Founders (26 page)

They sent the letters out via couriers over the course of the next three weeks. Two of the letters went with traveling traders, two with refugees heading toward Idaho, and one with a circuit-riding Baptist minister. They hoped that at least one of them would get through.

Maynard Hutchings was scheduled to present his State of the Continent speech, as part of his weekly
America’s New Dawn
morning show recording, for later distribution over the Red and Blue networks. (The two networks had the same staff, but different names were given for a feigned show of balance.) When Hutchings, his staff, and bodyguards arrived at the Fort Knox television studio in their Boxer APCs, they found that they were locked out. The studio staff had arrived a half hour earlier and found the door lock jammed. So they had summoned the Fort Knox MPs together, and they were furiously working on the building’s steel doors with a sledgehammer and crowbars.

One of the President’s aides jogged over to the MPs and demanded, “What’s going on here?”

“Somebody used Krazy Glue on the door locks!” the ranking MP answered.

With special funding directed by the President, the station staff had recently upgraded the physical security at the broadcast studio building. They had two teams of contractors install heavy vaultlike steel doors, and anti-vehicular barricades designed to stop suicide drivers or remotely controlled vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs). But imprudently, there had not been a corresponding increase in manpower, to provide someone to guard the building 24/7. The building was left unoccupied and unguarded between 1 and 5:30 a.m., five nights a week.

An empty tube of cyanoacrylate epoxy was found near one of the doors and bagged as evidence. The lock cylinders of every door were frozen in place. After resorting to using a cutting torch, they finally got into the building just twenty minutes before Hutchings was scheduled to go on the air.

Once inside, the studio staff found some of the inner door locks similarly jammed, but they were less of an obstacle. A couple of quick blows from a sledgehammer opened each door. The staff fumbled with flashlights, trying to determine why the lights weren’t working. They soon found that the saboteur or saboteurs had removed all the circuit breakers from the main breaker box. The floor cameras had their lenses smashed, but a spare handheld camera from the mobile van was brought in and set up on a tripod. Maynard Hutchings finally went on the air twenty-five minutes late, “due to technical difficulties,” and without his usual makeup.

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 constitutions 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 Hampshire, 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 Washington, 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 assured 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 assist 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 passcode. 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 smashing 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 Manus
, 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 document the executions. Their bodies went into unmarked graves. President Hutchings later explained: “Parents should be held accountable for their children’s actions.”

“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)

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 arsenals 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 document 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 arsenal 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 quantity 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 quantities 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 shift and grow.