by D A Carey
“We could. However, the risk is that if we’ve been hit with one nuclear device, there could be more coming and anything we move up could get fried.”
“Good point. What about Mr. Cavanaugh? Is he here?”
“No, sir, he isn’t back yet.”
Louis became alarmed. “Was he in the air when we were hit?”
“I don’t think so. We got a radio transmission from Sally McKinney about forty-five minutes before everything went dark. She confirmed that his plane touched down.”
“That’s good. He’s probably at the terminal without a ride home. Not the end of the world, and we don’t have to rush to mount a rescue mission. Do we have a car we can get to him?”
“We do have some old Willys Jeeps in the caverns we can pull out tomorrow and some older trucks and jeeps in the motor pool that we bought for this reason.”
“Good, let’s use one of those and send a team out to get Dave.”
“I will. It’s going to take a few hours, though. Those vehicles were stored on blocks without batteries or fuel. The thinking was to put all the wear and tear on the modern vehicles and save the older and EMP-hardened vehicles for a time like this. They aren’t making any more of them.”
“I guess that was solid thinking until a time like this when we need them. How long will it take?”
“Early to mid-morning. We have to do everything by hand. The power equipment is down, and I diverted a lot of the men to the caverns to set up communication equipment.”
“Do your best.” Louis returned to his room to prepare for a long day ahead.
* * *
A few hours later, as they were preparing to leave the gate in an old Chevy Suburban, they spied Dave trudging up the lane followed by Sally McKinney, Levi, and Michael. Despite the lines of stress around his eyes, Dave was smiling. Hiking always settled his mind and put him in a good mood.
“Hello, sir!” said Richard. “We were just heading out to get you. Mr. Clark will be elated to see you’re back. I’ll go get him.”
“No, don’t bother. I’m headed up to the cabin myself. I’ll see him there,” Dave said, waving him away.
“He’s in the caverns working to get the communications gear running, sir.”
Dave altered his path to head for the caverns. “Richard, can you work with Sally to have someone go pick up our other gear we couldn’t carry?”
“I’ll take care of it myself, sir.”
<< Luke >>
“Beeeeeep, beeeeep, beeeeep.” Luke was jarred from sleep by the emergency alert from his cell phone on the nightstand.
“What is that?” his wife Cindy asked just as her phone chimed the same tones.
“It says there is an emergency alert. It doesn’t say what it’s about. I don’t think we have a storm coming, do we?” Luke peeked out the window. Just then, the dogs came padding up to the bed, woken by the commotion. “I guess I need to take them for a walk now that they’re awake. If a storm is coming, it’s better to take them out before it hits.”
“Okay,” Cindy said before rolling back over to get some more sleep.
It was hard to check the phone while walking the dogs. Luke kept glancing at the sky expecting to see a storm roll in. While it was still dark, dawn was breaking over the horizon in the distance. He could have easily let the dogs out in the backyard, but he preferred to take them for a brisk run in the morning so he could get his steps in for the pedometer and wear them out before they went in their crates. Stepping back in the house and unclipping the dogs, he could hear Cindy waking the kids. He checked his phone and went upstairs. “Baby, they can go back to sleep. It says school is cancelled today. It doesn’t say why, though.”
“That’s silly. They go to private schools.”
“I know, but the emergency broadcast message says all schools are cancelled for the day. I’ll turn on the TV and see what else I can learn while I’m getting ready for work.”
“Okay, I’m getting in the shower.”
“Oh, never mind. I guess I won’t be getting ready for work. I just got a text from work that said the offices are shut down and that we are to work from home if we’re able. This is totally weird. I’m going to get on the internet and see what I can find out.”
“You do that. I want my shower and coffee.” Cindy gave him a drive-by kiss.
Luke logged into the internet to find news articles all over the place. Most were opinion pieces posed as news, and that made it all the more difficult. The best he was able to piece together was that the entire western half of the United States was experiencing rolling power outages that were cascading and impacting all the systems. From there, the opinion pieces began to get outrageous. Luke and Cindy had always privately scoffed at the term “fake news” while staying in the middle at work. Many of the leaders at his company were conservative. The couple had always assumed it was the journalist’s job to take a few facts and draw conclusions. That made for an interesting story and good news. They never bothered to contemplate on how few facts were actually used and how much of a biased stretch the journalists used to create their conclusions. That, coupled with a political or personal agenda of the author, made the stories virtually worthless. That hadn’t mattered before because the stories entertained and they could choose sources that pandered to their personal opinions and views. It was a form of “fake news” confirmation bias. What was considered hard mainstream journalism of today wouldn’t have been too outrageous and unsubstantiated to make the National Enquirer thirty years ago.
This morning was frustrating, and Luke had to admit the decline of journalistic integrity was dangerous. He needed to know if they were in danger and why power outages in the west impacted work and school in the east. He did find a few stories of possible terrorist attacks in the northeast. That concerned him because he had family there, though that didn’t justify why work and school was cancelled here in Louisville, Kentucky.
