Founders. Part 10

Brent Danley learned of the death of his parents later the same day. He was first told that the house had been destroyed by a bomb, but that was later corrected. It had been an artillery round. His parents, in their seventies, had no connection with the Resistance. His father had died in his bed, but his mother had apparently survived the initial blast and had managed to crawl out of the burning house. Her charred body was found seventy feet away, curled up in a fetal position.

It was later discovered that the confidential informant had his street addresses mixed up. There were no apologies from the ProvGov.

Brent soon decided to join the Resistance. He left his wife and six children to reside with his in-laws, who lived on a farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom region. They ran a dairy goat farm, near Stevens Mills, just a few miles from the Canadian border. He took his wife and kids, their clothes, and a few family mementos to Stevens Mills in his aging Ford van, towing a camping trailer that was crammed full. He left behind many of his household goods. His neighbors promised to keep an eye on the house, but that was the least of his concerns. He wanted to get to the fighting as soon as possible.

Brent traveled to Kentucky on a reliable 600cc Honda Hornet motorcycle that had been built at the turn of the century. The motorcycle was his cousin Craig's contribution to the Cause. All of Brent's motorcycle ride was through "pacified" states. He left most of his guns at his brother-in-law's home with his family. The exception was a Ruger LCP .380 pistol that he hid between two layers of one of his pannier bags.

Rather than join the Resistance in Vermont, Brent decided that the most important place for him to apply his skills was with the Resistance close to the seat of the Provisional Government. As he put it, "The quicker that we can arrest Maynard Hutchings, the better."

Volunteering for a militia in Bullitt County, Kentucky, Brent was soon dubbed their Token Yankee. While at first teased about his origin and viewed with suspicion, his tireless and skillful efforts as a medic earned him the praise of nearly everyone he met.

Brent didn't see his wife and children again until the war was over.

West of Yankton, South Dakota.

August, the Second Year.

Ken and Terry wanted to avoid the I-90 corridor as well as Rapid City and Sturgis, so they skirted to the north and came in on State Highway 34. They zigzagged their way through a heavily agricultural area in a checkerboard of roads to the town of Vale, where they planned to cut north on State Route 79.

At Vale, they began asking if there were any ranchers who might be looking for hired security. As they were talking to an elderly woman, they noticed two armed men approaching them from behind. As Ken turned to greet them, two more men walked around the corner from the other direction, also armed. Before they could react, one of the men shouldered a Benelli shotgun and shouted, "Put your rifles on the ground!"

With four armed men confronting them, the Laytons didn't think twice about doing as they were told. Another man shouted, "Hands on top of your heads!" Again they complied.

The four men closed in on them and pulled off Ken's and Terry's backpacks and disconnected their web gear, pulling it off and laying it on the sidewalk.

From behind one of the men asked, "What are you doing here?"

"We're just looking for work," Ken answered. "We've done ranch and farm security before, and I've got a letter of introduction in my pack that I can show you."

Two more men approached, armed only with handguns. One of the newcomers asked, "Do you think these could be more scouts?"

Another one agreed, "Yeah, they could be spies."

Ken asked incredulously, half shouting, "Scouts? Spies? You're making a mistake."

They had Ken remove his DPM s.h.i.+rt so that they could check him for tattoos.

Finally, they let Ken tell them where they could find the letter of introduction from Durward Perkins.

One of them read the letter aloud. That seemed to satisfy most of them.

Terry was perplexed. She asked, "What's all this talk about spies?"

The man with the Benelli riot gun explained, "The biker gang that hit Belle Fourche last week sent some spies in first to scout it out. They weren't dressed like bikers. They were posing as a husband and wife-refugees. Now can you see why we're being cautious?"

Ken was surprised to hear the man p.r.o.nounce the name of the town Belle Fourche "Bell Foo-Shay." Up until then, Ken and Terry had seen the town's name only on his road map and they had not realized how it was properly spoken. Ken nodded. "Yes, indeed I can see why you are taking precautions."

Ken then spent fifteen minutes describing where they were from, where they had been, and where they were headed. The men seemed satisfied. The leader of the Vigilance Committee apologized for detaining them, returned their guns and gear, and wished them well.

Ken and Terry continued on, still traveling in daylight. Whenever they met anyone, they asked about employment. The region was dominated by sheep ranches and sugar beet farms. At the junction of Highways 79 and 212, a sign read "Welcome to Newell, South Dakota." Another, below it, advertised the Lions International club. Within 100 yards of pa.s.sing the signs, they were again intercepted, this time by three men on horseback, who shouted, "Put your hands on your head! Vigilance Committee!"

As the men wheeled their horses around them, Ken muttered, "So this is how it feels to be 'Welcome' in Newell, South Dakota." They both laid their rifles on the ground.

