This blog is the result of a mistake. I stumbled into something I’d forgotten I’d done because I’d put it in a file where it definitely didn’t belong. I found it fun and thought I'd share it. Next week I’m headed for Oshkosh, so you can guess what that one will be about.
Compared to the majority of my fellow gray dogs, I’ve been hammering on a computer much longer than most. I didn’t resist the computer concept and they became the central core of my daily life when I bought my first Apple computer the same year they went into business, 1978. I’m continually updating and now have their latest desktop digit cruncher which cost twice what my first new car did. Even so, I’m about to run out of storage, even though have 9 Tb (Tb, not Gb) of storage. I’ve killed a lot of digits just staying alive.
Today, as I was racing through some folders a document name jumped out at me that shouldn’t have been there. It read “Road Kill, First Person- Word”. What the hell?
I popped it open and found it to be the first few chapters of a novel I had been considering writing (I’ve done/published two, more on that later) and, for the hell of it, I rewrote those chapters in first-person rather than the usual third-person. It was an experiment. You don’t read much fiction that’s done from the hero’s point of view.
Anyway, I thought a few of you might enjoy what fell out of my head. I fully expect most to skim the first few pages and bail. That’s understandable. See you next week.
Here it is:
Prologue
Do you want to know the most frightening thing about modern civilization? You’re probably going to say something philosophical like its cruelty to those at the bottom of the income ladder or maybe its general facelessness. But, you’re wrong. The most frightening thing about civilization is that it’s so incredibly easy to disrupt it. Under some circumstances, it can be very much a here-today, gone-tomorrow concept.
Civilization, you’ll soon realize as we get deeper into my story, is a paper-thin veneer floating on a sea of extremely complex interdependencies that are so engrained in our lives that they have become all but invisible to us. We see it, but we don’t see it.
At the heart of it all are the basics—food and shelter. Shelter, we can pretty much figure out for ourselves: we know to come in out of the rain and it’s not hard to do. When it comes to food, however, any modern city might as well be in a cage being tended to by benevolent caretakers because, when it comes to food and drink, we are 100% dependent on others.
The bars in the cage of civilization are formed by the simple fact that cities don’t, and can’t, grow what we eat. Nor can we go down to the local park and shoot or catch it, which today’s city dwellers wouldn’t know how to do anyway. Today, the forest in which we hunt is the super market, the grocery story, the corner 7-11. But those are horribly fragile supply systems because they too depend on others. They don’t grow it. They don’t shoot it. They just sell it. And, if it’s not there, they can’t sell it. And that’s where this story begins.
That arrogant sonuvabitch, President Thomas McAlvey Buchanan, forgot, or simply didn’t understand, that virtually the entire country is fed by an umbilical that attaches them directly to the trucking community with the super market being nothing more than a convenient distribution point. Eliminate the truckers and the shelves would be empty in a week. Eliminate them for a month and we’d be out there eating our front yards. Buchanan managed to eliminate them for four weeks. Need I say more?
Picture, if you will, what you would do if told to find some food for your family but every super market shelf in the city is stripped bare and isn’t going to be re-supplied for months. Got an answer? Of course not. That’s the nature of civilization. Someone else in another sector of the population was supposed to grow or make the food and yet another sector, the truckers, are supposed to deliver it to us. While they’re doing that, you and I are busy selling insurance, pumping gas or doing whatever it is we do to make the money to go to the super market for today’s vittles. The reality is that most of what we do on a day-to-day basis doesn’t feed us because we can’t eat insurance or drink gas. See? We depend on others.
Buchanan got sideways with the trucking unions nationwide. Some far-thinking, tree-hugging, never-had-a-real-job presidential advisor decided the world would be much safer if trucks only traveled at night between the hours of 9pm and 3 am. I’ll save you the math. That’s only six hours of drive time, not to mention it’s in the middle of the night. Buchanan must have been sober that day because he signed it into law as an executive order the same day it hit his desk. In his normal, shall we say “relaxed” condition, he couldn’t have pulled it off that quickly. About five minutes after Buchanan made the new regs into law, the truckers nationwide told him he could stuff it. They just headed for home, set the parking brake and dared the government to do anything about it. Hey, if they don’t want to drive, you can’t make them drive. ‘Ever tried to threaten a Teamster into action? It doesn’t work.
