SODIUM:2 Apocalypse

by Arseneault, Stephen

  Janie pulled back the cover to reveal a 1968 Ferrari. It was beautiful, red and it was ours. Frank's Ferrari had been a similar model when I was first dating Renee, so the memories came flooding back. I had a strong desire to get behind the wheel of that car for at least one more spin. One of the only big differences that I could see between that one and mine was the extreme dark tinting on the windows. Whoever road around in it would have done so in total anonymity.

  We would likely have to hot-wire it, but that was an easy task. I had acquired a Slim-Jim when we found Mike, so getting the door open would be no trouble at all. I was still baffled as to why it had been spared the death from above considering where it was parked. Perhaps the car cover had helped.

  As the girls and David ran their hands over its still sleek exterior I turned my attention to the half collapsed garage. There was no way in through the main doors, but there was a regular door on the side facing the house.

  The door was locked, but it wasn’t anything that a good boot and a little muscle wouldn’t get through. After a heavy kick the wood around the doorknob splintered and the door flew open... there inside was our prize.

  Two large horizontal freezers, they were still in working order. As I opened the first one and felt the cool air I could see that the handful of items still in it had been ruined from freezer burn, but we had plenty of our own stuff to stock it with anyways.

  I was rummaging around in the two freezers for almost a full minute before it finally dawned on me, they were still running! Almost a year and half after the invasion and here were two freezers that still had power!

  I called for the others to come in and look and they had the same initial reaction as I did. A couple of high fives and clinched fists were offered in celebration of the fact that we had two nice freezers. Again, it took David, Rachel and Janie almost a full minute before David spoke up wondering where they were getting their power from.

  I eagerly followed the wiring to the junction box and out to the side of the structure. From there it went down into the ground and I could only guess out to the pole by the street. We got back in the vehicles and began following the power lines to see if we could find a substation nearby.

  It only took about 500 yards up the road until we found it. It was a couple hundred feet back from the road and was completely surrounded by large trees except for a thin clearing out of the back.

  As I followed the lines out of the substation I could see that they went up as they went away. A short walk confirmed that a set of major high power lines ran back behind this property. They probably came from power plants down south and went all the way up to Daytona. I guessed that maybe a nuke plant had been spared for some reason and was still generating. Why it was spared I had no clue of, but the fact that it was still cranking out the juice was huge.

  The power lines would bring on a whole new days investigation, but our time that day was limited and we had two new freezers to get home and to get hooked up. It took us most of an hour to get them out of the garage and loaded onto Mike.

  The flatbed tow truck had been a great find for our scavenging runs. With the freezers loaded our attention was turned back to the Ferrari. I wasn’t sure if the roads would allow us to get it all the way back to the colony, but we would sure try.

  I retrieved the Slim-Jim from Mike and began fishing for the door lock mechanism. Twenty seconds later there was a nice little pop and I reached for the door handle with a smile. David and the girls all gleamed with excitement at the prospect of being able to drive her, I was just as excited.

  As the door was opened the glee on their faces turned to horror. The smell then hit me and I began to gag. There was a partially mummified body in the driver’s seat. From the looks of him, he had been dead for quite some time. A revolver lay still partially gripped in his left hand. He had apparently taken his own life.

  I stood back and let the air clear a little before getting closer for a better look. His right leg had been splinted and was quite crooked. It had likely been damaged in the initial raid and he had done his best to mend it.

  The poor guy had probably survived the initial attack, but had been in such unbearable pain and with no one else around had decided to end it all. With his last breaths he had probably placed the cover over the car so it would stay protected. He then slid in under the side and into the front seat closing and locking the door before ending it all.

  Our elation over the freezers turned to sadness as we all gazed at the poor guy’s bright red coffin. As a sign of respect I again locked and closed the door and the girls pulled the cover back over it. We would let the man rest in peace in what had probably been his most prized possession. The drive back to camp was quiet.

  The following day we had the freezers running at home and were beginning to stock them. They were now putting a tax on our solar system so more panels would be needed if we wanted to add anything else. With our new additions in place we decided to see just how far north those power lines maintained their energy.

  Once our morning chores had been completed we again loaded Bubba and Mike and hit the road. It was a good 20 miles from the Ferrari up to Daytona and the high power lines looked to be intact the whole way. We would stop periodically so that I could go out under them and listen for the low constant hum that came with the power they carried.

  Just before we reached the roadway into Daytona that we had used before, I noticed that the power lines split with one section continuing up the coast and the other heading for what had once been a thriving touristy Daytona Beach. We crossed over the Intracoastal Waterway once again into Daytona Beach proper and turned south to find where the lines came in.

  A mile down the beach from where we had made camp the two times before, we found a still intact power substation. Several hundred yards from the debris and we were on the beach and looking out at the still damaged watercraft and its hovering twin just above.

