SODIUM:2 Apocalypse

by Arseneault, Stephen

  Whenever traveling any distance no one wanted to be left behind, and no one wanted to be going it alone. We were happy with our little family and had decided that we stood a better chance of overcoming any unforeseen hardships if we stuck close together. So, off we went in search of a radiator.

  It took two days of searching before a suitable radiator replacement was found. Since we always traveled with our wish list we had managed to scrounge several other items while out. Five hundred feet of PVC pipe would take water over to the Kendall’s garden from our water pump, replacing our leaky hose setup. A toaster oven and a blender would become big hits for preparing our daily meals as well as for making snacks.

  There was no telling how long those types of things would last because there would be no replacements a little further into the future. We were thankful to have what we did, when we did, knowing full well it would someday be gone. With our new finds in tow we returned home and got to work on replacing Bubba’s radiator.

  Once the radiator was in place and functioning, David and I turned our extra time towards attempting to figure out how to counter the tremendous kickback of the coil gun. After several weeks of failed ideas we decided to try firing an identically powerful gun in the opposite direction with the hopes of the two forces canceling each other out.

  This brought on another problem in that if we aim one gun up the other would be aimed down and there was no way the setup would survive a blast into the ground right behind it. The debris flying back out of the inevitable crater that would be formed would certainly cause major damage of its own.

  We decided that if we could point the second gun at an angle just above horizontal we would be able to handle most of the kickback without a problem. We would need to have the section where the two guns adjoined sitting on the ground since there would still be a tremendous down force created because of the angle. But it was doable. We got to work the following day on once again gathering the resources needed to build our two guns.

  The new effort took three months of scavenging to gather the needed supplies and another three months to produce our guns. David also had to rework his computer program to run two guns at once, they both required precise timing for their firing.

  During our months of gun work we made several trips back to Daytona to spy on our enemies. The one water ship remained out of commission and under repair. The status of the other ships remained the same except for one very interesting discovery.

  During one of our trips we had seen the functioning water ship move over land and more specifically over the power substation we had found in Daytona. From a good distance we could see that as it hovered over the substation it had several large cables dangling down and connected to the electrical supply.

  Were the ships drawing power from our grid? Were they recharging? There was no way for us to know from the outside what was really going on, but it did give us a leg up on where the water ship might be at a given time if it was repeating that process.

  That giant fact of knowing where one of the alien ships might be at a given time was not lost on us as we continued work on our second version of the large coil gun. Eight months after the firing of our first full scale gun we had a new gun ready to try. After our last experiment we decided to not risk Mike and instead built the new gun mounted on one of our trailers.

  We had welded the axel to a lever arm that would allow us to lower the trailer base to the ground when we were in firing position. As we rolled back up to the power substation we were once again awed by the previous destruction we had caused.

  This time around a tree was selected that was almost twice the distance as the first. The secondary gun had a clear shot behind us of several hundred yards, wherever that BB ended up would not be an issue.

  After several hours of setup we were ready to test the new rig. Mike and Bubba were parked a good distance away and behind a berm where they would be protected. With a push of my fuse pole the power meter needles moved to the right as the transformers gave out a hum.

  We had added about 20 percent to the size of our original gun and the combination of the two guns took nearly 30 seconds to fully charge. I ran back to David and the girls feeling all jacked up. Even though Rachel and Janie had not participated in the design and manufacture of the weapon, it was every bit their accomplishment as it was ours, and they showed equal excitement.

  There is something very powerful about having the ability to defend oneself. For several years we had been at the complete mercy of the invaders if they had ever chosen to seek us out. We reasoned that perhaps that day we could change that. We looked at each other with anticipatory grins as David readied the trigger.

  Three… two… one… seemingly simultaneously the target tree in front and an equally unfortunate tree a quarter mile away behind us exploded. This time we all had our ears covered which was good because the concussions rocked us first one way and then the other.

  The oak in front was now a stump just a few feet off the ground and looked a lot like one of those onions that had been chopped, breaded and deep fried in oil. The next tree behind that oak met with a similar fate as well as part of the one after that.

  The results were far above what I had ever dreamed of accomplishing when I had first contemplated a coil gun. Janie then grabbed my shoulder and turned me towards the back oak. Not only had it exploded, but it had cleared a wide path of devastation deep into the trees behind it, the stump was on fire like a giant torch.

  David and I rushed over to the trailer to inspect the guns. Our initial inspection could only find a few minor broken welds and a now slightly warped trailer body that had sunk about four inches into the ground. Rachel drove Bubba over, got out and began talking about the torch tree.

