Dark New World (Book 4): EMP Backdraft

by Henry G. Foster

  Cassy shrugged and downed half a slice of buttered bread in one bite. After taking a sip of water, she said, “Well, given that we had two Clanners get killed right around the corner from where you killed the enemy for Mueller, maybe you saw what happened to them?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But you did check on the guy who got strangled, right?”

  Nestor sensed a trap. His thinking was clouded with fear, so he decided honesty was the best policy. Half-honest, anyway. “I did, yeah. But he was dead. I grabbed his rifle, but when I tried to shoot the camo guy it was empty. That’s why I had to beat him with it instead of just shooting him.”

  “No, Nestor—not the guy hanging out the window with a farm tool stuck into his skull. That’s the rifle you grabbed.”

  “Was it? I didn’t see him. He must have dropped it outside the window, I guess. Anyway, I thought it was from the guy I checked on.”

  Cassy’s eyes reminded him of a snake’s now, with that poised, eager glow they got right before they struck. “Hm. That must be it. I do kind of wonder why the soldier strangled that poor Clanner, instead of just shooting him. He still had ammo after all, since he was shooting at Mueller when you found them. Maybe he was just some kind of sick bastard who got off on killing him up close and personal. Or maybe something else happened. We may never know, right? Fog of war and all that.” She finished the other half of the bread and then stood. “Well, thanks for the clarification. I appreciate your time, but Nestor, you should get back to eating. Whatever’s bothering you, don’t let it starve you on top of everything else.”

  Cassy turned to wave to one of the Council members—her mother, if he remembered correctly—and left the table with a friendly nod at Nestor. Finally he relaxed, but only a bit. It felt like there were eyes on him coming from all directions. As much as he didn’t want to eat, he forced himself to peck at his food. Getting up just then would have looked guilty.

  As he nibbled at his stew without enthusiasm, he wished for nothing more than to be away from there, from those good people who didn’t deserve more trouble. Away from himself, if that were possible. But no, wherever he went, there he’d be.

  He had to leave. And he wanted to scream.

  * * *

  0600 HOURS - ZERO DAY +149

  Ethan lay on his back, one arm pinned beneath Amber’s head, and rubbed his eyes with the other hand. He let out a groan. “Is it that time already?” he managed to croak, but the words came out hoarse and garbled. He’d been awake all of five seconds. Then he realized his left arm wasn’t waking up with the rest of him, blood deprivation from Amber resting her head on it keeping it “asleep” longer than the rest of him. He groaned again.

  “Shut up.” She moaned theatrically and whined, “Five more minutes, Mom, I’ll get up, honest.” Amber half-smiled, but even she couldn’t quite chuckle at her little joke. Too damn early for that.

  “Maybe if we just stay here, no one will notice we’re missing,” Ethan muttered. “We can skip all the New Year’s stuff.” It’d be great if Amber agreed, but he knew she wouldn’t. Still, it was worth a try. “Why celebrate anyway? It’s just an arbitrary date that three caveman chiefs in Europe or somewhere agreed on. Like Christmas, when they needed to co-opt a pagan holiday.”

  “Ethan, my love, seriously—shut up.” He could hear the laughter hiding under her stern voice.

  He grinned at her. “One chief said hey, these days are really short, let’s make the shortest one the start of a new year, and then everyone will have to celebrate on that day forever and get in trouble with their wives. Then later, the Pope lost track of what day was the shortest, but we still had to party. All because of some Type-A caveman jerks sitting around the fire they just invented. That’s all it was. Let’s skip it.”

  “Conspiracies don’t exist until after at least three cups of coffee.” Amber propped herself up on one elbow, facing Ethan, which took the weight off his arm. Her sleepy grin was just lovely.

  He tried to move the arm, but it wasn’t ready for that just yet. Oh joy, the pins and needles would begin any moment as the blood rushed back into his arm… “But babe, we’re rationed to one cup a day, each, and you sure aren’t giving me yours.”

  “Then you can talk about it after coffee, and only once every three days,” she grinned.

