Founders. Part 13

They spent that night in their sleeping bags on the floor of Cliff's living room. Ken and Terry were so excited that they were scarcely able to sleep. Cliff roused them an hour before dawn. The gas cans had already been loaded in the back of the pickup the night before and covered with a tarp. They quickly loaded all the ammo cans and the rest of the gear. The heap filled up the entire bed of the pickup truck, most of the rear seat, and nearly all the pa.s.senger-side front seat and floor.

Terry opted to be tail gunner, sitting on top of the backpacks just behind the cab, but forward of the gas cans. She bundled herself up with both her unrolled sleeping bag and Ken's sleeping bag. She wore gloves, a m.u.f.fler, and a pile cap to keep her head warm. She sat facing rearward, with her CAR-15 in her lap.

Ken, meanwhile, sat in the seat directly behind Cliff. Remembering how all the windows of their Mustang and Bronco had been shot out, Ken ordered, "At the first sign of trouble, you hit all four b.u.t.tons to roll the windows down. We don't want them getting shot out, and besides, the way this HK ejects bra.s.s, it's a window smasher."

"You got it!" Cliff replied.

On the seat next to him, Cliff carried a folding-stock Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with a thirty-round magazine. Two spare-loaded twenty-round magazines were placed within reach in the center console, along with Cliff's ancient Webley revolver. Beside it were four full-moon clips of .45 ACP ammunition. Seeing this, Ken surmised that Cliff's revolver had been converted to .45 ACP.

Ken positioned his HK b.u.t.t down on the floor between his legs, and both his pack and web gear were next to him on the seat. He debated removing his M1911 pistol from its holster, but then, remembering an account that he'd read of the FBI's 1986 Miami shootout, he decided that the pistol might get misplaced if they came to a sudden stop.

Cliff started the engine and shouted, "Y'all ready?"

Ken and Terry both shouted back, "Yes!"

Cliff turned on the headlights, and they started down Henry Road toward the freeway. Cliff popped a ca.s.sette tape into the pickup's tape and CD player. The voice of Hank Williams Jr. came from the speakers, singing "A Country Boy Can Survive." Ken laughed uproariously. The situation seemed so surreal.

After Cliff turned west on State Highway 26, the sky behind them was starting to lighten. Cliff set the pickup's cruise control to fifty miles per hour. He said forthrightly, "I'm keeping it under fifty-two, for fuel economy. I read somewhere that's the magic number." The sensation of speed was overwhelming to both Ken and Terry. They had spent so many months on foot that fifty miles per hour seemed alarmingly fast. Ken laughed and exclaimed, "Woo-hoo! I feel like we're in the Millennium Falcon, and you just shouted 'Punch it, Chewie!'"

Recognizing the reference to the movie Star Wars, Cliff retorted, "Well, we both got red hair, so doesn't that make us both Wookies?"

Ken laughed again and yelled, "Wookie suiters of the world, unite!"

The landscape of Wyoming raced by as the daylight grew. At Torrington, they turned south onto Highway 85. At this junction and south of it, they saw dozens of burned-out hulks of cars on the shoulder. As they approached the cars, Cliff slowed to twenty miles an hour and sounded serious for the first time. "I gotta watch for any sc.r.a.p metal in the road. There was a looter roadblock here last year. It cost us five men's lives to clean those looters out."

Beyond the destroyed cars, Cliff sped up and again set the cruise control to fifty. Terry tapped on the back window and grinned at Ken. She gave an exaggerated thumbs-up.

Ken sat in silence, listening to "Tennessee Stud," "The Coalition to Ban Coalitions," and other songs that were unfamiliar to him. The tape began playing "A Country Boy Can Survive" for the second time. Looking in the center console box and in the glove box, Ken searched for other tapes or CDs, but he found none. He realized that not only was the audio system set to repeat, but also that Cliff had only one ca.s.sette tape in the vehicle. Ken shook his head and grinned. Cliff was a bona fide character.

They hadn't seen a vehicle heading in either direction all morning. The barren plains of eastern Wyoming were now in full daylight. The engine was running smoothly.

Ken said, "Say, Cliff, you never mentioned your family name."

