Founders (9 page)

The man stood petrified, wondering how many people were traveling with Ken. Little did he know that there were just two of them.

As they passed the man, Ken and Terry turned and walked backward, keeping their rifles trained on him. The man stood still, apparently afraid to move or raise an alarm. Once they had walked this way for another forty yards, they turned and ran for about 150 yards, and then left the raised railroad ballast and cut across a field. At the far side of the field, they helped each other over a three-strand barbed wire fence and then sprinted again to take cover behind a cattle loafing shed.

Terry gave Ken a hug: “That was close!”

Ken asked, “Do you think they were looters?”

“Might’ve been. Maybe just refugees. Whoever it was, that sure scared me.”

“Ditto,” Ken added.

They waited a few minutes. There was no sound of alarm in
the camp. When they resumed their march, they paralleled the railroad for nearly a mile.

This necessitated crossing several barbed wire fences. After a while, they got good at it—not snagging their pants, and not leaving a trace. Ken always made a point of wiping off any mud clinging to the wire from their boots.

Despite their stealthy movement, they had a few unexpected scares. Twice, stray dogs darted across their path. They were gone even before they had the chance to react. Another time, Ken almost tripped over the feet of a man who was lying in a sleeping bag. The man had positioned himself with the foot end of his sleeping bag protruding into the trail. Either he was sound asleep, or dead. The Laytons didn’t linger to find out which.

They reached the banks of the Mississippi during a heavy rain—the first significant rain since they had left Chicago. There was virtually no ambient light. The railroad bridge was several miles north of East Moline. It connected East Clinton, Illinois, with Clinton, Iowa. Crossing the bridge was frightening. It was dark, the bridge was wet, and it hadn’t been designed for foot traffic. They knew that the chance of a train crossing the bridge was slim, since there hadn’t been any trains running in days. Nevertheless, the prospect of being caught in the middle of the long bridge had both Ken and Terry very anxious.

“The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.”

—Freeman Dyson,
Infinite in All Directions,
1988

The rain continued and it was getting colder. The Laytons were cold, wet, and miserable. They realized that they were at risk of hypothermia. Three miles southeast of Durant, Illinois, they came upon a large silo complex that belonged to Cargill Corporation. It looked as if it was designed to hold millions of pounds of grain. It was one of the largest silo operations they had seen since leaving Chicago. Oddly, there was no one there.

They walked into an open-sided terminal building that was designed to accommodate eighteen-wheel grain-hauling trucks. They were just happy to be out of the rain. The building was dark and deserted. Most of the terminal building was set up with a complex arrangement of vertical silo chutes for filling rail cars and trucks. But one quadrant of the building was a pallet and front-end loader operation. Here, there were two large forklifts and a front-end loader parked, and enormous piles of bagged and loose corn ringed on three sides by six-foot-tall concrete retaining walls. They climbed over one of these and unshouldered their ALICE packs behind a tall loose pile of corn. Next to the back wall, the corn was just a few inches deep. There, they rolled out their sleeping bags and got out of their wet clothes. Terry was shivering, on the edge of hypothermia. They laid their clothes out flat to dry. Terry estimated that dawn would come in less than an hour.

At just after 8 a.m. they were awakened by the sound of a vehicle driving into the south end of the building. Peeking over the top of the containment wall, Ken saw that it was a Sheriff’s Department patrol car. But no sooner did the car arrive than they heard it leave. Ken and Terry gave each other shrugs, and then crawled back into their sleeping bags. Outside, the pouring rain continued.

They slept for most of the day. After they stopped shivering, they were comfortable. The building was quiet, except for the frequent
sound of the flapping wings of pigeons. In the afternoon, they awoke and shared a meal. Ken began to methodically clean and dry their guns and magazines.

The sign hanging above the corn pile where they were camped was marked “Yellow Dent—Untreated—Super Tested.” Ken knew that dent corn was used for livestock feed and that hunters used it to attract deer. Since it was untreated, he also knew that it would be safe to eat. He added heaping handfuls of the corn to two of their water bottles and left it to soak for their next meal.

At just before 8 p.m., another patrol car arrived. This time, since it was dark, a sheriff’s deputy scanned the building with the car’s searchlight. The car was there less than a minute and then it left.

Terry was becoming feverish and the weather was horrible, so they decided to stay. It rained steadily. The pattern of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. vehicular patrols continued for the next three days. After that, the silo complex was completely deserted, save for the Laytons. They surmised that a shortage of fuel had curtailed patrols. Their only companions were a few pigeons, which Terry referred to as “our fellow freeloaders.”

Soon, the rain transitioned to sleet. That was followed by snow. There were snow showers for two weeks. Very gradually, Terry recovered from her illness. They assumed that it had been a flu. They spent many hours in their sleeping bags talking with their faces just a few inches apart. These conversations left them feeling more connected than ever before in their marriage. The precariousness and immediacy of the situation were enormous, but they felt calm and reassured to be together. As Ken put it, he felt “ready to take on the world, just as soon as the snow stops blowing sideways.”

Ken’s and Terry’s diet consisted almost entirely of corn soaked in water. They didn’t leave the grain pile except to gather water from a downspout and to relieve themselves in a “cat hole” that Ken dug with his entrenching tool, thirty yards out in an adjoining field.

While they were there, Terry discovered that she had lost her headset walkie-talkie, most likely the day before they arrived in Durant.

Three weeks after they arrived, the sun finally peeked through the clouds one afternoon. It was still cold but Terry was again feeling healthy. They decided to press on. There were six inches of snow on the ground, and it was deeper where the snow had drifted. They filled their packs with as much dent corn as they could hold. Ken also filled the cargo pockets of their pants with corn. They planned to eat that first.

