Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Bloomfield, New Mexico May, the First Year

Moving to the ranch had been his wife Lisbeth’s idea. Laine had inherited the ranch two miles east of Bloomfield, New Mexico, from his father, Robie Laine, a retired lieutenant colonel. The elder Laine had spent the last four years of his life as a widower. He had died unexpectedly of a heart attack when Lars was attending the Civil Affairs Officer’s Basic Course and while Andy was still in high school. After Robie Laine’s death, the ranch had been leased out for several years to Tim Rankin, a part-time horse trainer and a full-time alcoholic. Meanwhile, as the beneficiaries of Robie Laine’s $600,000 life insurance policy, his two sons finished their educations and started their own Army careers.

The ranch was in the Four Corners region, where the state lines of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet. Beth thought that the activity of running the ranch would occupy Lars and lift his spirits. As it turned out, moving there was the best choice that they could have ever made.

The property was a twenty-acre ranchette that sat just above the south bank of the San Juan River, with a slightly run-down house that had been built in the 1960s. The place had a solid barn, a bunkhouse, a hay barn, a shop building that was built in the 1980s, and a couple of small outbuildings. It was on Road 4990, commonly called the Refinery Road, which paralleled the San Juan River east from Bloomfield. After passing by the refinery, the doglegged road traversed dozens of ranches and hay farms. Lars and Beth moved to the ranch just six months before the Crunch.

In the October following their move to Bloomfield, when he heard that the Dow Jones average had slumped its first 2,000 points, Lars shifted his attention away from fixing up the ranch, to stocking up for what was sure to be a cataclysmic Second Great Depression. Lars and Beth realized that they were, as he put it, way behind the power curve. They made multiple trips to the local Target store and Sam’s Club.

To fund some of their storage food purchases, they asked Andy’s fiancee, Kaylee Schmidt, to rent a room from them. She was self-employed, working at home, and doing substitute teacher scheduling for the San Antonio School District. Her manager was agreeable to the move, so long as she provided her own telephone. With a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone service, she had unlimited calling. Her work transition to Bloomfield went smoothly, but ironically, she was only there for three weeks before the phones went dead and the Internet disintegrated into a few isolated autonomous networks. Since she was firmly engaged to marry Andy, Lars and Beth made it clear that Kaylee was welcome to stay with them indefinitely, even if she couldn’t find work.