Dark New World (Book 3): EMP Deadfall

by J. J. Holden

  Jim got to his feet and, with a quick shuffling step to get closer to her, whipped his foot forward, kicking Cassy in the ribs. She screamed, pain exploding in her side as she curled into a ball just as Jim kicked her again. And again. He laughed maniacally as his blows rained down on her. After the third kick, she stopped moving; try as she might, her body refused to obey her.

  Jim kicked her twice more in the side and then stopped, panting. His shirt was covered in blood, and Cassy found herself wondering how long it would take him to bleed out. Not long enough, she decided.

  Still unable to move, she could only watch as Jim looked around the room. He’d find his rifle, or her pistol, and she knew it would all be over quickly after that. But then he stopped looking around and stared at the floor. She followed his gaze and realized with horror that he had found her broken knife. Four inches of good, sharp steel remained, and the jagged edge where it had snapped in two looked plenty sharp enough to stab her with. Or maybe he would just slit her throat with what was left of the blade. Jim bent over and groaned with the pain, but managed to pick up the knife. He was talking, but she couldn’t make out the words through her pain and fear-clouded mind.

  Cassy forced herself to take deep, even breaths. She had only moments to get herself together, get her body to obey her again, but it wasn’t working. Abruptly, she heard Choony’s voice in her head almost as though he was there talking to her, and she had a vision of one hot summer day when they’d met in the barn to talk and banter. “Your pain and turmoil is a product of your will,” he’d said. “You cling to what should be and so you don’t see what is. Change doesn’t hurt, Cassy. You change your socks, and it never bothers you. It’s the resistance to change that so greatly disturbs your peace.”

  And then she knew what to do. She’d been fighting for her life, ruled by her instincts, ever since she leapt out from the stairwell. But she didn’t have to fight for her life. What truly mattered was the Clan. She had given birth to the Clan, and if it lived, then a part of her would live on and not only through her children. Her idea would live on. She only needed to delay Jim as long as she could. Her pain and fear slipped away. She focused on moving her finger, and it obeyed. It obeyed! Her whole body tingled as she regained control. She opened her eyes.

  “—cut your head off and put it on a spike,” Jim was saying. “You die before I do, Cassy. Ladies first,” he said and then laughed.

  As Jim staggered toward her with the knife, she took one last deep breath to brace for the pain that was about to come and then rolled from her belly onto her right side. At the same time, she lashed out with her left leg, thrusting it with all her might. Her foot smashed into Jim’s knee, and the exposed nails from the caltrop embedded in her foot punched deep, crunching and grinding against bone. His leg caved backwards with a sickening wet, tearing noise, and he fell forward screaming. It was unlike any scream she’d heard before.

  The monster crashed face-first into the floor next to Cassy, still gripping her knife. She clenched her hand tightly around the caltrop she’d retrieved, heedless of the nails that sunk deep into her hand. However she gripped it, it was still a caltrop; one spike must always point away. Cassy screamed and swung it with all her might at Jim’s head. The blow landed just over his right ear, the caltrop spike sliding through the thinner part of his skull with ease. She felt something warm and sticky spatter over her hand.

  Cassy struggled to her feet. Her left leg wouldn’t bear weight so it was difficult, but after almost falling over once, she made it. She looked down at Jim, and for the first time she felt nothing. No hate, no outrage, no fear. Part of her wondered how she could look at that monster without those feelings, but she knew that was just her analytical side trying to make sense of things.

  The simple truth was that none of it mattered. Not anymore. Her Clan would live, under whatever conditions, or it would die. She would do all she could to ensure it lived, but she could only do what was possible. More than that was beyond her means and so not her responsibility. Peter’s conquest wasn’t her fault. Jim and his tortures weren’t her fault.

  Even killing Peter and Jim wouldn’t be her fault, though she accepted that responsibility gladly enough. They had sowed the seeds for this showdown, not Cassy. The fierce joy she’d felt at killing Peter melted away even as her nagging little feelings of guilt did, disappearing down some needed drain like wastewater. None of it was her fault, including Peter; he’d tried to kill her, and she had done what was necessary. That’s all.

