Founders (8 page)

In her MOLLE pouches, Terry confirmed that she had six spare black Teflon-coated M16 30 magazines for her CAR-15. Ken carried just four spare 20-rounders for his HK clone.

She whispered each item to Ken, who was guarding their camp as she worked. She took her time carefully writing out a combined list of the contents of their packs in her notebook:

Leatherman Wave tool

2 water bottles

2 first-aid kits (one with Celox coagulant packs)

2 CAT tourniquets

.223 cleaning kit with sight tool, carbon scraper, & CAR-15 stock/1911 bushing wrench. Spare firing pin w/retainer pin and extractor w/pin.

.308 cleaning kit with HK sight tool

.45 cleaning kit with spare firing pin, sear, finger spring, and extractor

6 sets of socks and underwear for K

8 sets of socks and underwear for T

One extra set of DPMs, for each

7 complete MREs

15 main course entrées

Magnesium pills (29 left)

Multivitamins (98 left)

17 Emergen-C packets

100 feet of olive drab parachute cord

AAA Maps: Illinois, Midwest States, Western States, Idaho/Montana

Metal Match magnesium fire starter

Gill net

Hardware wire

Hacksaw blade

Olive drab duct tape

Green bandana

2 bivy bags

Compass

Soap (1 Ivory, 1 Lava)

24 tampons (can be used as bandages)

3 camo face paint sticks

2 toothbrushes

Triple-thickness Ziploc bag of salt

Sewing kit

10 feet aluminum foil

4 black trash bags

Sierra Club cup (Ken’s left in Bronco)

$23.10 face value in pre-1965 silver dimes and quarters

3 bandoleers of 7.62 Ball (one is short 20 rounds)

40 rounds of .308 150 Gr. Spire Point soft nose

1 spare HK 20-round magazine, alloy (loaded with soft nose)

4 bandoleers of 5.56 Ball (one is short 60 rounds)

1 spare 30-round AR magazine, steel (loaded with tracers)

2 match safes with strike anywhere matches

2 spare 9-volt DC batteries

T’s Bible

Being thorough, she added another list below:

In pockets or carried:

LED minilight

1 tin of foot powder (half full?)

Headset radios

Gloves with liners

Tylenol (27 left)

Two bottles purification tablets (about 190 left)

DPM boonie hats

DPM jackets and raincoats

K’s wallet (mine left in car)

T’s sunglasses (Ken’s left in Bronco)

K’s key ring with Proto screwdriver & P-38 can opener (mine left in car)

Bench-made tanto pocketknife (K’s Cold Steel Voyager XL pocketknife left in Bronco)

Wish we had:

K’s study Bible (left in Bronco)

GPS (left in car)

Gerber Omnivore LED flashlights (both left in car and Bronco)

Fishing kit

Full-size tent

Fry pan

Tweezers

Hard candies

Granola bars

More food!

More ammo!

Sunscreen

Mosquito repellent

Gaiters

Better variety of plastic bags

Katadyn water filter (one left in Bronco, one left at Todd’s in Idaho)

Each time that Terry mentioned something that had been left behind in the Mustang and the Bronco, Ken groaned. But then, when she’d finished the list, Ken said resignedly, “We can’t worry about what we lost. We’re never getting any of that back. That’s just water under the bridge. I know it’s hard, but we even have to forgive the people that robbed us.”

Terry snorted. “I’ll let you know when I feel ready to do that. Don’t hold your breath.”

Ken gave Terry a hug and said, “I know it’s really hard, but we’ve got to let it go. It’s the Christian thing to do.”

“And shooting those guys?”

Ken answered, “That’s different. They were still
in the act.
That’s not revenge. And for those that lived, now it’s time for us to forgive.”

Terry gave Ken a kiss and said, “Okay. I’ll try. I’ll pray about it.
Your turn to sleep, until it gets dark. I’ll wake you then—I figure that’ll be about four hours.”

