Lights out in America's Dairyland: An EMP Adventure

by Victor Marbury

  Mustafa re-formed the column and led Delquan’s within sight of the roadblock at US 12 and W. Water Street. Delquan could see that the townspeople had put some barricades across the roadway.

  “How pathetic, he thought. That puny fence isn’t going to stop us!” He stopped his army about 200 yards from the roadblock and sent for the flag of truce he had fashioned before leaving the farm, perhaps he could convince the town to surrender without a shot instead of losing the majority of his troops in a pitched battle. He raised the flag of truce and proceeded with Mustafa to a spot about 20 yards in front of the barricade.

  He yelled, “Let me speak to the man in charge, we want to negotiate!” The message was passed to the command post, and Chief Krusk and Ben made their way to the roadblock to speak to Delquan. Neither of them held out much hope for a peaceful solution to their problems, but they had to find out if they could resolve the issue without resorting to violence that would end up costing everybody dearly.

  Elaine approached the roadblock and held a bullhorn to her lips, “This is Elaine Krusk, Chief of Police, who am I speaking to?”

  Delquan cupped his hands, “I am Delquan Jones, leader of the New Nubian Army. You must realize that you are outnumbered and outgunned…..surrender now, and I will spare your lives!”

  Ben began to laugh up his sleeve, “Who does this fucking guy think he is, Genghis Kahn?”

  “Shut up!” Snapped Elaine.

  She raised the bullhorn to her lips once again, “We have no quarrel with you or your people Delquan, but you are not welcome in your town because of your aggressive nature. If you leave now, nobody in your group will be harmed!”

  This statement brought yells of derision and threats from the army at Delquan’s back, a few, “Kill those crackers” and some other choice racial epithets emanated from the group. Delquan turned to the group and yelled “Silence!” He turned back around to face Elaine, “You have spilled our blood already, was it not you who attacked our settlement and killed our soldiers first?”

  Elaine frowned, “Not before you attacked our roadblock, sent in a spy, and kidnapped a child sir, so I’m giving you one last chance, leave the area and don’t return! If you refuse, prepare to face the consequences of your actions!”

  Within the ranks of Delquan’s army, a 19th Street Lord gang member named Eldon Grimes became quickly bored with the back and forth between the leaders. He wanted to start this show and win the battle so he could do some serious partying once they took the town. He stepped out from the ranks and made his way to a park bench on the sidewalk. He braced the rifle on the bench and lined up his weapon on the woman behind the bullhorn standing next to a guy holding a rifle. He had a chance at her head from his position. He was going to smoke this bitch and get down to killing everyone else he could. He squeezed the trigger like Mustafa taught him, and the rifle barked. The woman dropped to the pavement like a rag doll. The man next to her covered her body with his and pointed in Eldon’s direction yelling “Sniper!”. Ricky DuMont, stationed in the bell tower of Lutheran Life Church drew a bead on Eldon and sent a 30.06 bullet into his skull, ending the young punks life.

  Delquan jumped at the report of the rifle, and he saw the woman he was talking to fall to the pavement. There was a silence as everybody froze and a second shot rang out……then all hell broke loose!

  Delquan screamed, “Slaughter them!”

  Delquan’s army began firing at the barricade, killing several defenders in a hail of bullets. Delquan dropped to the ground and rolled under an abandoned pickup truck and frantically searched for an escape route from the free fire zone. Mustafa was not so lucky; he absorbed several bullets and fell to the ground in a heap, dead.

  Larry Clark, one of the defenders, low crawled away from his position and made his way to the plunger installed by Mitch the mad scientist. He raised the T- handle and pressed it down like he had been trained to do. The box made a “ZZZZZIIIIIIIIPPP” sound and detonated the 46 flowerpot claymores lining both sides of the street on the flanks of Delquan’s army. Thousands of nails, pieces of broken glass, scrap metal, and fire flew into the doomed soldiers. Some of the sweaty sticks of dynamite attached to the sappers detonated by the flying metal in the claymores, creating other secondary missiles causing even more carnage. In seconds, over 200 people were reduced to scraps of meat; the few survivors of the initial blast had severe injuries, from missing limbs to collapsed lungs from the concussion of the explosions.

