[hider=0300, Somewhere between Omaha and Wahoo, NE]

"I still can't believe we're actually doing this," Genevieve Tyler sighed as she gazed out the passenger window of the Nissan Sentra she had bought with her ex-husband several years ago. The single mother hated driving at night, and so she'd made Dean get behind the wheel for the short trip. Despite eventually agreeing with her ex that things really were probably only going to get worse, she had been arguing with herself for the last several hours about the decision to join Dean's paranoia.

"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you..." she reminded herself, using one of her ex's obnoxious quotes that he always used to support any of his overzealous ideas that she was pretty sure he indulged in because he was a child in a grown-man's body rather than out of a sense of safety or security. In this case, though, she was able to draw a little bit of comfort from them while she tried to push down the nerves that were spreading from her stomach.

Wahoo was a relatively small town, bigger than most of the other rural towns in Nebraska, but a small fraction of the size of the cities in the state, like Omaha, or Lincoln. It served as the county seat for Sarpy county, with a courthouse and a jail, along with some of the other governmental buildings that came with such an appointment. The reason Dean and Genevieve were heading that way in the thick of the night, though, was the National Guard armory stationed there and the massive trucks they had in their motor pool.

Dean had been a member of the Nebraska Guard for about seven years now, serving as a vertical engineer with the Wahoo unit, which Genevieve always thought was a fancy way of saying "carpenter." He had deployed once with them about five years ago. They ended up building some schools around the capital city of Afghanistan. That was all she knew, though. She had never bothered to try to get very close to any of his friends or their families in the unit, especially when it became apparent that they weren't going to stay together. When he first said they were going to go to his unit tonight to prepare for the coming panic, she thought he was crazy enough to try to get into the armory's vault and steal guns. The plan he had, though, sounded much simpler, but she couldn't believe it could be as easy as he had made it sound.

As they pulled into town, Dean turned off the headlights, navigating under the glow of the moon and stars with the occasional street lamp helping show the way. Now that they weren't on the highway, he wanted to draw as little attention as possible, and that meant keeping headlights from shining past windows. It wasn't too long before they turned down a side street adjacent to the large, deserted brick building he had come for. Just past the parking lot of the armory, a chain-link fence topped with razor wire held over a dozen military vehicles, most of them ten-ton dump trucks usually used by his unit of engineers to transport materials to and from work sites.

Something so bold would never have worked if he was trying to avoid being caught. Dean was sure that the balaclava over his face and the scarf and hat over his wife's wouldn't do much to hinder any investigation once the authorities began to track down the party responsible for stealing two military trucks. Night-vision-capable cameras would record the whole thing. By the time they would find him, though, if they were more interested in tracking down and arresting him than dealing with any of the other problems that were going to pop up, then he was wrong, and he'd go to jail and the world would hopefully go back to normal.

Parking his ex-wife's Sentra on the street down the block, Westin shut off the engine and got out, dressed in his multicam-pattern Army uniform. If anyone was going to see him in one of these trucks, it would be better if he looked the part. He had given his wife one of his zippered tops as well, but hopefully nobody would inspect her outfit very closely. None of his pants fit her frame, and she didn't care enough to try to make the disguise look much more convincing than just a uniform jacket and a patrol cap that were both too big for her.

With a large pair of bolt cutters in hand, Dean quickly went to work, cutting off the large padlock that held the gates to the motor pool shut. From there, he opened the gate, wincing as it squeaked on its rusting hinges, and walked quickly toward the nearest ten-ton dump truck. They used air brakes, and would need a few minutes to fill the tanks with air before they would be fully-functional. Luckily, these new models were all outfitted with automatic transmission. It might take a bit of getting used to, but if he allowed her the time, Genevieve would adjust to the sheer size of the truck and be able to follow him on the road without much difficulty. 

Climbing up into the cab of one, and then the other, Dean started the engines on both with the push of a button. The only mechanism preventing them from being stolen was a steel chain looped around the steering wheel that was attached to the floor. Once again, Westin's bolt-cutters went to work while the noisy machines sputtered, waiting for their tanks to fill.

