From the Indie Side (34 page)

Both the drinks and the camaraderie flowed
freely, and, somehow, four grown men soon found themselves engaged
in a magnificent and glorious snowball fight. A snowball fight to
end all snowball fights…

…And that’s what they were doing when it
happened.

* *
*

Everyone had known the world situation was
tenuous, but no one expected the dominoes to fall so quickly.
Things had been particularly bad for the last few weeks, but the
world had gone through similar convulsions since at least as far
back as the economic debacles of ’08, so—ever blinded by
Pollyannish hopes—people just assumed the societal ship would right
itself again after this latest series of rogue waves. Even a
lifelong survival expert like Phillip was susceptible to the
ceteris paribus
fallacy, also known as normalcy bias.
Normalcy bias is the condition where people come to believe that
because things have continued in a certain way for a long time,
they will necessarily revert back to that state after a shock or
disaster. People assume that things will always “get back to
normal,” but they do so without ever really defining what
normal
is. Perspective is a funny thing, and not merely
because as humans we always have a limited perspective; it’s funny
because even when we absolutely
know
something
intellectually, until we experience it in a way that goes beyond
the intellect, we still don’t know that thing aright.

What is “normal,” anyway?

In the weeks before the crash, all eyes had
been on the situation in the northeast, especially after the
hurricane and the subsequent nor’easter that ripped through that
area. Then, after the election was postponed in the storm-stricken
areas, riots began to break out in large cities all over America.
Some were saying it was like ’65 or ’68 again, but unlike those
riots—which had sparked brightly before fading away—
these
riots grew worse over time. And then, after the storms, and the
election, and the riots, the stock markets went into freefall, and
the world was busy speculating about just how bad things would get,
even while assuming that things would soon return to
normal
.

And so there were four grown men throwing
snowballs at one another on a mountaintop when the entire system
flatlined.

Then came the phone call.

With everything going on in the world,
service had been in and out, spotty, even in areas where there had
usually been good service. That far up the mountain, Goffrey didn’t
have great cell phone reception in the first place, but he could
usually get by.

The Call
(that’s what they’d come to
call it), though full of static, informed the artist that something
had indeed gone terribly wrong in the world. There weren’t many
details yet, and for much of the world those details would never
come. News organizations were scrambling for information, but at
the end of the world one of the first casualties is instantaneous
access to information. Answers often die first in a calamity. The
gist of the story, as far as the friends could tell, was that all
electronic communications for almost a third of the country had
been severed.

Even though he’d been caught off guard,
Phillip knew immediately what it was. In fact, he’d been quite
expecting an attack to come at some point. He was a survivalist, so
he liked to consider himself better informed than most people.
Still, no amount of expectation can totally eliminate the shock
when the long-awaited end finally does arrive.

* *
*

After The Call, the four men decided to go
visit one of Goffrey’s neighbors. Maybe someone else had more
information? Neighbors weren’t exactly close or easy to get to up
in those rugged mountains, but they did have televisions, most of
them anyway, which Goffrey did not. As Goffrey drove them down the
private road, and then a few miles back up the mountain to the home
of Goffrey’s nearest neighbor, Phillip filled the other three men
in on his suspicion: that there had been an EMP attack on the
eastern seaboard.

For the next week at the neighbor’s house, at
least one of them was watching the television at all times. The
other three scouted, stood watch, and made preparations and plans
for what they were now calling “the end of the world.” Of course,
it wasn’t the end of the world, only the end of the world as they’d
known it.

At the end of the week, they lost the
television signal, the phone, all outside communications—and it
never came back. That’s when they started to understand that what
they’d once called “normal” was never coming back.

A day later, when the power went out for
good, Leland Hamil, Goffrey’s middle-aged neighbor, their host,
packed up his stuff and announced that he intended to hike out of
the mountains and back into Taos.

“I’m not going to die out here in the
wilderness like an animal!” Leland said.

They never saw Leland again. Perhaps he died
in town like an animal. If they had to guess based on what they
learned later, he probably did. It was hard to know.

* *
*

With the power out for good, it was pure
survival time. Back at Goffrey’s lodge they trained and worked, and
worked and trained. Goffrey, like most rural folks in New Mexico,
not only had plenty of guns and ammo, he had the
right
guns,
too. He said jokingly that he’d been waiting to join the inevitable
communist revolution in America, but by this time Phillip and his
friends had come to believe that Goffrey wasn’t a communist at all.
He just liked to be different, which was ironic, since he chose to
live among and around the leftists in a hipster art community.
Conformity abounds everywhere.

The more Phillip got to know Goffrey, the
more he began to suspect that the artist had very few real
philosophical dogmas at all. He was a “live and let live” kind of
guy, who had just cultivated an outsider, radical image in order to
fit in better with the pretentious art crowd that made him his
living. Goffrey really just loved being around and talking to
people, and he was intelligent and helpful. He was more of a
conformist and a follower than he would ever have been willing to
admit.

When it came down to it,
Phillip
thought,
Goffrey was a good guy to have on your team. I mean, if
the world came to an end or anything like that.

There were worse friends to have, even among
his own peers in the ostensibly right-wing mercenary community. The
end of the world, it seems, makes for strange bedfellows.

There’d been a few early moments of tension.
When the crash first started, and Phillip informed the group that
he believed that there’d been an EMP attack, perhaps by an old
guard of hard-core communists in Russia, maybe with help from North
Korea, all eyes had turned to Goffrey.

“Maybe this is the revolution you’ve been
waiting for, Goffrey?” Phillip asked pointedly.

“What? No… No. Absolutely not,” Goffrey
replied. “I do not support this one bit. This is an attack against
my country!”

Rob glared at Goffrey. “I thought you were
‘waiting for the revolution’?”

“Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting anything
like this! I don’t believe in imposing any ideology on any people,
and I’d absolutely never agree to anything like this.”

“How libertarian of you,” Nigel had said, his
voice dripping with irony.

There had been an awkward moment of silence
before Goffrey added, “You don’t think I’d possibly support an
attack on innocent people… do you?”

“I don’t,” Phillip said with a smile. “But
maybe they do,” he said, gesturing with his thumb toward the other
two men.

The other men all laughed and set Goffrey at
ease again. It turned out that Goffrey was only a theoretical
communist, meaning that he wasn’t really one at all. Maybe he was a
socialist, but Phillip wasn’t sure if he even believed that.
Silently, and maybe cynically, he concluded that Goffrey was more
of a salesman and an oddball than an ideologue.

Truth be told, most people would not be
comfortable if they had to live permanently where their opinions
and worldview naturally led.

* *
*

Time and time again Phillip had planned to
head out from Goffrey’s place and back to Texas to be with his men,
but each time his plans had been thwarted by some necessity, some
attack, or some other reality that conspired to keep him away from
where he needed to be.

The day after the nuke went off in
Albuquerque, however, he decided he was leaving no matter what.
They’d watched the mushroom cloud climb into a previously blue and
unmarked sky. That was when they knew for sure that their new
reality was permanent.

On the morning after the bomb, Phillip woke
to the sounds of Nigel making coffee. Rob was on scout duty and
Goffrey was standing his post on the front deck with the sniper
rifle. Phillip rolled out of his rack and saw that Nigel was just
pouring the first cup of the morning. It was at that moment that
Goffrey gave the signal that someone was approaching. The
double-thump on the wall was followed by a long whistle that
indicated the visitor was a friend and not a foe.

Twenty minutes later the men were all
gathered on the front deck around Sam Gustavson, an artist friend
of Goffrey’s who lived down in the valley. Rob manned the rifle and
the watch, but he listened in as the men discussed the new reality
in the world, and the latest news passing through the valley from
Taos.

“It’s been hard down there,” Sam said, “but
not as hard as it’s been some other places, from what I’ve heard.”
He pulled a cigarette from out of a pack of Marlboros, and as he
did he looked at the pack with wistful affection. He lit the
cigarette with a Zippo and continued. “We’ve had a few groups come
through who’d trekked up through the National Forest from the
south, but not many. It’s really rough country out there, so we
haven’t had to deal with too many folks. We’ve had our share
though, and some troublemakers among ’em, too. But folks up here
generally know how to deal with troublemakers.” As he said this, he
nodded his head toward the burned-out truck down on the long
private road.

“Y’all makin’ out all right?” Goffrey asked.
“You have enough food and supplies put by?”

“We’re doing okay,” Sam replied. “We’ll be
hungry come spring, but we’re already growing some greens and
things in a greenhouse, and we’ve built seven or eight hot and cold
frames so we can start more winter veggies. Game’s been sufficient,
but not abundant. Rabbits are all but gone, but now we can shoot
the elk because the game wardens aren’t there to stop us. The best
thing we’ve had,” he said, smiling, “is know-how. All those years
of practice and planning have paid off. Bad news is that we’re
feeding about seven other families now, folks who didn’t have the
know-how or the planning and practice. We’re training ’em though,
and it’s good to have more fingers on triggers and boots on
shovels, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh, we know,” Rob said, laughing. “These
ten-hour shifts are really getting to me.”

“Any news from Taos?” Goffrey asked.

Sam looked up at Goffrey and took a long draw
from his cigarette, leaned back, and blew the smoke upward into the
cool morning air. “Most of it ain’t good.”

“What gives?”

“According to the stories, in the beginning
it was
real
bad. Trouble didn’t come from the locals so
much, but from the people flooding up from the south, from
Albuquerque and up and down I-25. Same ol’ business as was on the
news. Riots, looting, mayhem. So some vigilantes set up shop.
They’d had a belly full of it, and they were joined by the cops
from the reservation who were hoping to stop the troubles at their
doorstep. They cleaned things up for a little while. Then… then,
the word is, the drug gangs moved in. Narco-mafia from way from
down south and out west. Was a few weeks of street-to-street
battles, and then the biggest gang—supposedly they came over from
L.A.—they took over, and now they’re running the town.”

Phillip looked at Sam and frowned. “That
can’t be good for the civilians left in Taos, if there are
any.”

“No. You’re right,” Sam replied. “Now,
everything I’m tellin’ ya is hearsay. It’s gossip. It’s
good
gossip, based on who I got it from, but I ain’t verified it myself,
you know.”

Phillip turned and stared down into the
valley. “This means more folks might be heading this way.”

Goffrey, his friend who in every way ought to
be his philosophical opposite, clapped his hand on Phillip’s
shoulder. “It doesn’t look like most of the world is going to give
peace a chance.”

Phillip—the warrior—turned to Goffrey with a
tear in his eye.

“I think you’re right, Mr. Byrd.” He kicked a
melting chunk of icicle off the deck and watched it puncture and
bury itself in the drifted snow. “I think you’re completely
right.”

* *
*

Breaking up the team was a thoroughly
gut-wrenching affair. Never in his life had Phillip been so sad to
say goodbye to a friend. The four of them stood at the top of
Goffrey’s private drive, the three horses saddled and loaded for a
journey. Three men were leaving, but one was not.

“You sure you won’t go with us?” Phillip
said.

Goffrey shook his head, bent over, and picked
up a small handful of loose snow and weakly threw it at Phillip.
The soft snowball bounced harmlessly off of Phillip’s arm. Goffrey
wasn’t trying to start another snowball fight. It was just an
attempt to show affection and nostalgia… to bring back memories of
the time before the end came.