Terry spoke up. "Sir, you're just going to have to trust us. Some things you just have to do on faith."

Perkins nodded deeply, and then said over his shoulder, "Karen! I think we've found our hired help!"

The door swung open to reveal a pet.i.te woman holding a 12-gauge Browning pump shotgun with a goose-length barrel. She said quietly, "Hi. I'm the backup."

Durward gestured them toward the door and said, "Come on in the front room, and we'll get you some coffee."

Ken and Terry were surprised to see the top of the living room and hallway strung with dozens of wires held up by eyebolts. Hundreds of strips of brined beef were hung from the wires. Karen Perkins explained that for the past three weeks she and Durward had been converting all the beef from their chest freezer into jerky. The fat tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, slicing, and brining was a labor-intensive operation that had begun even before the utility power had gone out. Karen Perkins described it. "After we brine the meat, the strips get blotted dry and then hung up over the kitchen sink or the laundry room sink for eight hours. Then, after we're sure they've stopped dripping, we move them to the wires in the hall and the living room. It's a big, ongoing process. It'll be another week before we're done."

After more introductions, Perkins summarized his situation. "There's only about 2,300 people in West Branch, but there's about 70,000 in Iowa City, and they're starting to starve. And there's almost twice that much population in Cedar Rapids. And that ain't to mention all the millions of hungry riffraff from around Chicago-ah, present company excepted, that is."

Glancing again at Ken's rifle, he said, "The trouble is, we're just too close to Interstate 80. There are just way too many people still following that corridor. A lot of them are on foot or on bicycles now. Most are legitimate refugees, but a good portion of them are looters. I hear that the worst ones are in trucks and vans. They take gasoline at gunpoint wherever they go. They're brutal. The looters that have been hitting Iowa City are bound to make their way here sooner or later."

"So what exactly do you propose, D.?" Ken asked "I'm offering you room and board, in exchange for you two being my security staff, twenty-four hours a day, regardless of the weather."

"So, twelve on, twelve off?"

Perkins nodded and said, "Or six-hour, or eight-hour shifts, however you want to cover it. But I need to have someone watching the road and all around the house and outbuildings at all times. I can fill in if either of you catch a cold or something. Otherwise, you're it. No pay, but we'll feed you, and house you, and I'll replace any ammo you use defending the place. Karen can wash your laundry."

Ken turned to Terry and gave her a quizzical look. Then they both nodded.

Ken looked Durward in the eye, and said with a nod, "Okay, we'll do it."

They were provided a small bedroom in the back of the house that doubled as Karen's sewing and craft room.

After surveying the property, they determined that the tallest silo had a commanding view and was in an advantageous position for a watch tower. The silo, built by the Boythorpe Company, was an unusual design. Like most steel silos, it had a caged ladder going up the side. But instead of just a typical cone-shaped roof, it had an almost flat roof and cupola structure with a five-foot-tall "Patented, All Weather" door that had a pair of hatch levers near the top and bottom. The cupola was designed to give access to the top of the silo's unloader conveyor.

The field of view from the silo's doorway included the house, and nearly all of the barnyard. It also had a sweeping view of Charles Avenue. It took only a few hours to set up the cupola as a guard post. They first laid down a forty-inch octagon that was hand-sawn from a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. This covered the twenty-eight-inch-diameter loading port. Because of the confines of the caged ladder, the plywood was hoisted up with a rope. They then hoisted up an upholstered chair that fit nicely through the door of the cupola.

After the first day, they added a bronze j.a.panese brazier, in which they burned wood sc.r.a.ps and dried corn kernels. The Meiji-era brazier had been brought home at the end of World War II by Durward's grandfather, who had fought in the Pacific Theater. Just ten inches high, the tubular hibachi was a fairly plain design, with a light etching of an ancient castle on one side. For many years it had just been used by the Perkins family to hold potted plants. The brazier kept the cupola warm enough to be bearable all through the winter. A crude wire rack on top of the brazier could be topped with a teapot or a small fry pan for reheating foods.

After the chair was in place, Durward asked, "What'll we use for an alarm?"

Ken answered his question with one of his own: "Tell me, D.: Do you have any sc.r.a.p steel pipe?"

"Sure do, depending on the diameter."

They soon found a thirty-inch length of four-inch-diameter steel pipe. This was hung by a wire from the top of the ladder's extended top handrail loop to serve as an alarm bell. The clapper was simply a ball-peen hammer, which was kept just inside the door of the cupola. The pipe alarm bell could be heard quite distinctly from inside the house or anywhere within 100 yards.

Ken summarized the alarm bell procedure. "If it is friendly visitors, we'll ring the bell with three sets of double-taps, s.p.a.ced a few seconds apart. If it is an unidentified stranger, we'll bang on it in a continuous clamor. Beyond that, let's keep it simple and ballistic: If you hear one shot, that serves as a warning to whoever might be approaching, and as an alarm to anyone who is in the house."

