Founders (36 page)

The Mad Minute began. By prearrangement, Watanabe’s team first shot up the engine compartments and tires on the rearmost pickup. Then they shifted their fire and systematically shot out the tires on all the other vehicles. Joshua fired sixteen rounds, pausing once every four rounds to flip open the rifle’s bottom-hinged magazine and refill it. When they switched to shooting out the vehicle windows, the occupants panicked and ran. Caught out in open ground in a cross fire, most of them were shot within twenty seconds. A few of the looters tried running east on the road. They, too, were cut down.

Joshua toggled his handheld, ordering the three-man backup from the 341st team to sweep northward.

Confused and not realizing that the shots were coming from two different hills, García and three other men ran northeast, directly toward Joshua and half his team. The last of them dropped before they were within 100 yards of where Joshua and the ranchers lay prone. The firing died down to just a few sporadic shots from Joshua’s men.

Joshua shouted, “Okay, everyone top off your guns! Show me a fist when you’re done.”

He heard the sound of guns being reloaded. He stood and scanned his men. They soon all raised a fist. Joshua then swept his arm forward and shouted, “Shoot anything that moves. Follow me!”

They advanced at a slow walk. As they descended the two hills, there were only two coup de grâce shots fired. Joshua and Francisco then came upon Ignacio García, who was bleeding badly. As García lay bleeding heavily, he began to babble in Spanish. His last words, ending in a shout, were
“Dónde? Dónde está mi tesoro? Mi tesoro!”
Then his chest stopped heaving.

“What’s that he said?” Joshua asked.

Francisco translated. “He was asking: ‘Where is my treasure?’”

“Well, his worldly treasures won’t help him where
he’s
gone.”

They continued down to the road and crossed it, checking the bodies of the Force Two gang members for signs of life. Some of the men began to search the shot-up vehicles, which sat in green puddles of radiator water. They shut down the engine of one vehicle that was still sputtering.

The three enlisted men from the 341st trotted up to see what had happened. Joshua said simply, “We covered the rest of it from our positions. Good work on providing the cattle prod, guys. That was a job well done.”

As they passed by the body of García’s wife, who had been shot through the neck, Joshua instructed, “Save anything that looks useful for turn-in. Burn the rest.”

Still standing beside the body of García’s wife, Francisco picked up the collar of a full-length mink coat with the tip of his rifle barrel, and asked, “What about this fur coat, sir?”

“No. It has blood all over it. Burn it.”

“In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

“Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.”

—Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, 1957

Pastor James Alstoba set the parking brake on his Alliance Motors Elec-Truck. He stepped out and flipped down the side-mounted PV panels on both the truck and the trailer, giving the panels full exposure to the south, and he tilted up the rack on the truck’s roof to a 40-degree angle, giving that set of panels the best possible solar exposure as well. Unless the sky clouded up, the vehicle would be fully recharged by 3 p.m.

He paused to pray as he did before each day of detectoring,
asking for God’s providence. James depended on the detector work for his support. He spent five days a week with his church responsibilities at Grace Baptist—which included Sunday services, several Bible studies, outreach, and sermon writing—but just two days on detectoring. That was usually Mondays and Tuesdays, but that could be shifted if there was bad weather. Early on in his ministry, he had decided to work two days a week in detectoring, rather than begging for support. To his mind, begging was bad Christian witness. He’d rather sweat a bit.

His helper that day was twenty-two-year-old Mickey Johnson. Mickey was likable, but his broad facial features, vapid expression, and nasal voice immediately marked him as someone with Down syndrome. He would never surpass the mentality of an eight-year-old. But he was an amiable, cheerful worker. Some of Mickey’s sayings made James laugh. James also appreciated Mickey’s childlike wonder when examining a rock or an insect. And a couple of his observations on human nature were so unknowingly accurate that James had later mentioned them in his sermons.

James had to constantly remind Mickey to drink water and to wear his big sun hat. Mickey helped haul some of the detectoring finds to the trailer—mostly scrap aluminum and steel. But most importantly, Mickey went with him to be ready to radio for help in case of an accident. That was the first thing that Pastor Alstoba had taught him to do when Mickey replaced Alstoba’s son as his helper.

The front of the Elec-Truck was decorated with a painted cross and the words
“In Omnia Paratus.”
To James, that phrase had a double meaning: both physical preparedness, and spiritual preparedness. The trailer had been hand-built by a member of his congregation. The vehicle itself was ten years old and nearing the end of life for its second set of 6-volt batteries.

James had been in prayer that he’d soon make a big detectoring
find and hence have the funds to buy the new set of batteries without having to ask anyone for donations. With new batteries, the old truck would be back to its full potential range, and hence it would open up a wider area available for his detectoring.

James checked his holstered 5-7 and spare magazine. The pistol had been passed down to him from his grandfather. It was a relic from back in the lead bullet days. By the late 2100s, most projectiles were either copper-jacketed steel or all copper. Lead was too valuable for use in batteries to waste it in making bullets. It would be a shame if the projos weren’t recovered for re-cy.

James strapped on the battery pack and then the Steady Harness for his detector. The detector was an expensive new model from Minelab. He had upgraded to the new detector with the proceeds from a providential streak of one-eighth-ounce to one-quarter-ounce gold nuggets that he had found the previous year. The Australians still made the best detectors. This one had a nice backlit display and had great sensitivity and selectivity. The detector’s display could distinguish between various coins, pieces of fired brass, aluminum soda cans, spent bullets, or gold nuggets. Finally, he put on his Clarke headphones. They, too, were state-of-the-art, and even had automatic noise canceling if he ever took a shot at a rabbit or a deer.

