Founders (13 page)

They also had four saddle horses, including Kelly’s gelding, Fritz. Rhonda Monroe owned a Paint mare named Beverly. The horse was named after the western artist Bev Doolittle, whose paintings often featured Paint horses. The master bedroom in the house was decorated with four serialized Bev Doolittle prints, all depicting Paint horses.

As Kelly showed Joshua around the ranch, the only thing that seemed out of the ordinary was a Unimog truck. Kelly mentioned that her father had become fascinated by Unimogs when he was stationed in Germany. In 1995, he bought one from Cold War Remarketing, a military vehicle dealer in Englewood, Colorado. This Unimog had originally been a radio vehicle for the West German Bundeswehr. Jim Monroe used the “Mog” as a snowplow in the winter (with chains on all four wheels), and as a mobile hunting
cabin each fall. He had equipped it with a tiny woodstove that had originally been designed for use in hunting guide wall tents.

That day they took a long horseback ride from the ranch to the ghost town of Hughesville. The town had been abandoned in 1943, but its heyday was in the 1890s, so most of the buildings were very old. Many of them were collapsed or semi-collapsed and not safe to enter. It was the first time that Joshua had been there—and in fact the first time he had been in any ghost town—but Kelly had been there many times. She showed him some interesting buildings that most tourists overlooked. One of them was a cabin that was up in a side canyon. When they walked in the door, Joshua was surprised to see that there were still some rusty pans on the stove and chairs under the table. This cabin was the highlight of the town for Joshua, because its contents were so intact. There were even a few
McCall’s, National Geographic
, and
Saturday Evening Post
magazines from the 1930s and early 1940s on a shelf. Their edges had been ravaged by packrats and mice, but the magazines were still largely intact and legible. They left the cabin just as they had found it, carefully wedging the door shut with a twig to keep the weather out.

It was while they were riding home from Hughesville that Joshua first proposed marriage. Kelly rebuffed him, but Joshua was persistent and optimistic. He was falling deeply in love with Kelly, and he hoped that she felt the same. It was the pragmatist in her that triggered her first refusal.

“The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”

—Henry St. George Tucker, in Blackstone’s 1768
Commentaries on the Laws of England

As they entered the outskirts of West Branch, Iowa, it was dawn. They had walked slowly all night. Ken began to ask people they met if they knew of anyone looking for someone to hire for security for farms or ranches. Most seemed wary.

As they walked down 280th Street and reached Downey Street, they hailed a young man riding on a bicycle. He stopped and identified himself as a member of the Society of Friends church. In answer to Terry’s queries, he said that he indeed knew of someone who was looking for “security” for a farm. He pulled a scrap of paper from his wallet, and wrote on it: “D. Perkins Farm, North Charles Avenue. 2 mi. north of Main.”

The young man gave them directions to the farm. This required
several hundred yards of backtracking. Before riding off, the man said, “I’ll let them know that you’re coming.”

The farmhouse sat just twenty yards back from Charles Avenue. It was far enough out of West Branch that it definitely didn’t feel “in town.” The farmhouses were fairly widely distanced apart, depending on the acreage. Most the farms appeared to be 80 to 160 acres. Many of the farms used traditional windmills. As with the other windmills that the Laytons had seen traversing the plains, their tails were painted with names like Aermotor, Woodmanse, Monitor, and Challenge. Terry mentioned that seeing windmill water pumps in operation was a good sign of self-sufficiency.

Ken sized up the farm as they approached it. It was 120 acres, mostly planted in corn and soybeans, now harvested. There was a large hay barn, grain storage silos, a cattle loafing shed, an Aermotor windmill, a water tower, and a dairy parlor with a low roof. There were about twenty brown cows in the pen adjoining the shed. Ken didn’t recognize the breed but he could see that there were several cow-calf pairs.

The white two-story house looked like it had been built in the 1930s or 1940s. The front porch sagged a bit, but otherwise it looked well maintained and recently painted.

There were both propane and home heating oil tanks on the south side of the house. The modern touches included a DISH TV satellite dish and a CB radio antenna.

