Part 14 (1/2)

Wearing a tailored suit that couldn't conceal his ample girth, Hutchings began his speech: My fellow Americans: The United States is slowly recovering from the greatest tragedy in its history. I have recently been provided a detailed report on the extent of the catastrophe from the administration's chief scientists. Some of the report's findings are as follows: In the past three years, an estimated 160 million of our citizens have died. Most died from starvation, exposure, and disease. Of the deaths by disease, more than 65 million were caused by the influenza pandemic that swept the eastern seaboard. Without antibiotics available, the disease ran rampant until there were no more hosts left to attack in the heavily populated regions.

At least 28 million are estimated to have been killed in lawless violence. In addition, more than five million have died of complications of preexisting medical problems such as diabetes, heart disease, hemophilia, AIDS, and kidney disease. Hundreds of thousands more have died of complications of tonsilitis, appendicitis, and other ailments that were heretofore not life-threatening. The distribution of population losses ranged from in excess of 96 percent in some northeastern metropolitan areas to less than 5 percent in a few areas in the High Plains, Rocky Mountains, the intermountain areas of the West, and the inland Northwest. Order has been restored in only a few states, but we are making rapid progress.

As you are no doubt aware, the economy is still in complete disarray. The formerly existing transportation and communications systems have been completely disrupted. In the coming months, our biggest priority will be on revitalizing the petroleum and refining industries of Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. Next, we will strive to get electric power back online in as many areas as possible. With bulk fuel, natural gas, and electrical power available, it is hoped that agriculture and the many industries critical to our nation's economic health will be reestablished.

Here at Fort Knox, we have taken the lead in rebuilding a new United States. Already, with the help of security forces from other United Nations countries, we have pacified the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. But there is much more to be done. America must be put back on its feet again economically. Never again can we allow the economy to get so out of control. Strict economic policies will ensure that there will never be a repeat of the Crash. Wages and prices will, by necessity, be controlled by the central government. Many industries will have to be government-owned or government-controlled, at least in the foreseeable future. Reasonable limits on the press will stop the spread of unfounded rumors. Until order is completely restored, the federal and state const.i.tutions have been temporarily suspended, and nationwide martial law is in effect. The single legitimate seat of power is here at Fort Knox. It is only with central planning that things can be put back in order rapidly and efficiently.

Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama are already under the control of nine United Nations subregional administrators. I will soon be dispatching UN regional and subregional administrators to the other areas that have independently reestablished order. These include Maine, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and Vermont, the southern portion of Georgia, most of Texas, part of Louisiana, most of Colorado, southwestern Oregon, all of Idaho, all of Utah, eastern Was.h.i.+ngton, all of Wyoming, and most of North and South Dakota.

The UN regional administrators will oversee the many tasks required to accomplish a complete national recovery. For example, they will be setting up regional police forces, which will be under their direct control. They will oversee the issuance of the National ID Card. They will appoint judges that they deem properly qualified. Each regional administrator will bring with him on his staff a regional tax collector and a regional treasurer who will handle issuance of the new national currency. Rest a.s.sured that the new currency is fully backed by the gold reserves of the national depository. I hope that you, my fellow citizens, will do everything in your ability to a.s.sist your new regional administrators, the subregional administrators, their staffs, and those that they appoint under them. Only with your cooperation will America be able to quickly restore itself to its former greatness.

The applause from the small audience was digitally augmented to make it sound like a huge crowd.

There was then a staged question-and-answer session, with low-level ProvGov cabinet staffers posing as journalists.

The first stood and asked, ”Mr. President, how would you summarize our government's relations with UNPROFOR, and how would you characterize the current security situation in the country?”

Hutchings cleared his throat and responded, again looking at his notes. ”I have been gratified to see the outstanding cooperation shown by the UN Partners for Peace. Our recent victories over the bandits in Michigan and Colorado and the rapidly decreasing rates of terrorist acts and banditry indicate that we are winning and the terrorists are losing ground. Things are getting better.”

Another pseudo-reporter took to his feet and asked, ”Mr. President, when will elections be scheduled?”

Hutchings beamed. ”There will be regional elections real soon. But the security situation in certain parts of the country, particularly west of the Missouri River, might preclude other elections for a while.”

After the live airing, they decided to have him repeat the speech the next day and do another digital camera recording, with makeup and better preparation.

Five days after Hutchings's speech, a firing squad from the Fort Knox Provost Marshal's Office executed the television studio saboteur. He was the thirteen-year-old son of an Ordnance Corps major who was stationed at the fort and lived off-post in Radcliff.

The boy's mother worked as a secretary at the television station. With access to his mother's purse, the boy stole her keys and her address book that had the building's alarm system pa.s.scode. Unbeknownst to his parents, he bundled up in warm clothes and slipped out of the house at midnight. He rode his bicycle to a gap in the Fort Knox perimeter fence-known to all the teenagers in their subdivision-and then rode to the station. He then spent two hours smas.h.i.+ng equipment, stealing circuit breakers, and gluing door locks. His mother found the backpack full of circuit breakers, and he soon confessed what he'd done, explaining that he'd been inspired by seeing the movie Max Ma.n.u.s, about the Norwegian resistance during World War II. ”I'm like Max,” he told his father. ”Sometimes you have to be daring and do what you think is right, regardless of any risk of getting caught. So I decided I'd just go for it.”

