EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 19 | EMP Ranch

by Walker, Robert J.

  EMP Ranch

  Copyright 2020 All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means without prior written permission, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  1

  David scrolled idly through his social media feed, the swiping action of his thumb on his phone screen almost as automatic a reflex as breathing to him. He’d only been alive for sixteen years, and there had never been a time he could remember in his life when he hadn’t had a phone or tablet on him. He knew people who were his parents' age hadn’t had them growing up, though, and this thought made him look up from the screen and stare around for a few moments. His mother, standing next to him, was talking to the bank teller, but most other people in the bank were standing idly in lines, staring, like he had been, at little screens in their hands to pass the time.

  He looked past the throng of bored people out at the street, and that was when he saw it. David watched the motorcycle accident happen as if it were unfolding in slow motion. He had seen plenty of videos of auto wrecks on social media and had crashed his dirt bike on the ranch and in the woods more times than he cared to admit but seeing a motorcycle mishap of this magnitude play out before him on the street was an entirely different experience. With a mounting sense of horror and disbelief, his eyes followed the rider attached to the hurtling machine as if by two steel cables, as the man blasted into the intersection outside the bank…and was then T-boned by a careening F-150 truck.

  “Oh shit!” David gasped, his eyes bulging in their sockets and his jaw dropping open as the motorcyclist was flung across the intersection like a ragdoll while his cartwheeling bike disintegrated in a mess of spitting metal and shattered plastic. The truck, skidding on screaming tires, spun out and slammed with a sickening crunch into a traffic light pole. David had been so captivated by the spectacle that he hadn’t noticed one especially strange detail about the collision: neither the motorcycle nor the truck had made any sound other than the screeching of tires.

  Alice heard the accident but only turned around in time to see the aftermath. Her eyes—sea green, like her son’s—grew wide the moment she spun around. “Oh my God,” Alice murmured, moving hastily toward the exit. “Davey, call 9-1-1, quick!”

  “Ma’am,” the teller said uncertainly, her eyes locked on her computer screen and seemingly oblivious to the tragedy unfolding just beyond the glass walls of the bank, “uh, there’s been a little problem with the wire transfer. It seems um, the power’s just gone out, and I don’t know why the backup power isn’t…”

  The teller’s voice faded into the general background buzz in Alice’s mind; her instincts and training as a former trauma nurse were already kicking in, and she forgot about her business at the bank counter.

  “Come on, Davey,” she said, taking her teenage son’s hand and moving with determined speed toward the door. “I asked you to call 9-1-1, have you got ‘em on the line yet? That biker looks to be in a bad way,” she continued, talking more to herself than David, in the manner she often did. “He’s almost certainly got multiple fractures after that. The guy in the truck’ll be injured, too, but not as bad as the motorcyclist. I’ll do what I can to stabilize him before the paramedics—”

  “It’s dead, Mom, totally dead.” He was surprised to see that the phone had died; a mere few seconds ago, when he’d been browsing his social media feeds, the battery had been almost full.

  “Take mine,” she said, fishing her cell out of her bag as she navigated her way through the crowd of people who were all milling about in disarray, all staring at their phones and tablets, their faces scrunched up with frowns of confusion and consternation.

  The moment she handed David her phone, another two vehicles collided with a loud, sickening crunch in the middle of the intersection. It seemed that the drivers had no control over their cars.

  “Shit!” This time it was Alice who yelled out the expletive. She glanced up at the traffic lights, wondering how two serious accidents could have occurred within seconds of each other at the same intersection. Just as she noticed that both sets of traffic lights were out, David pressed her phone back into her hands.

  “Yours is dead, too, Mom.”

  “That’s not possible. I charged it this morning, and the battery was at ninety percent when we stepped into the bank.”

  Another two cars rolled through the intersection, one narrowly missing the other. Inside the bank, a tide of almost palpable panic was rising, while outside, cars were rolling to a stop all over the place, bumping into each other or straddling the curb without any semblance of order or, apparently, any adherence to traffic regulations. Alice stopped in her tracks just as she and David stepped out of the bank. She slowly looked down at her dead phone and then surveyed the sudden, disorderly traffic jam, immediately noticing something unsettling; every single one of the cars caught up in the chaotic jam was silent. It was as if they’d all parked up in the middle of the street and switched their motors off. Drivers were getting out and scratching their heads. Some were popping their vehicles’ hoods while others were pulling out their phones, which were all dead.

  David was running his fingers of his left hand through his close-cropped, blond hair, as he always did when he was concentrating deeply on something, while determinedly pressing the power button of his phone, as if holding it tighter might somehow resurrect the dead device.

