Nobody could guess the actual damage, but the sheer magnitude of the civil unrest and firestorm in Los Angeles made one wonder if L.A. wasn’t a total loss. Could the national economy suffer the complete loss of Los Angeles? In 2007, the loss of a single insurance company almost triggered the collapse of the world economy. What might happen if twenty insurance companies and several reinsurance companies went bankrupt all at the same time?
The answer to that question seemed to be playing out across America. All banks had closed due to massive runs on accounts. Nobody could get their cash out, not through the banks and not through ATMs.
The stock market holds and the bank closures sent everyone rushing to stores to get whatever they could with their cash. Within hours, every shelf on the East and West coasts was empty. Then rioting began in earnest.
The president had authorized the military to step into the inner cities nationwide. Like California, the National Guard units would need some time to spin up. In that gap, whole city centers were being looted and burned to the ground.
If people had stayed in their homes, the National Guard might have been able to help. In fact, the government had broadcast pleas for citizens to stay in their homes for the last twenty-four hours. Nobody listened. The roads were choked with refugees leaving the big cities to escape the violence and chaos of the inner cities. Every road coming out of a city was utterly packed with vehicles fleeing civil disorder. Most National Guard units turned back to their bases within a few miles, unable to get past thousands of angry and desperate refugees.
No one in the Governor’s Working Group had solutions. California was even worse than the East Coast, since Los Angeles had already been imploding for forty-eight hours. The call ended with flimsy ideas and even flimsier orders from the governor. Robbie had little hope that anyone could turn back the chaos. Like a brushfire running wild, this crisis would have to burn itself out.
Robbie’s view of Sacramento from the front yard of his uptown home belied the truth. Civil unrest consumed the guts out of the state capitol. He heard the firecracker pop of distant gunfire and smoke curled into the air from dozens of fires.
Electric power still ran in Sacramento, at least for the time being. All infrastructure—transportation, internet, water, natural gas—continued to run. Yet downtown burned, undoubtedly as a result of rioting and looting.
If utilities and services were running, they wouldn’t be for long. As morning dawned, every police officer, prison guard, military person, and civic leader would be looking at themselves in the mirror, asking the same question: “Do I do my job or do I protect my family?”
This morning, Robbie could only pray that the California National Guard would be worth a damn, but the cynical side of him suspected that the Army had become as fragile as the rest of the government.
He heard a loud roar and glanced up to see an unmuffled, late-model pickup truck race down the street perpendicular to his own. It blew past and he saw at least two men in the pickup bed. The roar of the engine faded in the distance.
Robbie shook off his malaise and went back inside. He headed to his gun safe at the back of his office and spun the tumblers, struggling to remember the code. Finally, the safe opened and he pulled out his Remington 870 Express shotgun. He broke into a new box of double-ought buck shells and loaded the magazine and the shell holder on the stock. As he loaded, Robbie reminded himself that one mistake with a firearm, no matter how slight, would end his career in the State of California. This was not the state to play fast and loose with firearms.
Many years back, when Robbie was still a union representative for the iron workers, he had taken a shooting class. Even then, he kept his guns secret. He hadn’t practiced much because it would be too easy for someone to recognize him at a shooting range and make political hay out of it. But he knew how to use the shotgun, and it gave him some comfort. Politico or not, Robbie was willing to kill someone to protect his wife and property. More so than at any other moment in his sixty years, he thought it might come to that.
Robbie placed the loaded shotgun next to the front door and went upstairs to check on his wife. She would ask some tough questions. He wished he had better answers.
Sometime during the long, tear-punctuated conversation between Robbie and his wife, the dog began barking like mad.
Robbie had originally hated that dog—a Shinu-imu or some such breed. He counted it as another useless trapping of the showcase life they lived.
The more he watched the dog, the more he thought of it as a fox. The thing displayed almost-inconceivable athleticism, able to hop around on its hind legs and make incredible jumps from a dead stop.
A fox, Robbie could respect. He came to love that dog, and it was clear the dog preferred him over the lady of the house, despite Robbie’s God-awful travel schedule.
He could hear the dog going berserk at the back sliding glass door. Robbie detoured by the front door and grabbed his 870 Express. He slid into the kitchen and looked around the edge of the glass door, using the wall as cover.
He couldn’t see anyone in the backyard. Even with Robbie standing beside him, the dog wouldn’t take his eyes off the back lawn and wouldn’t stop barking. Somebody was definitely out there.
Robbie found himself in a quandary. He knew the gun laws of California and, worse yet, he knew the judicial record of the state dealing with armed homeowners who shot intruders. In a nutshell, if you shot someone on your property, you would be lucky to keep your freedom or your home. You might lawyer your way out of trouble if you shot someone inside your house, but shooting someone in your yard was inexcusable in the eyes of California law. It would definitely land you in deep shit.
Robbie leaned the 870 Express just inside the glass door, let it go, reached over to the door lock and flipped it up.
He considered calling the police, but he knew they had their hands full and they wouldn’t respond in under an hour, if ever. Robbie took a few steps into the backyard and looked around. The dog hesitated at his leg then flew past him, running around the corner of the house.
The dog flew backward into the yard, yelping, obviously kicked. Two men came around the corner fast and moved straight for Robbie. Both carried revolvers and both revolvers were aimed at his chest.
“Hey, old man,” said one of the men. He shot Robbie twice in the chest before Robbie could take a single step toward his shotgun.
Highway 6 Roadblock
Delta, Utah
Dale Trenton, commander of the Delta Desert Patriots militia, looked out at the endless column of semi-trucks stretching beyond the horizon on Highway 6.
Dale had spent his morning talking with his prisoner, the commander of the small detachment of what he now understood were California National Guardsmen. Looking at the semis, he actually believed the commander’s story. The men he had captured were California engineers coming to get the power plant back online.
But Dale didn’t think the new information changed things. He realized the power plant was offline and that it was causing outages in California. Half the guys in his militia worked at that plant.