“After we had covered about eight blocks in short buddy rushes we were pretty well stressed out and exhausted. It was practically pitch black and we could have gotten blown away by some nervous citizen on any given rush. I said to Terry, ‘There’s got to be a better way. We’ll never get out of town by dawn doing it this way.’ So we sat down in some big bushes next to a church, and draped a poncho over ourselves so that we could look at a street map with a subdued flashlight without turning ourselves into a target.
“From where we sat, we had at least ten miles to traverse before we’d be out of the thickest part of the city and the suburbs. We looked, but there were no parks that we could cut through or creek bottoms that we could follow. It was just continuous blocks of city streets.
“We sat there giving each other dumb looks for maybe twenty seconds, and then Terry said,‘Why not go underground, down in the storm drains, just like we talked about for nuke scenarios.’ I whispered back, ‘I love you!’ Then she asked me, ‘How are we going to get down there?’ Then I reminded her about that thing in the book, Life After Doomsday by Bruce Clayton, where you take two hefty bolts and join them with a piece of wire, and then stick one down the pry hole on a manhole cover. In my pack I had some wire, but no bolts. I spent the next few minutes fishing through my pack looking for a reasonable substitute.
“What I came up with was my old Boy Scout knife-fork-spoon kit, you know the kind that all nest together? Anyway, I twisted the wire around the spoon and the knife. The knife ended up working just great, because it had a bottle-opening notch about halfway down it. That held the wire in place perfectly.
“I put my pack together again, and then spent the next few minutes groping around the street looking for a manhole cover. After a few embarrassing minutes, we found one. I handed my rifle to Terry, and I popped the knife down the hole. When I pulled up on the spoon connected by the wire, the knife toggled around nicely, just like a darned moly bolt. Next, I squatted down and put all my weight into lifting the manhole cover. Those things are heavy! After some grunting and groaning, I got the thing up, and slid it off to the side. I sent Terry down first, then handed down her carbine, then her pack, then my pack, then my rifle. I positioned myself on the rungs that were set in the concrete, and slid the lid back in place. I swear, it took a lot of strength. It closed with a thud that really reverberated down there.
“Once we got down in the storm drain, we decided to continue west in this storm drain that paralleled the street. Walking in a storm drain is a real bitch, especially with a backpack. The inside diameter is only about five feet. Terry was able to move along a lot faster and easier because she’s shorter, and consequently didn’t have to hunch over as far as me.
“One weird thing about the storm drains. The air down there was actually warmer than up on the street. Must have been the effect of the ambient ground temperature. Try as we might, we couldn’t avoid walking in the rainwater in the bottom of the drainpipe. Our feet got soaking wet and ice cold pretty quickly. After a while, we didn’t even bother keeping our feet straddled so that they’d be up out of the water. We just slogged along.
“We traveled west in the drain for several hours, keeping rough track of where we were by the number of gutter drains and manholes we passed under.
“At one point, we heard a lot of commotion and shooting above us. It was really eerie, hearing it reverberate around down there. As we passed under one gutter drain, I could hear a guy sobbing. He must have been lying right next to the grill in the gutter. I shined the light up for a second and could see that there was blood pouring down from the grill. There was a lot of it. Talk about blood in the streets!
“By four a.m., we were exhausted. About that time we came to one of those big four-way storm drain intersections. As chance would have it, this was the type with the catwalk made out of expanded metal running across the two levels. We got up on the catwalk, and found that there was just enough room for us to lie down lengthwise, positioned with our feet touching. We hung our packs and rifles on the ends of the ladders at either end. That’s where we spent the next day. Stretched out on that catwalk. We just took off our boots and wrung out our socks and hung them up to dry. After only about half an hour we started getting chilly, so we broke out the sleeping bags.
“If anything, the chaos up above got worse all through the next day. The shooting was practically constant. There must have been a lot of buildings on fire because you could smell smoke, even down in the storm drains. Occasionally, we could hear the sirens of an emergency vehicle pass overhead. Surprisingly, we actually managed to get quite a bit of sleep. We must have been pretty well wiped out.
