American Apocalypse Page 19

  “Go on.”

  “Some old lady came by the market trying to hand them out. No one wanted to take them. They didn’t want Max to find out because then he would send you by to fix them. So she just left them in a stack on the ledge where the dry cleaners used to be.”

  Interesting, I thought, I am the boogeyman.

  “So you grabbed one?”

  “Yes, when nobody was looking.”

  “Did you see anyone else take one?”

  He shook his head: He was back to being scared. He was also lying, but I let it go.

  “Okay. Not a problem. Anyone want to play some Halo?”

  “We can’t go online anymore.”

  “What?” I was genuinely shocked and dismayed.

  Shorter Ninja sighed. “Net won’t stay up. You get into the game and then you get dropped, like all the time.”

  This was interesting news.

  “Damn. Okay. See you later.”

  I headed back to the room. I knew that on the East Coast a lot of the Internet went through Reston, which was ten miles down the road. I didn’t mind the roads and all falling apart, but I always thought the Internet would be there for me.

  What the hell was the matter with this country?

  Back in the room I found Night alone, sitting at the table studying her lists. I pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “You know the Internet is acting up?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t look up from the paperwork.

  “Hmmm. So what did you figure out?”

  “That this is a lot more complicated than we thought.”

  She put the piece of paper she was studying on top of a pile in front of her.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t much help. I guess I am not real good at that kind of stuff.”

  Seeing all the papers in front of her was kind of depressing. Knowing you may not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier is one thing; seeing it confirmed is another thing entirely. Night heard the sadness in my voice, and she watched my eyes as I took in the piles of notes. She knew what I was thinking. She stood up and extended her hand to me.

  “That’s okay. You’re the best in the world at other things.”

  I woke up tired the next day—I look back now and remember the next month as the “month of scavenging”—partly for the future move and partly to find food to get us through to the future.

  Historians will write that it was this period when we reached the tipping point. The graves from that time will provide the punctuation to the death sentence that the collapse of the American food transportation system passed on to so many of our citizens.

  It was beyond ugly.

  It was Leningrad.

  Except the only enemies that surrounded us were our own greed, hubris, and incompetence.

  That, along with the cold, was sufficient to kill us in droves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  GRAIN

  Constant change was becoming the norm. Max and I would make plans and then have to drop them because the situation changed. Very rarely was it for the better. Our goal was to bug out in the spring. We were going to do a phased transfer of material and people to Tommy’s farm. That was still the plan, but right now we had to figure out how to keep ourselves fed and safe. Our first problem was food: Not only were we having to feed ourselves but we were also helping Carol feed the people at the shelter.

  She had pleaded with us to help at a meeting at the motel. I didn’t mind feeding her; at this point she was spending more time at the shelter than at home. The commute to Leesburg had become too difficult and dangerous to do daily. I figured it would only be a matter of time before she went home and never came back—either because she was with her family, or because she was dead.

  When I showed up for the meeting, Max and Night were already there. Carol was looking a lot thinner than the last time I had seen her. She had circles under her eyes and she was wearing a gun, the first time ever that I had seen that. She was brusque. She didn’t want to ask for help. She knew that none of us were rich in anything. But she had to, so she did.

  We were all busy. Night was also starting to look tired, I noticed. Our nighttime activities had abated a bit. I would come in and she would be asleep or vice versa. I thought about waking her sometimes but I knew what time she had to get up, so I would just slip into bed next to her. She had given up on appearances. Papa-san looked at me like he wanted to cut my balls off for a couple weeks but he got over it.

  Carol went right to the point. “I need food, and I need enough to feed twelve women, twenty children, and seven men on a daily basis. Can you help?”

  We all looked at each other. I didn’t want to say anything, at least not first. I knew we could feed ourselves and we had enough to do that for at least a month. Add in the extra mouths and we would be out of food in less than a week. Plus, some of the kids needed kid food. Night was the first to speak. She did the logistics. Her family owned the motel, and she knew more than any of us how many we could feed.

  “I won’t let babies and children starve while I have food.”

  She left unspoken whether she was committing us to feed the adults.

  Max added, speaking very softly, “Nobody gets left behind. Never.”

  Carol looked at me.

  I shrugged. “Not a problem by me.” I wanted to add: Maybe you should quit taking new people in, but I didn’t.

  She started crying. Then Night began. Next thing you know, they are both crying on each other’s shoulder. I looked at Max. He looked at me. We both shrugged and left. There was work to do.

  The good thing was the manpower it gave us. The women—and it was mostly women—were very good scavengers. We split them into groups. Tito, Carol’s security guy, had stayed with the shelter. He and a couple of the men from the shelter escorted groups or helped provide security at the market. We issued the men shotguns and gave them the twenty-round course on how to use one.

  We had the twenty-round course for shotguns and the twenty-four-round course for revolvers. That was how many times you fired it as part of the qualification class. That class and one rule were it. The one rule was: If you were seen pointing your weapon at anyone, including yourself, in a nonhostile situation, you lost the right to carry. That usually meant assignment to day-care duty, a powerful motivator for them not to screw up.

