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  Dan stood up and continued, “I started packing up a day before Tom. I couldn’t figure which of my guns to bring along, so I said to myself, ‘Aw shucks, I’ll just take all of them.’ Most of the guns are still wrapped up in blankets at the bottom of everything else in the back end of the Fong-mobile—all twenty-nine of them.

  “Because I had my doubts, I worked the next three days after I got Todd’s

  ‘The sky is falling!, the sky is falling!’ call. My last afternoon at the cannery, the general manager gave me a list of fifteen employees that I was supposed to hand pink slips to at four o’clock. I told him,‘Sorry boss, can’t do that. These people depend on their jobs, and we depend on them. We can’t put out a safe-to-eat product without a minimum level of staffing on each shift.’ Then he says to me,‘If you refuse, I’ll have no choice but to let you go as well.’ Then I said,

  ‘You can’t fire me, because I just quit,’ and walked away. I didn’t even bother to clean out my desk. I just grabbed a few of my engineering reference books, and the Sykes-Fairbairn ‘letter opener’ that I kept in the top drawer. On my way out, I stopped by the employee’s thrift shop and bought sixteen cases of various late-date-of-pack canned fruit and vegetables. They were still tagged at the old employee price which is like two cents on the dollar from current prices.”

  Fong scanned the room and then went on. “Soooo, that same evening I started packing up. By then the phones had been out for a couple of days. It took a lot longer than I thought to pack up. As T.K. told you, I spent the next few hours keeping a look out while he got his gear loaded. We left late, eleven o’clock—no, I guess it was after midnight.”

  T.K. nodded in agreement.

  Dan shrugged his shoulders and went on. “It didn’t seem that late. Any-hooo, we got ourselves on the road. On our way out of town we saw one house totally in flames, but not a single fire truck was in sight. We also saw two cars that had been gutted. The traffic on the freeway was nearly bumper-to-bumper, even at midnight. All of the gas stations were either closed or had big signs, mainly sheets of plywood spray painted with the words ‘NO GAS.’

  “By the time we were an hour and a half out of Chicago, we started seeing cars that had run out of gas alongside the road. A couple of times I had to swerve around people trying to flag us down. They were really desperate. By that time, I figured that stopping to help anybody out would be far more dangerous than it was worth. By the time we crossed the state line there were cars out of gas on the shoulder every half a mile. It was at that point that I got on the radio to T.K. and suggested that we cut over to the older two-lane highway that parallels the interstate. Things were really starting to look hostile on the interstate, so we cut over as soon as we got the chance. By that time, T.K. and I were both low on fuel.

  “My gauge read a quarter full, and T.K. radioed to say that he’d switched over to his reserve tank, so I started looking for a good place to refuel. I picked a side road that went out by a bunch of farms. There were no cars on it at all.

  We stopped about a mile down this side road at a straight stretch where we could see both ways for quite a distance. I got out with my Model 97, and had my Beretta nine mil in a shoulder rig. T.K. got out with his CAR-15, and slung it across his back. I played security for him while he refueled, and then he did the same for me.

  “Just as I was putting the last of a third jerry can into my rig, T.K. gave a whistle, and I saw a car’s headlights. Both of us got down on the far side of our rigs, trying to put as much engine block as we could between us and them.

  When the lights got within about 150 yards, I could see it was a patrol car.

  “At that point, both T.K. and I played it cool, and we slipped our long guns under my pickup, lengthwise, so they were out of sight. Turned out it was a sheriff’s deputy. When he stopped his patrol car behind our rigs, T.K. walked back to talk with him. Needless to say, he was very curious about us, and wasn’t taking any chances. He had a big Glock 21, and it was out of the holster.

  “T.K. explained to him that we were on our way to stay with friends in Idaho and had just stopped to refuel. He had already figured that out, and pointed his flashlight at the jerry can sitting by my rig. At first, he thought we’d both been riding in my Toyota, and that we had stopped to siphon somebody’s Bronco. It wasn’t until we showed him our driver’s licenses and the registration for both vehicles that he started to relax.

