But, after decades of the world not ending, the prophetic warning tapered off. These days, the Mormon Church made a concerted effort to sound more mainstream, and talking about the end of the world from the pulpit was definitely not mainstream.
Still, when a prophet speaks in the Mormon faith, his words are immutable and eternal. Even though Church leaders weren’t talking doom and gloom as much anymore, the old prophecies about the fall of the United States were definitely on the minds of the four men standing around the generator.
Jimmy’s next-door neighbor Thad said, “Well, at least we all have our gardens and food storage.” The guys laughed to be polite. Thad worked as some kind of lawyer, and he regularly made off-color comments in Gospel Doctrine class on Sunday. He was one of those guys who didn’t seem to know when he was saying something that rubbed people wrong.
Disobedience was nothing to joke about. Even ignoring “stale” commandments, like the commandment to have a year’s supply of food and to plant a garden, wouldn’t be taken lightly by a faithful Mormon. Every man in the circle knew that none of them had gardens, and they could also guess that nobody had a proper year’s supply of food, either.
Last year, on the deer hunt, Jimmy’s brother talked a lot about the Church and food storage. He had been asked to volunteer as the Ward Emergency Preparedness Coordinator, and part of that job was to inventory the food storage of ward members. At the end of his survey, he had discovered that less than ten percent of ward members had a year’s supply of food, and less than twenty-five percent had a three-month’s supply.
The Church, as an institution, had been backing away from preparedness, too, Jimmy’s brother confided. Most of their food storage centers east of the Mississippi were being shuttered, and the amount of food at the Bishop’s Storehouse had been dialed way back. The big grain silos, owned by the Church in Salt Lake and Ogden, sat largely empty.
If his brother was correct about the Church dialing back, it gave Jimmy some peace. If the Brethren had backed away from emergency preparedness, then it probably meant the Apocalypse and the Second Coming were still a long way off. The leaders of the Church were prophets, after all.
Jimmy thought about his own woefully insufficient food storage. They had only what his wife had set aside in canned food and Jimmy suspected it was precious little. He looked at his watch and did a quick calculation.
The Costco in Salt Lake City had already opened, since it typically opened at 7:00 a.m.. The only reason Jimmy knew this was because he had volunteered to buy a birthday cake a couple of times at the office and he had hit the Costco on his way to work.
Right then and there, Jimmy decided to skip work and head to Costco. This would be the day he would buy his year’s supply. He tried running the numbers on what it would cost compared to the limit on his American Express card, and he kept coming up against numbers that he simply did not know.
How many cans of food would his family eat in a year? What did a can of food even cost? How much toilet paper did his family use?
He would have to ask his wife. The thought of asking his wife stopped him in his tracks. She would reply with a million questions, challenge his decision, and then try to get him to do something that she wanted done. To heck with that.
Jimmy looked at his watch again. “Sorry, boys, I’ve got some stuff to do.”
“No work today?” Thad asked.
“Don’t think so. Without the computers running, I don’t see how I can get anything done.” Jimmy thought briefly of the real estate closing, knowing it would be postponed. “See you later, fellas.”
With Jimmy heading toward his wife’s big SUV, the guys returned to staring at the generator.
When Jimmy pulled onto Hartwell Avenue, the last turn to Costco, he uttered a rare expletive.
“What the freak!?”
Cars were parked up one side of the street and down the other. People were even parking on 300 West and walking two blocks to get to the store.
Jimmy parked on the little road behind Home Depot and made his way to the Costco parking lot on foot.
He had never seen anything like it. There were probably three thousand people, all standing in front of the store. The tide of people wasn’t moving. Someone at the front was shouting and the crowd began shushing one another, trying to hear what was being said.
An invisible person at the front of the massive crowd, presumably a store manager, shouted at the top of his lungs, “I’m sorry, folks. We’re closed…”
The crowd’s reaction sounded like a combination of a wave hitting the beach and a bear growling. The shushing began again and the noise dropped.
“We can’t run our credit card machines and we don’t have lights.” The emotion of the crowd again rose up, drowning out the manager. The shushing, mingled with the buzz of angry voices, restored silence.
“Please come back a little later today…” Then the angry roar overwhelmed all meaningful communication.
As Jimmy made his way back to his wife’s SUV, the faces around him triggered a primal sense of foreboding in his gut. He had never seen people this freaked out. He actually feared a little for his own safety, even in broad daylight. He hurried back to the Suburban but got distracted by his cell phone buzzing.
It was a text from his wife. “Where is my car? I have to take Taylor to school and her backpack is in the SUV. Why’d you take my car without asking?”
The bile in Jimmy’s stomach turned. He said a silent prayer and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Fulton Residence
Sacramento, California
Robbie Fulton had been enjoying a rare interlude at home in Sacramento when California imploded.
As a union representative and political mover and shaker, Robbie traveled more than two hundred days a year working politicians, the unions and other special interest groups. If he had been out of town when things went crazy, his wife would have been lost without him.
The governor had been right about Los Angeles rioting if the power went out. But the Cowboy Governor, as Robbie had begun to call him in his head, had no way to predict a nuclear attack on his state, and they had all failed to foresee the racially-fueled meltdown of every major metropolitan area in California big enough to have low-income housing.
That morning, Robbie called in via satellite connection to participate in a Governor’s Working Group. There had been more than thirty California political functionaries on the conference call. Robbie just listened.
Each new tidbit of information on the call was more terrifying than the last. The state representative from FEMA knew the most about conditions across the nation. While the initial power failure and nuke attack had struck the West Coast, the East Coast had a growing catastrophe of its own.
Without any obvious cause, rolling blackouts ravaged the Eastern seaboard from Ontario to South Carolina. Harried authorities at FEMA and Homeland Security could only speculate that the Russians had jumped at the chance to unleash the same malware virus they used against Ukrainian power companies in 2016. Government agencies stopped short of accusing Russia for the nuclear attack because there was no evidence, but it seemed increasingly likely that the Russians were using hackers to shut down power plants in the East, ensuring a full-blown national meltdown.
The NASDAQ and the NYSE stock exchanges were barely running; they would come alive only to have their automated emergency algorithms shut them back down, triggered by massive sell-offs of stock.
Of the top twenty property and casualty insurance companies insuring California, only two hadn’t gone into free fall in the brief moments when the stock exchanges were operating. Several of the massive reinsurance companies that backed those insurance companies had tanked in the international stock markets. An unimaginable quantity of capital had gone to “money heaven” overnight because of the Los Angeles nuclear attack. The markets were anticipating trillions of dollars of loss due to the fires and civil disorder appearing on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Most property insurance didn’t cover a nuclear attack, but almost all property and casualty insurance covered rioting and fire. The markets were betting that insurance companies wouldn’t get out of Los Angeles alive.