فصل 07

SEVEN

Ms. Rhodes was at the chalkboard writing assignment pages when Leni got to school. “Ah,” the teacher said. “It looks like someone put the scope too close to her eye. Do you need an aspirin?”

“Rookie mistake,” Leni said, almost proud of her injury. It meant she was becoming an Alaskan. “I’m fine.”

Ms. Rhodes nodded. “Take your seat and open your history book.”

Leni and Matthew stared at each other as she entered the classroom. His smile was so big she saw his mouthful of crooked teeth.

She sidled into her desk, which clanked against his.

“Almost everyone gets popped in the eye the first time. I had a black eye for, like, a week. Does it hurt?”

“It did. But learning to shoot was so cool, I didn’t—”

“Moose!” Axle yelled, popping up from his seat and running to the window.

Leni and Matthew followed him. All of the kids crowded together at the window, watching a giant bull moose amble through the grassy area behind the schoolhouse. He knocked over the picnic table and began eating the bushes.

Matthew leaned close to Leni; his shoulder brushed hers. “I say we make excuses and book it out of school today. I’ll say I’m needed at home after lunch.”

Leni felt a little thrill at the idea of skipping school. She’d never done it before. “I could say I have a headache. I’d just have to be back here at three for pick-up.”

“Cool,” Matthew said.

“Okay, okay,” Ms. Rhodes said. “Enough of that. Leni, Axle, Matthew, turn to page one-seventeen in your Alaska state history book…”

For the rest of the morning, Leni and Matthew watched the clock nervously. Just before lunchtime, Leni pleaded a headache and said she needed to go home. “I can walk to the general store and call my parents on the ham radio.”

“Sure,” Ms. Rhodes said. The teacher didn’t seem to question the lie, and Leni scooted out of the classroom and closed the door behind her. She walked down to the road and ducked into the trees, waiting.

A half hour later, Matthew strode out of the school, grinning widely.

“So what are we gonna do?” Leni asked. What choices were there? There was no TV, no movie theater, no paved roads for bike riding, no drive-ins for milkshakes, no roller rinks or playgrounds.

He took her by the hand and led her to a muddy all-terrain vehicle. “Climb on,” Matthew said, swinging his leg over the ATV and settling on the black seat.

Leni did not think this was a good idea, but she didn’t want him to think she was a scaredy-cat, so she climbed aboard. Awkwardly, she put her arms around his waist.

He twisted the throttle and they were off in a cloud of dust, the engine making a high-pitched whine, rocks flying out from beneath the wide rubber tires. Matthew drove through town, rumbled over the bridge, and onto the dirt road. Just past the airstrip, he veered into the trees, thumped over a ditch, and hurtled up a trail she didn’t even see until they were on it.

They drove uphill, into thick trees, onto a plateau. From there, Leni saw a crook of blue, seawater carving into the land, waves crashing onto the shore. Matthew slowed the vehicle and expertly guided it over rough terrain, where there was no trail beneath their tires. Leni was thrown about; she had to hold tightly to him.

Finally he eased to a stop and clicked off the motor.

Silence enveloped them instantly, broken only by the waves crashing on the black rocks below. Matthew dug through the bag on his three-wheeler and pulled out a pair of binoculars. “Come on.”

He walked ahead of her, his feet steady on the rough, rocky terrain. Twice Leni almost fell as rock gave way beneath her feet, but Matthew was like a mountain goat, perfectly at home.

He led her to a clearing perched like a scooped hand above the sea. There were two handmade wooden chairs positioned to face the trees. Matthew plopped down in one and indicated the other for her.

Leni dropped her backpack onto the grass and sat down, waiting as Matthew peered through the binoculars, and scanned the trees. “There they are.” He handed her the binoculars, pointed to a stand of trees. “That’s Lucy and Ricky. My mom named ’em.”

Leni peered through the binoculars. At first all she saw was trees, trees, and more trees as she panned slowly from left to right, and then, a flash of white.

She eased back to the left a few degrees.

A pair of bald eagles perched on a bathtub-sized nest built high in the trees. One of the birds was feeding a trio of eaglets who jostled and lurched, beaks up, to get the regurgitated food. Leni could hear their squabbling, squawking cries over the crash of water below.

“Wow,” Leni said. She would have pulled her Polaroid out of her backpack (she never went anywhere without it), but the eagles were too far away for the clunky camera to capture.