  I wasn’t sure what we could possibly use power out there for, but the fact that we had it was exciting none the less. With the two ships and their fighters still only a mile or so away I decided we had better get back out of there and keep the thoughts of our little power discovery for another day. Besides, it was David’s birthday and Rachel and Janie had planned a little surprise party for him. It wasn’t every day that you turned 18 so we headed back so they could prepare for the festivities.

  The girls used the rest of our wheat flour to bake David a birthday cake to remember. I had to keep him away from the bunker and busy so the girls could work their magic. Neither had baked a cake before, but we had stockpiled plenty of cookbooks by then, so they had all the instruction they needed.

  Whenever we came across books we would scan them for their educational content. If we thought it might be useful to ourselves or future generations we kept them and put them in our modest but growing library. We didn’t have much room at the ranch so novels, biographies, fiction and others would have to be left behind. It seemed an incredible waste of Man’s accomplishments, but we had survival as our priority, so the other books were returned to nature.

  I kept David busy weeding around the Hayward’s orange grove and picking oranges. The trees would undoubtedly produce fewer and fewer oranges every year without the proper care, but this was a sizeable grove and with our small group we could eat oranges non-stop and not make a dent in the harvest it produced.

  After three hours in the grove David was eager to get out of the sun and was Jonesing for Rachel, Janie came to gather us for lunch. The girls did a great job on the cake which included 18 full sized candles. The small birthday candles had been a bit too hard to come by. David blew out the candles and made his wish.

  I didn’t want to think about what it might be, but couldn’t help but imagine by the way the two were looking at each other and grinning. It was one of those love gazes where they slip into their own private world while everything going on around them just kind of fades away. Janie had to give him a nudge to get enough of hi
s attention where he would take the piece of cake she had cut for him.

  David had mentioned that he played soccer in high school so Janie gave him a soccer ball that she had scavenged and stashed away from an earlier outing. Rachel had made him a tie-dyed t-shirt which his eyes lit up over. I gave him a 9mm handgun of his own. He had been carrying an old thirty-eight of mine so I thought it was time he had his own piece to take care of.

  Even though the legal drinking age had been 21 I wasn’t too concerned about the law, so I made him a vodka and orange juice. I had a good stockpile of liquor, but wasn’t much of a drinker anymore so the stockpile largely just collected dust.

  I kept a good inventory count of the alcohol as I didn’t need juvies breaking into it and getting crazy. Halfway through his second round, David was definitely getting loopy. The girls were having a great time with his goofy behavior. The party was a good distraction for us from a world that seemed to be slowly closing in.

  Chapter 16

  I had gone out one morning to get some gardening tools for Rachel from a rack we had made under the canopy. The rack and shelves made a U shape. When I entered into the middle of the U I froze. There was a rattle going on behind me. As I slowly turned and looked downward, there was a large Diamondback Rattler laying there all coiled up and ready to strike.

  I was lucky in that I had walked right past it and had not been bitten. Maybe it had been just as startled as I was. I hated snakes since being bitten by a common yard snake as a kid. Cornering it and poking at it with a stick had not been its idea of fun, so it got a little revenge and latched onto one of my fingers.

  There was a hoe hanging nearby, but I couldn’t reach it without moving past the snake, and I had no intention of attempting such. I stood there at odds with the snake for almost 15 minutes before Janie went walking by on her way to tend her herd. I called to her, but with too low a voice to get her attention, a louder call turned her head. As she walked towards me I raised my hand slowly in a gesture to try to get her to stay back.

  While a bite from a rattler in a civilized place was usually not fatal, we were lacking in medical equipment and anti-venom, so fatality was not out of the question. Besides, this was a big snake. It had apparently been eating well because it was about a six-footer with a really fat body.

  As I struggled for what direction to give Janie to help me out of the situation, she made her way over, grabbed the hoe, pinned the snake down by the head and picked it up by the neck. I wanted to yell out, but she was too at ease and no words seemed to come out of my mouth. She turned the snake towards herself and then began scolding it. With all the commotion David and Rachel had come over to see what was happening.

  I was blown away at how much it was a non-event to them. David told me later that Janie had kept the rattler as a kind of free-range pet and had been feeding it for months with rats that she had caught. Here I was terrified of this 13 year old girl's pet. I tried to give her a talk about it later, but she wasn’t interested in listening. Again, I was taken aback at how fearless she was. At 13 she showed more guts around the snake than I ever would. Once the excitement died down we all got back to the day’s tasks.

  Later that afternoon David and I turned our attention back towards the coil gun project. We had racked our brains at how to get enough power to the coils to make it a formidable weapon. That’s when the thought of the power lines crept into my head. With the high voltage lines we could build a bigger gun and really ramp up its power output.

  I began imagining what a megawatt or two of instant power might accomplish. According to my calculations a mile of distance could be covered in less than a hundredth of a second. While we didn’t know how rapidly the alien ships could raise their shields, one hundredth of a second was not much time to react.

