Another pseudo-reporter took to his feet and asked, “Mr. President, when will elections be scheduled?”
Hutchings beamed. “There will be regional elections real soon. But the security situation in certain parts of the country, particularly west of the Missouri River, might preclude other elections for a while.”
After the live airing, they decided to have him repeat the speech the next day and do another digital camera recording, with makeup and better preparation.
Five days after Hutchings’s speech, a firing squad from the Fort Knox Provost Marshal’s Office executed the television studio saboteur. He was the thirteen-year-old son of an Ordnance Corps major who was stationed at the fort and lived off-post in Radcliff.
The boy’s mother worked as a secretary at the television station. With access to his mother’s purse, the boy stole her keys and her address book that had the building’s alarm system passcode. Unbeknownst to his parents, he bundled up in warm clothes and slipped out of the house at midnight. He rode his bicycle to a gap in the Fort Knox perimeter fence—known to all the teenagers in their subdivision—and then rode to the station. He then spent two hours smashing equipment, stealing circuit breakers, and gluing door locks. His mother found the backpack full of circuit breakers, and he soon confessed what he’d done, explaining that he’d been inspired by seeing the movie Max Manus, about the Norwegian resistance during World War II. “I’m like Max,” he told his father. “Sometimes you have to be daring and do what you think is right, regardless of any risk of getting caught. So I decided I’d just go for it.”
Two days after the boy’s execution, the major and his wife were also executed by a firing squad. They were shot at the remote and rarely used Yano Tank Range. There were no digital photos taken to document the executions. Their bodies went into unmarked graves. President Hutchings later explained: “Parents should be held accountable for their children’s actions.”
20. Fire Mission
“Money is a mirror of civilization. Throughout history, whenever we find good, reliable noninflated money, we almost always find a strong, healthy civilization. Whenever we find unreliable, inflated money, we almost always find a civilization in decay.”
Bradfordsville, Kentucky
December, the Second Year
Sheila Randall’s general store had prospered since the Crunch. As the proprietor of the only store in town that showed the flexibility to barter and with the courage to stay open amid the chaos, she had attracted customers from a wide radius. She had opened the store shortly after the Crunch began, soon after her husband had been murdered. A savvy barterer, Sheila had parlayed a small pre-Crunch investment in gardening seeds into a burgeoning inventory of everything from locally produced honey and sorghum to tools, ammunition, kitchen utensils, canning jars and lids, bolts of cloth, gloves, cans of kerosene, home-canned vegetables, rat traps, garden and mechanic tools, and dozens of other items. Starting with an empty storefront and with just the help of her ten-year-old son and her spry eighty-five-year-old grandmother, Lily Voison, her inventory soon grew to fill the store’s display room. Sheila then built up a substantial overstock that eventually filled the store’s windowless back room. She, her son, Tyree, and her grandmother Lily lived in the apartment upstairs.
Sheila was quick to react to changes like the ProvGov’s new currency and gun laws. One of the new gun laws was a restriction on arsenals that put a limit of 500 rounds of ammunition per home. This absurdly included .22 rimfire ammunition that had long been sold in retail boxes of 500 or 550. Sheila benefited from an exemption in the ammunition law for stocking stores. This allowed her to have up to 40,000 rounds on hand at any given time. Sheila seized this as an opportunity, offering to trade ammunition for any of her inventory. Within a week, the value of her inventory jumped, as people rapidly made trades to react to the changing legal landscape. When townsmen dumped their excess ammo in trade at Sheila’s store, it added tremendously to the volume of her business.
Recognizing the significance of the exemption for pre-1899 guns from the new registration requirements for rifles and shotguns, Sheila bought every antique gun that she could find. Her landlord, Hollan Combs, loaned her a printout of a Pre-1899 Firearms FAQ from the Internet that he had put in his file cabinet before the Crunch. It listed the serial number thresholds for guns that would allow her to determine which ones had receivers that were made in or before 1898, and those that were 1899 or later. Any modern guns required registration under the ProvGov’s new law. Sheila photocopied the FAQ on a day that the utility power was on so that she could return the original to Hollan. She posted the FAQ in document protectors, tacked up immediately below her store’s rack of antique rifles and shotguns.
As resistance to the new government grew and the Gun Amnesty deadline loomed, her customers soon migrated into two distinct camps. The first camp were those who scrambled to get rid of any guns that were banned or any supplies of ammunition that exceeded the 500-round arsenal threshold or that was of a restricted type. The other camp consisted of those who were trying to rapidly build up batteries of guns for resistance to the government. To them, the arbitrary ammo quantity limit and the distinction of the pre-1899 exemption meant very little, so they willingly traded their antique guns to Sheila for full-capacity magazines and large quantities of military-caliber ammunition. They sought calibers such as 9mm Parabellum, .45 ACP, 5.56 NATO, 7.62 NATO, and .30-06. The 5.45x39 and 7.62x39 ammunition for Kalashnikovs was also highly sought after. This put Sheila in a key position as a middleman and launched her into a blur of activity that caused her store’s inventory to rapidly shift and grow.
Since they were sympathetic to the Resistance, the local sheriff’s deputies turned a blind eye to the gun and ammunition trading that took place at the store. Many of these trades were made after-hours, in the store’s back room. As guerrilla activity grew, a huge array of guns that had been hidden—some since as far back as 1934—began to be pulled out of basements and de-greased and oiled. The citizens of Kentucky and Tennessee had long been notorious for owning unregistered machineguns. Sheila was amazed when she was asked to find magazines for BARs, Thompson submachineguns, M3 Greaseguns, M2 Carbines, MP40 Schmeissers, a Swedish K, and even a French MAT-49. Here again, Sheila acted as the middleman and prospered. She realized that she was taking some risks, but she wanted to take full advantage of the amnesty time frame. Thankfully, the amnesty in Kentucky, as the seat of the new national government, was extended to sixty days. Those sixty days were some of the most hectic days of her life.
Before the window of opportunity for the amnesty closed, Sheila had accumulated more than 6,000 rounds of assorted ammunition and sixteen antique guns. These included three early-production Winchester Model 1897 shotguns, five double-barreled shotguns from various makers, a Burgess pump shotgun, a Colt Lightning pump rifle in .38-40, nine lever-action Winchesters in various calibers, a Winchester Model 1890 pump-action .22, two Marlin lever-actions, and a Model 1894 Swedish Mauser carbine that had been rechambered to .257 Roberts. Most of these guns soon filled the rack on the back wall of the store, to the amazement of her customers. For each, she could document their “exempt” status, so she displayed them with impunity. A prominent sign above the gun rack read: “Pre-1899 Antique Guns. Trade for Ammo or Silver Coins Only!” Realizing that their exemption from the new gun law made them a rarity, Sheila put very high prices on the guns.