“Do we know what the Oakwood police department is doing? Are they covering the hospital?”
“We’ll need to do some recon on the hospital, the police station and the refinery. Either way, we should put our SOF operators to work. Otherwise, they’ll start making trouble, screwing the housewives and all. They’ll be champing at the bit to do something useful. Taking and holding a hospital and a refinery will keep them busy. Obviously, those big assets could speed up recovery later. We should keep them from burning to the ground. We can always give them back later if we feel like it.”
Jason sighed. “I hope you’re right. Otherwise, we’ll go to prison for this little caper of yours.”
“Three capers,” Jeff corrected.
“I assume you’ll be going with them on the assaults?”
“Of course.” Jeff smiled.
This mission did nothing to assuage Jason’s concerns about Jeff. He could see the logic in preserving local assets but, again, Jeff was proposing unlawful seizure of private property, plain and simple.
“Can you do your best to be diplomatic when you approach the people at those targets?” Jason pleaded. “Can you be more Bill Clinton than Joseph Stalin, please?”
“I’ll be nothing but sugar,” Jeff told him, “but I don’t think you can expect me to be Bill Clinton.”
“Yeah, probably not.” Jason and Jeff stood up and shook hands. “Good luck. Please don’t get us arrested.”
Federal Heights
Salt Lake City, Utah
It had been five days since his family had been able to shop for food, and already things felt desperate. Jimmy swallowed his pride and went door to door asking his neighbors for handouts. Some of them didn’t answer the door, even though Jimmy knew they were home. Others answered but claimed to already have given their extra food away. Once again, Jimmy felt caught behind the curve—unwilling to take care of business until it was too late. He shuffled home with two cans of sauerkraut and half a box of children’s cereal.
The day before, he and his wife had laid all their food out on the counter. At first, it looked like a lot. After just a day, Jimmy was startled at how quickly they had burned through it. As things stood, they were down to a day and a half of food, and most of it was virtually inedible. They would end up with a bunch of hard red winter wheat, but no way to grind it or bake it.
That morning, Jimmy’s wife made an uncharacteristic suggestion. “It might be time for you to take that rifle of yours and shoot a deer.”
She had always turned up her nose at game meat. In fact, she had wanted nothing to do with hunting since it had become a sore subject in their marriage—with Jimmy disobeying her wishes every time he hunted with his brother.
“You could do something useful with all that hunting knowledge you’ve been learning all these years.” She couldn’t help but take the poke.
She must have imagined that hunting one weekend a year made Jimmy an outdoorsman. He had only killed two deer in the last ten years, both of them small bucks. He had never risen above greenhorn status. The guys who knew what they were doing hunted many times a year, both in Utah and out of state. By comparison to them, Jimmy barely considered himself a novice.
“Hunting season doesn’t open for another month,” Jimmy argued out of reflex. Even as he said it, he asked himself if he really wanted to get caught behind the curve once again.
“I think you should risk it,” she said, suggesting he break the law for the first time since he had known her.
Jimmy thought of his commercial real estate license. Hunting out of season was probably a felony, and he knew that a felony would disqualify him for a real estate license when renewals came up next year.
What if he just wandered the mountains a little with his rifle? He could make the decision to shoot or not if he actually saw a buck.
Jimmy kicked those questions aside for a moment. He went downstairs to his vault and pulled out his rifle and a half-dozen shells. He dug around in his hunting bin and found camo pants, shirt and his hunting boots.
A shock went down his spine as he considered hunting in broad daylight. What if his neighbors saw him hunting out of season, even without shooting anything? Jimmy lived at the foot of the mountain, and he had seen plenty of deer over the years, pawing around their neighborhood. The safest thing for him to do, considering the risk of a hunting violation, was to walk up the mountain and hopefully drag a deer straight home. Best-case scenario, the neighbors wouldn’t call the wildlife people to report him—the phones weren’t working, and the wildlife police probably weren’t working, either.
But committing a crime in full view of the ward froze Jimmy in his tracks. How could the bishop give him a calling of responsibility if he was a known poacher? Jimmy didn’t aspire to be bishop or anything high up, but he could imagine being relegated to minor callings for years, like membership clerk or elders’ quorum secretary, until the stink of his poaching wore off.
Jimmy stuffed his boots and cammies to the bottom of his pack and then added a water bottle and the rifle shells on top. He walked out the back door, looked around, then made his way around out to the street with the rifle tucked along his leg, hoping a casual observer wouldn’t notice.
He walked across the street and slipped between two neighbors’ homes up onto the steep mountainside. He pushed hard up the hill, gasping for air, imagining the eyes of the neighbors on his back. When he couldn’t stand any more exertion, he headed across the slope toward a small fold in the hill.
Jimmy plunked down on a rock, undressed and traded out his street clothes for his hunting clothes. The south-facing slopes of the Wasatch Range were almost completely devoid of plant life. Geologically, Jimmy knew this had been an ancient beach when Lake Bonneville filled the northern third of Utah. About fifteen thousand years ago, the huge lake busted through the Snake River Valley in Idaho and dumped all but a fraction of its water into the Pacific Ocean.
What had been left behind on the foothills of Salt Lake City looked like the bottom of a lake—stony and devoid of topsoil. Over fifteen thousand years, only the shady sections sprouted enough brush to cultivate topsoil. The south-facing sides burned to a crisp every July when the sun blazed, leaving them as fertile as Mars.
Jimmy’s hillside definitely had more in common with Mars than he would have liked. Where deer hid in this terrain was anyone’s guess. Now dressed to hunt, Jimmy marched upward again, hoping to get some elevation so he could look up-canyon for deer.
He reached a high outcropping overlooking the bottom section of Tellers Canyon. His breath caught in his throat. Every direction he looked, he saw other hunters. While his gut sank, he did his best to take it all in. Across the entire canyon, he guessed he could see more than three hundred hunters milling about, even though hunting season was almost a month away.
Mule deer, Jimmy remembered vaguely, required about one square mile per deer. So that meant he was looking at probably ten hunters per deer—assuming the deer hadn’t headed for higher elevation at the first sign of a hundred stumbling foragers.
Once again, he found himself behind the curve.
Desperate to bring something home, Jimmy scoured the land for anything edible. Rabbits. Squirrels. Turkeys. Though his rifle was wrong for hunting small game, he would be happy with anything. His desperate hunter’s vibe went out before him, like a dark wave of warning to animals. He didn’t see so much as an ant.
Jimmy had no clue what kinds of wild plants might be edible. He knew that stinging nettle and cattails were edible, and the early Mormon pioneers had survived winters by eating sego lily bulbs. But either the plants weren’t there in Tellers Canyon, or Jimmy didn’t recognize them. He walked for three hours and found nothing.