Ken left $305 in cash on top of the front of the pile of grain. He composed a thank-you note to the owner of the elevator. Realizing that it made no sense for him to continue to carry his walkie-talkie since Terry’s had gone missing, he also left it as a barter payment for the owners of the grain elevator. But he first salvaged the ni-cad battery.

The temperature was 25 degrees lower than when they had left Chicago. They pressed on. It was almost unbearably cold. They took turns sleeping that night in a large open-sided hay barn located 200 yards from the nearest house. The barn was half full of hay and straw bales. It offered little protection from the wind, but they were thankful that they weren’t sleeping in the snow. They weren’t disturbed.

Just west of Lime City, Iowa, they decided to cross over Interstate 80. The freeway was deserted. To Ken, this seemed unbelievably strange, since up until a few weeks before, I-80 had been a major car and truck route.

When the Crunch hit, Joshua Watanabe was woefully underprepared. His only stored fuel was three gallons of gasoline for his
weed eater. His house was heated by propane, and the heater’s fan was useless without grid power.

He owned only one gun, a Browning A-Bolt .30-06 that he used for hunting deer and elk. The rifle was stainless steel, and it had a matching finish Nikon Monarch 4-12 adjustable magnification scope. He hadn’t bothered to buy any spare magazines for the rifle.

He had always been a “one box a year” type shooter, so as the Crunch set in, Joshua had only thirty-four rounds of .30-06 ammunition on hand. When the full implications of the Crunch became obvious, he made frantic trips to seven sporting goods stores. But he found that their inventories had already been devastated. He was able to find only three additional boxes of .30-06, and those had three different bullet weights, so he had doubts about the point of impact when using them. He bought a set of RCBS .30-06 reloading dies for $250. He was able to find 500 reloading primers (for $100), but no powder, brass, or projectiles. He also found a spare telescopic sight. It was an inexpensive 3-to-9 power scope made in China, but it was better than nothing in the event that his Nikon scope ever got broken or fogged up. Because the rifle had no iron sights, Joshua knew that if the original scope ever failed the rifle would become useless without a backup.

The sporting goods stores had hardly any guns or ammunition, but they still had a fair quantity of hunting clothes. So Joshua bought a heavy Realtree camouflage coat with a detachable hood, a set of camouflage overalls, a camouflage balaclava, and a camouflage microfleece sweater. Scouring the shelves, he also bought five rolls of rifle and bow camouflaging tape. This removable adhesive tape was intended to break up the outlines of guns or archery equipment. Since his rifle was stainless steel—with all of the metal parts looking very silvery—he felt that it was important to tone down its appearance.

Later that month, after his marriage to Kelly, Joshua’s new father-in-law gave him a pistol—a Kel-Tec PMR-30 .22 Magnum. Just a .22 rimfire, it was a pitiful stopper for men, but fine for shooting squirrels and rabbits. It also had an unusually bright muzzle flash. But at least the pistol used thirty-round magazines. The Kel-Tec came with only one spare magazine. This left Joshua wishing for half a dozen more. He decided that if he ever needed to use it for self-defense he would restrict himself to taking head shots. He practiced with it, keeping such shots in mind, aiming at just the eye area of the head on a human silhouette target. Short on ammunition, he mainly did “dry practice.” Because the firing pins of rimfire guns tend to gouge their chambers if they are dry-fired, Joshua made a habit of always inserting a piece of fired brass in the chamber before doing dry practice.

Not only was the pistol woefully underpowered, but he had only 340 rounds of .22 Magnum ammunition. Searching for more ammo for both the pistol and his rifle was his highest priority. The holster that came with the pistol was marginal. It was a generic nylon holster with a cumbersome thumbstrap. It took lots of extra practice to get used to quickly un-holstering the pistol with one hand.

Joshua’s father-in-law’s rifle was a .270 Winchester, and both Joshua’s mother-in-law and his new bride owned .243 Winchesters. The family had fewer than 200 rounds between the three rifles. Jim owned the only other handgun in the family—a Ruger Redhawk .44 Magnum with a ponderously long eight-inch barrel. It was fairly well supplied with more than 600 rounds of ammunition—a mixture of .44 Magnum and .44 Special, both of which could be fired through the gun. Joshua considered it substandard as a self-defense gun—he preferred automatics—but he was hardly in a position to criticize, since he had owned
no
handgun.

Joshua’s food situation was pitiful. As a bachelor, he had kept only about a twelve-day supply of food on hand, plus a couple of cases of MREs that he’d bought the year before through the base commissary with hunting trips in mind.

Joshua hadn’t filled a deer or antelope tag the year before. Without any meat in his freezer, other than two pounds of hamburger and four lamb chops, he was “behind the power curve.” He thawed and grilled that meat on his propane barbeque, fearing that there would soon be power failures. He was hoping to bag an elk or a couple of antelope before winter set in. This, he realized, would
not
be sport hunting. It was meat gathering, and vitally important.

The Monroes’ ranch was only two miles from the A-01 MAF. Only two weeks after the Crunch, Joshua was assigned caretaker of the facility, including its outlying silos. This assignment gave him “as needed” access to JP-4 fuel from Malmstrom, to do his sporadic roving patrols of the MAF and silos. He was encouraged to do patrols roughly four times a week, but not in any set pattern. The only vehicle at the ranch that could burn JP-4 was Jim’s Unimog. This at first seemed like a poor choice for patrolling the silos but it later proved ideal. The terrain around A-01 was mostly rolling hills. Because it had been set up for camping, the Unimog could be parked below the crest of hills so that it would be out of sight. Joshua could then stake out any of the silos. He could do so for days or even weeks at a time if need be.