PULSE: An Apocalyptic EMP Survival Thriller (Little Rocket Man Book 1)

by Keith Taylor

  Abi paused for a moment, struggling to remember half-remembered details.

  “A few years ago an intelligence report landed on my desk. I can’t quite remember the ins and outs, but I remember it scaring the crap out of me. It was from a think tank that spent its time gaming out unlikely threats: theoretical weapons, emerging enemies, treacherous allies, that sort of thing, and the report argued that we we’d spent the last decade focusing on the wrong threat when we talked about North Korea.

  “See, for years we’ve been worried about their nuclear program. They’ve been developing miniaturized warheads and ICBMs with ever longer ranges, and in the west we’ve always been terrified that they’ll eventually decide to take out a city. We’ve been working on the assumption that our next Pearl Harbor would come in the form of a Korean long range Hwasong missile tipped with a megaton bomb.”

  She shook her head.

  “Here’s the thing few people in the west really understand about North Korea: Kim Jong-un isn’t crazy.”

  Shepherd gave her a skeptical look. “Come on, you can’t claim that guy doesn’t have a screw loose. You only have to look at his hair to know he's a psycho.”

  “No. He may look like a maniac, but you should trust me when I tell you that he only plays one on TV. That guy knows exactly what he’s doing. The whole crazy Blofeld act is designed to keep us in a state of suspended terror. He wants us to be fearful of his unpredictability, because he knows that pretty much every dictator the west believes it can ‘handle’ ends his days being dragged behind a truck by his own people. All the unhinged threats of raining fire on the west keep him strong. They keep his generals happy, who in turn keep the people in line, but he knows better than anyone that if he ever actually launched an ICBM at us he’d be hiding in a bunker by sundown, and his little tinpot kingdom would glow in the dark for centuries.

  “No, he’s always known that an all out nuclear strike would spell the end for him and his country, but he also knows that he can’t carry on like this for years without any results. He can’t keep pumping money into his nuclear program forever, building bigger bombs and better missiles. Eventually he has to put his money where his mouth is and actually use this stuff, because the alternative is that everyone in the west would realize he’s nothing but a blowhard, and the result of that would be… well, his body being dragged behind a truck by his own people.”

  Abi chuckled humorlessly.

  “Being a dictator isn’t as fun as it looks. It’s about as safe as working as a lion tamer, standing in the cage trying to convince animals that could easily tear your throat out that you’re their boss. Anyway, I’m getting off track again. Back to the report.

  “The guys Kim Jong-il poached from the Soviets back in the Nineties weren’t just regular nuclear weapons specialists. There were plenty of those in the USSR back in the day, but Kim wasn’t interested in taking just anybody who had the skills to design a nuke. No, he went after these particular guys with a laser focus, for one reason and one reason alone: they were specialists in the EMP effects of nuclear weapons.”

  Shepherd interrupted. “But don’t all nukes have an EMP effect?”

  “Yes, but the effect varies massively from bomb to bomb. There are some multi-megaton warheads that are so well shielded they hardly create any electromagnetic pulse at all, and others that are barely powerful enough to take out a town but can generate a pulse so strong that they could knock out a power grid for hundreds of miles. I’ve no idea about the specifics of the technology, but I know that the Koreans were only ever really interested in the latter.

  “The intelligence report argued that the Koreans never gave a damn about developing the kind of massive nukes we have at our disposal. They never wanted the kind of firepower that could level a city, because they knew they’d never have the opportunity to use one without mutually assured destruction. Even their long range missile tests over the last decade or so were mostly just for show. We all cheered when one of their ICBMs spiraled off course and blew up hundreds of miles from its target, but the Koreans didn’t care. The report suggested that they hadn’t even bothered to develop a reliable guidance system. They didn’t need one, because the point of these regular tests was just to keep us distracted. To keep us worrying that their technology was improving; that they were just a couple of years away from finally developing a missile that could reach us, and a warhead that would fit on the end of it.

