Founders (7 page)

His first target was the man who held the Remington riotgun. By now, he was shouting, “I got the power! I got the power!” Ken waited until he had several other targets close to the bonfire. Then he whispered: “One, two,
three
!”

They each fired a full magazine. The man with the riotgun went down hard. They killed or wounded at least five others.

After there were no more distinct targets standing, they expended
the rest of their magazines shooting at likely places where the looters might have taken cover. They rose to their feet and ran around the corner, reloading their guns as they ran.

Halfway down the block they stopped to check each other for injuries and to talk. They decided that to get around the riffraff that ambushed them, they would walk another two blocks south, and then turn to resume traveling west.

They moved in tactical bounds for seven blocks, constantly watching for threats. The sound of gunfire and sirens was almost continuous in all directions. Some of it sounded as if it was within a couple of blocks, but most of it had to be farther off. With their movement in buddy rushes, they were soon feeling exhausted.

Ken trotted up to Terry and whispered, “There’s got to be a better way. We’ll never get out of town by dawn doing it this way.” They crawled behind the concealment of some large bushes next to a Lutheran church, and draped a poncho over themselves to consult a street map with a subdued flashlight.

Terry pointed out their location on the map. “It’s ten-plus miles to even get out of Chicago itself, and then there’s suburbs,” she whispered.

“So, shall I call for a cab?” Ken joked.

Then, more seriously, he added, “Our chances of walking out of this without getting ventilated are about one percent.”

He gazed down at the map again, and prayed silently. The map showed no parks or other breaks in successive city blocks for miles ahead.

Terry said, still in a whisper, “Why not go underground, down in the storm drains, just like we talked about for nuke scenarios?”

Ken beamed. “Oh, I love you! That sure beats staying up here in the free-fire zone.”

Terry looked up at Ken and asked, “How are we going to get down there?”

“Remember that illustration in T.K.’s book
Life After Doomsday
,
where you take two big bolts and join them with a piece of wire? Then you stick one of them down into the pry hole on a manhole cover, and pull up.”

Terry nodded.

He opened the top flap of his backpack and started to dig though its contents. He soon found a coil of wire. After some more searching, he pulled out a 1970s-vintage Boy Scout knife-fork-spoon kit that had belonged to his father. He twisted two thicknesses of the wire around the spoon and then the same for the knife, with one foot of wire between them.

The knife ended up working well as a toggle, because it had a bottle-opening notch in the middle. That held the wire in place perfectly.

Ken reassembled the contents of his pack and reshouldered it. He then began searching the block, looking for a manhole cover. It took a few minutes to find one marked “Storm Sewer,” visible by the dim light of Terry’s tiny single-LED flashlight.

Ken handed his rifle to his wife. After inserting the knife into the manhole cover’s one-inch aperture, he pulled up on the spoon connected by the wire. The knife had toggled over and held firm. Ken squatted, beefed the manhole cover up, and slid it aside with a clank that sounded uncomfortably loud. He then retrieved his utensils and wire and stuffed them into one of his pants cargo pockets.

Terry descended first. She said quietly, “Okay, it looks doable. There’s just a trickle in the bottom. Hand me my gear.”

Ken handed down her carbine, then her pack, then his pack, and then his rifle. He lingered at the uppermost ladder rungs to slide the lid back in place over his head. It closed with a reverberating thud.

“‘It has never happened!’ cannot be construed to mean, ‘It can never happen!’—might as well say, ‘Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,’ or ‘Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.’ One thinks first of some great plague of insects—locusts or grasshoppers—when the species suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as dramatically sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The higher animals also fluctuate. During most of the nineteenth century the African buffalo was a common creature on the veldt. It was a powerful beast with few natural enemies, and if its census could have been taken by decades, it would have proved to be increasing steadily. Then toward the century’s end it reached its climax, and was suddenly struck by a plague of rinderpest. Afterwards the buffalo was almost a curiosity, extinct in many parts of its range. In the last fifty years it has again slowly built up its numbers. As for man, there is little reason to think that he can, in the long run, escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilence, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.”

