Founders (24 page)

A 2009 crew cab Ford pickup sat in front of the trailer house. The house was a single-wide that appeared to be at least thirty years old. Old tires held down a blue tarp at one end of the roof.

A man answered the knock on his door with a .455 Webley revolver in his hand.

“Hey, Cliff, how are you doing?” Dale said warmly. “These are friends of my brother-in-law. Meet Ken and Terry.”

Cliff invited Dale and the Laytons into the house, saying, “Pardon the mess—I’ve been packing.” He laughed and kicked a cardboard box out of the way so that Dale and the Laytons could get to the couch.

Cliff immediately struck Ken and Terry as an odd but jovial character.

After just a few more minutes of introductions and assurances of their trustworthiness, Dale joined them as they folded out their maps on Cliff’s kitchen table. “It’s time to talk strategy,” Cliff declared.

They calculated that the distance to Coalville, Utah, was 410 miles. Between his pickup’s main and auxiliary tanks and the gas he had available in cans, Cliff estimated that he had enough fuel to travel 850 miles. Ever the optimist, he said, “So I can make it back here, even if I don’t find a drop of gas around Coalville.”

Cliff explained that he had been a heating and air-conditioning technician before the Crunch. Never married and living frugally, he had dabbled in energy stocks and silver, starting soon after the turn of the century. Cliff was in his late thirties, slightly overweight, and had thinning red hair and a wispy red beard. He lived alone in the sparsely furnished trailer. Neither Ken nor Terry could determine how he’d made a living since the Crunch.

Cliff summed up his desire to travel to Utah, saying, “I got word that they’re alive, but I haven’t seen my cousins or my aunt and uncle since before the stock market melted down. So I’d like to look in on them to see if they’re all right. I’m taking
all
my stuff with me. Who knows? I might find work there—maybe at a mine, and maybe I’ll even find a wife.”

Dale reiterated that he had heard that there were limited supplies of newly refined gasoline available in northern Utah. He and Cliff agreed that the trip was worth the gamble.

Ken spent most of the day checking on the mechanical condition of Cliff’s pickup. They had access to the inventory of an auto
parts store, which had been moved to the owner’s workshop for safekeeping just a mile away. At the shop, he checked the four mounted tires and the spare, adding air to two of them with a hand pump. He replaced the fuel filter and set aside an identical spare. Checking all the hoses, he noticed that the lower radiator hose felt soft. He was fortunate to find a new correct spare in the enormous pile of belts and hoses in the corner of the shop. He checked the belt tensioner and then all the fluids. He added some window washer fluid and coolant. He set aside one more full gallon of coolant to take along with them. Then he lubed the two points of the chassis that could take grease. The rest, he explained, were all “lubeless joints.” Finally, noting the motor oil looked dark, he changed the oil and filter. He kept the old hose and fuel filters to carry as spares. After checking both of the pickup’s fuse boxes, he also set aside an assortment of spare fuses with various current ratings.

Amid the many shelves of mostly disorganized parts, Ken found a spare serpentine belt for the pickup. “This belt runs all the auxiliaries. If this belt ever breaks, you’re totally out of luck,” he explained.

In all, the belt, fluids, fuses, filters, and motor oil cost Cliff just two ounces of silver and some gardening hand tools in barter. Clinching the deal, he promised the auto parts store owner, “If I’m not back here in a month, then you are welcome to my trailer house and everything left in it.” He handed him an extra door key.

After the maintenance on the pickup truck was complete, they headed back to Cliff’s trailer, where they ate a light dinner: three small cans of tuna and a loaf of homemade whole wheat bread that Cliff said he often bought from a neighbor. The paper labels had been removed from the cans and they had been painted in varnish, to protect them from rust. Cliff explained, “That’s a trick that I picked up from a guy I knew that spent four months crewing a yacht in the Bahamas.”

Looking closely at the cans before they were opened, Terry could see that their lids had “Tuna, 11/2012” written in Magic Marker, just visible through the varnish.

