Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

19. A Bump in the Road

North of Coalville, Utah

April, the Third Year

Again on foot, Ken and Terry walked on the rough service road paralleling the railroad and highway. They walked two miles before making camp for the night. Nearby, the Weber River roared in a spring torrent. Ken had developed a hot spot on his left foot.

After they had set up their camp, he pulled off his boots and socks. A blister had formed on the projection at the widest part of his left foot, near the head of his right-most metatarsal bone.

As he powdered his feet, Ken told Terry, “These new boots haven’t been broken in well enough. I think that we’re going to have to take it easy and only do a couple of miles each day for the next couple of days.”

He decided that the left boot needed stretching to improve its fit. So he spent ten minutes walking around barefoot, looking around the campsite at various small rocks. He eventually found a lozenge-shaped rock that was just slightly wider than his foot. He carefully inserted the rock into his boot, wedging it in, just where he thought the boot was too tight. As an afterthought, he wet that part of the boot leather to help it stretch.

They awoke before dawn. Ken applied moleskin to the blister on his foot. As they rolled their sleeping bags and packed their gear, he consulted their Utah road map. A tiny dot on the map ahead on their route was marked “Henefer.” Just after sunrise, they skirted around the small town of Henefer, following Echo Road. The town appeared to have just a few hundred residents. Two dogs barked at the Laytons, but otherwise they attracted no interest. Their progress was slow, both because of their stealth and because of Ken’s blister. They camped up a side canyon, two miles from Morgan City. The canyon was steep, so it took them an extra half hour to set up camp, arranging rocks to make level spots for their sleeping bags. A seasonal creek trickled down the draw. Ken muttered as he pulled off his left boot. The blister was larger and starting to redden.

The next day they decided to hunker down, in deference to Ken’s blister. It was a pleasant spring day, and they had fresh water close at hand. There were a few spring wildflowers dotting the hillsides. They took turns napping and nibbled at dried fruit and jerky. In the afternoon, they watched Blue Bellies—western fence lizards—dart around the rocks. Terry thumbed through her well-worn Missal, saying, “Well, there are worse ways to spend a day.”

Ken roused her at 4 a.m. the next morning. By the light of Terry’s tiny LED light, they could see that Ken’s blister hadn’t improved, and that it now extended beyond the moleskin. So he applied a larger piece of the protective covering, hoping for some improvement.

They buried their trash beneath some rocks and erased the signs of their camp. They were back on the trail by 4:30 a.m. Their progress was slow and agonizing. Ken winced each time his left foot hit the ground. In six hours, they advanced only one and a half miles.

They set up camp in the afternoon in the tall grass of what had been the Round Valley Golf Course. In the distance, they could see that the west end of the golf course had been fenced, and now contained a flock of horned sheep. Terry took the first watch while Ken tried to sleep. The blister was very painful and looking even more red.

The next morning, Ken declared, “I think it is infected.”

He put on a clean sock and then painfully put on his boot.

“We need to find a place to stay and let that heal,” Terry suggested.

“Maybe we can do some more security work. Let’s head for a farm that reeks of prosperity,” he answered.

They made slow progress toward Morgan City. Ken was in agony. The verdant fields of the valley floor contrasted the brushy and sparsely wooded hillsides above them. Most of the fields appeared to be hay grass, but there were also some row crops. They were surprised to see and hear tractors operating.

Spotting a tall, gleaming grain silo north of town, they headed for it. The silo was at a tidy farm with several large fields. A sign at the county road proclaimed, “L. & L. Prine Farm, Hay Sales By Appointment Only,” with an 801 phone number. The stylized outline of a beehive was painted beneath the phone number. Ken knew that this symbol indicated that the family was associated with the LDS Church.

Down the lane, on the porch of the farmhouse a dog barked, already aware of their presence. They walked slowly with their rifles slung muzzles down. Another dog joined in on the barking. A teenage girl stepped out onto the porch, armed with a lever-action carbine. Another girl, slightly younger, soon joined her armed with a Mossberg .22 rifle. The front door opened again, and a portly man stepped out, carrying both a scoped rifle and a holstered revolver. “We don’t want any trouble,” the man warned.

“We’re not trouble,” Terry said. “We’re the antidote to trouble.” She and Ken made a show of laying down their rifles, packs, and web gear.

