Chapter 1

It was getting pretty damned scary. I sat in my office watching the economy slowly spiral down in the death grip of climbing fuel prices. The governor of Illinois was frantically trying to close department after department, office after office in a vain attempt to keep the state government alive.

Gas prices had hit ten dollars a gallon and showed no sign of stopping. Food prices were climbing fast. Rolling power blackouts covered the entire mid-west. I ordered three hundred mixed one- three- and five-gallon food-grade buckets with gamma-seal lids. (Remember Y2K? All the food scares? Gamma-seal buckets have air-proof twist off lids that re-seal easily.) I began using all my spare cash to stock up on long term stored food. Starches? Of course—pasta, flour, rice, corn meal—even potato flakes and corn starch. I bought into well over a hundred pounds of each. I bought oils such as corn oil, olive oil, crisco and ghee in the same quantities. (Ghee is clarified butter which lasts quite a long time under cool, sealed storage. I stored that in mason jars, using sterile canning practices.) Under "Everything Else" I bought bulk quantities of baking powder, yeast, raisins, sugar, salt and spices. I bought flats of canned vegetables, pork and beans, canned meat stock, canned meat, evaporated milk, tea and coffee, all in institutional sized containers. I bought spices in bulk. I packed my chest freezer with the spices, nutmeats and chocolate. If nothing else they would make great trade goods.

Everything got a good purging shot of dry nitrogen before sealing the buckets to keep any oxygen from 'burning' the food.

Each pay check I bought a few 5-gallon steel jerry-cans that the military used to store fuel and pack along on vehicles. I filled 'em full of gasoline and put a shot of stabile in each one, then stashed 'em away. I rented a truck, loaded it up with everything I'd stashed and everything that I wanted to keep from my apartment then headed down South to a suburb of Springfield. I rented a 20x10 storage cube. I filled it up and prepaid the rent for four months.

Gas hit 14 dollars a gallon. Very few groceries were on the shelves. What there was were sold at incredible prices. It wasn't unusual to see gas stations in flames on the news. The economy was looking grim, grim. When I went to work that Monday I knew something was up. We were all called into the main conference room. Most of the secretaries were crying. The boss looked like someone had shot his dog. "We're closing down. We can't afford to stay open and the county won't cash your next paycheck." He started passing out envelopes. "Here's a month's pay for each of you. This taps out our funds but at least you get paid. I'm sorry, but that's it. Please shut everything down as you leave." I could see that he was heartbroken as he turned to go to his office. I hurried after him. "I want to shake your hand. You at least tried dammit. Most places I've been reading about have just locked the doors and scooted with any salaries and pension funds. You at least tried. Thanks."

I vowed to get out, no matter the cost. I wanted to be at the other end of the food supply—a producer rather than a consumer. I sat in my car in front of a grocery store that had just gotten in a food shipment. I noticed an armored car in front, waiting to pick up a deposit. I saw my solution. I was going to knock over a few armored cars to fund my migration.

I spent a week watching the armored car routes. I found four armored cars on routes running through a high-dollar neighborhood about 35 miles away, in towards Chicago. I thought up a plan that might work. If I worked fast enough my method would allow me to nail three-maybe four cars before the police began to catch on. I needed certain supplies first. My first objective was transportation. I wanted a large truck that would blend into nearly any environment. The paper mentioned that Stevens industrial electrical was bankrupt, going into receivership due to a huge defaulted loan. I tracked down their warehouse and drove by. Yep, there behind a chain-link fence were a row of 10,000 pound GVW (Gross Vehicle Weight) cube trucks painted with the company's logo. I pulled the power interrupter on an electrical pole outside the fence and padlocked it open. I wanted to let any security company come and go before I broke in.

Two days later I biked up to the gate in broad daylight with another padlock, a battery powered angle grinder, two spare charged batteries and a stack of spare steel cutting disks.

