Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

As ordered under my hand, Maynard Hutchings, President (pro tem) of The Sole and Legitimate Provisional Government of the United States of America and Possessions.

Sheila asked, “So what does that leave us?”

Deputy Hodges answered, “Not very much. I ’spose .22s, and antiques, and maybe thirty-thirty lever actions. But even those have gotta get registered. You know, that list won’t do diddly in stopping crime, since of course criminals never obey any laws. But it’s worded just right for squelching resistance. Notice how radio transmitters, military calibers, and night-vision scopes are banned? Maynard’s list would make Hitler or Stalin proud. This whole thing stinks.” Gesturing to the SIG 556 rifle on his shoulder, he pressed on, “Now, why is it legal for me to have this as a deputy but not you? That’s just plain unconstitutional. If and when they come into Marion County and try to enforce that load of hogwallop, they’d better be ready for one mighty big gunfight.”

That evening Sheila hid her revolver, ammo, and holster inside the bin of a hand-crank seed broadcaster. She hung it up on the wall near the ceiling, amidst the profusion of overstock items in the store’s back room. She explained to Tyree, “Sometimes its best to just hide things in plain sight. I want to be able to get to that in a hurry too.”

31 A Bulwark Never Failing

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

-Mao Tse-tung

Fort Knox, Kentucky August, the Second Year

Maynard Hutchings and his cronies laid out their goals like a military campaign. Military bases, food distribution warehouses, power plants, oil fields, and refineries topped their list of sites to be controlled. Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi were the first states to be pacified.

Chambers Clarke was the undersecretary of information for the Hutchings government. He accompanied many of the first convoys that contacted military installations and served as liaison for the ProvGov. Before the Crunch, Clarke had been a fertilizer and pesticide salesman for Monsanto Company. In many ways Clarke was just a bagman for the administration. He literally handed out millions of dollars in the new currency to the owners of mines that were being nationalized. It was Hutchings’s wife who had first suggested the carrot-and-stick approach to nationalizing the industries. Mr. Clarke was the carrot, while General Uhlich provided the stick. Later, it was the UN peacekeepers that provided the whippings, with fewer compunctions than American troops.

One of the Council’s first goals was controlling oil refineries. Hutchings initially dispatched an APC convoy to a small refinery in Pulaski County, Kentucky, near the town of Somerset. It was a very small refinery by twenty-first-century standards, producing just 5,500 barrels per day. But it was online, so Hutchings had a source of fuel to expand his area of influence. They next visited and served papers on the much larger refineries in Calletsburg and Perry, Kentucky, but both were off-line because the power grid was down, and they lacked sufficient cogeneration capacity.

The pacification, reunification, and nationalization campaign’s first large prize was the ConocoPhillips refinery in Ponca City, Oklahoma. It was the largest refinery in the state of Oklahoma and it was still partially online. After Ponca City, the army advanced on the Oklahoma refineries in Ardmore, Tulsa, Wynnewood, and Thomas. Of these, only the Ventura refinery at Thomas was in operation.

In Ohio, all of the refineries that the Fort Knox government “visited” were found to be off-line. The regular pinging of bullets bouncing off their APCs as they advanced served as a reminder that Ohio was still unpacified country. A combination of harsh winter weather and the ravenous gangs had reduced the population by 87 percent. The only people left in Ohio were the gang members and a handful of farmers who had become accustomed to paying the gangs’ so-called fair share crop taxes.

Meanwhile, other convoys were dispatched to electric power plants. These-coal, natural gas, and hydroelectric-were another high priority for the ProvGov. The hydroelectric plants were the easiest to get back online, and in fact a few of them were already operating on isolated mini-grids that had been reestablished soon after the Crunch took down the big power grids.

Because it takes a source of power to start up a gas turbine engine, and because most power plants in the U.S. built after the 1960s didn’t have auxiliary power units for self-starting, the “black start” restarting process took several months to gradually work up the capacity to get the biggest power plants in Kentucky back online. These included the Big Sandy, Ghent, Mill Creek, and Paradise power plants.