Copyright © 2016 Brian Douglas
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1530274664
ISBN-13: 978-1530274666
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my amazing wife and children.
“The EMP Commission estimates that within 12 months of an EMP event two-thirds of the US population would likely perish from starvation, disease, and societal breakdown. Other experts estimate the likely loss to be closer to 90 percent.”
Former CIA Director, R. James Woolsey’s, testimony before the House Armed Services Committee - July 23, 2014
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
When the EMP attack occurred, the entire East Coast of the United States was plunged into darkness. In the blink of an eye, the power grid was destroyed along with most electronics that were not shielded from the devastating effects of the electromagnetic pulse. Vehicles stopped in their tracks and planes plunged from the sky, raining death and destruction on the earth below. The results were unimaginably catastrophic and instantly changed the lives of everyone in the affected region.
East of the Mississippi river, the immediate death tolls numbered in the hundreds of thousands, from Florida to Canada. Every passenger on board a plane. Every family living in a home hit by a falling plane. Every hospital patient being kept alive by machines. Everyone fitted with a heart pacemaker. Dead. All dead.
Before the reality could even set in for the survivors, fires would rage out of control, burning entire neighborhoods and increasing the death toll further. First responders were helpless to assist those in need. Hospitals quickly became inundated with patients and before long, they were abandoned by the overwhelmed doctors and nurses who could do nothing more to help the steady stream of people in need of care.
Prisons all along the East Coast were unable to contain their inmates without power. As a result, hundreds of thousands of hardened criminals were soon unleashed on the communities closest to their facilities, where they immediately joined the local struggle for food, water and shelter. In many cases escapees banded together to form marauding gangs that promptly pillaged the countryside, leaving a path of destruction in their wake. Smaller gangs found more success than the larger ones, since there were fewer members to feed and share the plunder with. However, merely banding together didn’t make it any safer for those malevolent invaders, because rival gangs killed each other just as frequently as they killed the weak and innocent in their battle for dominance.
In addition to the EMP’s effect on the eastern power grid, there was also a cascading effect, which temporarily knocked out power to other parts of the country as well. Power surges overwhelmed their systems and forced automatic shutdowns to avoid permanent damage to their infrastructure. Even though those shutdowns would not be as long lasting as what the east coast was dealing with, it still brought life to a virtual standstill in those areas as well. The only advantage that they had in their recovery effort was the fact that they still had working transportation vehicles and electronics, since they were not in the direct blast zone of the EMP.
Nevertheless, with the inevitable domino effect of power grids going down, the government of the United States was incapable of preventing much of the country from plummeting into complete and total anarchy. Its own continuity of government plan was significantly disrupted and delayed, due to the challenges of evacuating the country’s key leaders out of Washington D.C. in the midst of all the turmoil that ensued.
In the northeast, the city of Boston, Massachusetts was not much different than every other major metropolis impacted by the EMP. Civilization slowly descended into chaos in the city over the first few days, as stores were looted down to the bare shelves. People quickly realized that they were on their own, without any immediate hope for aide and assistance from their local, state and federal governments. But no one was prepared for what happened after the water stopped flowing at the end of the third day, when the societal decline began to intensify. Just like in other cities, predatory gangs targeted the weakest and most unprepared, stealing their resources and killing at will. The reality of the situation was that very few were even remotely prepared for a disaster of this magnitude.
Without clean water to drink and lacking the skills and knowledge necessary to find water and make it safe for consumption, many residents within the city began to succumb to dehydration in the intense summer heat. Poor hygiene conditions led to chronic diarrhea, dysentery and outbreaks of cholera amongst the survivors. While most people were initially worried about their food running out, that was not their most immediate priority. The absence of clean drinking water alone took thousands of lives in the neighborhoods of Boston in the weeks following the disaster and most victims died long before they had to face the threat of starvation.
This same experience was shared by all of the other major cities in the eastern states, driving the collective death toll into the millions, during the first month alone. In this time of great struggle and tribulation, only the strongest, or those who had prepared in advance for the disaster, stood any chance of surviving the downward spiral.
CHAPTER 1
Alex Stone rested the barrel of the .22 caliber rifle on a headstone, as he peered through the scope and settled the crosshairs on his target. The large Canadian goose was one of many that made their daily pilgrimage from the nearby Mother Brook to the cemetery and other nearby fields in search of food. Before the EMP event, Alex often tried to count them as he passed by different groups of geese on his way to work. The birds were generally considered a nuisance, snarling traffic at times on the parkway and making a mess of the Little League field a short distance away with their droppings. There always seemed to be an endless number of them around and Alex was hoping that would remain true into the distant future.
