Eric Walters - The Rule of Three

Supper had been more of the same—semifrozen burger patties that I pulled out of our freezer and cooked on the barbecue. Danny looked like he was going to complain but was smart enough to keep his mouth closed. I couldn’t help wondering when we had last filled the propane tank and how much was left and what would happen after that.

Now Mom and I sat around the table having a cup of tea by moonlight and a couple of candles. We still had the power line from Herb, but he’d turned off the generator for the night and so there were no other lights. If it hadn’t been that we were sitting in the dark without any background noise of a TV or radio, it would have felt normal. Mom was drinking out of the WORLD’S BEST MOM mug I had made for her in a crafts class when I was seven or eight. She always said it was her favorite mug in the world. She was in her usual Mom clothing. It was almost hard to believe all of what had happened, and was still happening. Or, really, what wasn’t happening. The area outside our doors was shut down. No, that was wrong. It wasn’t just the area outside our doors—it was the entire country, maybe even the entire world.

Mom looked over at me. “How do you think your brother and sister are doing?”

“All right, I guess. I made sure they had a good day today. They’re just worried about Dad.”

“I know he’s fine,” she said.

“You can’t know that.”

“I know your father. He’s so impatient he’s probably left Chicago and is working his way back home instead of waiting for things to recover.”

I could picture him walking home across the country, but I imagined him in an old Cessna. I shrugged, and Mom reached out to hold my hand.

“Neither of us can even think of him as not being fine. We have to be as reassuring as we can with Danny and Rachel.”

I gave her a quick smile. “They are scared, but they don’t understand how big all of this is.”

“Nobody really does,” she said.

“Herb has a pretty good idea.” I looked at my watch. I’d asked Herb to come over. “He should be here soon.”

“Do you know what he wants to talk about?” she asked.

“It was my idea. I asked him to explain things to us,” I said. “Everything.”

“It would be good to know all that he knows. He’s been slightly ahead of the curve on things, knowing what was going to happen.”

“He told me that this is like a chess game.”

“Who does he think he’s playing chess against?” she asked.

“Probably everybody, including us.”

It wasn’t long before there was a knock at the sliding door. It was Herb, and my mother waved for him to come in.

“How are you two doing on this fine evening?” he asked. “I brought over a box of canned goods that might come in handy.”

He was all smiles, fresh clothing, clean hair, and a well-rested look. The only hint that things weren’t all sunshine was the bulge under his jacket where I knew he had his pistol.

“Thanks for the pantry donation. We are starting to run low on some things. Do you want tea?” my mother asked.

“Sounds good.” He sat down, and my mother put a cup in front of him. He smiled, then cleared his throat. “I’ve had a chance to go over the first day’s results from the survey.”

“And?”

Herb pulled out a sheaf of papers from the food box and placed them on the table. “There are four hundred and twenty households, and sixteen hundred thirty-seven people in the neighborhood,” he said.

“I would have thought there would be many more than that,” my mother said.

“Normally there are, but there were people away on business or holidays or who for whatever reason haven’t been able to get home. For some people even twenty miles is an impossible distance.”

My father was a thousand miles away.

“We need the people at the checkpoints to become more stringent in checking the identification of all people claiming to live in the neighborhood. We have to restrict entry to people who live here.”

“I know the flow of people past our walls is becoming more pronounced,” my mother said.

“It’s all part of the flight from larger centers to smaller ones. Nobody can live for long in an apartment in the city, because they can’t grow food or get water. They’re fleeing to places where they think they can take refuge, find food and water. Cities that had millions will soon have hundreds of thousands and then become practically deserted.”

“And a lot of those refugees are walking right past our neighborhood,” my mother said.

“And we need them to keep walking. We can’t take them in,” Herb said. “As every place else deteriorates, we’re going to be seen not only as a destination but also as a target.”

“How do the patrols and checkpoints look tonight?” my mother asked.

“Thanks to the survey, it looks like we’ve been able to enlist four firefighters, two former military men, and three retired police officers who I didn’t even know lived around here,” Herb said. “We also have a couple of doctors on standby. Our checkpoints are more solid.”

“The question is, are they solid enough?”

“We have to hope. I picked up a report on the shortwave last night from a ham in the Los Angeles area of a significant increase in violence, including murder, arson, and formal gang or group violence.”

“But that’s in the cities, not here, right?” I said.

“It’s a wave spreading out from the cities. Whatever is happening there will happen here in time. If we know the trends, we can stay ahead of them.”

“What are the next steps you think we need to take?” she asked.

“You’re going to have to put more people out for security purposes.”

“We don’t have more trained people who I can trust in those positions.”

“And having people you can trust is going to become even more essential,” Herb said. “Have you given any more thoughts to arming civilians?”

“So far we’ve been effective with only the officers having weapons.”

“That will change quickly, and when it does there will be loss of life.”

“I hate to think that it’s going to come to us having to kill people,” my mother said.

“Loss of life isn’t just going to be on the other side. We will have people killed. That is a certainty. We have to devise a plan to make sure that many more of those casualties take place on the other side.”

“It sounds like you’re talking about a war,” my mother said. She sounded a bit shocked, and so was I. How bad did Herb think things were going to get?

“I am,” Herb said softly. “Actually it’s more like hundreds and hundreds of little civil wars are going to take place—which is, if nothing else, a contradiction in terms, because no war is civil. In fact, a civil war is even more evil because it involves not soldiers and strangers but civilians and neighbors.”

My mother rubbed her hands through her hair. “I don’t think it will come to that.”

“I fear it will,” Herb said.

“How can you be so certain of all of this?” I asked.

“I’m not certain of anything,” Herb said. “Had I seen everything coming that’s already happened, I would have been much better prepared.”

“You’re the best-prepared person in the neighborhood.”

“Not as well prepared as I should have been. I never dreamed of a scenario this severe. This has the potential to be so much worse than anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“What have you seen?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

“I know you worked in foreign affairs,” my mother said, “but what exactly did you do?”

“I held a variety of posts and did a number of things in a number of countries.”