Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

own a gun. And some of their ‘committees’ that meet at the clubhouse are a bit of a joke. But at least the most important one, Vegetable Gardening, is getting its act together. The plan is to haul in truckloads of manure and good topsoil to some of the empty lots with the least rocky soil. The water, thank God, is all gravity flow, from up in the mountains. The ‘private gated community’ aspect doesn’t mean jack now: since the power is out, they have to leave the gates wired wide open. I’m trying to organize things to get that situation changed, pronto.”

Ian nodded, and Alex went on: “The house where I bunk is 3,800 square feet, and it had just a couple living in it. They have room for at least two more full-timers, and believe you me, I need the help. We gotta get continuous 24/7 shifts going right away.”

Alex pulled into the general aviation gate at Love Field. After the formalities of getting through the inner gate, he was able to drive up to where the pair of Larons were tied down.

They all exchanged hugs and shared some tears about the death of Linda. But then they were all busy with their first concern: getting the planes unloaded. All of Ian and Blanca’s gear fit with ease in the back of the Excursion with its third-row seat folded down. Alex mentioned that he was impressed with how much Ian had been able to shoehorn into the planes. Ian explained almost apologetically: “I ran the weight and balance numbers, but they were marginal. Balance was decent, but gross weight was really pushing the envelope. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do and pray for the best.”

As Alex shut the back doors on the Ford, he said, “Judging from the guns that you brought, they will not say no to hiring you.” His prediction proved right. That evening, after some brief objections about extra mouths to feed, Ian and Blanca were hired by the four homeowners. Like Alex, Ian and Blanca would receive no pay but would be provided meals and a comfortable bedroom. Their room was in the 2,750 -square-foot home that sat behind the one Alex was in. It belonged to Dr. Robert Karvalich, a widower who was a retired pediatrician. Everyone called him Doctor K. Many years before, he had served a stint as a Navy medical officer, but only in an office setting, never at sea or in combat. He carried a World War II-vintage Remington Rand Model 1911 in a full flap holster daily. The gun, he explained, had belonged to his father, who was also a Navy doctor, during the Korean War.

Unlike the other homeowners, who took several weeks to get accustomed to constantly carrying guns, Doctor K. took to it immediately. The difference was that he had been robbed at gunpoint once before. As he told it, six years before the Crunch, Doctor K. answered his door to find a drug addict with a pistol in his hand. The man was after narcotics. Fearing for his life, Doctor K. reluctantly complied, giving the robber his small supply of Tylenol with codeine, Vicodin, and an oral solution of morphine sulfate. The robber fled in a car with California license plates and was never caught by the local authorities. When Ian Doyle asked everyone in the compound to be armed at all times, Robert Karvalich was one of the first to do so.

Transporting the planes to Doctor K.’s house the next day at first seemed like it would be difficult, requiring borrowed trucks, but then it proved easy: they just flew them there. The street in front of the four-house “compound,” as Alex called it, was curving and on a slight slope, but there was a long, wide street a quarter mile away that was straight and nearly level. This street was in the new “Phase 2” portion of the Conley Ranches development, where the streets had been paved, but only a few lots had been sold and no houses had yet been built. In Phase 2, the streetlight poles had not yet been installed. The street made a very practical runway for the Larons. They were able to land there and then just taxi the planes to the street where Alex lived. The sight of this made quite a stir in the community.

Soon after they stopped the planes in the driveway, one of the neighbors from down the street came to threaten to file a complaint about the planes landing as “a safety nightmare,” and about the very presence of the planes. She shouted that the planes were “flagrantly against the association rules.” As she stood wagging her finger in Alex’s face, Blanca and Ian were already at work disassembling them. Once the wings were removed and the planes disappeared into one of the bays in Doctor K.’s capacious four-car garage alongside his RV, the neighbor quieted down. Alex talked some sense into her by emphasizing that she’d be the indirect beneficiary of the additional armed security at no cost. “Well, I suppose that’s okay,” she said quietly, and walked off.