The Stone family had a decent supply of rice and beans that they stored as part of their family emergency preparedness plan, prior to the disaster. But Alex and his wife, Olivia, knew right away that the situation they were experiencing wouldn’t be resolved anytime soon and their food would eventually run out long before any recovery would happen. So hunting fresh food and collecting wild edibles was an important way to supplement the stored food and make it last longer. That task would have been much easier if it was just his own family that he was hunting and gathering for. However this hunt would be shared with the surviving residents of the Oak Tree Lane neighborhood where he lived, which now consisted of nine adults, five children and one large Doberman.
When the EMP event occurred, the Stones and their neighbors banded together, agreeing to support each other and work towards their mutual survival. Together, they defeated a gang that attacked their neighborhood in an attempt to take their resources. And in the weeks following the attack, they repelled a few smaller groups who were also opportunists seeking to steal from others without fear of consequences. However, in all of those cases, the groups moved on to easier targets, once they realized that the neighbors of Oak Tree Lane were determined to defend themselves.
A month after the initial event, their small community was doing well and they still had a decent supply of non-perishable food that they hoped would at least see them through the winter months. Their neighbors, Chung and Seung Kim, who were killed in a home invasion during the first week of the disaster, left behind a large stockpile of food and supplies. The couple had emigrated from South Korea in search of the American Dream for their family. Together they owned a convenience store in nearby Brookline that they worked at tirelessly. After their death, the neighbors discovered that they kept many of the supplies for the store in their home.
The Oak Tree Lane group also scavenged the food left behind by other neighbors who were either away at the time of the event, evacuated the neighborhood or perished from a lack of medical care, in the case of Mr. Harrison.
While each family kept their own personal food supplies separate, they treated the scavenged food as a community pantry and regularly ate meals together, as a group. By hunting for fresh food, Alex was contributing to the community food supply, which his own family would also benefit from. This was a particularly important investment, since Alex’s brother in law, David Mendez, came to live with them along with his wife, Lilliana and their son, Elias. The neighbors gladly welcomed the Mendez family as part of their group, even at the expense of sharing their resources with them. Alex felt as though he had to reward their sacrifice through his efforts to provide the group with more fresh foods, so he made every effort to do so, when he could.
The shot rang out and Alex watched the bird flutter its wings spasmodically. The subsonic ammunition that he used was not as loud as typical .22 long rifle rounds, so although the other geese quickly moved away, few took flight as they were quite used to loud city noises and didn’t startle easily. He shouldered the rifle and picked up a large bucket, which already contained one other goose from his morning hunt. As he approached the bird, the spasms slowed until it was still. Alex then carried the goose to a nearby tree, where he sat in the shade to begin the process of breasting out the two birds.
“Got another one, huh?” Jack “Gunny” Sullivan said as he approached from the nearby treeline that separated the cemetery from their neighborhood.
“Yeah, we’re going to have fresh meat tonight,” Alex said, handing the rifle to his neighbor. “This .22 of yours is a real tack driver. It almost feels like I’m cheating, when I use it.”
“If you want more of a challenge, I’ll keep the rifle and you can throw rocks and sticks at them next time.”
“If that’s the case, we might starve sooner than later.” Alex said. “The truth is they are so used to people that they let you get real close most of the time. I could probably walk up and club one, but I think it might be against the law to hunt with a shillelagh in Boston.”
“Give me one of those birds, I’ll help you clean em. Let’s save the organs for Leo. He seems to like them.” Jack said.
Leonidas was the Mendez family’s Doberman, who was now an important part of the neighborhood security watch team. He reminded Jack of a dog that he had as a child, so he always went out of his way to make sure that Leo got a special treat when Alex brought back fresh meat.
“Leo gets the organs and I’ll save some of the intestines for fish bait. I want to set out some of the fish traps and jug lines in the brook tomorrow,” Alex said. “Speaking of traps, how did it go with the squirrel traps?”
As part of his emergency preparedness plan, Alex had purchased a number of rat traps that were now being used to catch squirrels, using a small amount of peanut butter as bait. He set them up by screwing a trap directly into a tree, so that the squirrels couldn’t scurry away with it, once it was triggered. They had a dozen traps set up in various spots around the perimeter of the neighborhood and across the parkway in the Stony Brook Reservation property, which was mostly wooded land. The result was an effective way to catch meat without much effort.
“Good,” Jack replied. “We only got a couple tree rats, though, so your geese will be the main course at dinner tonight.”
“Well, meat is meat. I’m grateful for whatever we have, as long as we have something.”