  Cassy looked around the room and spotted Peter’s pistol. At her feet, Jim cried and whimpered, unable to move, begging for mercy. First, she realized she probably couldn’t save him even if she’d wanted to. Without trauma surgery in a hospital, he’d die regardless of what she chose. She wasn’t bothered by that fact.

  She’d seen the monster he truly was outside of Philadelphia, but she knew she’d spared him out of cowardice—a resistance to the idea of killing that made it too emotionally painful to finish the job. Because of that lack of will on her part, so many good people had suffered or died at Jim’s hands…

  No, their blood was on her hands. If he lived and she exiled him—the worst punishment the Council had agreed to take responsibility for—he would only prey on others. Then their blood too would be on her hands. She knew now what mercy for Jim would cause for others. Ending him was her responsibility. Cassy picked up the pistol. Jim saw it, but could do nothing about it. Couldn’t move. Destiny was coming full circle for him.

  “Jim, the terrible things you’ve done are as much my responsibility as yours. I let you live once. It was a mistake. I want you to know that I no longer hate you. God made people good, and Satan made them evil. We’re both, Jim. All of us have good and bad within us. God doesn’t make us do evil things, but He doesn’t force us to do good, either. We have free will, even when people harm us. You choose evil every time.”

  “You… could spare me,” Jim whimpered. “I did… what I was told…”

  His breathing was shallow and rapid, and Cassy recognized that he was in shock. It didn’t matter though.

  “I could leave you to live or die, but that would only avoid my responsibility again. I did that once, and look what it brought. Not again. We all have free will, Jim. I chose to fight you, to put you in this state after you made many people suffer. Your suffering here is because of me. And now, I choose to end your suffering. And ours too, you see, because today’s survivors will be better off if I kill you before they get here than if I simply leave you in pain awhile longer before you die. Choony would call it ‘realizing your Karma,’ but I call it justice. This world needs that right now. And I am responsible.”

  Cassy raised the pistol and, reaching forward, placed the barrel against Jim’s forehead. His begging was only the pain and fear that came from resisting what is. Hanging on to what was.

  “Burn in Hell, Jim.”

  * * *

  Cassy felt faint. Blood loss was taking a toll. She managed to pull herself to the bed and sat leaning against it. Outside, the shooting had almost stopped. Soon, the victors would find her and either kill her or save her. Either way she could die satisfied knowing that she’d taken out Peter and Jim. Whoever was in charge after this would be better than those two sociopaths.

  She recognized the symptoms of shock settling in and felt more exhausted than she’d ever been before. Maybe she could just…rest a minute. Her eyes drifted closed.

  A noise. Cassy’s eyelids snapped open. Blearily, she saw a ghost; Peter stood at the top of the stairs, axe in hand, swaying on his feet. He was covered in blood.

  The ghost said, “You almost got away with it. Almost.”

  So, not a ghost. He wasn’t as dead as she thought. Not like she’d been able to check carefully while Jim was picking off her people. Her gun—the one she’d taken—was on the floor nearby. She tried to move her arm but just didn’t have the strength. She focused and slowly moved toward the weapon—her arm weighed a ton.
<
br />   “It doesn’t matter, Peter. You’re done.”

  Despite the blood trickling from his mouth, Peter chuckled. It must have hurt, from the way he clenched his jaw, but the bastard never passed up a chance to gloat. He staggered toward her and kicked her pistol aside. Of course he’d want to kill her with the axe, not the gun. Showoff.

  “God Himself sent me here, bitch,” Peter said with a wheeze. “Was gonna start a new society, like Noah after the flood. This hippie bullshit you had here has no place in this new world. Surviving will take iron balls, not a group hug.”

  Peter raised the axe and rested the hickory handle on his shoulder to catch his breath the best he could. “You may get another day or week of peace. But sooner or later, someone like me will come along and take your pretty little farm. Let that be your last thought, bitch.”

  Peter flexed his fingers to get a better grip on the axe, took a deep breath and, still grinning, raised the deadly blade over his head.

