Before long, they found a suitable cave that would prove to be very tight quarters, but would keep them dry and, they hoped, undetected by anyone passing through. They decided to drop their packs to lighten their load on the way back so that they could move quickly with Megan, Jean, and Leo before complete darkness. Malorie suggested that they just take what they needed from the carts and leave them cached well out of sight so that they could move faster and bed down before nightfall. Joshua replied, “Good idea. Megan, may I carry your pack? This way you can assist Malorie with the boys. I’ll grab the tarps and extra blankets. I’m not sure about you, but I got cold last night.”
“Not me,” said Malorie. “I was too busy with all of the squirming going on in my sleeping bag!” as she reached out to tickle Leo, who squealed with laughter.
The next morning, everyone awoke and ate something. Megan wanted to start good habits, so she had the boys brush their teeth with the minimal amount of toothpaste immediately after breakfast, and then everyone gathered around and took turns reading a chapter of Scripture followed by prayer. It helped the morning feel more normal and familiar.
Megan and Joshua set out to retrieve the carts from their cache. It gave them a chance to sit, talk, and share their thoughts—something that they had not done since fleeing D.C.
“You know, Megan my love, the last time we got to sit and talk was at the Agency. It seems like a lifetime ago. I have to tell you, I really feel cheated by this whole Crunch.”
“Really? How is that?”
“Well, I knew that I was falling in love with you, and of course I was thinking marriage, but it takes time to reach that decision, you know what I mean?”
“I do. As a matter of fact, I was in no hurry to get remarried. I was convinced that as soon as a guy found out that I had two sons, he would bolt. And even if he did stick around, who would walk me down the aisle now that my papa passed?” Megan traced a pattern in the forest floor between her feet with the stick she was holding. “That seems silly, doesn’t it?”
“Not to me it doesn’t. I want to hear your thoughts on marriage—I kinda like you.” He elbowed her and she giggled. “Wow, when was the last time you laughed?”
“Just now!” She laughed again, then looked away as a whitetail deer bounded back into a thick clump of brush on the other side of the open glade. “When you came along and still wanted me despite of all of the turmoil in my life, I thought that I was getting that second opportunity to live life again. Then, after just six short months of a romance, we have this financial crisis and the whole stupid Crunch—it’s just not fair. Why couldn’t we just have had two years to be married? You could have taught the boys to ride bikes, I could’ve packed your lunch every day for work, and we could’ve gone for family hikes after church on Sundays—why all of this? Why now? How many couples come home to each other and don’t say a word, each one taking dinner into a separate room to watch separate television shows and chat with separate friends on social media and sleep on separate sides of the bed? They wasted their days in peacetime, and they’ll probably be the first to kill each other in the lean times of this Crunch. I just think that you and I could have done better together.”
“I am with you now and if you’ll have me, I plan on marrying you the first chance we get. And as for now, what would you say to an extended camping trip in the Olympia State Forest—no phones ringing, no high-side e-mail to check, no disgruntled ex-wives’ club clicking their tongues around your cubicle space—how does that sound?”
Megan kissed Joshua. Then they got up, found their bearings, and located the carts. Getting the loaded carts up and over the rugged terrain was not easy and took most of the day. “This should make it more difficult for someone trying to pursue us, if it was this hard for us to get these carts up here,” Megan said.
“Well, maybe, but someone doesn’t need to bring very much with them to spell trouble for us up here.”
When they returned to camp in the midafternoon, they were completely exhausted, but the weather had changed. The air was wet and almost warm, the kind of conditions that were familiar to Megan or anyone else who’d grown up in cold country as being a precursor to snow. “The snow should cover our tracks and give us a clean canvas to know if someone has been in our area. Also, it’ll be easier to track game.”
Malorie had Leo and Jean on leaf and pine needle detail. They eventually had quite a thick pad of brush down for everyone to sleep on. The cave had a narrow entrance, and they had to stoop to enter. It was a classic karst water-carved cave, but at some point the limestone formation had gone dry, leaving a chamber that varied between four feet and eight feet wide, with a gentle upward slope. The height varied between six and twelve feet, before sharply tapering at the back. The cave lacked fancy stalactites and stalagmites, but the boys still declared it “awesome.”
They squeezed the deer carts into the back of the cave. There were spots wide enough for beds down the length of the cave, with enough room to walk by them. Joshua’s bed spot was closest to the entrance, then came Malorie’s, then Megan’s, and finally the boys’. Megan and Malorie helped set up the quarters as best they could in the space they had. Once a blanket was rigged to cover the cave’s entrance, they noticed that their body heat alone—when added to the sixty-two-degree ambient ground temperature—soon took the chill off the air in the cave.
Joshua set about improving the site in small ways, such as digging a slit trench for a solid-waste latrine, improvising an overwatch position, and making a range card for everyone’s use.
“We’re going to be here awhile, so we need to be able to defend it. It likely goes without saying, but our first defense is passive. That means that we remain unseen. We’re too small a force to ward off anyone, and it won’t take any time at all for the reports from our guns to alert anyone within earshot that there are people up here. People mean possible resources to exploit, which brings me back to the first thing that I said—passive defense.”
Malorie added, “I can see a real need to go out for water, to forage for food, or to hunt. I’m assuming that our chief liabilities as far as protection would be the children. That being said, one adult is likely enough to stay here and take care of them and ‘hold down the fort,’ but if anyone needs to go out, they should have at least one adult with them.”
“I like that idea,” Megan said. “What about weapons?”
“Yeah, about that.” Joshua took off his watch cap and scratched his head. “Handguns mandatory at all times—always within arm’s reach. I’m fine with long weapons slung around your body, but definitely at the ready anytime you’re leaving camp with another adult, like you said, Mal. I’m going to see what I can fashion out of some wood and 550 cord to put the .270 in the cave up off the ground so that it’s accessible and out of the way. I think that your carbines are decent for close targets as are both of the shotguns; we’d only need to use these to defend ourselves, because if someone is out far enough that we would need the .270—”
Malorie finished his sentence, “Then we’re to be quiet and unseen in a passive defense, right?”
“Exactly!” Joshua replied. “So for day-to-day storage, the .270 will be in the shelter out of the way. Besides, a shotgun is my preferred weapon anyway.”
Megan said, “I’ll do a thorough inventory of our food and set a rations schedule for us. We’ll be dependent on fishing, foraging, and hunting for supplementing what we have. I can’t think that we have anyone that we can trade with here, so we’ll have to make what we have last.” Joshua and Malorie nodded in agreement. “There must be houses around, so I think that we should probably set up deliberate two-person patrols to find out if there are others in our AO so that we can steer well clear of them. Anyone with a house nearby is likely going to be very keen on shooting first and asking questions later of anyone approaching their turf.”