Chapter 1

The ecologists won. There we were, minding our own business, recovering from Christmas when the cult came. They arrived in fat torpedo-shaped silvery ships that you could only see through a telescope. They seeded our orbital space with nukes and set them all off at once. Everything stopped. The jets and planes fell from the sky. Every car, truck, semi and railroad engine died. The dieback had started

I woke up to a giant flash of light that left purple after-images in my eyes. When the dazzle left me I tried to orient myself. It was totally black.

The alarm clock was dead. I reached for a flashlight I kept in my nightstand--nothing. I stumbled into the closet for an LED camping lantern I knew I had and tried it-more nothing. Then I realized that the streetlights I always had beaming into the window were gone as well.

I fished around my desktop for a box of matches and lucked out. I lit a votive candle and looked around. Everything that ran on electricity was dead and gone, whether it ran off of line power or batteries. My laptop that I'd scrimped and saved for was so much trash. Damn.

I checked the bathroom. The water was still running so I filled every canteen and jug I had, including the gallon water jugs that I had waiting to go back to the grocery store to fill.

I realized that I was panicking. I needed to sit down and re-assess what had happened and what my next step would be. I settled down at my kitchen table with that little candle and sat in the silence thinking. The traffic sounds outside my apartment building were gone. The emergency services trucks would have been out by now if they could, so no cars were working. I was 48, out of shape and couldn't carry much. I was a bachelor so I had no help. I started to hear yelling and thumping from the rest of the building. People were beginning to realize that we were screwed. The building ran on electricity--heat, light and cooking. We were helpless in the apartments.

I had to get to somewhere that I could keep warm and find food, water and a reasonable place to live. The closest place with LP gas tanks was the county fairgrounds, across the street, thank God. I dug out all my candles and candle lanterns. I dug out all the camping crap that I'd accumulated over the years and picked through it. We had grocery stores nearby that were fully stocked so I didn't worry much about food. I had a cot in the car and a winter sleeping bag handy that still fit me. I was good to go for the night. Now the scary part. I had to find people to help me. There was no way I could do this on my own.

I exited into the hallway and locked the door behind me. People were bouncing around, shouting and arguing in the dark. They were drawn to my light like dogs to food.

"Hey! Quiet, please."

It started to get calmer.

"No lights, right? Not even flashlights. The streetlights are gone. right?"

There was a general murmur of agreement.

"No cars or trucks, or the emergency sirens would be out there, right?"

"My car won't start, either!" came from the group."

"Right. Now be calm. You won't like this. Anyone else see the flash? Yeah?

Well, we probably got nuked way up high. It all fits. If it was lower the heat flare would have toasted us by now. Orbit is 40 miles or more straight up."

I kept talking thru the sudden panic. Most kept listening. Those were the ones I wanted.

"Stay calm. We can't do much in the dark, but we need to move away from here.

With no electric this place is useless. Let's get some sleep and get together come dawn. Oh, and fill any empty jugs with water--it won't last long, just until the water towers empty, I guess."

"Where we gonna go?" came from a young latino guy I knew worked at a local restaurant.

"If we take over the fairgrounds we have LP gas and places to stay. We can raid the big Meijer store next door. We'll be all right.

"Why not stay at the grocery store?"

"You want to be around all that rotting milk and meat? Not me. And what about other people that want what you've got? Are you going to fight everyone? We need to lay low with what we have until things thin out.

That could be a few months. But first, we have to move fast and hard to build a stash. We need to stay together and work together. If we don't we'll die like dogs fighting over the last bone."

People started to drift back to their apartments. Whew. I hadn't been knifed or shot. I could still hear people thumping around and yelling upstairs. I could only manage so many. Some would join later, some would not. I just hope I didn't have to shoot anyone One big black guy in a leather coat stood there, evaluating me.

"May I help you?"

He grinned a little. and got serious again.

"Maybe we can help each other."

He opened his coat. He was a police officer, stuck here while patrolling the place. I motioned him inside and cleared off my couch for a place to sit.

"Tom Harris. You're going to need some security to pull this off.

You're making sense so far."

"Jim Sexton. You want to team up with me? I'd appreciate it. Your uniform can be a focal point--if we can find any ex-military we may be able to form a squad or two to watch each other's backs.

That's for later. You eaten lately? I've got a fridge full of food that's going to go bad and a way to cook it."

He smiled and shook my hand. "Now you're talkin'."