  So this was how it would end. She was surprisingly okay with it. Peter was a dead man, and whoever won the fight for the farm would be better than this monster. They’d do everything they could to secure the farm. There may be no true safety for her family anymore, but this was as good as it got.

  Cassy said, “Get this over with so you can fucking die already.” She glared into his eyes as he began to swing.

  A deafening BANG! flooded the room, and Cassy winced, taking what she knew was her final breath. A sudden darkness overtook her, and time seemed to stand still as her heart pounded in her head.

  When her eyes shot open, she saw the left side of Peter’s head had disintegrated, covering the wall and part of her bed in gore. Peter collapsed like a dropped sack of flour, the axe clattering onto the wooden floor at Cassy’s feet.

  Ears ringing, Cassy saw the figure behind where Peter had stood. Then the figure became clear—at the top of the stairwell stood Jaz with a rifle in her hands. Behind her, still on the stairs, Cassy saw Choony’s eyes wide with surprise.

  Jaz looked down at Jim’s corpse and shook her head. “Dammit, Cassy. You couldn’t leave Scumbag Jim for me to finish off?”

  Cassy smiled, a wide grin. Thank goodness they’d survived. God—or perhaps Buddha?—must have watched over those two. “Sorry, Jaz.”

  Then the grin faded, as it just took too much effort. Still, she was happy to see them. “Welcome back, you two.”

  Choony and Jaz approached her, Choony with a medical kit in hand. It looked Mil-grade. They knelt beside her, and Choony began to cut away her pant leg while Jaz moved the hair out of Cassy’s face and peered intently at the swollen mess Jim and Peter had left.

  “Don’t worry,” Jaz said impishly. “Dudes dig scars.”

  - 22 -

  1400 HOURS - ZERO DAY +41

  CASSY SAT WITH the other members of the Council and gazed out over the rapidly browning fields of the Jungle. Winter would soon be on them, but this was still a time for the Clan to celebrate, and heal—at least for those who weren’t on the Council.

  Originally, the Council had included Michael, Frank, Mandy, Ethan, and Cassy. The Clan had grown now though, between the original Clan survivors and the White Stag sympathizers who had earned an honored place among them. Cassy had summarily added Choony, as well as Joe Ellings, to the Council. Despite the urgent nature of this ad hoc meeting, it was good beyond words to see them all again, free of fear and tension and even looking tranquil, if only for the moment, after the total chaos of last week.

  Cassy’s eye was still swollen shut and her nose would never be the same, but they’d both heal. She’d carry a scar from her forehead down across her left cheek for the rest of her life, and the shattered cheekbone wouldn’t let her face recover quite the same as before, but she considered all that to be small penalties for saving her family from Psycho Santa and his Evil Elf. Remembering that moment of crazed laughter could still make her smile. She needed a crutch to get around, but the infections in her leg, hand, and foot had been checked by antibiotics brought back from the bunker, and she felt stronger every day.

  The others were doing well, too. Frank’s amputated foot was healing much faster now with the antibiotics. Michael had somehow managed to avoid injury in battle, despite striding fearlessly back and forth across the battlefield, giving orders as combat ebbed and flowed around him. Mandy’s health and vitality had recovered much since getting insulin again, though her eyesight was fading as a result of her diabetes going untreated during the occupation. Ethan had been stabbed in the side during some brutal hand-to-hand combat toward the end of the battle, but the vet who had been among the sympathizers was sure he’d live, even though he’d have to watch what he ate from now on due to damage to his gall bladder.

  Cassy decided to scratch a curiosity itch while she had the chance. “Choony, will you miss the people who died? I mean, being a Buddhist, I know you aren’t supposed to grieve about such things, but I’m curious.”

  “I didn’t know most of them, I’m sorry to say. I would have liked to. My destiny was not to be among you during the occupation though.”

  Frank nudged Choony with his elbow. “Your destiny was to avoid capture, rescue Jaz, and bring those Marines to us. Without you, what were the odds against them all showing up just when things went off the rails like they did?”

  Ethan, still setting up his laptop for his urgent, couldn’t-wait presentation, answered for Choony. “Mathematically, the odds were effectively zero in 100. Common sense, Frank. Try some.”