  “Their entire nuclear program was nothing but a huge game of Three Card Monte. They distracted us with all their tests, but all the while they were running a second weapons program beneath the first, a secret program with the aim of developing super-EMP weapons that didn’t even need to be mounted to advanced ICBMs. I'm talking about small, low yield warheads could be fired from modified freighters off the coast of the States using the kind of short and intermediate range missiles they perfected years ago. Accuracy wouldn’t matter, and our missile shield would be almost defenseless. All they’d need to do is launch a couple dozen basic missiles to high altitude across the continent. We might manage to take out a few, but the rest would overwhelm us. If just a few of them detonated in the upper atmosphere, generating a powerful EMP… game over.”

  Shepherd stared at her, shaking his head in disbelief. “You really believe that this is all true? This is an intentional attack? We’re being invaded?”

  Abi nodded. “I do, and not just because of the report.” She dropped to her haunches into the shade of the truck. “A couple weeks ago I saw something else, a DHS rundown of the latest conspiracy theories getting traction online. Now that’s real scut work, mostly carried out by bots that scrape everything from Twitter and Facebook to survivalist forums and chat rooms on the dark web, searching for specific keywords. Most of these rundowns go unread, but I happened to catch one that jumped out at me, some batshit crazy theory about the Pacific test. It sounded really out there, but when I checked the sources I found a classified report from the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force that seemed to back up the story.

  “A few days after the test a Japanese vessel was patrolling the shipping lanes about 800 miles north of the Marshall Islands. They were on the way back to home base, passing just to the west of the region the Koreans used for their test, and they stumbled across an unmarked vessel trying to scupper a small derelict freighter with sea mines. The vessel turned tail and bolted as soon as they knew they’d been caught, but the Japanese were able to get a team onto the freighter to search for survivors before it went under. It turned out to be abandoned, but they found something really weird before they left.

  “They said the entire deck was decked out with all sorts of crazy shit. The freighter itself was a fifty year old rust bucket, but the deck looked like a damned Black Friday sale. Rows and rows of modern cars and trucks. Tables full of electronics, from TVs to tablets to cellphones to blenders, all of them plugged in to what looked like a miniature version of a land-based power network, complete with power lines and transformers. They said there were even arrays of solar panels and a miniature wind turbine on deck.

  “As if this wasn’t weird enough, before the freighter went under they documented everything. They took down model numbers, serial numbers, technical specifications. They noted down pretty much everything they could think of in the hope that they could figure out what the hell was going on, and when they checked it all out they noticed one thing that connected everything on the deck. All of it, every last thing, from the cars to the electronics to the smallest components of the power network, was based on American specs, right down to the plug types, the surge protectors and the voltage and frequency of the power supply.

  “It was as if someone had built a perfect facsimile of a US town right there on the deck of the freighter. They wanted to get that deck as close as they could to the conditions of the United States, and then they left it drifting beneath a North Korean nuclear test site in the middle of the Pacific.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I ca
n only think of one reason anyone would do that.”

  ΅

  :::15:::

  IT WAS GETTING on for six before Shepherd was ready to get on the road again. He’d told Abi he needed time to make repairs to the truck, and while that was halfway true – he wanted to make sure the shots into the side hadn’t hit anything important on their journey through the truck – he was more concerned about her health. She was still shaky on her feet and deathly pale, and the only thing that would fix that were food, water and time. He’d given her a candy bar and more water from his bug out bag, sent her to rest on the back seat of the truck and crawled beneath the car to check it out. Everything seemed fine, but he tinkered under the hood and checked his tire pressures for an hour while she slept.

  Shepherd hadn’t signed up to be a nurse, and he didn’t relish the thought of dragging a wounded woman along for the ride to the cabin, especially now he’d lost some of his supplies, but on the other hand he couldn’t abide the thought of just dumping her somewhere far from home to fend for herself. As tough and uncaring as the old man might have been, even Shep Senior would probably have thought twice about doing that. Young attractive women don’t tend to fare very well when things break down. When the rules fail, eventually everything becomes a commodity. Even people.