<< Malcolm >>
Ellie woke to a frantic knock at the door. Malcolm was already up. He held the shotgun in his hand that was never far from him after the trip down from Chicago. As she walked past Kate’s room, she could see her reaching into the nightstand where Ellie had reluctantly allowed her to keep her father’s old Bersa 9mm. At the time, it was just to placate the bad dreams and fears Kate had since the hellish trip out of Chicago. She trusted Kate’s maturity and wanted her to be safe. Now Ellie felt like she was the only one in her community who wasn’t packing.
Am I the only sane one or am I the one with my head in the clouds?
An event like last year never left you. Despite moving on, the wounds lurked below the surface, and all it took was a frantic early morning knock at the door to pull them right back to the surface.
“What’s going on, Malcolm? Who’s at the door?”
“Stay back, baby. I’ll find out and let you know. Go back to our room or stay with Kate.” Malcolm reached for the doorknob. Ellie noted how he was careful to stand to the side of the door as he pulled it open. The shotgun looked like a toy in his hand. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, sir. I’m Joe from the other side of the community. We’ve met in passing a couple times. You worked on an old car of mine.”
“Yes, I remember you.” Malcolm shifted the shotgun to his left hand so he could reach out to shake Joe’s hand. Simple gestures like these were coming back in fashion in the chartertown. “What can I do for you? It’s early for a social call.”
“I’m sorry to wake you. We are getting some odd news out of the western half of the country and other news out of the northeast. Right now, no one knows for sure what’s going on. We’re trying to get some information from the satellite. Some people think we may be at war, although I’m not supposed to speculate.”
“Oh my lord!” Malcolm said.
“My secondary job here is auxiliary to the security folks. They asked us to knock on doors and invite everyone to the school auditorium for a meeting, though we don’t know how much information the l
eaders will have.”
“We’ll get dressed and be right over. Thanks for letting us know.”
Joe appeared to want to talk. “I feel like this is one of those times when people want to be around each other and talk. I don’t know for sure how much we will know or what we could do even if we did. In any event, we are all on edge, and it’s best to be together.”
“Thank you again. I need to go get dressed.” Malcolm eased the door shut.
<< Don >>
“Ladies and gentlemen, I won’t ask you to take a seat. I don’t suppose you could sit still. I know I can’t.” A slightly aging man with broad shoulders, blond hair, blue eyes, Don was working on a little bit of a paunch. Malcolm knew Don from when he first came into the chartertown from Chicago almost a year ago. Since then, they’d become friends and built a mutual respect. “I will ask that if you need to have side conversations, please step outside. I need to reserve this space for the satellite TV feed and some direct questions or conversation. There is coffee, donuts, and some other snacks in the hall. Feel free to mill around, only please keep the noise down.”
“What’s going on, Don?” a woman on the other side of the room asked. “Did I hear we are at war?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Watson. Whatever is going on is why we are all here.” Don had to wait for the murmurs to die down. “We’ve lost connection with virtually everything west of the Mississippi. We’re getting reports of a huge spike in terrorist activities in the northeast, and there are rumors of naval action in the Gulf of Mexico, although I don’t have any more information on that yet. Honestly, that’s all I know for real at this time.”
“So what will we do?” someone yelled.
“First, there will be loads of mistaken information and mis-reporting going on over the next few days. We need to remain calm and take it all with a grain of salt. Second, I want to close the gates to the community, but people are free to come and go as they please. I would ask that if you plan to come and go frequently, park your car outside the community down by the river.”
“What about our jobs?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” Don said wearily. “Some of you may be set up to work remotely. I expect others have critical jobs, and they will arrange for security.” This was followed by a stunned silence. “For all we know, this could be greatly exaggerated and we’ll all be back to work in a few days. It could similarly be like last year and take a few weeks or months to get through. If it’s like either of those scenarios, then we should be good here and your jobs will be there when things reboot.”
“What if it’s not those scenarios and it’s as bad as many of us have dreamed it could get?” Mrs. Watson spoke up once more in the hushed room.
“Then, Mrs. Watson, we should all thank our lucky stars that a man like Dave Cavanaugh had the forethought to build these communities. We have food, our gardens, chickens, and cattle. We’ve trained, we have schools, redundant systems, and even medical facilities.” The room got even more quiet, if that was possible. “Mrs. Watson, I hope and pray that you’re wrong. If you’re not, it’s not us we need to pray for, it’s them.” Don pointed outside the walls. “Those people have a world of hurt coming, and we have the only life raft for many miles around.”
<< Kate >>
“What about my dad?” Kate asked anxiously. “Has anyone heard from him?”
“No, Kate, I’m sorry,” Don replied. “We haven’t heard from anyone yet. We haven’t even heard from SOP-town in Colorado and your great uncle. In a weird way, that’s a good sign for your dad. It merely means that communications are down. It doesn’t mean anyone was hurt.”
