Chapter Five

With no vehicle available to us, our only option was to walk to town – it took 3 hours. I never overcame the extremely edgy feeling. We constantly surveyed our surroundings. We only saw one vehicle – we heard it with enough time to run into the undergrowth on the side of the road to hide. From there, we could see that it was a truck, and there were two people in the back with guns at the ready. I only had my AR-7, and it was packed away in my pack. Eric had no weapon.

As we topped the last little rise before town, we could see that there was a barricade made mostly of vehicles blocking the way into town ahead. It was difficult to find cover – we left the road and headed across fields, sometimes finding a little bit of visual protection in the irrigation ditches and fence lines. We could hear an occasional burst of gunfire, but mostly we heard an eerie silence.

Eric’s place was all the way across town, but our goal was to find out what the situation was, so we headed toward the home of one of his friend Jimmy nearby. As we approached, it was clear that all was not well. The back door had been kicked in, and several of the windows were shattered. A body was lying on the ground just to the side of the door. From our vantage point behind a hedge Eric thought it was Jimmy. The landscaping of the yard allowed us to get close to the door if we stayed low. When we got inside it looked pretty bad – every cupboard, shelf, and closet had been emptied out into the rooms. Jimmy’s wife was lying dead in the upstairs hall, and there were a few shell casings nearby. I could see that Eric was extremely shaken.

We left as cautiously as we had come. We encountered similar sad and grisly sights at the homes of other acquaintances. The gunfire had all but ceased, and dusk was rapidly approaching. Rather than run the risk of accidentally stumbling into a bad situation in the dark, we chose to overnight in an outbuilding behind the last house we had visited. We also needed more information – we had no idea what was happening and who was responsible for this destruction. There was no food to be found in any of the houses, but I shared the little I had left in my backpack with Eric and we fell asleep.

The next morning we were up before dawn. Nothing seemed to be stirring. Thus far our route had taken a sort of semi-circle around the center of town. We carefully made our way toward Main Street in the same fashion that we had moved the day prior. We were taking our time – the sun came up before we got too close. As we drew near we could hear voices and the noise of a vehicle engine. It was risky, but we crept through an alleyway and slipped behind several pallets of big bags by the farm store.

The courthouse was a block away, and we could see a small tank and two troop transports out front. At least a dozen people were milling about. I counted eight of them in matching military fatigues carrying assault rifles. From the looks of it, they were well-trained. I was guessing that these guys had been working together a long time – maybe in the same guard unit. It seemed crazy that an actual military unit would be responsible for the wanton destruction that we were witnessing, but nothing else was coming to mind. What we had seen was pretty systematic and would have required coordination – after all, in small town western America there were lots of freedom-loving folks that wouldn’t just lay down and die without a fight. Nothing was making sense.

Several pickup trucks came and went while we watched. Most of the men in the trucks were just dressed in civilian clothes – a few were wearing hunting camouflage – but the eight guys with the assault rifles seemed to be at the center of the activity. The trucks were bringing deliveries – we could see them offloading boxes into the back of the troop transports. I was sure that it was collected plunder from the town. It made me sick to think about people preying upon other people – innocent people – and right here in my own country.

The longer we stayed in our spot the greater chance there was of being discovered, so we determined that it was time to go. This time we would head toward Eric’s house to evaluate the situation there. We found our way back down the alleyway and slipped as quickly as possible out of the center of town. His house was on the edge of town. Our method of evading notice seemed to be working – or maybe we were just getting lucky.

Eric’s place was in nearly the same condition as the other houses we had seen. We were just about finished looking around when we heard the sound of crunching glass. We wheeled around and ducked around the corner. A whispered voice called out, “Eric, it’s just me, your neighbor Tucker. I saw you come in. I’ve been hiding out at my place.” A few minutes later we were all huddled together at Tucker’s house exchanging stories.

Tucker had been in the city where I had lived and worked when the power went out. He also had no idea what had caused it, but the “vultures” had descended almost immediately. The blackout could not possibly have been a coincidence – men with military fatigues, weapons, troop transports, and tanks seemed to be at the center of all of the disorder. This had to have been a coordinated attack. Blockades went up quickly and tactical teams began to make coordinated sweeps in grids of the city. They had central command and seemed to be in close communication with each other.

He had watched people get mowed down by automatic gunfire in parking lots and stores. His wife had been in town too, visiting friends. The chaos had been too great – he made it back to where she was, but nobody was there. All he could do was make the long and dangerous hike back here to their small town. He had no word from her and all he could do was hope for the best. But we were all starting to expect the worst.

During this conversation I learned that the problems hadn’t been as immediate as it seemed to me – not long after I had disappeared to the mountains there had been a fairly rapid breakdown of the economy – at first it was like any other recession and people had talked of recovery, but the price of fuel was skyrocketing with each passing month and the hole was getting deeper and deeper. Unemployment went through the roof and so did crime, especially in the city. There were sporadic problems with the infrastructure – brownouts and blackouts – but the lights always came back on after a while. There were occasional riots and insurrections, but most people kept hoping for a return to normal. Fuel became very difficult to obtain, and then everything stopped moving – that’s probably when I had noticed the silent sky. Then came the total blackout and the renegade army.

I remembered that my grandfather had once told me that the fabric of society is a delicate and fragile weave, and all it takes is a little bit of unraveling to make the entire fabric come apart. Apparently it was true. It had taken several months for the chaos to build, but in just a few quick days the whole thing had come apart at the seams. It seemed impossible. I had been completely oblivious to the whole thing.

Two days later I lost Eric and Tucker. We were all extremely hungry, and had systematically been searching for anything edible in the surrounding houses. We had found a small cache of cans in the crawlspace of a home and I had been passing them up through the hole in the floor. I had a few more things to bring up, but Tucker and Eric had gathered what they could reasonably carry and headed back toward Tucker’s place a couple of blocks away. As I lifted the last of the cans out of the crawlspace, I heard shouting and the staccato of gunfire. I pulled myself up and carefully looked out the windows – I could see a truck in the field behind the house and four men with rifles pointing at the ground – Eric was down and not moving. Tucker was still trying to get away, but obviously hurt. Two of the men ran and grabbed him and brought him back to the truck. I heard a lot of shouting. Tucker was down on his knees with his hands behind his head. My heart was pounding – nothing prepares a man for this kind of moment. What could I do? I guessed they were trying to find out where he had come from and who else he might be with, but his answers must not have satisfied them, because I heard several more shots and then his body went limp and slumped to the ground. I vomited on the floor. My body just shook with convulsions for several minutes. Then – nothing. The hole in my heart was deeper than ever. I regained my senses, gathered the cans up, and hid myself behind an old couch and overturned shelf against the wall of the room. I waited until after dark, packed up the cans, and walked slowly to Tucker’s place. I paused to pay respect to Eric and Tucker on the way. The killers had failed to find all of the things they were carrying – I picked up several more cans in a nearby ditch.

At Tucker’s, I gathered everything useful together into my backpack, opened up a can of corn and ate it, and descended into a hollow sleep. I awoke very early, just before light, and started back across town in roughly the same semicircle that Eric and I had arrived. I moved carefully yet quickly, and had made it out of town and well up the canyon before full light. It took almost all day to get back to my camp. I had no idea what to do, but I knew what to expect up here. In my emptiness, it was the closest thing to home that I had.