I know, you're not supposed to use propane stoves inside. Pthbttt.

We had bacon, eggs and hashbrowns in butter. He sacked out on the couch (It was a futon bed that had seen better days.) while I went back to bed.

I woke at dawn We had hamburgers cooked over a propane stove for breakfast.

I started telling him what was worrying me. I was pacing.

"Water could kill us, either the lack of it or polluted feedstock.

We can't let anyone use a flush toilet anymore. The kids and women will be hard to teach. Everybody's got politically correct sanitation on the brain and not a one of 'em has been under field conditions.

One disease could wipe us all out. Without a doctor or access to antibiotics we're hosed. All this and we're living on consumables, too. What happens when our supplies and bulk tanks run dry?

Who did this to us? This was too big to be an accident. No jets have flown over or we'd hear 'em. Dry air carries sound. It's cold and clear out there.

What about raiding parties? If I were raiding I'd shoot officers first, then the guys with longer-range weapons."

"Jim, you're borrowing trouble. Get your head on straight."

That settled me right down.

"Thanks. First, find a place, then organize people, get'em places to stay. Once the're comfortable that they'll have a place to sleep we'll have to start raiding parties to build a larder."

"The main building has a kitchen that they feed everyone out of on weekends. The main office is there, too. There should be a map of the place and keys. I ought to know--I've patrolled it enough times."

I got dressed. I dressed warmly, in layers. It was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside and would probably get to 40 during the day.

We put together small packs for the both of us with candles and lighters, canteens, wire cutters, parachute cord and a couple of light sticks.

I stopped by my car for a big hammer I had stashed there for driving tent stakes. About twenty people followed us to the gate. It was open, so we just marched on through. I'd been there before so I knew where the main building was. So did Tom. We had to punch out the lock but then we were home free. The place was pretty gloomy. We had enough places for everyone to sit at the picnic tables. The big heaters wouldn't work without electricity to run the thermostats and igniters. We needed sleeping bags, blankets and cots to start with. The kitchen was well supplied. It had bread, eggs and bacon. Everyone had breakfast, not that we needed it-- more of an emotional thing. We were one group now. We had to start thinking that way. I talked as I thought. I watched people start to smile as they saw a big problem get broken down into reasonable chunks.

"The little ones would need to be kept warmer than the adults, and probably would be best off sleeping in the kitchen. Bunkbeds would be fine.

We'd need to move any portable toilets we could find close to the building after dumping them out. We needed cots and sleeping bags. We needed lights, heaters and LP Gas tanks. Everyone should have a backpack."

It was time to make our first raid.

We hit the Meijer superstore like a horde of locusts.

"Hey everyone! Take wheelbarrows, not shopping carts. The wheels are too small for the snow!"

We had to shift over to a sporting goods store less than a mile down the road to get enough cots and sleeping bags. We found some low cots the kids would be more comfortable with, too.

We started with easy lists to scavenge for and got more involved as we went.

I started a couple of people getting fresh foods and meat, bread and butter for us to consume while it was good. We found pallets of canned goods that we wanted. It was too bad that we had nothing to move full pallets with. we had to break them into thirds to move them in wheelbarrows. Cases fit fine.

Several women and one man were professional cooks. That took a load off my mind.

We had grilled steaks and pork loins for a week. By then the meat in the store freezer was going bad. We picked through what was left to find whatever was still good. We made six thirty-gallon pots of meat stew. We kept that going for days and days. Eventually it was down to a vegetable-grain soup when we finally did 'er in.

I went thru the paid invoices and open bills in the office after lunch the first day. The bulk tank had been filled two weeks previously and seemed to be on a six-month fill cycle. I found enough propane fittings to empty 20- pound tanks into the bulk tank, one painful tank at a time. It seemed we always had two or three people carting in full tanks and carting away empties thruout the winter and into spring until we ran out of tanks to steal.

Every gas station had twenty or so. The Ace hardware store three miles away had a bulk tank with a filler setup. We gravity-fed tanks until we drained it.

We had 46 people with Tom and I. Most were in families. There were a few bachelors, including Tom, Carlos, James and I. The few single women began hooking up with the bachelors, one by one. Some came from within our camp, some not. The double-wide cots were much in demand and you were looked on with envy if you had one, at first. Eventually we scavenged full beds and dressers for everyone but that took months. We strung curtains to make rooms and hallways. It wasn't too quiet but we learned to live with it.