Cliff asked Ken and Terry to help him pack for the trip. He had remarkably few clothes, which all fit into just two large cardboard boxes. He also packed a large Tupperware box that he explained contained some photocopies of family history and genealogy documents that his late mother had made before the Crunch.

Then they started digging. Using a rusty shovel with a broken tip, they dug up three hidden caches in the yard. The first was very shallow. A sheet of plywood, a thin layer of soil, and a large pile of used wooden pallets covered it. This cache contained seventeen 5-gallon gas cans painted various colors, mostly red. The cans had been positioned on top of an odd assortment of scrap wood blocks to keep their bottoms from rusting. All the gas, Cliff said, had been treated with PRI-G gasoline stabilizer.

As they pulled the cans up out of the hole, Cliff said, “You know, this gas was the fruit of four months of hard dickering and bartering. I’m hoping that there’ll be gasoline back in production soon. I heard there’s some sort of ‘Provisional’ national government, headquartered at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and that they’re getting things straightened out.”

The second cache, deeper than the first, held more than twenty military surplus .30 caliber, .50 caliber, and 20mm ammo cans containing various ammunition and some hand tools. Atop the ammo cans, there were some canned foods, stowed in two Sterilite brand plastic tote bins. All had been varnished and hand-labeled, just like the tuna cans.

The third cache, nearly three feet down, contained three guns in a capped piece of eight-inch-diameter PVC pipe, and two more .30 caliber ammo cans. The latter, Cliff said, held what he called his “silver trove.”

They spent that night in their sleeping bags on the floor of
Cliff’s living room. Ken and Terry were so excited that they were scarcely able to sleep. Cliff roused them an hour before dawn. The gas cans had already been loaded in the back of the pickup the night before and covered with a tarp. They quickly loaded all the ammo cans and the rest of the gear. The heap filled up the entire bed of the pickup truck, most of the rear seat, and nearly all the passenger-side front seat and floor.

Terry opted to be tail gunner, sitting on top of the backpacks just behind the cab, but forward of the gas cans. She bundled herself up with both her unrolled sleeping bag and Ken’s sleeping bag. She wore gloves, a muffler, and a pile cap to keep her head warm. She sat facing rearward, with her CAR-15 in her lap.

Ken, meanwhile, sat in the seat directly behind Cliff. Remembering how all the windows of their Mustang and Bronco had been shot out, Ken ordered, “At the first sign of trouble, you hit all four buttons to roll the windows down. We don’t want them getting shot out, and besides, the way this HK ejects brass, it’s a window smasher.”

“You got it!” Cliff replied.

On the seat next to him, Cliff carried a folding-stock Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with a thirty-round magazine. Two spare-loaded twenty-round magazines were placed within reach in the center console, along with Cliff’s ancient Webley revolver. Beside it were four full-moon clips of .45 ACP ammunition. Seeing this, Ken surmised that Cliff’s revolver had been converted to .45 ACP.

Ken positioned his HK butt down on the floor between his legs, and both his pack and web gear were next to him on the seat. He debated removing his M1911 pistol from its holster, but then, remembering an account that he’d read of the FBI’s 1986 Miami shootout, he decided that the pistol might get misplaced if they came to a sudden stop.

Cliff started the engine and shouted, “Y’all ready?”

Ken and Terry both shouted back, “Yes!”

Cliff turned on the headlights, and they started down Henry Road toward the freeway. Cliff popped a cassette tape into the pickup’s tape and CD player. The voice of Hank Williams Jr. came from the speakers, singing “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Ken laughed uproariously. The situation seemed so surreal.

After Cliff turned west on State Highway 26, the sky behind them was starting to lighten. Cliff set the pickup’s cruise control to fifty miles per hour. He said forthrightly, “I’m keeping it under fifty-two, for fuel economy. I read somewhere that’s the magic number.” The sensation of speed was overwhelming to both Ken and Terry. They had spent so many months on foot that fifty miles per hour seemed alarmingly fast. Ken laughed and exclaimed, “Woo-hoo! I feel like we’re in the
Millennium Falcon
, and you just shouted ‘Punch it, Chewie!’”

