Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

As the dozens of seed mail orders arrived, Sheila had her grandmother hide them in her bedroom closet. Jerome had only begrudgingly gone along with the seed-buying plan, knowing that the money all came from Emily’s retirement nest egg. But Sheila saw no need to tell Jerome about the mail orders of the heirloom seeds. If he found out about her “petit secret” with her mother, she knew that he’d go ballistic. But since Sheila handled paying all the family’s bills, Jerome never caught on. Eventually, there were boxes containing thousands of seed packets stacked up in the back of Emily’s walk-in closet.

Even with all of the economic chaos, the mail was still coming through, and the seed companies-mostly family-owned businesses-were good to their word: nearly all of the orders eventually arrived. While all of their neighbors were desperately scrambling to buy canned food, Sheila Randall was quietly buying enough vegetable seeds to plant hundreds of gardens.

Seeing what was happening, many small-business owners wisely went “on vacation” or “closed for inventory.” This started with the local coin shop. Then the local jewelry store and the Cav store closed. The privately owned gas stations followed suit, but many people suspected that they had quit business while they still had fuel in their tanks. The big chain stations and truck stops soon had supply difficulties. Every time that word circulated that a tank truck delivery had been made, that station was swarmed with customers, who would line up their cars for blocks.

Short of gas cans, people resorted to filling unsafe containers such as two-liter bottles, ancient milk cans, and water barrels with gasoline and diesel fuel. This wasn’t allowed at the gas stations, but that didn’t stop customers from filling their fuel tanks at the station and then driving home to siphon the gas into small containers at home. It seemed that the main occupation of many people was either standing in line in front of the bank or sitting in their cars in long queues at gas stations.

Jerome spent many evenings after work driving up to thirty miles to buy staple foods. His dwindling supply of cash was spent primarily on canned foods, pasta, pasta sauce, and breakfast cereal.

Jerome’s other contribution to the family’s preparedness effort was to withdraw their savings from the bank to buy a shotgun from one of his coworkers. The only gun that he could find was a 20-gauge “Youth” version of the Remington Model 870, with a special short stock designed for small shooters. The gun was obviously well used and had a scratched stock, a dented barrel rib, and a few rust spots from previous improper storage, but it was serviceable. It cost Jerome $1,400 in the rapidly inflating dollars. As a teenager he had hunted ducks with his father’s 12-gauge Model 870, so he was quite familiar with the gun’s operation. With much searching and what he considered a huge outlay of cash, he was also eventually able to buy forty-five boxes of 20-gauge shotgun shells-an odd assortment of mostly birdshot of various sizes, #0 buckshot, and a few slugs. Some of the birdshot shells were so old that they had paper hulls, and Jerome wondered if they would still fire.

On their third weekend seed-buying trip, Jerome took his family to the Hoosier National Forest, just across the river, in Indiana, to try out the shotgun. He explained and demonstrated how to load and fire the gun, and the operating of its safety button: “This gun had a duck-hunting plug in it, so the magazine would only hold two shells. But I took that out, so now it holds five shells, plus one in the chamber. Now, let me show you something my daddy taught me. Right after you shoot one shell, after you pump the action, without taking the gun off your shoulder, you right quick shove another shell into the magazine from your bandoleer. You need to learn how to do that just by touch. That way you always keep the gun’s magazine full. And then if you ever have to shoot multiple, uhhh, ducks, then you can keep pumping from a full magazine. Okay?”

“Okay, shoot one, load one, unless it’s an emergency,” Sheila echoed.

“That’s right, ma chere.”

They shot only the oldest shells, aiming at empty soda pop cans set up twenty feet away. This gave an impressive display of the gun’s power, thoroughly shredding the cans with birdshot. Since he had only two pairs of earmuffs, one of them had to plug their ears with their fingertips. While the gun was small for Jerome, the stock was just the right length for Sheila, who was five feet two inches and weighed just 110 pounds. Sheila soon got used to shooting the gun, obviously enjoying it. Even Emily fired a few shells, and Tyree fired three shells while sitting between his father’s knees. He was thrilled. As they walked back to his car, toting the shotgun and a paper bag full of ventilated aluminum cans, Jerome said, “Well, now we’re all ready for World War Three.”

Sheila snapped back, “More likely Civil War Two.”