Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story

by Holden, J. J.

  Orien, standing behind the open passenger door on the SUV’s far side, said, “But you’re keeping them in check, is that the story?”

  David almost moved his hand to his sidearm, expecting a burst of violence or at least anger.

  Instead, the man shrugged again. “So far. But you know how people with kids are. They’ll do anything to keep those brats from crying at night. ‘Oh, Daddy, I’m so hungry.’ Right? Makes ’em stupid and crazy. Now, I kept them honest so far, but that won’t last long if they can’t get some food. And this looks like a nice, cozy farm town. I don’t think you guys are rolling the trucks out to Safeway anymore, so there’s got to be lots just lying on the vines, right? Or whatever. Maybe you could let us pinch off a little of that extra food. It’ll rot, otherwise, but this way, they’re helping kids. And helping me keep them on the straight and narrow.”

  David had listened with rapt attention. The man certainly had charisma, and courage. He also had a faded neck tattoo with rough, black lines and shading, which barely jutted out above his light jacket collar. That told David the probable reason why the man was made of stone. A convict. That looked every bit like a jail-house tat, and David had seen enough of those to tell the difference. It wasn’t a guarantee, but “convict” fit everything he’d seen.

  Orien began to protest, but David held his hand out at him and replied to the man, “I’ll ask. Either way, I’ll come back and let you know. Fair enough?”

  “What’s fair got to do with anything? It’s enough. But I’m telling you, these are family men. Well, I guess women can shoot straight, too, these days.”

  David grimaced before he could stop himself.

  The man’s smile returned. “New world, new rules, I guess. Point is, I think I can keep them from turning into a mob of looters until you get back. Might want to hurry, though.”

  With that, he turned his back to David and Orien, then walked back to his waiting people. They closed in around him, all their mouths moving at once.

  Orien said, “No disrespect, but are you kidding me? That guy just threatened to raid this town if we don’t cough up food and meet their demands, and you want to go ask nicely for that Cobi guy to cave in?”

  David let out a long breath, feeling much of his tension flowing away with it. He’d make the mayor—HOA president, whatever—see reason. He had to. There were kids there, and where there were children involved, there were desperate people. “Nope. If there’s a fight, people will die, maybe on Weldona’s side too. Cobi seems to be on his own side, but at least his interests lie with Weldona’s.”

  They climbed back into the SUV, and once the creaky doors had shut, Orien asked, “Could this have something to do with the shooting? No one could blame you if it did. That had to be rough. Watching it was rough enough.”

  David’s head whipped around, mouth open to snap at Orien, but he caught himself. That reaction alone told him Orien had struck a nerve. He got into gear and slowly pulled away, then said, “I don’t know. I’ll think about that later. Right now isn’t the time.”

  But regardless of the timing, David spent the ride to the town hall with his thoughts twisted up over Orien’s question.

  29

  Cobi stepped out from behind the podium, and his voice shot up, both in volume and pitch. “Are you crazy? You want to start handing out food like candy at a refugee camp, while I figure out how to keep the whole boat afloat. Is that it?”

  David spread his feet shoulder-width apart and clasped his hands behind his back, staring straight ahead, a habitual shield against ass-chewings like this one. It helped him not to deck the little turd. “No, sir. This is one group, and not only do some of them have rifles, most of them have children. I do not imagine they will walk past all our food on the vine without taking some, not when their kids are crying from hunger. Do you have children, sir?”

  “Do you? No, I don’t. The people of Weldona are my family, my legacy. Not these strangers making weak threats against us. Weldonans are not the kind of people who bend over every time someone demands they grab the soap.”

  There was a murmur of approval from the people in the hall, watching the exchange intently. Well, they might have an interest in the outcome, but they also were probably getting a damn kick out of watching the outsider cop get put in his place. David suppressed a growl.

  Orien took a physical step forward. “But, sir—”

  “No, dammit,” Cobi shouted. “We aren’t a charity. We have to feed our kids before we worry about millions of people outside this fantastic town of ours. It won’t be fantastic for long if we give everything we have to everyone who passes by.”

  David put a restraining arm across Orien’s chest and matched his gaze until his trainee slumped and stepped back. He withdrew his arm and turned back to the podium. “It’s because you’re the mayor that I brought this to you, sir. You say you want to help Weldona? Start by not provoking a gunfight with strangers who just want to feed their kids. We can’t feed everyone, but we also don’t have to. And food’s rotting on the damn vines out there, with no workers to pick it, no trucks to ship it—”

  “I’m well aware of the circumstances, Officer Kelley.”