I made short work of the padlock on the gate and closed it behind me. Each truck had a four digit number stenciled on the driver's side door. I broke into the warehouse office looking for a key repository. Yep, there it was. It was Standard Operating Procedure. Install a lockable key box and screw it to the wall next to the dispatcher's desk. Two minutes with a cutoff blade later I had a handful of keys, all nicely numbered. I looked around while I was there. I found a flashlight in the desk drawer and wandered through the warehouse. Lord, talk about strange pieces and parts! I found a few things that might come in handy-- a large drill with a belly-bar to drill through joists and beams, a box of 1-1/4" hole drilling bits for making runs for conduit (that's thin galvanized pipe that city code demands all electrical wiring be run through to cut down on fires. If a circuit shorts and melts the insulation on the wires it'll ground out on the metal conduit which is earth grounded, and blow the fuse or circuit breaker rather than burn the house down.), junction boxes, reels of insulated heavy copper 3-conductor wire, wall boxes for 1 and 2-gang, wall switches and receptacles, cover plates, a 200-amp distribution box and a box of breakers. I figured that I was going to build a place eventually so why buy what I could steal?

I looked through each truck in the line, inspecting them for mileage and general repair. I narrowed it down to three then looked in the boxes (storage rear-ends). One was full of crap: transformers, heavy insulators—you name it. It would take more effort than I wanted to expend to empty. The next was greasy-filthy. Again, I passed. The third was a happy medium between 'em. It was fairly full, but the stuff was on pallets and the interior looked quite clean. I backed it up to the loading dock and used a pallet jack to empty it then loaded the stuff I wanted onto some spare pallets, wrapped up everything in stretch-wrap and loaded them neatly into the front of the box. I added six more empty pallets and a huge 3-foot wide roll of stretch-wrap with handles. I spent over 300 bucks filling that damned thing with gas. I swore that I was going to find a generator and portable pump. I'd driven a cube truck before. It was pretty scary until you got a feel for it. They were wide enough to take up an entire lane with very little room to spare. You couldn't drift around for nuthin'.

I found a university that had closed down—people couldn't afford to drive to classes and back. I broke into the chemistry building with my trusty angle grinder, made my way to the chemical stores room, broke in and stole six five-pound cylinders of carbon monoxide. I made sure that I wore gloves the entire time so that nobody could identify me through the cylinders.

Shopping around I picked up a Tyvek painter's suit, a pair of generic high-top sneakers, goggles and a respirator. I had tape, nitrile gloves (non-latex surgical gloves) and a baseball cap with the electrician's logo on it that I'd filched from the office. I bought a pair of gauntleted heavy leather gloves as well.

My little battery-powered cutoff saw wasn't going to 'cut it' for my next job. I paid good bucks for a quiet little Honda generator, an industrial high-volume fan and a high-end cutoff saw. Now for my evil plan.

The first armored car I'd watched was near the end of their run. I walked by the back of my first target as they were opening the rear door load the cash from the day's take. Just as he was closing the door I twisted open a CO cylinder, lobbed it through the door and rammed it shut with my shoulder. There was a whole lot of shakin' going on for a minute, then things quieted down. I tried the door. It had automatically locked on closing. I geared up in the sneakers, Tyvek suit, gloves, respirator and goggles, backed my cube truck up to the back of the armored car with about 3 feet between 'em, opened the rear door to my truck, popped the starter to the generator, then made DAMNED SURE to start the fan blowing out the back of my truck at the armored car doors. About forty minutes of screeching and sparks later I had the door open.

I cut the generator and opened the door wide with me NOT facing the inside of the armored car. I waited the longest fifteen minutes of my life for the carbon monoxide to disperse then crawled in and looked around. The two poor bastards that had run the route were dead as hell. I was sorry that I had to kill them to do the job, but there it was. I detest the phrase 'collateral damage'. You're responsible for everything you do. Their deaths were a weight I'd have to bear.

There were bags of money and receipts everywhere. I crawled out, backed my truck up to the armored car until I could just fit between 'em and crawled back in. There was a heavy aluminum ramp in the armored car that I used to bridge the two vehicles. I got to work transferring all the bigger bills using their hand-truck. I left bundles of checks and most of the coin. I took a couple of bags of quarters just for the hell of it. The shotgun and pair of pistols in the armored car mysteriously disappeared. When I was done I pulled the ramp back in, closed up both vehicles as best I could and drove away. I had a half hour until I had to be in position to do it again. Once someone noticed the open door to the armored car human curiosity would do the rest. There would be fingerprints everywhere and I'm certain that everything that I'd left would be missing.