Recognizing the reference to the movie
Star Wars
, Cliff retorted, “Well, we both got red hair, so doesn’t that make us
both
Wookies?”

Ken laughed again and yelled, “Wookie suiters of the world, unite!”

The landscape of Wyoming raced by as the daylight grew. At Torrington, they turned south onto Highway 85. At this junction and south of it, they saw dozens of burned-out hulks of cars on the shoulder. As they approached the cars, Cliff slowed to twenty miles an hour and sounded serious for the first time. “I gotta watch for any scrap metal in the road. There was a looter roadblock here last year. It cost us five men’s lives to clean those looters out.”

Beyond the destroyed cars, Cliff sped up and again set the cruise control to fifty. Terry tapped on the back window and grinned at Ken. She gave an exaggerated thumbs-up.

Ken sat in silence, listening to “Tennessee Stud,” “The Coalition to Ban Coalitions,” and other songs that were unfamiliar to him. The tape began playing “A Country Boy Can Survive” for the
second time. Looking in the center console box and in the glove box, Ken searched for other tapes or CDs, but he found none. He realized that not only was the audio system set to repeat, but also that Cliff had only one cassette tape in the vehicle. Ken shook his head and grinned. Cliff was a bona fide character.

They hadn’t seen a vehicle heading in either direction all morning. The barren plains of eastern Wyoming were now in full daylight. The engine was running smoothly.

Ken said, “Say, Cliff, you never mentioned your family name.”

Cliff answered ambiguously, “That’s right.”

“Well, I noticed the mailbox there was marked ‘Larson.’ So is that your name?”

Cliff answered with a laugh, “Well, it
might
be.”

Ken laughed and shook his head. “Oh well . . . How about them
Cubs
?”

“I’m a Red Sox fan, personally, but I don’t think there’s going to be a baseball season next summer. Folks are using their baseball bats for other purposes these days.”

Cliff seemed distracted, and didn’t continue. He slowed and turned west onto County Road 218.

Cliff was looking anxious and he regularly scanned the sides of the road and his rearview mirrors. Finally, Cliff explained, “This route that we’re taking will bypass Cheyenne.” Then he gestured over his left shoulder, and said, “You do
not
want to go through Cheyenne. Last I heard, that city was in the hands of the bad guys, and they will eat you for breakfast.” After loudly drawing a breath, he added, “Literally.”

Cliff took several more turns on small roads, some of them gravel, for the next hour. Several times, Cliff stopped and consulted his maps to be certain of his route. They finally got back on the Interstate just east of Laramie. “From what I’ve heard, it should be smooth sailing from here on,” he reassured Ken.

They stayed on I-80, heading west, transiting the Rockies. In
places the mountains loomed above them. There were a couple of places where rocks had rolled into the road, and there was one small slide two miles west of Green River that partially blocked the right lane. Otherwise, the highway was in remarkably good condition, considering that it had gone through two winters without any maintenance.

They pulled off the road just past Green River to check on Terry. Cliff left the engine running. Ken handed everyone strips of jerky and bottles of water. Terry had rosy cheeks, but seemed exuberant. “Why did we get off the highway onto all those small roads back there?” she asked.

“Just a shortcut,” Ken told her, not wanting to darken her mood. “Don’t sweat it. Say, do you want to switch places?”

She shook her head and said, “Nah. I want to do the
whole
width of Wyoming out in the open, soaking it all in. I’m in a big, happy dream right now.”

They continued their descent from the western slope of the Rockies. The air was now comfortably warm. Other than abandoned cars on the shoulder that had run out of fuel in the midst of the Crunch and a few tumbleweeds, the Interstate was clear of any obstructions. But they could see the recent ruins of some ranch houses near the freeway. With most of these, there was little more than a stone chimney and a blackened patch of earth left as a silent testament to the chaos that had reigned over the past year and a half.