A man with a flamboyant mustache wearing a gray cowboy hat with a high Montana peak halted his horse five yards in front of the Laytons. "Keep your hands up, and no sudden moves."

They again went through being searched and questioned. And again, it was the letter of introduction from West Branch that established their bona fides.

After the townsmen seemed satisfied, Ken asked, "We'd like to find security work around here, like we had last winter in Iowa. Do you know of anyone who might be hiring?"

The eldest man with a gray beard answered, "Yeah, you could talk to the Norwoods. I heard that they've been real worried since the big shootout in Belle Fourche. That was two weeks ago. Carl Norwood and his son have been watching their place 24/7 ever since. They're about a mile beyond the area that our committee keeps patrolled. I think he's looking for just one man, but I don't know, he might consider hiring a couple. They're cattlemen. They live out on Parilla Road, north of town."

Ken was given directions to the Norwood ranch and was told that the committee would contact Carl Norwood via CB radio to let him know to expect the Laytons. Just before the members of the Vigilance Committee left, the leader reached into his saddlebag and pulled out two lime green bandanas. He instructed Ken and Terry to tie them around their boonie hats. These, he explained, would ensure their safe pa.s.sage through town. He noted, "You're expected to turn these in when you get to the committee's guard post on 9th Street, up at the north end of town. You can pick up your rifles and packs now."

As they walked the ten blocks through Newell, Terry commented, "They have a pretty clever and low-key security arrangement. It seems to work well for anyone coming in on foot, or I suppose on horseback or bicycles. But I wonder how they'd stop vehicles without a roadblock."

Ken countered, "Maybe they have some security measures we haven't seen yet."

"Yeah, given that reception, it wouldn't surprise me."

As they continued their walk through town on Dartmouth Avenue there were no motor vehicles moving, but they saw several people on bicycles, and one on horseback. The town of Newell evidenced a mix of 1950s culture and early-twenty-first-century trash culture. There was a bakery, a used bookstore, and a hardware store that all could have been from the set of The Andy Griffith Show. But alongside them there was a payday loans and check cas.h.i.+ng storefront and a tattoo and piercing shop. Terry mentioned that she was happy to see the latter were both boarded up.

Most of the businesses that were open in town were repair and secondhand stores. The local abundance of wool had inspired a group of local women to open a store called the Fiber Farm. As Ken and Terry walked by, there were four women in the store's front room operating spinning wheels, chatting and treadling their way to prosperity. Signs in the window advertised "Hand-Knitted Wool Socks," "Sweaters Made to Order," and "We Trade."

Just beyond 9th Street, a young man armed with an M1A rifle and carrying a handie-talkie on his hip stepped out of a small building that looked like it had formerly been a drive-through espresso shop. The shop's windows had been painted over and prominently marked "CLOSED."

Before the young man shut the door, Ken caught a glimpse of someone else inside, with just his head exposed over the top of a low cinder block wall. This wall was set back three feet from the building's lightly constructed outer wall.

Ken whispered, "Clever."

The young man walked up to them and asked for the bandanas.

Terry handed them over, saying, "Have a nice day."

16.

Good Fences.

I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision. . . . I enjoyed the life to the full.

-Theodore Roosevelt.

North of Newell, South Dakota.

October, the Second Year.

Four miles north of town, Ken and Terry Layton turned east on Parilla Road. The day was warming up, but the earlier chill in the air made it clear that winter was coming.

Two miles down Parilla, they came to a house on the south side with a mailbox marked in faded paint, "NORWOOD." Even before they arrived, a pair of mixed breed cattle dogs began barking at them. A large ranch house that looked like it dated from the 1960s or 1970s was located twenty yards from the road. Behind it there was a hay barn and a combination shop/tractor shed. There were various other outbuildings and corrals on either side. They could hear cattle mooing in the distance.

As they approached the gate, they heard a shout coming from inside the closest outbuilding, a woodshed: "Identify yourselves!"

Ken answered, "Kenneth and Terry Layton."

A teenager carrying an M1 Garand rifle and a large revolver in a cross-draw hip holster stepped out of the building, and declared, "h.e.l.lo! I'm Graham. My dad is expecting you. Come with me, please."

Graham was lanky and had oily brown hair. He was wearing a heavy brown Carhartt stockman's jacket, black jeans, and hiking boots.

As they walked, Graham asked, "So, you're from Chicago, and you're a car mechanic, and you worked doing security for a farm last winter in Iowa?"

Ken laughed. "You seem to know all about us."

"We were briefed," Graham replied matter-of-factly.

As they walked up to the porch, he shouted, "They're here!" Then, in a quieter voice he said, "If you folks will excuse me, I got to get back to my guard post."

