Megan said, “Okay. Understood. I’m willing to trade at a deep discount.”
“Go ahead and bring in what you have to trade.”
As Joshua started to unload the back of the pickup, Sheila flipped around the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED.
With three of them working, the pile of tools and other barter items rapidly grew in the middle of the store’s sales floor.
Sheila sized it up and said, “Okay, this is better than I had expected. We can negotiate swaps for each item individually, or we can expedite things by just calling all of this a $5.25 silver coin purchase credit.”
Megan said, “I vote for expediting things.” Joshua nodded in agreement. Megan stepped forward to shake Sheila’s hand, and said firmly, “Deal.”
To use their purchase credit, they settled on eight AA rechargeable Sanyo Eneloop batteries, a 12V DC AA battery charger with a cigarette lighter plug, two cans of dark brown spray paint, a large roll of masking tape, a U.S. road atlas, and a box of fifty .22 LR cartridges. Together, those purchases came to $4.75 in silver coin. They used the rest of their purchase credit on some packets of nonhybrid carrot, squash, lettuce, and celery seeds. These were all varieties that would grow well in northern climates.
Once they were back at the house, they packed everything that they had originally brought with them to Bradfordsville, including the deer carts, in case they might have to abandon the pickup at some point and continue on foot.
As Megan and Joshua filled all of their canteens and laid out items to pack by the door that connected the living room to the garage, Malorie checked out the pickup and took it on a short test drive.
She returned and started looking under the hood. Meanwhile, Joshua used some 409 spray cleaner and rags to carefully wash the portions of the door panels that had the painted advertising text and logos. He then neatly masked off rectangles around them, backed with scrap paper left over from Jean and Leo’s homeschooling, to protect from overspray. Two coats of paint, with a twenty-five-minute delay between the first and second coats, made the Chem-Dry logos and the area code 270-prefix phone numbers disappear. The rectangles were a full shade darker than the rest of the truck, but at least the truck now looked much less distinctive. Once the paint was dry, Joshua peeled off the masking tape and scrap paper and put them in a paper bag, along with the empty spray-paint cans. Megan was about to toss this in the trash can, when Joshua snatched it away, and said, “We can’t leave clues like that around for the MPs.” He stowed the bag next to the gas cans in the bed of the pickup.
As they positioned a sheet of scrap cardboard over the two rows of gas cans, Malorie rattled off a report on her inspection of the pickup. “There’s no time to drop the transmission pan, but the color of the transmission fluid on the dipstick looks decent, and it shifts smoothly. The oil was one quart low, and with a hundred and ninety-two thousand miles on the clock, I suspect that it’s starting to burn some oil. The oil didn’t look dark. The tires are in fair shape and their pressure was fine except the left rear, which I brought up with the hand pump. The engine compression seems decent, and the serpentine belt should be good for several thousand more miles. The body is in fair shape but the rear wheel wells are rusted out. The shocks are iffy, but with the load we’ll be carrying, they should suffice. The gas gauge reads seven-eighths full, if that can be trusted. I checked the owner’s manual, and that shows this rig has a twenty-eight-gallon tank. Conservatively assuming fifteen miles per gallon on the highway, that gives us a four-hundred-twenty-mile range. Those five-gallon cans will provide another seven hundred fifty miles. Not bad. The power steering fluid is a bit on the dark side, but the power-steering pump itself doesn’t sound noisy. No noise from the water pump, either. There is a little slop in the steering wheel, but it’ll do. The brakes seem firm, and while I’d prefer to pull the hubs to do an inspection, there’s not enough time. The battery has full cells, but the terminals look a little snowy. Hoses look good and feel supple, but you never know with a vehicle that’s been parked for a long time. In summary, I’d say that whoever owned this pickup must’ve taken pretty good care of it—at least mechanically. Too bad that it isn’t four-wheel drive, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
Joshua and Malorie took one last look around the house while Megan wrote a note to their landlord. At the last minute, Malorie tossed in the tire pump, alongside the deer carts. They left at 11:30 P.M., just after saying prayers and bedding down Jean and Leo in sleeping bags in the back of the crew cab. Leo asked, “We’re going on an adventure, aren’t we, Mommy?”
