Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

a piece of penny candy.”

“I mean five dollars in silver coin.”

Hollan Combs jerked his chin back and said, “Oh, well, that’s different.” After pondering for a moment, he said, “I’ll need you to pay two months in advance, but you can lease it from month to month after that. I’ll also need a signed statement from you that you’re getting it as is, with no guarantee that the power will ever come back on. If and when it does, the power bill will be separate.”

Just a few minutes later Combs unlocked the store’s front door and ushered in Sheila, Tyree, and Emily.

“My last tenants here were brothers. They had a unique combination gun, cigar, and liquor store. They called it ‘Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ and they even answered the phone that way. That was good for a laugh. But the recession just went on and on-double-dip and then triple-dip, you know. They folded a year ago. I heard they moved back to Tennessee.”

Sheila examined the glass display cases as Combs went on, “The roof was redone just three years ago. The apartment ain’t much, but it’s been repainted since the ‘ATF’ guys moved out. I had a man clean the chimney, and he put a new elbow on the back of the wood stove, since the old one had rusted out. The place was clean, but I’m afraid the mice have made a mess up there.”

Sheila was pleased to see that the store building had plenty of windows that provided light to conduct business in the absence of grid power. Traces of the building’s former use lingered. The back room was still cluttered with empty gun and whiskey boxes, and one of the glass display cabinets still had a distinct tobacco smell. There was an empty twenty-rifle rack on the north wall of the store, behind the counter. The only entrance to the apartment was via an inside staircase that led up from the store’s small windowless back room. The stairs creaked as they walked up. The apartment had two bedrooms, a gas cooking range, a small Jotul wood/coal stove, an electric refrigerator (propped open with a stick of firewood), and a small bathroom with a toilet and a tub- shower.

“Bring me the lease papers. I’ll take it,” Sheila said.

Less than an hour later they had unpacked the car and moved in. Sheila’s packets of seeds filled two of the glass display cases, in neat rows. They put a few other items suitable for trading in another case.

“Not a lot to start with,” Emily remarked.

“Trust in the Lord, Gran, we trust in the Lord.”

Emily warned, “And you know the ten dollars in silver that you gave Mr. Combs was almost all the coins we had. I gots just three silver quarters and one dime left.”

“Trust in the Lord, Gran, trust in the Lord.”

Sheila dug out her tempera paints and soon started painting signs on the inside of the front windows. The signs read: “The Seed Lady,” “Sundry Merchandise,” “Buy-Sell-Trade,” and “Open 8 to 8. Closed Sundays.” She had her first customer walk in even before the paint had dried. He traded a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells for three packets of seeds. In the next few days a steady stream of customers began to arrive, all eager to trade. Eventually, some came from as far as the towns of Lebanon and Campbellsville. Sheila soon developed a reputation as a savvy yet fair storekeeper.

People brought Sheila all sort of things to trade for seeds, or at least to try to trade for them. Most of what they offered was junk, and Sheila got in the habit of saying politely yet forcefully, “Pass.” But she did trade for hard items, like tools, cans of WD-40, batteries, rolls of duct tape, ammunition, and hardware like nails and nuts and bolts. She made it her habit to reject any appliance that required electricity, since the grid power was down, and batteries were in short supply.

Late on the afternoon of the sixth day after they arrived, a slightly drunk man brought in an old Pilot brand vacuum tube table radio that had a wooden case. It had both AM and shortwave bands, and according to the man it worked well, back when utility power was available. He also said that his grandfather put all new capacitors in it, to replace the older, paper-wrapped ones. Sheila was about to reject it when her mother asked: “Look in the back. Has it got a transformer? And how many tubes does it have?”

Puzzled, Sheila did as she was told, which was easy, since the radio’s original back cover was missing: “It’s got no transformer, and it has five tubes.”

“Go ahead and trade for that.”

“But, Gran, it takes AC power. We don’t have a generator.”

Emily insisted, “You go ahead and trade for that radio, and I’ll explain later.”

Sheila drove a hard bargain, trading just one packet of squash seeds for the old radio. After the man had left, Emily gave an explanation: “Sheila girl, that radio is what your late Grandpere-rest his soul-he call an ‘All-American Five’ radio. He used to fix them. With five tubes and no transformer, it can run on AC or on the DC power. Out on the bayou in the old days, where there was no co-op power line, our kin would hook up ten or eleven car batteries in a row. That makes you about 115 volts of DC power. That will run one of them radios for days and days! And what do you see all over the place these days? I tell you what: abandoned cars with no gasoline. But they each got a 12-volt battery, now don’t they? You put out the word that you’ll trade for car batteries that still have a strong charge. We’re gonna listen to the shortwave, maybe even tonight!”

11. Provisional Beginnings

“There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.”

— Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, The State (1935)

Radcliff, Kentucky Late October, the First Year

The situation in Radcliff was out of control. The sound of gunfire punctuated every night. There were an average of eight home invasion robberies per day, and most cases went unsolved. Many were never even investigated. The mayor had left town with no notice, towing a Ryder rental trailer, with no indication of his destination. The chief of police had been shot and killed, and more than half of the police officers were not showing up for work.

It was just after seven a.m. and Maynard Hutchings was sitting in his bathrobe in his den, drinking some of his last remaining jar of instant coffee, alternating between listening to his police scanner and his CB radio. The latest rumor was that Washington, D.C., had burned down-all of it. His wife came into the kitchen and asked expectantly, “Well?”

“Well, what, darlin’?”

“Well, what are you gonna do? Isn’t it time you called a meeting or somethin’? Ain’t you the chairman?”

He nodded. He was chairman of the Hardin County Board of Supervisors. In a city without a mayor or even an acting mayor, and with just an acting police chief, he had more right than anyone to try to sort things out. The utility power was off, but the local phones were still working. Maynard started making calls.

None of the other county board members would agree to meet. They thought that it would be unsafe and that their families would be in danger in their absence. Two of them gave Hutchings their resignations verbally.

Then he started calling some of his golfing friends to serve as stand-ins. He set a meeting time for two o’clock that afternoon at the county courthouse. Almost as an afterthought, he called to invite General Uhlich. Under the Army’s new Streamlined Management system, Major General Clayton Uhlich wore two hats. He was both the post commander of Fort Knox and chief of Armor-the head of the U.S. Army’s tanker school and armor development programs. All that Hutchings knew about Clay Uhlich was that he was a two-star general who drank Scotch before five p.m. and that he cheated at golf.

Rio Arriba Youth Center, Gallina, New Mexico Late October, the First Year

The Phelps boys were on the trail leading west from the Rio Arriba Youth Center by eight the next morning. The headmaster, obviously embarrassed by the situation, didn’t even come to the stable to say good-bye to the