By the end of the first month, every super market in the country was totally bare. There wasn’t a single crumb to be had and people were freaking out. I’m from Blairstown, New Jersey, which is pretty much out in the country in the north east corner of the state, but “down below” in the metropolitan area, they were going bananas. We weren’t in such great shakes out in the country either.
Buchanan tried to send the National Guard in but most of the guardsmen already had enough trouble feeding their own families, much less taking off to help feed someone else’s family so they just didn’t show up. Then the same thing started happening to the Army. Pretty soon, Buchanan was serving spaghetti (no meat balls) at state dinners. The man’s an idiot, I tell you!.
The same gotta-take-care-of-my-family thing hit the police forces too. They tried, they really did, but by the time Molly, that’s my wife, and I got back from England there wasn’t a cop to be seen because they too were taking care of their families, and I can’t say as I blame them.
Let me start at the beginning, when we landed in Kennedy. I still wonder if the airline gave us our frequent flier miles for that flight. We sure earned them.
Chapter One
We had been following the whole mess in the States by television in England. Molly had inherited her uncle’s castle and we go over periodically to make sure things are okay. Molly and I had only been married about a year, so it was sort of a vacation for us and we left my sixteen-year-old daughter, Debbie, home alone. She’s a super stand-up kid so we weren’t worried about it. But then Buchanan started messing with the truckers and before you knew it, we couldn’t get a flight home. It took us nearly two weeks to get a flight and by that time, the brown stuff had really hit the fan.
We knew things were bad when the captain came on the PA as we were coming into JFK and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about twenty minutes out from landing and we have a highly unusual situation developing at Kennedy. Don’t be alarmed, as it shouldn’t affect our landing or safety at all, but I thought you should know about it in advance.”
Molly looked over and squeezed my arm. She knows bad news when she hears it.
“As you know the trucking strike has gone on for over a month now and it appears the lack of deliveries to supermarkets and grocery stores has spread to the point that people are leaving their posts to care for their families and we just got word that includes air traffic controllers as well. So, there is no formal air traffic control at Kennedy. Officially they have closed the airport, but we’re talking to all the other aircraft inbound to JFK and we’ll just follow each other in. It is, however, going to be crowded because weather at other cities has diverted some traffic to Kennedy. The weather is perfect, so there should be no problem whatsoever.”
No problem, my ass. I’ve been flying for over thirty years and I could just imagine what was going on in the cockpit. It has been years since any airline pilot has made an approach without radar telling them what was going on and where their traffic was. Oh, man, this had the potential for being a real boondoogle!
I was pissed and told Molly, “Dammit, I knew we should have left earlier. As soon as I saw how badly that jerk Buchanan was handling the strike, we should have packed up and left right then.” I was fuming. “I don’t know what the hell Buchanan thought was going to happen. It’s been damn near six weeks and grocery stores can’t last nearly that long. Same thing with gas stations. What was he thinking? We should have learned our lessons with the gas shortages back in the seventies: let a population think they’re about to run out of something and everyone starts hoarding. Then, guess what? They do run out of everything.”
Molly gave me a “look” and I glanced around. I guess I was using what she calls my “big” voice because people were staring at me. Screw ‘em. They were in the same mess we were in but they didn’t know it yet. They would soon.
I ignored the old lady across the aisle and kept talking. I told Molly, “Don’t kid yourself, this is happening everywhere in the country. It’s just that places like the New York area are so over-populated that as far back as two weeks, a blind man could see what was happening. But, what did Buchanan do? He just sat there on his ivory throne acting like God and thumbing his nose at the truckers. Now, even the truckers aren’t eating. Damn! We should have left then.”
“Honey, there was no way you could have known,” Molly said, “Besides, flights were nearly impossible to get. We were lucky to get this one.” She knew what was bothering me. “Debbie will be just fine. She’s a level headed kid and can take care of herself.”
