That day outside the mill, Hollis was walking past the man on the box, fighting the hunger in his belly and the anger in his heart, when something made him stop and listen. He’d thought the man was a preacher, the way he talked. Hollis kept waiting for the mention of Jesus, or the Bible, but it never came.
Which was fine with Hollis. He’d given up on the Lord, but not before the Lord had given up on him. He’d tried the Army to get some job training but he didn’t learn anything that would get him work in the real world. He knew he needed college but he couldn’t make himself sit in class or at a computer all day. So he’d worked at a succession of factories and mills that had closed, one after the other, until there was no place left for a middle-aged guy like Hollis. His wife left before the unemployment ran out. He had to sell the car. He never could afford to own a house, so he had nothing left to lose. Except hope. By the time he met the Messenger, he’d definitely lost that.
But there was something about the man and the story he told. The changing world they lived in, how it was no longer made for regular people, working people.
Hollis found that he was hungry to learn the reasons for the slow-motion disaster he was living through. The economic forces arrayed against him. The Industrial Machine, always growing. The people who owned the Machine, profiting from the relentless future that never stopped coming at you. While regular people slowly lost everything they had spent their entire lives working for.
He was even hungrier to learn what he could do about it.
First, prepare.
Then, act.
When the man on the box finished speaking and stepped down, Hollis had introduced himself and asked how he could learn more.
Instead of answering, Gary had looked him in the eye, introduced himself, put his strong hand on Hollis’s slumped shoulder, and asked about Hollis’s own life.
It was a small thing. Almost nothing, really. But it had been such a long time since anyone had treated Hollis Longro like a human being. It overwhelmed him, the sense of gratitude. As the words tumbled out, he’d wept and Gary had wept with him.
Hollis returned to the shuttered mill the next day and listened again. And again the next day, and the next. Every day for a week. Until Gary told him he was going to Wenatchee to spread the word there. Would Hollis like to come with him and meet the others?
It turned out that Gary wasn’t alone. There was a Movement. Tiny, but growing.
Hollis had asked what he had to do.
Not a thing, Gary said. Just be yourself. We’ll figure out a use for you.
And so they had.
—
Gary didn’t always talk on street corners. Sometimes, he went to people’s houses, where he would stand in the living room and talk towhoever showed up. Sometimes two or three people, sometimes a half dozen. And so the Movement grew.
Gary had a plan from the beginning. Build the community. Buy some property in a remote area, as much as they could afford. Get self-sufficient. Prepare for the worst.
The second part of the plan came later.
Even in the early days, Gary had asked for donations. People were happy to give what they could. It was the Message, of course. But the sound of his voice was a big part of the appeal, that country preacher sound reminding people of a gone-away time, when communities were whole and people really knew one another. There was something about his eyes, too. His presence. When he looked at you, you mattered. Almost as if, when you stood in his sight, you became fully real.
In the beginning, the donations were small. These people didn’t have much. But it was enough to put gas in the car and food in their bellies. When they weren’t sleeping in somebody’s guest room, they stayed at the cheapest hotel they could find. All that time together on the road, Gary always talking, always looking at Hollis like he was a true and cherished friend, like he was somehow more important than Hollis could ever know.
Over time, the Message spread and the Movement grew. As the years passed, and the Machine began to grind up more and more people, the Messenger began to refine the Message. The pandemic came, and it was easier to imagine a Dark Time coming, a Time of Undoing. Wildfires and back-to-back hurricanes only added to the sense of the world gone wrong. Then artificial intelligence went mainstream, and people could feel the Machine getting bigger, stronger. It was only a matter of time before it grabbed up anyone and everyone, grinding them into meat pulp.
Even the tech people, who should have felt like the winners in this winner-take-all contest, saw the writing on the wall and began to payattention. With that small but affluent audience, donations grew. By then Hollis had found his role. The Messenger was the voice and the vision. Hollis was the man who made the plan work. The cassette tapes were his idea. So was the subscription model with various levels of membership, depending on the size of your donation. The tech boys loved it. Survival as service, they called it.
Three years ago, with money to spend, Hollis and the Messenger started looking for land. They finally found an old summer camp, a legacy parcel tucked in the middle of twenty thousand acres of national forest.
A place to make their stand when the shit hit the fan.
That’s when the Messenger began to develop the second part of his plan. Hollis helped.
Closing his eyes, he walked himself through it, step by step, reviewing it for flaws. He and a select few of the Hardcore Originals would do their part, then make their way overland to the camp in the first hours of the Dark Time. As he sat imagining it, how they would stand fast and hold together while the Industrial Machine fell apart, his phone vibrated in his lap. A message.
He opened the app. From BigGuns.
“Running late. There’s been a setback.”
“What kind of setback?”
