Free Founders by James Wesley Rawles

preferably from a distance. Okay, it’s your turn to get some sleep.”
    At 5 p.m. another group of refugees passed through, this timeon the opposite bank of the river. Ken watched quietly, not bothering Terry, who was sound asleep.
    This group was nine people, all white—four adults and five children. Like the last group, they were walking clustered together and the adults were carrying backpacks and slung long guns. One of the women was wearing a white ski jacket that, compared to most of their other clothing, stood out like a beacon.
    When Terry awoke an hour later, Ken told her about the group that had passed by. He concluded with the words “Low life expectancy, no doubt.”
    Terry replied, “Ours isn’t much better.”
    “Well, at least we’re in all earth tone and camo clothes, and we’ll be traveling at night.”
    “But there’s just two of us. That makes us vulnerable.”
    Ken countered, “Yeah, but we’re also not in a big, noisy gaggle. ”
    Terry grinned.
    Darkness was falling. They relieved themselves and buried their waste and the empty wrappers from their MRE. They applied foot powder and put on dry socks. As they were rolling up their sleeping bags, Terry whispered, “I’m starved.”
    “Me, too, but we’ve got only what’s in our packs. It might be days before we can find a safe place to barter silver for food. So let’s stick to one MRE per day.”
    Terry nodded and put on a glum face. She finished stowing the gear in her pack. They applied green and loam camouflage from a stick onto each other’s faces and the backs of their hands. Standing in the cleared spot where their sleeping bags had been, they took turns jumping up and down to check for noise. Other than a slight slosh from Terry’s canteen, their gear was quiet. Terry made a mental note to refill her canteen as soon as possible.
    Weaving their way out of the willow thicket, they resumed their walk alongside the river. They began passing small refugeecamps. These numbered from five to forty people. Most of the camps were lit by large campfires. There was a fistfight in progress in one of the camps. It ended with a pistol shot. Ken and Terry kept moving, leaving them wondering what had happened. The camps were easy to skirt around unobserved. At one of them, Ken recognized the woman wearing the white ski jacket. “She won’t blend in until there’s snow on the ground. That is, if she lives that long,” he commented.

6
Walking by Faith
    “Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.”
    —Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1987)
Near Joliet, Illinois
October, the First Year
    Ken and Terry continued to follow the river for two more days, moving slowly and with extreme caution. They rested during daylight in clumps of brush or far out in fields of harvested corn that had been left with their stalks still standing. Even this far out of Chicago they could still hear gunfire in the distance around the clock.
    They communicated mostly via hand and arm signals. Theywere often spaced as much as fifty feet apart, so they would occasionally use their pair of 500-milliwatt RadioShack TRC headset walkie-talkies in push-to-talk mode. Even though these radios were twenty years old, they were very handy, particularly if whoever was trailing needed to contact whoever was in the