I wasn’t convinced and frankly, I felt guilty as hell. I said, “Yeah, but we should never have left her alone. I absolutely guarantee you that we’re going to see food riots and that means we’re one step away from gangs cruising neighborhoods looking for houses that may have food. It may be happening already and she’s stuck at the house. At least I hope that’s where she is. I don’t…” Then the captain started talking again and gave us more good news.
“We’ve been in contact with other aircraft that have landed ahead of us and they advise us that all of the boarding bridges are full so we’ll have to deplane you on the ramp and will probably have to use the emergency slides. Again, this will be no problem and our flight attendants will assist you and give you instructions on how to use the slides. We apologize for this inconvenience, but we’ll do our best to help in every way we can.”
I’ve spent my entire life wiggling out of one bad situation or another and this was another of those bad situations. When I was eighteen I joined the Marines, saw some combat, then came back and went to college at Rutgers. I started a construction company almost as soon as I got out and I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t admit that being a commercial building contractor in the New York, New Jersey area is at least as rough as combat. A side benefit is that you get really good at figuring the odds of a bad situation and these didn’t look good.
I moved in close to Molly because I didn’t want the rest of first class (hey, I earned it) hearing me. I said, “Babe, I think we’re going to find a real shit storm going on and we’d better be prepared for it. Take a look down there.”
We were miles north of Kennedy turning south and the bank gave us a clear view of what was under us and it didn’t look good. I told Molly, “That’s the Triboro Bridge down there and it doesn’t look as if anything is moving for miles. You can actually see people walking on the bridge. The tunnels have to be a disaster. I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get past New York and back to Jersey.”
On the best of days, the ride from JFK, around Manhattan then across Jersey on I-80 was no picnic but looking at the traffic below I knew it was going to be flat-out impossible. It was really frustrating because it was so clear that from that altitude we could damn near see the Delaware Water Gap way out on the other side of NYC and our place is just north of the Gap. For a fact, I knew getting over there was going get ugly. Really ugly. We weren’t on the ground yet and I felt as if we were already trapped on Long Island. What I didn’t know was that things were heating up on the ground and getting past New York City was going to be the least of our worries.
Chapter Two
Even as Jack and Molly Slattery stared out across New York at their home in far western New Jersey, Bo Black, a twenty-nine-year-old youth with the build, complexion and demeanor of a short Mike Tyson was sitting in the back of a Department of Corrections van handcuffed to the seat. He couldn’t help but grin as a bulky guard yelled into his radio.
“Dispatch! Dispatch! Is that you, Jackson? What the hell do you mean; the station is leaving?
A tinny voice came out of the speaker, “Yeah, Things are going to hell in a handbasket around here. Maloney got word that a gang was moving down his street in Secaucus cleaning the food out of every house as they went. He wanted to roll a couple of black and whites to stop it, but the captain said they didn’t have the manpower, so Maloney told him to fuck off and left. He took his squad car. Most of the other guys are gone too. Heading back to their places. Hey, man! We’re supposed to be protecting the people but who in the hell is protecting us? I’ll talk to you. I’m splitting. Later.”
“Jackson! Jackson, what the hell am I supposed to do with this load of jail birds?” his answer was random static.
“Shit!” He dropped heavily into the driver’s seat, his head in his hands.
Bo Black was enjoying the display immensely. The van was sitting on a side street where the driver had stopped after being forced off the Jersey Turnpike because of a near riot at a traffic jam where everyone was blaming the other for the automotive chaos they found themselves in. It was pretty obvious that getting to the prison was going to be nearly impossible. Even Black, himself a product of the inner-city and used to a high level of localized chaos, was amazed at how quickly the area was unraveling. It seemed as if every block had it’s own little battle of some sort in progress.
The guard abruptly picked up a clipboard fastened to the dash of the big van. He scanned down it, his lips moving as he read. Satisfied, he reached into a lock box and came out with a ring of keys.
He was shaking his head in disbelief as he moved down the aisle unlocking handcuffs and leg chains as he went. The nametag on his khaki uniform shirt said, “Datillo.” He was talking in a near-shout as he worked.
