Patriot Dawn: The Resistance Rises (3 page)

The HOA, although ostensibly well meaning, was in fact a microcosm of the problems in the country. It appeared to attract to its employ those petty authority types who enjoyed wielding power over others in the small tyrannies.

Go against the HOA at your peril, because they had the money to afford the attorneys, which funnily enough came from the dues that those same homeowners paid for the HOA to serve their best interests. Sounds familiar? It was almost laughable if it were not so tragic.

The presence of the HOA
was another reason that they had to keep their prepping low key. Operational security, or OPSEC, was always a factor in prepping anyway. But if they had lived in the country they could have aspired to a vegetable garden, goats or cows for milk, and chickens. Instead, the prepping was confined to the purchasing, and storing in the basement, of food and equipment.

The Berengers had discussed this
problem at length but they were not financially positioned to sell up and move to a rural retreat, they were too tied to the golden handcuffs of the beltway rat-race, with the kids in school and all the rest.

They always said that if the slide began, it would get to a point that the HOA would
not matter anymore, and they would get chickens and goats then. They had heirloom seeds ready to start a garden. But in the end it had all happened so fast there was no chance to buy any animals. Luckily, they had about a years’ worth of food stored in cans and buckets in the basement.

As part of their prepping, Jack
had worked diligently on the tactical side: defense of his family. He had two 5.56mm Colt M4 rifles, two Remington 870 pump action shotguns and three Glock 23 handguns, chambered for .40 caliber rounds. He had amassed a sizeable quantity of ammunition for all the firearms, plus an ACOG x4 magnification combat optic for his M4.

He had
acquired a set of body armor plates and he had used them recreate his old rig from his Ranger days, creating a tactical plate carrier vest in ranger green. He had ammunition pouches attached across the front of the vest, allowing him to carry eight magazines, along with some other utility pouches for various items.

As well as the plate carrier rig, he had created a battle belt using a tactical belt, a padded hip pad, and several types of pouches. On the battle belt he had his handgun and spare magazines, three double rifle ammunition pouches allowing carriage of six thirty round magazines, and a dump pouch for used magazines, plus several other utility items in their own pouches. He could wear the battle belt on its own or with the tactical vest, allowing him to rig himself according to the situation.

Basically, Jack stuck to what he knew and felt comfortable with. For him, weapons and equipment had always been tools that he had been ‘issued’, so he stuck to familiarity and he was by no means an expert on all the various firearms, optics and equipment on the market. 

Jack
had also collected various amounts of web gear and other tactical supplies that he fitted to Caitlin and Andrew for when the time came. They both had battle belts; Andrew’s rigged up just like his, while Caitlin’s was specialized for her handgun and also shotgun ammunition carriage. Andrew also had a chest rig for carriage of additional ammunition for his rifle.

Jack
worried about having only one set of ballistic plates but whenever they discussed, or more rarely ran through a tactical situation, they practiced for Caitlin to act as protection to the young kids, while Andrew moved to cover and a fire support position with one of the M4s. Jack would always do the maneuver and thus it seemed right that he wore the set of armor.

Whenever they went and did paintball
games it always worked out that Andrew liked to stay back and snipe from cover while Jack would always run about doing bounding over-watch like he had been trained to do in his soldiering days, which inevitably got him killed in paintball, usually by a twelve year old hiding in a bush.

             
Jack was terrified of any harm coming to the kids. He worked on close protection drills with Caitlin as much as he could, and although they both understood the need to prep, it was never easy with inter-marital politics to actually train together. Wives and teenagers did not make ideal training buddies, and it was all too easy for him to put his foot in it and unintentionally cause offense.

He
was also very mindful that Andrew was a teenager, his son, with no combat experience and he wanted to keep him safe as much as possible. He always had him in a fire support role working from cover.

Andre
w was actually a very good shot. He wasn’t an experienced combat shooter like Jack, but he had the basics and had been on the air rifle team with the ROTC before Jack had introduced him to range shooting with the M4.

One of the aspects of preparing his family that Jack gave a lot of thought to was their mental preparation. Although he did not want to discuss specific aspects of his combat experience
s with them, he felt a strong need to try and make them understand what it may be like, and what could be at stake, should violence come to them.

He talked to them and had them visualize combat situations, attackers coming at them bent on their destruction. He explained that in the absence of law and order, and facing armed marauders, it was a simple ‘them or us’ situation. On the range, he had them fire at photographic and realistic targets, and when simulating combat through training such as paintball, he had Andrew actually aim and fire his ‘weapon’ at the ‘enemy’.

Jack explained that if or when it came, the violence would likely be sudden and unexpected, and they would probably not be ready for it. They needed to visualize their reactions in advance, train muscle memory, and be ready to ‘turn it on’ in an instant should the need arise.

In the three month period between the terrorist attack and the Chinese attack on the power grid the Berengers had found themselves out of work. Jack worked as a consultant for a corporation and as such he was one of the first to be let go, before the full time employees.

Caitlin
should have had a secured job with the DoD, but what happened was that government employees were not fired, but put on furlough without pay ‘until further notice’.

They
had planned to fall back on their savings but the hyperinflation that followed the bank run soon wiped those out and they were solely reliant on their preparations and food stocks.

They had never got as far with their prepping as buying precious metals, but they
figured that you couldn’t eat them anyway so what was the use? Better to buy more ammunition.