  Max and I had already taught the remaining ninja how to handle weapons. He got a lot more than the 20/24 courses. We took an entire precious day with him. Plus, I worked with him at night down in the basement of the motel. He didn’t realize that when Max would show him something, he was also showing me. We wanted him to be good because We were expecting trouble. After Shorter Ninja left I began calling the older one Ninja. He liked it and soon everyone was calling him that. The ninjas had wanted to teach us—or least me—martial arts, which they were very good at, but I didn’t want to learn. Part of it was my pride, and part was that I didn’t care. I didn’t see any use in it for me at this point. Max had taught me some basic moves, but that seemed like an eternity ago.

  I figured that people were either polite or hostile. If you were hostile, then I shot you. It worked for me. If it didn’t, well, that would probably mean I was dead.

  The ladies from the shelter proved to be excellent scavengers. When I went out with a team of them I always made sure I had Rosa. Rosa was El Salvadoran and beyond extraordinary when it came to finding food or other stuff we needed. We would be driving through an industrial park and she would say, “Stop.” She would sit there for a second and then point at a building. I never saw what tipped her off, but she could find the food. If there was a lot, we would call the other groups that were out and tell them to come to our location. We could usually come up with one functioning cell phone for each group. Ninja was usually with me and I let him handle our communications. He liked that.

  By midwinter we began to have real problems with communications. The Burners began taking down cell phone towers and relays whenever they could.
As food began to be harder to find, we assigned people to do nothing but wait in store lines to purchase whatever was available. Carol opened a stall in the market so we could trade what we found and didn’t need for goods or sometimes silver. No one was taking cash on the gray or black market anymore. Silver, gold, jewels, and tradable goods were the only way to purchase anymore.

  Rosa brought her friend Maria to see me. Maria was El Salvadoran also. Where you came from was a big deal, even in the shelter. Maria knew we were doing everything we could to find and stockpile food. She had two kids and no man, so she had a stake in our success.

  “Hello, ladies, what can I do for you?”

  I was sitting at a table in the back of the Dollar Store finishing teaching a class on how to clean a revolver. That was going to be followed by a class on how to use a speed loader. For the speed loader part I was going to have each of my students—there were only three—run out to the oak tree and back, then try doing it, but only after each of them had done it thirty times from a standing position. I had them practicing with wax bullet dummy rounds. I had no desire to end up perforated by a student. One of the scavenger teams had found the rounds in a house, along with a beautiful Colt single-action .45 pistol. Max had looked the Colt over and told me it had been customized for fast-draw shooting. It came with a beautiful holster. I thought about switching from the Ruger to the Colt, but I decided against it. A little Hollywood for me, but I could appreciate the work that had gone into it. I gave it to Night who either traded or sold it for something we needed.

  Rosa started the conversation. I noticed that the newer people were very hesitant to talk to me. “Gardener, we are sorry to bother you. We can come back or wait.” Her friend was hanging back, standing almost behind her. This being Rosa, I knew it was something important, maybe not to me, but you never know.

  I told my students, “Take a break but don’t leave the market area.”

  I gestured for the women to sit down in the folding chairs the students had just vacated. I had to make a point of waving Maria into one or she would have stood behind Rosa. “Not a problem, Rosa. What’s up?”

  Sometimes I really liked playing el jefe or the Godfather. I wasn’t sure what movie this was yet.

  “Maria knows where to find food—a lot of food. Go on, Maria, tell him.”

  Then Rosa spoke sharply to her in Spanish. Maria began hesitantly, but once she got rolling, she kept going. She would stop only to ask Rosa to translate a word or phrase for her. Pared of all the information I didn’t need to know—Maria would go off on tangents about the personal habits of her former employer—what she had was interesting.

  Maria had worked for a while as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Leesburg. They were horse people, which, besides the cultural and status baggage, meant they had horses—a lot of them. The estate was a horse farm. They now also boarded other people’s horses, something they had not done previously. Apparently, the last couple years had been less than kind to the family fortune. At any rate, Maria had gone out to the stables a few times; some young man who was in charge of stall cleaning, or something equally prestigious, had caught her eye.

  What had surprised her was how well the horses ate, especially the grain. It wasn’t corn meal, but it was close enough that it had stuck with her. It was oats, something she was sure would be edible for us. The big deal was how much they had of it—no little five-pound bags. They bought in bulk: big, heavy bags on wooden pallets that her friend said were a bitch to unload and move. I asked how much they might have, where it was, and if they had guards. She didn’t think so. The house had a safety room, and she was sure the man had guns. Other than that, she shrugged. I thanked them, told them I would think about it, and called my class back in.

  Usually we would meet at the end of the day in the break room back at the motel. There we would eat a communal meal and talk about whatever we thought the others should know. Or we’d just bitch, although that was usually kept to a minimum. Bitch for more than a few minutes and you began to get ridiculed. A more formal planning session was held on Sundays. That group would expand to include Carol, some of the guys like Tito and Ninja, and whoever Night or Max thought had something to bring to the table. Since it was Saturday, I decided to hold off, and bring up Maria’s info at the Sunday meeting.