“Alright, you dirt bags, this is your lucky goddamn day! The frigging world around us is going down the toilet fast and I don’t want to be stuck here nursemaiding you assholes while one of your homies is out there burglarizing my place or hassling my family, so I’m outta here. For two goddamn cents I’ve leave you all chained up in here, but I’m such a nice frigging guy, I’m not going to do that. I’ve checked all your sheets and none of you are rapists, murderers or really bad guys, so you’re on your own.”
As Officer Datillo finished speaking, the key clicked in Bo Black’s cuffs. He was free! He’d been on his way to serve two years for armed robbery and now he was free, courtesy of the chaos caused by truckers who wanted to overturn regulations he neither knew nor cared about.
Bo Black stood on the curb watching Officer Datillo drive away in the van with New Jersey government license plates. He had to swerve to miss a slow-motion fistfight between two elderly white women. A broken grocery bag was at their feet. Black looked around at a part of Hoboken he knew well and rubbed his wrists where the cuffs had been. The cool evening air felt good. Life was suddenly very good, even though his old neighborhood was beginning to like a combat zone complete with a couple of burning wrecked cars.
The first order of business was to replace the bright orange prison clothes with something more fitting his image as a proud black man. The next was to round up a couple of his friends. There was a huge opportunity here for the right man with the right people. As he watched the van disappear he saw something very symbolic in it: the law had just decided to return home to tend to family business. Officer Datillo was worried about feeding his family. Bo Black grinned his signature toothy grin. This was a career opportunity of massive proportions and he wasn’t going to let it pass without engaging his natural bend towards entrepreneurialism.
People had to eat. People had to travel. The world had suddenly turned into a basic commodities market and he who has the commodities, will have the power. A plan was solidifying in his mind but he had to reach his guys and act immediately. Yes sir, with the law at home guarding their own gates, there were some real opportunities here.
As if to underscore the reality of the situation, a Hispanic woman came screaming out of the brownstone directly behind him. She was driving a middle-aged white male in a well-pressed business suit down the steps while beating on him with a broom. “You sonuvabitch, that’s my bottle of milk and I don’t give no damn how much dinero you got. We can’t eat money. It’s mine! I catch you in my building again and my man gonna cut you good!”
Chapter Three (this is the last one)
“I don’t like this one damn bit,” I was talking mostly to myself as I stared down out of the airliner window. We were low on final approach and I got my first glimpse of what was happening in the neighborhoods. “Look down there,” I told Molly. “I can actually see mobs of people around the stores. It looks like wall-to-wall riots and…oh, shit!”
As a pilot, I’m hyper sensitive to moving shadows and, as I was looking down, a big one cut under us. Airplane! I snapped my head up and couldn’t believe it. There was a United 777 barely a hundred yards off our wing slowly converging on us.
“I don’t believe this!” I couldn’t stop myself and said it too loud. Molly leaned across me for a better view and I said, “I think he’s trying for the same runway we’re going for! Oh, man! This isn’t going to work, this isn’t going to work!”
There’s something instinctive in a long-time pilot that we just “know” when the paths of two airplanes are about to become one, and this was the situation here. The other pilot could clearly see us, so it wasn’t as if it was an accident. For whatever reason, he was moving in to hug us closely. He was actually doing a good job of formation flying but I had no idea why.
We were gear and flaps down on final approach to Runway 17 Right at Kennedy, although I couldn’t actually see the runway. We couldn’t have been a half-mile out when I saw a quick puff of dark smoke from the other plane’s left engine.
“Damn! One engine just flamed out. He’s running out of fuel,” I blurted. “I hope he has…oh, oh, there goes the other one. Oh, my God! It looks as if he’s trying for the taxiway.”
Every fiber in my soul fought the reality of what I was seeing. The other bird must have been diverting from another destination, so it was fuel-critical and that’s why he was staying so close to us. He was planning on touching down right behind us. This couldn’t have happened at a worse time for him. An airliner will glide really well when it’s high and has speed, but when it’s slow with the gear and flaps out, it’s basically an anvil and depends on lots of power to stay in the air. Unless the airport was right under our nose, this guy was screwed. As far as I could see there was nothing below but buildings and the occasional boulevard.