—George R. Stewart,
Earth Abides
(1949)

Ken climbed down to Terry and said, “I sure hope this works.”

They helped each other put on their packs, which was difficult in the cramped confines of the drain. They slung their rifles across their chests, with their muzzles down and with their buttstocks positioned unusually high.

They headed west, moving slowly, with the path ahead lit by just Terry’s LED penlight.

The concrete storm drain had a circular cross section and had just a sixty-five-inch inside diameter. This was fairly comfortable for Terry, but it was soon agony for Ken, who was seventy-three inches tall. Walking hunched over, carrying a pack was very uncomfortable. He stopped twice in the first 300 yards, to adjust his pack. He found that repositioning the sleeping bag to the bottom of the pack and loosening the shoulder straps—lowering the entire pack—worked best.

There was no way to avoid walking in the rainwater that had collected in the low spots in the drain system. Their feet were soon wet and cold. The air in the storm drain network was warmer than up on the street. This was an effect of the ambient ground temperature. So they soon had to strip off their field jackets and stow them in their already crammed packs.

They continued westward, now with Ken leading the way, and holding the penlight. The sound of sirens and gunfire could be heard, via the storm drains, as they went. Most of it sounded fairly distant, but at one point, after walking for an hour, they heard shouting and shooting directly above them. The reverberations of the gunfire sounded very strange and muffled in the confines of the drains.

Beneath one gutter drain, they could hear a man moaning and sobbing. He was lying prone in a gutter, right next to a grille. Ken
pointed his light upward briefly and could see that there was a substantial trickle of blood pouring down from the grille.

After proceeding a few blocks, Ken stopped and pulled out his Nalgene water bottle and they passed it back and forth, taking deep swallows. He asked, “Did you see all that blood?”

“Yeah. That was the most brutal thing I’ve ever seen or heard my whole life.”

“Well, please say a prayer for that guy. I think he was dying.”

Terry said in a clipped voice, “I already have.”

They trudged on and on, rarely speaking. Ken counted the storm drains so that they could estimate how many blocks they had traversed. There were numbers and letters painted on the ladder shafts, but other than one number group that continually incremented downward, they were indiscernible to the Laytons.

At just after 2 a.m., they heard a deep, loud explosion. They assumed that it was a piped natural gas or propane tank explosion a few blocks away. They stopped to ponder it.

Terry asked, “How many fires are burning out of control, right now, do you think?”

“Lots. Hundreds of fires, maybe. It’s a world of hurt up there, Terry. There are a lot of unpredictable explosions when there are so many fires burning. There aren’t any firemen responding to half of them.” They pressed on.

They reached a large four-way storm drain intersection, where they could hear the water in the pipe trickling to an area below. It was 4:12 a.m. and both Ken and Terry were exhausted. This was by far the largest junction they had yet reached. There was a catwalk decked with expanded steel mesh running across two levels above, and a staircase with metal steps leading up to a steel door. They climbed up on the first catwalk, unshouldered their packs, and sat down to rest. They shared the rest of Ken’s water bottle. Next, they refilled their empty rifle magazines from the extra ammunition that they carried in bandoleers in their packs.

Terry said, just above a whisper, “I don’t think I can go on much longer without some rest.”

“Me neither. Let me go up and check that door, and then maybe we can get some sleep.”

Carrying just his rifle, Ken walked quietly up the stairs. The door was rusty and was locked with a dead bolt on his side. It looked like it was used only rarely.

He padded back down to Terry and said, “I don’t think anybody is going to come through that. We should be safe here.”

“Good,” Terry said gratefully.