  Alice touched her fingertips to her lips and chin, hearing her pulse hammering in booming thumps and bassy surges through her ears and temples. A realization had just hit her with all the force of a sledgehammer blow to the skull. “David,” she said firmly, “drop the phone and come with me, quickly!” She only called him David when things were really serious.

  He looked up, his long, angular face twisted into a perturbing mixture of worry and confusion. “What’s happening, Mom?”

  “We have to get out of the city. Now. Come on, move!”

  Alice tossed her own phone onto the ground; it was nothing but dead weight now, and no amount of technical wizardry could breathe life into the device ever again. Alice was utterly certain of this fact. Her husband had told her that this day would come, and while she’d come around, over time, from thinking that it was a delusion to accepting that it was indeed a likely possibility, she’d never actually quite prepared herself for the reality of it happening. Was this how people felt when finally confronted with the inescapability of their own mortality? Was the look on her face right no
w that same look of complete disbelief and horror that she’d seen so many times on the faces of accident and heart attack victims in the emergency rooms she’d worked in?

  There was no time to mull over these things, though; she had to act, and she had to act fast. She couldn’t, in good conscience, leave an injured man untreated, but at the same time, she knew that every second she wasted from this point on was an extra pound of danger and peril that she was heaping on to her chances of getting herself and her son out of the city alive, much less unscathed.

  Behind them in the bank, people were already yelling and pushing, while those on the sidewalk were milling around, confused and growing increasingly afraid and agitated. The collective panic Alice had begun to sense inside the bank would soon spread like a contagious virus to those gathered outside; this was inevitable. She ran diagonally across the intersection, sure now that no more vehicles would be entering it, making a beeline for the biker, who was lying on his back on the ground, groaning and trembling. A few other people had gathered around him, but none of them knew what to do.

  “Let me through, please. I’m a trauma nurse,” Alice said, pulling out a pair of surgical gloves from her handbag. In her late thirties, she was a shade under five foot four and petite in build, but the tone of her voice and the calm confidence in her words added an authoritative stature to her slim figure.

  The people stepped aside to let her through, and she knelt down next to the biker. He was wearing a full-face helmet, and two eyes, stark and white with pain and panic against his dark skin, stared up at Alice through the visor. His left leg was bent at an unnatural angle; it was clear that he’d suffered a major fracture there. His chest was rising and falling in a rapid, uneven rhythm.

  “The light…was green,” he panted raggedly, his weak voice muffled by the helmet. “But then…bike died, traffic lights died…couldn’t…stop.” He coughed, and a spray of red splattered against the inside of his visor. His condition was worse than Alice had hoped; she now knew that there were some severe internal injuries too.

  “All right, sir, just try to stay calm,” she said gently, pressing her finger against the man’s neck to check his pulse. It was weak and uneven, another bad sign.

  “Why aren’t any of our phones working?” one of the bystanders asked. “How the hell can everyone’s phones be dead?”

  “Help me, please, help me, help me,” the biker gasped, his weak voice raspy. He coughed again and sprayed another spattering of blood across the inside of his visor.

  Alice was quickly beginning to realize that there was nothing she could do for him, especially given the fact that no ambulance would be coming, but she refused to abandon him to die alone. She took his hand in hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze, and then glanced over at David, who had squatted down across from her. He had his father’s lean, lanky build, and the angle at which the late morning sun was hitting his strong-jawed face made him look even more like Phil, to the point at which the resemblance was uncanny. All that the boy had inherited from Alice was his green eyes and sandy-blond hair; the rest was all Phil. Although his face had the structure of a man’s, at this moment, with the shivering accident victim convulsing and coughing between the two of them, the look on David’s face was that of a terrified child. Unlike Alice, he’d never seen a man die before. David stared at his mother with a look of pleading and helplessness, wordlessly asking if the man was going to make it. She locked eyes with her son, subtly shook her head, and squeezed the biker’s hand a little tighter.

  “I can see…Momma,” the biker wheezed. He breathed out a soft, gurgling sigh, and then his hand went limp in Alice’s.

  “He’s gone,” she whispered, setting his hand down on the sidewalk.

  “Mom…” David said, his face a contorted mess of fear, disbelief, and horror.

  “Come on,” she said, briskly standing up and taking his hand.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” one bystander demanded. “You said you were a nurse. You’re just gonna leave this guy?”

  “Let’s go, David,” Alice said, pushing past the angry man and ignoring his questions.

  “I said, what are you doing, lady?” the man yelled after them as they hurried away. “You heartless fuckin’ bitch, you can’t just leave the man like that!”