“They’ve been coming back here to lay eggs for as long as I can remember. Mom first brought me here when I was little. You should see them making the nest. It’s amazing. And they mate for life. I wonder what Ricky would do if something happened to Lucy. My mom says that nest weighs almost a ton. I’ve watched eaglets leave that nest my whole life.”

“Wow,” Leni said again, smiling as one of the eaglets flapped its wings and tried to climb up over its siblings.

“We haven’t come out here in a long time, though.”

Leni heard something in Matthew’s voice. She lowered the binoculars and looked at him. “You and your mom?”

He nodded. “Since she and Dad split up, it’s been hard. Maybe it’s ’cuz my sister, Alyeska, moved to Fairbanks to go to college. I miss her.”

“You guys must be close.”

“Yeah. She’s cool. You’d like her. She thinks she wants to live in a city, but no way it will last. She’ll be back. Dad says we both have to go to college so we know all our options. He’s kind of pushy about it, actually. I don’t need college to tell me what I want to be.”

“You already know?”

“Sure. I want to be a pilot. Like my Uncle Went. I love being up in the sky. But my dad says it’s not enough. I guess I need to know about physics and shit.”

Leni understood. They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

She sat back in the splintery chair. He had told her something personal about himself, something that mattered. She needed to do the same thing. Wasn’t that how true friendships worked? She swallowed hard, said quietly, “You’re lucky your dad wants the best for you. My dad has been … weird since the war.”

“Weird how?”

Leni shrugged. She didn’t know exactly what to say, or how to say it without revealing too much. “He has—nightmares—and bad weather can set him off. Sometimes. But he hasn’t had a nightmare since we moved here. So maybe he’s better.”

“I don’t know. Winter is one big night up here. People go batshit in the dark, run screaming, open fire on their pets and friends.”

Leni felt a tightening in her stomach. She had never really thought about the fact that in winter, it would be as dark as it was light now. She didn’t want to think about that, winter dark. “What do you worry about?” she asked.

“I worry that my mom will leave us. I mean, I know she built a house and stayed on the homestead, and that my folks still love each other in some weird way, but it’s not the same. She just came home one day and said she didn’t love Dad anymore. She loves Cal the creep.” He turned in his chair, looked at Leni. “It’s scary that people can just stop loving you, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“I wish school lasted longer,” he said.

“I know. We have three more days before summer break. And then…”

Once school ended, Leni would be expected to work full-time at the homestead and so would Matthew at his place. They’d hardly see each other.

ON THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL, Leni and Matthew made all kinds of promises about how they would keep in touch until classes started again in September, but the truth shouldered in between them. They were kids and not in control of anything, their own schedules least of all. Leni felt lonely already as she walked away from Matthew on that last day and headed for the VW bus waiting on the side of the road.

“You look down in the dumps, baby girl,” Mama said from her place in the driver’s seat.

Leni climbed into the passenger seat. She didn’t see the point in whining about something that couldn’t be changed. It was three o’clock. There was an ocean of daylight left; that meant hours of chores to do.

As soon as they were home, Mama said, “I have an idea. Go get us that striped wool blanket and the chocolate bar in the cooler. I’ll meet you down on the beach.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“What? Dad will never agree to that.”

“Well, he’s not here.” Mama smiled.

Leni didn’t waste a second. She ran to the house (before Mama changed her mind). She grabbed the slim Hershey’s chocolate bar from the cooler in the kitchen and the blanket from the back of the sofa. Wrapping it around her like a poncho, she headed for the rickety beach stairs, followed them down to the curl of water-stippled gray pebbles that was their own private beach. To the left were dark, enticing stone caves, carved by centuries of hurling water.

Mama stood in the tall grass up from the beach, a cigarette already lit. Leni was pretty sure that, to her, childhood would always smell like sea air and cigarette smoke and her mother’s rose-scented perfume.

Leni spread out the blanket on the uneven ground and she and Mama sat down on it, their legs stretched out, their bodies angled into each other. In front of them, the blue sea rolled forward ceaselessly, washing over the stones, rustling them. Not far away an otter floated on its back, using its small black paws to crack open a clam.

“Where’s Dad?”

“He went fishing with Mad Earl. I think Dad’s hoping to ask the old man for a loan. Money is getting pretty tight. I’ve still got some of the money from my mom, but I’ve been using it for cigarettes and Polaroid film.” She gave Leni a soft smile.

“I’m not sure Mad Earl is good for Dad,” Leni said.

