A small fishing kit. Some snares. A gill net. A toothbrush. A hank of olive drab 550 parachute cord. A little Tupperware container of salt. Some Ziploc bags and three plastic trash bags. Signal mirror. One of those Navy signal strobe lights with a spare battery. A small sewing kit. A little over twelve dollars face value in pre-1965 silver dimes and quarters. A Case skinning knife and small sharpening stone.”
He hesitated briefly, and then went on, “Let’s see, what else? Some pieces of tanned deer hide. A pocket address book. Three bandoleers of seven-sixty-two ball. Forty-seven rounds of .308 soft-points. Some granola bars. A bar of soap. A couple of camo sticks. A cable saw. Matches in a waterproof container. About seven or eight packs of damp-proof matches out of MREs. A ‘Metal Match’ fire starter. About ten trioxane ration heating bars. In the bottom of the pack I’ve got a Survival Arms AR-7 .22 rifle, stowed in its stock. Three spare magazines, and 462 rounds of .22 long rifle—a mixture of soft nose and hollow points. I may have forgotten a few odds and ends, but that’s about it.”
“No handgun?” Todd asked.
“Negative. That was going to be my next purchase, but then the economy went ballistic.”
“Sounds like you had the survival bent well before the Crunch hit, Doug.”
“Yeah, I’m a ‘prepper.’”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Are you a member of a survival group?”
“No. Last spring semester some of the cadets in our ROTC department and I talked about forming a group, but nothing ever came of it. So you have a group retreat here?”
With a frown, Todd rebuked, “For now, let me ask the questions, Cadet Carlton. If we decide it’s appropriate, you might get some of your questions answered later. It sounds as if you have some information on what is going on outside our immediate vicinity that would be of interest to us. I also need to discuss some things with my friends. Now… what I want you to do is to get up and walk slowly toward the house. You are now our guest. Once again, you don’t have to fear for your life or property. You can collect your gear later and go in peace. We’ll just leave it exactly where it is for the time being.”
They slowly walked to the house, with Carlton leading the way, five paces ahead. When they got to the house, Todd asked Mary to wait outside and watch Carlton. She stood twenty-five feet away, with the muzzle of her CAR-15 pointed toward him. Gesturing to the gun, Carlton said, “That really isn’t necessary, ma’am.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Mary replied, with her exhaled breath making a miniature cloud of fog.
After twenty-five chilly minutes, Todd poked his head out of the door.
“You can come inside now.”
Doug Carlton sat in an easy chair at the end of the living room near the stove, warming his hands and sipping a cup of instant coffee. After waiting a few minutes, Todd inquired, “Very well then, Doug, let’s hear your life’s story, beginning with ‘I was born…’.”
“My full name is Douglas John Carlton. My father was a telephone line-man and later a phone company office manager. Before that, he did two tours inVietnam with the 101st Airborne Division. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. He got out as an E-6. My mother was a legal secretary.
They wrote letters back and forth the whole time he was overseas. I guess you could say that they fell in love via correspondence. They got married just a month after he ETSed, and I was born exactly one year from the day that they were married. Every year we celebrated my birthday and their anniversary together. I was an only child. Something about a complication from when I was born prevented my mom from ever having any more kids….”
Carlton sighed and went on. “I was born and raised in Missoula. I had a pretty typical childhood, at least by Montana standards. My dad liked hunting and fishing, so I got to do a lot of both. I’ve always been mechanically inclined.
I guess I took my Erector Set and Legos too seriously as a boy.
“When I was five or six years old I was building little forts in the backyard. By the time I was ten, I had free rein at the junkyard that was a quarter-mile away from our house. The old guy who ran the place humored me by selling me scrap box-bar stock, sprockets, pulleys, and wheels and whatnot for nickels and dimes. I built pushcarts at first, and later chain drive pedal carts. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I built my first motorized go-cart. It was powered by a five-horse Briggs and Stratton engine. It’s a wonder that I didn’t get myself killed, driving those go-carts around.
“It was only natural that I wanted to study engineering. I started out at the junior college in Missoula. I tried getting into the engineering program at the University of Montana there in Missoula, but it was ‘impacted.’ So I started applying all over the place for scholarships. I got a two-year scholarship from the University of Southern Colorado. That was more than enough to make up for the higher cost of out-of-state tuition. I only paid the out-of-state fees for the first two years. After that, I had my Colorado residency, so I paid the lower resident tuition.
“The University of Southern Colorado is in Pueblo. Everyone calls it USC, which of course leads to some confusion. When I told my friends in Montana that I was enrolled at USC, they immediately thought that I was talking about the University of Southern California. Personally, I thought that our USC was the better school. I really liked the people there. On campus everybody got along, whether you were Mexican, Indian,Anglo, or anything in between. The engineering program there at USC was excellent. We called it the University of Solid Concrete, because of all the concrete architecture.
“Pueblo is essentially a blue-collar town. So the campus and town are two different worlds. Off campus, there were already some interracial problems, so I knew it wouldn’t be a good town to stick around in, during an upheaval.
“Two years ago, one of the guys in my dorm asked me if I wanted to go with him to Army ROTC Basic Camp at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Since I had grown up hearing my dad’s stories about his Army days, I was naturally interested. My dad had talked about shooting M60 machineguns and Browning .50s, and here was my chance to get trained on all that stuff, with no ROTC contract obligation. I thought ‘wow, I’m going to get paid to go shoot up Uncle Sam’s ammo and get tactical training?’ I went to go talk to the PMS, Colonel Galt, and he signed me up. It didn’t pay much for the six-week camp, but they let us keep the two pairs of combat boots that they issued us. The weather was really hot and humid, but other than that, I had a blast and I learned a lot. When I got back, I signed up for a Guaranteed Reserve Forces Duty contract with ROTC. That pays four hundred dollars a month for an MS-4. Last summer I went to Advanced Camp. That’s another six-week camp that cadets usually take between their junior and senior years.
“I liked the idea of the GRFD contract, because I knew that I wanted to work in civilian industry, rather than spending four years in the active Army. My only active duty commitment was a five-month officer’s basic course, and then six years in the Army Reserve, with two weeks of active duty training each year. I had applied for branch assignment to the Ordnance Corps with the Engineers as my second choice. But then everything collapsed and I had to bug out before my branch assignment ever came down from the Army Personnel Headquarters.
“When the dollar took its swan dive, things in the dorms at USC got strange. More than half of the dormies had bugged out by the time I left. Some of them that didn’t have cars had family members come and pick them up. Nearly everybody who bailed out left things behind, but it was amazing seeing some of the useless stuff they took with them, like computers, and stereos, and desk lamps. They just weren’t thinking the scenario through to its logical conclusion. I probably should have bailed early on too, while there might have been gas still available. But I made the mistake of sticking around an extra day, waiting to see if things were going to get back to normal. Big mistake. I should have gone didi mau and not worried about missing any classes.