EMP Retaliation (Dark New World, Book 6) - An EMP Survival Story

by J. J. Holden

  Nestor nodded. “Absolutely. That’s almost as high a priority as this. Damn, two hundred people control the food production for thousands, and they’re Empire groupies. Rotten luck for us. Our presence will be rotten luck for them, however.”

  “The Boiling Spring leaders had said they’d burn the fields and stocks if Carlisle tried to take any of ‘their’ territory, even while they gouged Carlisle for three times what the food ought to cost.”

  Nestor grinned, “We’re going to surprise the hell out of ’em and let them know it isn’t the fields that will burn.”

  Ratbone hummed happily. No doubt he was thinking of the joy he’d take in torching the village, Nestor mused. Well, that was despicable, of course, but useful. They were in a war, after all. Nestor assumed he’d have to let the Other out to take control while the burning was going on, since the bastard wasn’t bothered by such things. Terrible and tragic things seemed to feed the Other, but then he’d sleep awhile afterward, leaving Nestor in peace.

  * * *

  A small crowd of a dozen Lititz people arrived shortly after lunch and had been escorted to the “Complex,” the area where most of the Clan’s tiny earthbag houses were built into a small fortress-like walled circle. The Lititz people brought a man with them, bound and gagged.

  Frank recognized the bound man as one of the refugees who had passed through the day before, a few of whom he had allowed to camp outside the north food forest with instructions to leave quickly. He gave them 48 hours to trade and rest, and had generously refilled their water bottles and added more to the group’s meager stockpile. Water bottle trash could be found by the thousands almost everywhere, so that had cost the Clan nothing.

  Cassy had approved of Frank’s decisions, but of course, that was probably why she’d made him the next Clan leader. That, and just to irritate him. He glanced at Cassy, who arrived right before he had, but she seemed content to let him deal with it. Appropriate, since it showed everyone that the transition of his leadership was real, and amiable.

  Frank approached the incoming group as they exited “the Jungle.” They were led by a Clanner for safety, to avoid the many boobytraps scattered throughout the intensive gardening grow beds. The Jungle’s grow beds were fecund enough to provide the reason for the area’s name.

  “What’s going on?” Frank demanded with a scowl. “Who are you, and why is this man tied up?”

  One of the Lititz dozen, a plain-looking brunette woman in her late twenties, said, “I’m Marice, and this piece of garbage killed someone in Lititz arguing over a trade. The bastard ran, but we rode him down and captured him. Instead of stringing him up like we would any of our own, we figured you’d want to know. And I hope it shows you what your stupid generosity to refugees has brought us.” She spat on the ground. “You let them in. With all due respect, Frank, you’re responsible for the damages he caused.”

  “Why bring him here, Marice? I hope not just to rub something in my face. You could have resolved this in Lititz without disturbing our work routine. If he’d committed some hanging offense here, we wouldn’t have brought him to Lititz to deal with him.”

  “You gave him and his group shelter. We didn’t want to string him up without you knowing about it. Plus, we thought maybe stringing him up could upset some apple cart for you, so we decided to bring him here to make sure it was okay to hang him. It’s a courtesy. Rubbing your nose in it is just a cherry on top.”

  “But again—why bring him personally when you could have sent a messenger?” Frank felt a mixture of concern, irritation, and bemusement.

  “We figured since Lititz expects damages, you’d want a chance to question him before deciding whether to make payment arrangements up front or make a counter-offer.”

  “What exactly are you asking for in terms of reparations?”

  Marice shrugged. “What’s due. We’re asking for a total of ten thousand man-hours of work over the next ten to twelve years. It’s what he cost us.”

  That caught Cassy’s attention, Frank noted. Super. So now this would be a test as well as a challenge…

  “That’s twenty hours weekly, basically forever. Ten years is a long time, these days.”

  Cassy muttered something about being glad she didn’t have to deal with conflict resolution anymore. Right now, Frank kind of envied her.

