Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Read Philippians 4:6-7 and Psalm 46 and write them on your heart.

The commercial flights may have stopped, but there are still a few MAC flights. I also talked with a gal at the Military Travel Office, and she said that there are still flights going back and forth between Madrid and Mexico City. I will take a bus home from Mexico, if need be!!! Or I’ll get a flight to Havana and rent a row-boat. I mean it. I WILL get home. Trust in the LORD. I’ll get home, Deo Volente, but remember that we are on God’s timetable.

You are in my Constant Thoughts and Prayers,

With My Love,

Andy

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While waiting for his flight to Ramstein, Andy discovered that all of the ATMs on base were shut down. He also learned that the BX, commissary, and NAAFI store were all operating on a cash-only basis, with no checks, credit cards, EC Cards, or debit cards accepted. Only the Burger King was still taking credit cards, and because of this, it was deluged with customers.

The second evening that he was stranded, Andy stopped at the Burger King and ordered a Whopper Combo and a beer. The cashier said, “That will be ninety-six dollars, please.” Pulling out his VISA card, Laine muttered “That’s highway robbery.” A faceless voice behind him said, “Get used to it. It will be closer to two hundred bucks tomorrow.” He turned to see an Air Force major, dressed in an olive drab nomex flight suit, with his blue “p-cutter” cap tucked into one of his leg pockets. In a more distinct voice Laine replied, “Signs of the times, I suppose.”

Rio Arriba Youth Center, Gallina, New Mexico October, the First Year

Shadrach Phelps sat on his bunk in the Rio Arriba Youth Center dormitory, looking glum. He was seventeen, but the other two boys were both only sixteen, so that made him the leader. He summed up the situation to them succinctly, “Basically, we’re screwed.”

As the Crunch set in, the boys had been warned that their days at the center were numbered. The school was about to be shut down. The Rio Arriba Youth Center was originally established in the 1940s as The Phelps School for Orphan Boys. It was sixty miles north of Albuquerque, on the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest, just north of the town of Gallina. Donations from churches had dwindled, so both the staff and the number of boys had been pared down substantially since their peaks in the early 1970s. When the Crunch started, there were just nineteen boys and three resident staff members remaining at the sprawling 160-acre center.

The orphans were given a sound education and taught the value of hard work-plenty of hard work. The center included eighty acres of irrigated hay fields, which provided some cash income for the school. It had two dormitories (one of them shuttered in the late 1980s), a classroom and multipurpose building, three staff residence buildings (one of which was unoccupied), a stable, and two large hay barns.

Shadrach Phelps was lanky, and dark-skinned-undoubtedly with at least half African-American blood-but his facial features showed some other, unidentified heritage. Like the other infants that had come to the orphanage without a name, he had been given the surname Phelps in honor of the school’s benefactor, a wealthy widow from Santa Fe. She had passed away in 1962. After her death, the school was supported by church donations from fifteen different churches in New Mexico and West Texas, and the annual sale of hay. The Rio Arriba County road department sporadically filled the school’s walk-in freezer with roadkill deer. All of the boys grew up accustomed to eating venison and learned how to field dress and butcher deer as taught by Diego Aguilar, who served as cook, wrangler, haying boss, and jack of all trades for the center.

Following the announcement of a school budget crisis and the planned closing of the school, fifteen of the nineteen boys had been claimed by family members. As they packed up and left, the remaining boys without any known relatives began to despair. The departures left just Aaron Phelps, who was the headmaster’s favorite student, and the trio of Shad, Reuben, and Matthew. The headmaster made it clear that he would be adopting Aaron, but his stony silence about the other boys was devastating. The evening after Aaron moved into the headmaster’s house, Shad, Reuben, and Matthew gathered to pray and talk.