There were only two babes in arms, one pre-schooler and four school-age kids.

It was damned cold that first night. We salvaged patio heaters and white gas lanterns the next day, as well as fuel for 'em. You can kill yourself refilling a hot lantern, as I demonstrated for the group outside our building.

I purposefully missed the fill hole while refilling a hot lantern and it went up in a respectable fireball. I dove away from it as I bobbled the fill, dropping the supply can. The fire back-drafted into the fuel can and it exploded, scattering buring fuel across the area. Tom helped to put me out.

After that I turned to a very quiet crowd.

"That is what can go wrong. You can burn yourself and family to death in an instant. The lantern must be just warm or cool to the touch before refilling it. Always leave a finger's width of air inside the chamber when refilling it or it can explode from pressure. Liquid fuelled stoves are the same."

The big patio heaters are seven to eight feet tall and broadcast heat all around them. They take two twenty-pound propane tanks for about ten hours of use.

With the people and six heaters we kept the place about forty-five degrees at night. That's not too bad with sleeping bags and no breeze. Everyone was up off the concrete, on cots with blankets under them and sleeping bags around them.

We had six people that had been in the military and had at least qualified with small arms, including Tom and myself. We carried pistols and practiced with them.

Each carried a whistle to call the others. Tom had a shotgun in the trunk of his car. All my weapons were in storage, over twelve miles away. They may as well have been in the next state.

I spent some time in a pharmacy with a PDR- a Physican's Desk Reference. It's a massive drug guide to every pharmaceutical available in the United States. It gives uses, dosages, warnings and drug interactions. With it's help I filled a couple of big tackle boxes of disposable syringes, pill and liquid medications as well as pain killers.

We put together the best EMT responder kits we could and made sure to grab all the

"Ensure" and "Boost" we could find, to feed people sick and in bed. We took a reasonable stock of vitamins for everyone, as we didn't really have a balanced diet. Everyone got vitamins after that.

We got medical histories of everyone in our group. Very few knew their blood type and that worried me. We couldn't give cross-transfusions unless we knew blood types. If someone swung an axe and hit a bleeder, that's all she wrote.

Everybody in our militia got a medic bag and we cross-trained each other. It wasn't much but it gave us all a bit more confidence.

We dragged the portable toilets to the edge of the fairgrounds for dumping with doubled-up hand-trucks once a week. We flushed 'em out each time with bleach and water, then wiped 'em down.

We did laundry in big tubs outside the kitchen. We heated the water over the stoves and strung lines to dry everything inside to keep the humidity up in the dry winter air.

A couple of people had guitars. Everybody was quiet when they played.

We appreciated any music at all.

We played a lot of cards at night. Everyone learned dominos and Yahtzee.

Checkers and chess had their own advocates.

As an active patrol officer Tom had a key to the police station. About March We raided it for enough weapons for sixteen and all the ammunition we could scrounge.

We found a bonus in several cases of military MRE's. (Meals, Ready to Eat. Also known in the trade as Meals Rejected by Etheopians)

I asked Tom what the cage room was for.

"That's the evidence lockup."

I looked around and started getting curious.

"Do you think it matters anymore?"

He looked at me kind of funny and just grinned. "Hell, no."

We punched the lock and started exploring.

Now, St. Charles was a fairly large town, over 80,000 people. A lot of weird shit gets confiscated in a town that large.

We found some select-fire rifles in there. That means automatic weapons.

We left those behind. We didn't have enough ammunition to support them.

We did break them down and take the firing pins. There was no sense in leaving behind something like that to be used against us.

I did take the three hand grenades we found and the grand prize-- a scoped .50 caliber Barrett rifle with a case of tungsten penetrator bullets.

"What you gonna do, Jim? punch out engine blocks?"

"Maybe."

I'd always been good with a rifle, making expert in Army basic and afterwards.

Firing a rifle is a skill--you get better with practice. I wanted to be as capable as I could.

Somebody had had a S&W 6" Chrome .357 confiscated. Poor bastard. They weren't even made any more and were like hen's teeth to find. It was easily an $800.00 to $1200.00 pistol. I adopted it and found leather for it.

We took a little pot, a little hashish and whatever methedrine they had.

Any schedule X pharmaceutical went into a little tacke box (Talwin, coedine, amphetamine, barbituates, general CNS depressants and stimulants.) I carefully left any feel-good stuff and date rape drugs like MDA and Ketamine.

