Founders (14 page)

The routine of manning the OP (observation post) was grueling. They soon discovered that Ken preferred nights and Terry preferred days. The couple traded off at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. The individual coming on duty would carry up a lunch, which consisted of a Tupperware container of parched corn, a one-pint canning jar half filled with cream (to agitate into butter, which was then used to top the parched corn), and either a large carrot or a turnip. Occasionally there would be a treat, like sweetened homemade tofu, or a piece of beef jerky.

Since they had binoculars close at hand, Terry developed the hobby of bird-watching while on duty. She kept a birding
notebook and the Perkins family’s copy of an Audubon Society bird identification book in the cupola at all times. So that there would be no risk of any lengthy distractions, no other reading materials were allowed at the OP. There were many boring hours of duty, with nothing more to do than clean pistols and trim fingernails.

A few days of each week, Ken or Terry would also churn butter with a large hand churn while standing guard. Carefully hauling the completed churn full of butter—ready for washing—down the side of the silo with a rope required someone to be standing by below, to ensure that the ceramic churn didn’t hit the ground.

A 10-liter water can as well as a teakettle that fit on the brazier’s wire rack were soon provided. The store-bought tea soon ran out, so they switched to willow bark to make a weak tea. There was always plenty of cream available to sweeten the tea.

The guard shifts were monotonous. There was little to do other than churn butter, so Ken and Terry often composed love letters and poems to each other, which they would leave behind when their shifts were over.

The Perkinses had eight Brown Swiss cows that were producing. Without electricity, they reverted to hand milking their cows. This turned what had been a forty-minute job (twice a day) into a two-hour job. The raw milk and cream were bartered to families in West Branch for nearly all of the Perkins family’s outside needs—everything from sugar and honey to homemade washable cotton menstrual pads.

Because the front forty acres of the property were perimeter-fenced and cross-fenced for cattle, it was easy enough to simply keep the front gate chained shut and padlocked.

A great source of fear and confusion was when strangers would approach the farm, hoping to barter. Since the Laytons were new to the farm and didn’t recognize neighbors and acquaintances of
the Perkinses, this caused a number of false alarms. By December, this problem was largely resolved by Durward bartering only through two trusted middlemen.

The Perkinses had two young daughters, ages three and five. Out of diapers, but not yet school age, their lives was relatively carefree, concerned only with dolls, coloring books, and “helping Mommy” in the kitchen.

The Perkinses were members of a Society of Friends church that met on North 6th Street. The local church’s “Yearly Meeting” doctrine remained conservative and relatively pacifistic. But the Laytons were not surprised to see that the Perkinses and the other Quakers they met always had guns close at hand. Following the Crunch, the local church clarified that their stand on pacifism mainly involved foreign wars, rather than self-defense, which they declared “a matter of personal conscience.”

Once a month, weather permitting, Durward filled in for the Laytons so that they could attend Mass at the St. Bernadette Parish in West Branch, on East Orange Street. It was a two-and-a-half-mile walk, so the “Mass trips” were a six-hour exercise. Ken and Terry treated these as very special occasions. On the preceding Saturdays, Terry would give Ken a haircut and beard trim. The long walks to and from church were the only times that they had to talk with each other at length, aside from lingering together at the change of each OP shift.

Even with the combined membership of St. Joseph church in West Liberty, only about thirty people attended on average. For most, it was simply too far to travel in a world without gasoline, or people didn’t want to risk leaving their houses unguarded.

At first it seemed odd seeing nearly all of the adults armed with rifles, handguns, or shotguns. One congregant regularly carried a Saiga 12 shotgun in a Kushnapup bullpup stock with a ten-round detachable magazine. Another had a Kel-Tec RFB .308 rifle—also a bullpup. Those were considered status symbols. And some of the
congregants assumed that Ken and Terry were wealthy because they carried both black rifles and Colt .45 automatics.

