In his youth, his father forced Tim to work like a slave, claiming to teach him a strong work ethic. The indentured servitude had the opposite effect. Since his father’s early death, Tim had avoided work at all costs. He had become adept at projecting confidence and insinuating himself into positions of authority such as city planning commissions, church callings, and his current position as part of the county emergency committee. Tim had chewed his father’s inheritance down to almost nothing, but everyone else in the area considered him one of the wealthy, old boy’s network, and he hung onto that advantage with deft machination.
His efforts to craft his reputation in the neighborhood would now catapult him forward into leadership and control and ensure his family’s survival. He had been born for this moment, and he had every intention of seizing neighborhood leadership.
Like his despised father, Tim would carry a gun into battle. Unlike his father, Tim would lead instead of follow. He pictured his father looking down from heaven, seeing his son take command like his father never had in Viet Nam.
Tim smiled at the knowledge that seeing him lead men in battle would make his old man turn in his grave. His father had frequently railed on Tim about being a boy without talent or ambition—a complete disappointment. Now, with everything turning his way, Tim would finally prove to the dead alcoholic what a fool he had been.
Ross Homestead
Oakwood, Utah
Like a tick dug in deep, the private security guards still held the refinery. It felt like unfinished business to Jeff, but he knew better than to risk lives to tidy this up. The stalemate at the refinery nagged at him, and he decided to take a quick field trip to see if he could break the logjam.
Jeff and Josh Myler grabbed a Chevy Suburban and drove outside the barricades. Jeff rode shotgun with his Robinson .308 poking out the window.
Everything in town appeared to be looted out. Just eleven days after the fall of the stock market, people had resorted to pulling up the hardwood lanes at the bowling alley for firewood. Jeff watched as a father-and-son team carried a long bundle of maple out the double glass doors of the Excelsior Bowl.
Fires burned everywhere, big and small, most of them in front yards where folks consumed any wood they could find—furniture, fencing, molding, even plastic and tires. It had taken a little more than a week to burn through everything that could be considered firewood. Now people were tearing up anything the slightest bit flammable. More than once on the four-mile drive, Jeff saw men attempting to ignite trees they had just cut down in their yards, green wood that only smoldered and smoked.
The first thing to run out in the Apocalypse was firewood, something Jeff had never considered. The trees in the valley were too green to burn, and the trees in the mountains were too far away to collect. Heading to the mountains for firewood consumed more calories than anyone could afford. People were collecting and chopping firewood much of their day. America hadn’t seriously utilized wood as fuel for generations, so the realities of how much work firewood actually required shocked everyone and, because of America’s tidy landscaping, there had been precious little firewood to be found within walking distance of urban and suburban homes.
Dirty water required a LOT of fire to boil. Open fires consumed an enormous amount of wood, with only a small transfer of heat energy. Very few people had the knowledge or equipment to burn wood with any level of efficiency. Dry firewood had run out in a matter of days, burned wastefully on open campfires.
Now people were sick and dying right before Jeff’s eyes from an inability to boil water. One case of pool shock—easily-available chlorine tablets—could have saved whole neighborhoods, reducing the need for wood. Chlorine had been dirt cheap back in the days when factories turned out chemicals and drugs for next to nothing. Today, with Home Depot and Right Aid in shambles, those miracle chemicals might as well have been sitting on the moon.
When Jeff looked down from the Homestead at the Valley, he imagined the fires he could see were cooking fires. This turned out to be untrue. Most of the tendrils of smoke Jeff had seen came from boiling water.
They passed a number of canals carrying water from the Wasatch Mountains to the Great Salt Lake. People gravitated to those canals, schlepping water in buckets, pots and milk jugs. Half of everyone on the streets looked to Jeff like they were traveling to and from water.
Little more than swamp water, the canals could ease the discomfort of thirst, but they brought the scourge of diarrhea. Jeff watched as one woman took an emergency squat on the dirt bank beside the canal. Jeff fretted about his men at the refinery drinking downstream from this pathogenic nightmare.
In a field tucked between a row of bungalows, another woman harvested weeds with a kitchen knife, probably to feed her family. Down another street, Jeff did a double take when he saw a guy chasing a dog, trying to kill it with a roofing hammer.
When they had almost reached the refinery, Jeff spotted a man walking across the wetlands carrying a dead crow by the feet, its wings flopping open like some sort of inverted firebird.
I wonder what crow tastes like. Jeff shook his head.
More than anything, Jeff was amazed at how listless people had become; they shuffled about like zombies. Almost everyone in the valley had dropped from three thousand calories a day to less than one thousand calories a day, and many of them blew those calories out of their bodies a few minutes later, from one end or the other.
The view from the Homestead lulled Jeff into thinking that people down in the valley were hanging in there, perhaps roughing it. From ground level, he could see they hovered on the brink of death, as though one good flu could wipe out the entire town.
As they approached the refinery, Jeff shook off what he had witnessed. No matter how haunting, the valley couldn’t become his concern. The townspeople might as well be living in Africa. There was nothing he could do about their situation, so why torture himself worrying about them?
Jeff spotted his campsite a couple hundred yards from the fence of the refinery, and he directed Josh toward it. Six men had been rotating in and out of guard duty, keeping the refinery bottled up and denying the guards access to ground water. Jeff rolled out of the Suburban and shook hands with the off-duty fighters hanging out at camp. Somewhere in the folds of the swampy wetlands surrounding the refinery, the rest of his garrison stood guard.
“They getting thirsty in there yet?” Jeff couldn’t believe the security guards hadn’t reached out to make a deal. It had been three days since his team surrounded the refinery.
“Nope. Not a peep. Nobody has stepped so much as a pinkie toe outside those gates.”
“Unbelievable.” Jeff shaded his eyes and gazed at the buildings, tanks and smokestacks of the refinery. Someone handed him a pair of binoculars. Jeff could see one guard behind some kind of sandbag bunker on top of one of the big fuel storage tanks, watching him back.
“Okay.” Jeff handed back the binos. “Radio your men and let them know I’m going in.”
“Roger.” One of the guys jumped on his radio and made the call.
Jeff reached in the SUV and grabbed the pair of bolt cutters he’d brought with him. He left his handgun and rifle on the front seat of the Suburban and walked to the gate.
“Hello! I’m coming in.” Without waiting for a reply, Jeff cut the chain on the gate, stepped inside and walked down the middle of the refinery.
“Don’t shoot. I’m unarmed. I just want to talk.”
As he sauntered into the jumble of pipes and valves at the heart of the facility, a man burst out of an office trailer, whipping his assault rifle toward Jeff. The man looked like he had been taking an afternoon nap.