“At about five p.m., we got our boots and socks—they were still wet—back on and climbed back down to the east-west drain. We just kept going west most of that night. We stopped awhile to catch our breath and straighten-out our backs. I practically spaced out; a real troglodyte existence. All I could hear was the echoes of our breathing and the splashes of our footsteps. I thought it would never end. Then I saw dim light up ahead.
“We stepped out of the storm drain onto the banks of the Des Plaines River. It was about 6:00 in the morning. Just between nautical twilight and civil twilight, as Jeff would call it. Because the river bottom provided good concealment, we decided to stick to it. We followed the river bottom for about fifteen minutes before I found a good place to lay up for the day. It was a big clump of willows on the bank of the river. They were plenty thick, so I figured our chances of getting spotted there were about nil.
“By then, it was getting fairly light. We just rolled out our sleeping bags and took turns sleeping. About noon, we split an MRE. It was only then that I realized that we hadn’t had anything to eat, and darned little to drink in nearly thirty hours. We just devoured that MRE. Next, one at a time, we cleaned our rifles. I’m glad that I checked on our .45s, too. Mine was soaking wet. I even had to unload the magazine and towel-dry each cartridge.
“About two in the afternoon, Terry woke me up with her hand held over my mouth. A group of about twenty people were walking right toward us, the same direction that we’d been traveling. We just held still and they passed by. They didn’t have a clue that we were there. Most of them carried guns, but they carried them slung over their shoulders like they were out deer hunting or something. They were walking through all kinds of potential ambush zones, and they were at sling arms. Just plain stupid. They obviously chose the creek-bottom route to get out of Dodge just like we did. They had no tactical training, though. They were noisy. The idiots were talking out loud in a normal tone of voice. And they were walking in a clump, no interval whatsoever. No point man, either. They were just getting out of Dodge in a hurry, in broad daylight.
“Before sunset another group came through. This one only had about ten people; same modus operandi. Traveling in a gaggle like that, one grenade could have killed half of them. It was a pretty pitiful show. I doubt that they got very far in one piece, traveling like that.
“Just as it got dark, we powdered our feet, put on dry socks, packed up, and hit the trail. We followed the river west for two days, avoiding all contact, and laid up during daylight in clumps of brush or fields of harvested corn that had been left standing. By that point, the river was starting to curve around almost due south—not the direction that we wanted to go. About 8 o’clock the third evening on the river, we passed under a railroad trestle just north of Joliet. Voilà! The tracks ran east-west. We followed the tracks west for several nights without incident.
“Knowing we had a long way to go, we just split one MRE per day. We were constantly hungry. The only extra food that we got was an occasional sugar beet that we found on the railroad ballast. They were ones that had fallen out of hopper cars. We cut these up with Terry’s Swiss Army knife. We also gleaned a few dried-up ears of corn at the edges of fields. We didn’t turn up our noses, though. We gnawed on them like crazy. You hear people talk about being hungry, but let me tell you, missing a meal o
r two is nothing like being truly hungry. It’s the only thing you can think about. It’s about enough to drive you nuts. I figure that we were burning several thousand more calories a day than we were taking in. We both lost quite a bit of weight.
“At one point, we came across an abandoned railroad company high-railer pickup parked on a siding. I could have hot-wired it in a heartbeat, but unfortunately, someone had either siphoned all of the fuel out of it or run it dry. With that high railer, we could have been a few hundred miles closer to Idaho in just a day. Too bad. Anyway, we pressed on.
“As we approached each town of any appreciable size, we got off the tracks and cut around them. This took a lot of extra time, but I suppose it was worth the extra effort. We heard shooting and saw buildings on fire in some of the towns.”
Terry interrupted Ken again at this point. “We had one scary incident near the town of Mendota. On the outskirts of town, we passed a sort of refugee or hobo or looter camp. They didn’t have any fires lit, and most everyone must have been asleep. Anyway, it was dark and quiet, so we were practically in the midst of the camp before we realized it. Ken called me on the Trick and said, ‘Act brave and keep walking.’