Early in the afternoon, Terry first heard and then saw a group of people walking alongside the river, on the same bank that they were hidden. She woke Ken, pressing her index finger over his lips, to warn him to be quiet.

They lay still, watching the group as it passed by. They counted twenty-two people—fifteen adults and seven children. All of them were African American, carrying their belongings in backpacks. They moved downstream, oblivious to the Laytons’ presence. The adults were carrying guns, but only the man in the lead carried his gun at the ready. He was armed with a Saiga 12 shotgun. All the rest had their rifles slung on their shoulders. Some also had holstered pistols. They had an odd assortment that included two AKs, several scoped deer rifles, an AR-180, a SIG-556, and a couple of .22 rimfire rifles. As they passed, several of the people in the group were talking loudly, debating whether the water in the river was safe to drink. Several children were complaining about the weight of their loads.

Two minutes after the group was out of sight around a bend in the river, Terry whispered, “Amazing. Talk about an invitation to get ambushed.”

Ken nodded. “Yeah, notice how they were mostly clumped up? And the guy out front wasn’t acting like a real point man, either. Their spacing—er ‘intervals’—sucked.”

“Noise discipline was sucky, too.”

Ken sighed. “I hope they don’t have to learn those lessons the hard way. At least they had the sense to get out of Chicago.”

Terry gave a thumbs-up and said, “Yep, bonus points for that.”

“That’s the way I want to see everyone from here on,” Ken said. “From concealment, and preferably from a distance. Okay, it’s your turn to get some sleep.”

At 5 p.m. another group of refugees passed through, this time
on the opposite bank of the river. Ken watched quietly, not bothering Terry, who was sound asleep.

This group was nine people, all white—four adults and five children. Like the last group, they were walking clustered together and the adults were carrying backpacks and slung long guns. One of the women was wearing a white ski jacket that, compared to most of their other clothing, stood out like a beacon.

When Terry awoke an hour later, Ken told her about the group that had passed by. He concluded with the words “Low life expectancy, no doubt.”

Terry replied, “Ours isn’t much better.”

“Well, at least we’re in all earth tone and camo clothes, and we’ll be traveling at night.”

“But there’s just two of us. That makes us vulnerable.”

Ken countered, “Yeah, but we’re also not in a big, noisy
gaggle.
”

Terry grinned.

Darkness was falling. They relieved themselves and buried their waste and the empty wrappers from their MRE. They applied foot powder and put on dry socks. As they were rolling up their sleeping bags, Terry whispered, “I’m starved.”

“Me, too, but we’ve got only what’s in our packs. It might be
days
before we can find a safe place to barter silver for food. So let’s stick to one MRE per day.”

Terry nodded and put on a glum face. She finished stowing the gear in her pack. They applied green and loam camouflage from a stick onto each other’s faces and the backs of their hands. Standing in the cleared spot where their sleeping bags had been, they took turns jumping up and down to check for noise. Other than a slight slosh from Terry’s canteen, their gear was quiet. Terry made a mental note to refill her canteen as soon as possible.

Weaving their way out of the willow thicket, they resumed their walk alongside the river. They began passing small refugee
camps. These numbered from five to forty people. Most of the camps were lit by large campfires. There was a fistfight in progress in one of the camps. It ended with a pistol shot. Ken and Terry kept moving, leaving them wondering what had happened. The camps were easy to skirt around unobserved. At one of them, Ken recognized the woman wearing the white ski jacket. “She won’t blend in until there’s snow on the ground. That is,
if
she lives that long,” he commented.

“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.”

—Barbara Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
(1987)

Ken and Terry continued to follow the river for two more days, moving slowly and with extreme caution. They rested during daylight in clumps of brush or far out in fields of harvested corn that had been left with their stalks still standing. Even this far out of Chicago they could still hear gunfire in the distance around the clock.