  “Mom, are you, are we, uh, can we…” David stammered, a mess of confusion and fear.

  Alice led him on, her grip on his hand firm, not once looking back. “The man’s dead, David, and there’s nothing I, or anyone else, can do for him.” Her tone was stern but not unkind.

  More people were spilling out of buildings onto the streets, which were choked with stationary vehicles. People were already shouting, arguing, and pushing, and chaos was beginning to unfold. Everything felt completely surreal to Alice, as if she’d somehow fallen asleep at the bank counter and had dropped into some sort of lucid nightmare. This was no hallucination, though, no trick her mind was playing; she knew this with as much certainty as she knew that she was still breathing, and her heart still beating: this was an EMP attack. She also understood, with a chilling sense of clarity, that if she and David didn’t make it out of this city by nightfall, they might not make it out of the city alive at all.

  2

  “Give it a try now, Fred. Remember, give her a smidgen of gas as you start her,” Phil called out from the front of the tractor.

  Fred, a heavyset, thirty-year-old man in mud-spattered dungarees, gave the tractor a little throttle before hitting the starter. The machine instantly roared to life, and Fred flashed his boss a gap-toothed grin as he gave the powerful diesel motor a few triumphant revs.

  “Never thought you’d get the old gal started!” Fred yelled over the rumble of the engine. “Fifty years old, but now she’s purring as sweet as ever! You’ve got that magic touch, Mr. McCabe, you sure do.” He chuckled and shook his head, grinning all the while, and observed Phil as he leaned in to give the clattering motor a finetuning.

  Phil was tall and lean, and as angular in his features as if his face had been hewn from stone. He had the tanned limbs and wiry muscles of a man who spent the majority of his day engaged in manual labor, but in his eyes, there was a keen and almost intimidating intelligence. His fingers worked with a quick, effortless dexterity, and he worked with a singular focus. He was almost fifty, and his short, neatly-trimmed hair, parted to the side, was more white than its former sandy blond, but he still stood with a ramrod-straight back and carried himself with the agile poise of a far younger man.

  After making a few adjustments, Phil was satisfied and gave Fred a nod, indicating that he should shut off the tractor.

  “I’m going to head over to the stables to see if Wyatt’s finished loading the horses,” Phil said. “You can take the rest of the day off, Fred. I figure you could use a little more family time, especially with the new arrival, right? If you don’t mind, though, before you go, could you give the tractor a good cleaning and get her back into the barn?”

  “Thanks, boss, yeah, I’ll do that.”

  “Thank you, Fred. Say hi to Phoebe for me, and please tell her that if she needs anything for the little one, anything at all, to just let me know.”

  Phil left Fred to take care of the tractor and then began making his way across the ranch to the stables. He’d been waiting for Alice to call him to let him know that the buyer’s money had arrived in her account before sending Wyatt out with the truck and the horse trailer to deliver the mares to their new owner.

  The ranch was nestled in the foothills of the Rockies and sprawled out over a vast area encompassing meadows, a hill or two, and some woods. A stream from the nearby mountains ran through the property, providing both the human and animal residents of the ranch with a reliable source of clean, potable water all year round. A diesel-powered purification plant made the water as clean as any spring water one could buy from a store. The stream also served as an ample source of irrigation for the many crops Phil grew on his land, from grains to vegetables a
nd seasonal fruits in a greenhouse and crop tunnels, all cultivated on permaculture principles. It had taken over a decade of intense toil to restore the neglected sections of the ranch, of which there had been many in the wake of his late father’s protracted and ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer, but he’d done it. He’d attained his goal of complete self-sufficiency, and he was immensely proud of this achievement.

  Phil paused as he rounded the back of the barn, which overlooked one of the rotational meadows on which his herd of cattle was grazing. Beyond them, some of his horses were grazing contentedly in the next field over. He hadn’t stopped to admire the steers or horses, though; he veered off the path and into an addition he’d tacked onto the 19th-century bard: a small aircraft hangar.

  In the hangar were a few large items, most of them hidden under tarps. Dominating the space, though, was a single prop Cessna 182, old but lovingly polished. The airplane was the last phantom of a reminder of Phil’s former career as a highly esteemed aerospace engineer. If he had stayed at the firm for just two or three more years, he could have gone on to a senior position at NASA, but as talented as he was when it came to engineering, the ranch he’d grown up on was in his blood. When his father had passed away eleven years ago, Phil—an only child and thus sole heir to the ranch—had taken it as a sign that it was time to leave the world of rockets, satellites, and space shuttles behind, and instead pursue his lifelong dream of converting the family ranch to a completely self-sustaining unit.