  The fire was starting to belch out a lot of smoke and the smoke would be a sure sign of activity from the air for miles around. At that thought we scrambled to get the gun unhooked from the power and to get the trailer back on its axle. Ten frantic minutes passed before we were headed back towards camp, the drivers trying to make their best time to get out of there while the passengers attention was turned towards the skies.

  Only when the vehicles had been safely parked and stowed, and we were in the security of the bunker, did we finally let out yells in celebration. We now had a weapon that we felt we could do substantial damage with. Mankind would either rise from the rubble or at a minimum exact some toll from the invaders before he perished.

  Three days later we returned to the substation site to conduct more testing. The gun now had several new modifications and we desperately wanted to try it at full power. We had managed our way from the substation out to the high power lines where we had a clear distance of close to a mile in front of us.

  With the gun in place and powered up fully we let loose of the iron BB round. The impact was nearly a half mile away. It wasn’t as impressive looking as our last test, but we chalked that up to possibly being the distance we were viewing the impact from.

  After a two minute drive in Bubba, David and I were upon the impact site. We had a direct hit right at the base of a palm tree. The tree had not splintered like the oaks, but instead looked to be sheared off.

  Beyond the palm there was other visible damage, but it was nothing as compared to our previous tests. I was baffled at how there appeared to be so much less carnage from as compared to our previous time out. As I inspected the site further it hit me like a ton of bricks.

  The BB had been given so much energy that it had turned into plasma and had essentially been burning up before it reached the palm, losing much of its energy over the half mile distance. We needed a projectile that could tolerate the heat.

  Back in college when Pete and I had taken the metallurgy course it had for some reason stuck with me one day that he was droning on and on about tungsten. It seemed my good friend Pete had one last item to give that we could make full use of.

  At the time I remembered laughing uncontrollably at how much of a geek he was. For
whatever reason that college moment had stayed with me through the years. I recalled one of his rants was about the melting point of tungsten and I remembered tungsten was a metal that we had back at the compound. We had scavenged numerous tungsten rods along with other materials that we used for our various welding needs.

  The following week we once again returned to the power lines and the results were similar to our first two trials. The first strike was over half a mile away and the devastation was tremendous. We now had our weapon, we had our ammo, and we had our jacked up attitudes. All we needed was a real target. We returned to the compound with our heads high and ego’s swelling.

  The Hayward’s orange grove had several lime trees and I just happened to have some tequila stashed away. As the elder of our little family I decided that a party was in order and that margarita’s would be made. The girls and David prepared a small feast while I made the rita’s.

  Since they were still underage I substituted sugar water for the tequila and the girls were none the wiser. I wouldn’t let them near the alcohol on their own, and they showed no desire to get into it, so I thought it was a worthy substitution.

  Even though I had let David have the vodka for his 18th birthday he didn’t seem to know the difference this time. We all had a great time faking our drunkenness, which made our little celebration all the more fun. We stayed up late and slept in the following morning. I had to chuckle at the girls and their supposed hangovers.

  After the celebration we took another three months to put the new gun and trailer back in top shape. During that time we made repeated visits to the Daytona area and discovered that the water ship was recharging for almost a full day about once a month.

  That’s when Rachel came up with the idea of perhaps building a number of permanent guns at the substation that were aiming straight up. We could then blast the water ship when it came for a recharge. After all, we would have plenty of power available and could allow any number of guns to sit fully charged while waiting on our nemesis. Again, I was blown away at the fantastic ideas coming from those young kids.

  During our observations of the craft we had noticed five large circular sections equally spaced around the bottom of the water ship. It was pure speculation, but we believed they were the mechanism for the ships propulsion, and as such would be primary target centers for our weapons. If we could somehow bring this mighty ship down it would perhaps tempt the invaders into leaving our planet.

  For more than two years they had been harvesting our natural resources. We reasoned that maybe they would cut their losses and leave with what they had. We had all decided that it would be worth all of our lives if we could bring down just one of those behemoths.

  As we planned and schemed I had begun keeping log books of all we were doing. I hoped future generations could one day use the knowledge if we were to perish. I could only hope there would one day be such people.

  Chapter 18

  The girls took over virtually all of the daily chores which allowed David and me to put full time into our arsenal. Over the next six months we worked long into the night building five large vertical coil guns. Since each one would be placed at a different location we had to also somehow scavenge five computers as controllers.

  We had happened on a collapsed retail store and had managed to salvage 12 gaming consoles from the rubble. The cardboard boxes they were housed in had deteriorated, but the plastic wrapping within had remained well sealed.

  With further scavenging at the same site we also came home with a half dozen games. They would be a good distraction for relaxation, but I would have to keep an eye on my young family to make sure they did not become addicted to play. We had much too much work to get done, so I was eager to avoid any large distractions if possible. I had to stop and smile at myself when the thought entered my head that we would have plenty of time for play after reeking destruction on the aliens. It was a thought that had me smiling all the way home.