I pulled off four armored car robberies in six hours. I had to quit because: 1, my truck was full. 2, I didn't have any other armored car routes scoped out, 3 I'd been visible for too long.

Parking behind a factory I blended in. I snoozed from about 2 AM to 8 AM. I climbed out, straightened myself out, took a pee and looked around. I threw the sneakers, Tyvek suit, respirator, mask, angle grinder and gloves in a dumpster. I was concerned that the alloy used in the armored car's lock was identifiable so everything went. It was over 70 miles from where the robberies occurred. I was now South of South East Chicago near the Indiana border—corn country. I'd stayed away from truck stops, interstates and back roads, following the old state highway system where I could go slowly. It was a technique I'd observed other commercial drivers use to conserve fuel—driving slowly and keeping an even speed.

I'd pocketed ten packs of twenties in various pockets of my coat the previous night before closing up. I left the truck cab and box locked up in the parking lot of a large strip-mall then hunted up a diner.

After grub came a hunting-camping store that I was surprised to find still operating. I reasoned that here away from the city people hunted more for food. I bought into more than a few boxes of ammunition and looked over what firearms they had available. There was a 2-day holding period on all firearms sold in Illinois so I gave them a pass. I'd buy something in Tennessee where I wanted to hole up. The laws were more forgiving there.

I bought a couple of electric lanterns, a stove, cot and some heavy-weight shirts and pants. A new pair of red-wing boots were added to the cart along with a few pair of socks. It was time well-spent washing the new clothes. They felt great. I headed south for Springfield.

While at the storage place I packaged most of the money into gamma-seal buckets at one hundred thousand per bucket in used twenties. It came to thirty eight buckets packed full of cash--mostly twenties with some fifties and hundreds separated into their own buckets. I had three buckets of tens. It came out to about 3.8 million. The risks had been worth the reward as far as I was concerned.

Now I had to cut any trace to the robbery sites. The van had to go.

A local newspaper had a large for-sale section. Since gas was so expensive it was no wonder that big vans were going for a dime on the dollar. I'd once driven an old bread delivery truck re-purposed to hold sheet-trays of fresh donuts that I'd made that night. Yep, time to make the donuts (remember that commercial? It gave me flash-backs!) I found a van just like it, about ten years old and on its third, brand-new motor. I took a taxi to the address listed on the ad and paid 1300 cash for it. A short trip to the DMV later and I was legal. I filled it up (again, 50 gallon tank, 15 dollars a gallon. You do the math.). I had made sure that it had a hitch when I bought it. I went shopping for an 9x20 foot enclosed trailer. I found one that was in good shape and didn't look like it'd been stolen from U-Haul. Most of my apartment goods from the storage place went into the trailer. I stuffed every open space I could find with family packs of toilet paper. I pure despise running out of bog paper. What can I say? I 'm a product of my upbringing. Thankfully the truck had a pass-through where the cube van hadn't. It was a long, narrow space that would fit a sleeping cot. I rented a motel room for the night and parked the now-packed trailer in front of the door. I had some time before dark so I kept working.

At a grocery store I found a half-dozen cans of wasp killer and three fogger kits. A hardware store yielded a siphon and four jerry-cans. After transferring all the contents from the cube truck to the bread truck I siphoned all the gas I could into the jerry-cans and stashed them in the bread truck. I sprayed all inside surfaces and everything I would have touched outside the van with wasp killer to destroy the proteins making up the finger prints. I finished the job with one fogger kit in the cab and two more in the cube. Later I wiped down all the outside surfaces with ammonia. I left it behind a closed-down factory beside a loading bay, unlocked and with the key in the switch.

I had that truck stuffed like a Christmas turkey. Still, there was room to set up a cot in the aisle. On my way south I stopped at a truck stop for a deep discharge 12-volt battery, a 12-volt drop cord (It's a shielded light bulb at the end of an extension cord.) and a cigarette-lighter linked battery charger. One 75 to 100 watt light bulb will keep you warm overnight down to about 15 degrees if you can keep the wind out. I'd just put it under the cot when I slept. It was near the first of March and snow still covered the ground. The temperature wasn't that bad at night—in the twenties—so a 50 watt bulb should do.