There was sufficient room for them both to rest on the catwalk. They hung their rifles and backpacks on the looped tops of the steel ladders at both ends of the catwalk structure. Then they removed their sodden boots and socks. After wringing out the socks and hanging them on rungs of the ladders to dry, they positioned their boots on the other catwalk to dry. Lying lengthwise on the narrow catwalk, their feet nearly touched. They retrieved their rifles and kept them close at hand. At first they used their coats for padding, but feeling chilled, they then rolled out their sleeping bags. Shortly after crawling into their bags they both fell asleep. They were so exhausted that they didn’t even make an attempt to have one stay up to maintain a watch.

As they rested, the situation deteriorated in the neighborhood above them. They were frequently awoken by the sounds of shots—rifles, shotguns, pistols. There were also sirens, but those became less frequent as the day wore on. By 4 p.m., the shooting became almost continuous. They could smell smoke infiltrating the storm drain system.

Ken and Terry both felt oddly isolated and immune from the chaos above. Despite the sounds of gunfire, they slept well. Terry had awoken and broken out her water bottle around noon. As they shared sips, Ken commented, “This is just surreal. Total chaos up there. We can hear it, we can smell it, but we can’t see it.”

Terry said forcefully, “I don’t
want
to see it. Any of it. It’s a two-way shooting range up there.”

After a pause, she added, “I vote we keep heading west through the drain tunnels as far as we can go.”

“I agree.”

Shortly after, they both fell back asleep. They slept off and on—still disturbed by bursts of gunfire until just before 5 p.m.

They rolled up their sleeping bags and stowed them. After some more water with an Emergen-C packet mixed in, they put on their still damp socks and boots. Ken took a Tylenol and a magnesium tablet to help with his back spasms.

Back in the drain, they continued westward. There was gradually less gunfire, but the smell of smoke became more distinct.

They continued on, walking all through the night, stopping only briefly for water. At another pipe junction, the drain transitioned to an eight-foot-diameter pipe. Ken let out a moan of relief, and whispered, “Thank you Lord!”

They stopped and adjusted their backpack straps. As they moved on, no longer walking hunched over, they were able to pick up the pace.

Ken’s back was still painful, so he took another dose of Tylenol two hours before dawn. They marched on. After what seemed an eternity, and again at the edge of exhaustion, they saw dim light ahead.

The storm drain emptied onto a jumble of riprap rocks on the banks of the Des Plaines River. There was a four-foot drop from the mouth of the pipe to the rocks below, so exiting was slow and cumbersome. With daylight rapidly increasing, they felt uncomfortably exposed. They immediately set a twenty- to twenty-five-foot interval as they walked. They walked with their rifle butts tucked into their shoulders and their muzzles down. They moved slowly and cautiously, scanning in all directions and stopping frequently to listen. Ken, in the lead, gave hand
signals to Terry. This was a method that Jeff Trasel had called “TABbing”—referring to what the British army termed “tactical advance to battle” (TAB).

They walked along the river for twelve minutes until they came to a large patch of willow trees behind a jumble of fist-sized rocks. The willows were densely spaced, so Ken suggested that the center of the thicket would provide enough concealment for them to set up a cold camp. For the final fifty yards they walked carefully, stepping from rock to rock so that they wouldn’t leave a visible trail.

Before heading into the willows, they refilled their water bottles from the river, dosing them with water purification tablets.

They picked their way into the thicket, trying to minimize any noise.

After clearing some downed tree branches and large rocks, they rolled out their sleeping bags. By the time they had them positioned, it was full daylight.

Ken whispered, “I’ll take the first watch. You try to get some sleep.”

Terry replied, “Try? No problem, trust me.”

Terry awoke at midday. They divided an MRE. They hadn’t eaten in more than a day, so they wolfed it down eagerly.

They then took turns cleaning their rifles and pistols. They were thorough, even unloading each magazine to dry the cartridges. Next, they removed their boots and again wrung out their socks.

Terry did a detailed inventory of the contents of their web gear and packs. Terry carried a standard LC2 ALICE pack. Ken’s was a large “Arctic” variant. Both of them had Wiggy’s brand Ultima Thule sleeping bags strapped on the bottoms of their packs, stowed along with their bivouac (“bivy”) bags, in compression stuff sacks.