Mama’s smile faded. “I know what you mean.”

“He’s happy here, though,” Leni said. She tried not to think about the conversation she’d had with Matthew, about how winter was coming and winter was dark and cold and crazy-making.

“I wish you remembered your dad from before ’Nam.”

“Yeah.” Leni had heard dozens of stories of that time. Mama loved to talk about Before, about who they’d been in the beginning. The words were like a much-loved fairy tale.

Mama had been sixteen when she got pregnant.

Sixteen.

Leni would be fourteen in September. Amazingly, she’d never really thought about that before. She’d known her mama’s age, of course, but she hadn’t really put the facts together. Sixteen.

“You were only two years older than me when you got pregnant,” Leni said.

Mama sighed. “I was a junior in high school. Christ. No wonder my parents threw a clot.” She gave Leni a crooked, charming smile. “They were not the kind of people who could understand a girl like me. They hated my clothes and my music and I hated their rules. At sixteen, I thought I knew everything, and I told them so. They sent me away to a Catholic girls’ school, where rebellion meant rolling up the waistband of your skirt to shorten the hem and show an inch of skin above your knees. We were taught to kneel and pray and marry well.

“Your dad came into my life like a rogue wave, knocking me over. Everything he said upended my conventional world and changed who I was. I stopped knowing how to breathe without him. He told me I didn’t need school. I believed everything he said. Your dad and I were too in love to be careful, and I got pregnant. My dad exploded when I told him. He wanted to send me away to one of those houses for unwed mothers. I knew they’d take you away from me. I’ve never hated anyone more than I hated him in that moment.”

Mama sighed. “So we ran away. I was sixteen—almost seventeen—and your dad was twenty-five. When you came along, we were flat broke and living in a trailer park, but none of that mattered. What was money or work or new clothes when you had the most perfect baby in the world?”

Mama leaned back. “He used to carry you all the time. At first in his arms and then on his shoulders. You adored him. We shut out the world and lived on love, but the world came roaring back.”

“The war,” Leni said.

Mama nodded. “I begged your dad not to go to Vietnam. We fought and fought about it. I didn’t want to be a soldier’s wife, but he wanted to go. So I packed my tears with his clothes and let him go. It was supposed to be for a year. I didn’t know what to do, where to go, how to live without him. I ran out of money and moved back home with my parents, but I couldn’t stand it there. All we did was fight. They kept telling me to divorce your father and think about you, and finally I left again. That’s when I found the commune and people who didn’t judge me for being a kid with a kid. Then your dad’s helicopter got shot down and he was captured. I got one letter from him in six years.”

Leni remembered the letter and how her mother had cried after reading it.

“When he came home, he looked like a dead man,” Mama said. “But he loved us. Loved us like air. Said he couldn’t sleep if I wasn’t in his arms, although he didn’t sleep much then, either.”

As always, Mama’s story came to a stumbling halt at this point, the fairy tale over. The witch’s door slammed shut on the wandering kids. The man who’d come home from war was not the same man who’d boarded the plane for Vietnam. “He’s better up here, though,” Mama said. “Don’t you think? He’s almost himself again.”

Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices. “You know it’s dark up here for six months in the winter. And snowy and freezing cold and stormy.”

“I know.”

“You always said bad weather made him worse.”

Leni felt her mother pull away from her. This was a fact she didn’t want to confront. They both knew why. “It won’t be like that here,” Mama said, grinding out her cigarette in the rocks beside her. She said it again, just for good measure. “Not here. He’s happier here. You’ll see.”

AS THE LONG SUMMER DAYS PASSED, Leni’s anxiety faded. Summer in Alaska was pure magic. The Land of the Midnight Sun. Rivers of light; eighteen-hour days with only a breath of dusk to separate one from the next.

Light, and work; that was summer in Alaska.

There was so much to get done. Everyone talked about it, all the time. In line at the diner, during checkout at the General Store, on the ferry to town. How’s the fishing going? Hunting good? How’s the garden? Every question was about stocking up on food, getting ready for winter.

Winter was a Big Deal. Leni had learned that. The coming cold was a constant subtext up here. Even if you were out fishing on a beautiful summer day, you were catching fish for winter. It might be fun, but it was serious business. Survival, it seemed, could hinge on the smallest thing.