  “You’re kidding.” Frank didn’t sound amused, and his jaw was clenched. “How on Earth can you ask us for that much? Clanners didn’t kill your man.”

  “True, but you did bring those people in and let them stay awhile.”

  “We don’t know anything about the victim. Maybe he wasn’t worth such an extreme number of hours. He may have been in ill health. And there’s no guarantee that he would live that long. Not these days.”

  “No guarantee he wouldn’t have.” Marice shrugged indifferently.

  “Your claim is absurd. Or do you really simply want to provoke Clanholme? A test, maybe?” Frank found himself having to concentrate to keep his hands from clenching into fists.

  Marice looked relaxed, seemingly heedless of his obvious tension, and he decided that had just been a first offer. Haggling had returned to the world in the absence of currency and global supply networks.

  She said, “I figured you’d say that. I have been instructed to let you know that we can go as low as eight-thousand man hours of labor. Or if you prefer, an equivalent amount of production, presuming we agree to the items, of course.”

  That confirmed his suspicion, and Frank let his shoulders slump. The tension went out of his jaw, and he forced his whole posture to relax.

  “That your man died in a dispute with this person is truly tragic, and I’m sure the details will only be more so.”

  “Thank you for saying so.”

  Frank nodded. “But with that said, I must tell you that the Clan can’t accept either personal or collective responsibility for the actions of a non-Clan member, engaged in non-Clan activities, and outside of Clan territory.”

  “Even though they were only here to commit this murder because you sanctioned them to stay?” She eyed Frank warily, then, and looked uncertain for the first time since her arrival.

  “We’d be worse than foolish to accept such responsibility when it isn’t ours to take. Of course, we’ll be happy to escort the refugees you rejected out of the Confederation when their allotted time is up.”

  Marice raised her eyebrow. Hesitantly, she said, “You’d need to take them east to the Confederation-New America border and ensure none of them stay behind.”

  Frank nodded and smiled. “Oh, absolutely. We were saddled with that responsibility when they approached the Clan instead of some other group. That should serve your need to ensure this doesn’t happen again with anyone from this group.”

  And, Frank thought, it would make sure the hotheads in Lititz didn’t let a vengeful mob string up all three-dozen refugees. Those poor people had come from the fracturing Empire, fleeing a low-intensity guerrilla war throughout the eastern region that bordered Confed territory. The quality of life in the Confederation had inspired many to try to throw off the Empire’s yoke, or flee to greener pastures in the Confederation, and a vengeful lynch mob could have derailed that encouraging trend, just as it had begun to gather momentum.

  Marice slowly nodded as though considering the offer, then said, “We’ll be wanting that too, of course. But the Clan’s decision to host those Empire bastards led to this. And ten-thousand hours is what your decision has cost Lititz. What do you propose?”

  Frank allowed his features to shift into a sad, tired expression. “I’m so sorry to disagree, but I think that man’s decision to kill someone, and your own lax security, are what cost Lititz a man. The Clan isn’t responsible for either of those things.”

  Marice smiled. Frank eyed her carefully, trying to see whether it was genuine, but she didn’t give him any tell-tale signs. She said, “I thought that would be your position. And, since we have no real laws or anything to govern
disputes between Confederation members, we’re in untested waters. So make a counter offer.”

  Frank froze for half a second. He sensed he’d fallen into a trap of some sort. He knew maybe there was still a way to resolve this problem before it became a real schism between the two groups. “It’s simple. We appeal to the Confed Chancellor to hear our dispute and resolve it.”

  Cassy winced at that but remained silent, and Frank suppressed a grin at her expression.

  “Look, Marice,” Frank said, “this isn’t going to be the last time a dispute crops up between Confed members. The Clan likes Lititz. But this is an important issue. We can get a process laid out now, when the stakes are low, so that down the road we’ll have a clear way to resolve our differences quickly. What do you think?”

  “Well,” Marice said, “If the Chancellor is willing, I can take the offer back to the Lititz Council to see what they think.”

  “Fine, let’s appeal to the Chancellor to figure this out.” Frank turned toward Cassy and raised an eyebrow.