Megan stroked his hair and answered, “Yes, we are. It’s time to go to sleep now.”
Picking a route that would avoid UNPROFOR checkpoints, they headed west on Highway 733 to Elizabethtown. As he drove, Joshua started simulating interrogations of Megan and Malorie on the details of their Georgia driver’s licenses, to be sure that they still had the details memorized. They did the same for him. Joshua cut north to Owensboro. From there, they took a succession of small highways through Henderson, Waverly, and Morganfield. Since they had mainly been walking for the past six months, their progress seemed lightning fast. Near 3:30 A.M., they crossed the Ohio River into Indiana. They stopped on a side road to refuel. Six hours and another refueling later, they were in Havana, Illinois. There, they found one gas station that was open. Spending almost all of their ProvGov Blue Bucks, they refilled the tank and all of the gas cans.
Leaving Havana, they ran into a UNPROFOR roadblock. There was just a cursory ID check, where they handed the bored MPs their “inherited” Georgia driver’s licenses. Megan offered a story about how they had been promised work at a food-processing plant in western Illinois. There were lots of people moving long distances within UNPROFOR territory to find work, so this sounded plausible to the sentry. They were greatly relieved that they weren’t searched (since their guns were hard to hide), and that their IDs were not scanned—as UNPROFOR had started to do in Kentucky. (They didn’t want to end up in a database.)
It took all of them a couple of hours to calm down from the tension of the roadblock stop. Megan later asked Joshua about his impressions of the incident. He said, “My mind was mainly on reminding myself not to take chest shots, since they were wearing Interceptor Body Armor. My mind got caught in a loop: ‘They’re wearing IBA, so aim for the ocular window . . .’”
• • •
At the same time that they were pulling away from that checkpoint, an MRAP pulled up in front of their former house in Bradfordsville, Kentucky. A team of German Bundeswehr soldiers armed with G36 rifles and carrying a battering ram trotted to the door. Finding the door unlocked, they rushed in to find the house deserted. The officer in charge called in the two Soldats who had been covering the rear of the house. Disgusted with finding their prey missing, the officer snorted, “Ekelhaft.”
They found an envelope on the kitchen table, addressed to the landlord. Inside was four dollars in pre-1965 half dollars and a handwritten note that read:
Dear Mr. Combs,
We were called away on short notice to attend to my grandmother in South Carolina, who is ill. Enclosed you will find our house lease money for October and November. If we have not returned by November 30, then you can assume that we will not be returning and you can rent the house to someone else.
Thanks, and God Bless, Megan Kim
• • •
Joshua’s party continued to switch drivers once every two or three hours as they zigzagged west and slightly north, on smaller highways. At 1:15 P.M. in Osceola, Iowa, they made inquiries about how to avoid UNPROFOR checkpoints around Omaha, doing their best to sound casual. They were told to cross into Nebraska on Highway 138.
There was gas available in Osceola, but the station took only silver in payment. They again completely refueled and also bought two quarts of oil, since the engine was obviously burning some. They crossed into Nebraska at 4:30 P. M., feeling exhausted. Even sleeping in shifts, fatigue was catching up
to them. They stopped at the parking lot of the abandoned Tecumseh Country Club to make sandwiches and to get some sleep.
Megan, Malorie, and the boys squeezed into the back of the pickup after pulling out the deer carts and the tent bags so that there’d be room to sleep in the camper shell. The Scepter cans sealed exceptionally well, so there was just a faint aroma of gasoline. Joshua did his best to sleep in the pickup’s rear seat, but it was too short for him and had some uncomfortable bumps. He awoke at 3:00 A.M. with a backache. He spent some time stretching his back before waking the others. Using his flashlight, Joshua checked the radiator, the radiator hoses, and the serpentine belt. Then he checked the tires with a pressure gauge. They had everything reloaded and were back on the road within ten minutes.