“Shouldn’t we mount a mission to go get him? He would do that for any of us.” Kate turned to the group. “Any of you.”
Most people stared down at their feet. Malcolm felt angry and confused at the same time.
“Kate, we don’t know where to go. We don’t even know what’s going on in California or if he needs help. He could be coming back this way and we might miss him by a single mile. You know your dad. He would never want us risking lives when he is on his way home.”
Kate was crying huge alligator tears. “He would come get you! He wouldn’t worry about the odds. You know I’m right! He’s weak and recovering from cancer. He may need our help.”
“Kate, I promise you that if I find any clue as to where he is or that he needs us, I’ll move heaven and Earth to get a team out there. Right now it’s too risky, and we don’t know that he needs us.”
Kate’s body was wracked by sobs.
Malcolm put his arm around Kate. “Honey, your dad told you in Chicago that he’s hard to kill. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s about the truest statement I ever heard. When the time comes, I’ll go with the team to help your dad. You’re right, he would’ve done the same for me.”
Kate buried her head in Malcolm’s massive chest, and her sobs were muffled as she watched the news scroll across the big screen in the school theater.
Aftershock
“While avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.”
- Thomas Paine
<< Christy >>
“Mary, I think we need to leave here.”
“So soon? It’s gotten quieter.”
“Yes, and that’s bad for us.”
“How so?”
“The first night or two was drunken revelry. After that, people got worried and camped indoors. I daresay a lot of babies were conceived during the first couple of days. That probably would have been the best time to get out, but at that time we still had hopes that the lights would come back on.”
Mary smiled. Many people incorrectly thought that because she and Christy chose to live together as a couple, they didn’t want children. Nothing could be further from the truth. While many couples like them adopted, Christy and Mary never chose to go that route. That didn’t mean they didn’t feel a little melancholy when thinking about how they would have liked to have a child. Right now, it was probably for the best they didn’t.
Seeing the angst on Mary’s face, Christy knew her thoughts. “After that came petty crime, fights, and even some gunshots. Most likely that was regular nine to five people arguing over food or water. What comes next is worse.”
“What comes next?” Mary wished she’d paid more attention when Christy was reading all her prepper books and studying doomsday scenarios.
“What’s next is a die off.” The grim visage on Christy’s face scared Mary.
“Die off?” she shrieked.
“It comes in different waves, and generally speaking, the old people and those dependent on medicine and machines die off first. Then you have the unprepared as they compete for food and resources. Finally, you see the sides separate into good versus evil and predator versus prey. The last part is what I expect is coming. I expect bad people to try and take what we have or even kill us. This is a secure building with a pool, and it screams something valuable is here.”
“Can’t we find some good people to side with?”
“It’s not that simple. The good people are way outnumbered. Many good people will join the bad or do bad things just to survive. And you have to consider that for years now we have ridiculed the preppers and self-sufficient people. The government needed mindless followers to read the headlines and follow their mass psychosis level of a propaganda machine. We just don’t have enough good people, and what we do have are scattered, hidden, and hunkered down. It will be a while before more bad people die off and good people band together. Good people tend to stand on their own two feet like a lion, and bad people tend to be more pack animals like coyotes. That gives them a head start in an apocalypse.”
“What about the chartertown we invested in? Aren’t those good people?”
“I hope so. That was the plan. In either event, we need to pack our bicycles and the carts I bought to be pulled behind them with all we can carry and leave here tonight.”
“It’s also easier to be seen. Most people have less than three days’ food in their homes. We’re now on day four. They’re hungry and we’re loaded with supplies. You don’t shoot, and even though I have a gun, I’d rather not use it. Let’s plot the most deserted path we can to Turk-town and leave around one a.m.”
Mary pulled Christy close and buried her head in Christy’s chest. A gesture being repeated all over the nation this week.
<< Big Jim >>
“Clyde, wake up. I’m hungry.” Big Jim kicked the bed Clyde slept in.
Clyde rolled over. “I’ll be up in a minute, boss.”
Big Jim kicked him hard in the leg, and quick as a snake, Clyde went for his stiletto knife on the nightstand that he normally kept in his boot. Big Jim slapped the knife away with one massive paw and wrapped the other around Clyde’s scrawny neck. “Don’t ever try anything on me, you sniveling bastard.” Big Jim shoved Clyde back on the bed and released his neck.
Gasping for air and rubbing his neck, Clyde said, “Boss, I was dreaming. I didn’t know it was you. I’d never try anything on you.”
“You stink, Clyde. You need to bathe.”
“Boss, this big ole house on the hill needs pumps for water pressure, and without those, I can’t shower.”
“I know that, you idiot. That’s why I got buckets of water from the pool and went out back. You should, too. You’re disgusting.”
“I ‘spose I could grab some soap and jump in the pool.”
“You do that and I’ll kick your ass. I might need that water for drinking. That’s why we’ve been putting in the chemicals and stirring it up each day.”
“All right, boss, so what’s the plan for today?”
“We need to gather more food and plan to get out of here.”
