TEOTWAWKI: Beacon's Story

by David Craig

  Trudy served them wheat bread and a hot broth thick with potatoes, carrots, onions and a meat Beacon couldn't immediately identify. She proudly proclaimed the meat to be guinea pig.

  She explained that within the walls chickens were raised in wheeled bottomless walk-in mobile chicken wire coops with laying beds at the end which served, along with free ranging sheep and llamas, as lawn mowers and insect control on the wide lawns between the gardens inside the wall.

  The large mobile pens could be wheeled, a little bit each day, across the smooth lawns between estates inside the wall but the rough rocky ground outside the citadel precluded such ranching methods so she raised guinea pigs and rabbits in foot high two feet by six feet chicken wire cages which had to be moved twice a day so the guinea pigs and rabbits could graze then brought into a low shed next to the cabins for protection at night.

  She also boarded a few semi-wild chickens in a predator proof henhouse out by her garden. They consumed garden insects and table scraps. The chickens ran wild all day but had to return on their own to be locked in the little henhouse each night or face the perils of nighttime predators. Stubborn chickens were a self correcting problem.

  "The first six months were the worst," Trudy said, "a lot of people knew about the citadel and begged or demanded to be let in. But the gardens and fields hadn't even been planted yet, let alone harvested. So the corporation had to turn them down, sometimes by force."

  "They'd just barely finished building the citadel and were still stocking it when The Blowup occurred. They'd over extended their pre first harvest stored food supply by letting us join them. After all, seven is a lot of extra mouths to feed," she added as she poured them more dandelion tea.

  "We kept the pigs inside the walls all the time and fed'em food scraps. But horses, cows, llamas and sheep had to be taken out to graze. We never went outside the wall in groups of less than five with Doc and some other snipers on overwatch for us. The grass near the wall was kept real short that first year."

  "You lived inside the wall back then?" Beacon asked before blowing across his hot tin teacup.

  "Oh Yes, they took good care of us letting us live in the back of the deuce and a half and giving us food from their own stores. After the worst of the die-off was over we started building these cabins with the help of a shareholder who'd been an architect before The Blowup.

  We couldn't buy land inside the walls because it already belonged to the various shareholder households and each shareholder family had just enough space to supply their families. Besides, we had nothing but our labor to pay for anything.

  We didn't want to build too far from the gate and we couldn't build right up next to the wall because that would give attackers a way to climb up and in. So we all decided that a hundred feet was far enough away from the wall yet close enough for us to escape inside the gate in an attack.

  Nobody wanted us to obstruct the fields of fire from the wall so we had to make a lot of design compromises like low roofs slanting away from the wall."

  Beacon kept asking questions until he confirmed what he'd suspected from the first. The citadel was owned, or at least had been owned when land titles and money meant anything, by a corporation. All of the mansions he'd seen around the wall were condos owned by shareholders.

  As the family members of shareholders Keith and Cindy could buy out the condo of the shareholder family that hadn't made it to the citadel. They would be responsible to the Board of Directors and other shareholders for paying a share of their crops to the corporation as well as the upkeep and productivity of the land they'd assumed from the presumed deceased shareholder.

  It was a kind of instant aristocracy with corporate labels. Trudy and her clan, being outsiders, couldn't buy stock in the private corporation or land inside the walls. However due to their early association with the corporation during the Long March Trudy's clan were favored vassals and their descendants would likely assume the roles of middlemen and merchants vis-à-vis the corporation's princes and barons as civilization rebuilt itself from the ruins.

  Keith knocked and stuck his head in the door, "Doc needs you at the Board of Director's meeting and I'm supposed to escort you in."

  Beacon left his Ruger 10/22 rifle and gear in the care of Trudy and her sons, but made it a point to wear his M1911A1 Colt forty-five prominently on his hip.

  The Board of Directors was meeting in a large stone building adjacent to one of the gatehouses.

  Like any good leader Doc wanted to be sure he had all his ducks in a row before a public meeting so he'd sent for Beacon to answer questions and cement his interpretation of the situation with the Board before bringing the matter up before the full body of shareholders.

  Beacon noticed Molly standing behind a woman he assumed to be her mother and wondered why a kid was allowed at Board of Director's meeting. As the meeting went on he realized Molly had mastered the art of manipulating adults; when she wasn't filling water glasses or fetching notepads and pencils Molly stood behind her mother silent and motionless unnoticed and almost unseen, but listening.

  When the time came Doc's introduction of Beacon to the Board of Directors was short and sweet; "I'm sure you all remember the young man who saved Cindy from the bikers and negotiated our acquisition of the second Humvee with its machine gun."