Eight hours later, with Malorie doing most of the driving across the broad prairie expanses of Nebraska, they arrived in the town of Gering, just south of Scottsbluff, across the river. There was gas available at a station in Gering, but the price there was forty cents in silver per gallon—twice as much as they had paid farther east.
In Gering, they got confirmation that a point twenty miles west of Scottsbluff was still the farthest western outpost of UN troops. Beyond the Wyoming state line, they would be outside UNPROFOR-controlled territory. It would also mean that they probably wouldn’t be able to buy gasoline. They were warned of a large UNPROFOR contingent in Scottsbluff and at the state line on Highway 26. However, a state line crossing point on the much smaller Highway 88—only a dozen miles south—was said to be unguarded.
They said some prayers asking for protection before turning west on Highway 88. The crossing was indeed unguarded, and Joshua breathed a sigh of relief. They stopped short of La Grange, Wyoming, to make sandwiches, using the last of their bread and some peanut butter that was made in Oklahoma under the post-Crunch trade name of “Glop.” Over lunch, they scrutinized the Rand McNally road atlas and did some mileage calculations.
The more direct route would have taken them through Casper, Billings, Butte, and Missoula. Taking that route, they might make it all the way to Bovill, Idaho, with the fuel that they had available. But on that route, there were recent reports of heavy looter activity, and gangs controlling several cities and highways.
The alternate route—about 140 miles longer—would take them looping south, though Idaho’s “Banana Belt.” They would pass through Jackson, Wyoming; Rexburg, Idaho; and then through Pocatello, Twin Falls, Boise, Lewiston, and Moscow, Idaho.
Joshua said, “Okay, from here on, we set the cruise control at just thirty-five miles per hour, for maximum gas mileage. We took a huge risk rushing out of UNPROFOR territory the way that we did. From now on we’ll plan on logging just two hundred fifty miles a day. We go slower, and move much more cautiously. We’ve successfully escaped the clutches of Maynard Hutchings, so we can relax a bit. Proverbs twenty-eight teaches us rightly that only the wicked flee when no one pursues.”
35
THE NEW HIGHWAY PATROL
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
—Jorge Luis Borges
Dubois, Wyoming—Early November, the Second Year
Their progress driving through Wyoming was good until they reached the town of Dubois. The roadblock there was very cleverly and covertly constructed. It was where Highway 26 passed through the city streets at the south end of Dubois. At the corner of South First Street and East Ramshorn Street, the highway made a sharp turn to the west at a stoplight that had been retrofitted with a stop sign.
As Joshua slowed and neared the stop sign, someone forward and to the left of his truck shouted, “Out of state!”
Horizontal half-inch steel barricade cables were simultaneously raised to a height of thirty inches ahead of them, to the left, right, and behind them, all within seconds. These cables were jerked up and pulled taut by teenagers spinning hand-cranked windlasses. Men swarmed out of buildings on both sides of the street. Joshua pivoted his head left and right to see that nine men had rifles of various vintages pointed at the cab of the truck.
A young man with a scraggly beard approached closer than the others, with a shouldered SKS rifle. He had it pointed at Joshua’s head. He shouted, “Shut it down!”
Joshua did as he was ordered.
Four more men appeared, three armed with ARs, and one with a Saiga-12 shotgun. A dozen teenagers, some of them armed, soon followed.
A gray-haired pudgy man holding an AR-10 and wearing a camouflage hunting jacket walked out of a nearby café. He ordered, “Hands on the dashboard and the backs of the seats, all of you! Driver, roll down your window.”
Joshua cranked the window down immediately.
They could now hear the man more clearly. “I’m Elder Josiah Wilson, and I’m in charge here. We cannot have hordes of easterners coming into our county.”
Joshua shook his head and said in a calm voice, “We’re not a ‘horde.’ As you can see, there are only five of us—and two are small children. We are God-fearing and law-abiding folks, and we’re just passing through your county on our way to live with a friend of mine up in northern Idaho, up near Moscow.”
