocket and waved it past Digger’s throat. For a moment, nothing happened. Then Digger coughed. A gout of blood exploded from a straight, dark line that appeared across his throat. Digger’s hands flew to his neck, but his head tipped back unnaturally, as though all the muscles and tendons had sprung loose at once. His hands caught his now-floppy head, returning it to its proper place. Blood cascaded down the front of his shirt. His eyes looked down at his chest, he crumpled to his knees, fell over sideways and died.

  Aleki held up his hand and the men surrounding them paused.

  “It’s a good start.” Aleki looked down at Digger’s corpse and spit on his still-warm face.

  Francisco continued as though nothing had happened, as though there weren’t a hundred men standing around them ready to tear them limb from limb. He wiped his straight razor on the inside of his shirt, taking his time, folded it carefully and slipped it into his back pocket. “We can give you half a semi-load of dried and canned food if you lend us a hundred fighting men two days from today.”

  The big Polynesian thought about the offer, mulling over his options. He had clearly planned on ambushing the Latinos and killing them. The possibility of food seemed to give him pause.

  “Give us a full semi-load of food, give each one of my men a gun and ammunition, and add two hundred bottles of booze to the deal. Then, maybe I’ll consider not killing you right now.” Aleki negotiated from a position of strength.

  “Fuck you,” Francisco countered, glossing over the threat. “I’ll give your men guns and ammunition, half a semi-load of food, and one hundred bottles of hard liquor. That’s my final offer.”