When the power went out for the last time we knew we would have to kill the survivalists as quickly as possible, while they were still in their bunkers.
For a few days we had all been talking over the problem. The township of Threshold hosted at least a dozen families that could be considered survivalists, or doomsday preppers, or postapocalyptics - "posties" - or eschatologists, or pork and beaners, or whatever you wanted to call them.
None of them were new, but they had been more active than usual over the previous few months, consolidating their stockpiles of food and water and batteries and guns and ammunition. If they hadn't built their bunkers themselves - hiring earthmovers and cement trucks and day labourers from the camps - they simply had prefab fallout shelters shipped in on the backs of prime movers, and buried them up there in the hills, on their farms and their ranches.
They took their children to the shooting range next to the bowling alley on Main Street, and taught them how to fire and strip and clean their weapons. One of the older girls had a pink ghost AR-15 with extended clips. She would burn through $200 worth of ammunition in half an hour. Flushed and sweating and breathless, the boys crowded around her. She was a good shot, apparently. They all told her so.
The posties wore camouflage everywhere, all the time. They drove nothing smaller than Ford F-250s, needing the extra torque for their flags and bumper stickers. Around town they carried their weapons openly and talked about sight-lines and defensive positions, pointing from one building to another building and then to the road out of town. I watched them use military hand signals to order pie at the diner. They went to church every day and drank beer and said the government would be coming for all of us because of the leftist police state and the homos and the immigrants. Had they been able to pull it off, I suspect the posties would have mined all the streets to stop the endless columns of black women and abortion doctors they imagined were coming to ruin their way of life. One of them said: "There's no 'us' in 'liberty'." I thought that needed some work.
At the first whiff of the end times the posties loaded their shotguns and sealed themselves underground with their families. And we knew that once their tinned peaches ran out and the water stagnated - or they simply grew bored, the romance of crowding around to watch one another shit into a chemical toilet next to the bunk beds having dissipated - they would have no real choice but to descend, armed, onto the town, and take what they needed by force.
And they would have to take it by force. We resolved to not let them have anything. Preparing for catastrophe is one thing, but anticipating it with desire is something else. We didn't need people like that in the new world. To my mind, the new world didn't really need any people in it at all, but there we all were anyway.
We spot welded the primary hatches and secondary escapes and then used the posties' own trucks to drag boulders over them. Air vents had insecticides and herbicides poured down them and were then sealed. There were probably more humane ways to do it, but none of us could think of anything that didn't involve getting in close, and we didn't want to risk it. Many of the townspeople of Threshold expressed sadness and concern for the children trapped down in those bunkers. For my part, I was simply glad that there were no animals down there: everything other than the dogs had been released by the posties before they locked themselves away, and the dogs had been shot on their front lawns as soon as Fox News went off the air.
It was amusing, over the next few weeks, to watch the cats swarming into town. First a trickle and then a stream as they realised their cans of ash and giblets weren't going to be opened, and they had been left to fend for themselves. We were glad to have them there. Food rotted in supermarkets faster than we could eat or preserve it, and the rodent and insect populations boomed, and the cats helped to manage that. They never had the chance to turn feral, and provided comfort and companionship to many. Bibles might provide solace depending on which bits of them you read, but they don't warm your lap or soothe your heartbeat.
We found one bunker already open. Somebody called up for help from below, and we found a bearded man with his hips and legs trapped beneath huge steaming bags of seed. Water had got into the seed from somewhere, invisibly, and after a time many of them had swelled with mildew stink and blight, while others sprouted and fed off the decay. The man told us his wife had gone to solicit help after the sacks of seed had fallen on him while he was dragging them from the shelf, hoping to dry them on the bunker floor, but she had not returned. His eyes kept darting to his AR-15, propped against the wall just out of reach. His fingers scrabbled uselessly for it as I hammered a survey post slowly through his forehead. I expected this to be a revelation: instead I felt that same brief upset you feel when you walk face-first through a spider's web, inadvertently ruining their hard night's work.
Another of the posties had been a retired paediatrician, or so we were told. There was a sick baby that needed attention, so a few of us went up and called into the retired paediatrician's gun slit. He shot out at us and Jake caught it in the chin, and the slug bounced around inside his skull. We threw fire in through the gun slit. That hadn't been my idea, but I went along with it because community and shared purpose is important. It turned out that the retired paediatrician had actually been a podiatrist, and had been hoarding gold against whatever future he had imagined. When we cracked the place open a couple of days later we saw that the gold had melted and run across the floor, then hardened again. Two blackened skeletons were stuck in it. Something silver glinted at a joint, and I tore up a titanium hip, cracking it away from the bone. Coated in gold, like a thick-bladed, curved dagger with a bulbous hilt. Right away somebody asked if they could look at it.
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