An open-sided four-bay tractor shed sat to the east of the house. In addition to a Ford tractor and its implements, the tractor shed also housed a late-model Toyota Tacoma pickup, an older Toyota Corolla sedan, and a muddy ATV. Beyond were some assorted outbuildings, two small Butler brand galvanized steel grain silos, and one forty-foot silo that looked fairly new. They later learned that the silo was more than twenty-five years old, but it was still shiny because it was constructed mostly of stainless steel.

There was a pitifully small kitchen garden plot—now heaped
with foot-deep straw mulch for winter—with a five-foot-tall fence that looked incapable of keeping out deer.

Ken and Terry reslung their rifles muzzle down so that they would look less hostile as they approached the house. Ken rapped on the frame of the front porch’s outer door.

A man armed with a scoped Remington Model 760 pump action deer rifle opened the door to the house and asked warily, “Who are you?”

Seeing the rifle pointed at his chest unnerved Ken.

“I’m Ken Layton and this is my wife, Terry.”

“Durward Perkins is my name. My friends call me D. We heard you were coming. Step on in.”

There was an uneasy moment as they appraised each other. Perkins lowered the rifle muzzle, but it was still uncomfortably pointed at Ken’s knees. As he later mentioned to Terry, he still felt like he was being “muzzled.”

Perkins was in his forties, with sandy-brown hair, slightly chubby, and starting to bald.

Ken offered, “We heard that you were looking for someone to provide security.”

Perkins nodded. “That’s right.” He lifted his free hand to his chin and asked, “Are you Christian folk?”

“Yes, we’re Catholic, and we attend Mass regularly.”

Perkins nodded. “We’re Quakers, but we don’t get to church very often.”

Ken said, “We’re trustworthy and we know how to use these guns. I’m also a light truck mechanic with seven years of experience—I’m ASE-certified A5, T6, and E3.”

“That’s all Greek to me. You’ve got no car?”

“We had a car and an older Bronco that I had restored and modified, but we got ambushed on our way out of Chicago. So what you see here is all of our worldly possessions.”

“Do you mean to stay around Iowa City? Long-term?”

“No sir. We plan to continue on out west, next spring. We’re looking for a place to spend the winter. There’s a group of our friends waiting for us in Idaho. We’re what you’d call preppers or survivalists.”

Perkins nodded. “Uh-huh.” Then he pointed to Ken’s HK clone and asked, “So those black space rifles you’ve got—hers looks like a short M16, and what’s that one you’ve got there?”

“It’s a Vector V91—that’s a clone of the German HK91 rifle. It shoots 7.62 NATO, same as .308 Winchester. Terry’s is what’s called an M4gery or what I still call a CAR-15. It shoots 5.56 NATO, like an M16. They’re both semiauto only.” After a pause, he added, “We’ve both put in a lot of trigger time with our rifles. We’ve shot competition and qualification high-power rifle matches—both CMP and Appleseed. We were also both trained by a former Force Recon Marine in our survival group—a staff sergeant named Jeff Trasel. He taught us all the tricks: perimeter security, patrolling, and small unit tactics.”

“So neither of you’re military veterans? Iraq, Afghanistan?”

“No sir.”

Perkins gave a slight groan and said, “Well, that’s what I was hoping for. But beggars can’t be choosers, I guess.”

There was another long, uncomfortable pause.

Terry spoke up. “Sir, you’re just going to have to trust us. Some things you just have to do on faith.”

Perkins nodded deeply, and then said over his shoulder, “Karen! I think we’ve found our hired help!”

The door swung open to reveal a petite woman holding a 12-gauge Browning pump shotgun with a goose-length barrel. She said quietly, “Hi. I’m the backup.”

Durward gestured them toward the door and said, “Come on in the front room, and we’ll get you some coffee.”

Ken and Terry were surprised to see the top of the living room and hallway strung with dozens of wires held up by eyebolts. Hundreds
of strips of brined beef were hung from the wires. Karen Perkins explained that for the past three weeks she and Durward had been converting all the beef from their chest freezer into jerky. The fat trimming, slicing, and brining was a labor-intensive operation that had begun even before the utility power had gone out. Karen Perkins described it. “After we brine the meat, the strips get blotted dry and then hung up over the kitchen sink or the laundry room sink for eight hours. Then, after we’re sure they’ve stopped dripping, we move them to the wires in the hall and the living room. It’s a big, ongoing process. It’ll be another week before we’re done.”

