“Hi, Terry. Hi, Mark.” Jason knew the family from church. As he approached the confrontation, he remembered how many times he had told Mark he loved him over the years. Maybe a dozen times?
Mark and Jason had grown close amidst the homeless of Salt Lake City’s “Rio Grande” ghetto. They had spent countless hours sitting on the filthy concrete, listening to heroin addicts and schizophrenics mutter about their lives and their rocky relationships with God. He and Mark had seen God’s apparent hand at work, over and over, as they listened to homeless men and women. Now, they stood on new ground, outside the black metal gates of the Homestead.
“We didn’t know where to go,” Mark launched into the inevitable explanation. “We’re freaked out by the trouble we’re seeing in the city. We just had a van full of gang people drive down the street shooting at houses. We knew you had lots of guns, and we thought we could ride this out for a couple of days at your place until the authorities get things back to normal.”
Mark looked across the drive at the multitude setting up tents and preparing to “ride this out” at the Homestead. “I guess we’re not the only ones with that idea, right?” Mark said hopefully.
Jason had played this conversation in his mind a dozen times since first hearing about the nukes and the stock market. He knew it would come to this. As he had done many times before in business and in life, Jason reached down inside, envisioned a knob on his heart and turned the knob way down.
Jason had worked hard to grow his heart over the last few decades, expanding his humanity far beyond the sum of the traits that had been given him at birth. He suspected his personality resided somewhere along the slope of the Asperger’s spectrum. He hated crowds. He liked being alone. He enjoyed project work more than being around people. Despite that, like a monk wearing a hair shirt, Jason forced himself into heavy human contact every day. However, when it was necessary, he could put steel in his back.
Jason knew he played a dangerous game when he turned that knob on his heart down; it was a game of chicken between the ties of humanness and the Devil himself. He also knew God stared directly into that tension, that He somehow occupied it. Under the eyes of God, Jason sensed that it was neither selfish nor inhuman to face suffering and refuse to blink.
“Mark, first of all, this almost certainly isn’t a passing thing. This situation will get far worse and it’ll stay bad for a long time. I want you to know this, and I beg you to believe me because the chance that your family will survive depends on you taking this seriously.”
“What?” Mark looked confused. “Are you saying all these people can stay here and we can’t?”
“Please, Mark, hear me out before you speak, okay?”
“Fine. But that’s pretty hard to swallow.” Mark physically choked back his desperation while anger played across his face. Then a primal urge to ingratiate himself—to somehow finagle a way past the black gate – took over and Mark’s eyes shifted back and forth, searching for an argument.
Jason held out his hands, palms up. “All these people behind me have spent the last five years preparing for this day, and they built up this place for their families.”
“You never asked us to join in all this. We would’ve helped!” Mark blurted out.
“True, but it wasn’t my decision to make alone. For whatever reason, I never put you forward to be a part of this group. I have to live with that. But, Mark, you’re fighting me when you should be listening to me. You need to get out of Salt Lake City and get someplace rural. Maybe somewhere you have family. You need to do it right now.”
Mark’s eyes narrowed. “So that’s it. That’s where your fellowship ends?”
“I suppose that’s one way to say it. I’m sure you won’t understand, but I’m praying for you and your family.” Jason could feel his grip on that knob to his heart weaken.
“Let’s go, guys.” Mark gathered his family and walked back down the street to their car. His wife looked back, angry and bewildered.
Jason turned to Ron. “One down. Two hundred to go.”
“Fuck me,” Ron replied, “I don’t know how you can do that.”
“Me neither.” They both laughed, trying to shake the tension. Jason suddenly wrapped his arms around Ron, hugging the massive, hairy man like he was hanging onto a barrel in the ocean.
The knob trembled but Jason held. He let Ron go and turned away. As he walked back up the drive, he took a deep breath.
“Motherfucker,” Jason whispered to himself, speaking his tension into the fall afternoon.
Two hours later, Jason pulled out of the Homestead gates in his Ford F-350. Driving around town in a Tesla or a Range Rover would draw attention and could get him robbed or killed. He hadn’t been off the property in a few days and this might be the last time he would take a drive around town.
He glanced up at the sky, exceptionally grateful for the chance to take this drive. He had four children still “out there” and one of those four, hopefully, would be landing at the Salt Lake airport any minute.
One of Jason’s daughters was married to an Air Force medic stationed in northern California. His oldest boy served in the United States Marine Corps, deployed in Iraq. His seventeen-year-old son had been visiting Jenna’s grandparents on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington and, hopefully, was on his way home by car. His daughter Emily had caught, quite possibly, the last flight departing Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended medical school at Johns Hopkins.
He had begged her to get on a plane for a couple of days, but the flights had been booked solid. Jason used every bit of pull he had with his American Express Black Card and a huge block of SkyMiles to finagle her ticket. He had no idea how the plane would be landing without electricity at the airport. He decided they must have back-up generators.
Four hours earlier, Emily called him from the plane. She had boarded and the doors were closing. Jason had literally done everything he could to avoid having a daughter stuck in the midst of twelve million confused, hungry East coasters.
When Jason and Emily visited Johns Hopkins years ago, he had huge misgivings. While it might have been the preeminent med school in the country, there was nothing posh about the neighborhood surrounding Johns Hopkins. Tucked up against Baltimore, the level of obvious crime scared him, even though he had grown up near the gangs of southern California himself.
When Emily had been accepted at Johns Hopkins, Jason put together a multi-tiered escape plan in case the world ever went through a collapse. It had been the weirdest thing Jason had ever done with his money, so he kept the plan secret from everyone he could.
Option Number One, thankfully the option that had ultimately panned out, had been for Emily to board a plane immediately when things got funky. This option led to a couple of instances where Emily had missed class due to “false alarm” trips back to Utah: once, when there had been a bad flu virus and another when the stock market took a big, but recoverable, downturn. Jason felt sheepish, like a tinfoil-hatted survivalist, when things returned to normal both times. Emily wisely lied to her friends about the true reason for her unscheduled trips home.
Option Number Two had been the “Escape Pod,” as Emily called it. Over the course of two trips to Maryland, and countless hours of research, Jason engineered a plan for Emily to drive from the East Coast to Utah. This prepper escapade cost him about twenty-five-thousand dollars, a price he had been happy to pay to buy his daughter some hope of making it out of the East if society’s bubble burst. All the equipment he bought now sat moldering in a “Storage Suite” in the Hampden EZ Storage close to the Johns Hopkins campus.
He thought about the Escape Pod as he drove toward the airport. Somebody was going to be a happy camper when they looted that place. The plan was for Emily to back her SUV into the storage unit, connect the trailer to the hitch, toss everything into the cargo compartment and drive like hell westward. The trailer carried a pair of ultra-light motorcycles that had been purchased based on two qualifications: could they go a long way on little gas, and could they support large panniers?