“But there’s just two of us. That makes us vulnerable.”
Ken countered, “Yeah, but we’re also not in a big, noisy gaggle.”
Terry grinned.
Darkness was falling. They relieved themselves and buried their waste and the empty wrappers from their MRE. They applied foot powder and put on dry socks. As they were rolling up their sleeping bags, Terry whispered, “I’m starved.”
“Me, too, but we’ve got only what’s in our packs. It might be days before we can find a safe place to barter silver for food. So let’s stick to one MRE per day.”
Terry nodded and put on a glum face. She finished stowing the gear in her pack. They applied green and loam camouflage from a stick onto each other’s faces and the backs of their hands. Standing in the cleared spot where their sleeping bags had been, they took turns jumping up and down to check for noise. Other than a slight slosh from Terry’s canteen, their gear was quiet. Terry made a mental note to refill her canteen as soon as possible.
Weaving their way out of the willow thicket, they resumed their walk alongside the river. They began passing small refugee camps. These numbered from five to forty people. Most of the camps were lit by large campfires. There was a fistfight in progress in one of the camps. It ended with a pistol shot. Ken and Terry kept moving, leaving them wondering what had happened. The camps were easy to skirt around unobserved. At one of them, Ken recognized the woman wearing the white ski jacket. “She won’t blend in until there’s snow on the ground. That is, if she lives that long,” he commented.
6. Walking by Faith
“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.”
Near Joliet, Illinois
October, the First Year
Ken and Terry continued to follow the river for two more days, moving slowly and with extreme caution. They rested during daylight in clumps of brush or far out in fields of harvested corn that had been left with their stalks still standing. Even this far out of Chicago they could still hear gunfire in the distance around the clock.
They communicated mostly via hand and arm signals. They were often spaced as much as fifty feet apart, so they would occasionally use their pair of 500-milliwatt RadioShack TRC headset walkie-talkies in push-to-talk mode. Even though these radios were twenty years old, they were very handy, particularly if whoever was trailing needed to contact whoever was in the lead to alert them when they weren’t looking behind.
The course of the river was mostly southwest, but it eventually turned southward—not in their intended direction, which was west or northwest. But it offered the best opportunity to travel undetected and provided numerous wooded and brushy areas where they could rest. They decided to follow the river until they got away from the Chicago metropolitan region.
A large railroad bridge crossed over the river, just north of Joliet. “Okay, now we’ve finally got tracks that are heading east–west. According to the map, if we stay on the river, it joins with the Kankakee River southwest of Joliet and that creates the Illinois River,” Ken said.
Terry added glumly, “And that would take us down toward Peoria and Springfield.”
“Right,” he agreed.
Terry gave Ken a hug and said, “Following those tracks sounds good to me.”
The tracks, they later found, belonged to the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, a regional line. The tracks began westward, but then curved northward. They soon intersected a set of Burlington Northern tracks oriented east–west. They followed the Burlington Northern tracks west for several nights without incident. They were amazed to see that even though the line they were walking along was heretofore high volume, all train traffic had stopped.
As they got out onto the plains, the Laytons had less frequent opportunities to find secluded places to camp. They continued to split just one MRE per day. This required great discipline, as their growling stomachs were a regular reminder that they were operating on a caloric deficit. They scavenged a few ears of corn at the edges of fields that had been missed during harvest, and they gnawed them clean, being careful to thoroughly chew the half-dried corn kernels so that they would be digestible.
They also occasionally found a sugar beet that had fallen from an open car hopper to the railroad ballast below. These they peeled, sliced, and ate raw. Ken called them “Manna from Heaven.” Each time Ken said this, Terry would counter, “Naw, they’re Manna from the Oracle of Omaha.” By this, she was referring to billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s ownership of the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad.
Even with the corn and sugar beets to supplement their MREs, they were losing weight quickly. Terry had an extra ten pounds of fat on her hips but Ken was wiry, so he had little to spare. Realizing the disparity, Terry “accidentally” made sure that Ken got a larger portion of each MRE entrée and the supplemental food that they found.
The weather was growing colder. There was frost on top of their sleeping bags each morning. They bundled up, wearing nearly all of their clothes. Now out on the open prairie, they dispensed with using face camouflage paint, as they had done when “sneaking and creeping” along the river near Chicago.
Their progress was still slow and stealthy. Wanting to avoid an ambush, they stopped following the railroad tracks whenever they went though large towns. Instead, they bypassed the towns, skirting mostly through farm fields.
Near midnight, just east of Mendota, Illinois, the Laytons inadvertently stumbled into an encampment that straddled the BNSF tracks. The camp was quiet and there were no campfires burning. Terry was in the lead, twenty feet ahead. When she realized that they were passing through the encampment, she pressed the PTT button on her radio five times in rapid succession to alert Ken. By the dim moonlight, they could see at least twenty tents. Ken quickly concluded that since they were already in the midst of the camp, it would have exposed them even more to reverse their direction. So he whispered into his radio’s boom mike, “Just act brave, and keep walking. Need be, we can bluff our way through. Safeties off.”
They both thumbed their rifles’ safeties. A man staggered toward the tracks, obviously drunk. He unzipped his fly and looked up to see Ken and Terry walking by on the raised railroad above him. Their boots were at his face level. In the dim light, Ken could see that the stranger was carrying a holstered handgun. Ken shouldered his rifle, and centered the HK’s ringed front sight on the man’s chest.
Startled, the man asked, “Who the hell are you?”
Ken replied in the most macho voice he could muster, “You don’t want to know, mister. Just leave us alone, and we won’t waste you.”
The man stood petrified, wondering how many people were traveling with Ken. Little did he know that there were just two of them.
As they passed the man, Ken and Terry turned and walked backward, keeping their rifles trained on him. The man stood still, apparently afraid to move or raise an alarm. Once they had walked this way for another forty yards, they turned and ran for about 150 yards, and then left the raised railroad ballast and cut across a field. At the far side of the field, they helped each other over a three-strand barbed wire fence and then sprinted again to take cover behind a cattle loafing shed.