TEOTWAWKI: Beacon's Story (20 page)

"Elaine they won't just try to shoot a hole just anywhere in your wall, they'll put an artillery spotter up on the hill to look down on your wall like I did before coming in here. He'll tell'em where to shoot to hit between your containers and adjust their fire."

"But they line the entire wall."

"Except for the spaces you left open between them so you can get in to the ends to get at the supplies you've stored in them."

"Those sections between the freight containers are small, just a few feet, and the walls between the CONEXes are double thick rodded and poured."

"Cannons are the reason they stopped building castles…"

"But Doc's rifle…"

"Has a range measured in meters," Beacon interrupted, "and that cannon's range is measured in miles."

She still looked stubborn.

"They'll sit just outside of Doc's range and blast holes in your wall until they're ready to charge in at several points some night while their machine guns keep your heads down." Beacon handed his SALUTE report to Doc.

Elaine started to complain again but was soon cut off.

It was Doc's turn to interrupt, "We've got to capture or destroy that cannon!"

Doc called for an emergency meeting of the Board of Directors. Beacon went back out to Trudy's place for lunch while Doc and Elaine started making arrangements for a meeting of all the corporate shareholders to be called that evening after the BOD met.

Trudy warned Beacon to step down coming through her front door and apologized saying, "The low floor gives us a low roof which gives sharpshooters on the walls a clearer shot over it at attackers."

Keith and Rick rode up as she pointed out that the below ground level floor also helped keep her home cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Keith invited Beacon to dinner and went on into the citadel while Rick unsaddled the horses and put them out to pasture.

Trudy served them wheat bread and a hot broth thick with potatoes, carrots, onions and a meat Beacon couldn't immediately identify. She proudly proclaimed the meat to be guinea pig.

She explained that within the walls chickens were raised in wheeled bottomless walk-in mobile chicken wire coops with laying beds at the end which served, along with free ranging sheep and llamas, as lawn mowers and insect control on the wide lawns between the gardens inside the wall.

The large mobile pens could be wheeled, a little bit each day, across the smooth lawns between estates inside the wall but the rough rocky ground outside the citadel precluded such ranching methods so she raised guinea pigs and rabbits in foot high two feet by six feet chicken wire cages which had to be moved twice a day so the guinea pigs and rabbits could graze then brought into a low shed next to the cabins for protection at night.

She also boarded a few semi-wild chickens in a predator proof henhouse out by her garden. They consumed garden insects and table scraps. The chickens ran wild all day but had to return on their own to be locked in the little henhouse each night or face the perils of nighttime predators. Stubborn chickens were a self correcting problem.

"The first six months were the worst," Trudy said, "a lot of people knew about the citadel and begged or demanded to be let in. But the gardens and fields hadn't even been planted yet, let alone harvested. So the corporation had to turn them down, sometimes by force."

"They'd just barely finished building the citadel and were still stocking it when The Blowup occurred. They'd over extended their pre first harvest stored food supply by letting us join them. After all, seven is a lot of extra mouths to feed," she added as she poured them more dandelion tea.

"We kept the pigs inside the walls all the time and fed'em food scraps. But horses, cows, llamas and sheep had to be taken out to graze. We never went outside the wall in groups of less than five with Doc and some other snipers on overwatch for us. The grass near the wall was kept real short that first year."

"You lived inside the wall back then?" Beacon asked before blowing across his hot tin teacup.

"Oh Yes, they took good care of us letting us live in the back of the deuce and a half and giving us food from their own stores. After the worst of the die-off was over we started building these cabins with the help of a shareholder who'd been an architect before The Blowup.

We couldn't buy land inside the walls because it already belonged to the various shareholder households and each shareholder family had just enough space to supply their families. Besides, we had nothing but our labor to pay for anything.

We didn't want to build too far from the gate and we couldn't build right up next to the wall because that would give attackers a way to climb up and in. So we all decided that a hundred feet was far enough away from the wall yet close enough for us to escape inside the gate in an attack.

Nobody wanted us to obstruct the fields of fire from the wall so we had to make a lot of design compromises like low roofs slanting away from the wall."

Beacon kept asking questions until he confirmed what he'd suspected from the first. The citadel was owned, or at least had been owned when land titles and money meant anything, by a corporation. All of the mansions he'd seen around the wall were condos owned by shareholders.

As the family members of shareholders Keith and Cindy could buy out the condo of the shareholder family that hadn't made it to the citadel. They would be responsible to the Board of Directors and other shareholders for paying a share of their crops to the corporation as well as the upkeep and productivity of the land they'd assumed from the presumed deceased shareholder.

It was a kind of instant aristocracy with corporate labels. Trudy and her clan, being outsiders, couldn't buy stock in the private corporation or land inside the walls. However due to their early association with the corporation during the Long March Trudy's clan were favored vassals and their descendants would likely assume the roles of middlemen and merchants vis-à-vis the corporation's princes and barons as civilization rebuilt itself from the ruins.

Keith knocked and stuck his head in the door, "Doc needs you at the Board of Director's meeting and I'm supposed to escort you in."

Beacon left his Ruger 10/22 rifle and gear in the care of Trudy and her sons, but made it a point to wear his M1911A1 Colt forty-five prominently on his hip.

