The Event Trilogy (Book 1): Life After the Meteor

by Larson, Thomas

  Elgin also said that when those weapons went off the EM blast would pretty much wipe out the communications and unshielded computers. He suggested that it might be wise to wrap any electronic devices in metal foil, seal them in a waterproof container or bag and then put them in a large barrel or bucket of water. This would hopefully reduce the damage.

  It was 2 PM, I had two hours to get to the Berkshires and hook up with the rest of our group. Through texting they told me that they had decided that Peru, Massachusetts as a good place to meet. It was in a good geographic location and hopefully cleared of Zoms.

  We had just passed through Blatchford and were still heading north. When we went to cross under I-90, aka the Mass Pike, we found our first true victim. A Mass State Trooper had crashed. The strobe lights were still blinking and the car was still running. We stopped, thinking that we could help. The trooper was strapped in and his blood covered head was lolling back and forth. When he sensed us he began to gnash his jaws and growling. I could not leave him like that and dispatched him with a single shot to the head.

  The trooper was pulled from the car, and burned. I check out the car and found that the police radio was still working. I tried to transmit to his dispatch or barracks. To my surprise I got an answer. I identified myself as a retired detective from the Manchester Connecticut Police. I told the voice on the other end of the radio what we had found and the situation with the dead trooper. He calmly acknowledged saying that he had received calls from other people saying that they had similar finds.

  The dispatch trooper said, “I am the Barracks Commander, Captain James. It is just me here, the trooper you found was Bill Warner.” “I am glad to have a chance to talk to someone our situation was pretty bleak.” “I am going to hold the fort for a little longer and at 3 pm I am going to make a break for it, in the direction of Pittsfield.”

  “Captain, if you don’t mind I was going to toss the cruiser for weapons and supplies and then we are going to continue in direction of Peru,” I radioed.

  James radioed back “The Peru area was last reported as clear, but that was almost two days ago.”

  He said that in some ways we had hit the jackpot. It seems that Warner was a SWAT guy and should have some goodies in his trunk that may be of value to you.

  The trunk of the cruiser contained a pair of sniper rifles. The first was a 223 Remington with a scope. It had about 100 rounds of spare cartridges. There was also a 50 cal. Barrett M082. At first I was almost not going to take it because it was a single shot weapon and not the best weapon for Zom termination. But then I thought about the non-Zoms we might be dealing with and decided that the big gun and the 50 rounds could be a good thing to have in the event of a situation similar to the Otis face off.

  We still had a way to go and it was 2:30. A text came in from the main group “We have reached Peru, it is empty”.

  The residents must have evacuated a couple of days ago. They had found a small warehouse building with pretty good protection and a five bay garage. As it turned out, it was a town maintenance and repair shop. It still had power, and water, hot water. While people from Teckla’s team were cycling through a shower the rest of the group was in the process of setting up defenses and safe areas should the blast reach out that far.

  We continued on and reached Peru at about 3:10. We had a little time to help out with the setting up, although most of it was done before we arrived. This gave a brief chance for the scavenger crew to show what they had found, and made. We were shown the melee weapons, and Teckla / Lauren’s go packs. Margo and Jan had found a little lunch room that had a TV and a stove in it.

  The Keurig was in there and I could not pass up on a hot cup of coffee, the first I had drank in a few days. Sometimes the simple pleasures are the best and here I am going on about a cup of Newman’s Own as the world is ending.

  As time ran down before the cleansing, the girls were monitoring the TV to get information as to what was going on. CNN and Fox were still on the air. They were telling of the widespread chaos, what to expect from the cleansing, and what the post cleansing impact would be. There were also a couple of channels in which there were famous religious people talking about the end of world….Revelations.

  One channel even had the sense of humor in this time of tribulations to put on the music “Closer to thee my God” that was played when the Titanic went down. It reminded me of a movie I had once seen in which the world was going to end, and how people lived out their last days. The big difference was that the movie had given months before the end, we had days, and many still did not accept that this was truly the end.

  One of the news channels was talking about the means by which the government / military had planned to implement the cleansing. There were three separate parts to the plan that would be used based upon the size of the area in question. Large cities such as NY, Boston, DC, basically anything over 500,000 populations would take a nuclear blast from a traditional aerial warhead or missile. In cases where several cities were all in close proximity it was an assessment based upon head count per square mile. In some cases the plan was an aerial detonation to maximize the burn.

  Cities under 250,000 to about 75,000 would be done with W-54s which were the suitcase nukes that we claimed we never had. The weapons in both situations were already in place and had been brought in by rail about two days ago. The placements were set-up to maximize the kill zones and minimize escape or re-animations.

  They would all be detonated simultaneously by some sort of satellite signal. That signal was to be transmitted in about 20 minutes, so basically, if you were in your home in one of these cities, it was pretty much over for you.