  Delquan, being the lucky bastard that he is, remained unscathed, save a ruptured eardrum courtesy of the claymores. He emerged from under the truck, hoping that the large amount of smoke and carnage would cover his escape. As he moved to the edge of the roadway, young Sam caught movement through the small 4 power scope of his Ruger 10/22 and lined up on the fleeing figure’s head. He knew that the CCI Stinger would penetrate this jerk’s skull with no difficulty and scramble his brains. He said under his breath, “This is for Zeke”, and squeezed the trigger. The little 40 grain bullet streaked towards its target, and struck Delquan where the ear joins the skull, blowing it off. The bullet then skittered along the jaw line traveling at a downward angle fracturing 2 teeth in his lower jaw before exiting out of the point of his chin. Delquan let out a burbling scream, spitting blood and tooth enamel, but stayed upright and kept running. Sam snapped off and additional two shots that failed to find their target. Delquan ran around the corner of the building, out of Sam’s line of sight. Sam clicked on the safety of his rifle, alighted from his perch, and headed down to street level, knowing that he had done his part.

  The smell of blood was everywhere, Sam saw a few of his neighbors lying on the ground while medics attended to them, but by the look on some of their faces, he knew they would not survive the night. Sam saw Ben bent over the Chief of Police desperately trying to stanch the bleeding from a head wound sustained by the chief. He saw Ben rip a quick clot bandage from his IFAK and slap it on his lover’s wound. He then placed a gauze pad over the wound and yelled for a medic. Medics picked up Elaine, moved her to a stretcher, and carried to the Police station with an EMT in tow holding an IV bottle as they ran. He saw Ben sit down on the pavement and hold his head in his hands, rifle cradled across his lap. Sam approached him and touched him on the shoulder. “Go see to the Chief, we’ll clean up here” After what seemed like an eternity, Ben rose from the street and made his way to the Police station.

  Chapter 16

  As I was making my way to the Police station, Mitch ran up to me and trotted alongside.

  “I heard what happened at the roadblock.”

  He rubbed his hands together with relish, “It looks like my little toys were able to wipe out his whole force Ben.”

  “Yeah, and I got a headache to prove it!”

  Seeing that I was dragging himself along as if I was going to get a root canal with a chisel, Mitch asked “is everything ok pal?’

  I looked at Mitch with sadness, “Elaine”, and kept up my slow pace to the makeshift hospital fearing the worst.

  Mitch stopped and said, “Anything I can do, let me know brother.” With that, he returned to the roadblock to do a detailed analysis of the damage incurred by his terrible invention.

  I made my way into the basement and asked after Elaine, and was directed to the last curtained off section of the basement. I went over to the curtains and took a deep breath. I simply couldn’t bear losing this woman; she awakened something in me that was dormant, and now that it began to live again, I couldn’t go back to the way it was. My heart hammered in my chest as I parted the curtain and saw Elaine sitting up in bed with one of the medics stitching the 5 inch long gash in her scalp. She winced as the medic stitched her up, but when she looked up and saw me, she smiled, “You’re not getting rid of me that easy buster!”

  My eyes filled with tears, and I sobbed, I wanted to hug her, kiss her lips and never let her go ever again, but that would interfere with the medic’s work. As I was thanking every deity I could think of for
keeping Elaine with him, Doc Halverson entered the enclosure and checked the medic’s work.

  “Elaine, you can never buy a lottery ticket again because all of your luck is now officially used up! You probably have a mild concussion, so I’m advising a few days rest. Keep an eye on your graze wound for infection; I’ll start you on a course of antibiotics to prevent that from happening. Come to my office in a week, and I’ll remove those stitches, I suspect you will be as good as new by then.”

  Doc Halverson advised his staff that Elaine was to stay overnight for observation and then free to return to her home in the morning. He then left the enclosure to attend other patients in the ward. Sensing that I wanted to be alone with Elaine, the rest of the staff left her enclosure leaving us to our privacy.

