Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Lars had an anxious morning, waiting for his infantry team to arrive. He penned an after-action report and asked to have it delivered to Doctor K. Bob Potts was the last one back, arriving at eleven a.m. He was dripping with sweat. By the time he arrived, the horses were already loaded in trailers and the rest of the team was packed up and ready to go. After some handshakes and a long pull on a canteen, Potts and the others climbed aboard the pickups. There was no ceremony. There was no celebration. They had done what needed to be done, and they were just happy to be heading home. Lars was anxious to be well away from La Fuerza before they had the chance to regroup. Hector’s arm was decorated with a new row of thirty-seven surgical staples. He said the arm was painful, but regular doses of pain meds from Johanna Visser made it manageable. Other than Hector’s wound, Lars’s team got away unscathed.

They drove beyond Flagstaff to Winona the first night and camped just off Twin Arrows Road, east of town. They were all edgy and had difficulty sleeping. Shortly after they left the next morning, they were surprised to see a small herd of elk on a hillside just above the road. They braked to a halt and Chad Stenerson rested his scoped M1A across the hood of the lead pickup. He dropped a cow and a bull in rapid succession. This took six shots. The other elk fled into the nearby timber. In less than an hour the elk that had been shot were gutted and dragged down to the pickups. With all eight members of the team working together, dragging the elk down to the trucks was relatively easy. But it took considerable effort to get them up on the fuel trailer. After that, the rest of the trip home was speedy and trouble-free.

With two of the gold coins that he had earned from the Humboldt raid, Lars bought two 9mm pistols, a Glock 17 and a Glock 19. These used magazines that were largely interchangeable, although the short magazines from the Model 19 would not work in the longer-gripped Model 17. Together, the two pistols came with just five magazines and one holster. He badly wanted some more magazines, but they were a scarce commodity. Few people were willing to part with any extra magazines. As one Navajo vendor explained it to Beth, “In bad times, when people are shootin’ at you, what exactly is a spare magazine? There’s no such thing. You can never have too many. Same thing for ammo.”

The only magazines that the Laines often saw regularly offered for sale at the flea market were military-surplus M16 alloy thirty-round magazines, which had been produced in huge numbers. But even those now had ridiculously high asking prices. Seeing the depleted shelves and such high prices on a visit to Zia Sporting Goods in Farmington, Beth commented, “We really should’ve invested in magazines and ammunition. It would have been a better investment than silver. Lars sighed and replied, “Yeah, you’re right. Ammo is practically worth its weight in silver, these days, and magazines are a you-name-your-price kind of item.”

Lars would have actually preferred to have bought a couple of SIG P226 or P228 pistols to be compatible with Andy’s first pistol, but those were much more scarce than Glocks. In the new Age of Deep Schumer, beggars couldn’t be choosers. He also realized that his chances of eventually finding spare Glock magazines was much better than finding spare SIG magazines, since Glocks were made in much larger numbers.

44 Ignis

“Vengeance has no foresight.”

-Napoleon Bonaparte

Ignacio was furious. He spent the hours before sunrise running from house to house, assessing the damage. He radioed his cousin Simon in Humboldt. Adding Simon’s tally, he concluded that every one of La Fuerza’s armored vehicles had been destroyed by fire. So were more than half of the pickups and vans. Further, more than half of the gang’s loot, ammo, and fuel were gone, destroyed in the fire and explosions. Some twenty-six of his men and three women had been killed. Another fifteen men had been wounded, and of those, three were not likely to live.

Only one of the men who had attacked them had been captured. He lived under torture only long enough to tell them that the raiders had originated from Prescott. Ignacio was whipped up into a genuine frenzy. He ran from truck to truck, screaming “?Bastardos! ?Venganza, venganza! ?Matenlos a todos!” (“Bastards! Vengeance, vengeance! Slaughter them all!”)

They spent the next day and a half salvaging what they could from the wrecked vehicles, and requisitioning more pickups and vans from all over Humboldt and Dewey. They ended up with an odd assortment. Several were bright colors, but that didn’t matter. They just needed enough to get all of his men to Prescott. He was going there soon, and going for blood.