Eventually, Chad told about crossing Wyoming. They laughed about his misadventures raiding cowboy roadblocks. Eventually, he told about the massacre inside the Walmart distribution center. Everyone listened quietly. They all knew what the story meant; it was both a victory and an atrocity.
Stories of violence mingled with stories of humor. As the hours passed, they talked about friends who had died in the line of duty.
Jason had always been a listener during these meandering, drunken confessionals, an outsider who hadn’t experienced combat but who was welcomed anyway because he brought the booze. Tonight, Jason belonged. But the last thing he wanted was to talk about the death he had dealt, even among these friends.
The conversation turned to hunting, and Chad bragged about a winter elk hunt with Jason, a couple of miles above the Homestead. They had killed two cow elk while trekking on snowshoes.
“Two dozen elk scattered every which way. It was my first big game hunt and my instinct was to lay suppressive fire… that didn’t work out. Finally, I downed a nice cow. There’s probably still some of that meat in the freezer, right, Jay?” Jason nodded. The solar panels had kicked on after the grid died, and the walk-in freezer was still good.
“After I killed my elk, Jay killed another elk at six-hundred-fifty yards out with his big .300 Remington Ultra. One shot through the pump house. We should send a hunting party up there. It’s a little box canyon that’s hard as hell to find. I bet it’s full of elk that’ve been pushed there by the zombies. It’s not far from your OP/LPs.” Chad paused to refill his tumbler with whiskey.
“You made a six-hundred-fifty-yard kill shot on an elk?” Jeff asked Jason.
“Yeah. I’ve made plenty of shots like that. Why?”
Jeff took another sip of whiskey instead of answering. He looked Jason dead in the eyes and both men knew what the other was thinking.
Author’s Note
I dedicate my part in this novel and its upcoming sequels to the operators of the United States Special Operations Forces, or SOF. I’ve had the privilege of working with many of them in entrepreneurial businesses as they’ve cycled out of long military service to the United States of America.
Here’s what I’ve learned: they are our best and brightest and they have borne an inordinate amount of the work of death for our armed forces. They have carried this burden so the rest of us can enjoy the fruits of American freedom and American foreign policy. None of them have taken their missions lightly and they paid, and continue to pay, a high price for their service. Our tiny population of American operators carries a brutal load and they do so voluntarily and with professionalism. We owe them a debt, one I pray we do not forget. As a father with sons in the military, I take my hat off to our operators and thank them and their families for the risks they endure so other servicemen and women stand farther behind the lines of conflict.
The SOF boys of ReadyMan and Black Rifle Coffee have spent the bulk of their adult lives in parts of the world where the Apocalypse already happened: Kurdistan, Ramadi, Haiti, the Kandahar Province… In those places, the locals wouldn’t even know the Apocalypse had come. It would just be another day. Operators know the lines of drift taken by the human race when civility and technology vanish. They know the cadence of chaos and the stench of collapse. Perhaps nobody in our modern society knows better how lightly we retain the Rule of Law than they do.
Today, the SOF boys of ReadyMan live stateside, teaching American citizens the hardscrabble reality that lurks beneath the chrome of modern society. Between training American civilians and experiencing dozens of global war zones, most scenes in this novel are derived from personal experience. Even stateside, our SOF instructors have seen American gun owners and survivalists crumple, time and again, when faced with the mind-shattering specter of mayhem. We have a long way to go before we can honestly consider ourselves “prepared” for a true collapse and the ReadyMan vets, along with thousands of other SOF vets, would like to see people trained and hardened to the reality that might suddenly punch through this wonderland of comfort. Jeff Kirkham, among others, would love to meet, train and share perspective with the readers of this novel and every preparedness-minded American. Check out Jeff’s hundreds of instructional videos and his dozens of life-saving inventions at Readyman.com. Even better, log in to ReadyMan’s Plan2Survive for a computer app that will guide you through the process of improving your families’ preparedness one step at a time.
We hope this novel scared the hell out of you the way it scared the hell out of us. Some disasters arrive with foreknowledge, telegraphing doom, begging us to prepare. Other disasters, especially in complex, fragile systems like ours, come out of left field and leave us wondering what happened.
Economists call these historical surprises “Black Swans”—events like World War I, the Great Depression, 9/11 and the Crash of 2008―and they only make sense looking back. Black Swan events sideswipe history with regularity. No reasonable person can pretend a Black Swan couldn’t happen again. We will never be that smart.
In this post-modern epoch of the American Empire, we run the risk of being blissfully unprepared for the rise of chaos and a resurgence of Mother Nature. It is safe to say that none of us is as prepared as we would like to think.
Afterword
I tracked Jeff Kirkham through both of his careers, including his move to federal law enforcement, his deployment to the global war on terror, his transfer over to the realm of intelligence and his continued real-world, down-range assignments for both the U.S Government and the U.S. Army. Driven by an extremely high intellect and exceptional patriotism, no better thinker, soldier, trainer, operator, or man, exists.
As a lifelong Special Forces soldier myself and as a 35-year police officer and current Chief of Police, I’m uniquely positioned to understand the precarious nature of our continued freedoms in the United States of America. From where I stand, this book is fiction, but it is also real. The events in it are not just plausible, they are probable. We are in challenging times and with so many potential trigger events, it would take only a few at once to kick us into the exact scenario described in this book. “Black swan” events do happen, and they have side-swiped America into chaos more than once: World War I, the Great Depression, the financial collapse of 2007–2008. Our technology has not inoculated us from this threat. If anything, technology may have made us more vulnerable.
Black Autumn is more documentary than a work of fiction. No civilization lasts forever. The mayhem described in this book will likely become real. It is only a matter of time and a couple of key, black swan events. If you consider sections of Chicago today, you will identify many of the same conditions, albeit on a smaller scale.
This book, I hope, will strike the same chord in you that it did in me. I hope we realize our vulnerabilities, our limitations, our level of survivability, and most importantly, I hope we gain a strong desire to prepare.
Your family and your community are counting on you to become a civilian operator or perhaps a peacekeeper, taking personal responsibility now for those you love during, potentially, very dark times ahead.