Cliff answered ambiguously, "That's right."

"Well, I noticed the mailbox there was marked 'Larson.' So is that your name?"

Cliff answered with a laugh, "Well, it might be."

Ken laughed and shook his head. "Oh well . . . How about them Cubs?"

"I'm a Red Sox fan, personally, but I don't think there's going to be a baseball season next summer. Folks are using their baseball bats for other purposes these days."

Cliff seemed distracted, and didn't continue. He slowed and turned west onto County Road 218.

Cliff was looking anxious and he regularly scanned the sides of the road and his rearview mirrors. Finally, Cliff explained, "This route that we're taking will bypa.s.s Cheyenne." Then he gestured over his left shoulder, and said, "You do not want to go through Cheyenne. Last I heard, that city was in the hands of the bad guys, and they will eat you for breakfast." After loudly drawing a breath, he added, "Literally."

Cliff took several more turns on small roads, some of them gravel, for the next hour. Several times, Cliff stopped and consulted his maps to be certain of his route. They finally got back on the Interstate just east of Laramie. "From what I've heard, it should be smooth sailing from here on," he rea.s.sured Ken.

They stayed on I-80, heading west, transiting the Rockies. In places the mountains loomed above them. There were a couple of places where rocks had rolled into the road, and there was one small slide two miles west of Green River that partially blocked the right lane. Otherwise, the highway was in remarkably good condition, considering that it had gone through two winters without any maintenance.

They pulled off the road just past Green River to check on Terry. Cliff left the engine running. Ken handed everyone strips of jerky and bottles of water. Terry had rosy cheeks, but seemed exuberant. "Why did we get off the highway onto all those small roads back there?" she asked.

"Just a shortcut," Ken told her, not wanting to darken her mood. "Don't sweat it. Say, do you want to switch places?"

She shook her head and said, "Nah. I want to do the whole width of Wyoming out in the open, soaking it all in. I'm in a big, happy dream right now."

They continued their descent from the western slope of the Rockies. The air was now comfortably warm. Other than abandoned cars on the shoulder that had run out of fuel in the midst of the Crunch and a few tumbleweeds, the Interstate was clear of any obstructions. But they could see the recent ruins of some ranch houses near the freeway. With most of these, there was little more than a stone chimney and a blackened patch of earth left as a silent testament to the chaos that had reigned over the past year and a half.

As they crossed the Utah state line, Ken did some math in his head. In just over eight hours, they had covered more distance than they could have traveled by foot in more than two months.

Late in the day, they reached the junction of Interstate 80 and Interstate 84. In the distance, they could see the odd blue color of Echo Reservoir to the south.

"Well, here you are," Cliff announced.

He slowly brought the pickup to a stop in the right lane of the freeway, not bothering to pull onto the shoulder. They had still not seen another vehicle in motion all day long. Cliff turned off the engine.

Ken and Terry thanked Cliff repeatedly. After pulling out their packs, they helped him refill the pickup's main fuel tank, emptying six of the 5-gallon cans. Ken dug into his backpack and pulled out a brown twenty-round box of Federal 5.56mm ball ammunition and handed it to Cliff, saying, "This is just a token for all the gas that you burned today. Thanks."

Cliff nodded, accepting the gift, and said, "Don't mention it."

Ken and Terry shouldered their packs. Cliff started the pickup's engine and shouted, "Thanks for the ammunition, pardner!" He gave a wave, and drove away.

"What a lunatic," Ken said with a laugh.

"Well. Let's thank G.o.d for the kindness of the lunatics in our lives," Terry said.

19.

A b.u.mp in the Road.

"He doubted whether they could survive the winter, even though they piled broken furniture into the fireplace. Some accident would quite likely overtake them, or pneumonia might strike them down. They were like the highly bred spaniels and pekinese who at the end of their leashes had once walked along the city streets. Milt and Ann, too, were city-dwellers, and when the city died, they would hardly survive without it. They would pay the penalty which in the history of the world, he knew, had always been inflicted upon organisms which specialized too highly."

George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (1949).

North of Coalville, Utah.

April, the Third Year.

