It took them half the day to get the truck and camper loaded. Jacquelyn hoped the list had been complete. Looking at her home, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she would never see it again. Tom came trudging out of the house in full military kit: gun belt, chest rig, bump helmet, magazines, handgun, and an AR-15 rifle in his hands. He scanned for threats as he crossed the front yard.
Jacquelyn almost laughed, thinking that it was a little early for her neighborhood to be considered a “threat zone.”
“Look who’s a badass now,” she joked. Tom was a member of the Homestead Quick Reaction Force, or QRF, and that meant he had done hundreds of hours of firearms training. Guns were a big part of Tom’s life, but Jacquelyn had never seen him in full kit. The part of her brain that clung to the world of parent-teacher conferences and talk therapy recoiled at his ultra-macho outfit. The other part of her brain, the one that had prepared for a disaster, and learned how to make cheese and to bottle apricots, pushed back, reminding her the stock market had crashed, two nukes had exploded, and big cities around the country had dissolved into chaos.
Seeing Tom like this brought up all kinds of feelings. She knew her husband to be a competent man, repairing things around the house, fixing cars, building parts for his guns in his garage machine shop. She also knew him to be a dork. He rarely remembered to take out the trash on Wednesdays. He sang badly to the radio, usually screwing up the lyrics, and his personal hygiene left something to be desired. Unless she insisted, he neglected to cut his toenails, pluck his ear hairs and wear deodorant. In some ways, she thought of him as another one of her children.
Soon, this man might be the only thing standing between her children and starvation. The thought sent a shiver down her spine. It wasn’t that Tom couldn’t protect them; she had it on good authority he was an excellent shooter. What terrified her was the slim margin between life and death that real calamity might bring. All her money was on Tom. He was Plan A, B and C. Never before had she been forced to so completely rely on her husband.
Over the years, she had earned more than her fair share of the income. Tom treated her well. She couldn’t complain. But she felt like she was the smart one in the marriage. Most of the time, she felt like Tom had no idea what she even did during the day.
Marrying him had been the right decision. Looking back, she loved the life they had cobbled together. But that was then, when the world made sense. Back then, when a kid was sick, the medical insurance would kick in. Back then, if they saw someone lurking in the neighborhood, they called the cops. Back then, if she and Tom weren’t getting along, she could go stay with her mother for a few days. Now all they had was each other.
Tom walked around the truck, doing a last-minute mechanical check. When he reached the passenger door, he opened it.
“You drive, please.” Jacquelyn slid across the bench seat and got behind the wheel. Before pulling the door closed, Tom laid his rifle across his lap, minding the muzzle and checking the kids in the back seat.
Maybe in this new world, Tom was the ultimate breadwinner after all—a skilled protector and a man who understood how things worked. In any case, he was her man and she knew she could do a hell of a lot worse.
She fired up the old truck and they rolled away from their family home of ten years. Tom had her go across town on side streets, and soon they began moving up the hill toward the Ross Homestead. They saw nothing more threatening in town than a few broken stop lights.
Ross Homestead
Oakwood, Utah
Jeff and Tara Kirkham arrived at the Homestead in their minivan, pulling a trailer stacked with supplies.
As soon as he planted his family in the Homestead barracks, Jeff switched into full non-commissioned officer―“NCO” mode. He wasn’t going to wait around for a committee to decide the fate of his family. He would go to work and make it happen. At that moment, it meant burning up the phone lines.
“Hey, Alec. What’s up, dude?”
“Hey, Jeff. You ready for the end of the world?” Alec Hammer had spent the previous ten years as an Army Ranger and a CIA contractor.
“Roger that,” Jeff replied. “I’m just waiting for you to get over here so we can spool up and get this party started.”
“You at your place?”
“Negative. I’ve got us set up in a hard point with a bunch of indigenous folks who we’ll need to run through their paces. Are you ready to get to work?”
Alec took it in. “Are you serious? Do you really have a plan for this?”
“Affirmative,” Jeff replied. “Why are we still talking about it? Grab your wife and your gear and get over here. I’ll text the address. Write it down in case comms go south.”
Alec continued, “Yeah, I was just kitting up. I thought I’d call a few guys and maybe get together… figure out a nice little farm somewhere we could vacation for a few weeks.”
“I got something like that going on up here in Oakwood. It’s a bunkered-up community of survival types with a shit-ton of food, water and solar. They’re welcoming Special Operations Forces guys with open arms. You bring the gun; they bring the grub sort of thing. Operators and their families. You in?”
“Hell, yeah, I’m in. Let me call a few guys and I’ll put together some more dudes. You good with that?”
“Yep. We’ll take all Tier One and Two operators plus anyone with legit combat experience. Combat-experienced Marines too. SEALs. Air Force Para-rescue. TACPs. Of course, Rangers and Green Berets. I’ll take as many shooters as you can muster.”
“I’m on it. Text me the address and I’ll start sending you resumes.”
“Don’t bother waiting for my say so. If you think they’re good, I’ll take them.”
“Okay. I’ll come up with my wife tomorrow morning, hopefully with a bunch of other guys. I’ll see you tomorrow, Master Sergeant.”
“See you then.” Jeff hung up.
After a half-dozen calls like that, Jeff was satisfied that he could bring in at least a dozen SOF veterans. That would make up the core of what he wanted: a two-hundred-man army. Training the civilians would take some time and he would have to pull men from somewhere other than just the Homestead. The Homestead had some good enough shooters—they had been training for years—but they only had around a hundred people who were gun-capable and Jeff admitted to himself that a good chunk of them weren’t going to be worth a damn in combat, at least not at first.
He anticipated that a lot of the Homestead men would crumple at the sudden change of lifestyle. Going from cushy modern society to living in the dirt and eating weird food would flip the “depression switch” on a lot of folks. For some, it would be permanent. Other guys would fold under combat stress, and the vast majority would struggle at the moment of pulling the trigger, if it came to that. But all that was de rigueur for a Green Beret. He had trained indigenous fighters all around the world and the same factors applied to men everywhere.
Jeff recalled his earliest training as a Green Beret—learning that all animals have a strong aversion to killing their own kind. Even rattlesnakes and piranha elect to posture when fighting rather than killing members of their own species. Likewise, all men have a deep-seated resistance to aiming their rifles at one another and pulling the trigger. In his book, On Killing, the author collected data from wars throughout history and less than fifteen percent of soldiers would fire their weapons at the enemy in the heat of battle. That resistance to killing could be trained out of men, but it would take time and ammo. At the end of the day, Jeff figured he would be lucky if he could get thirty actual shooters out of the hundred or so citizen gun owners of the Homestead.