  Cassy said, “I could appoint a panel or resolution court or something to deal with disputes, if everyone agrees to abide by the Confederation’s decision.”

  “If our leaders agree,” Marice said, “then yes, we’d agree to be bound by their decision. Maybe it’s even appropriate that the Clan and Lititz—the two Confed founding members—should be the ones to take the lead in resolving these issues.”

  Marice looked thrilled, and Frank wondered if he’d been manipulated into volunteering to give up jurisdiction in resolving the problem, but what he’d said was true. The Confederation needed a precedent. Not every dispute would be as clear-cut as this one.

  “Very well,” Cassy said. “The Confederation Chancellor agrees to act as arbiter of this dispute between Lititz and the Clan. Frank, Marice—let’s go and talk about how to handle this.”

  - 3 -

  1030 HOURS - ZERO DAY +338

  FRANK STOOD WITH his back straight, up against one post, and gazed southeast out to the next post fifty yards away. Another fifty yards beyond that stood one of the teens with a thin pole. Frank tapped the air horn once, telling the teen to move to his right a bit. When the three poles lined up, Frank gave the air horn one long blast, and his teen assistant replaced the pole with a posthole digger, and began to dig the hole.

  Frank turned to the kid next to him, who looked to be perhaps fourteen. “That’s all there is to it. Line them up like that so they run straight. Go two hundred yards out, turn ninety degrees to the right, and go another two hundred yards. Repeat. When you’re done, we’ll have the key posts set for the wattle-and-daub crews to finish out the new paddock.”

  The kid nodded, radiating excitement at having such an important responsibility assigned to him, and by the Clan leader himself no less. Frank played along, gravely reminding the boy of the importance of a precise alignment.

  In reality, it hardly mattered so long as the wall was roughly straight. Once the wattle fencing was up, and daubed, they’d have a walled-in paddock for grazing some cows coming in soon from the Gap. The hilltop pens currently in use were woefully inadequate, now, so they planned to turn that space over entirely to the pigs, ten more of which were also due in from the Gap.

  Having delegated laying out the initial key posts, Frank headed in toward the HQ. On the way there to meet up with Cassy, he thought about Michael’s desire to make the paddock walls from earthbags. Frank had vetoed that, as it would have taken too much labor and been too hard to add gates later, too hard to move as events dictated. Wattle and daub together made sturdy walls from easily sourced materials—sticks and mud—and it wasn’t nearly as labor-intensive. The teens could lay the sticks, and they and the younger children could daub the walls.

  Tasks like that gave the younger Clanners something useful to do besides pestering their parents, now that planting was done. There was little else to do beyond feeding animals and gathering early crops from the coldframes and lightweight greenhouses.

  The latter were made of PVC and clear plastic sheeting, built with two sections, one for plants and one for chickens. The chicken droppings went through the flooring into a dug trench, where droppings and spent nesting straw were turned into worm castings. Those in turn were added to the plants in the greenhouse’s other half. The carbon dioxide from the chickens made for healthy plants, and the chickens ate the pests that went for succulent greens. Everything at Clanholme was interconnected, adding to the farm’s productivity in more than one way.

  When Frank reached Cassy’s house, he glanced at the digital clock. It was one of those huge supermarket clocks, visible for quite some distance. Ethan had rigged it with a Raspberry Pi module to record the time at Solar noon each day, and that night it adjusted its time based on that. Every day, the time was set to actual noon, ignoring obsolete timezones. It also made it easy for everyone’s biological clocks to tune in to natural rhythms. Without trains and planes, timezones were irrelevant to the flow of life now. It was no longer “a small world.”

  The clock was a nice touch, though he knew Ethan had only put it together out of boredom one afternoon. Frank had made a big deal of it though, both to excite the Clanners and to give Ethan the “gold star” he seemed to need from time to time to stay motivated. Managing people was as much about knowing how to inspire individuals as it was about organizing tasks. Frank took some pride in his reputation as a master at the art of keeping it all ticking along.