  “Boy, was I scared. The last thing that we needed was to get locked up in some county jail in Iowa just as the shit was hitting the fan. As it turned out, the dude was pretty cool after all. We shot the breeze for a bit while I finished gassing up, and cramming the cans back in the rigs. Just before he left, he said, ‘Well, I hope you make it to your hidey-hole in Ide-ho in one piece.’ He sure had us pegged. Anyway, we waited ’til he was well out of sight before we picked up our guns. He never spotted them. Jeez, that would have taken even more explaining.”

  After a brief pause, T.K. spoke. “I was scared to death, too. After the deputy left, we praised God for his protection, and got turned around and headed back for the highway. We tooled along just fine. In fact, Dan kept picking up speed.

  Sometimes he got up to about seventy-five. I had to get on the CB and yell at him to slow down. We made another refueling stop using the same method just before dawn in eastern South Dakota, and then again about ten in the morning. After that stop, I took the lead. By then, there were virtually no cars on the road at all.

  “Not long after we crossed into Montana we had to slow down because there was a pair of wrecked cars almost blocking both lanes. At first, it looked like just another accident, two cars smashed together, typical fender bender.

  Then I realized, hey, there aren’t any intersecting roads there, so how could they have been in a fender bender unless one car had rear-ended the other? I knew that couldn’t be the case, because one of the cars was practically perpendicular to the road. By the time I had figured that out, we were practically on top of them. Luckily, the shoulder was pretty wide. I didn’t have time to call Dan on the CB to warn him. I just hit the gas and swerved around onto the shoulder around the wreck. All I could do was hope that Dan would catch on and do just the same thing. Luckily, he did.”

  Dan picked up the thread of the story, “I saw the munched cars up ahead, and then I saw a puff from T.K.’s tailpipe when he hit the gas. A second later, I did likewise. I followed right behind. As we went around the two wrecked cars, I saw two guys with shotguns stand up behind the car on the right-hand side.

  They weren’t riotguns either, just regular old pump action birdguns. When that happened, I just ducked, and kept on going. They got about three or four shots off at me.

  “The first shot took out my windshield and passenger’s side window. The second and third pretty well peppered my camper shell. Needless to say, it took out the back window of the camper, as well. Nothing inside got wasted except my sleeping bag. It’s leaking goose down like crazy now. Some pellets also hit two of my gas cans, but luckily they were empties. Otherwise, the back end would have been swimming in gas.

  “Judging by the holes, they must have been using shells loaded with good-sized buckshot. Probably number four buck, possibly a bit larger. It went through my camper shell and just kept on going. Anyway, after we got about ten more miles down the road, we pulled off along a straight stretch. T.K. pulled security while I assessed the damage. The windshield was shattered. I could hardly see through it. The passenger’s side window had disintegrated into chunks.

  “I spent the next ten minutes kicking out the windshield and sweeping out the majority of the broken glass. It was pretty cold, and I didn’t want to freeze my tail off driving without a windshield, so had to spend another five minutes pulling gear out of the back of my rig until I found the box with all my cold weather clothes. I bundled up in my field pants with the cold weather liners, a woolly pully, my down jacket, and then my DPM camouflage smock. I also put on my army gloves with liners and
one of those navy watch caps that we got at Ruvel’s Surplus. Even with all that, I felt cold, but at least I didn’t freeze. That was the only exciting thing that happened on the way here. The last part of the trip was rather anticlimactic. Saw some nice looking deer and elk, though.”

  With the formal debriefing over, the newcomers continued their tales over lunch. To everyone’s surprise, it was a hearty spread, with fresh meat, cheese, and vegetables. T.K. asked Todd, “Hey, what’s with wasting all this fresh food? I thought you’d be starting on the storage food by now.”

  “Savor it while you can, T.K. We’re just in the process of using up all the food from the refrigerator and freezer. We don’t know how much longer we’ll have power.”

  T.K. looked glum. He moaned, “We’ll be eating wheat berries for breakfast tomorrow, I suppose.” They all laughed.