I caught the taxiway out of the corner of my eye, but it was already too late. I had to lean forward to see far enough back to follow the other airplane because it was falling behind. Just before crossing the big highway that circles the airport, he clipped a tower with a right main gear. That slewed him right, but the pilot was right on top of it and slammed in a left bank. But the timing was all wrong. Right at that moment, he crossed over the dirt bank that circles the airport and stops water from running off into the highway. His left wing tip caught the berm and the last thing I saw was the airplane breaking up as it cartwheeled down the runway overrun with flaming fuel and pieces being catapulted up on the taxiway.
I was absolutely sick. I just told Molly, “He didn’t make it. Dammit!” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Sir, just cross your arms in front of you and jump feet first, the slide will catch you.” I was standing in the open door looking down but I was so amazed at the scene below on the ramp I only half heard the flight attendant who was doing everything she could to keep her teeth from chattering. Poor kid. She was terrified.
We were parked over a quarter of a mile from the terminal, which, I don’t have to tell you is huge and usually surrounded by empty ramp area. But not today. Airplanes were jammed in there like insects trying to build a nest and almost every square foot was covered with mobs of people milling around not knowing what to do. It was surreal. Before I jumped into the slide, I looked over the crowd and picked out a point on the building to use in navigating our way out to the parking lot. Now that we were safely on the ground, things were beginning to assume a chronological line of priorities, with getting off the ramp being first and finding our truck being second. I just hoped my truck was still there. The whole thing was much worse than I had imagined.
I stood at the bottom of the slide and jerked Molly to her feet the instant she came down because she was about to be squashed by a portly old lady who was screaming like an insane person as she came down the slide. I wanted to get us out of there before the mob got really out of control.
People can think and do some of the dumbest damn things in situations like that. It looked as if we were all witnessing the end of the world and this overly tan, middle aged man with too many gold chains, too much chest hair and too much attitude was screaming at one of the flight attendants, “Hey, lady, I don’t give a damned about your problem, here. I want my goddamn bags! I wear thousand dollar shirts, ya know, and you don’t think I’m going to leave my stuff in the belly of your goddamn airplane do you?”
Some people!
As I dragged Molly through the disorganized crowd, she had to shout to be heard, “What about our baggage?”
“Forget it,” I yelled back, “We’d need a baggage loader to even get up to the cargo hatches and it’s about to become a frenzy out here when people realize they’re stranded in the middle of an airport. I hope to hell someone disarmed the ramp side security door locks, or we’re not even going to be able to get off the ramp. What an incredible mess!”
The mobs were everywhere and you could almost feel the panic floating in the air. People were just beginning to understand how desperate this whole situation was. Post-911 major airports are specifically designed to keep people off the ramp and away from the airplanes, which creates a weird kind of reversal—once people are inside a fence that’s designed to keep them out, there’s no logical way to escape because every door and gate is locked. I felt as if we were trapped inside a gigantic cage.
One thing about being both a pilot and a commercial building contractor, I had a better than average grasp on the way airport security systems worked and the way they laid out their buildings, which was a good thing. Everywhere we looked panicked mobs were beating on locked doors at the elevated ends of jetways and ground level personnel doors. Panic had taken away their ability to think and they were crammed against one another as if by shoving the people ahead against the doors they could somehow gain entry. But it wasn’t working.
I was looking for other ways in and almost immediately found one: we’d make believe we were bags and use the conveyor system belts. They would lead us off the ramp and into the terminal. We’d deal with what was inside when we got there.
I told Molly, “There’s a baggage loading dock over there. Let’s go.”
First, you have to understand something about Molly; she’s not your average housewife. Actually, she’s not your average anything. When we met something like two years ago, she was a field agent for British Intelligence. I was in England tied up in…well, never mind, it’s too complicated… but suffice it to say Molly had received some of the best training she could receive for this kind of situation. Besides, even though she only comes up to my chest (and has a great body), she could Karate my butt off any day of the week. She’s a tight little bundle of dynamite so, as soon as I brought the baggage dock to her attention, she was way ahead of me and up on one of the conveyors.