  My mind raced at the possibilities. Would we actually be lucky enough to build a gun that could harness this vast available source of power and get it close enough to the alien ships to get off a shot? I wasn’t sure, but just having the possibility was enough to get David and myself back to work on the project almost full time.

  Once David got started on the gun, Rachel was a little put off by the lack of attention she then commanded, but she was a trooper and mostly kept it to herself. David was consumed with building a bigger model. We had decided the tow truck would make an excellent platform for making our weapon mobile. We worked for a full week at nothing but building a larger gun.

  Scaling up the coils seemed easy as opposed to making them smaller. There were still enough salvageable electrical parts and wiring available from the surrounding destruction that we didn’t lack for resources to scrounge from. The larger gun was coming together.

  When finished we had a coil gun that was now 20 feet in length and it went from near the back of Mike to just over the cab. I had been concerned about kickback from launching even such a small projectile to those speeds. By my calculations it would have the same force impact as the truck striking at a BB sized point at 20 mph. I felt that amount of force should be able to penetrate a fairly thick steel plate and cause havoc once inside. What damage that might do to the large ships might not be much, but it was something.

  We decided that with the available high voltage power we could ramp up the output even more, but it would tear the structure from the truck. We would have to figure out a way to limit or counter the kickback when launching, but we didn’t need full power to test it out.

  With our first large gun completed it was time to try the scaled up design. After our initial morning chores we set out towards the power substation that we had seen just past the Ferrari memorial. With the gun sticking up over the cab we had to drive slowly through many areas as limbs hanging down from tree growth were beginning to interfere with our driving.

  After an hour we reached the substation. Mike was the perfect transport for this weapon as we also had 50 feet of high current cable to truck along with us. After some inspection of the substation I had figured a way to get us connected.

  We would use the local power line that ran out to the roadway. With some planning I was able to knock out the fuse coming off the local transformer which allowed us to then safely connect in.

  I had salvaged another fuse from closer to home to act as our power on switch. We had positioned Mike so that the gun aimed squarely at a large water oak about 30 yards away. The moment of truth was upon us.

  Since we were dealing with a large amount of power I had the girls and David back Bubba up a good distance from Mike. I had a ten foot pole that I would use to flip the fuse into place and arm the weapon. David had rigged a remote control from an RC car to our fire button. I flipped the fuse and after a large arc the transformer on the pole hummed as the weapon charged.

  I was thrilled that the design was holding together as I peered at the power meters we had rigged to it. A full charge was achieved in less than ten seconds. My immediate thoughts were that we could have a weapon that we could fire multiple times in short succession.

  I turned and hustled my way over to Bubba and the others who were now well off to the side. I gave David a big grin and a big thumbs up to let it fly. At that moment I was glad that I had the forethought to not park us directly behind the weapon.

  As David flipped his RC trigger the truck lurched violently backward and the gun itself broke loose from its mooring and shot across the ground behind Mike. At that same instant the mighty oak blew apart about 20 feet up sending splinters and wood shards flying. The ground shook and the sound of the exploding tree was deafening. The limbs and foliage on the surrounding trees were stripped bare from the shrapnel. Bits of wood were flying everywhere including the stripped remains of a branch that made its home right in the center of Bubba’s radiator.

  I was in awe of what we had created. The force delivered surpassed my wildest dreams. The towering mighty oak was reduced to a ten foot high shredded stump. The surrounding trees now stripped of their foliage and all but their largest of branches. Mike’s bed had a s
light bow to it where it had given way just before our anchoring for the gun failed.

  And the gun was a total loss, having dug a 30 foot trench in the ground behind Mike before coming to a stop. With my ears still ringing I stood for nearly a minute just taking in the destruction. We had managed to inject the energy from nearly ten seconds of the high power line into that little BB. I was actually still slightly in shock when Rachel put her hand on my shoulder and turned my gaze towards our new radiator problem.

  Bubba was not going far without a radiator. We began salvaging what we could of the gun which was very little. It took us the remainder of the day to get our truck back to the compound where we could initiate repairs. We wrapped the radiator hose back around bypassing the radiator. We then drove for five minutes and followed that with parking for 25 to allow a cool down.

  It made progress slow, but we managed to get back before dark. We still would not dare drive with headlights at night for fear of being detected. It was difficult to get to sleep that night while thinking of the day’s accomplishments, but sleep came soon enough with the cool quiet haven that was our bunker.

  Chapter 17

  The following morning we turned our attentions back to our daily survival chores. Once in good shape, we had to go out looking for a new radiator for Bubba. The four of us gathered our normal allotment of several days of food and other assorted survival gear, and made our way out in Mike and Suzie.

  It had been several months since I had last started Suzie and it was somewhat comforting to see that she started right up as always. We never traveled without the whole group and never without two vehicles.

  There were many things in the new world that we did not have control over, but keeping close together was not one of them. After our experience with the looters we would not break that rule again. Even only going as far as the Kendall’s or Hayward’s was unnerving enough that we rarely did that without a minimum of two of us. My snake encounter had reinforced that thought process.