  As it turned out, David had hacked that exact version of the game machine just before the invasion, and had managed to take control of much of the hardware on board. He felt confident that he could adapt those boxes to be controllers for our guns.

  After seeing what this kid was capable of on a computer I could only imagine that he would have been either very successful in the computer programming business or he would have gotten locked up for hacking into someone’s network. Even the second scenario would have probably landed him some cushy computer security job with the government. Either way, I was happy to have him on our team.

  A hunt back to a previous hobby shop site yielded the goods needed for our remote radio controllers. We needed the RC so that we could fire the weapons all at the same time, and from a distance. If we got lucky enough to bring down a ship we didn’t want it falling on our heads.

  After much planning we decided to move each of the completed vertically aimed weapons into place all at once. We needed to not only disguise them so that they fit in with the surroundings, but also to run the necessary high power lines to them for charging. The high power lines would need to be disguised as well. The last thing we needed was to arouse suspicion which would not only blow our entire plan, but it would also alert the aliens to our presence.

  It took us another six months of building and planning before we were ready to prep the Daytona substation site. We camped out for three days before the great ship next visited the substation. A day later it moved back out to sea and we moved in. During our observations we had mapped out where we thought the propulsion discs might be. It took two weeks for us to carefully move the first three guns into place and camouflage them. The final two were in place the following week.

  The ships schedule was not exactly on a monthly basis so we had to be extremely careful going into week four. We used the four wheelers to drag our cables around as each was about two hundred yards long. We had to rely on many splices in order to string the cables out that far, but we had no choice with the target being almost half a mile in diameter.

  We had our first cable in place and sufficiently hidden when our friend decided to pay the substation another visit. David was caught flat footed at one of the guns connecting cables when it started towards the beach.

  Although we certainly did not desire it, we had planned for just such an event. David had a small stash of food with him and several camo covers for himself and his four wheeler. A large part of the cable that he had just finished dragging lay in plain view, so we were desperately hoping that having been here for several years with no incidents, that the aliens would keep their security level at a minimum.

  As part of our camo we had placed several large potted plants around each gun with hopes that it would make them blend in better. We chose potted plants because we did not want to take the time to actually plant them and with a little water we could keep them healthy for months.

  In the time since the invasion there had been a great deal of overgrowth covering almost every spot of barren ground. Even the rubble had begun to be covered over nicely so our guns blended in well. Nature was slowly reclaiming its ground.

  With all the rubble underneath, we had come away with several slightly twisted ankles, but that not had been anything serious enough to slow us down. We were lucky that it was now November and the temperatures were very mild. David stayed under his camo cover for a full day while the great ship recharged overhead. Our intense planning had paid off that day as we remained well concealed and undetected by the giant craft.

  When the ship returned to sea, David finished his hookup and made his way back to our hidden camp almost a mile away. We decided to take a few days rest back at the homestead to catch up on our chores and relax. Regardless of whether or not we were fully successful in our warfare with the invaders, we would still need to eat and sleep afterwards, if we survived. We would not immediately be in harm’s way and even with a lack of success a little luck would allow our escape.

  In our last bit of planning we had de
cided to enable ourselves to trigger the weapons from almost two miles away. A pair of two way radios would do the trick and provide us that bit of a safe cushion we desired. We felt that a momentary blast of radio waves would be difficult to pinpoint and would still allow us a quick getaway from the area.

  Tree and brush growth along the roadways had made travel on them much more secure as it made line of sight very difficult except for from nearly directly above. We had tried to cover all the angles for our getaway. I was sure we would stir up a hornet’s nest of their fighters immediately following the triggering of our weapons.

  After our days of rest we returned to Daytona and began our final preparations. Two weeks into our countdown we had the final power cables rigged. I closed five scavenged fuses and the power flowed out to the five coil guns. As we traveled from one to the next we checked, double checked and triple checked that they were charged and ready for action, we would only have one chance at firing upon the ship.

  I knew the next several weeks might seem like the longest of my life. Everything was in place and ready. All we needed was a victim. We pulled back to the Two Mile camp and began our wait. It took us two days of pacing about and twiddling thumbs before we decided to head back to the homestead for a week. Cows required milking and eggs gathering if we wanted to keep our little food factory in good working order.

  Again the time dragged on and there was much pacing about. We always had enough work to keep us busy, but with such a huge event coming up there was a complete lack of concentration on any given task. I tried to fill Mike’s gas tank three times the same day. David followed after with the same thoughts twice. The anticipation of the event was powerful enough that I began to imagine that any one of us could spontaneously combust at any moment from our high level of excitement.