James Rawles - Survivors - A Novel of the Coming Collapse

Ian wangled a ride from the airport-in exchange for twenty-five rounds of 9mm hollowpoints—while Blanca stayed behind to guard the planes. Alex was impressed with the country. Granite Mountain loomed large in the distance. There was obviously more water here than down in the Phoenix area, but this was still Arizona. There were lots of trees here-a scarcity in southern Arizona. The elevation of the town was about 5,500 feet. This gave it a much cooler climate than Buckeye.

There was no answer when Ian knocked on the door of Alex’s rental house on Oak Terrace Drive. Ian discovered that the door was unlocked, and inside there were signs that Alex had left hurriedly. Most of the furniture in the house was still there, but nearly all of Alex’s other personal possessions were missing. The kitchen smelled of sour milk. There was a knock on the door. It was Alex’s next-door neighbor, carrying a baseball bat.

After explaining who he was, Ian learned that Alex had just been hired on as a “full-time security consultant” for four families with adjoining properties in Conley Ranches, a fairly new gated community two miles north of town. Contacting Alex was a snap, once he knew how to do it: CB Channel 12. “They monitor it around the clock.” The neighbor, a former trucker, had a CB radio in his SUV. Alex responded immediately to Ian’s transmission and said that he’d be at his old house in less than half an hour to pick him up.

Alex pulled into the driveway in his Ford Excursion. Ian was carrying no baggage, so he just hopped into the passenger seat and Alex immediately backed out of the driveway. There was a long-barreled Dan Wesson .44 Magnum revolver resting in the center console.

After a palm-slapping high five, Alex asked simply, “Airport?”

“Yep.”

As he drove, Alex explained rapidly, “I got hired as a security guy for a group of four families on contiguous one-acre lots, in a square, on the end of a block. Two of them are retired bankers from Tucson. Strictly a ‘room-and-board’ arrangement. There’s four hundred lots in the development, but less than half of them have houses built: it’s kind of a patchwork, with clusters of houses surrounded by empty lots. Its a bunch of half-million-dollar to million-plus houses there. A lot of retired executives with more money than brains. They watched it all go down on TV, and now they’re scared spitless and playing catch-up.”

Without allowing Ian time to comment, Alex went on: “I think we’ve got food and water covered, but they’re pretty darn light on fuel, and pitiful on security. Some of the families in Conley Ranches don’t even own a gun. And some of their ‘committees’ that meet at the clubhouse are a bit of a joke. But at least the most important one, Vegetable Gardening, is getting its act together. The plan is to haul in truckloads of manure and good topsoil to some of the empty lots with the least rocky soil. The water, thank God, is all gravity flow, from up in the mountains. The ‘private gated community’ aspect doesn’t mean jack now: since the power is out, they have to leave the gates wired wide open. I’m trying to organize things to get that situation changed, pronto.”

Ian nodded, and Alex went on: “The house where I bunk is 3,800 square feet, and it had just a couple living in it. They have room for at least two more full-timers, and believe you me, I need the help. We gotta get continuous 24/7 shifts going right away.”

Alex pulled into the general aviation gate at Love Field. After the formalities of getting through the inner gate, he was able to drive up to where the pair of Larons were tied down.

They all exchanged hugs and shared some tears about the death of Linda. But then they were all busy with their first concern: getting the planes unloaded. All of Ian and Blanca’s gear fit with ease in the back of the Excursion with its third-row seat folded down. Alex mentioned that he was impressed with how much Ian had been able to shoehorn into the planes. Ian explained almost apologetically: “I ran the weight and balance numbers, but they were marginal. Balance was decent, but gross weight was really pushing the envelope. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do and pray for the best.”

As Alex shut the back doors on the Ford, he said, “Judging from the guns that you brought, they will not say no to hiring you.” His prediction proved right. That evening, after some brief objections about extra mouths to feed, Ian and Blanca were hired by the four homeowners. Like Alex, Ian and Blanca would receive no pay but would be provided meals and a comfortable bedroom. Their room was in the 2,750-square-foot home that sat behind the one Alex was in. It belonged to Dr. Robert Karvalich, a widower who was a retired pediatrician. Everyone called him Doctor K. Many years before, he had served a stint as a Navy medical officer, but only in an office setting, never at sea or in combat. He carried a World War II-vintage Remington Rand Model 1911 in a full flap holster daily. The gun, he explained, had belonged to his father, who was also a Navy doctor, during the Korean War.

Unlike the other homeowners, who took several weeks to get accustomed to constantly carrying guns, Doctor K. took to it immediately. The difference was that he had been robbed at gunpoint once before. As he told it, six years before the Crunch, Doctor K. answered his door to find a drug addict with a pistol in his hand. The man was after narcotics. Fearing for his life, Doctor K. reluctantly complied, giving the robber his small supply of Tylenol with codeine, Vicodin, and an oral solution of morphine sulfate. The robber fled in a car with California license plates and was never caught by the local authorities. When Ian Doyle asked everyone in the compound to be armed at all times, Robert Karvalich was one of the first to do so.

Transporting the planes to Doctor K.’s house the next day at first seemed like it would be difficult, requiring borrowed trucks, but then it proved easy: they just flew them there. The street in front of the four-house “compound,” as Alex called it, was curving and on a slight slope, but there was a long, wide street a quarter mile away that was straight and nearly level. This street was in the new “Phase 2” portion of the Conley Ranches development, where the streets had been paved, but only a few lots had been sold and no houses had yet been built. In Phase 2, the streetlight poles had not yet been installed. The street made a very practical runway for the Larons. They were able to land there and then just taxi the planes to the street where Alex lived. The sight of this made quite a stir in the community.

Soon after they stopped the planes in the driveway, one of the neighbors from down the street came to threaten to file a complaint about the planes landing as “a safety nightmare,” and about the very presence of the planes. She shouted that the planes were “flagrantly against the association rules.” As she stood wagging her finger in Alex’s face, Blanca and Ian were already at work disassembling them. Once the wings were removed and the planes disappeared into one of the bays in Doctor K.’s capacious four-car garage alongside his RV, the neighbor quieted down. Alex talked some sense into her by emphasizing that she’d be the indirect beneficiary of the additional armed security at no cost. “Well, I suppose that’s okay,” she said quietly, and walked off.

The Doyles-Ian, Blanca, and Alex-agreed to each stand a daily eight-and-a-half-hour guard watch, thirteen days out of each two weeks. The intense guard duty schedule left them very little time for recreation-and hardly even enough time to hand-wash their laundry-but at least all of their meals were provided by the four families on a rotating schedule.

Blanca began to carry one of the M16s that Ian had taken in for safekeeping from Luke Air Force Base. Alex provided her some 5.56mm ammo, both for target practice and to keep in loaded magazines. She disliked the M16, mostly because of the odd twang sound that the buffer made in the buttstock when it was fired. She also considered the gun ugly but would not elaborate beyond saying, “I know a good-looking gun when I see one, and this one ain’t it. I like a gun with at least some wood. This thing is like a plastic toy.”