Again on foot, Ken and Terry walked on the rough service road paralleling the railroad and highway. They walked two miles before making camp for the night. Nearby, the Weber River roared in a spring torrent. Ken had developed a hot spot on his left foot.

After they had set up their camp, he pulled off his boots and socks. A blister had formed on the projection at the widest part of his left foot, near the head of his right-most metatarsal bone.

As he powdered his feet, Ken told Terry, "These new boots haven't been broken in well enough. I think that we're going to have to take it easy and only do a couple of miles each day for the next couple of days."

He decided that the left boot needed stretching to improve its fit. So he spent ten minutes walking around barefoot, looking around the campsite at various small rocks. He eventually found a lozenge-shaped rock that was just slightly wider than his foot. He carefully inserted the rock into his boot, wedging it in, just where he thought the boot was too tight. As an afterthought, he wet that part of the boot leather to help it stretch.

They awoke before dawn. Ken applied moleskin to the blister on his foot. As they rolled their sleeping bags and packed their gear, he consulted their Utah road map. A tiny dot on the map ahead on their route was marked "Henefer." Just after sunrise, they skirted around the small town of Henefer, following Echo Road. The town appeared to have just a few hundred residents. Two dogs barked at the Laytons, but otherwise they attracted no interest. Their progress was slow, both because of their stealth and because of Ken's blister. They camped up a side canyon, two miles from Morgan City. The canyon was steep, so it took them an extra half hour to set up camp, arranging rocks to make level spots for their sleeping bags. A seasonal creek trickled down the draw. Ken muttered as he pulled off his left boot. The blister was larger and starting to redden.

The next day they decided to hunker down, in deference to Ken's blister. It was a pleasant spring day, and they had fresh water close at hand. There were a few spring wildflowers dotting the hillsides. They took turns napping and nibbled at dried fruit and jerky. In the afternoon, they watched Blue Bellies-western fence lizards-dart around the rocks. Terry thumbed through her well-worn Missal, saying, "Well, there are worse ways to spend a day."

Ken roused her at 4 a.m. the next morning. By the light of Terry's tiny LED light, they could see that Ken's blister hadn't improved, and that it now extended beyond the moleskin. So he applied a larger piece of the protective covering, hoping for some improvement.

They buried their trash beneath some rocks and erased the signs of their camp. They were back on the trail by 4:30 a.m. Their progress was slow and agonizing. Ken winced each time his left foot hit the ground. In six hours, they advanced only one and a half miles.

They set up camp in the afternoon in the tall gra.s.s of what had been the Round Valley Golf Course. In the distance, they could see that the west end of the golf course had been fenced, and now contained a flock of horned sheep. Terry took the first watch while Ken tried to sleep. The blister was very painful and looking even more red.

The next morning, Ken declared, "I think it is infected."

He put on a clean sock and then painfully put on his boot.

"We need to find a place to stay and let that heal," Terry suggested.

"Maybe we can do some more security work. Let's head for a farm that reeks of prosperity," he answered.

They made slow progress toward Morgan City. Ken was in agony. The verdant fields of the valley floor contrasted the brushy and spa.r.s.ely wooded hillsides above them. Most of the fields appeared to be hay gra.s.s, but there were also some row crops. They were surprised to see and hear tractors operating.

Spotting a tall, gleaming grain silo north of town, they headed for it. The silo was at a tidy farm with several large fields. A sign at the county road proclaimed, "L. & L. Prine Farm, Hay Sales By Appointment Only," with an 801 phone number. The stylized outline of a beehive was painted beneath the phone number. Ken knew that this symbol indicated that the family was a.s.sociated with the LDS Church.

Down the lane, on the porch of the farmhouse a dog barked, already aware of their presence. They walked slowly with their rifles slung muzzles down. Another dog joined in on the barking. A teenage girl stepped out onto the porch, armed with a lever-action carbine. Another girl, slightly younger, soon joined her armed with a Mossberg .22 rifle. The front door opened again, and a portly man stepped out, carrying both a scoped rifle and a holstered revolver. "We don't want any trouble," the man warned.

"We're not trouble," Terry said. "We're the antidote to trouble." She and Ken made a show of laying down their rifles, packs, and web gear.