“Just then, some guy with a pistol on his hip who was drunk staggered toward the tracks and started to take a leak. He looked up at us—we were traveling at about a twenty-foot interval on opposites sides of the track and he asks, ‘Who the hell are you?’ to Ken. Ken told him, ‘You don’t want to know, mister. Just leave us alone, and we won’t waste you.’ We kept our guns trained on him, walking backward, and disappeared into the night. I was scared to death that he’d call the alarm and we’d be in the middle of a firefight. Either we scared him, or he didn’t think we were worth hassling. Well, either way, he didn’t go gunning for us. I guess we just lucked out. There were at least fifty people in that camp.”
Ken picked up where Terry left off. “As we headed west, I realized that we were going to have to find some place to cross the ‘Mighty Mississip.’ The problem was that there were only a few bridges, and they were natural choke points—just about ideal for an ambush. The problem solved itself, however, when we got there. The night that we hit the banks of the Mississippi, it was in the middle of a heavy downpour. It was the first appreciable rain we had since we left Chicago. It was pitch dark, and pouring rain. Only some ex-Green Beret or LRRP would be lying in ambush on a night like that.”
Jeff chimed in, “You left out Force Recon.” Everyone laughed.
“We crossed on a long railroad trestle bridge just above East Moline. It was very scary. It was dark, the bridge was wet, and it wasn’t designed for foot traffic. It seemed like it took hours, walking along in our ponchos, carefully stepping from one tie to the next to get across. Also, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wondering if a train or high-railer might come barreling across.
Of course, the chance of that was slim, but nonetheless, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
“Once we were on the west bank of the Mississippi, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was one of the few natural barriers that we had to cross, and it also marks a change in demographics. The population density is far lower west of the Mississippi. Fewer people, fewer encounters, fewer problems.
“Once we were into Iowa, the weather took a turn for the worse. We ended up spending three miserable weeks there on the reverse slope of a pile of grain at a big grain elevator about three miles out of a town called Durant. First it poured down rain steadily for four days. Then it turned to sleet. Then it turned to snow. It snowed off and on for two weeks. We mainly ate corn soaked in water. We spent most of our time huddled up in our bags, sleeping in shifts.
Luckily, nobody came by during the entire three weeks.
“By now, it was late November, and we didn’t see much of the sun. After the snow let up, we filled our backpacks with as much corn as we could carry. I left all of my paper money—about three hundred dollars—on top of the pile with a thank-you note to the owner of the elevator. It was there at the elevator that we realized that Terry had lost her TRC-500 somewhere along the way. Because one two-way radio is not much use, I salvaged the ni-cad out of mine, and left the radio there for the owner of the grain elevator. He probably thought it was pretty funny when he found the money, considering that by then it was damned near worthless. At least the TRC-500 would be worth something to him, at least for parts.
“We tried heading west again, but we didn’t make much progress. On average, the temperature was twenty or thirty degrees colder than when we first left Chicago. When we first left, the days were clear and chilly and the nights were bearably cold. Out on the plains, we practically froze to death. We knew we had to find a place to spend the winter, but where?
“We ended up finding a place to stay in a little town called West Branch. Kind of ironic, it was the hometown of Herbert Hoover, the guy they blamed for the last depression. I guess in the long run, history will be kinder to Hoover, once people realize that the 1930s weren’t all that bad. That so-called Great Depression was just a case of the sniffles compared to this one. Shoot, this one’s double pneumonia.”
Terry picked up the thread of the story. “We stayed at a farm just outside West Branch, which is about ten miles east of Iowa City. The farm was owned by a Quaker family called Perkins. They claimed that they were actually distant relatives of the Hoovers. I suppose they were telling the truth. There are probably hundreds of people in that area that are related. The Perkins were salt-of-the-earth country folk. They grew corn and soybeans mostly, on one-hundred-and-twenty acres. They had two small children. Because West Branch had had a lot of trouble with looters coming from Iowa City in recent weeks, we didn’t have any trouble at all convincing them to hire us on for security in exchange for room and board. Mr. Perkins was pretty funny. He introduced us to his neighbors as his ‘Night watchmen from Chicago with the space rifles.’