Two days after the boy's execution, the major and his wife were also executed by a firing squad. They were shot at the remote and rarely used Yano Tank Range. There were no digital photos taken to doc.u.ment the executions. Their bodies went into unmarked graves. President Hutchings later explained: ”Parents should be held accountable for their children's actions.”

20.

Fire Mission.

”Money is a mirror of civilization. Throughout history, whenever we find good, reliable noninflated money, we almost always find a strong, healthy civilization. Whenever we find unreliable, inflated money, we almost always find a civilization in decay.”

-Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? (2010).

Bradfordsville, Kentucky.

December, the Second Year.

Sheila Randall's general store had prospered since the Crunch. As the proprietor of the only store in town that showed the flexibility to barter and with the courage to stay open amid the chaos, she had attracted customers from a wide radius. She had opened the store shortly after the Crunch began, soon after her husband had been murdered. A savvy barterer, Sheila had parlayed a small pre-Crunch investment in gardening seeds into a burgeoning inventory of everything from locally produced honey and sorghum to tools, ammunition, kitchen utensils, canning jars and lids, bolts of cloth, gloves, cans of kerosene, home-canned vegetables, rat traps, garden and mechanic tools, and dozens of other items. Starting with an empty storefront and with just the help of her ten-year-old son and her spry eighty-five-year-old grandmother, Lily Voison, her inventory soon grew to fill the store's display room. Sheila then built up a substantial overstock that eventually filled the store's windowless back room. She, her son, Tyree, and her grandmother Lily lived in the apartment upstairs.

Sheila was quick to react to changes like the ProvGov's new currency and gun laws. One of the new gun laws was a restriction on a.r.s.enals that put a limit of 500 rounds of ammunition per home. This absurdly included .22 rimfire ammunition that had long been sold in retail boxes of 500 or 550. Sheila benefited from an exemption in the ammunition law for stocking stores. This allowed her to have up to 40,000 rounds on hand at any given time. Sheila seized this as an opportunity, offering to trade ammunition for any of her inventory. Within a week, the value of her inventory jumped, as people rapidly made trades to react to the changing legal landscape. When townsmen dumped their excess ammo in trade at Sheila's store, it added tremendously to the volume of her business.

Recognizing the significance of the exemption for pre-1899 guns from the new registration requirements for rifles and shotguns, Sheila bought every antique gun that she could find. Her landlord, Hollan Combs, loaned her a printout of a Pre-1899 Firearms FAQ from the Internet that he had put in his file cabinet before the Crunch. It listed the serial number thresholds for guns that would allow her to determine which ones had receivers that were made in or before 1898, and those that were 1899 or later. Any modern guns required registration under the ProvGov's new law. Sheila photocopied the FAQ on a day that the utility power was on so that she could return the original to Hollan. She posted the FAQ in doc.u.ment protectors, tacked up immediately below her store's rack of antique rifles and shotguns.

As resistance to the new government grew and the Gun Amnesty deadline loomed, her customers soon migrated into two distinct camps. The first camp were those who scrambled to get rid of any guns that were banned or any supplies of ammunition that exceeded the 500-round a.r.s.enal threshold or that was of a restricted type. The other camp consisted of those who were trying to rapidly build up batteries of guns for resistance to the government. To them, the arbitrary ammo quant.i.ty limit and the distinction of the pre-1899 exemption meant very little, so they willingly traded their antique guns to Sheila for full-capacity magazines and large quant.i.ties of military-caliber ammunition. They sought calibers such as 9mm Parabellum, .45 ACP, 5.56 NATO, 7.62 NATO, and .30-06. The 5.45x39 and 7.62x39 ammunition for Kalashnikovs was also highly sought after. This put Sheila in a key position as a middleman and launched her into a blur of activity that caused her store's inventory to rapidly s.h.i.+ft and grow.

Since they were sympathetic to the Resistance, the local sheriff's deputies turned a blind eye to the gun and ammunition trading that took place at the store. Many of these trades were made after-hours, in the store's back room. As guerrilla activity grew, a huge array of guns that had been hidden-some since as far back as 1934-began to be pulled out of bas.e.m.e.nts and de-greased and oiled. The citizens of Kentucky and Tennessee had long been notorious for owning unregistered machineguns. Sheila was amazed when she was asked to find magazines for BARs, Thompson submachineguns, M3 Greaseguns, M2 Carbines, MP40 Schmeissers, a Swedish K, and even a French MAT-49. Here again, Sheila acted as the middleman and prospered. She realized that she was taking some risks, but she wanted to take full advantage of the amnesty time frame. Thankfully, the amnesty in Kentucky, as the seat of the new national government, was extended to sixty days. Those sixty days were some of the most hectic days of her life.