All of the adults in their community had begun to lose some weight, but it was still minimal, since they generally had enough to eat. Extra effort was made to ensure that the kids continued to eat as much as they normally would, although the picky eaters in Alex’s household were beginning to protest the lack of Cheesy Crackers and Pasta O’s, which ran out a couple of weeks after the event.
When the men finished cutting out the breast meat on each of the geese, they packed the food in a plastic bag and tossed it into the bucket for the short trip back to their neighborhood. Along the way, they passed by the graves of their old neighbors, Mr. Harrison and Mr. and Mrs. Kim, who they buried there one month earlier. Neither man said anything in passing, but they both acknowledged the dead with their thoughts, remembering the good neighbors that they were.
When they approached the tree line, they couldn’t help but remember the moment when they were trying to bury Mr. Harrison, who had died from complications from his diabetes. At the time, Jack, Alex and Tony Marino were interrupted by the sound of gunshots and had to rush back to their neighborhood along the same path, only to discover that the Kim’s had been murdered. That day and the days that followed made it very clear to each of the men and their families that they were in a real struggle for life and death. Since that time, they rarely let their guard down and always assumed that danger was lurking around every corner.
The men approached the neighborhood boundary, which was marked by a short stone wall that separated the fenceless back yard shared by two of the neighborhood homes and the wooded area that led to the cemetery. One of the homes belonged to Naomi Alleyne, an ER nurse, who helped care for the neighborhood medical needs along with Alex’s sister in law, Lilliana, who also happened to be a nurse. The other home had been the residence of Mr. Harrison and his daughter, Diane, who went missing a few days after the EMP event.
As the men hurdled the wall, they heard someone call out from the second floor of the Harrison house. “Halt, who goes there?”
“What are you the Queen’s guard?” Jack replied.
“How did it go?” Tony asked from the window, where he watched the back side of the neighborhood. “I heard a few shots.”
“It went well; we got a couple of geese for dinner.” Alex said.
“Awesome. I can’t believe we lived with those pains in the asses running around the parkway for all those years and never realized how good they were to eat. I would have definitely run a few down with my Jeep, if I had known.”
“Yeah,” Alex agreed. “The good news is that there are still plenty of them out there. If we don’t have much competition from other hunters, hopefully they will last us a while, as long as we only hunt them a couple times a week.”
“Personally, I wish we had some sweet and sour sauce to go with them, but I ain’t complaining,” Jack said.
“Shit, Jack, this ain’t the Chop Suey Palace,” Tony said laughing. “Next you'll be asking for some egg rolls to go with your meal.”
“Alex, when the little birdy comes down from his perch, remind me to put my foot in his ass,” Jack said.
“We’ll send some food up when it’s ready,” Alex said to Tony, as the men continued on towards the Anderson house, which was situated between Tony’s house and the Stone residence.
The Anderson’s happened to be away on vacation in Florida, when the EMP hit, so the neighbors used the uninhabited home as a community gathering place. When they ate together, it was usually at the Anderson’s home, so the men planned to cook the food there. It was also a place where the neighborhood children could play together, in order to keep some semblance of normalcy in their lives.
During the first week after the power went out, Alex’s children, Isabella and Daniel, were cooped up in the house the entire time, so once the neighbors got into a regular routine and had a security plan
figured out, they decided to try and give the kids more opportunities to play together. The Marino children, Lucas and Christian, were close in age to the Stone kids and Elias Mendez was only a little younger at four years of age. It generally made for a fun play group, but Isabella, being the only girl, usually got annoyed with all the games that the boys wanted to play.
Jack and Alex entered the Anderson house through the front door and were greeted by all of the kids engaged in a lively game of chase. Isabella was “it” and she was chasing the boys in a circle around the first floor of the house, through the living room, dining room, kitchen and back to the living room.
“Whoa, slow down.” Alex called out. “We don’t want to get run over.”
“Beep, beep,” Said Elias cheerfully, as he ran by his uncle.
“Hey guys, how did it go?” Olivia asked from the kitchen area, where she was sitting with Jack’s wife, Andrea and Martina Marino. All three women carried a sidearm, holstered on their belts. At any other time, it would have looked like a photo shoot for an NRA Women advertisement. The ladies were very capable of protecting themselves and their families, which gave Alex and Jack some peace of mind when they had to leave their loved ones to go hunting.
“Great, we've got a couple of geese and squirrels,” Alex replied. “We’ll boil them up with some of those cans of mixed vegetables.”
“I know that making a soup is the best way to make sure we get all the nutrients without waste, but I really can't wait until the world returns to normal so we can have barbecue or stir fry," Olivia said.
The Power Struggle Series (Book 2): The Downward Spiral Page 1