She and her parents woke at five A.M. and mumbled through breakfast and then set out to do their chores. They rebuilt the goat pen, chopped wood, tended the garden, made soap, caught and smoked salmon, tanned hides, canned fish and vegetables, darned socks, duct-taped everything together. They moved, hauled, nailed, built, scraped. Large Marge sold them three goats and Leni learned how to care for them. She also learned to pick berries and make jam and shuck clams and cure salmon eggs into the best bait in the world. In the evenings, Mama made them new foods—salmon or halibut in almost everything, and vegetables from the garden. Dad cleaned his guns and fixed the metal traps Mad Earl had sold to him and read manuals on butchering animals. Barter and trade and helping out your neighbor was the way they all lived. You never knew when someone was going to drive up your driveway and offer extra meat or some mildewed planks of wood or a bucket of blueberries in exchange for something.

Parties sprouted like weeds in this wild place. People showed up with coolers full of salmon and a case of beer and a call was made on the ham radio. A boat full of fishermen pulled up to shore; a float plane landed in their cove. The next thing you knew, people were gathered around a fire on the beach somewhere, laughing and talking and drinking well past midnight.

Leni became an adult that summer; that was how it felt to her. In September, she turned fourteen, started her period, and finally needed a bra. Pimples popped out like tiny pink volcanoes on her cheeks, her nose, between her eyebrows. When it first happened, she worried about seeing Matthew, worried that he would change his opinion based on her awkward adolescence; but he didn’t seem to notice that her skin had become an enemy. Seeing him remained the highlight of her days up here. Whenever they got the chance to be together that summer, they ran off from the group and holed up and talked. He recited Robert Service poems to her and showed her special things like a nest full of blue duck eggs or a huge bear print in the sand. She took pictures of the things he showed her—and of him—in every light and tacked them into a giant collage on her loft bedroom wall.

Summer ended as quickly as it had begun. Autumn in Alaska was less a season and more an instant, a transition. Rain started to fall and didn’t stop, turning the ground to mud, drowning the peninsula, falling in curtains of gray. Rivers rose to splash over their crumbling banks, tearing big chunks away, changing course.

All at once, it seemed, the leaves of cottonwood trees around the cabin turned golden and whispered to themselves, then curled into black flutes and floated to the ground in crispy, lacy heaps.

School started, and with it Leni felt her childhood return. She met Matthew in the classroom and took her seat beside him, scooting in close.

His smile reawakened her in a way, reminded her that there was more to life than work. He taught her something new about friendship: it picked right back up where you’d left off, as if you hadn’t been apart at all.

ON A COLD NIGHT in late September, after a long work day, Leni stood at the window, staring out at the dark yard. She and her mother were exhausted; they’d worked from sunup to sundown, canning the last of the season’s salmon—preparing jars, scaling fish, slicing the plump pink and silver strips, and cutting off the slimy skin. They packed the strips in jars and put them into the pressure cooker. One by one, they carried the jars down to the root cellar and stacked them on newly built shelves.

“If there are ten smart guys in a room and one crackpot, you can bet who your dad will like best.”

“Huh?” Leni asked.

“Never mind.”

Mama moved in to stand by Leni. Outside, night had fallen. A full moon cast blue-white light on everything. Stars filled the sky with pinpricks and elliptical smears of light. Up here, at night, the sky was impossibly huge and never quite turned black, but stayed a deep velvet blue. The world beneath it dwindled down to nothing: a dollop of firelight, a squiggly white reflection of moonlight on the tarnished waves.

Dad was out there in the dark with Mad Earl. The two men stood beside each other at a fire burning in an oil drum, passing a jug back and forth. Black smoke billowed up from the garbage they were burning. Everyone else who had come by to help had gone home hours ago.

Mad Earl suddenly pulled out his pistol and shot at the trees.

Dad laughed uproariously at that.

“How long are they going to stay out there?” Leni asked. The last time she’d gone to the outhouse, she’d heard snippets of their conversation. Ruining the country … keep ourselves safe … coming anarchy … nuclear.

“Who knows?”

Mama sounded irritated. She’d fried the moose steaks Mad Earl had brought with him; then she’d made roasted potatoes and set the card table with their camping plates and utensils. One of Leni’s paperback novels had been used to prop up the table’s bad leg.

That had been hours ago. Now the meat was probably as dry as an old boot.

“Enough is enough,” Mama finally said. She went outside. Leni sidled to the doorway, pushed the door open so she could hear. Goats bleated at the sound of footsteps.

“Hey, Cora,” Mad Earl said, smiling sloppily. He stood unsteady on his feet, swayed to the right, stumbled.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Earl?” Mama asked.