  Ethan grinned right back. It was a running thing between them, his “conspiracy theories”—which were true, dammit… well, mostly—and her willful ignorance. Or her common sense, if one listened to Amber’s version. “Fine, wear those blinders if you must. I’m getting some coffee, speaking of that. We went without yesterday, right? We get two cups today.”

  “Yep, and I can’t wait. Although I wish we could use sugar. Pollenpowder isn’t the same.”

  Ethan staggered his way around the bed and headed toward the door. Over his shoulder he said, “Pollenpowder, huh? Is that what we’re calling that cattail dust these days?” The door was only a privacy curtain, really. “We need bees. Honey would do fine.” He stretched. “More than sugar, I wish we had T.V. I’d love to watch the ball come down in Times Square at midnight.”

  Amber didn’t reply, but she might not have heard him. It wasn’t important anyway, so instead of repeating himself, he poured them each a cup of black heaven, added cream to his—Amber didn’t like cream in her coffee—and then with a grimace, he used the tiny spoon to shovel in a bit of cattail pollen. It added a weird taste, but at least it covered the coffee’s bitterness with a touch of sweet. They had tons of the damn stuff, and he doubted they’d ever use it all, even cutting their flour with it to make the flour go farther.

  Cups in hands, he walked back to the makeshift bedroom and ducked inside, careful not to spill their cups on the curtain. Inside, he nearly missed a step. Amber sat with her back against the wall, knees pulled up to her chin, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her unhappy, vacant stare showed she was somewhere else, lost in thought.

  “Honey? Earth to Amber, come in.” He sat on the bed next to her and when she looked over, he handed her a cup. “Something’s on your mind. Did I say something wrong?” The truth was, he rarely knew when he had stirred something up so it had become a habit to ask.

  Amber took the cup, sniffed it once, then took a sip. “No, sorry. Nothing you said. Well, it was, but you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just thinking about the ball in Times Square. Like, it’s really gone and done. For real. None of this is a terrible dream, it’s just a terrible new reality, right? No New Year’s ball dropping, no really old guy stiff with Botox, mangling his lines for the camera. No people standing out in the cold, kissing, wearing ridiculous sunglasses and yelling ‘Happy New Year!’ when the ball hits the sidewalk, not ever again.”

  Ethan froze. What a terrible, morbid thought for starting the day. A kind of quiet sadness filled him. That world was dead, yesterday’s dream, replaced by this dark world. “I wonder if the people in New York will figure out a way to make the ball drop anyway, even without electricity.”

  Amber’s jaw clenched and her nose wrinkled a bit, while her face flushed red. He recognized that look… “What people, Ethan? What people are even left there?”

  “Not everyone there is dead, sweetie. Someone’s alive, someone who could do it. They could! If they really wanted to, they could get together and figure out a way to lower the ball themselves.” He practically shouted it. In the back of his mind, he wondered why that thought suddenly felt so very important. In fact, he felt kind of frantic and closed in. The bunker, his safety cave, the comfortable place where reality couldn’t find him and every game was his to win, took on a dark atmosphere as he looked around. It felt oppressive in this moment, even prison-like.

  Then he felt something on his arm and looked down to find Amber’s hand lightly resting on him. He looked up at her face and saw her concerned look.

  “Ethan, it’s okay, I swear. Take a deep breath. I know just what you’re feeling, okay? That’s why I was all curled up when you came
in, remember? Deep breaths. They help.”

  Ethan forced a smile. “I should be comforting you, not the other way around.”

  “Maybe. But the truth is that all of this—the dying, the hunger, the violence, all of it—is too much for anyone to just be fine with it, not all the time. It’s overwhelming. But the numbers I saw about New York? They’re beyond simply being overwhelming. All those people…”

  Ethan swallowed, knowing what she had to say next, and his throat was so dry that it hurt to swallow.

  Amber paused, then said what he knew she’d been thinking. “There were ten million people in New York City and all that surrounding urban sprawl. Two million of those got taken to god-knows-where by the invaders to do god-knows-what. A million died right after the EMPs, within a few weeks. One million people, Ethan! If your intel is right—and it usually is—another five million people have been eaten since then. So let’s celebrate?!” She was openly crying now.