  And besides, she might be useful. She seemed to have a good bead on current events, and information could be as valuable as a good sidearm in what was to come. Information and insight might be the difference between walking into danger and making it to safety.

  Shepherd would be the first to admit that he usually only tuned in to the evening news for the sports segment. With few exceptions the news was something that happened far from Willow Falls. It was a soap opera that starred feuding talentless celebrities Shepherd couldn’t name with a gun to his head. It was politicians on both sides of the political divide who seemed to care more about scoring cheap points than actually helping people.

  More than anything these days the news seemed to be angry shouting matches between bloated, overpaid talking heads, all of them yelling about the latest politically correct drama blowing up on Twitter. Is Starbucks offending Native Americans with the pumpkin spice latte? Should the First Lady have worn that hat to that event? And, hey, just which bathroom should a disabled transgender Dominican war veteran use? Tune in at six to see who can yell about it the loudest.

  He wouldn’t argue that these things weren’t important. They probably were vitally important to the people involved, but they wouldn't be settled on the evening news, and they had about as much relevance to Shepherd and the people of Willow Falls as a debate on how high you could jump on the surface of Mars. As long as the coffee was hot, the harvest looked good and the local sports teams were kicking ass nobody in Campbell County could give a moist shit about much of anything that went on in the outside world.

  Shepherd dropped the hood with a clatter, and in the back seat he saw Abi jerk awake at the sudden sound. “You about ready to move?”

  She climbed from the back of the car and yawned, stretching her arms to the sky. “God, I feel human again.” She looked like she had a little more color in her cheeks. “Umm, yeah, I’m ready, but where are we going?”

  Shepherd hesitated for a moment, out of habit more than anything else. Not even his closest friends knew about his bug out location. “I have a cabin in the woods about eighty miles west of here. It’s safe. Plenty to hunt. Lots of running water. It’s a good place to hole up and wait out the worst of the panic.”

  “And you’re sure you want me there? You barely know me.”

  “I know you enough to know I’d book myself a VIP ticket to Hell if I just dumped you at the next town. Things are gonna get much worse before they get better. And it’s not a permanent invite. You’re not coming to live with me or anything. I can drop you off anywhere you please along the way, if that’s what you’d prefer, but you’re more than welcome to stay until the panic dies down. A few weeks, couple of months. As long as it takes.”

  Abi smiled warmly. “Thank you. I mean… thank you for everything. I don’t think I told you that earlier.” She stepped up to the passenger side door and pulled it open. “And yes, I accept your invitation for as long as you’ll have me.”

  “Then that’s settled. You might want to save your thanks for an hour or two, though. We need to make a stop on the way, and if things are as bad as I think they are we’ll be lucky if we make it in one piece.”

  “Where’s the stop?”

  “Get in.” He grabbed the door frame and swung himself into the driver’s seat. “We’re going shopping.”

  ΅

  :::16:::

  SHEPHERD FELT HIS nerves return as he guided the truck across the train tracks and onto the asphalt that ran alongside it. Just a couple of hours ago he’d promised himself he was done with the public roads, and before the sun had even begun to set he was already going back on his word.

  There was no other option, though, not after what Abi had told him. The train tracks cut in a straight line through the woods all the way to Roanoke, miles from the nearest town of any size, and despite every cell in his body screaming out against the idea of going within spitting distance of a population center Shepherd knew that they really needed a town. Specifically Bedford, the closest small town that had been plagued by a bunch of big box stores on its outskirts.

  “You said the Koreans would launch lots of missiles from ships off the coast, right? Like, they’d throw everything at the wall and just hope some of it sticks?”