James ran the detector’s Built In Test and Calibration “bitsy” sequence. The display indicated green in all segments. He was good to go. Then he consulted his tablet-comp, and used a stylus to mark the next area of the map grid that he planned to search. It zoomed in to display a composite satellite image overlayed with old map data. The tablet comp’s GPS subsystem then kept track of what ground he had covered, and beeped a reminder if he missed a spot.

As Pastor James swept the detector’s trapezoidal head slowly left and right, his mind soon began to wander, as it often did when
detectoring. He thought about his son, Matthew, who was off training with the 3rd Liberator Brigade. The brigade was famous for freeing slaves and fighting Islamists all over the world.

James was very proud of his twenty-year-old son. Matthew had already mastered several languages, including English, Navajo, and Spanish. Now he was also learning Arabic, to ready himself for crusading. James was hoping that Matthew would return to Arizona after his militia service, but Matthew was already talking about settling in Wyoming. The lure to go there was strong. But, inevitably, like everything else, where he settled would be up to God’s plans.

James’s father, Alan Alstoba—the great-great-grandson of General Alstoba of World War III fame—was a prospector and celebrated
detectorista.
He had become wealthy by finding and patenting a uranium mine. But most of the old man’s cattle and fields had been passed down to his firstborn son, Jonathan. As the second-born son, James inherited only a one-tenth share of the cattle, and a few guns from the household armory. But James had become a successful detectorist in his own right, despite the fact that he devoted only two days a week to the art.

Most of the younger Alstoba’s finds on public lands over the years had been modest. But he had often found gold nuggets, iron meteorites, vehicle body panels and engine blocks, and long discarded car and truck batteries. Those had each been days to celebrate.

As always, he worked under a broad-brimmed canvas hat that had been made back east at one of the Amish communities. The hat had originally been white, but it was now badly stained by sweat and accumulated grime. As James’s wife put it, the hat had “character.” Living in Arizona, the sunshine was both a blessing and a curse. Economically, the strongest regions were the Pacific Northwest, the northern Rockies, and the Midwest. The Northwest was envied for its vast forest lands (a fantastic source of
constantly renewing fuel for steam power), its wind farms, its hydroelectric dams, and its farmlands—most of which didn’t require pumped irrigation water.

The Midwest was nearly as prosperous because of its rich farmlands and its growing network of canals. But people in the arid Southwest were doomed to a lower standard of living. The Southwest’s greatest sources of wealth came from its coal mines, natural gas wells, and a few uranium mines. But without regular rains, living in the Southwest was always a struggle. At least the Mexican Border Wars were a thing of the past.

Alstoba had read that the planet was coming out of the Second Little Ice Age. For a century and a half, there had been unusually cold weather. But now some climate scientists were warning that there might finally be the long predicted global warming, as the glaciers again began to retreat. This was a great source of debate, both in scientific and political circles.

By James’s generation, there were still fifty states, but no more “capital” cities. The early twenty-first century, in addition to the First Great Die-off, was also remembered as the beginning of a monumental decentralization trend. Americans learned the hard way that large cities—especially capital cities—were targets for nukes and dirty bombs by Islamic terrorists. So the population spread out. All elections were held via the Net, and legislatures met only virtually.

Because of transportation costs, most goods were transported by ship, barge, and steam train. Steam, sail, and nuke-powered ships dominated the high seas. These days, more than half the dwindling oil production was dedicated to making lubricants rather than fuel.

By the late twenty-second century, the silver-to-gold price ratio had dropped to 5 to 1. This shift took place because silver was being used up in various industrial processes like building PV panels, and the re-cy processes couldn’t recover much of
this silver. Inexorably, the price of silver rose in relation to gold.

The Islamists had made territorial gains throughout the twenty-first century, but in the twenty-second, when
their
oil ran out, they were forced to retreat on all fronts.

By the late 2100s there were just 50 million people living in the United States, which was deemed to be just about its long-term sustainable carrying capacity. Excess population was being shunted into the African colonies. These colonies had been developed in an attempt to repopulate the African continent, and to push out the Islamists. The Islamists had been stopped, and then pushed back, starting in Rhodbabwe, early in the twenty-second century. The rallying cry in World War IV had been “Push them back across the Zambezi.” But by Alstoba’s generation, five decades later, it was hoped that the Islamists could soon be pushed entirely off the African continent.

James heard a “whirrr!” in his headphones. Digging with his weeding probe, the target turned out to be a four-inch-long steel bolt. He put the rusty bolt in his collection bag, and resumed scanning. Two paces forward, a large hit showed up on his detector’s screen. This one turned out to be a four-foot length of rusted one-inch steel pipe. This piece alone would have made his day worthwhile. Then he found an old steel T-post, also just below the surface. This got him excited, because three years earlier he had followed one hit after another on an old fence line and had recovered seventeen T-posts in just one day. That was considered a pay dirt day.

Next, James got into an odd patch of soil, roughly rectangular, where the detector indicated a high level of diffuse iron oxide. From his past experience, he knew that this meant that a vehicle had sat there rusting for many decades before it had been hauled away for re-cy, long before James was born.

He kept searching, still finding useful nuts and bolts and other bits of rusted steel. There was enough scrap here to warrant him
stopping and moving his vehicle and trailer closer, to obviate making tiring trips back and forth.

He knew he’d come upon a productive patch for finding steel. He could probably dig up valuable base metals here for several days. He pulled out his tablet and triple-tapped the stylus on his currently indicated position and said, “Good patch for scrap steel.” The icon of a human ear appeared on the screen, indicating that a new voice annotation had been made to the map.

He moved his truck and trailer in close, to an adjoining patch that he had already scanned as clear. He again flipped the PV panels down. The charge controller showed the batteries were already back up to 47 percent. The skies were still sunny, so he would have enough juice to drive home within a couple of hours. This was shaping up to be a good day.