“Once we got down in the storm drain, we decided to continue west in this storm drain that paralleled the street. Walking in a storm drain is a real bitch, especially with a backpack. The inside diameter is only about five feet. Terry was able to move along a lot faster and easier because she’s shorter, and consequently didn’t have to hunch over as far as me.
“One weird thing about the storm drains. The air down there was actually warmer than up on the street. Must have been the effect of the ambient ground temperature. Try as we might, we couldn’t avoid walking in the rainwater in the bottom of the drainpipe. Our feet got soaking wet and ice cold pretty quickly. After a while, we didn’t even bother keeping our feet straddled so that they’d be up out of the water. We just slogged along.
“We traveled west in the drain for several hours, keeping rough track of where we were by the number of gutter drains and manholes we passed under.
“At one point, we heard a lot of commotion and shooting above us. It was really eerie, hearing it reverberate around down there. As we passed under one gutter drain, I could hear a guy sobbing. He must have been lying right next to the grill in the gutter. I shined the light up for a second and could see that there was blood pouring down from the grill. There was a lot of it. Talk about blood in the streets!
“By four a.m., we were exhausted. About that time we came to one of those big four-way storm drain intersections. As chance would have it, this was the type with the catwalk made out of expanded metal running across the two levels. We got up on the catwalk, and found that there was just enough room for us to lie down lengthwise, positioned with our feet touching. We hung our packs and rifles on the ends of the ladders at either end. That’s where we spent the next day. Stretched out on that catwalk. We just took off our boots and wrung out our socks and hung them up to dry. After only about half an hour we started getting chilly, so we broke out the sleeping bags.
“If anything, the chaos up above got worse all through the next day. The shooting was practically constant. There must have been a lot of buildings on fire because you could smell smoke, even down in the storm drains. Occasionally, we could hear the sirens of an emergency vehicle pass overhead. Surprisingly, we actually managed to get quite a bit of sleep. We must have been pretty well wiped out.
“At about five p.m., we got our boots and socks—they were still wet—back on and climbed back down to the east-west drain. We just kept going west most of that night. We stopped awhile to catch our breath and straighten-out our backs. I practically spaced out; a real troglodyte existence. All I could hear was the echoes of our breathing and the splashes of our footsteps. I thought it would never end. Then I saw dim light up ahead.
“We stepped out of the storm drain onto the banks of the Des Plaines River. It was about 6:00 in the morning. Just between nautical twilight and civil twilight, as Jeff would call it. Because the river bottom provided good concealment, we decided to stick to it. We followed the river bottom for about fifteen minutes before I found a good place to lay up for the day. It was a big clump of willows on the bank of the river. They were plenty thick, so I figured our chances of getting spotted there were about nil.
“By then, it was getting fairly light. We just rolled out our sleeping bags and took turns sleeping. About noon, we split an MRE. It was only then that I realized that we hadn’t had anything to eat, and darned little to drink in nearly thirty hours. We just devoured that MRE. Next, one at a time, we cleaned our rifles. I’m glad that I checked on our .45s, too. Mine was soaking wet. I even had to unload the magazine and towel-dry each cartridge.
“About two in the afternoon, Terry woke me up with her hand held over my mouth. A group of about twenty people were walking right toward us, the same direction that we’d been traveling. We just held still and they passed by. They didn’t have a clue that we were there. Most of them carried guns, but they carried them slung over their shoulders like they were out deer hunting or something. They were walking through all kinds of potential ambush zones, and they were at sling arms. Just plain stupid. They obviously chose the creek-bottom route to get out of Dodge just like we did. They had no tactical training, though. They were noisy. The idiots were talking out loud in a normal tone of voice. And they were walking in a clump, no interval whatsoever. No point man, either. They were just getting out of Dodge in a hurry, in broad daylight.
“Before sunset another group came through. This one only had about ten people; same modus operandi. Traveling in a gaggle like that, one grenade could have killed half of them. It was a pretty pitiful show. I doubt that they got very far in one piece, traveling like that.
“Just as it got dark, we powdered our feet, put on dry socks, packed up, and hit the trail. We followed the river west for two days, avoiding all contact, and laid up during daylight in clumps of brush or fields of harvested corn that had been left standing. By that point, the river was starting to curve around almost due south—not the direction that we wanted to go. About 8 o’clock the third evening on the river, we passed under a railroad trestle just north of Joliet. Voilà! The tracks ran east-west. We followed the tracks west for several nights without incident.
“Knowing we had a long way to go, we just split one MRE per day. We were constantly hungry. The only extra food that we got was an occasional sugar beet that we found on the railroad ballast. They were ones that had fallen out of hopper cars. We cut these up with Terry’s Swiss Army knife. We also gleaned a few dried-up ears of corn at the edges of fields. We didn’t turn up our noses, though. We gnawed on them like crazy. You hear people talk about being hungry, but let me tell you, missing a meal or two is nothing like being truly hungry. It’s the only thing you can think about. It’s about enough to drive you nuts. I figure that we were burning several thousand more calories a day than we were taking in. We both lost quite a bit of weight.
“At one point, we came across an abandoned railroad company high-railer pickup parked on a siding. I could have hot-wired it in a heartbeat, but unfortunately, someone had either siphoned all of the fuel out of it or run it dry. With that high railer, we could have been a few hundred miles closer to Idaho in just a day. Too bad. Anyway, we pressed on.
“As we approached each town of any appreciable size, we got off the tracks and cut around them. This took a lot of extra time, but I suppose it was worth the extra effort. We heard shooting and saw buildings on fire in some of the towns.”
Terry interrupted Ken again at this point. “We had one scary incident near the town of Mendota. On the outskirts of town, we passed a sort of refugee or hobo or looter camp. They didn’t have any fires lit, and most everyone must have been asleep. Anyway, it was dark and quiet, so we were practically in the midst of the camp before we realized it. Ken called me on the Trick and said, ‘Act brave and keep walking.’
“Just then, some guy with a pistol on his hip who was drunk staggered toward the tracks and started to take a leak. He looked up at us—we were traveling at about a twenty-foot interval on opposites sides of the track and he asks, ‘Who the hell are you?’ to Ken. Ken told him, ‘You don’t want to know, mister. Just leave us alone, and we won’t waste you.’ We kept our guns trained on him, walking backward, and disappeared into the night. I was scared to death that he’d call the alarm and we’d be in the middle of a firefight. Either we scared him, or he didn’t think we were worth hassling. Well, either way, he didn’t go gunning for us. I guess we just lucked out. There were at least fifty people in that camp.”