The Shelter: Book 1, The Beginning (40 page)

“Sarge, I agree with you. Our orders came through SOCOM, I’m hoping they’re putting us into the heartland to help hasten the recovery. I promise you, I won’t accept any order that tells us to fire on unarmed or armed normal citizens. They can court martial me, but I won’t do it. I swore an oath, the same oath as you, I intend to keep my oath. I’ll do whatever is required to defend America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

“Cap, thanks, I know the men will appreciate that.”

“Sarge, I’m very concerned about the word warlord in our orders. I’m worried some of my brother officers decided to use their troops to set up feudal systems in the heartland.”

“Cap, I agree that’s going to suck. With your permission, I’ll check the men.”

“Yes. Good idea, I bet you find most of them sleeping.”

“Cap, to be truthful, I can’t wait for the ride home. I intend to sleep on both flights.”

“Sarge, always sleep when you can. I envy you, I have paperwork to catch up with. You’d think in the twenty-first century the damn Army would dump some of the stupid paperwork.”

“Captain, just be happy they don’t ask you how many rounds we fired.”

“Crap, I think there is a form asking how rounds we expended.”

“Why, they didn’t come out of our inventory.”

“Doesn’t matter, this man’s Army runs on paperwork.”

“Glad it’s you and not me.”

“Asshole.”

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The group moving north out of Nashville is being led by a small group of Iraqi war veterans who took their families out of the city looking for a safer location to make a new home. The veterans are followed by two waves of people. The first wave is made up of four thousand college students and other teens. The second wave is made up of three thousand adults and families. They’re pulling wagons, pushing supermarket carts and even wheelbarrows overflowing with large black plastic bags that hold the most valuable items they were able to take with them. The bags usually hold photo albums, jewelry, a few toys for their kids and whatever food and bottled water they had or could find. They’re tired, but also in good spirits since they’re out of the tinder box of Nashville.  The walk is very hard, the sun is warm for October, most of the people are thirsty and bone weary tired. Almost none of them have an idea where they’re going. They’ve become lemmings, following the person in front of them. They spend nights along the side of the road, they fill rest areas to overflowing. They drink from streams without considering how pure the water is or even that some of the refugees are using the stream to relieve themselves further upstream. Hundreds have come down sick from drinking bad water. They lay on the sides of the road throwing up and fighting stomach torturing diarrhea. Many are too ill to move, laying in their own filth looking up into the sky asking for help. Help no one is able to provide. Those who live alongside Interstate 65 have barred their windows and doors with wood or metal bars to keep the refugees away, refusing to provide any help because they have only a limited amount of supplies. Small farms and towns are stripped bare of anything usable. Stray animals and pets are captured and eaten.

Following the waves of refugees are gangs who are waiting for stragglers to fall out of the group. When someone falls out, the gangs pounce on them, they steal everything the stragglers have, sometimes raping the women and children, sometimes killing the adult men just for the fun of it. There are rumors of cannibalism from different places in the country.  

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Our community celebrated Fred’s release today from the medical shelter. While he can’t work the fields or stand any security watches, at least he’s out of the infirmary. His right arm is in a sling. It may be a couple of months before he regains full use of it and that’s after rehab. I count my lucky stars that Fred is going to live. I’ve come to trust Fred and count him as one of our closest and most trusted friends and advisors. I don’t know what I’d do if he were lost. I know Cheri would have been beside herself. I wonder if she’d have blamed me. Our arrival here has changed so many things. We’ve turned Fred and Cheri’s lives upside down. Our arrival didn’t cause the economic meltdown, our arrival didn’t cause the destruction of Nashville and most of the country’s other cities. Our arrival did save Fred’s farm and their home, we stopped their eviction. If anything, our arrival here saved them from total economic loss. We’ve developed a strong bond together, we’ve shared our plans and dreams with Fred. The only thing we haven’t shared with him is what really happened to our money. Only Tony, Lacy and I know the real story about what happened, it’s not something we’ll ever tell another soul. We’ve dug under our home’s foundation where we had a couple of very secure safes buried. The safes hold over $20 million in gold and silver. The safes in our basement hold an armory’s worth of weapons. Weapons we acquired through both legal and not so legal means. We have enough weapons to equip a medium size army. I still wish we would have been able to make a deal for mortars. Even with the economic meltdown, we weren’t able to find a source willing to sell them to us. Even offering huge bribes to a couple of supply sergeants we’d previously acquired M4s and M16s from couldn’t get us mortars. It wasn’t a question of price, they just refused our requests out of fear they’d be caught. They sold us grenades, body armor, helmets, ammo, and MREs, they even sold us C4, but no missiles or mortars. I want the mortars because I know it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a group numbering in the thousands. The mortars would give us the range to reach out to them before they got close to us. John said he’d try to build one, so far he’s been busy with other tasks. I’d give my right arm for weapons that will give us a standoff range to attrite the enemy before they can get close enough to hurt us.