Larry Prine interrogated the Laytons for twenty-five minutes. While they spoke, Larry's wife, Lynda, and more and more of their family emerged from the house. Soon, six children ranging from five to sixteen were lined up, listening intently. Larry was curious, and seemed to take pity on the Laytons. He read the letters of introduction from Durward Perkins and Carl Norwood.

After their interrogation, Terry asked, "How are things here in Morgan City?"

Prine leaned back against the wall casually and replied, "We've gotten by a lot better than most towns, since we have irrigation water from the river. We've prospered, but we've been shorthanded. When those derivatives imploded and the dollar collapsed, the town Elders panicked and got a little overzealous. They sent home every student enrolled at Weber State, and they ran all the migrant farm workers out of town. They did the same to the druggies and drunks at the halfway house. At least that move made sense. But as it turned out, we could have used the help from the college kids for the next summer's harvest, and for security, too. If they hadn't been in such a rush, they could have taken their pick of the students from the college. For instance, they could have kept all the ROTC cadets and criminal justice majors, and some of the ag students. That was very shortsighted of them. But like I say, everyone was very panicky when the hyperinflation kicked in and the riots started in the big cities."

"So how have things been recently?"

Prine scratched his chin and said, "The last few months, things have been getting dicey, with the looter gangs that have come up from Nevada and west from the Plains states. Some of 'em have armored vehicles-mostly old bank armored cars. I heard that St. George and Vernal both nearly got destroyed. More than half the houses in both those towns burned down. And in Richfield there was a gang that moved in and stayed for months, just brutalizing everyone in town. Then that same gang moved on to Price, and did the same thing, and they're still there. Hopefully the new government in Kentucky will send the Army to come and clean them out."

"What about here, around Morgan?" Terry asked.

"This is an agricultural community, so we apparently draw from quite a large radius. Burglaries, mostly. But once in a while there's a really wicked home invasion. Looters will sneak into farms in the middle of the night. They catch a family sleeping, and then . . ." He glanced down at his row of children and said tersely, ". . . Well, you know what happens. It ain't pretty."

After glancing at his wife, Larry said, "If you are willing to both put in eight-hour guard s.h.i.+fts, you're welcome to stay for at least a couple of weeks while your blister heals up."

It took a full week for Ken's foot to heal. Then he spent many hours each day in the Prines' fields, weeding with a hoe. He developed a technique that he called speed weeding. His goal was both to eliminate thistles and other weeds, and to toughen up his feet. He would sprint to each weed he spotted and then come to a sudden stop and start hoeing. Then he would sprint to the next patch. It looked comical, but it worked. Day after day of this exercise toughened up his feet.

Just when Ken felt that his feet were ready for him to resume their journey, Terry had an accident. After more than a week of doing her guard duty from ground level, she decided to try manning a s.h.i.+ft from atop the Prines' silo, just as she had done at the Perkins ranch. Coming down the ladder at the end of her s.h.i.+ft, she reached the bottom of the caged section, turned, and absentmindedly hopped off the ladder. But unlike the ladder at the Perkinses' silo in Iowa, the transition to the caged section of the ladder began eleven feet off the ground instead of six feet. She landed on her right knee. Recognizing the intense pain, she realized that she had broken it.

She shouted for help, and soon Ken and several of the Prine children were standing over her. "I feel like an idiot," she said, grimacing. "There's nothing stronger than habit. At the Perkins place, I got used to turning and jumping off the ladder just when my head got below the caged part."

Five weeks after Ken and Terry's arrival, Mrs. Prine's sister Kate, her husband, Roy, and their two sons arrived from Oak City, Utah. They were seeking refuge because the town had been savagely attacked by looters just a few days before, and it was feared that the looters would return and burn the rest of the town. Their arrival made the already crowded house even more crowded. Several of the children were sleeping on the carpeted living room floor in sleeping bags.

For two weeks, Ken and Terry had been trying to get a message through to Todd Gray's retreat group in Idaho, via the regional CB radio network, but they found that it didn't extend any farther than southwestern Idaho and Bozeman, Montana.