“The life there on the farm was pretty grueling. The weather was horrible, and the hours were lousy. We basically worked twelve-on, twelve-off shifts, rotating at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m. But we ate well. Mr. Perkins was incredibly hard working. He put in at least ten hours a day working on the farm. He’d often say,‘Work is life.’
“Early one morning in November, two vans pulled up to the front gate. I happened to be on duty, and Ken was asleep. I yelled down to Mr. Perkins, who was feeding hay to the cows, ‘Do you recognize those vans?’ He said, ‘Nope.’ So I screamed, ‘Get back in the house, and wake up Ken and then your wife, right now!’
“I was standing in my usual spot, on the platform just inside the top door of the silo. Once I saw them stop, I sat down and put my elbows on my knees to get a good rest position to shoot. One guy got out of the first van with a pair of bolt cutters. Just after he cut off the padlock, but before he could swing the gate open, I fired my first shot. I missed. I fired a few more times, and finally hit the guy. By now, they were shooting back at me. I could hear bullets pinging off the silo like crazy.
“The next thing I heard was Ken opening up from the kitchen window with his H-and-K, ‘Whump. Whump-whump. Whump-whump.’ Between the two of us shooting, I guess they figured they had bit off more than they could chew. By the time they had backed away from the gate, we had shot out both of their windshields. They left the guy with the bolt cutters dead on the ground. A few hours later, when we were fairly sure that they weren’t coming back, we went out to assess the damage. We had fired about seventy rounds between the two of us. All that we found was the dead guy, a cheap pair of Chinese-made twenty-four-inch bolt cutters, about fifty pieces of their fired brass, a lot of broken glass, and a lot of blood. Apparently, we hit more than one of them.”
Ken carried on. “I apologized to Mr. Perkins for having shot right through the kitchen window. He just said,‘Shucks, that what they make that clear sheet plastic fer, ain’t it?’ We counted twenty-five holes in the silo, and ten in the house. No really serious damage though. Mr. Perkins said, ‘Well, I guess I got my mon
ey’s worth for the security force. Those space rifles sure are something.
It sounded like World War Three.’ We buried the dead marauder out in the garden. He’s probably pushing up big healthy turnips by now.
“We made our goodbyes to the Perkinses in late April. We had our packs bulging with canned food, beef jerky, and pemmican. We also still had two MREs that we had saved. Traveling at night, mainly along railroad tracks and occasionally cross-country, we made it to western South Dakota that summer. In late September, realizing it was too late in the year to make it to Idaho, we started looking for a place to spend the winter.
“This time it took three weeks and a couple of run-ins with nervous ranchers with shotguns before we found someone who would take us in as ‘security consultants’ for room and board. We stayed outside a little town called Newell, in Butte County, with a family called Norwood. Real nice people. Cattle ranchers. We ate so much beef that winter, that we almost got sick of it. Both of us learned how to ride and care for horses that winter. We also learned the basics of horse shoeing.
“In all, it was a good winter. Because the Norwood’s oldest boy, Graham, was also pulling security, we had the relative luxury of only eight-hour shifts. Graham carried an M1 Garand and an old Smith and Wesson Model 1917 revolver, chambered in .45 automatic. He was pretty good with both guns, and even better after we gave him a few pointers on combat shooting. The kid was incredibly fast at reloading the revolver using full moon clips. I swear, he could reload that gun faster than anyone I’ve ever seen reload a revolver using a speed loader.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have any encounters with marauders that winter. We did hear that Belle Fourche, which was about twenty-five miles away, had got shot up pretty badly by a whole army of bikers before they were finally driven off.
“We left the Norwoods in late March. We rode out on horseback with Graham. He rode with us as far as Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where they had relatives. There, after delivering a few letters and renewing acquaintances, Graham had to head on back to the ranch.
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