Larry Prine interrogated the Laytons for twenty-five minutes. While they spoke, Larry’s wife, Lynda, and more and more of their family emerged from the house. Soon, six children ranging from five to sixteen were lined up, listening intently. Larry was curious, and seemed to take pity on the Laytons. He read the letters of introduction from Durward Perkins and Carl Norwood.

After their interrogation, Terry asked, “How are things here in Morgan City?”

Prine leaned back against the wall casually and replied, “We’ve gotten by a lot better than most towns, since we have irrigation water from the river. We’ve prospered, but we’ve been shorthanded. When those derivatives imploded and the dollar collapsed, the town Elders panicked and got a little overzealous. They sent home every student enrolled at Weber State, and they ran all the migrant farm workers out of town. They did the same to the druggies and drunks at the halfway house. At least that move made sense. But as it turned out, we could have used the help from the college kids for the next summer’s harvest, and for security, too. If they hadn’t been in such a rush, they could have taken their pick of the students from the college. For instance, they could have kept all the ROTC cadets and criminal justice majors, and some of the ag students. That was very shortsighted of them. But like I say, everyone was very panicky when the hyperinflation kicked in and the riots started in the big cities.”

“So how have things been recently?”

Prine scratched his chin and said, “The last few months, things have been getting dicey, with the looter gangs that have come up from Nevada and west from the Plains states. Some of ’em have armored vehicles—mostly old bank armored cars. I heard that St. George and Vernal both nearly got destroyed. More than half the houses in both those towns burned down. And in Richfield there was a gang that moved in and stayed for months, just brutalizing everyone in town. Then that same gang moved on to Price, and did the same thing, and they’re still there. Hopefully the new government in Kentucky will send the Army to come and clean them out.”

“What about here, around Morgan?” Terry asked.

“This is an agricultural community, so we apparently draw from quite a large radius. Burglaries, mostly. But once in a while there’s a really wicked home invasion. Looters will sneak into farms in the middle of the night. They catch a family sleeping, and then…” He glanced down at his row of children and said tersely, “…Well, you know what happens. It ain’t pretty.”

After glancing at his wife, Larry said, “If you are willing to both put in eight-hour guard shifts, you’re welcome to stay for at least a couple of weeks while your blister heals up.”

It took a full week for Ken’s foot to heal. Then he spent many hours each day in the Prines’ fields, weeding with a hoe. He developed a technique that he called speed weeding. His goal was both to eliminate thistles and other weeds, and to toughen up his feet. He would sprint to each weed he spotted and then come to a sudden stop and start hoeing. Then he would sprint to the next patch. It looked comical, but it worked. Day after day of this exercise toughened up his feet.

Just when Ken felt that his feet were ready for him to resume their journey, Terry had an accident. After more than a week of doing her guard duty from ground level, she decided to try manning a shift from atop the Prines’ silo, just as she had done at the Perkins ranch. Coming down the ladder at the end of her shift, she reached the bottom of the caged section, turned, and absentmindedly hopped off the ladder. But unlike the ladder at the Perkinses’ silo in Iowa, the transition to the caged section of the ladder began eleven feet off the ground instead of six feet. She landed on her right knee. Recognizing the intense pain, she realized that she had broken it.

She shouted for help, and soon Ken and several of the Prine children were standing over her. “I feel like an idiot,” she said, grimacing. “There’s nothing stronger than habit. At the Perkins place, I got used to turning and jumping off the ladder just when my head got below the caged part.”

Five weeks after Ken and Terry’s arrival, Mrs. Prine’s sister Kate, her husband, Roy, and their two sons arrived from Oak City, Utah. They were seeking refuge because the town had been savagely attacked by looters just a few days before, and it was feared that the looters would return and burn the rest of the town. Their arrival made the already crowded house even more crowded. Several of the children were sleeping on the carpeted living room floor in sleeping bags.

For two weeks, Ken and Terry had been trying to get a message through to Todd Gray’s retreat group in Idaho, via the regional CB radio network, but they found that it didn’t extend any farther than southwestern Idaho and Bozeman, Montana.

Next, Ken and Terry spent several hours composing a letter. It read:

Terry then wrote out five copies of the letter and map by hand. Her hand felt cramped when she was done. She and Ken added their signatures and Ken appended his characteristic stylized “D.V.—Ps. 37” logo, which was short for “Deo Volente, Psalm 37.” For many years, he had penned this logo on all his personal letters.