“You are vagrants with no visible means of support.”
“I’m no vagrant. I am a traveler, exercising my right of way. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to drop that cable to my left.”
Wilson said, “You’re not going anywhere until after we’ve exacted our road tax and fine for vagrancy.”
The man with the SKS approached and pressed the muzzle of the rifle into Joshua’s temple, and ordered, “Flip that key forward, just one click. If you start that engine, I’ll shoot all of you.”
Joshua did as he was ordered. Then he put his right hand back on the dash.
The man glanced down at the gas gauge and shouted over his shoulder, “They’ve got a quarter tank.”
Joshua said, “I don’t believe this. I’m not—”
Wilson, looking angry, yelled, “No, no! You are going to pay the county a fine and tax consisting of any fuel that you have in cans. You may keep what is in your gas tank. Then you can decide whether you will press on, beyond the confines of Fremont County, or if you want to turn around and head back from whence you came.”
After a pause, Wilson ordered: “Search the vehicle.”
Six men swarmed the back of the truck. There were gleeful shouts when they dropped the tailgate and saw the ten Scepter fuel cans. In just a few minutes, they had removed all of the cans, the spout, and the lid wrench.
Wilson said consolingly, “We haven’t molested any of your other belongings. We’re civilized here.”
The man with the SKS pulled out a blue slip of paper and placed it on the dashboard between Joshua’s hands.
Wilson explained, “That is a pass, good for twenty-four hours. It’ll get you through the roadblocks on either side of Jackson Hole and all the way to the Idaho state line. You may proceed, but don’t stop anywhere in Fremont County. Once you’ve left Fremont County, you may not return, or you will be shot on sight. Have I made myself clear?”
“Perfectly.”
Wilson said snidely, “Have a nice day. You are free to go.”
The cable to the left was dropped, and Joshua started the engine.
After the pickup had cleared the barrier, Joshua asked, “Did you see any badges?”
Megan answered, “No. But what difference would that make in times like this? They’ve got the ultimate revenue scheme.”
Joshua, still livid, asked, “How many of them did you count?”
Megan answered, “There were at least twenty-two of them.”
Joshua shook his head and said, “If I was by myself, I’d sneak back there and wax as many of them as I could.”
“But you’re not traveling by yourself,” Megan chided. “You can’t take on a whole town. We have the boys to look after. We certainly can’t do that if we’re dead.”
• • •
/> When they were ten miles south of Driggs, Idaho, with Megan driving, the engine blew a head gasket and noticeably lost compression. The fuel gauge was pointed near E.
Malorie said dryly, “Do you suppose this is God’s second way of telling us that we need to start walking?”
Megan pressed on, wanting to squeeze another few miles out of their gas tank. With the fuel tank exhausted, the engine hesitated and finally died when they were two miles south of Driggs. Megan turned the wheel and coasted to park the pickup on the shoulder of the highway.
They reorganized their load onto the two deer carts. Malorie checked the tire inflation on the carts and found two tires were a few pounds low, so she topped them off with the hand pump. With the extra canned food that they’d brought from the house, this was by far the most that they had ever loaded on the deer carts. The heavy carts, along with backpacks that were quite full, made for slow going. Even Leo and Jean carried small loads in their rucksacks.
The afternoon was cold, and the dark sky threatened snow. They started walking, singing hymns to raise their sprits.
Driggs was an interesting town. For many years it had been considered the poor man’s version of Jackson Hole. Like Jackson, it had a wonderful view of the Grand Teton peaks—but as seen from the west side, rather than the east. The town was unpretentious and had only the basic amenities. Not surprisingly, most of the businesses were closed.
One of the few open businesses was a Big R farm and ranch supply store. The cavernous store was unheated and now had a pitifully small inventory. It obviously was in the process of becoming a secondhand goods store.
While Malorie watched the boys and guarded the carts, Megan and Joshua went in and struck up a conversation with a sales clerk, who was dressed in heavily insulated mechanic’s coveralls, gloves, and a fluorescent orange pile cap.
Liberators Page 25