  Beacon stepped forward, "Greeting, I'm your friendly local heathen," that drew a laugh, "I've come from the Settlement in the third valley over to the west of you. After this unpleasantness is over we hope to establish some sort of trade agreement with …"

  "We're not interested in trade deals with peasants, get to the point!"

  "Silence!" Doc roared banging the gavel on the oak table as he looked, Elaine in the eye, "I'll not have you denigrating our guest! One more outburst like that and I'll have you removed from the room."

  "You can't have me removed; I'm a member of the board!"

  "Maybe not, but I can hogtie and gag you. Do you want to try me?"

  Elaine looked down at the table and mumbled something venomous.

  "As I was about to say before I was interrupted, we at my settlement learned of the impending attack on you from one of the Blue Heads that attacked y'all a little while ago."

  "They didn't get inside our wall either," he emphasized the words 'our wall' as he looked meaningfully at Elaine, "but they came damn close.

  This next group that's comin' for y'all has a much better chance of blasting through your wall than that disorganized mob you just fought off."

  "They may be rogue reserves, but they're organized with military discipline and a chain of command. They have at least two M60 machine guns like the one we got along with the other up armored HUMVEE during the Long March." Beacon used the term the citadel had come to use to refer to their exodus from the cities after The Blowup and reinforce their memory of his role in the acquisition of the vehicle and machine gun without seeming to be blowing his own horn or calling in a debt. Elaine fumed.

  "In the recent past both of our groups have faced a common enemy the Blue Heads, or "Blue Meanies" as you call them, so we share an appreciation of their capabilities and our own." Beacon said again looking directly at Elaine. "We at the settlement pretty much wiped out the Blue Heads this last time around so you shouldn't have any more trouble from them."

  "The Blue Heads were short on guns and had damn little ammunition. These military guys coming at you are all carrying M16s and then there's the pesky little problem of their cannon."

  Elaine mockingly asked Beacon why he, "an experienced woodsman" hadn't simply slit the tires on the artillery piece instead of running "like a little girl to get our help."

  "If I blow out their tires they'll stuff'em with leaves and grass. The softer tires will slow them down only a little bit." Beacon looked her in the eye, "Anything we do is going to hurt. The trick will be making what we do hurt them a whole lot more than it hurts y'all."

  The board asked increasingly desperate questions as it became apparent that the
ir modern day castle was no more immune to the effects of artillery than the castles of the Middle Ages.

  Several board members wanted to mount a preemptive attack, Elaine was just angry that the whole situation existed at all and one man wanted to give up until Doc asked if he'd like to surrender his condo now.

  Once it became apparent that losing this battle would put them on the same footing as Trudy Peace even Elaine decided something had to be done. The question was what.

  An convoy of practiced well armed survivalists fighting its way along roads through disoriented, disorganized and poorly armed survivors in the confusion immediately following a civilization ending catastrophe was one thing. A long range infantry assault against a trained, well equipped disciplined military unit through a forest, rough terrain and fallen timber was something else again.

  On the open road their mobility and scoped semi-automatic rifles gave them an advantage. In the forest fighting at relatively short ranges among fallen trees against military men with machine guns and automatic rifles their advantage evaporated. Even Doc's big Barrett rifle would be of little use in the close confines of the forest.

  A midnight attack by a suicide squad might be able to stuff mud and dirt down the cannon's barrel and then fire it, hopefully, rupturing the breach. But they didn't know that for sure and no one in the citadel even knew how to properly load a cannon much less fire it. Did the cannon's shells require a separately loaded primer or was a percussion cap part of each shell? A whole lot of people could die while failing to fire the mud filled cannon because they didn't know how to turn off some unknown built in safety device.

  A preemptive strike followed up by repeated raids and ambushes would be costly in terms of killed and wounded shareholders, but seemed to be the only way to stop or at least slow Colonel Darkin's advance.

  Colonel Darkin could simply order his men around; they were used to it and although the carrot and stick of a paycheck and court marshal was gone it had been replaced by promise of plunder and the fear of being mustered out of the unit and left as defenseless as the people they'd previously prayed upon. As long as he didn't push them too hard Darkin's men would obey the colonel out of habit and fear.

  Doc was at a severe disadvantage in that regard. Like the American Indian chiefs of old he'd need to gather a consensus of opinion from his followers before asking for action whereas Darkin could simply issue orders.

  Doc's "troops" were successful business men and women who hadn't clawed their way to the top of their chosen professions by blindly taking orders.