The front door swung open to reveal a tall man in his late forties, wearing a large-frame Glock pistol in a Kydex hip holster. He was wearing denim pants and a plaid flannel s.h.i.+rt. The man said, "I'm Carl. Please come in."

He motioned them in the door. "You can put your rifles and packs under the coatrack." Before leaving his pack, Ken pulled out the letter of introduction, which was protected in a Ziploc bag.

A tall, big-boned woman stepped out of the kitchen. She was also carrying a holstered Glock, but it had an unusual green polymer frame. "Hi, I'm Cordelia," she said with a friendly wave of her arm. She motioned the Laytons to sit on a couch.

Ken reached across to Carl Norwood's armchair and handed him the letter.

Carl flipped his eyegla.s.ses up onto his forehead with practiced ease, and took a few minutes to read the letter from Durward Perkins. He held the letter just six inches from his nose, explaining, "I can never find my reading gla.s.ses, and I never got bifocals, since I can't use those shooting with a scope."

The Laytons sat quietly while Carl Norwood read the letter. At a couple of points while reading, Carl chuckled. Finally, he flipped his gla.s.ses back down and handed the letter to Cordelia. He seemed impressed, commenting, "It sounds like you handled yourselves very well when those looters came at you."

Ken replied, "Well, that was mostly Terry's work. When it happened, I was late to the party, rolling out of bed. I just added a bit of accompaniment."

Terry giggled. "Yeah, accompaniment in Ba.s.s Staccato, as our friend T.K. would call it."

Carl grinned broadly. Then he put on a serious face. "Let me give you the layout: It's just the three of us here-my wife, my son, and I. All our relatives are in Texas and Oklahoma, and we haven't had word from them since the Crunch. We've got 320 acres, mostly paid for-although I've no idea what the situation is with mortgages these days." After a pause to reflect, he went on. "We're running 120 head of Angus, Herefords, and Bald-Faced Blacks."

Terry c.o.c.ked her head, and asked, "We've only been around Brown Swiss, and some neighbors had Jerseys. What's a Bald-Faced-?"

Carl jumped in. "If you cross a Black Angus with a Hereford, they throw a cross called a Black Baldy or what we call a Bald-Faced Black-a black cow with a white face. They're known for their hybrid vigor. They do really well in this climate, and the cows make really good moms."

Terry nodded.

Carl Norwood continued, "We have a creek running through the property that by G.o.d's grace runs year-round. We cut hay on about thirty-five acres, and the rest is grazing ground. It's mostly good ground, and we've reseeded a lot of it in a pasture blend. The hay ground is mostly seeded in LG-31 Orchard Gra.s.s. A lot of our neighbors have had problems with Knapweed and Leafy Spurge, but we've managed to keep those sprayed out."

Ken and Terry both nodded, as Carl was now speaking in terms that were familiar to them.

"We've got three good saddle horses, two geldings and a mare. We also have a semiretired twenty-five-year-old mare, Molly. Her back isn't up to any heavy loads these days. The other three saddle horses are all less than ten years old, so they have a lot of good years ahead of them. Two of those three are bombproof. We also have Andre-'Andre the Giant.' He's half Fjord, one quarter Percheron, and one quarter Heinz. We use him for all the pulling around here. He's saddle-broke, but he's so tall that he's not comfortable to ride."

Ken asked, "Okay, I'm stumped. I know what Percheron draft horses and what Norwegian Fjords look like, but did you say 'Heinz'? What's a Heinz?"

Carl answered with a laugh, "That's like a mutt dog-Heinz 57 Varieties."

"Tell them about our firewood and fuel," Cordelia urged.

"Oh, yeah. We heat and cook mostly with wood. We have enough wood laid in for this coming winter. I'm out of gas for the chain saw, but we have friends that swap firewood for beef. We have a pickup, an SUV, and two quads, but again, no gas left to run them. We only have about 480 gallons of diesel left on hand and we're keeping that in reserve for cutting, baling, and hauling hay. I'd like to switch to haying with our horses, but I haven't found a hay mower yet. I also need more horse collars, hames, and other harness bits. A lot of the horse-drawn mowers either got melted down for sc.r.a.p iron during World War II, or turned into yard ornaments. Most of those are rusted junk. So I'm still searching. You know, I had the chance to buy any one of several restored horse-drawn mowers that a guy from Wyoming brought to the Antique Tractor Pull that they held every September in Newell. But the Crunch of course brought an end to all those events. It's now just strictly local commerce. Our world got a lot smaller."

