Malthus Smirks (Cumberland Saga)

It was a grim meeting on Sig’s patio that evening. Planting in the new fields was going more slowly than expected and Malthus seemed to be smirking. The Cove was top-heavy with people. The new people were getting blisters and sprains and sunburn and there was just too much work.

But what really shook all of the old-timers was what had happened to Miss Shannon. Miss Shannon attended their Sunday services on a regular basis and she was one of the life-lines, the very few, they trusted to order stuff “on-line”.

And she was invariably cheerful. Everybody agreed (except perhaps the now departed Constanze) that Miss Sharron was “a peach”.

Miss Shannon had been toileting her mother when the chime informed her that a vehicle had entered her ½ mile drive. The chime was located at the mid-point well away from the road to minimize the number of false alarms. It was where the drive hooked to the south just past the gully.

She was just getting her mother settled back into her power recliner when the men started battering the back door. She looked at the security cam and saw four men and they had a law-enforcement grade breaching tool.

Miss Shannon uncharacteristically said “Shit!”

“What is it dear?” her mother asked sweetly from her chair.

“We gotta go to the safe room” Shannon said as she tried to dial 9-1-1. No signal. Crap!

As they huddled in the confined space behind the false-wall between the house and the garage, Shannon had a lot of time to consider what she had seen.

Bob and Shannon had seen the signs that society was fragmenting. They discretely became preppers. They did a lot of research and a lot of shopping before they found their dream property, 120 acres with one corner touching Soddy Creek and completely masked from the road.

Over the years they had added a deep pond just east of the house, gardens, outbuildings, orchards and animals. Bob hired a local to plant the 30 acres of tillable soil into food-plots to attract deer which he hunted in the fall.

In time, Shannon’s mother was unable to care for herself due to a host of health issues. Shannon resigned from her job and took her mother into their home. Bob was a saint and was fine with the idea.

Even though Shannon and Bob were hard-core preppers at that point, you really had to know what you were looking for to see it. A casual look at their house and property would not inform of how deeply integrated everything was. Many of their neighbors had animals for pets. Many of their neighbors had food plots for deer. Many of their neighbors had a pond or their property touched a rapidly flowing creek. Many heated with wood and a surprising number had a few solar cells. Many of their neighbors were set back from the road or had a mix of different aged woods and open ground. But very, very few of them had ALL of those elements.

Shannon shared those things with the men crowding Sig’s patio. “But I don’t think it was about the supplies or the house or the land. I think somebody knew that Mom’s pain was so bad that there would be good drugs in the house.”

Samson was the first to bring up the unmentionable. “So you think it was an inside job? Somebody you trusted was in on the job?”

Shannon looked bitter. “So it appears.”

Sig, in his role as her pastor asked “If we git it back, are you willing to move back in? Sometimes folks don’t wanna ever go back to places where bad things happened.”

“Absolutely!” Shannon said. “Bob and I planted our hearts there. But the point is that two women can’t defend it, not when one is an invalid who needs care and the other one is the care-giver.”

Blain rarely spoke up at these meetings. In his opinion, he was still “the new guy” although in the eyes of the newcomers he had been there forever. “I don’t think that is really much of a problem. We have many families who would be overjoyed to live on your property and would defend it as their own.”

“The only real questions are “How many?” and “Which ones?” Blain said.

To that end, Samson launched into a monologue where he discussed different threat environments and various force multipliers. Based on what he had learned about Shannon’s property and his own personal assessment of how quickly things were falling apart he opined “Three families in addition to Miss Shannon and her mother would be marginal, even with older kids. We really need to send at least four families and a couple of them need to have dogs.”

“Not just any dogs but dogs that are alert and intelligent and can be trained when they are supposed to sound the alarm.”

Gregor volunteered to join the men who would recover Shannon’s property. Roger said he would take a poll of the newcomers in the morning and make two lists of those who would be willing to relocate again: One list with with dog-owners and one list of non-dog-owners. 

That is when Samson threw a wet-blanket on the plans. "You are grossly underestimating the resources this is going to take. This ain't a TV show."

"This is going to take at LEAST 10 men. And it is going to take scouting and training. We will be lucky if we can pull it off in less than 10 days."

Shannon was dismayed that Samson insisted on training prior to the mission. The longer they waited, the more animals she would lose due because they ran out of feed and water and the more supplies the looters would use/steal/destroy.

“Look” Samson told her “it is pretty easy to get shot by your own team and we don’t vests or flash-bangs or tear-gas or have air-lift to a hospital. So we need a plan and we need to train each man to the plan...and each man needs to be able to do at least two roles in case we have to shift people around.”

"That means we need to build a replica of your house, even if it is sticks laid on the ground for walls and short-sticks for where the doors are and then we train to the replica until we can do it with our eyes closed."

"I refuse to participate in an evolution that is more focused on saving a few chickens than on keeping my men safe!"

"We might get lucky and just walk into an empty house...but counting on luck is not a plan that leads to long-term success" Samson concluded.