Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

He began walking more and more on the pair of crutches, then just one crutch, and eventually just a cane. He walked farther and farther each day, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion. His days started with dozens of sit-ups and push-ups. Eventually the length of the sets and the daily aggregate number of repetitions increased. He also started doing pull-ups, using the horizontal bar that held one end of the Moras’ clothesline in their side yard. Andy’s exercise time started to stretch into the evenings. Watching him do his pull-ups, Darci commented: “You’re a driven man, Andrew.”

Bradfordsville, Kentucky July, the Second Year

As the first summer that Sheila ran the store began, there were increasing requests for soda pop, mainly from the men who manned the towns’ three roadblocks. Sheila began offering more and more in trade for the dwindling supply of bartered soda in cans and bottles, simply because the men were progressively willing to pay more-even as much as ten cents in silver per can of Coca-Cola or root beer.

As this strange price inflation developed, Grandmere Emily wisely began collecting used beer bottles. She also traded a considerable quantity of ammunition for a bottle-capping tool with a magnetic head and a ten-gross box of fresh bottle crown caps. These came from a maker of home-brewed beer who lived near Ellsburg. By June, she created her first batch of homemade root beer. She used spring water and locally grown birch bark, sarsaparilla root, ginger, burdock root, dandelion root, hops, wintergreen, and molasses, in her secret recipe.

Emily Voisin’s first batch of root beer was uncarbonated and attracted a good number of customers. But her second and subsequent batches were carbonated using a large cylinder of CO2 and a special seltzering apparatus. Hollan Combs had built this for Emily by scaling up the design from an old SodaStream machine and using some hardware from his moribund soil analysis laboratory. These later batches of root beer were a huge success-so much so that Emily eventually had to hire seasonal help to wash bottles and help her brew root beer in the erstwhile butcher room of the Superior Market building. “Grandma Emily’s Ol’ Timey Root Beer” attracted customers from as far away as Springfield and Munfordsville. She offered a discount to anyone who would return their bottles or sell her other brown glass bottles or who could provide fresh crown caps.

Sheila Randall could not believe the first descriptions of the Provisional Government when she heard them. At first she thought that they were wild exaggerations. Hollan Combs warned her: “Whenever you hear of a government agency that declares itself “Legitimate” in its own name, you gotta wonder about its legitimacy. Know what I mean? That gang of fools is about as legitimate as some Hollywood bimbo’s baby.”

More and more customers patronizing her store reported seeing and hearing the same things about the Fort Knox government. In April of the second year, the first of series of “peacekeeping” convoys passed through Bradfordsville. Most of these convoys stopped in town for less than a half hour. The soldiers were all Americans, as were their weapons and most of their vehicles. But something struck Sheila as odd when she overheard a radio conversation between the convoy’s commander and his battalion commander. The latter had a distinctly German accent. Later, there were reports of entire battalion-size foreign units deployed inside the ProvGov’s area of operations.

Other than their control of key industries, the Provisional Government’s authority seemed relatively benign in the first year. Then a new currency was issued. The small lime-green watermarked bills soon reached general circulation and by law had to be accepted for all transactions. But the full weight of the Provisional Government and the “guest” UN peacekeepers wasn’t felt until the third year after the crash, when firearms restrictions were enacted.

Sheila Randall’s first word of the new gun laws came when Brian Tompkins, an Armor Corps lieutenant, visited her store. One of the first things he said to her was “You gotta make that gun disappear or it’ll get confiscated as contraband.”

“Contraband?”

Tompkins answered, “Yeah, haven’t you heard? It sucks, but handguns have been banned for civilians, though you can still own some rifles and shotguns. It’ll all be explained in the poster that we’ll put up at your sheriff’s office and in some flyers the Civil Affairs guys will be handing out in town today.”

The next day Sheila saw two posters nailed up side by side on the wall in the main hall of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. A table beneath held a pile of flyers that duplicated the posters in a smaller format, printed on their front and back sides. As she stood reading the posters, Deputy Hodges walked up behind her and said softly, “Hi, Sheila.”