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 b.u.t.ter, 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 b.u.t.ter with a large hand churn while standing guard. Carefully hauling the completed churn full of b.u.t.ter-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 b.u.t.ter, 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 Ma.s.s at the St. Bernadette Parish in West Branch, on East Orange Street. It was a two-and-a-half-mile walk, so the "Ma.s.s trips" were a six-hour exercise. Ken and Terry treated these as very special occasions. On the preceding Sat.u.r.days, 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.p.a.ced 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 gla.s.s 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 Ma.s.s, but Terry quipped, "Perhaps that would make it seem too medieval, now that we're back in the Dark Ages."

Radcliff, Kentucky.

November, the First Year.

It was common knowledge that Washington, D.C., was in ruins. The ProvGov filled the power vacuum left when the East Coast had a ma.s.sive 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. n.o.body 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 a.s.sistance. (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 a.s.sumed that the UN's a.s.sistance 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 bypa.s.sed 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."

12.

Terminal Ballistics.

"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.

West Branch, Iowa.

Late November, the First Year.

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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.senger 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.

Ken opened a package and inserted a pair. As he did, he gestured for Perkins to do likewise. Then he said, "You've got the rifle with the scope."

"To make 'absa-tively' sure he's dead?"

Ken nodded. "That's right, D. Just give me a chance to warn the ladies that you're going to shoot."

It took Perkins a full minute to get ready for the shot. He laid a throw cushion from the couch on the windowsill of the window that Ken had been using to shoot from. He pulled up a dining room chair to sit on, and rested the fore-end of the Remington pump-action .270 across the cushion. He exhaled loudly. Then he cranked up the scope to 9 power and clicked off the rifle's safety. Just when Ken thought that he was about to shoot, Durward said, "Give me a sec. I'm still kind of nervous. The crosshair is dancing."

He again loudly let out a breath. A few moments later, he squeezed off a shot. Pulling the muzzle back down from the recoil, he looked through the scope and said, "I hit him just above his ear. So if he was faking before, he ain't faking now." He calmly pumped the rifle's action, chambering a fresh cartridge, and toggled the safety b.u.t.ton to the safe position. Then he removed the rifle's magazine and topped it off with a cartridge from his pocket.

They waited another hour to see if the looters would return, Durward concerned that they might be back with reinforcements. He paced back and forth between the kitchen and the back bedrooms, consoling his wife and daughters, and giving them updates.

As they waited, Ken said, "I'm sorry that I shot right through your kitchen window."

"Shucks, that's what they make clear sheet plastic for, right? Don't you worry. . . . I'm sure I'll be able to scrounge up some replacement windows in the next few days. But before dark tonight, we'll cover the broken windows with sheet plastic. We can hold it in place with some batten strips."

Their neighbor from down the road drove up to the gate on his ATV, with his mixed breed cattle dog on the back as usual. A sporterized Springfield rifle rested in the rubberized spring steel forks mounted on the ATV's front deck. Carrying their rifles, Ken and Durward walked out to the gate to talk to him.

As they neared the gate, the neighbor asked, "You folks okay?"

Durward answered, "Yeah, we're fine, just scared spitless."

"All that shooting, and you only got one of them?"

"I think we hit a few more of them inside their rigs," Ken answered.

Durward swung the gate open and the three men closely examined the body and the surrounding ground. The gravel and the adjoining pavement were heavily littered with chunks of broken safety gla.s.s, in at least three distinct colors. There was blood on some of it. There was even more blood around the body. They found more than seventy pieces of fired bra.s.s that obviously came from AR-15s, AK-47s, and at least one AK-74. The lacquer-coated steel-cased bra.s.s from the latter captivated Durward and his neighbor. This was the first time that either of them had even heard of the smaller-caliber AK. The neighbor's dog watched all this from the back of the ATV, with its tail wagging.

The dead looter's body was partially resting on an inexpensive pair of Chinese-made bolt cutters. The man was in his late twenties or early thirties, Hispanic, and overweight. He had lots of tattoos. He had been hit twice through the lungs by .223 bullets from Terry's M4, and once through the head by Durward's .270 Winchester.

Ken said in a droll voice, "Well, D., you can sleep peacefully tonight, knowing that you didn't kill anyone. This guy was dead long before you sent that piece of 'let's make sure' through his noggin."

As they were examining the body, the neighbor's dog jumped off the back of the ATV and started licking at the blood on the gravel driveway. "That's just wrong," Durward said.

Seeing this, the neighbor shouted, "Bad dog! Load up!" The dog obediently jumped back onto the rear deck of the ATV.