The Board of Directors was meeting in a large stone building adjacent to one of the gatehouses.

Like any good leader Doc wanted to be sure he had all his ducks in a row before a public meeting so he'd sent for Beacon to answer questions and cement his interpretation of the situation with the Board before bringing the matter up before the full body of shareholders.

Beacon noticed Molly standing behind a woman he assumed to be her mother and wondered why a kid was allowed at Board of Director's meeting. As the meeting went on he realized Molly had mastered the art of manipulating adults; when she wasn't filling water glasses or fetching notepads and pencils Molly stood behind her mother silent and motionless unnoticed and almost unseen, but listening.

When the time came Doc's introduction of Beacon to the Board of Directors was short and sweet; "I'm sure you all remember the young man who saved Cindy from the bikers and negotiated our acquisition of the second Humvee with its machine gun."

Beacon stepped forward, "Greeting, I'm your friendly local heathen," that drew a laugh, "I've come from the Settlement in the third valley over to the west of you. After this unpleasantness is over we hope to establish some sort of trade agreement with …"

"We're not interested in trade deals with peasants, get to the point!"

"Silence!" Doc roared banging the gavel on the oak table as he looked, Elaine in the eye, "I'll not have you denigrating our guest! One more outburst like that and I'll have you removed from the room."

"You can't have me removed; I'm a member of the board!"

"Maybe not, but I can hogtie and gag you. Do you want to try me?"

Elaine looked down at the table and mumbled something venomous.

"As I was about to say before I was interrupted, we at my settlement learned of the impending attack on you from one of the Blue Heads that attacked y'all a little while ago."

"They didn't get inside our wall either," he emphasized the words 'our wall' as he looked meaningfully at Elaine, "but they came damn close.

This next group that's comin' for y'all has a much better chance of blasting through your wall than that disorganized mob you just fought off."

"They may be rogue reserves, but they're organized with military discipline and a chain of command. They have at least two M60 machine guns like the one we got along with the other up armored HUMVEE during the Long March." Beacon used the term the citadel had come to use to refer to their exodus from the cities after The Blowup and reinforce their memory of his role in the acquisition of the vehicle and machine gun without seeming to be blowing his own horn or calling in a debt. Elaine fumed.

"In the recent past both of our groups have faced a common enemy the Blue Heads, or "Blue Meanies" as you call them, so we share an appreciation of their capabilities and our own." Beacon said again looking directly at Elaine. "We at the settlement pretty much wiped out the Blue Heads this last time around so you shouldn't have any more trouble from them."

"The Blue Heads were short on guns and had damn little ammunition. These military guys coming at you are all carrying M16s and then there's the pesky little problem of their cannon."

Elaine mockingly asked Beacon why he, "an experienced woodsman" hadn't simply slit the tires on the artillery piece instead of running "like a little girl to get our help."

"If I blow out their tires they'll stuff'em with leaves and grass. The softer tires will slow them down only a little bit." Beacon looked her in the eye, "Anything we do is going to hurt. The trick will be making what we do hurt them a whole lot more than it hurts y'all."

The board asked increasingly desperate questions as it became apparent that their modern day castle was no more immune to the effects of artillery than the castles of the Middle Ages.

Several board members wanted to mount a preemptive attack, Elaine was just angry that the whole situation existed at all and one man wanted to give up until Doc asked if he'd like to surrender his condo now.

Once it became apparent that losing this battle would put them on the same footing as Trudy Peace even Elaine decided something had to be done. The question was what.

An convoy of practiced well armed survivalists fighting its way along roads through disoriented, disorganized and poorly armed survivors in the confusion immediately following a civilization ending catastrophe was one thing. A long range infantry assault against a trained, well equipped disciplined military unit through a forest, rough terrain and fallen timber was something else again.

On the open road their mobility and scoped semi-automatic rifles gave them an advantage. In the forest fighting at relatively short ranges among fallen trees against military men with machine guns and automatic rifles their advantage evaporated. Even Doc's big Barrett rifle would be of little use in the close confines of the forest.

A midnight attack by a suicide squad might be able to stuff mud and dirt down the cannon's barrel and then fire it, hopefully, rupturing the breach. But they didn't know that for sure and no one in the citadel even knew how to properly load a cannon much less fire it. Did the cannon's shells require a separately loaded primer or was a percussion cap part of each shell? A whole lot of people could die while failing to fire the mud filled cannon because they didn't know how to turn off some unknown built in safety device.

A preemptive strike followed up by repeated raids and ambushes would be costly in terms of killed and wounded shareholders, but seemed to be the only way to stop or at least slow Colonel Darkin's advance.

Colonel Darkin could simply order his men around; they were used to it and although the carrot and stick of a paycheck and court marshal was gone it had been replaced by promise of plunder and the fear of being mustered out of the unit and left as defenseless as the people they'd previously prayed upon. As long as he didn't push them too hard Darkin's men would obey the colonel out of habit and fear.

Doc was at a severe disadvantage in that regard. Like the American Indian chiefs of old he'd need to gather a consensus of opinion from his followers before asking for action whereas Darkin could simply issue orders.

Doc's "troops" were successful business men and women who hadn't clawed their way to the top of their chosen professions by blindly taking orders.