Systemic Shock

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Authors: Dean Ing
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of a ground-pounder would be heavily hit by fallout, the firestorm effects were enormously less. There was nothing much to burn in Nevada, and Dakota corn was largely spared. Thanks to a cunning variation on the MX theme, the submerged portable MX modules were also intact. Apparently it had never occurred to SinoInd strategists that a Trident launch system might work handily in Lake Sakakawea.
    At the bottom line, as Israelis on Cyprus knew, lay the survival of the population. In our intermountain region, folks near Twin Falls, Winnemucca, Green River, and Holbrook wept and prayed for their urban relatives; and while they prayed, they worked. Prayer and honest labor characterized these people more than most, particularly among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints—Mormons.
    It should have surprised no one that paralysis of the body politic might leave one limb functioning if it were insulated against systemic shock. If you put aside the arguable features of Mormon theocracy—the fact of theocracy, women's rights, resurgent polygamy, the identification of Amerinds as lost tribes of Israel,—you could focus on the more secular facts of Mormonism. They scorned drugs, including nicotine and alcohol; they swelled their ranks with as much missionary zeal as any Moslem, and they strengthened their church with tithes. They were studious. They voted as a bloc.
    Each of these factors was a survival factor, though not obviously so. The most obvious survival factor was the one which Mormons had taken for a century as an article of faith without demanding an explicit reason: stored provisions.
    Every good Mormon knew from the cradle that he was expected to maintain a year's supply of necessities for every family member against some unspecified calamity. Mormon temples maintained stocks of provisions. A year's supply of raw wheat was not expensive, and its consumption meant that one must be able to grind flour and bake bread. The drying of fruit, vegetables, and meat allowed storage at room temperature with no chemical additives more injurious than a bit of salt and sulfur.
    Mormons had such a long Darwinian leg up on their gentile neighbors (to a Mormon, all unbelievers including Jews were gentiles) that, by the 1980's, the church found it wise to downplay the stored provisions. Faced with a general disaster, a Mormon might choose to share his stored wealth with an improvident gentile—but no longer advertised his foresight because he did not want that sharing at gunpoint. Devout, self-sufficient, indecently healthy, many of the more liberal Mormons had moved to cities by 1990. Most of those perished. The more conservative Mormons, and the excommunicated zealots of splinter groups, tended to remain in the sprawling intermountain American west; and most of those were alive on Monday, 12 August 1996, the day that would become known as Dead Day.

Chapter Twenty-Four
    At first, Quantrill thought the pickup would ghost past him to disappear down the mountain as two others had done, on Tuesday morning. It was a green '95 Chevy hybrid with the inflatable popup camper deck that melded, when stowed, into an efficient kammback. Then he saw it ease onto the shoulder and ran to open the right-hand door. “Got room for my pack?" He was already shucking it.
    "What if I said 'no'?" She saw him hesitate, then chuckled. "I'm kidding. Room between us, or push it through the hole," the woman said, aiming a gloved thumb at the orifice behind her.
    Quantrill tried to smile as the Chevy coasted downhill, glanced again at the driver. His first impression had been of a tanned little old lady, sun-crinkles at the corners of her eyes, wrinkles running down her throat into the open-necked work shut. But the lines on the throat were sinew, and the chuckle hummed with vitality. He revised her age at under forty, saw that her own gaze mixed shrewdness and curiosity.
    "Where'd you spend the night? You look hungry," she said.
    "A cave in

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