Before the window of opportunity for the amnesty closed, Sheila had acc.u.mulated more than 6,000 rounds of a.s.sorted ammunition and sixteen antique guns. These included three early-production Winchester Model 1897 shotguns, five double-barreled shotguns from various makers, a Burgess pump shotgun, a Colt Lightning pump rifle in .38-40, nine lever-action Winchesters in various calibers, a Winchester Model 1890 pump-action .22, two Marlin lever-actions, and a Model 1894 Swedish Mauser carbine that had been rechambered to .257 Roberts. Most of these guns soon filled the rack on the back wall of the store, to the amazement of her customers. For each, she could doc.u.ment their ”exempt” status, so she displayed them with impunity. A prominent sign above the gun rack read: ”Pre-1899 Antique Guns. Trade for Ammo or Silver Coins Only!” Realizing that their exemption from the new gun law made them a rarity, Sheila put very high prices on the guns.

She set aside three of the antique guns for her own use: A Model 1892 .44-40 carbine that she kept loaded behind the front counter, a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge takedown shotgun with a nineteen-inch barrel (for Tyree to use while standing guard in the back room), and the Swedish Mauser (dated 1895 on the receiver ring) that she kept upstairs. Since .257 Roberts was an odd caliber, she set aside all of it that she had acquired for the store inventory-just sixty rounds.

There were just two guns that she had to make disappear before the registration amnesty ended. These were her Remington 20 Gauge Model 870 ”Youth” gun, and her .41 Colt revolver. She hid the revolver in a seed broadcaster among the clutter of merchandise that hung from nails on the walls of the back room. She had Tyree coat the shotgun inside and out with automotive grease and bury it in a fifty-two-inch length of six-inch-diameter PVC pipe in the hills just outside town. Also greased and packed away in the same tube was an a.s.sortment of twenty-three rifle and pistol magazines that she hadn't sold or traded away quickly enough. Most of the excess s.p.a.ce in the tube was taken up by boxes and socks filled with 20-gauge shotgun sh.e.l.ls. She also included $40 face value in silver dimes, quarters, and half dollars for a cash reserve. Her wise grandmother Lily had urged including the silver coins, reasoning that they shouldn't keep all their eggs in one basket.

The caching tube was glued shut with standard end caps, using clear PVC cement. Sheila would have preferred to use a threaded end cap at one end, but those were almost impossible to find after the Crunch. To eventually open the tube she would have to use a hacksaw. Before the tube was glued shut, Sheila inserted six large silica gel desiccant packets to absorb any moisture inside the container.

The length of PVC pipe was buried next to a large, distinctive boulder at the edge of an abandoned dump. Tyree reasoned that the boulder was unlikely ever to be moved, and that the clutter of rusty cans in the dump would make it impossible for anyone to ever find the cache with a metal detector.

The Prine Farm, Morgan City, Utah.

June, the Third Year.

Just seventeen days after they had sent out the last of the letters to Idaho, Ken was helping Larry Prine clean his chimney. As Larry was threading on another rod section, he heard a vehicle approaching. Glancing up to size up the situation, Larry shouted down from the roof, ”There's a vehicle coming in!”

Ken grabbed his rifle and stepped to the front door to investigate. An older Ford Bronco pulled into the Prines' lane and approached the house. The Bronco's roof had been removed, and its winds.h.i.+eld was flipped down and covered with burlap. Two men in camouflage uniforms and wearing Kevlar helmets were in the front seats. As the vehicle got closer to the farmhouse, Ken recognized his friend Tom Kennedy's vehicle-despite the fact that it was being driven with its winds.h.i.+eld flipped down and it had a new cable cutter attached to its front b.u.mper. Then he recognized the faces of Dan Fong and Kevin Lendel. Without hesitation, he ran out to greet them.

Ken was wearing a huge grin as Dan Fong braked the Bronco to a halt and shut down the engine. ”What, only two of you came?” Ken joked. ”I figured you'd have at least three or four guys.”

Kevin looked down, fighting back tears. Then he replied, ”We were three, but we're just two now.”

He motioned with his thumb at the pair of jungle boots protruding from the end of the rolled-up ponchos.

After a few moments, Kevin blinked his eyes heavily and said in a broken voice, ”It's T.K.”

The expression on Layton's face melted.

Ken walked back to the tailgate and stared down at Tom Kennedy's shrouded body. With his voice wavering, Layton said, ”If I'd known something like this was going to happen, I'd have never sent word to the retreat. This . . . this is all my fault.”

Dan shook his head and said, ”It wasn't your fault, dude. It's rough wherever you go out there. We all knew the risks. But we're your friends. Some things are a lot more important than your personal safety. It was a matter of honor.”

Ken took some time to stand over Tom Kennedy's body and pray. Kevin and Dan stood a polite distance away. As Ken turned back toward them, they could see tears running down his cheeks. They shared a three-way hug.