  Frank grinned for the first time that Cassy had seen since the occupation began. “Mandy has a different theory. Right, Granny?”

  “I’m Mandy, or Grandma Mandy, not Granny. You do like to egg me on, Frank!” She grinned. “But you aren’t wrong. Bad things happened to us because of decisions other people made, but God turns bad events to His good purpose. The odds are meaningless for the Lord. Not just the help arriving right when we needed it the most, either. Ethan reaching those Marines. Choony escaping. Jaz finding him. Them finding the Marines. My amazing daughter’s survival… Too much. The Lord’s hand was with us.”

  Cassy didn’t know how to reply to that. She couldn’t prove it either way, but Mandy had a point. It all seemed extremely unlikely, the way everything folded together at the end.

  Ethan interrupted with, “Alright, let’s get this going. This is mostly bad news, I’m afraid, but things are what they are, and we have to take them into account when we make plans. I haven’t been able to do much of the labor around here on account of my excessive iron intake.” He chuckled, pleased when Cassy politely groaned. “So instead I’ve got our power system up again with spare parts Cassy had, and I’ve been lurking on the internet, radios, anything I could monitor. The short version is, this is the apocalypse, or close enough. And our side caused it.”

  Michael grunted. “How bad are things, and how bad will they get?”

  “I’m getting to that. San Diego and Camp Pendleton weren’t hit by EMPs. Not theirs, not ours. Every other industrialized nation was blanketed during Operation Backdraft. Not just the Middle East, China, Korea, and Russia. All of it, including our allies. I guess General Houle didn’t want to leave anyone able to take advantage of the situation. Also, most second-world nations are blacked out. Basically, only the Australian Outback, rural Africa, and the Amazon Jungle were spared, but it isn’t really sparing them either.”

  “Why not?” Cassy asked. “They didn’t need all that infrastructure to begin with, so why does it matter?”

  Ethan said, “Because except for a few truly Stone Age tribes, almost every place on Earth relied on goods and raw materials being trucked or shipped around. Some of them could make it on their own by going primitive or self-sustaining like we have here, but unfortunately, it isn’t working out that way for most.”

  Frank nodded and frowned. “Because all the millions of city people from Baghdad to Buenos Aires are about to be real hungry. They’ll go where they think the food is.”
>
  “Yes,” Ethan said. “The rest of the world will suffer between seventy to ninety percent casualties within twelve months, depending on how industrialized they were and how harsh the winter. And forget about east Asia—half the world’s population lives in a circle stretching from Indonesia to China, Japan to Pakistan. Once the cities disperse, they’re almost all doomed without infrastructure, not to mention imports and exports. Same with Europe from France to the Ural Mountains in Russia. Britain may survive if they have the will to cordon off the big cities.” He scowled. “General Houle made a brutal response against people who had nothing to do with the attack. Brutal.”

  Michael clenched his jaw and spat. “What does that mean for the U.S.?”

  “We’re actually okay compared to them. So far, casualties are only about ten percent, but winter and disease will skyrocket that. Stuff we haven’t seen in a century or more, like plague and typhoid. Third World diseases, man. Cholera and worse. By the time it all settles out, the General’s estimates average out to seventy percent dead, globally. They think we’ll have ninety-seven million survivors, which is about what we had at the end of the first World War.”

  Frank replied, “Nothing we can do about that, people. But Ethan, didn’t you once tell me it would take two years for us to order, import, and install the power grid’s big transformers? What happens to that with the rest of the world gone dark?”

  “LPTs, or Large Power Transformers.” Ethan nodded. “Yeah, they almost all had to be built overseas and shipped in, and the U.S. only had thirty or so rail cars even capable of transporting them. We threw away our own industrial base when the corporations went global. None of our railways are running again yet, but I’m sure the General will have steam engines running by springtime, if he can find any. But if not, who will build them? There might be a couple factories left that can make those beasts here in the U.S., and I imagine the General will make it a priority to occupy those locations. If we’re lucky, parts of the power grid will be up again in three years. By then, we’ll be a mostly rural nation with small, busy cities that are easy to control, if you see what I mean.” He was still scowling.