“Because I had my doubts, I worked the next three days after I got Todd’s
‘The sky is falling!, the sky is falling!’ call. My last afternoon at the cannery, the general manager gave me a list of fifteen employees that I was supposed to hand pink slips to at four o’clock. I told him,‘Sorry boss, can’t do that. These people depend on their jobs, and we depend on them. We can’t put out a safe-to-eat product without a minimum level of staffing on each shift.’ Then he says to me,‘If you refuse, I’ll have no choice but to let you go as well.’ Then I said,
‘You can’t fire me, because I just quit,’ and walked away. I didn’t even bother to clean out my desk. I just grabbed a few of my engineering reference books, and the Sykes-Fairbairn ‘letter opener’ that I kept in the top drawer. On my way out, I stopped by the employee’s thrift shop and bought sixteen cases of various late-date-of-pack canned fruit and vegetables. They were still tagged at the old employee price which is like two cents on the dollar from current prices.”
Fong scanned the room and then went on. “Soooo, that same evening I started packing up. By then the phones had been out for a couple of days. It took a lot longer than I thought to pack up. As T.K. told you, I spent the next few hours keeping a look out while he got his gear loaded. We left late, eleven o’clock—no, I guess it was after midnight.”
T.K. nodded in agreement.
Dan shrugged his shoulders and went on. “It didn’t seem that late. Any-hooo, we got ourselves on the road. On our way out of town we saw one house totally in flames, but not a single fire truck was in sight. We also saw two cars that had been gutted. The traffic on the freeway was nearly bumper-to-bumper, even at midnight. All of the gas stations were either closed or had big signs, mainly sheets of plywood spray painted with the words ‘NO GAS.’
“By the time we were an hour and a half out of Chicago, we started seeing cars that had run out of gas alongside the road. A couple of times I had to swerve around people trying to flag us down. They were really desperate. By that time, I figured that stopping to help anybody out would be far more dangerous than it was worth. By the time we crossed the state line there were cars out of gas on the shoulder every half a mile. It was at that point that I got on the radio to T.K. and suggested that we cut over to the older two-lane highway that parallels the interstate. Things were really starting to look hostile on the interstate, so we cut over as soon as we got the chance. By that time, T.K. and I were both low on fuel.
“My gauge read a quarter full, and T.K. radioed to say that he’d switched over to his reserve tank, so I started looking for a good place to refuel. I picked a side road that went out by a bunch of farms. There were no cars on it at all.
We stopped about a mile down this side road at a straight stretch where we could see both ways for quite a distance. I got out with my Model 97, and had my Beretta nine mil in a shoulder rig. T.K. got out with his CAR-15, and slung it across his back. I played security for him while he refueled, and then he did the same for me.
“Just as I was putting the last of a third jerry can into my rig, T.K. gave a whistle, and I saw a car’s headlights. Both of us got down on the far side of our rigs, trying to put as much engine block as we could between us and them.
When the lights got within about 150 yards, I could see it was a patrol car.
“At that point, both T.K. and I played it cool, and we slipped our long guns under my pickup, lengthwise, so they were out of sight. Turned out it was a sheriff’s deputy. When he stopped his patrol car behind our rigs, T.K. walked back to talk with him. Needless to say, he was very curious about us, and wasn’t taking any chances. He had a big Glock 21, and it was out of the holster.
“T.K. explained to him that we were on our way to stay with friends in Idaho and had just stopped to refuel. He had already figured that out, and pointed his flashlight at the jerry can sitting by my rig. At first, he thought we’d both been riding in my Toyota, and that we had stopped to siphon somebody’s Bronco. It wasn’t until we showed him our driver’s licenses and the registration for both vehicles that he started to relax.
“Boy, was I scared. The last thing that we needed was to get locked up in some county jail in Iowa just as the shit was hitting the fan. As it turned out, the dude was pretty cool after all. We shot the breeze for a bit while I finished gassing up, and cramming the cans back in the rigs. Just before he left, he said, ‘Well, I hope you make it to your hidey-hole in Ide-ho in one piece.’ He sure had us pegged. Anyway, we waited ’til he was well out of sight before we picked up our guns. He never spotted them. Jeez, that would have taken even more explaining.”
After a brief pause, T.K. spoke. “I was scared to death, too. After the deputy left, we praised God for his protection, and got turned around and headed back for the highway. We tooled along just fine. In fact, Dan kept picking up speed.
Sometimes he got up to about seventy-five. I had to get on the CB and yell at him to slow down. We made another refueling stop using the same method just before dawn in eastern South Dakota, and then again about ten in the morning. After that stop, I took the lead. By then, there were virtually no cars on the road at all.
“Not long after we crossed into Montana we had to slow down because there was a pair of wrecked cars almost blocking both lanes. At first, it looked like just another accident, two cars smashed together, typical fender bender.
Then I realized, hey, there aren’t any intersecting roads there, so how could they have been in a fender bender unless one car had rear-ended the other? I knew that couldn’t be the case, because one of the cars was practically perpendicular to the road. By the time I had figured that out, we were practically on top of them. Luckily, the shoulder was pretty wide. I didn’t have time to call Dan on the CB to warn him. I just hit the gas and swerved around onto the shoulder around the wreck. All I could do was hope that Dan would catch on and do just the same thing. Luckily, he did.”
Dan picked up the thread of the story, “I saw the munched cars up ahead, and then I saw a puff from T.K.’s tailpipe when he hit the gas. A second later, I did likewise. I followed right behind. As we went around the two wrecked cars, I saw two guys with shotguns stand up behind the car on the right-hand side.
They weren’t riotguns either, just regular old pump action birdguns. When that happened, I just ducked, and kept on going. They got about three or four shots off at me.
“The first shot took out my windshield and passenger’s side window. The second and third pretty well peppered my camper shell. Needless to say, it took out the back window of the camper, as well. Nothing inside got wasted except my sleeping bag. It’s leaking goose down like crazy now. Some pellets also hit two of my gas cans, but luckily they were empties. Otherwise, the back end would have been swimming in gas.
“Judging by the holes, they must have been using shells loaded with good-sized buckshot. Probably number four buck, possibly a bit larger. It went through my camper shell and just kept on going. Anyway, after we got about ten more miles down the road, we pulled off along a straight stretch. T.K. pulled security while I assessed the damage. The windshield was shattered. I could hardly see through it. The passenger’s side window had disintegrated into chunks.
“I spent the next ten minutes kicking out the windshield and sweeping out the majority of the broken glass. It was pretty cold, and I didn’t want to freeze my tail off driving without a windshield, so had to spend another five minutes pulling gear out of the back of my rig until I found the box with all my cold weather clothes. I bundled up in my field pants with the cold weather liners, a woolly pully, my down jacket, and then my DPM camouflage smock. I also put on my army gloves with liners and one of those navy watch caps that we got at Ruvel’s Surplus. Even with all that, I felt cold, but at least I didn’t freeze. That was the only exciting thing that happened on the way here. The last part of the trip was rather anticlimactic. Saw some nice looking deer and elk, though.”