  The military even had a back-up plan if a city did not go up in the initial detonation because of poor signal, or some other fluke, the devices had already been programmed to detonate on a secondary schedule 12 hours after the initial signal was set out.

  In retrospect I never did come up with a logical reason for the military to use the rail yards as ground zero. I would have thought that when we started to reclaim or clean up areas the most effective way to bring people and equipment in, or out would have been the railroad.

  The timer was down to 10 minutes and it was time for us to hunker down and wait. We had built a fairly good little bunker using the oil change bay of the garage. The only real concern at this point was how intensely the shockwaves would hit us. I think that because of our location and the terrain we would be okay. I think we were all praying to God that we had it right with our rabbit hole.

  Five minutes to go and what do you do? I kind of laughed, not a roaring laugh, but a chuckle. To all in the bunker I said “Back to the days in the 50’s and early 60’s when I was, a number of us, were in elementary school we were in the era there was the Cold War. The US was very concerned that there would be a nuclear attack by the Russians. As a result, in addition to the old school fire drills we also had bomb drills or nuclear drills.”

  As I told the story, I saw Anne and Nick nodding their heads.

  “In a bomb drill there was an announcement over the school PA telling us that we were having the drill.”

  In the real world I am not sure if we would have been told if it were a drill or was the real thing. I am thinking the former to prevent a school filled with scared little kids panicking.

  “So when we heard the announcement we would all hide under our desks in an almost fetal position. The lights would go out and we would wait. Then the teacher would flick on the lights and we were supposed to duck and cover our heads.” I ended the story.

  In retrospect, with all the windows and the nature of the construction of the schools of the 1950s we would probably have been killed by the broken glass from the shockwave, or toasted by the heat wave. But it was a simpler time and we believed in government and what they said.

  The story took us up to zero hour and suddenly we no longer heard the TV talking heads but just a buzz of static. Next there was a little tremor. Fifteen or twent
y seconds after that there was a series of soft booms from different directions. Then there was nothing.

  We waited, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes….nothing. We had not suffered from the shockwave; the mountains appeared to have dissipated it. We crawled out of our rabbit hole and looked through the glass and saw that nothing really had seemed to change. Being in the glen left us very little visibility of what the larger area looked like. Were there mushroom clouds, fires, or other unseen destruction? I think that each of us wanted to know, yet, there was a sanctity in not knowing, it meant that it had not happened or wasn’t real.

  Finally a number of us piled into two of the trucks and we used Route 143 which ran east west through town and up to high points in the mountains. My group, with Anne, Matt and Margo went to the East. Frank, Teckla, Jan and Lauren went to the West. Nick and Anne’s folks decided that they would stay behind. As much as Mark wanted to go, we had to leave someone behind to guard the fort so to speak. In the time we had been there we had not seen a soul, or a soul-less but who knew if we might get a sudden visitor.

  Looking east from the top of the mountain road there was some smoke from fires many miles away. That would be something that we had to keep an eye on. The idea that there could be forest fires raging was real. One could also still see the mushroom clouds that had blossomed from the directions of Hartford and Springfield. There also seemed to be some clouds further out that could have been from Worcester, Boston or Providence.

  Teckla and her team found their view blocked by higher mountains but could make out the top of one cloud from Albany. The smoke of fires on her side seemed less dramatic, and less likely to have impact on us. But that could have to do with the smoke just not getting up that high. The Hudson River may have acted as a fire break from the Albany blast.

  It was about 40 minutes later that we all got back to the garage / repair shop. We talked about what we had seen, and also what we had not seen, specifically population. There were supposed to be 800 plus people here in Peru, yet we have seen no one. We decided that we should post someone up on that east hill until we had a better idea what the fire situation was. It was a little higher up than the west side so we could kind of keep an eye to that side also.

  We drew straws, actually numbers to determine what the watch slots would be and who teamed with whom. We put the time slots into a hat and took turns picking. There were two tickets for each slot. The shifts were 6 to 10, 10 to 2, 2 to 6 and off. Nick and Teckla teamed up for the first watch. I drew the 10 pm to 2 am slot with Mark as a partner. Matt and Frank teamed up for the 3rd shift. Anne and Lauren drew the 4th shift. The way that we had set it up each team would get a night off as we cycled through. I was not happy with the prospect of Anne and Lauren being out there alone tomorrow night but did not say anything. After getting through the night we would reassess the fire situation and whether to continue, if the fires seemed not closer, we would discontinue the watch. By leaving Anne and Lauren in the cycle it was a confidence builder for them as well as not making a big deal out of something that might not even be an issue.