“Naw, but thanks,” Mad Earl said, stumbling sideways. “My daughter will tan my hide if I don’t make it home. She’s making salmon chowder.”

“Another time then,” Mama said, turning back to the cabin. “Come on in, Ernt. Leni’s starving.”

Mad Earl staggered to his truck, climbed in, and drove away, stopping and starting, honking the horn.

Dad made his way across the yard in a mincing, overcautious way that meant he was drunk. Leni had seen it before. He slammed the door behind him and stumbled to the table, half falling into his chair.

Mama carried in a platter of meat and oven-browned potatoes and a warm loaf of sourdough bread, which Thelma had taught them how to make from the starter every homesteader kept on hand.

“Loo … s great,” Dad said, shoveling a forkful of moose meat into his mouth, chewing noisily. He looked up, bleary-eyed. “You two have a lot of catching up to do. Earl and I were talking about it. When TSHTF, you two would be the first casualties.”

“TSHTF? What in God’s name are you talking about?” Mama said.

Leni shot her mother a warning look. Mama knew better than to say anything about anything when he was drunk.

“When the shit hits the fan. You know. Martial law. A nuclear bomb. Or a pandemic.” He tore off a hunk of bread, dragged it in the meat juice.

Mama sat back. She lit up a cigarette, eyeing him.

Don’t do it, Mama, Leni thought. Don’t say anything.

“I don’t like all of this end-of-the-world rhetoric, Ernt. And there’s Leni to consider. She—”

Dad slammed his fist down on the table so hard everything rattled. “Damn it, Cora, can’t you ever just support me?”

He got to his feet and went to the row of parkas hanging by the front door. He moved jerkily. She thought she heard him say, G-damn stupid, and mutter something else. He shook his head and flexed and unflexed his hands. Leni saw a wildness in him, barely contained emotion rising hard and fast.

Mama ran after him, reached out.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarled, shoving her away.

Dad grabbed a parka and stepped into his boots and went outside, slamming the door shut behind him.

Leni caught her mother’s gaze, held it. In those wide blue eyes that held on to every nuance of expression, she saw her own anxiety reflected. “Does he believe all of that end-of-the-world stuff?”

“I think he does,” Mama said. “Or maybe he just wants to. Who knows? It doesn’t matter, though. It’s all talk.”

Leni knew what did matter.

The weather was getting worse.

And so was he.

“WHAT’S IT REALLY LIKE?” Leni asked Matthew the next day at the end of school. All around them, kids were gathering up their supplies to go home.

“What?”

“Winter.”

Matthew thought about it. “Terrible and beautiful. It’s how you know if you’re cut out to be an Alaskan. Most go running back to the Outside before it’s over.”

“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.

“You’ll make it,” Matthew said earnestly.

She nodded, wishing she could tell him that she’d begun to worry as much about the dangers inside of her home as outside of it.

She could tell Matthew a lot of things, but not that. She could say her father drank too much or that he yelled or lost his temper, but not that he sometimes scared her. The disloyalty of such a thing was impossible to contemplate.

They exited the schoolhouse together, walking shoulder to shoulder.

Outside, the VW bus waited for her. It looked bad these days, all dinged up and scraped. The bumper was duct-taped in place. The muffler had fallen off at a pothole, so now the poor old thing roared like a race car. Both of her parents were inside, waiting for her.

“’Bye,” Leni said to Matthew, and headed to the vehicle. She tossed her backpack into the back of the bus and climbed in. “Hey, guys,” Leni said.

Dad jammed the bus in reverse, backed up, and turned around.

“Mad Earl wants me to teach his family a few things,” Dad said, turning onto the main road. “We talked about it the other night.”

In no time, they were out of town and up the hill and pulling into the compound. Dad was the first one out of the bus. He grabbed his rifle from the back and slung it over his shoulder.

Mad Earl, seated on his porch, immediately rose and waved. He yelled something Leni couldn’t hear and people stopped working. They put down their shovels and axes and chain saws and moved into the clearing in the center of the compound.

Mama opened the door and got out. Leni followed close behind, her wafflestompers sinking into the wet, spongy ground.

A dented Ford truck pulled up beside the VW and parked. Axle and the two girls, Agnes and Marthe, got out of the truck and headed for the crowd gathering in front of Mad Earl’s porch.