Next, Ken and Terry spent several hours composing a letter. It read: Dear Todd, Mary, and Whoever Else Arrived: Terry and I are writing to let you know that we are safe and living temporarily at a farm three miles north of Morgan City, Utah (twenty-five miles northeast of Salt Lake City-see enclosed strip map). We walked most of the way here from Chicago. We had planned to stay here only a week to rest up and then press on to the retreat, but Terry took a bad spill off a ladder, breaking her kneecap. That was nearly two months ago. I'm afraid that the break is not healing properly. I don't believe that there is any way that we will be able to continue on, at least not on foot. We hope that all is well with you. This is the third letter that we couriered up your way. If you got either of the previous ones, I apologize for the redundancy. However, we figured that sending multiple letters by different couriers would be the best bet in getting our message through to you.

We are staying in a spare bedroom at the Prines' farm. They are wonderful people. Like most of their neighbors, they are Mormons, and thus were relatively well prepared for the collapse. To earn our keep I am being employed as a night security guard on the farm. I also help out with the heavy work during the day (mending fences, splitting wood, etc.). Terry is still confined to bed most of the time.

Because of Terry's injury, the Prines have agreed to let us stay on as long as we'd like, but we don't want to wear out our welcome and their stock of supplies. (Mrs. Prine's sister and brother-in-law and their two teenage boys moved in three weeks ago, and the stored food supply will soon be critical.) Is there any way that you could provide transportation to the retreat? I realize that this is asking a lot, and would involve considerable risk, so feel free to say no.

To avoid missing you, we promise that we will stay here until we either hear from you or somebody shows up. Please send word via courier or by radio if you get a chance. Do you have the nighttime CB voice message relay network set up? Well, that's all for now. Once again, we hope that all is well with you. G.o.d bless you all.

Ken Layton and Terry Layton.

D.V.-Ps. 37.

Terry then wrote out five copies of the letter and map by hand. Her hand felt cramped when she was done. She and Ken added their signatures and Ken appended his characteristic stylized "D.V.-Ps. 37" logo, which was short for "Deo Volente, Psalm 37." For many years, he had penned this logo on all his personal letters.

They sent the letters out via couriers over the course of the next three weeks. Two of the letters went with traveling traders, two with refugees heading toward Idaho, and one with a circuit-riding Baptist minister. They hoped that at least one of them would get through.

Fort Knox, Kentucky.

January, the Fourth Year.

Maynard Hutchings was scheduled to present his State of the Continent speech, as part of his weekly America's New Dawn morning show recording, for later distribution over the Red and Blue networks. (The two networks had the same staff, but different names were given for a feigned show of balance.) When Hutchings, his staff, and bodyguards arrived at the Fort Knox television studio in their Boxer APCs, they found that they were locked out. The studio staff had arrived a half hour earlier and found the door lock jammed. So they had summoned the Fort Knox MPs together, and they were furiously working on the building's steel doors with a sledgehammer and crowbars.

One of the President's aides jogged over to the MPs and demanded, "What's going on here?"

"Somebody used Krazy Glue on the door locks!" the ranking MP answered.

With special funding directed by the President, the station staff had recently upgraded the physical security at the broadcast studio building. They had two teams of contractors install heavy vaultlike steel doors, and anti-vehicular barricades designed to stop suicide drivers or remotely controlled vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs). But imprudently, there had not been a corresponding increase in manpower, to provide someone to guard the building 24/7. The building was left unoccupied and unguarded between 1 and 5:30 a.m., five nights a week.

An empty tube of cyanoacrylate epoxy was found near one of the doors and bagged as evidence. The lock cylinders of every door were frozen in place. After resorting to using a cutting torch, they finally got into the building just twenty minutes before Hutchings was scheduled to go on the air.

Once inside, the studio staff found some of the inner door locks similarly jammed, but they were less of an obstacle. A couple of quick blows from a sledgehammer opened each door. The staff fumbled with flashlights, trying to determine why the lights weren't working. They soon found that the saboteur or saboteurs had removed all the circuit breakers from the main breaker box. The floor cameras had their lenses smashed, but a spare handheld camera from the mobile van was brought in and set up on a tripod. Maynard Hutchings finally went on the air twenty-five minutes late, "due to technical difficulties," and without his usual makeup.