They communicated mostly via hand and arm signals. They
were often spaced as much as fifty feet apart, so they would occasionally use their pair of 500-milliwatt RadioShack TRC headset walkie-talkies in push-to-talk mode. Even though these radios were twenty years old, they were very handy, particularly if whoever was trailing needed to contact whoever was in the lead to alert them when they weren’t looking behind.

The course of the river was mostly southwest, but it eventually turned southward—not in their intended direction, which was west or northwest. But it offered the best opportunity to travel undetected and provided numerous wooded and brushy areas where they could rest. They decided to follow the river until they got away from the Chicago metropolitan region.

A large railroad bridge crossed over the river, just north of Joliet. “Okay, now we’ve finally got tracks that are heading east–west. According to the map, if we stay on the river, it joins with the Kankakee River southwest of Joliet and that creates the Illinois River,” Ken said.

Terry added glumly, “And that would take us down toward Peoria and Springfield.”

“Right,” he agreed.

Terry gave Ken a hug and said, “Following those tracks sounds good to me.”

The tracks, they later found, belonged to the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, a regional line. The tracks began westward, but then curved northward. They soon intersected a set of Burlington Northern tracks oriented east–west. They followed the Burlington Northern tracks west for several nights without incident. They were amazed to see that even though the line they were walking along was heretofore high volume, all train traffic had stopped.

As they got out onto the plains, the Laytons had less frequent opportunities to find secluded places to camp. They continued to split just one MRE per day. This required great discipline, as their growling stomachs were a regular reminder that they were operating
on a caloric deficit. They scavenged a few ears of corn at the edges of fields that had been missed during harvest, and they gnawed them clean, being careful to thoroughly chew the half-dried corn kernels so that they would be digestible.

They also occasionally found a sugar beet that had fallen from an open car hopper to the railroad ballast below. These they peeled, sliced, and ate raw. Ken called them “Manna from Heaven.” Each time Ken said this, Terry would counter, “Naw, they’re Manna from the Oracle of Omaha.” By this, she was referring to billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s ownership of the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad.

Even with the corn and sugar beets to supplement their MREs, they were losing weight quickly. Terry had an extra ten pounds of fat on her hips but Ken was wiry, so he had little to spare. Realizing the disparity, Terry “accidentally” made sure that Ken got a larger portion of each MRE entrée and the supplemental food that they found.

The weather was growing colder. There was frost on top of their sleeping bags each morning. They bundled up, wearing nearly all of their clothes. Now out on the open prairie, they dispensed with using face camouflage paint, as they had done when “sneaking and creeping” along the river near Chicago.

Their progress was still slow and stealthy. Wanting to avoid an ambush, they stopped following the railroad tracks whenever they went though large towns. Instead, they bypassed the towns, skirting mostly through farm fields.

Near midnight, just east of Mendota, Illinois, the Laytons inadvertently stumbled into an encampment that straddled the BNSF tracks. The camp was quiet and there were no campfires burning. Terry was in the lead, twenty feet ahead. When she realized that they were passing through the encampment, she pressed the PTT button on her radio five times in rapid succession to alert Ken. By the dim moonlight, they could see at least twenty tents.
Ken quickly concluded that since they were already in the midst of the camp, it would have exposed them even more to reverse their direction. So he whispered into his radio’s boom mike, “Just act brave, and keep walking. Need be, we can bluff our way through. Safeties off.”

They both thumbed their rifles’ safeties. A man staggered toward the tracks, obviously drunk. He unzipped his fly and looked up to see Ken and Terry walking by on the raised railroad above him. Their boots were at his face level. In the dim light, Ken could see that the stranger was carrying a holstered handgun. Ken shouldered his rifle, and centered the HK’s ringed front sight on the man’s chest.

Startled, the man asked, “Who the hell are you?”

Ken replied in the most macho voice he could muster, “You don’t want to know, mister. Just leave us alone, and we won’t waste you.”