Molly was through the heavy plastic drapes they use to seal the baggage tracks in a heart beat but it took me a little longer. I’m six feet and one hundred ninety pounds, so I didn’t slide through as easily.
“Oh, this is charming!” Molly said. She had dropped off the track and was looking around as she smoothed her short-cropped auburn hair. I liked it better when it was longer, but you know women. My vote was ignored. We were in a high-ceiled, darkish room that was a mess of baggage, conveyors and baggage carts. We could barely hear the crowd noise coming through the walls and there was a gloomy kind of silence in the room. She said, “And what now, Mr. Slattery? You know it’s going to be pandemonium as soon as we get into the terminal.”
She was right. We needed a plan. The last thing I wanted was to go barging out there and get swept away by the crush of people that undoubtedly filled the terminal. There had to be a hundred airliners clustered on the ramp in addition to those already on boarding gates, so the problem of people getting out of the airport was reaching critical mass. I tried to picture what was happening on the other side of the terminal wall and what it would take to make it to the parking lot.
“I’ve got it,” I said. “Let’s do the baggage thing and follow the conveyor. That will put us on the lower baggage claim area. Thank God, we didn’t find space in the parking garage and the truck is way the hell out in the overflow lot. That’ll be away from most of the crowds. I hope. When we hit the terminal floor, I think we can count on every door and stairwell being packed to the point they’re dangerous. Once we’re out of the terminal, I think we’ll be okay. So, let’s think about making our own door.”
I started poking around the baggage make-up room and found what I was looking for almost immediately. “Aha! This’ll do the trick.”
I yanked the attaching pin out of the base of a tow bar on a baggage dolly. It had to weigh a solid hundred pounds. I motioned toward the conveyor belt and said, “This’ll do it. Let’s go.”
I was right about it being pandemonium in the terminal. In fact, when we crawled through the baggage door into the baggage claim area, not one person even noticed us. I can’t imagine what a scene we would have caused on a normal day, especially since I was dragging the tow bar behind me toward the middle of the concourse. That day everyone was intent on getting out of the terminal and that wasn’t going to be easy.
Mobs can’t begin to think logically, and they were all trying to wedge themselves into the revolving doors at one time and it wasn’t working. In fact, it was painful to watch. Because the walls are mostly glass, you could see that once outside the terminal, the sidewalks were wide enough that people were acting crazy, but at least traffic was moving. What I wanted was a short cut to the sidewalk.
“You ready?” I asked Molly. She was holding the other end of the tow bar. She nodded. “Then, let’s do it!”
We lunged toward one of the big panes of glass that made up the wall of the terminal. I guided the bar at the exact center of the panel. I’ve installed plenty of those windows in some of the buildings I’ve put up and I know you can throw chairs against them, batter them with just about anything and they won’t break. They are practically bullet-proof. But they weren’t designed for something like the towbar hitting them with its pointed end. I have to admit that, when putting those windows in, I’d often wondered how hard they would be to break and what it would look like. Now I know. It was spectacular!
The tow bar effectively removed the lower four feet of glass, and the glass above collapsed down, first as a single sheet, then it too broke into a bazillion pieces. We had our way out and we started jogging toward the parking lot. I was thinking ahead to how we were going to get off the airport and through New York and said, “This is going to be a very long day.”
Molly wrinkled up her nose in that impish grin of hers and said, “What do you mean ‘going to be?’”
That’s all folks! The rest of the plot has them making no effort to make it through NYC to their home in NJ. Instead, they go East and commandeer a Piper Cub at a farm strip and put-put their way over NYC home.
The rest of the plot has the surrounding states blowing the river bridges around NJ so the growing panic can’t get into their states which makes NJ into an island being taken over by the bad guys who immediately occupy all the Costcos, Walmarts, etc. Our hero, Sam Tipton, gets with a bunch of his old Marine buddies and the VFW/Police to form an armed, guerrilla resistance. While that’s happening he has to find and rescue his daughter.
I’ll never finish this one but thought it was a fun read and the first time I’d ever written fiction in the first-person. A new experience. I do have a normal third novel well underway but will wait to talk about that later.
If you made it this far, thanks. You’re a hearty soul.
bd
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