  “You’re right, and it’s tragic,” he said, keeping his voice low, soothing her. “More than tragic—I don’t have the words to describe such a horror. But what can we do?” He realized his own voice had been rising and he paused to breathe for a moment. “It bothers me, you know. I have nightmares about it, ever since I got that intel. But it’s not like it happened here. We’re alive and we’re not eating people.”

  “Don’t say that. We had our run-ins with cannibals, or did you forget the Red Locusts? But in New York… by now, for every man, woman, and child still alive in that city, two or three left their bones littering the streets. Can you imagine that? Imagine what those survivors must be like now. Hardly even people anymore. They gave up their humanity to survive, and for what?”

  Ethan coughed. She was right, but not for the reason she thought. He would do whatever he had to for Amber and her family to eat, to stay warm, to stay alive. That included eating the hell out of strangers, dogs, cats, pigeons, rats… No, she was right because by this time next year there’d be only a few thousand people left in New York City. The rest would either figure out how to get out, die trying, or get eaten, until what they could grow in the parks or catch in the rivers balanced the population. “We are alive, Amber. That’s victory, these days. Everyone alive by next Christmas will have won the damn lottery-of-life. It’s a big win. Don’t you see?”

  “That’s my point. Big win. So happy fucking New Year, we won—and that’s why we have to go out there today with the others, and dance and sing, and drink our faces off with hard apple cider and moonshine. Not a Pope losing track of the calendar, just us. Up there, out of this bunker with the Clan, our people. Because we are still alive. Really alive. Safe, sort of, and with enough to eat. Enough extra to have someone teaching our children instead of working the fields. And we all know we might not be so lucky by next New Year. Live while we can, as much as we can, and damn the rest of it. For one night, Ethan, just screw all of that other garbage. The fear, the hunger, all of it. Tonight we are alive, and maybe if we go up there and party with the rest, we’ll finally feel that way. Even if only for a moment.”

  Damn. In the space of one cup of coffee, Amber had worked her way around from despair to as good a reality as anyone could have, these days. Amazing, good—really good—woman. As much as he hated to leave the bunker, he knew she was right. But he still didn’t want to go. Maybe that was all the more reason to do it, though. So that the winning lottery number he picked up wasn’t wasted. Someone out there deserved to live more than he did, surely, but had already died cold, hungry, and alone except for the nightmarish people who killed him like lions on a gazelle. A shitty way to die. For that person, then. It would be a total travesty to waste the life he’d been given, when so many better people hadn’t made it, or soon wouldn’t be more than a gnawed leg bone on the street.

  Ethan sighed. “Fine, I’ll go. Sometimes I just need a swift kick in the ass. Besides, we won’t have much safe time to celebrate after this, not with Indiana coming our way.”

  “Fort Wayne? The so-called republic we call the Empire? We don’t need to worry about them. Not tonight, and not until spring. I figure maybe May, even, because they won’t come until spring planting is done or they won’t have enough to eat next winter.”

  “I’m not betting my life on that timeline, Amber. It’s fine to be optimistic, but let’s prepare for less-than-perfect timing. Remember, George Washington attacked on Christmas and the Brits were too drunk to fight back. The Fort Wayne bosses could have set up a slave-based agricultural system for all we know. They sure had enough people to pick from, out of all those thousands of starving people who must have flooded them from every direction—Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Indianapolis…”

  “Shut up and drink your coffee, Dark Ryder,” Amber said in her ‘I’m teasing you’ voice. “We need to go help set up the party.”

  * * *

  1300 HOURS - ZERO DAY +149

  Amber’s daughter Kaitlyn had spent the lunch hour with her older teenaged friend Brianna. The two had grown even closer after they barely escaped some attacking dogs, and now Kaitlyn had an idea to share.

  “Grandma Mandy says people need to be recognized for the good things they do, right?” she asked Brianna, who nodded. “Well, this was like twice that Jaz and Choony came in at the last minute and helped the Clan drive off invaders. And everybody treats them like, yawn, yeah, thanks, good job, what’s for dinner. And that’s not right.”

