Ken picked up where Terry left off. “As we headed west, I realized that we were going to have to find some place to cross the ‘Mighty Mississip.’ The problem was that there were only a few bridges, and they were natural choke points—just about ideal for an ambush. The problem solved itself, however, when we got there. The night that we hit the banks of the Mississippi, it was in the middle of a heavy downpour. It was the first appreciable rain we had since we left Chicago. It was pitch dark, and pouring rain. Only some ex-Green Beret or LRRP would be lying in ambush on a night like that.”
Jeff chimed in, “You left out Force Recon.” Everyone laughed.
“We crossed on a long railroad trestle bridge just above East Moline. It was very scary. It was dark, the bridge was wet, and it wasn’t designed for foot traffic. It seemed like it took hours, walking along in our ponchos, carefully stepping from one tie to the next to get across. Also, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wondering if a train or high-railer might come barreling across.
Of course, the chance of that was slim, but nonetheless, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
“Once we were on the west bank of the Mississippi, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was one of the few natural barriers that we had to cross, and it also marks a change in demographics. The population density is far lower west of the Mississippi. Fewer people, fewer encounters, fewer problems.
“Once we were into Iowa, the weather took a turn for the worse. We ended up spending three miserable weeks there on the reverse slope of a pile of grain at a big grain elevator about three miles out of a town called Durant. First it poured down rain steadily for four days. Then it turned to sleet. Then it turned to snow. It snowed off and on for two weeks. We mainly ate corn soaked in water. We spent most of our time huddled up in our bags, sleeping in shifts.
Luckily, nobody came by during the entire three weeks.
“By now, it was late November, and we didn’t see much of the sun. After the snow let up, we filled our backpacks with as much corn as we could carry. I left all of my paper money—about three hundred dollars—on top of the pile with a thank-you note to the owner of the elevator. It was there at the elevator that we realized that Terry had lost her TRC-500 somewhere along the way. Because one two-way radio is not much use, I salvaged the ni-cad out of mine, and left the radio there for the owner of the grain elevator. He probably thought it was pretty funny when he found the money, considering that by then it was damned near worthless. At least the TRC-500 would be worth something to him, at least for parts.
“We tried heading west again, but we didn’t make much progress. On average, the temperature was twenty or thirty degrees colder than when we first left Chicago. When we first left, the days were clear and chilly and the nights were bearably cold. Out on the plains, we practically froze to death. We knew we had to find a place to spend the winter, but where?
“We ended up finding a place to stay in a little town called West Branch. Kind of ironic, it was the hometown of Herbert Hoover, the guy they blamed for the last depression. I guess in the long run, history will be kinder to Hoover, once people realize that the 1930s weren’t all that bad. That so-called Great Depression was just a case of the sniffles compared to this one. Shoot, this one’s double pneumonia.”
Terry picked up the thread of the story. “We stayed at a farm just outside West Branch, which is about ten miles east of Iowa City. The farm was owned by a Quaker family called Perkins. They claimed that they were actually distant relatives of the Hoovers. I suppose they were telling the truth. There are probably hundreds of people in that area that are related. The Perkins were salt-of-the-earth country folk. They grew corn and soybeans mostly, on one-hundred-and-twenty acres. They had two small children. Because West Branch had had a lot of trouble with looters coming from Iowa City in recent weeks, we didn’t have any trouble at all convincing them to hire us on for security in exchange for room and board. Mr. Perkins was pretty funny. He introduced us to his neighbors as his ‘Night watchmen from Chicago with the space rifles.’
“The life there on the farm was pretty grueling. The weather was horrible, and the hours were lousy. We basically worked twelve-on, twelve-off shifts, rotating at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m. But we ate well. Mr. Perkins was incredibly hard working. He put in at least ten hours a day working on the farm. He’d often say,‘Work is life.’
“Early one morning in November, two vans pulled up to the front gate. I happened to be on duty, and Ken was asleep. I yelled down to Mr. Perkins, who was feeding hay to the cows, ‘Do you recognize those vans?’ He said, ‘Nope.’ So I screamed, ‘Get back in the house, and wake up Ken and then your wife, right now!’
“I was standing in my usual spot, on the platform just inside the top door of the silo. Once I saw them stop, I sat down and put my elbows on my knees to get a good rest position to shoot. One guy got out of the first van with a pair of bolt cutters. Just after he cut off the padlock, but before he could swing the gate open, I fired my first shot. I missed. I fired a few more times, and finally hit the guy. By now, they were shooting back at me. I could hear bullets pinging off the silo like crazy.
“The next thing I heard was Ken opening up from the kitchen window with his H-and-K, ‘Whump. Whump-whump. Whump-whump.’ Between the two of us shooting, I guess they figured they had bit off more than they could chew. By the time they had backed away from the gate, we had shot out both of their windshields. They left the guy with the bolt cutters dead on the ground. A few hours later, when we were fairly sure that they weren’t coming back, we went out to assess the damage. We had fired about seventy rounds between the two of us. All that we found was the dead guy, a cheap pair of Chinese-made twenty-four-inch bolt cutters, about fifty pieces of their fired brass, a lot of broken glass, and a lot of blood. Apparently, we hit more than one of them.”
Ken carried on. “I apologized to Mr. Perkins for having shot right through the kitchen window. He just said,‘Shucks, that what they make that clear sheet plastic fer, ain’t it?’ We counted twenty-five holes in the silo, and ten in the house. No really serious damage though. Mr. Perkins said, ‘Well, I guess I got my money’s worth for the security force. Those space rifles sure are something.
It sounded like World War Three.’ We buried the dead marauder out in the garden. He’s probably pushing up big healthy turnips by now.
“We made our goodbyes to the Perkinses in late April. We had our packs bulging with canned food, beef jerky, and pemmican. We also still had two MREs that we had saved. Traveling at night, mainly along railroad tracks and occasionally cross-country, we made it to western South Dakota that summer. In late September, realizing it was too late in the year to make it to Idaho, we started looking for a place to spend the winter.
“This time it took three weeks and a couple of run-ins with nervous ranchers with shotguns before we found someone who would take us in as ‘security consultants’ for room and board. We stayed outside a little town called Newell, in Butte County, with a family called Norwood. Real nice people. Cattle ranchers. We ate so much beef that winter, that we almost got sick of it. Both of us learned how to ride and care for horses that winter. We also learned the basics of horse shoeing.