  I moved to the side of the bed and kissed her on the lips, “Please don’t ever do that again sweetheart, you should avoid bullets, not dance with them!”

  “I’ll keep it under advisement lover.” Elaine sank back into the bed to rest.

  The medics found me a chair to sit in that was pretty comfortable, and I planned on staying the night next to the woman I was quickly falling in love with. We ate, dozed, and just existed in our little sheet-enclosed world.

  During the middle of the night, I woke up in a cold sweat with my heart roaring like a freight train……Simone! I had forgotten all about her! The sickening realization came to me that they had either killed her when they captured her, or tortured her then killed her landed upon me like a lead weight. I got out of the chair as quietly as possible and made my way upstairs. There was a light on in the Chief’s office, and upon opening the door, I saw Mitch and Grinker poring over a map. They both looked up at me at the same time.

  “What about Simone? We got to get to the farm and check it out! We gotta find her man!” Mitch came from around the desk with a concerned look on his face, “We were working on that, but I figured that you needed some rest, Grink and I are going to take one of the things and do a quick recon to see if any of Delqan’s army survived.

  “Count me in as well; give me a second to get my gear.” I made my way down to the hospital and grabbed my gear from Elaine’s bedside and rejoined Grink and Mitch at Thing One.

  As dawn broke, we made our way back down Highway PQ to the McDonnel farm. About a quarter mile out, we stashed the vehicle and made our way up the drainage ditch to the farm. Mitch glassed the farm with his binoculars for about five minutes searching each building thoroughly, “This party is over, the place looks deserted.”

  Mitch took up an over watch position, and Grink and I cleared the house, machine shack, and barn. Outside of finding a small amount of ammunition in the machine shack, Mitch proved to be right, the army fled this place. We did a thorough check of the outlying area for hasty graves or dumped bodies and found no evidence that Elaine was dead and buried. That thought brought the second lead weight down. Perhaps Simone was in the group as a prisoner when the army got destroyed on Water Street. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, “We have to go back and check," kicking myself for not even thinking of my friend during the battle. We boarded thing 1 and re-entered the town, headed for the barricade.

  Robert was at the barricade supervising the cleanup of the carnage. A work crew of townspeople was busy cleaning up the mess. The crews picked up bodies, as well as an assortment of pieces, and piled them in the center of the street. A 1950’s backhoe scooped up the remains and moved them over to a disposal site in the town dump where a mass grave dug that very morning. Other crews were scrubbing the street and washing it down with soap donated from the local car wash. The whole mess was washed from the street with a fire hose hooked up to a fire hydrant while there was still pressure in the system.

  I approached Robert who was busy making checks on a clipboard, “Did you find any trace of Simone in that mess Robert?”

  Robert blanched and swallowed hard, “I wasn’t looking man, besides, I don’t think that we would have been able to recognize her thanks to the damage that Mitch’s devices wreaked on those poor souls.”

  “Thanks Robert, I’m going back to the hospital and see about Elaine.” He waved as we drove away in thing 1 back to the Police station, my heart heavy with the loss of my wonderful friend and fellow officer.

  Meanwhile……..

  Simone crouched in the brush and eyed the town. During the march to battle, she was able to slip away from the column into a cornfield. She couldn’t believe that nobody missed her, but then again, they were all yelping and woo woo-ing so much, she hardly thought they were going off to battle. She was hungry, thirsty and wondered about how she was going to re-join her friends in the town without getting her ass shot off at any of the barricades. She figured that the townspeople would automatically assume her an enemy if she just casually walked up to one.

  “I don’t think they are taking too kindly to darker folk right now," she thought to herself ruefully.

  She knew that time was a factor in this situation. Ben and Robert would leave without her if she loitered out here, and if that happened then she was in some pretty shit. She said to herself, “Decision time bitch, die out here for sure, or potentially die approaching the roadblock, what’s it going to be?”