  Kaitlyn was obviously as sure as any early adolescent could be about right and wrong, and Brianna kind of agreed that what Choony and Jaz had pulled off deserved special mention. From the advanced age of fourteen, she could see that it would be good for Kaitlyn and her to do something special for the two older crazies, too. Young people need encouragement, Brianna told herself wisely.

  Plus, it was kinda ravey. A pacifist Buddhist and a Philly street girl jumping into battles together like that… Who knew such a pair could be, like, almost superheroes! “They’re having an assembly after dinner so Mom can tell everybody what the whole battle seemed like from the boss point of view,” Brianna said thoughtfully. “I bet we could do something special for them then, like an announcement.” She saw Kaitlyn looking at her from the corner of her eyes—yeah, her young friend was definitely up to something. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Kaitlyn grinned. “I wrote a song about them.”

  “What? You can write music?” she whooped, grinning.

  “No, not really. But I wrote some words to a tune my dad used to sing when he had too much beer. Mom didn’t like the song, said it was crude, but I thought it was pretty funny.”

  “Let’s hear it!” As Kaitlyn’s eyes widened, she added, “The Jaz and Choony song, silly, not your dad’s beer song.”

  Kaitlyn shook her head no. “Not here. People will listen, and it has to be a surprise. And anyway, we need something more. We need to give them something. Medals, maybe.”

  Brianna frowned. “How can we get medals?” Kaitlyn was onto something with this idea, for sure, but she hoped the little kid knew where to get them and wasn’t just hoping Brianna would know where to get some.

  “I bet Mr. Jepson has some. He seems like an old soldier.”

  Brianna laughed. “You’re going to ask that grumpy old farmer? He always just scares the little kids away when they try to watch what he’s doing. Half of the younger ones think he bites.” Oh, that would be perfectly funny, wouldn’t it?

  “He never chases me away. I spend a lot of time learning cool stuff from him,” Kaitlyn answered defensively. “He can make anything! He’s a genius. I like him.”

  Brianna tilted her head at her younger friend. “Really? Let’s go over and see what he says.”

  * * *

  As usual, Dean Jepson was working on some project at the small forge when the two girls arrived. He had set up his “shop” at the southern tool shed, where there weren’t too many people around. He had a nasty way with a sharp word and no patience for anything that
struck him as foolish, which was most of the time, so people simply stayed away from him. It wasn’t worth the grief to take his insults if you could do something for yourself instead, and that suited Jepson just fine. Being the crusty old man felt like wearing comfortable old shoes. They could look sharper, maybe, but they never pinched your toes.

  When he heard footsteps approaching from behind, he whirled around, ready to blast someone with grouchy words, but then he saw it was Kaitlyn and broke into a broad smile. He liked that kid, but he’d never admit it to anybody.

  “Well howdy, Kait! Hi, Brianna. What are you two fine belles doing out and about in the cold?” As he talked, his hands never stopped working to fit pieces of metal together. The reputation he had as the world’s best redneck engineer was well deserved, though he himself paid it no mind.

  “We have a problem, Mr. Jepson,” Brianna said. “Do you know how to make a medal?”

  Jepson pursed his lips. “I don’t hold with playing war, if that’s what you’re up to. It don’t do any good for people to go at each other like that, and we have enough of it here for real. Nope, no medals to play war with. Won’t do it.”

  “No, no,” Kaitlyn objected. “We want to give some recognition to Jaz and Choony for the way they keep coming back by surprise and saving our lives and stuff.”

  Brianna added, “Kaitlyn wrote a song for them but we want to make some sort of medal to go with it.” The younger girl grinned at Brianna’s use of “we,” Dean noticed, probably assuming that with Brianna on board they could pull it off.

  Kaitlyn continued, “I still have some red and blue ribbons in my sewing kit, so if we had a medal, we could hang it around their necks, like a medal of honor, you know?”

  Jepson’s pursed lips had disappeared and a slow, wide smile had spread in its place. Mostly for the girls’ benefit, of course, because ol’ Dean didn’t want to hurt little girls’ feelings if he could avoid it. “I reckon. When do you need ’em?” he asked.