  • • •

  After concerted study, Todd and Mary Gray had chosen the Palouse Hills region of north central Idaho as a place to look for their retreat. It fit all of their criteria. It had a low population density. It was more than six hours’ drive from the nearest major metropolitan area, Seattle. The entire region had deep, rich topsoil and diverse agriculture. Most importantly, it had precipitation through most of the year, eliminating the one weak link in most modern agriculture in America—water. The region did not need electrically pumped irrigation water to grow crops.

  A “vacation” trip in the summer of 2001 proved out their hopes about the region. Everyone they met was friendly, there was no traffic, and most of the pickups had gun racks and N.R. A. stickers. Aside from the occasional double-wide mobile home or satellite TV dish, it looked more like the 1960s than the “Aughts.” To Todd and Mary, who had both grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, the price of land and houses seemed absurdly low. The price of a three-bedroom house on twenty acres ranged from $140,000 to $300,000.

  After three subsequent trips looking at real estate, they finally found a forty-acre farm that they wanted to buy. It was a mile out of Bovill, a small town thirty miles east of Moscow, Idaho. Bovill was situated at the eastern fringe of the Palouse Hills farming region. The town was a bit colder than much of the surrounding area, but that also meant that the price of land was lower. Further, the economy of the area had a mix of both agriculture and timber to support it. Todd also liked the prospect of being close to the Clearwater National Forest. As he put it, the 1.9 million acre forest would make “a big backyard.”

  The brick farmhouse was built in 1930. It needed some work, but it met all of their needs. It had a full basement, three small but adequate bedrooms, a wood cook stove that also looked 1930s vintage, and a metal roof. There was also a garage/shop, a barn, a woodshed, a meat house, a large orchard of fruit and nut trees, and a spring house a hundred yards up the hill behind the house. Unlike most of their neighbors, who were on well water, they had a five-gallon-per-minute spring gravity fed to the house. Because the current owners were retiring and moving to Arizona, a seven-year-old John Deere tractor also went with the house. The owners had asked $178,000 for the place. The Grays offered $125,000. After two counteroffers, they finally settled on $155,500.

  They paid cash.

  • • •

  The path that led Todd and Mary Gray to the Palouse Hills began one evening in October, 2006, as Todd and his college roommate Tom “T.K.” Kennedy walked back to their dorm. They had just watched a DVD of the Australian film The Road Warrior at a mutual friend’s apartment. Todd commented, “Pretty good movie, T.K., but not too believable. Personally, I think that in a situation like that, the gasoline would be gone long before the ammunition, not the other way around.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing myself,” T.K. said. “Also, the best way to survive something like that wouldn’t be to zoom around from place to place.

  That just increases contact with other people. Consequently, that increases the chance of trouble. Mel Gibson’s character should have set up some sort of retreat or stronghold.”After a few moments of silence he asked, “Do you think a scenario like that—total collapse of society—could ever really happen?

  “I think all this talk about ‘The Y2K Bug’ is overblown. But given the complexity of society, and the interdependence of systems on other systems, it probably could. In fact, all it might take would be economic trouble of the same magnitude as the Great Depression of the 1930s to set something like that off. That could be all it would take, and the whole house of cards would collapse. Our economy, our transportation system, communications systems—everything, really—is so much more complex and vulnerable than back in the 1930s. And our society is not nearly so well-behaved.”

  T.K. suddenly stopped on the sidewalk and cocked his head. He looked Todd in the eyes and proclaimed, “If something like that is truly possible, even on an outside chance, then I think it might be prudent to make some preparations.”

  Back at their dorm room, their conversation on the subject went on with great intensity until three a.m. Without knowing it at the time, Todd and T.K. had formed the nucleus of an organization that eventually would have more than twenty members, regular meetings, logistics standards, a set of tactical standard operating procedures (SOPs), and a chain of command. Oddly, despite its formal organization, their survival group was not given a name for many years. It was simply referred to as “the Group.”