  Abi wobbled her head, half nodding, half shaking. “Well yeah, that’s what I said, but it’s just a theory. I was talking about stuff I read in an intelligence report written at least a few years ago. Who knows how far their technology has advanced since then? Hell, who knows if it was even North Korea, or for that matter that it was even an intentional attack? This is all just guesswork, you know? All we know for sure is that something took out the power to Virginia, or at least this part of it.”

  Shepherd nodded. “Exactly. We don’t know, and we won’t be able to make any informed decisions about what to do next until we find out. We don’t know if it was an intentional attack. If it was we don’t know who launched it, or how, or if everywhere else has been affected. Maybe the rest of the country got off just fine, or maybe it’s in even worse shape than we are. Hell, maybe the whole world’s gone dark. Whatever the case may be, we need information. That’s our greatest weapon right now.”

  Abi flashed a smile. “Way to go, Shepherd, you’re really thinking like an intelligence operative now. Maybe you should come see me about a job when this is all over.”

  Shepherd chuckled as he shook a Marlboro from his pack. “In D.C.? Wild horses couldn’t drag me to that swamp.”

  “So what’s the plan? Try to find a TV and magic it back to life?”

  “Think smaller.” The road began to curve away from the train line, and Shepherd wished to God he was still safely on the gravel trail. “A high altitude EMP weapon with the kind of power to knock out vehicles at ground level would likely take out most small electrical items as well. TVs, computers, tablets, that sort of thing. Anything plugged in to an outlet at the time of the pulse would almost certainly be fried with the overload of the power grid, but small gadgets that weren’t connected to power might have survived, especially those that don’t contain aerials or wires. It’s all a bit of a crapshoot when you get down to things that fit in your hand. Some get fried and some come through without a scratch, depending on the strength of the pulse, the distance from the epicenter and a few dozen other variables. The fact that my truck didn’t even stall when the pulse hit suggests to me that some small electronics could have survived, and I saw a cell phone this morning that made it through OK, even though the network was fried.”

  “So… what are we shopping for?”

  “We need a shortwave radio. If we can find one that still works we should be able to pick up stations hundreds, maybe even thousands o
f miles away after nightfall. With no electronic interference we should be able to pick up any signals clear as a bell, so if there’s anyone broadcasting within range we should be able to find out how far the damage has spread, and maybe even who dealt it out.”

  “OK, so where are we gonna find one if almost everything has already been fried? I’m guessing you have some kind of plan, right?”

  Shepherd nodded hesitantly. “Yeah, but you’re not gonna like it. Maybe we could get lucky if we searched a few random electronics stores, but there’s only one place within fifty miles of here I know we’ll be able to find what we need, and where a lot of the stock might have survived the pulse.”

  Abi gave him a sidelong glance. “Go on...”

  “Best Buy. They opened a new branch in the strip mall outside Bedford just last month. I passed by a few times during the construction, and the whole building is basically a prefabricated aluminum shell covered in brick and plastic cladding. It’s far from an ideal Faraday cage, but it doesn’t have to be. If it provided enough insulation to take the edge off the pulse it may have been enough to leave some of the stock intact.”

  “OK. Wait, why did you think I wouldn’t like that plan? Sounds pretty good to me.”

  Shepherd slowed the Jeep as they rounded a curve in the road, leaving the forest behind and emerging into the industrial outskirts of the town. He pulled the truck to the side of the road, looking around for movement as he drew to a stop.

  “You won’t like it because the store right next door to Best Buy is a Walmart. If the folks in Bedford have figured out what’s going on… well, we could be about to walk into looter central. So lemme ask you this: do you know how to use a gun?”

  ΅

  :::17:::

  ABI SAT IN nervous silence, her hands clasped tightly around the grip of the Glock in her lap as Shepherd pulled the Jeep slowly towards the chain link fence behind the strip mall. With the windows rolled down she could hear the distant sound of engines in the parking lot on the other side of the buildings, maybe half a dozen or so, and just at the very edge of her hearing she picked up the sounds of yelling. Angry. Scared. Threatening.