When the grid went down,
Jack wished they had been able to afford the generator they had planned for, but by then it was too late. It was the beginning of fall and luckily they had a wood fire, a woodpile, plenty of propane and some camping style wood burning stoves and a rocket stove.

Jack
had also stockpiled enough gas to refill both their cars once each. They had a Suburban and a Dodge grand caravan, and when the lights went out they moved the two vehicles to the rear of the house to keep them out of sight.

The plan, given that they did not have an alternative place to go, was to hunker down in place. None of their family was near and the only suitable place that
Jack could think of was the farm belonging to their friends Bill and Cindy, who lived out in the country past Manassas towards Shenandoah. But they had made no plans and they did not want to impose uninvited. How would they feel if the roles were reversed, after all?

Bill was an old friend from
Jack’s army days. He had fully embraced the prepper thing, but had gone beyond that to writing a libertarian blog highly critical of the Administration. Jackagree
d
with him, but given that he and Caitlin worked in DC and had security clearances, he didn’t want to make any waves.

Jack
and Caitlin worked on getting their place ready to sit out the coming chaos following the cyber-attack. They did not in fact know it had been a cyber-attack, they just knew that the power had gone out and that it appeared to be widespread. They were getting FEMA updates on their wind-up radio, which were mainly transmitting locations for FEMA refugee camps and food distribution areas.

There was no more
fuel in the gas stations so there was a network of pickup points for FEMA buses that would take people in. The unofficial word was that firearms were now outlawed and you had to turn them in, and anyone in receipt of handouts had to be RFID chipped.

Apparently, y
ou did not have to go into the camps permanently, but if you took food handouts and returned home on the buses, you had to be chipped and file your address and details with FEMA.

Initially after the blackout their street had been pretty social
, more so than in normal times. The situation had drawn a lot of neighbors out of their homes to talk and pass around information and rumor. There was talk of mass exoduses from the cities and gridlock on the roads, with many ignoring FEMAs request to concentrate under their control.

They had not seen much traffic
, either foot or vehicle, through their sub-division and so far no rioting or looting had spread their way. However, there were rumors of mass violence as the mobs tried to get out of the cities into the surrounding country.

The
remainder of the utilities had all shut down a couple of days after the power went out. There was no longer any water service. As the days dragged into weeks this took its toll, along with the beginning of starvation, and activity dropped on the street. Some families drove to the FEMA reception center downtown, or took the bus there instead. Others decided to head out and try to make it to relatives or simply into the country. Many stayed in place.

Jack
had boarded up his ground floor windows internally with plywood and barricaded his front door, including moving an upright piano from the opposite wall in the foyer to block the doorway. They had shifted to cooking on propane tanks on a camping stove in the kitchen. It was the start of fall and they had firewood, but it wasn’t really cold enough to need it yet.

Jack
had an old camping shower tent that he set up in the yard over a deep drop latrine that he dug. They would go potty in a bucket, and tip it into the hole, with the adults simply going out to this improvised outhouse for ‘number twos’. He was using biocide to tackle the waste in the hole and gradually filling it in with dirt; he would start another hole and move the tent when it was full.

The
y still had plenty of drinking water in 55 gallon drums in the basement, and there was a small lake that had fish nearby that he planned to replenish from, filtering and boiling the water as necessary. Jack had rain barrels attached to the downpipes on the corner of the house, and they had initially used this water to flush the toilets before they decided to block them as a defense against backflow and gas.

They were even able to shower, using the rainwater heated up over a wood stove to fill a solar
shower. Jack had rigged a bar up over the shower in the master bedroom to hang the solar shower from, and it was fairly comfortable to use. The bath in the main bathroom was still occupied by the ‘water bob’ that they had filled before water service stopped.

It was not really practical to run a watch system, and
there really did not seem to be much going on. Jack relied a lot on their German Shepherd family dog, Jasper. He barked without fail whenever anyone approached the house.

Jack
took to stashing his tactical vest and rifle in an easily accessible central place. He had started wearing his battle belt with his handgun and some magazine pouches all the time anyway, and Caitlin and Andrew wore their battle belts also. Jack always slung his rifle on his back when he went outside.

The rifles and
shotguns were moved room to room inside the house to keep them close, and the ‘Alamo’ was in the basement. They put the weapons up on six inch nails Jack had hammered into the walls, to keep them available yet safe from the young kids.

They ran the kids through ‘bad guy’ drills for taking cover in the basement. When they
weren’t doing chores in the house or the yard, Jack and Andrew often took turns sitting in a chair by an open window in an upstairs bedroom, just listening and observing the junction. Between that and Jasper, they hoped to avoid being taken by surprise.

There had been some gunfire in the distance
from time to time, sometimes the sirens of emergency response vehicles, but none of those lately. It was plain from the rumor mill that although FEMA was determined to concentrate everyone at their reception centers and camps, it was not working out like that. Many had gone in to the camps; others just used the distribution centers, handing over their firearms and getting chipped for the privilege.

Jack had expected more of a problem in his area from looters and marauders, but although he
could hear the evidence of the gunfire in the distance, they had not really seen anyone transiting through the neighborhood. It was true that their sub-division was off the beaten track, it was not an obvious transit route so may have been bypassed.

Jack also wondered whether it had something to do with the high proportion of ranking government workers and those in the employ of the various DC alphabet
agencies who resided in the area. Perhaps the area had been a higher focus for protection by law enforcement agencies?