  He reached her door and knocked. Cassy called out for him to enter, and he stepped inside after wiping his feet. His foot, rather—he sometimes forgot he only had one foot now. Frank spared a moment to curse the memory of that psycho, Peter, who had chopped his foot off as nothing more than a warning to the Clan.

  As Frank entered the house, he saw Cassy on her customary recliner, a laptop on her lap. She looked up and smiled.

  “Howdy, Cassy. Plotting evil destruction?”

  She grinned. “No, just ordering a pizza from Blackjack’s.”

  “I wish.” Frank had forgotten what pizza tasted like, which bothered him more than it should. “The new paddock fencing is underway. Should be set up within the week, though I don’t know how long the kiddies will take to cover it with mud.” Dropping into portentous Obi-Wan Kenobi tones, he added, “The mudfight potential is great in those ones.”

  “Daub,” Cassy corrected. “It’s daub.”

  “Dobbie has no master. Dobbie is a free elf…” Frank said, grinning.

  Cassy grinned, too. “Fine, jerkface. Mud then. Anyway, what’s up? Need something?”

  Frank motioned toward the couch with one eyebrow raised, and Cassy nodded. He sat down, parked his crutch, and felt relief to be off his foot. “Ahhh. That’s the ticket.”

  He tilted his head back and let out a deep sigh. Then he said, “First, I wanted to let you know that Lititz is happy with your handling of the trial for that incident with the refugee killing one of their people. They would have liked to get more than one quarter of what they had asked for, but it turns out they hadn’t expected you and your Tribunal to rule against the Clan at all.”

  “Panel. And we had to set an example of fairness. You did allow the refugees to stay camped out for a couple days, so you did share the responsibility. Sort of. Lititz took it as your stamp of approval, anyway. I know that part’s pretty debatable. And for the record, I would have let them stay, too.”

  “I know. I won’t argue the point anymore. I think that having those refugees work off the hours themselves was brilliant. Not only will they fulfill all those hours in just a month, those refugees get food and protection while they do it. It’s humanitarian, and also practical.”

  Cassy nodded, smiling at the compliment. She set down her laptop and said, “That was a big part of the reason for the ruling, and Lititz knew it. It also had the effect of getting the refugees to police themselves better. Have you heard how well behaved the troublemakers have been for the last few days?”

  “Well, I
sure heard about the black eyes and busted lips on a couple of them. A nice unintended consequence.”

  Cassy grinned. “Who said it was unintended? If they’re going to be in Lititz for a month, I can’t have them being unruly to their hosts. But get this—we’re seeing way too many refugees from the Empire flowing our way lately. I’ve been considering how to address it, and I’m thinking of setting up more Clanholds.”

  Frank thought about that for a moment, then nodded. He considered the ramifications. Despite the risk of enemy agents infiltrating, that could hardly be stopped with or without Cassy’s plan going into effect. “It would indeed solve multiple problems.”

  “Since my permaculture methods mean labor is only intensive during sowing and reaping, we Clanners have plenty of man-hours available to help settle new groups in, handle Hold leader duties, and so on. Especially after the summer fruits were gathered.”

  She was right, but shop talk wasn’t the real reason for his visit. Best get to it. Frank said, “So, I’ve taken other steps to deal with the increasing refugee crisis.”

  Cassy tilted her head and said, “Crisis? Is it really that bad?”

  Frank nodded, pursing his lips. “Yeah. There are more every day, and they’re taking up our resources despite our efforts. They don’t contribute much—they don’t know how—and that’s another reason I liked your ruling on the Lititz thing. In the meantime, however, these other refugees are everyone’s problem, and we don’t have enough surplus to keep supporting them all.” He fidgeted with his crutch, which he had leaned against the couch next to him. “Anyway, this solution stacks functions,” he said, using Cassy’s permaculture term.

  “Okay. Stop beating around the bush. What’s your grand plan?”

  “I’ve negotiated with some of their leaders, and we’ve made a deal you should know about.”