  She decided to roll the dice and approach the roadblock, after all, she was familiar with some of the people in town, hopefully she would be recognized by the people standing guard. After all, there weren’t too may six-foot black women roaming around town over the past couple of days. She dumped her rifle and magazines and concealed them in the brush and made her way down the trail that she and Sam rode on a thousand years ago and headed back to town. She desperately hoped that she was not going to get shot to pieces for making this decision.

  Delquan woke from a troubled sleep. He was sweaty and felt like shit. The entire left side of his head was swelled up and throbbing, more than likely in the beginning stages of infection, he thought bitterly. He barely escaped the battle with his life, and certainly not unscathed. As he ran from the scene, he felt like he got hit with a sledgehammer on the left side of his head. His mouth filled with blood and he lost hearing in his left ear as he fled. He ran for what seemed to be miles, and when he came across the trailhead that led out of town he ran with all his might. When he reached the safety of the woods, he went immediately to his knees under a bush. He passed out from the pain and slept until the next morning. When he awoke, he was introduced to a new universe of pain, and he groaned loudly. As he rolled to a sitting position, he fumed at how his army failed him. All of those people he had saved from the hell pit of Madison, their laziness and poor training are what botched the invasion. Their stupidity had cost him any legitimate chance of ruling a large swath of territory! He gingerly touched his head; it was immediately painful and almost caused him to pass out once again. He tried to take a drink from his canteen, but his jaw felt swelled shut, which caused him a great deal of pain if he tried to open his mouth at all. Delquan knew he needed medical attention, if he didn’t receive some soon, he knew he would die. He thought about this problem and came up with a few scenarios that might work. He still had his pistol so he could take a hostage, or dump the pistol and play the part of a member of the army forced into service by the evil Delquan, or sneak into the town, find the doctor’s office and force him to treat his wounds. A thousand possibilities flooded his mind, unfortunately, thanks to the infection growing in his body, Delquan was not thinking as clearly as he needed to. As he spun scenarios in his head about addressing his immediate problem, he heard somebody approaching his hiding place. All other scenarios dropped away; he was going to take this person hostage and demand medical attention. His spirits soared as he congratulated himself on his genius. He crouched in the bushes until the time was right and struck!

  Simone was heading down the trail thinking about her own problems when Delquan sprung from the brush and took her down in a perfectly executed side tackle. The wind was knocked out of her as they tumbled in a heap to the ground.
Simone landed face down in the dirt, bloodying her nose and causing stars to appear in her field of vision. Due to the weight and strength of her attacker she assumed he was a male. He was breathing heavily and trying to grab her around the neck to gain further control over her. She drove her left elbow directly to the rear, making contact with her attackers face, and heard a satisfying howl of pain. She drove a second elbow backward, and her attacker fell away. She rolled to her side and regained her feet to face her enemy. When she saw Delquan, she was not surprised; his kind always survives disaster. She drove a kick to his midsection, and he curled up on the ground. She now had the advantage; Simone rolled him onto his stomach and used an arm bar across his throat, pulling him to his knees. He struggled mightily, but was unable to break the black Amazon’s hold. Simone then exposed Delquan’s neck and delivered a punishing brachial stun, rendering Delquan unconscious. She got up off Delquan, huffing and puffing. She untied his boots and used the laces to bind his hands behind his back.

  “What a lucky find," she thought; she just found her ticket into town! She was going to turn this piece of shit into the town to face justice. More than likely, they wouldn’t shoot her if she were giving them something they would desperately want.

  When Delquan awoke, he was re-introduced to a world of pain. His head and neck throbbed; his hands felt tied behind his back, and the circulation was slowly being cut off from his arms, causing them to fall asleep. He looked up out of his one good eye, apparently the other eye suffered some damage in the scuffle he just had, and looked upon the sister he had taken prisoner a couple of days ago, and then recruited into his army! That traitorous snake, she ruined everything, all of his grand plans because she couldn’t stay the course with him.

  Simone approached him with a smile on her face, “Well, well, Delquan, it looks like you’re in some trouble now, I don’t think that the townsfolk will be too merciful with you once I deliver you to them.”