Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

During the “Prayer and Praise” time before the class began, when prayer requests were made, a black teenager who the Laines didn’t recognize stood up, and announced: “You folks don’t know me-or us. My name is Shadrach Phelps. My friends and I would appreciate your prayers. The three of us come from an orphanage over in Rio Arriba County that was closing down. We don’t have anyplace to go, and we’re looking for work around here, even for just room and board and hay for our horses. We’re all hard workers; we each got our own horses and tack. We can buck hay all day long, split wood, butcher deer, and we know which end of the shovel goes in the ground. Oh, and a-course we’re Christians. We’re trusting in God’s providence. Thing is, we all want to get hired on somewhere together; we’re tight, so we don’t wanna split up. Anyway, again, we’d appreciate your prayers.” Phelps gave an embarrassed grin as he sat down. As he did, there were murmurs throughout the classroom.

After the Sunday school class, the Laines approached the Phelps boys. They were talking with a widow that Lars recognized as the owner of a ranch near Bloomfield. Shad Phelps was gesturing, pointing to his friends. “I’m sorry, but if you can’t take all three of us, then I’ll have to say no, but thank you.” The woman nodded and turned away. Lars approached Shadrach Phelps and shook his hand. He looked Shad in the eye and pronounced, “My father always used to say, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, then go together.’ I’d like you young men to come work for me and my wife, at our ranch. I think that we’ll go far, together.”

Hiring the boys was a straightforward arrangement, but feeding their six horses was a bit more complicated. When Lars and Beth first took over the ranch, they found that Tim Rankin had not done a very good job of maintenance. The little brush and roller painting that he had done had left copious spatters, and the spray-painting had left obvious overspray. The elder Laines’ saddles were still there, but Rankin had “borrowed” and never returned their girth straps as well as several horse pads and blankets. At least Rankin had been vigilant about poisoning the mice and pack rats, and he had done a decent job of weed control in the pastures.

Lars and Andy were both away on active duty when Tim Rankin moved into the house. When they asked about their father’s guns, Rankin said that he hadn’t found any in the house. This made Lars and Andy suspicious, because they knew that their father owned several guns. Since these guns had mostly sentimental value, they didn’t push the issue with Rankin, who pled, “Well, if they were in the house, they musta been burglarized before I ever got there. There were a lot of strangers in the house after your dad passed on: the paramedics, the cops, the coroner, and probably more. Any one of them could have lifted your dad’s guns.”

When Tim Rankin left, there were still two tons of year-old alfalfa hay in the hay barn and about three tons of baled straw in the stable loft. As soon as his job offers to the Phelps boys were accepted, Lars started to make inquiries about hay, grain, and firewood. After much searching and dickering, he bartered a mint-condition U.S. $5 gold piece in exchange for nine tons of alfalfa, five cords of Pinyon Pine firewood, seven salt blocks, and two hundred pounds of molasses-sweetened COB-a mix of cracked corn, rolled oats, and barley. Lars felt that he got the worst end of the deal, because gold was then selling for $8,460 per ounce. Since not even counting its numismatic value, the $5 gold piece contained almost a quarter ounce of gold, Lars felt cheated.

The ranch’s pair of fifteen-acre irrigated pastures were in decent shape, but to be useful to their full capacity once again, they needed to be reseeded. The local feed store still had some sacks of orchard grass pasture blend seed on hand. It took some dickering, but Laine was able to get fifty pounds of the seed blend in exchange for three silver quarters and a box of fifty .22 Long Rifle cartridges.

Laine soon put the Phelps boys to work, broadcasting half of the sack of seed with a hand-cranked broadcaster, primarily in the pastures’ many bare spots. But the more difficult work came in the next two weeks, when they laboriously raked the seed into the soil. They also had to be vigilant in scaring off any passing birds until after the seed had sprouted. Like so many other things that had previously been taken for granted, grass seed had become a precious commodity.