"Hurry up!" Genevieve hissed at him, the noise of the two trucks sparking her fear. She glanced around anxiously, positive that it would just be a few moments before flashing lights and sirens would scream around the corner to throw them in jail.

"I'm going as fast as I can," Dean told her in the calmest tone he could summon, "I told you, we have to wait for the tanks to fill up. Once the red light on the dash goes off, we can go. Come here, I'm gonna run you through the basics real quick before I go cut the lock off the other truck and scrounge up as many gas cans as I can find.

Genevieve climbed into the cab and examined the buttons and lights on the panel- which was quite different from the sedan  she was used to operating. She made sure to focus on which buttons controlled the lights and the transmission, but past that, she had a hard time following everything Dean tried to tell her. The red light on the dashboard held her rapt attention as well. She knew that as soon as it turned off, they needed to get moving as quickly as possible.

Four minutes later, the dashboard light went dead and Genevieve looked up to see Dean close the driver's door on another massive, tan truck, and start the vehicle crawling forward. His eyes looked toward her expectantly, and she took the parking brake off and set the truck into Drive, like he'd taught her. After a little bit of fumbling, she managed to get the lights on and they were off, headed back toward the city.

Dean wondered how long it would take for someone to get to the armory in the morning and realize there were two trucks missing. He had looped the chain back around the gate again after leaving to make it at least look like it was still locked, but he had his doubts that his deception would last very long. They had a very limited window to pack up as much of their stuff as they could into the beds of these trucks and then stash them somewhere out of view. Neither he nor his ex-wife would be getting much sleep until they parked the vehicles somewhere out of sight, but the alternative was to play it safe and risk getting caught in a city filled with desperation and panic.

"Hello America!" a raucous voice cut into the steady growl of the truck's Diesel engine, "My name's Three Dawg! I'll be your post apocalyptic radio host, as the world goes to shit around you! I'll be offering advice, music, news and more every day until I can't broadcast no more, or this whole mess gets sorted out, whichever comes first!"


"What the hell...?" Dean looked down at the speaker attached to the SINCGARS radio mounted to his dash. A few moments later his phone lit up with a text from his wife; she had heard the same thing and now music was playing over the sound system in her truck as well as his, a system that was usually reserved only for communication between military radios.

While the frequency-hopping function allowed the SINCGARS to pick up a broad spectrum of broadcasts, it had a security feature built in that made it difficult for anyone that didn't have the same security programmed in to listen in on secure broadcasts. With that in mind, Dean pushed a few buttons to transition to non-secure transmission, cleared his throat, and got on the microphone.

"For anyone else out there, this is Ginga Ninja reaching out to anyone that can hear me," he chose a call-sign he often jokingly chose during radio-training exercises because of his dirty strawberry blonde hair. "I've commandeered some heavy-duty vehicles and I'm looking to take care of my family in the coming crisis, but I don't know where would be safe to go. I was thinking of heading up to Montana just because of the terrain and isolation, but it seems now that I'm not the only one paranoid that this is gonna get worse.

"I guess I don't know what exactly I'm trying to say, other than that I think this would be a heck of a lot easier with a little bit of help, and I think I'd be able to offer a significant asset to anyone willing to provide adequate shelter to a family of five. We're heading to go collect all of the useful material we can find, and we're going to be heading out from there this morning to a location out in the country. We're in the midwest currently, with a pretty decent range of travel."

Dean didn't know what exactly to expect, or what the full extent of his plan moving forward was going to be. So far, he had only planned to head back to the apartment, throw everything he could grab in the back of his Tacoma and these two dump-trucks, and then head for the rural community in Iowa he had grown up in. There were several farmhouses and barns that had been abandoned years ago, as well as his parents' house that could offer shelter. His childhood home was likely out of the question, though. If there would be a man-hunt for him and Genevieve over the stolen trucks, he would want to lay low and keep his mom and dad out of it. 

Right now, it looked like it might be worth it to see if other options might be out there. 
[/hider]