Mad Earl stood on the eroding, slanted porch, his bandy legs spaced a little farther apart than looked comfortable. His white hair hung limply around his loose-skinned face, greasy at the roots and frizzing at the ends. He wore dirty jeans tucked into brown rubber boots and a flannel work shirt that had seen better days. He made a sweeping motion with his hands. “Get closer, come on in. Ernt, Ernt, come up by me, son.”

There was a murmur of sound through the crowd; heads turned.

Dad strode past Thelma and Ted, smiling at Clyde and thumping his back when he reached him. Dad stepped up onto the porch beside Mad Earl. He looked tall and rangy next to the diminutive old man. Super-handsome, with all that black hair and the bushy black mustache.

“We was talking last night, us boys, about the shit going on Outside,” Mad Earl said. “Our president is a certified crook and a bomb blowed a TWA jet right outta the sky. Ain’t nobody safe anymore.”

Leni turned, looked up at Mama, who shrugged.

“My son, Bo, was the very best of us. He loved Alaska and he loved the good old US of A enough to volunteer to fight in that damn war. And we lost him. But even from that hellhole, he was thinking of us. His family. Our safety and security mattered to him. So he sent us his friend, Ernt Allbright, to be one of us.” Mad Earl thumped Dad on the back, kind of pushed him forward. “I been watching Ernt all summer and now I know. He wants the best for us.”

Dad pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket, held it up. The headline read: Bomb on TWA Flight 841 Kills 88. “We might live in the bush, but we go to Homer and Sterling and Soldotna. We know what’s going on in the Outside. Bombings by the IRA, the PLO, Weatherman. Folks killing each other, kidnappings. All those girls disappearing in Washington State; now someone is killing girls in Utah. The Symbionese Liberation Army. India testing nuclear bombs. It’s only a matter of time before World War Three starts. It could be nuclear … or biological. And when that happens, the shit will really hit the fan.”

Mad Earl nodded, murmured his agreement.

“Mama?” Leni whispered. “Is all that true?”

Mama lit up a cigarette. “A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush. We don’t want to make him mad.”

Dad was the center of attention, and he drank it up. “You all have done a great job of preparing for scarcity. You’ve excelled at homesteader self-reliance. You have a good water-collection system and good food stores. You’ve staked out freshwater sources and you’re expert hunters. Your garden could be bigger, but it’s well tended. You’re ready to survive anything. Except the effects of martial law.”

“Whaddaya mean?” Ted asked.

Dad looked … different somehow. Taller. His shoulders were higher and more square than she’d seen before. “Nuclear war. A pandemic. An electromagnetic pulse. Earthquake. Tidal wave. Tornado. Mount Redoubt blowing up, or Mount Rainer. In 1908 there was an explosion in Siberia that was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There are a million ways for this sick, corrupt world to end.”

Thelma frowned. “Oh, come on, Ernt, there’s no need to scare—”

“Shush, Thelma,” Mad Earl snapped.

“Whatever comes, man-made tragedy or natural disaster, the first thing that happens is a breakdown of law and order,” Dad said. “Think of it: No power. No communications. No grocery stores. No uncontaminated food. No water. No civilization. Martial law.”

Dad paused, made eye contact with each person, one by one. “People like Tom Walker, with his big house and expensive boats and his excavator, will be caught off guard. What good will all that land and wealth do him when he runs out of food or medical supplies? None. And you know what will happen when people like Tom Walker realize they aren’t prepared?”

“What?” Mad Earl stared up at Dad as if he’d just seen God.

“He’ll come here, banging on our doors, begging for help from us, the people he thought he was better than.” Dad paused. “We have to know how to protect ourselves and keep out the marauders who will want what we have. First off, we need to put together bug-out bags—packs that are already packed for survival. We need to be able to disappear at a moment’s notice, with everything we need.”

“Yeah!” someone yelled.

“But that’s not enough. We have a good start here. But security is lax. I think Bo left me his land so I would find my way here, to you, and teach you that it’s not enough to be prepared for survival. You have to fight for what’s yours. Kill anyone who comes to take it from you. I know you all are hunters, but we’ll need more than guns when TSHTF. Impact weapons break bones. Knives sever arteries. Arrows puncture. Before the first snowfall, I promise you, each one of us will be ready for the worst, every single one of you—from youngest to oldest—will be able to protect yourself and your family from the danger that’s coming.”

Mad Earl nodded.

“So. Everyone line up. I want to assess precisely how good each of you is with a gun. We’ll start there.”