We split our days working the fields and doing security rounds, and building additional defenses. We all wonder what happened to the National Guard and the US Military. We haven’t seen them in months, not since they tried to steal our crops. The HAM reports we hear scare us. Thousands of cities and towns have been destroyed, millions are dead. We’ve heard odd reports of Navy battle groups leaving Pearl Harbor and San Diego. We’ve had reports of contractors working 24/7 getting ships ready for sea. The strangest report of all, we heard that five thousand people are working around the clock to make the USS Missouri ready for sea again. Why in the world is the Navy trying to make the Battleship USS Missouri ready for sea? Today there was a report saying hundreds of Patriot missiles were bring installed around Honolulu. Raytheon and Lockheed announced their latest quarterly results are going to exceed Wall Street’s estimates due to the increased demand from the US military. It almost sounds like we’re preparing for another World War or an alien invasion. I’m not sure which would be worse. Maybe that explains why the military has disappeared, maybe they have a more important mission than providing food convoys to the country’s hungry citizens. I asked Tony to check with his contacts to see if the underworld, which usually knows what’s going on has any usable information. My gut says something big is going on. Based on the new taxes and special fees, I thought we would have easily paid China most or all of what we owed them. Somehow none of this adds up. The feds stopped making all welfare and other benefit payments so if we didn’t pay China, where did the money go?

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The thousands of people traveling south on Interstate 65 have been walking for months. These were some of the first to see the problems brewing in the cities and their bedroom communities. They gathered their families, their special mementos, all of their supplies and left their homes as quickly as they could. Most have worn out at least two pairs of boots or sneakers, all have lost at least 15% of their body weight from lack of food and constant walking. As they pass the beltways around other cities and their bedroom communities, they’ve picked up additional people who are looking for a safer place for their families. Their numbers grow every day. At first they ignored the new people but as the days turned into weeks, which turned into months, they built new relationships, making new friends among their neighbors who are walking with them. After months of walking, they find themselves forty miles outside Nashville. There are five thousand people spread over miles of the freeway. They strip the land and everything on it bare as they move south. Wood buildings are burned so the mob is warm, flowers are pulled up and used in soup, tree bark is removed and chewed, every stray animal is killed and eaten. The group moving north from Nashville and the group moving south are within four days travel of each other. We’re in the path of both groups.

Chapter 21

Both groups of refugees surprises each other when the leading scouts from each group run into each other two miles from our complex. At first the front line of both groups fought with each other, they fight over the meager small animals the northern group is cooking over campfires. The southern group which has been moving north smells the meat cooking. Their noses pick up the faint smell as the wind blows the smell towards the refugees. They pause mid-step looking at each other, they share the same thought, “Grilled MEAT!” Most are tired of looking for editable plants and a handful of the group has gotten very ill from eating the wrong plants. One member had a copy of a document called, “Plant Warning Signs.” He passed it person to person until the document reached the front of the line so those looking for edible plants could make the right choices and not kill any more of the group. The scouts, the Iraqi veterans tells the rest of the refugees to wait, they are going to find the source of the meat. They promise to return with food.

The rest of the refugees are hopeful they’ll be eating this evening, stopping where they are. They make camp on the center median and shoulders of Interstate 65. They roll out their sleeping bags, those who have tents pitch them, those without walk into the woods that line the interstate gathering tree branches and anything else they can use to make a shelter. Animal scavengers who’ve been following the crowd for any remains left behind are careful since it’s a contest every day between the humans and animals to see who catches whom. Any animals that get careless are caught and made into dinner for the crowd. Any small children, elderly or any who are too weak to continue are usually dragged away into the underbrush along the freeway where they become the animal’s dinner.

Members of both groups push themselves to the front lines trying to stop the fighting. When the leaders of the groups realize they’re really the same, they want the same things, they are both trying to find a safe location for their people, the fighting slowly winds down. The fighters in both groups stare across at their counterparts. They pause, looking the other side in the eyes. They slowly lower their weapons, they stop fighting and begin talking. The leaders of the two groups agree to merge the groups together forming one ‘super crowd’ as they exchange information on what they’ve seen and news they’ve picked up on their march. News is hard to gather, most of what spreads as news is really rumors and hearsay. The group that was heading north realizes there’s nothing to the north for them. The land has already been stripped bare, those heading south learn Nashville is in ruins, there’s nothing left in the cities the groups can use to survive or make a new life. The two groups sit around a giant bonfire talking about their various options. The leaders of the groups agree to wait where they are while they send scouts out to see if there’s anything useful in their proximity. Scouts are sent five miles in all directions to look for a farm or any food. The two groups discuss if they should turn east towards Knoxville or West towards Memphis and the Mississippi River.

Three hours after leaving the super crowd’s camp site three scouts find our road. They are surprised to find a road without any road signs. None of the scouts knows where they are, or what’s ahead of them. Our newly installed cameras see them make the turn onto our road. The alarm in the security shelter alerts the on-duty team that someone is close by. John calls my cell, “Jay, three people starting down our road. My gut is screaming, there’s more here than three people.”

“John, what’s your gut tell you?”

“It says DANGER WILL ROBINSON. It’s like when I was in Iraq just before my team walked into an ambush.”

“You just said there are only three people.”

“Forget what I said, something is wrong, my gut hasn’t been wrong yet.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Be on guard.”

“Will do.”

Six of us wait in the trench for the three lost souls walking towards us. Six others are arming themselves to join us in the trench just in case there’s a couple more behind them.

After twenty minutes and no visitors, just as I start thinking they turned back, our gate alarm sounds. They’re here. Our cameras send their videos to my iPad, I see the three looking at our gate. One of them is pushing on our gate, another is looking at the barbed wire surrounding our property line, the third walked along the road trying to see up on our property. We wait and watch them on my iPad. The three men walk along our barbed wire looking for a weakness in our defense line. They take some pictures with their cell phones before leaving. They return the same way they came, back down our road. Thirty minutes later they disappear around the turn on the main road that connects with our street. My gut is screaming at me, now I understand what John was saying. Something is definitely wrong with this situation. I think our three visitors were a scout group for a much larger group. I call John, “John, do you see anything on the cameras?”