Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

“Most people can’t think, most of the remainder won’t think, the small fraction who do think mostly can’t do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion-in the long run, these are the only people who count.”

-Robert A. Heinlein

Radcliff, Kentucky October, the First Year

Sheila Randall was fretting. Her husband, Jerome, had moved them from New Orleans to Radcliff, Kentucky, just a few weeks before the Crunch. After he was laid off in New Orleans, Jerome had been offered the steady job in Kentucky. But that meant leaving behind their extended families in Louisiana. They brought with them Tyree, their ten-year-old son, and Emily Voisin, Sheila’s spry seventy-six-year-old grandmother. They settled into a three-bedroom rental house on Third Street in Radcliff. The town was just outside the south gate of Fort Knox, the home of the U.S. Army’s Armor Center and School-the school for tanker troops.

Jerome got a job at a Big O tire shop, just as he had in New Orleans, but with a higher salary and the promise of bonuses. Jerome had also been promised inflation indexing for his pay. Sheila took a job in data entry for the local phone company’s billing department, much like the one that she had held before for a power utility in Louisiana. It was boring, repetitive work, but it helped pay their bills, and she was able to work six hours per day, five days a week, which allowed her to pick her son up after school each day. Even working only thirty hours per week, the job offered full health and dental benefits. And this was a plus, since her husband’s job didn’t provide a dental plan.

Jerome had thought Radcliff was a good place to work because the Army payroll meant that a steady stream of cash customers came into town every week, mainly on the weekends. All the local stores did well. The soldiers mainly spent their money at the grocery stores, Wal-Mart, and the many bars and tattoo parlors. But the town had a slightly unsavory air to it, and that bothered Sheila. Most of all, she missed her large Creole family. Sheila had such fair skin that she could pass for white, but her husband had much darker skin.

Their house was nice, as rentals go, and had a big yard, but there was noisy traffic, since it was close to the Dixie Highway. The city park and the Big O tire store were both within walking distance. At least the backyard was fairly quiet, since it had an alleyway behind it, and it had a fence, so it was a safe place for Tyree to play. Their neighbors were a mix of whites, blacks, and Mexican-Americans. Most of the houses in the neighborhood, including theirs, had been built in the 1920s. The owner-occupied homes had been well maintained, but most of the rentals had shabby yards. Their next-door neighbor was Mrs. Hernandez, a divorced woman who worked as a shipping clerk at the U.S. Cavalry Store. It seemed that half the town currently worked for the Cav store or had worked there in the past. The company had started out in the early 1980s as a military uniform store that made machine-stitched uniform name tapes and sold tanker boots to soldiers from Fort Knox. It eventually grew into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, mainly selling by mail order.

When the inflation started, Grandmere Emily advised Sheila to buy up vegetable seeds. Jerome said he thought it was evidence of senility, but Sheila went along with the plan, since her grandmother was very wise and had lived through the Great Depression. So they spent three Saturdays in September driving to nearly every seed store in Hardin, Meade, and Breckinridge counties, buying up their late-summer seed closeouts. Also on Emily’s advice, they bought dozens of pairs of gardening gloves in various sizes.

Without telling her husband, Sheila also spent some of her lunch hours at work mail-ordering seeds via the Internet. These were mostly the open-pollinated “heirloom” varieties that Emily had suggested were best because they bred true, as opposed to hybrid seeds. Sheila followed that advice and concentrated on the non-hybrid varieties. She bought nearly all vegetable and herb seeds. The only flower seeds that she bought were nasturtiums, which could be eaten as salad greens, and marigolds, which Emily said could be planted around the perimeter of a garden as a barrier to protect it from rabbits, moles, and even slugs.