After more introductions, Perkins summarized his situation. “There’s only about 2,300 people in West Branch, but there’s about 70,000 in Iowa City, and they’re starting to
starve
. And there’s almost twice that much population in Cedar Rapids. And that ain’t to mention all the
millions
of hungry riffraff from around Chicago—ah, present company excepted, that is.”

Glancing again at Ken’s rifle, he said, “The trouble is, we’re just too close to Interstate 80. There are just
way
too many people still following that corridor. A lot of them are on foot or on bicycles now. Most are legitimate refugees, but a good portion of them are looters. I hear that the worst ones are in trucks and vans. They take gasoline at gunpoint wherever they go. They’re brutal. The looters that have been hitting Iowa City are bound to make their way here sooner or later.”

“So what exactly do you propose, D.?” Ken asked

“I’m offering you room and board, in exchange for you two being my security staff, twenty-four hours a day, regardless of the weather.”

“So, twelve on, twelve off?”

Perkins nodded and said, “Or six-hour, or eight-hour shifts, however you want to cover it. But I need to have someone watching the road and all around the house and outbuildings at all times.
I can fill in if either of you catch a cold or something. Otherwise,
you’re it
. No pay, but we’ll feed you, and house you, and I’ll replace any ammo you use defending the place. Karen can wash your laundry.”

Ken turned to Terry and gave her a quizzical look. Then they both nodded.

Ken looked Durward in the eye, and said with a nod, “Okay, we’ll do it.”

They were provided a small bedroom in the back of the house that doubled as Karen’s sewing and craft room.

After surveying the property, they determined that the tallest silo had a commanding view and was in an advantageous position for a watch tower. The silo, built by the Boythorpe Company, was an unusual design. Like most steel silos, it had a caged ladder going up the side. But instead of just a typical cone-shaped roof, it had an almost flat roof and cupola structure with a five-foot-tall “Patented, All Weather” door that had a pair of hatch levers near the top and bottom. The cupola was designed to give access to the top of the silo’s unloader conveyor.

The field of view from the silo’s doorway included the house, and nearly all of the barnyard. It also had a sweeping view of Charles Avenue. It took only a few hours to set up the cupola as a guard post. They first laid down a forty-inch octagon that was hand-sawn from a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. This covered the twenty-eight-inch-diameter loading port. Because of the confines of the caged ladder, the plywood was hoisted up with a rope. They then hoisted up an upholstered chair that fit nicely through the door of the cupola.

After the first day, they added a bronze Japanese brazier, in which they burned wood scraps and dried corn kernels. The Meiji-era brazier had been brought home at the end of World War II by Durward’s grandfather, who had fought in the Pacific Theater. Just ten inches high, the tubular hibachi was a fairly plain design, with
a light etching of an ancient castle on one side. For many years it had just been used by the Perkins family to hold potted plants. The brazier kept the cupola warm enough to be bearable all through the winter. A crude wire rack on top of the brazier could be topped with a teapot or a small fry pan for reheating foods.

After the chair was in place, Durward asked, “What’ll we use for an alarm?”

Ken answered his question with one of his own: “Tell me, D.: Do you have any scrap steel pipe?”

“Sure do, depending on the diameter.”

They soon found a thirty-inch length of four-inch-diameter steel pipe. This was hung by a wire from the top of the ladder’s extended top handrail loop to serve as an alarm bell. The clapper was simply a ball-peen hammer, which was kept just inside the door of the cupola. The pipe alarm bell could be heard quite distinctly from inside the house or anywhere within 100 yards.

Ken summarized the alarm bell procedure. “If it is friendly visitors, we’ll ring the bell with three sets of double-taps, spaced a few seconds apart. If it is an unidentified stranger, we’ll bang on it in a continuous clamor. Beyond that, let’s keep it simple and ballistic: If you hear
one shot
, that serves as a warning to whoever might be approaching,
and
as an alarm to anyone who is in the house.”