  Their teenaged children, the children of privilege, had lots of experience playing with the latest top of the line civilian weaponry but hadn't been through eight weeks of basic training or a further eight more weeks of advanced infantry training like Darkin's men had. Although their youthful sense of invincibility and lust for adventure might lure them towards the warpath, their parents knew better than to expect bloodless combat.

  Doc couldn't just issue orders and expect them to be followed. Even with the support of the Board of Directors he'd need the wholehearted support of virtually all of the shareholders to go to war.

  Doc asked Beacon if he'd mind speaking to the assembled shareholders at the Castle Keep later that evening.

  The Castle Keep at the center of the spider web of roads and trails enclosed by the walls and fortified villas was indeed a fortress Beacon saw as they walked to the shareholder's meeting. Windowless, constructed of large blocks of stone its only openings were its gate and loopholes beginning at its second story.

  The Castle Keep's gate led to a passageway lined with loopholes that ended at an amphitheatre which could double as a sniping balcony from which shareholders could fire upon any enemy foolish to break through the gate and lucky enough to have made it past the murder holes into the keep proper. It was as round as the fortress that enclosed it. Beacon stood in the wings watching the crowd as Doc outlined the situation to the assembled shareholders.

  Although there were no obvious physical dividers he could see family groups seated around the empty central area with teenagers visiting between families as children ran and played everywhere.

  Doc outlined the situation to the shareholders then he called Beacon still wearing his Colt forty-five, into the assembly room to answer questions. Beacon felt like the pony in a dog and pony show. Or maybe, he mused, he was the dog.

  Beacon verified that everything Doc had said about the raiders was true and finished with, "Ambushes and raids while Colonel Darkin is fighting his way up hill will be less costly to you than waiting for him to blast down your wall. Failure to make a decision is a decision in favor of the status quo and right now that status quo isn't looking good."

  Elaine shouted out "Why do you care what happens to us?"

  Beacon answered even as Doc was banging the gavel for order. "Colonel Darkin is building a kingdom. He won't be satisfied with taking your castle homes from you, he wants a safe place from which to launch invasions and your castle is it. Once he's digested your holdings he'll move on his neighbors and that's my settlement."

  Several people nodded, but Elaine looked unimpressed so Beacon continued. "Like it or not, our old way of life is gone forever. Your foresight in building this refuge will provide you and your children with a safe haven today and the groundwork for a dynasty, if you can hold it."

  Molly raised her hand and Doc called on her.

  Molly stood up. "In school we learned that in ancient times just aiming a cannon at a city's gates could cause the whole town to surrender without a shot being fired." Beacon knew that to be true, but was surprised to hear it from someone so young. Molly must have been one of those kids who stayed awake in class.

  Molly was still talking, "If that's what these guys intend to do, so they can steal our stuff and live in our houses, they'll set up at the bottom of the valley outside of Doc's rifle range and threaten us. And if they do that we could maybe stall'em long enough to maybe raid'em some night and steal their cannon."

  Molly was showing tactical wisdom beyond her young years. With the cannon the Castle Corp. could command their whole valley without having to venture outside their wall.

  In a demeaning voice Elaine said, "Sit down girl and let your elders handle this."

  Beacon interrupted Elaine, "This young woman has drawn the blood of your enemies, and her tactics are sound. The enemy is bringing the fight to you. To survive you'll have to bring the fight to them before they can shell your homes from the bottom of the valley. You've got to destroy or capture that cannon." If looks could kill Elaine's would have decapitated Beacon right then.

  "You're an outsider, you have no say here!"

  But Doc was on Molly's side too. "Let the girl continue, she at least," he said with a meaningful look at Elaine, "put her hand up and waited to be called."

  Elaine bristled, "I'm a member of the board of directors! I don't have to put my hand up to speak!"

  "But, by Robert's Rules of Order you do have to be recognized by the chair and that's me and I haven’t recognized you! Molly has the floor."

  Molly's plan had her and her rider friends hooking up ropes from their horses to the cannon. Two horses would have a sling between them to support the "tail thingies sticking out the back of the cannon" keeping them off the ground while six other riders would pull the big gun with ropes from their horses.

  The plan was risky. The citadel would be putting a major percentage of its horseflesh and their children in harms way. The plan would hinge on the raiders positioning the cannon on or near the central road near the bottom of the valley.

  And that was the death of Molly's plan. To make a swift getaway with the cannon they'd need a road and at its farthest point the valley road put the castle well within the cannon's range.

  Also, something would have to be done to keep the raiders from shooting the riders and their horses as they rode in the open up the straight road all the way up to the citadel gate.