I carefully stored the LSD we found in a glass jar. That had its own use.

Interrogation.

Since the station was at the other side of town from us we took a large party with us with wheel barrows. An antique store yielded a couple of nice oil lamps and some washboards to help with the laundry.

There were lot of dead bodies in the street. Most had died in fights.

We got shot at from a grade school on the way back. We pulled back around a brick house. I looked at Tom, then the Barrett.

He said "Kind of short range, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but it'll do the job. Spot for me?"

"OK."

We broke into the house shielding us. The living room had a window that looked out onto the school. I set up the rifle on top of their TV and set the scope to focus out onto the school. The bipod made it a cinch.

"Got him. Third window left of the main door. See him?"

There he was--a big, fat camo-colored target with a rifle in his hands, looking out at the house. I pulled away from the scope, loaded a cartridge and locked the breech, then pulled that mother tight to my shoulder. When I'd re-acquired my target I squeezed off a round.

I aimed for center of mass. Right in the breadbasket.

My ears were ringing and the window was gone. My shoulder hurt. I had one hell of a headache. I made a note to myself to never fire that big bastard from inside a room again.

"About four inches high, dead on." I heard him yell.

I yelled back "How can you tell?"

"Hole in the glass."

The guy had been keeping his own harem, and not willingly. He had one woman and two teens handcuffed to beds. They were damned skinny.

I didn't want to dig through the bloody mess to find the keys... Thank God Tom knew that the handcuff keys would all match. We got them all free and cleaned up. The girls latched onto my arms like limpets. I made sure that they each got an MRE to eat, and that they ate slowly so as not to vomit them back up. We found their sneakers and clothed them in doubled blankets made into ponchos, then belted around the waist. They wanted to come back with us. I shrugged. Why not?

A few more mouths wouldn't hurt. Besides, they were cute.

I fell for them hook, line and sinker. They slept with me, ate with me and walked around with me. They did all but go to the toilet with me. I got adopted as a daddy.

We had chained up all the fairgrounds entrances but one. We found a lot of stuff stored around the property, including eight house trailers, a whole fleet of riding mowers and a John Deer tractor. I kept coming back to that tractor, looking it over time after time. It had a manual crank start and a big hydraulic shovel front-end-loader.

I figured it was worth a try. It should only need a voltage regulator and a condenser to work. I kept an eye out for parts.

Well, to make a long story short, I found 'em. The holes didn't fit, but that was OK. I wired a good ground strap up, set the choke, advanced the throttle and gave it a good crank. It took a while, but it caught. The damned thing worked. People ran up from everywhere when they heard that engine run. I was proud as a new poppa. Then it died. Everyone sighed at once. Tom just laughed, the bastard.

"Your diesel went bad over the winter. You need new fuel."

Well, that news wasn't so bad as it could have been. A pump-siphon to get fuel out of ground tanks, a case of Sta-Bil, green spraypaint and some 5-gallon Jerry cans were next on the raider hit parade.

The color green is reserved for Diesel, at least in North America. I siphoned out the bad fuel from the tank and cleared the line using the petcock on the glass fuel filter designed to vent water in the fuel.

Soon we were mobile. We had farm wagons We talked it over. We were moving to where there was water at a top speed of 35 MPH. It sure beat walking.

We took over a farm just outside of town with a stream behind the house.

We made water filters out of fifty-gallon drums with baked charcoal over sand. This would probably keep us healthy.

There was a nursery down the road. I found a water pump on a skid attached to a Briggs-and-Stratton 5-horse motor. I bolted it to another small tractor's Power-Take-Off behind the driver's seat and we had a water pump.

We scavenged a tank for a diesel supply, mounted it on a berm for gravity feed and filled it the hard way--with five gallon jerrycans.

With fifty people working together, we managed to steal another pole barn from a different farm. We cut off the poles at the ground and put it up a bit shorter. It made for a lower ceiling and easier heating.

We lined it with pink construction foam and wood panelling on 2x6 joists. It was pretty comfortable--even for fifty people--once we put in partition walls.

We didn't have seed for the fields, but we did have some that had been laid by for gardening from the local farms and the ag extension office. The dried-out produce from the grocery store gave us a lot of seeds, too--even seed potatoes. We had a pretty good truck garden going by May, and we had fresh meat soon after from critters that thought our garden was just the neatest thing on earth. I learned to like raccoon if it was cooked long enough.