  Sunday was in theory a day of rest, not for religious reasons as much as to avoid burnout. What it really meant for everyone was that it was okay to sleep late if you didn’t have to stand watch. It also meant that Night and I could stay up late and see how many different positions we could try—three or four were as many as we usually got before I ran out. It was fun. I had not had a lot of experience before Night, especially not with someone who actually enjoyed it instead of seeing it as a way of paying for dinner.

  The meeting had already started when I arrived. Max had a thing about punctuality. His idea of being on time was being there fifteen minutes before you were supposed to be there. That never made sense to me. If you meant 0545 hours, well, then say 0545. I figured fifteen minutes late was close enough to being on time that it should count. Plus, I never wore a watch. Why bother? Before, if you needed to find out the time, you would either look at your cell phone or computer, or ask someone. None of those ways worked well anymore. Night kept pressing me to get a watch.

  Eventually, I traded four silver dollars and fifty rounds of .38 special ammo for a Rolex at the market.

  Tito laughed when I told him what I paid. “You got burned, bro,” he said, showing me his. “I paid three silver dollars.”

  “Nice—too bad it’s fake,” was my reply.

  I didn’t know if it was or not, but I loved the expression on his face.

  I walked in and sat down next to Night, who had saved me a seat. She rolled her eyes when I walked in—like I had really missed anything that was that important. I did the greeting thing and Max continued with what he was saying.

  “We may have a problem with heat soon. The motel is electric, which means if what we have seen lately holds true—and I have no doubt it will—we can expect some cold days and nights this winter.”

  Everyone nodded their heads, including me. Having a roof over your head meant heat when it was cold. Otherwise we might as well all be camping out in a car, or in the woods with the Tree People.

  “We need to find iron stoves, like the old ones they used to use. If we have to, we can use fifty-gallon drums. Regardless, we need wood, a lot of wood, and we don’t have the bodies to spare to cut everything we need now. So we need to hit some of the old suburban developments, the ones without gas heat, and see what we can find before everyone decides the same thing.”

  “Why can’t we hire day laborers? It’s not like there is a shortage of Juans and Josés around here. We could pay them with lunch and silver.”

  This got me an elbow from Night. She frowned on my inability to be politically correct at times. We had had a big argument about it once. She had told me, “You only talk that way because you’re a white male. If you had grown up inside another color skin, you wouldn’t be so cavalier with your comments.”

  Perhaps she had a point. I can’t say I really cared. For her sake, I tried to pretend when I remembered.

  They had been going back and forth about the stoves, wood, and hiring help for a while. I really wanted to take Night back to the room for some fun. After that I wanted to clean my guns and go to sleep. I was willing to change the order that I did that in, but that was about it. I interrupted, told them about my conversation with Maria, and was surprised about how excited Carol and Night got about the idea.

  They started talking about raiding the nearest southern states and about how we needed hand mills. Argh was what I thought about it. Watching them get all excited, talking about how critical this might be—well, I understood it. It was just that, watching them, I knew I would be cleaning my guns and going to sleep, since I could see this meeting going on until midnight.

  I looked over at Max. He was ju
st sitting back watching. I caught his eye and he grinned. He may have found it amusing that my sex life was going to suffer, but I knew he was going to be here until they got tired. It passed through my head that Carol wouldn’t be going home tonight. I wondered where she was going to be sleeping and if Max already knew.

  Oh well, none of my business.

  I leaned over and told Night, “I’m out of here.” She nodded her head. I didn’t kiss her—she was not fond of public displays of affection. I am sure it was something cultural. I went back to my room and cleaned my guns.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  HELP IS ON THE WAY

  The next day I met Ninja under the oak tree. We were scheduled to work the morning shift providing security and discouraging the riffraff. I still wore my Fairfax City police shirt. We had found some patches at city hall for the police department. I had given one to Ninja, and someone had sewn it on a shirt for him. Looking official still counted for something, especially if we bumped into feds. Unlikely, but possible. It was the same reason I hung on to my credentials.

  We were walking through the area where not all that long ago there had been real stores.

  They were gone. I knew this, but Max and I had agreed to patrol outside our perimeter whenever time allowed. It was always good to know who was lurking out there. Plus, we were looking for gang or Burner signs. I was surprised that a large number of the empty stores were occupied by Mexicans. The men looked thin, tired, and in need of showers. Up ahead, on a corner, stood four of them, just standing, talking, and smoking.

  I felt myself become a little more alert. Especially when I heard one of them call me by name. “Hey, Gardener!” he waved. The men he was standing with were a tougherlooking bunch than what I usually saw, and two of them were armed. They were trying to go for the concealed, but I noticed that they touched the bulge they thought they had covered up with their jackets. Max had taught me that. People who don’t carry a weapon on a daily basis will touch it every once in a while, especially when they think they are going into a situation. It reassured them that it was still there and was a good “tell” for a cop.