They soon learned the new norm of sitting widely spaced apart, to leave room for guns on the pews. Ken joked that the new order of worship was “Sit, stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, and
sling arms
.” The church was very dimly lit—the only light came in through the stained glass windows. Without enough light to read by except on sunny days, the hymns were sung by memory, rather than from reading the
Novus Ordo
Modern Missal. They often remarked that this lighting made the services seem medieval. Ken and Terry missed the Latin Mass, but Terry quipped, “Perhaps that would make it seem
too
medieval, now that we’re back in the Dark Ages.”

It was common knowledge that Washington, D.C., was in ruins. The ProvGov filled the power vacuum left when the East Coast had a massive die-off, in part due to an influenza pandemic that particularly struck the eastern seaboard from New York to Charleston in the first winter of the Crunch. The new government rapidly spread out, “pacifying” territory in all directions. Any towns that resisted were quickly crushed. The mere sight of dozens of tanks or APCs was enough to make most townspeople cower in fear. What it couldn’t accomplish through intimidation, the ProvGov accomplished with bribes.

The ProvGov soon began issuing a new currency. Hutchings administration cronies spent the new bills lavishly. Covertly, some criminal gangs were hired as security contractors and used as enforcers of the administration’s nationalization schemes. Some of these gangs were given military vehicles and weapons and promised booty derived from eliminating other gangs that were not as
cooperative. Hit squads were formed to stifle any dissent. These did so through abductions, arson, and murder. Nobody was ever able to prove a link, but an inordinately large number of conservative, pro-sovereignty members of Congress from the old government disappeared or were reported killed by bandits.

Some foreign troops were clothed in U.S. ACU digital or OCP camouflage. But most foreign troops stayed in their national uniforms, and were used as shock troops to eliminate any pockets of resistance. Disaffection with the new government smoldered everywhere they went to pacify.

Within the first three months of launching the new government, Hutchings was in contact via satellite with the UN’s new headquarters in Brussels to request peacekeeping assistance. (The old UN Building in New York had burned, and the entire New York metropolitan region was nine-tenths depopulated and controlled by hostile gangs.) Hutchings had at first naively assumed that the UN’s assistance would be altruistic, with no strings attached. It was only after the first UN troops started to arrive in large numbers that it became clear that UN officers would control the operation. Eventually, Hutchings became little more than a figurehead. The UN administrators held the real power in the country. They had their own chain of command that bypassed the Hutchings administration, and they had direct control over the military.

One closely guarded secret was that Maynard Hutchings had signed an agreement that promised a payment of thirty metric tons of gold from the Fort Knox Depository to defray the costs of transporting and maintaining a mixed contingent of UN peacekeepers, mostly from Germany, Holland, and Belgium. The gold was shuttled out of the country in half-ton increments in flights from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. There had also been the offer of Chinese peacekeeping troops, but Hutchings insisted that no Asian or African troops be used on American soil, saying, “I want it to be all white fellas that’ll blend in.”

“Whoever looks upon them merely as an irregular mob will find himself much mistaken. They have men among them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as rangers against the Indians and Acadians; and this country being much covered with wood and hilly is very advantageous for their method of fighting.”

—Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland, from a letter written from America, April 20, 1775

Early one morning, shortly after sunrise, Terry idly rolled a Mason jar of cream beneath her boot, churning it. Sitting in the cupola atop the silo, she was enjoying some unusually clear weather, but it was still bitter cold. There was some snow in the shady areas on the north sides of the buildings, left over from the last cold front. She wondered if it would all melt before the next front came in. Durward said the barometer was starting to fall, and that they could expect rain rather than snow in about thirty-six hours. In the month that they had been at the farm, Terry learned that Durward had a knack for predicting the weather, which was an important skill in a world that was deprived of the Weather Channel.

Terry saw a pair of full-size vans approaching on Charles Avenue
from the north. Vehicle traffic had continued to gradually decrease since their arrival, so every passing vehicle had become an object of attention. The two vans slowed and then pulled up to the front gate. The trailing van was tucked up tight, yet the rear half of it protruded into the county road. That seemed odd.