They sent the letters out via couriers over the course of the next three weeks. Two of the letters went with traveling traders, two with refugees heading toward Idaho, and one with a circuit-riding Baptist minister. They hoped that at least one of them would get through.

Fort Knox, Kentucky

January, the Fourth Year

Maynard Hutchings was scheduled to present his State of the Continent speech, as part of his weekly America’s New Dawn morning show recording, for later distribution over the Red and Blue networks. (The two networks had the same staff, but different names were given for a feigned show of balance.) When Hutchings, his staff, and bodyguards arrived at the Fort Knox television studio in their Boxer APCs, they found that they were locked out. The studio staff had arrived a half hour earlier and found the door lock jammed. So they had summoned the Fort Knox MPs together, and they were furiously working on the building’s steel doors with a sledgehammer and crowbars.

One of the President’s aides jogged over to the MPs and demanded, “What’s going on here?”

“Somebody used Krazy Glue on the door locks!” the ranking MP answered.

With special funding directed by the President, the station staff had recently upgraded the physical security at the broadcast studio building. They had two teams of contractors install heavy vaultlike steel doors, and anti-vehicular barricades designed to stop suicide drivers or remotely controlled vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs). But imprudently, there had not been a corresponding increase in manpower, to provide someone to guard the building 24/7. The building was left unoccupied and unguarded between 1 and 5:30 a.m., five nights a week.

An empty tube of cyanoacrylate epoxy was found near one of the doors and bagged as evidence. The lock cylinders of every door were frozen in place. After resorting to using a cutting torch, they finally got into the building just twenty minutes before Hutchings was scheduled to go on the air.

Once inside, the studio staff found some of the inner door locks similarly jammed, but they were less of an obstacle. A couple of quick blows from a sledgehammer opened each door. The staff fumbled with flashlights, trying to determine why the lights weren’t working. They soon found that the saboteur or saboteurs had removed all the circuit breakers from the main breaker box. The floor cameras had their lenses smashed, but a spare handheld camera from the mobile van was brought in and set up on a tripod. Maynard Hutchings finally went on the air twenty-five minutes late, “due to technical difficulties,” and without his usual makeup.

Wearing a tailored suit that couldn’t conceal his ample girth, Hutchings began his speech:

The applause from the small audience was digitally augmented to make it sound like a huge crowd.

There was then a staged question-and-answer session, with low-level ProvGov cabinet staffers posing as journalists.

The first stood and asked, “Mr. President, how would you summarize our government’s relations with UNPROFOR, and how would you characterize the current security situation in the country?”

Hutchings cleared his throat and responded, again looking at his notes. “I have been gratified to see the outstanding cooperation shown by the UN Partners for Peace. Our recent victories over the bandits in Michigan and Colorado and the rapidly decreasing rates of terrorist acts and banditry indicate that we are winning and the terrorists are losing ground. Things are getting better.”

Another pseudo-reporter took to his feet and asked, “Mr. President, when will elections be scheduled?”

Hutchings beamed. “There will be regional elections real soon. But the security situation in certain parts of the country, particularly west of the Missouri River, might preclude other elections for a while.”

After the live airing, they decided to have him repeat the speech the next day and do another digital camera recording, with makeup and better preparation.

Five days after Hutchings’s speech, a firing squad from the Fort Knox Provost Marshal’s Office executed the television studio saboteur. He was the thirteen-year-old son of an Ordnance Corps major who was stationed at the fort and lived off-post in Radcliff.

The boy’s mother worked as a secretary at the television station. With access to his mother’s purse, the boy stole her keys and her address book that had the building’s alarm system passcode. Unbeknownst to his parents, he bundled up in warm clothes and slipped out of the house at midnight. He rode his bicycle to a gap in the Fort Knox perimeter fence—known to all the teenagers in their subdivision—and then rode to the station. He then spent two hours smashing equipment, stealing circuit breakers, and gluing door locks. His mother found the backpack full of circuit breakers, and he soon confessed what he’d done, explaining that he’d been inspired by seeing the movie Max Manus, about the Norwegian resistance during World War II. “I’m like Max,” he told his father. “Sometimes you have to be daring and do what you think is right, regardless of any risk of getting caught. So I decided I’d just go for it.”

Two days after the boy’s execution, the major and his wife were also executed by a firing squad. They were shot at the remote and rarely used Yano Tank Range. There were no digital photos taken to document the executions. Their bodies went into unmarked graves. President Hutchings later explained: “Parents should be held accountable for their children’s actions.”