A young Christian couple is attempting to flee the social chaos and violence of Chicago to their bug out home in northern Idaho. Stores have been looted, gangs roam once-quiet neighborhoods where people are starving and panic-stricken. Now they must abandon their well-stocked SUV and travel on foot, carrying only minimal supplies and their defensive weapons. But they soon realize their futility in escaping afoot. So they take to the underground storm drainage system, and walk for days and countless miles in ankle deep water, listening to gunfire and screams of victims as they pass manholes overhead.
They travel for weeks, months, and years through a United States that is now without any form of government or grid system of any kind. It’s a place where every man, woman, and family must defend themselves and make do with exactly what they have right then and there—and no more.
James Wesley Rawles’ Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse provides a realistic how-to and what-if manual for dealing with a future societal collapse. Money is worthless. There is nothing to buy. Most people have nowhere to go. But the young couple knows that friends await them in their northern redoubt or retreat, if only they can keep going:
“Traveling at night, mainly along railroad tracks and occasionally cross-country, we made it to western South Dakota that summer. In late September, realizing it was too late in the year to make it to Idaho, we started looking for a place to spend the winter.
“This time it took three weeks and a couple of run-ins with nervous ranchers with shotguns before we found someone who would take us in as ‘security consultants’ for room and board. We stayed outside a little town called Newell, in Butte County, with a family called Norwood. Real nice people. Cattle ranchers. We ate so much beef that winter, that we almost got sick of it. Both of us learned how to ride and care for horses that winter. We also learned the basics of horse shoeing.
“In all, it was a good winter. Because the Norwoods’ oldest boy, Graham, was also pulling security, we had the relative luxury of only eight-hour shifts [24/7 guard duty]. Graham carried an M1 Garand and an old Smith and Wesson Model 1917 revolver, chambered in .45 automatic. He was pretty good with both guns, and even better after we gave him a few pointers on combat shooting. The kid was incredibly fast at reloading the revolver using full moon clips. I swear, he could reload that gun faster than anyone I’ve ever seen reload a revolver using a speed loader.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have any encounters with marauders that winter. We did hear that Belle Fourche, which was about twenty-five miles away, had got shot up pretty badly by a whole army of bikers before they were finally driven off.”