I slowly cruised down Illinois route 47 to near Normal, Illinois then started South East to Indianapolis on 74. Just after passing Indy I over-nighted at a full-service truck stop. A shower after dinner felt great. I bagged my dirty clothes and changed. I slept well, lulled by the sounds of the diesel engines turning over in the Semis surrounding me. A toilet stop, breakfast and a purchased brown bag lunch later saw me back on the road headed for Lexington and points south down Route 75. I was aiming for the TVA (Tennessee Valley Water and Power Authority) area around Knoxville. I'd looked into some of the river bow and slough areas that were outside the TVA impoundments but found the river waters rose and fell so much as to make much of the acreage near the water unusable. The TVA used a series of dams, artificial lakes and impoundments with controlled water releases to generate cheap power for the area and control the levels of the lakes and impoundments.

I had enough money to buy about anything I wanted but it was 'dirty'—it hadn't passed through a bank or the nasty little fingers of the federal revenue system, and I wanted to keep it that way! With the services of a plat book I hoped that I could find several small farms backing onto a TVA lake that I could directly pay for and incorporate into a large truck garden operation.

(A plat book is published by the county assessor's office. It maps out and identifies each parcel by land use, buildings, property ID number and by owner for all the land in the county.)

Living near Chicago I was at the wrong end of the food supply chain. I needed to be at the SOURCE to stay fed and solvent. If I could sell the produce that I'd raise locally perhaps I could circumvent government intervention and nosy-parkers. If travelling back into Appalachian Tennessee wouldn't do it I was screwed. One hundred acres is a bit more than one square mile. That was my goal. If I were to lease out most of the land at first to a farmer that wanted more land to farm in exchange for a portion of the yield I could keep pigs and a milk cow or two, whether he grew hay or grain. Timothy was fine for feed, but alfalfa had more protein. I know due to a well-spent summer on a Wisconsin dairy farm as a field hand back in my youth. I also knew that the best way into a small community was through the church. I was born and raised Lutheran and now despised it. The Baptists were too close to the Lutherans as far as I was concerned. I wanted a nice calm, cool, collected Methodist congregation to attend. But first I had to find the property and buy in.

About 30 miles after I passed the Tennessee border I hit Route 61. My map book said that this is what I wanted. I headed east until I picked up 170. The lake in question was headed by Big Ridge State Park and continued to cover the Northern bank. The Southern bank was farm and forest all up and down the lake. I stopped at a couple of mailboxes, writing down names and addresses. I carried on until I hit a little 'town' called Breadbox. It barely had a gas station, but it did have a restaurant/bar called Judy's. I pulled into the lot about four oclock on a Monday afternoon, stretched and headed in for, hopefully, a good dinner. The tall red-haired woman behind the bar gave me a 'Howdy!". I grinned and 'Howdy!'d back. "What'cha want?"

"How about a tall sweet tea, a menu and point me to the men's room."

After I visited the necessary I sat down to scan the menu. I looked it over but had no idea what the kitchen day crew were like.

"I know it's off hours. What can I get this time of day that I'll like?"

"Oh, I guess Silas fries up a mean burger, but the pork tenderloin sandwich falls apart if you look at it."

"Sold!"

I had a very tasty deep-fried breaded pork cutlet.

"That was truly fine. I can see I'll be back here a few times, I can tell."

Her eyebrows got mobile. "You movin' in hereabouts?"

"Yep. If I can get a hundred acres or so together back on 170 south of Big Ridge Park I will. I plan to build up a farm, set a new house and outbuildings then make a living with a truck garden, chickens, pigs and a cow or two."

I showed her the list of names I harvested from the mailboxes. "I need three or four of these together that are willing to be bought out to make up a square mile or so. The plat book shows all of these farms to be mixed forest and field, just what I'm after."

She looked over the list and started ticking names off. "Samuelson wants out. James lives in-city now. Carpenter wants out. Fredericks wants out. The bank owns the Boies place. The Carters live in-town. There—that's five-six in a row that would probably settle up without an argument."