The Doyles-Ian, Blanca, and Alex-agreed to each stand a daily eight-and-a-half-hour guard watch, thirteen days out of each two weeks. The intense guard duty schedule left them very little time for recreation-and hardly even enough time to hand-wash their laundry-but at least all of their meals were provided by the four families on a rotating schedule.

Blanca began to carry one of the M16s that Ian had taken in for safekeeping from Luke Air Force Base. Alex provided her some 5.56mm ammo, both for target practice and to keep in loaded magazines. She disliked the M16, mostly because of the odd twang sound that the buffer made in the buttstock when it was fired. She also considered the gun ugly but would not elaborate beyond saying, “I know a good-looking gun when I see one, and this one ain’t it. I like a gun with at least some wood. This thing is like a plastic toy.”

The Doyles wanted to construct a sandbagged fighting position inside each ground-floor exterior window, but they ran into a problem: a shortage of sandbags. There were no nearby Army or Marine Corps installations, so the local surplus store had no sandbags available. And because Prescott was not in a flood-prone area, the county had just a small supply of sandbags for use if a water main broke. The local feed store had had its supply of empty feed sacks wiped out by just a couple of customers long before the Doyles inquired.

It was Blanca who came up with the answer: sewing their own, using rolls of black polyester mesh road construction underlayment material. This material came in ten-foot-wide rolls. They were able to trade a local road contractor a box of .30-06 ammunition for two rolls of the material.

Because the power was out, electric sewing machines were not available, but Doctor K. put his late wife’s Singer treadle sewing machine table back into operation. The table’s sewing machine had been discarded years before, when the table became a decorator item. But Doctor K. was able to install a much later model Singer machine into the treadle table. This one sewing machine eventually served the families in all four homes in the compound, for everything from patching blue jeans to making ammunition bandoleers. It proved capable of sewing the sandbags as well.

They cut the material to yield completed sandbags of the same fourteen-by-twenty-six-inch dimensions that had been standardized for U.S. military sandbags for nearly a century. Each sack weighed about forty pounds when filled.

Once filled and stacked, to the casual observer, the stacked black sacks looked like dark shadows inside the windows. The sandbag-making-and-filling project went on for three weeks. Clean sand was available from a large pile at the development’s uncompleted golf course. When asked permission to use some of the sand, Cliff Conley replied, “You take what you need. I expect it’ll be a long time before that golf course ever gets finished. Just don’t ask me to help you fill ’em. I did my share of sandbag filling in Vietnam. I’ve now reached the ‘supervisory’ stage of life.”

By SOP, all wireless connections were turned off, for fear that they might be detected by passing looters.

Ian and Blanca settled into an upstairs bedroom that sat above the living room, which was heated by a woodstove. A floor vent gave their bedroom sufficient heat. More important, the bedroom had a sliding glass door to a story deck with a commanding view of much of the compound and the neighborhood. A hot tub sat on the corner of the deck, already drained for winter. It was soon lined with sandbags, turning it into a soft-top pillbox. The hot tub’s plywood lid was covered with Naugahyde and had flaps that hung down six inches. Ian and Blanca constructed a C-shaped framework with five two-by-four legs to support the lid. This positioned the lid seven inches higher than normal, providing a 360-degree horizontal vision slit. To anyone walking by on the street below, the hot tub-cum- pillbox didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, just a covered hot tub. Ian also cut five blocks from a length of four-by-four. These blocks allowed them to raise the lid an additional three and a half inches to provide better vision and hearing at night.

Because his master bedroom in the north wing of the house was too cold after the grid power went down, Doctor K. moved a single bed to what had formerly been his den. The den was just off the living room, and thus it was well heated. He and the Doyles then closed off the hallways to nearly half of the house by nailing up blankets with batten boards, to confine the heat to just the kitchen, living room, and den.

The Four Families staged a coup at the Conley Ranches homeowners association (HOA) meeting just a few days after Ian and Blanca arrived. By prearrangement with their sympathizers, they ousted two “Pollyanna”