  We did not include Margo, Jan or Anne’s parents in the draw. Cyril, Anne’s dad, really wanted to be part of the guard, but his eyesight was so bad and he was always cold. We did make him fire warden, to keep the wood stove stoked and burning. It was not much of a task. But it was a task and he accepted it gracefully and actually handled the job with a great deal of vigor.

  March 4th

  One of the things that had worked to our favor so far had been the weather. It was early March but the weather had been reasonably mild for the time of year. It was in the 40s during the day and into the 30s at night.

  Mark and I had taken up our post at 10 PM. and around midnight the wind picked up out of the West and it started to snow. After we had gotten a couple of inches of snow we decided that it was probably best if we just ended the fire watch thinking that the weather would help in curtaining the fires. They had not seemed to be getting closer than when we had first seen them anyway. We were more concerned with our getting stranded on top of the hill, or the way back down.

  When we got back I was still not ready to go right to sleep so I can give you a little rundown on Peru, MA and where we were in the town. The building we occupied was the town maintenance garage. It was a good sized building that easily housed us and our vehicles. About 100 yards to the west was the town hall. According to the sign, the population was 847. It seemed odd looking toward the downtown area to see one traffic light which no longer worked, a gas station, a half dozen homes and a couple of small businesses that it would hold that many folks. It troubled me that there was no one around. It was fairly clear that the town had emptied out; the question was when, and why. I turned in about 2 AM.

  It was a fitful sleep. I was exhausted after all the events of the last week, but there was something that kept creeping into my dreams. It was just there on the edge, waiting, watching and tormenting. I could not see it clearly, but there was a murky figure just out of my dreamscape.

  Sleeping late was not much of an option considering the layout of the building. By 7 AM we all were up and moving about. After a coffee and a shower, we still had hot water; I was actually feeling somewhat civil. Around 8:30 Anne and I took a walk over to the town hall building to see if there were any clues there as to what happened to the population. The wind had died down but we were still getting snow, about 9 inches had fallen. We found that the building was locked up, but there was a little sign in the front door window saying that the people had all moved out to the area of Camp Danbee by the lake because it was safe there. Initially that did not help much because we were unfamiliar with the area.

  In peeking in the window we found a sign that said the police department and the fire chief’s office were housed there. Thinking that there might be something of value inside the town hall, like maps, radios, or who knows what else we found a “broken” window and were able to get in. The power was out so it was pretty dark.

  We started checking though the offices as we walked around the building. In the Town Clerk’s office we found a couple of terrain maps that laid out the area. We also found some information about the town with regards to civil defense, water, and planning. The water for the town was drawn from wells at the individual buildings. The town hall and maintenance building were on the same water line and the pump was located in a small out building. The pump did have provision for manual use as well as a connection to a generator that was located off the back of the maintenance garage.

  In the FD headquarters we discovered that there had been 18 volunteer firemen in town. The fire truck was kept at a small fire station out by the lake front where the bulk of the buildings in town were built. We found nothing else of value there. It seems that this office only housed the fire chief and the dispatcher.

  In the health department office we found some contamination suits and masks. They were really only a kind of Tyvek suit that one might use in a dirty or dusty environment. They were not the kinds that were self-contained with breathing apparatuses. On the main desk Anne found a number of e-mails from the CDC and the Massachusetts State Health Department that had been printed out. A quick look showed that those e-mails were regarding what the government knew so far about the plague. It outlined some information on how the disease spread, what to do with those infected, and other things that needed to be addressed in terms of containment. It also gave their best idea of the origins of the illness. We really did not have time to go over it all so we ended up packing it up and taking it with us to read and study later.

  Finally, there was the Police Office. It was a 10 x 12 room with a desk, a closet and a holding cell. It was darker in this room than the others because the windows had been painted over. I guess that they did not want people peeking in. The room smelled bad. Anne thought it was rotting meat left in the refrigerator. I knew better and using a flashlight we had found, scanned the room. This revealed that there were spots of blood, and bullet holes
in the walls.

  There was a rustling and a growl in the holding cell; it was a burly shape of a man who looked like a biker. His face was partially covered with blood and there were a number of bullet holes in his chest. He moved to the bars and was reaching for us. Anne was freaking out over all this, and I was a little queasy looking at him; imagining the circumstances of what might have happened.

  I said to Anne, “Wait outside the office, our friend here is secure and I need to look around a little.” She did not argue.

  The area showed a scuffle had occurred so there were papers, and items strewn about. On the desk printer was a police case report. The guy in the cell was Arnold Parkins. He had been at the local bar and started acting weird. The cops, two of them, the entire department it turns out had gone to the bar to deal with him. They ended up arresting and transporting him back to the PD with the intentions of letting him sleep it off. The report went on to say that he suddenly went nuts and came after them, growling and trying to bite them. They followed their training and first tried using the Taser him and when that didn’t work they shot him.