Durward Perkins was feeding grain to the cows, just twenty yards from the silo. Terry yelled down to him, “D.! Do you recognize those vans?”

Perkins answered, “Nope.”

She shouted, “Get back in the house, and wake up Ken and then Karen,
right now
!” Grabbing the hammer, Terry began pounding on the pipe bell. Durward dropped his grain bucket and sprinted toward the house.

Terry edged forward off the stool and sat on the plywood, raising her M4gery, resting her forearms on her knees for a good shooting position.

A man stepped out of the passenger side of the lead van with a pair of bolt cutters. Just after he cut off the gate’s padlock, Terry thumbed off the carbine’s safety and fired. From the dirt that was kicked up behind him, she could see that her shot went just over the man’s shoulder.

Then she remembered Tom Kennedy’s advice from years before: “Whenever you are shooting uphill
or
downhill, hold
low
.” The man dodged to the side just as she pulled the trigger again, so she missed for the second time.

Several doors on both vans opened, and suddenly there were several AKs and ARs pointed at the house and up at the silo. The intruders opened fire, and soon there were bullets puncturing or ricocheting off the silo. Feeling unexpected calm, Terry realigned her sights on the same man’s chest—holding lower—and squeezed the trigger twice more. This time he went down, kicking and screaming.

The firefight soon escalated as Ken began returning fire with his
Vector HK91 clone, firing rapidly. Shoeless and wearing just a pair of British DPM camouflage pants and a brown T-shirt, Ken leaned his elbows across the kitchen table. He was shooting through the closed kitchen window. He and Terry soon established a rapid firing tempo at the two vans.

Ken’s vantage point was slightly to the left of the vans and level, and Terry’s was slightly to the right and above. The vans were in a deadly cross fire. Two of the men from the rear van hesitated and held their ground, but all of the others leapt back into the vans. Realizing that her magazine was nearly empty, Terry did a rapid magazine switch. As she did, Ken’s heavy fire continued to rake the vans, shattering window after window. The two men still standing outside the vans realized that they were outgunned and jumped in to join the others.

The vans quickly backed away from the gate, just as Ken was changing magazines. Terry continued to fire. She could now see blood splatters inside the windows of both vans.

As they roared away, Ken resumed firing, but he had the chance to fire just four more rounds before he judged that the vans were out of range. The looter on the ground ceased thrashing. Ken put a fresh magazine in his HK, and shouted, “Is everybody okay?”

Durward answered, “We’re okay, just shook up.” His daughters were wailing back in their bedroom.

Ken’s ears were ringing. He hated shooting indoors without any hearing protection, but the attack had come so suddenly that he had had no choice.

With his rifle shouldered, Ken edged out through the front door, and then through the porch door. He shouted up to Terry in the OP, “What’s your status?”

She answered, “Green and green!”—indicating that she was uninjured and had plenty of ammunition. A moment later, she shouted, “They left one guy on the ground. I think he’s dead.”

“Any stay-behinds?”

Terry responded, “I don’t think so, but things were happening pretty fast.”

“You did great! Okay, let’s hang tight for a while to make sure that guy is dead, and we’ll wait and see whether they decide to come back.”

Ken asked Karen Perkins to stand guard and watch for anyone approaching the back of the house, from the vantage point of the master bedroom window. Then he retrieved his boots and coat from his bedroom and put them on.

As they waited, and watched, Durward leaned over Ken’s shoulder and alternated between looking through his rifle’s scope and through a battered pair of old binoculars finished with black crinkle paint. “Crimminy sakes, that’s a lot of blood. He ain’t moving. You expect he’s dead?” He handed the binoculars to Ken.

After spending a minute looking through the binoculars, Ken said, “Yes, I think so. But I’m no expert. We should make
sure
of it. Have you got some earplugs?”

“Yeah, I’ll go get them.”

He returned a minute later, offering a handful of disposable foam earplugs in clear cellophane packages.