  When they recruited new members, Todd and T.K. described “the Group” as a “mutual aid” organization. Members could depend on help from each other, both in good times and in bad. If a member had their car break down, or got into a financial bind, for example, the other group members were sworn to give immediate aid to the best of their ability—no excuses, and no questions asked. The group’s major benefit was that in truly hard times it would provide strength in numbers and a solid logistics base, allowing the members a greater chance of pulling through a crisis unscathed.

  Within a few months Todd and T.K. had gathered a number of friends into the Group. Most of them were fellow students at the University of Chicago.

  Since nearly all of them were short on cash, they didn’t get far beyond a lot of talk until most of the members had graduated from college, and started making decent salaries.

  For the first few years following its inception, Todd and his fellow group members talked, argued, and reasoned their way into a formal organization.

  Todd held the overall leadership and guiding role. He was simply called either “boss” or jokingly, “head honcho.”

  T.K. became the group’s personnel specialist. He counseled group members and ironed out wrinkles in interpersonal relations. In addition, T.K. emerged as the organization’s main recruiter. He carefully sized up each prospective group member, weighed their strengths and weaknesses, and did his best to judge how each would react to a prolonged period of high stress.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ready and Able

  “…it would be appropriate… to have organized groups charged to conserve certain data and certain civilized forms, and to foster a new beginning when the right time for it comes.”

  —Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age

  Less than an hour after the second debriefing ended, the TA-1 field telephone at the “Charge of Quarters” (“C.Q.”) desk clacked three times in succession. Mike snatched it up. “Mary says that a pickup truck just stopped at the front gate.”

  Mike asked, “Pickup?… but Ken and Terry own a… Bronco!” Anxious looks spread around the table, then in a blur everyone was snatching up their weapons and heading for the windows. If it weren’t serious business, it might have looked comical, with everyone bumping into each other. Todd was shouting, “Hold on! hold on! We can’t all man the front windows! Kevin, watch the back! Dan, west side!” Meanwhile, Mike was still at the C.Q. desk with the field telephone held to his ear. Mike yelled, “Mary says whoever it is, is out of the truck and is waving his arms.”

  By now, Todd was scanning the road with his rubber-armored binoculars.


  “I don’t believe it,” he muttered, adjusting the focus wheel. “Well, I’ll be! The old super-warrior came for a visit. You can relax, everyone. It’s Jeff Trasel.”

  Todd and T.K. jogged down the hill to the gate, their rifles carried at “high port.” As they approached Jeff’s Power Wagon, they could see that Jeff was agitated.

  “Got any room for an ex-member with a big problem?” Trasel asked.

  Todd answered, “Could be. What’s the matter, Jeff?”

  Trasel blurted, “It’s my girlfriend. She’s been shot!”

  They got Jeff’s truck through the gate and up the hill as quickly as possible.

  Todd clicked his radio from the off to the VOX position. “Mike, call Mary on the landline ASAP. Tell her we have a medical emergency at the house. Send Dan to relieve her at the O-P.”

  Jeff’s girlfriend, Rose, was in bad shape. Jeff and Todd carried her into the house. Rose was unconscious. They temporarily laid her on a blanket on the floor near the wood-heating stove. Mary quickly but thoroughly examined her, briefly removing three blood-soaked pressure dressings. She had been shot in the left side of her upper chest. The bullet had entered just below her collarbone. It then traveled at an upward angle, shattering the upper portion of her left shoulder blade before exiting the top of her shoulder. The entrance wound was scarcely larger than the diameter of the bullet. The exit wound, in contrast, looked like a patch of red raw meat two inches in diameter.

  “What happened?” Mary asked, as she was digging through a large box of sterilized medical instruments that were individually wrapped in Ziploc bags.

  “We were on our way up here. We stopped because Rose said that she had to pee. She couldn’t wait. So I stopped by the side of the road, and Rose scampered off into the bushes. Just as she was walking back to my truck, a Corsica with Wisconsin plates pulled up behind me and stopped. Two guys jumped out, and one of them intercepted Rose before she could get back in her door.