After a pause Norwood continued, "At least I had the common sense to switch our propane delivery contract to 'keep filled,' back when there was the big fight in Congress over raising the federal debt ceiling. So when the Crunch came, our propane tank was almost full. For the last year, we've been closely shepherding that supply. Right now, we're at about 70 percent. We've mainly been using that while we've been learning to cook on the woodstove. Believe me, that was quite a steep learning curve. Anyway, we won't starve, and we won't freeze. Hauling water is a pain, especially when there's snow on the ground, but we'll live. We've been able to trade butchered beef or cattle on the hoof for just about everything we've needed. The big surpluses around here are wool, mutton, lambs, and sugar beets. Since this is mainly sheep country and we're one of the few cattle outfits, we're in a fairly strong position for bartering. Eating mutton gets boring in a hurry."

After another pause he added, "With the power out, we get our water from the creek, and parts of each year from runoff from the roofs on the house and barn. The cattle now get their water straight from the creek. I fenced off the part of the creek that's upstream of the footbridge out back to prevent any contamination of the water. We run everything we use for drinking through a copy of a Big Berkey filter. It uses ceramic filter elements."

"Down in Newell, and out on a lot of farms and ranches, people are using water from the Irrigation District ditches," Cordelia said. "That water comes from the Belle Fourche Dam. Luckily, there's a manual emergency gate up there. Without that, the people in Newell would have been without water. The ditch doesn't go through our property, but we've got our creek."

"So, what about your security situation?" Ken asked.

Carl sighed and said, "In a word, our security situation stinks. I'm afraid we'll get targeted by looters. We're far enough out of town that we can't depend on the Vigilance Committee. We also don't have any neighbors that are within line of sight. So we can't depend on their help, either. The big problem here is that there's two main ways into the ranch-from both Highway 79 to the west and from Highway 212 to the east. And of course our house is so close to the county road that it hardly gives us any warning time."

Terry asked, "So what are you doing for security?"

"We have a big padded swivel chair set up in the corner of the woodshed for whoever's on guard duty. It's chilly in the winter, but we've got several washed wool fleeces-one to sit on and two others tied together like a serape to drape over you. That corner of the shed has a pretty good view up and down the road and, if you swivel around and look out the other way, you can see two sides of the house and most of the barnyard. We've got four walkie-talkies. They're just the cheap kind-FRS band, from Walmart. I got a 12-volt charging tray that can charge two radios at a time. That is connected to a pair of 6-volt tractor batteries that are wired in series. Those batteries are trickle-charged off a 20-watt photovoltaic panel that I bought a couple of years ago from Harbor Freight company. That's our only electricity here at the house. I really wish I had a few more panels. With more charging capacity, we could do a lot more than just run the CB and recharge the radios and a few flashlight batteries.

"Recently, Graham and I have been trading off with twelve-hour guard duty s.h.i.+fts, but we're starting to burn out. At the rate we're going, we're just getting exhausted. We don't have enough time to properly take care of the stock, and there's no way that next year we'd have the time to cut hay or put in a garden. The past two weeks, we've been concentrating on security, and that has forced us to let other things slide. The good news is that we're pretty well armed, and all three of us are good, safe shooters."

"That's right," Cordelia interjected. "We're all experienced hunters, but none of us have any military or police SWAT-type experience. We've got two .30-06 rifles with scopes, and Graham has a Garand, which is also a .30-06. Plus a Kel-Tec .223, a half a dozen bird guns-12- and 16-gauge-several .22s, and a .17 HMR, which is our ground squirrel gun."

Ken asked, "What's the depth of your ammo supply?"

Carl answered, "We've got more than 500 rounds of 06, and that includes eighty rounds of the black-tipped armor-piercing. That's all loaded in eight-round Garand clips. We've got just over nine boxes of .45 ACP, and five boxes of 9 millimeter for Cordy's Glock. We've got only about 200 rounds of .223 for the Kel-Tec, but I consider that gun kind of secondary. In open country like this, .30-06 rules. For the shotguns, we've got just over twenty-six boxes of sh.e.l.ls, mostly 12-gauge. But those are all pheasant and quail loads-we don't have any buckshot or slugs, so that makes our shotguns useless for self-defense-"

Ken interrupted, "I can teach you how to cut shotgun sh.e.l.ls. I saw a YouTube video on how to make cut sh.e.l.ls, back before the Crunch, and my buddy Dan Fong and I did some experimenting. When you cut a sh.e.l.l-it's a scoring cut that doesn't quite go all the way around-it makes the whole front half of a shotgun sh.e.l.l go down the bore, so that it hits someone like a slug, and then it fragments. It's a very neat trick, but it's strictly for single shots and double-barrel guns. You don't want to have a sh.e.l.l come apart inside a pump or a semiauto. That could cause a jam at the worst possible time."

Carl looked surprised and said, "Thanks, I'd appreciate seeing how to do that! I've got a short-barreled side-by-side 12-gauge we could try that with."

Ken said, "Sorry, I jumped in there. To get back on track, how's your supply of ammo in other calibers?"