“If we do nothing to stop it, the neighborhood and this property will be overrun by hungry people who will loot our homes, take everything we have, and leave our families to die. I believe that will happen in a matter of days, not weeks.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” the bishop said, his mouth agape. “You’re not planning on shooting people, right?”
Jason preferred to get bad news out front. This approach had served him well in business and it had become his knee-jerk reaction during tough conversations.
“If we haven’t shot and killed someone by the end of the week, I’ll be surprised.”
The bishop sat back with an audible huff. He rubbed his eyes. “It can’t be coming to this…”
“Bishop, we have a powerful shortwave radio. You’ve seen the antennas. Do you know what our ham guys are telling us about the world? They’re telling us that tens of thousands are dying in the big cities. Salt Lake is better off than most, but I don’t think the Church planned for this. They don’t have silos of grain waiting for a catastrophe on this scale. We’re better off here because of the Church, yes, but we’re not safe. We’re not safe at all. What’re you hearing from Church headquarters?”
Bishop Decker looked like someone had gut-punched him. He thought about the question for a moment. “The Brethren are communicating with us through ham radios on the stake level. You remember: a stake is made up of five to ten wards. Each ward is about three hundred members. A stake is about fifteen hundred to three thousand members. The stake president has been talking to Salt Lake City—Church headquarters—every day.”
Jason knew what stakes and wards were. He had spent the first half of his life in the Mormon Church, but he got the bishop’s point. The Mormon Church was at least communicating to some degree.
“Our stake emergency communications coordinator talks with church headquarters, and church headquarters talks to FEMA.”
Jason sat forward. He was particularly interested to know what FEMA was doing. There had long been rumors in the hard-core prepper community that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would be a tool of oppression, used in a crisis to dismantle the Constitution and enslave Americans. Jason didn’t personally buy into that fear of government, but he had been wrong before. If FEMA was becoming a threat, he would like to know.
Bishop Decker continued, “The Church is telling our stake president that FEMA can’t give a definite timeline for when assistance will arrive. Headquarters tells us the same thing each day: “rely on your own food storage, take care of each other, avoid panic.” I wish I had more to tell you, but that’s all we’re getting.”
It was about what Jason expected. Salt Lake City might be the last place FEMA would focus. For one thing, Utah had been a bastion of conservative electoral votes. Few people in the bureaucratic agencies of the federal government cared much for Utah.
More important, perhaps, was that Utah stood a good chance of helping themselves. The state had agriculture, a fairly competent state government, and it had the Mormon Church. The chance of Utah feeding its own was certainly better than Chicago, Baltimore or Atlanta.
If there was some nefarious federal scheme to turn the U.S. into a globalized, Socialist enclave, the odds of Utah submitting to federal authority, given that the state had more guns than pine trees, were long odds indeed. Jason continued, “So nothing new from Church headquarters? Could you please let me know if you hear anything?”
The bishop nodded, obviously wishing the Church would give him more to work with.
Jason turned back to the issue of defense. “My guys can maintain defense up on the ridge behind our neighborhood. Soon, those fifty or so people mulling around in front of the barricade down on Vista View Boulevard are going to become a thousand people, then maybe ten thousand. When that number gets big enough and hungry enough, they’re going to march through us like cockroaches on their way through a cafeteria and they’re going to clean us out.”
“I can’t believe the police would let that happen,” the bishop argued.
“When’s the last time you saw a police officer?”
Decker looked at Jason and nodded, conceding the point. “I need to go talk to my bishopric counselors. I’ll try to reach the stake president and see what he thinks we should do next.”
“Bishop, a couple more things to think about. I can arm and train about a hundred and fifty men if you provide the men. They would answer to the command of our Special Forces leader, Jeff Kirkham. You and I could save a lot of lives if we gathered the entire stake, and maybe the stake down on Parrish Street. If we got the stakes involved, and gathered a hundred more men, we could move our barricade down another half mile and get a lot more neighbors protected behind our security perimeter.”
Jason could tell Bishop Decker was overwhelmed and that too much had been dropped on him too soon. But he needed the Mormon leaders to take security seriously; their help would radically increase everyone’s survivability. Jason wanted to push the line of defense farther down the hill, farther away from the Homestead.
“Bishop, how about you and I meet every morning around this time? Maybe we should include your counselors.”
The bishop nodded, got up and drifted toward the door. “Thank you for the water spigot,” he said over his shoulder as he walked out of the conference room. He pivoted, like he was forgetting something, shook Jason’s hand, and wandered back down the drive.
Alena was facing a situation she had never considered. On the gurney before her was a grown man who could possibly die in a matter of days just because he had slipped with a knife. Without antibiotics, did people actually die from bad cuts? She knew it to be true, but she had never seen anything like it in her career as a nurse.
“We’ve got to get this man to a hospital,” she said to Doctor Larsen. “He needs to be stitched up and put on a course of Cipro.”
The doctor shook his head, “I hear you, Alena. That’s what we would’ve done last week, but I think the drive down to the hospital in town would be riskier than the infection. I took a look this morning, and there were half-a-dozen fires between here and the hospital.”
“So what’re we going to do about antibiotics? Do we have any here? And what about anesthesia?”
“You’re going to laugh,” Larsen said. “We do have antibiotics here, but they’re all fish antibiotics.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.
“Nope, I checked them out myself before Ross started buying them in bulk. They work just like the pharmaceutical-grade stuff. Maybe there’s a bit of fish food in there, too,” Larsen joked, but Alena wasn’t in a joking mood.
“And the anesthesia? You guys didn’t buy fish-grade anesthesia, too, right?”
“Sorry, no,” Larsen answered, put in his place by the nurse. “But let’s not use anesthesia, anyway. Not for sutures, not anymore. Old boy over there,” he motioned to the cobbled-together exam table with the unhappy gentleman holding his bloody hand, “can get his stitches the old-fashioned way, a shot of whiskey and a leather bite-strop.”
“You’re joking again, right?”
“Not a joke.” Larsen smiled. “Whiskey’s right over there on the shelf.”
“Seriously, Doctor Larsen, we’re not giving a patient whiskey,” Alena said flatly. “It’s a diuretic.”
“Why don’t we let him decide? You need me to do the stitches?”
“I can do them just fine, thank you, Doctor Larsen.” Alena turned to the shelf, looking for sutures. She found them, a plastic tub full of assorted sutures, all of them expired. What kind of person stocked up on sutures?