  That threw David for a half-second, and he paused. But this was too important to let himself be bullied by some piss-ant hillbilly bureaucrat. “Then you know we could feed them all and send them on their way without violence, without taking one bite off Weldona’s tables, and without risking someone else getting killed. Maybe one of our own.”

  “Our own? Now you’re one of us? The people here voted for me, officer. They did that because, no matter what it costs me, I look out for them, not for strangers. Like you. Now, you will go back there, but to tell them they’d better go around, because we don’t bow to threats. We rise above them. If they want to start a fight, well, there’s a lot more of us, better armed, and we will damn well use those guns to protect our property and our rights. Now, I have actual work to do here. This conversation is over, Kelley.”

  Cobi turned away and began to speak in quiet tones to a farmer standing nearby, and pointedly turned his back toward David and Orien.

  David stared at the back of his head, imagining how loudly that punk would cry if David started tagging him with his ASP extensible baton…

  “Come on, boss,” Orien said, quietly enough that no one else would likely hear him. “You tried. Let’s go, before you make it worse than it already is.”

  David snorted. “Ha. It’s hard to imagine worse than this.” Before his partner could reply, he spun on his heels and strode toward the exit, toward his SUV, toward peace and sanity, leaving Orien to follow or not. At that point, David would have been okay with either.

  Before he got the vehicle in Drive, Orien had climbed into the passenger seat. It seemed he was going to come along.

  Probably a good thing, David considered, given his mood. “Thanks for coming,” he said, only half meaning it. “I need to drive around a bit and clear my head,” he added, meaning every word of it, as he threw the SUV into Drive.

  Instead of cruising through every street in town, as usual, he instead headed north out of the tiny town, onto a deserted country road.

  Orien asked, “Where are we headed?”

  David didn’t answer for a moment. It took that long to gather the will to reply—all he really wanted was silence—but at last, he said, “I don’t patrol the outlying areas enough. Too many miles on the gas they give me. But a trip out and back, half the gas they gave me for each way, I can do. Once in a while. They’ll give me another allotment tomorrow, or they won’t have a patrol car.”

  Orien grunted acknowledgment as fields of apple trees seemed to pass them by going the other direction, and just looked out the window, watching.

  Just before a bend in the road, David saw movement and the force of long habit made him take a closer look as they approached. A middle-aged man in overalls, wearing a straw hat against the sun—brutal, even at five o’clock in the afternoon,
this time of year—had a giant wrench held in both hands, over his head, and swung with what looked like all his might to bring the wrench crashing into some big, metal tube with a domed head.

  Orien chuckled. “That farmer seems to really hate that metal tube. Maybe it screwed his wife.”

  “Hey now,” David said, his voice edged with warning. “Don’t be so quick to judge.” Then, he added, “After all, that pipe thing probably has rock-solid abs and never has to explain how ‘it happens to everyone.’”

  Orien laughed, and pointed up ahead. “There’s the entrance. Gate’s open.”

  David pulled in, slowing down to creep along the gravel frontage road leading back toward the farmer. They pulled up to the pipe, which stood about ten feet beyond the gravel road, maybe twenty feet from the “main” road, such as it was.

  The farmer stood, planting his hands into his lower back, and stretched as he turned to face them. When David and Orien climbed out and walked up—David made sure to smile, to allay any fears the man might have—the farmer said, “Hello there, officers. I heard we had a new sheriff in town, as they say. Didn’t do much to keep them kids from spray-painting my barn yesterday, though, didja?”

  David’s polite smile turned into a grin. “Damn kids and their spray paint. In my day, they used dirt and sticks, or just did donuts on your lawn in cars stolen from their parents.”

  The man stopped stretching and peered hard at David for two seconds, before his grumpy expression exploded into a sloppy grin. “Well, now, I’m pleased to meet you. Name’s Jones. Joe Jones. You’re David, and your partner would be Ryan, am I right? So, what can I do for you, Officer David and Officer David’s trusty sidekick?”

  Orien’s expression soured. “I’m going to the car.”

  David and Joe watched him stomp back to the car until he’d climbed in and slammed the door. Then, David turned back to the farmer. “His name’s Orien. Actually, I saw you attacking that big metal thing with a wrench, and I thought I’d offer you a proper sledgehammer, if you want to kill it so badly. I carry one in the trunk for busting open doors.”

  “Probably works. But I’m not really trying to kill it, though I’d love to. This is my wellhead, to get water from the well into a pretty big tank. It keeps the tank under air pressure so I get good flow at the tap. The farm supply is fine, but the house is drier than…never mind. Not appropriate. But it’s not pumping air into the tank like it should, and I can’t make heads or tails of the problem. Got a bit frustrated.”

  “But you do have some flow?”

  “Yeah. It’ll move the water, but it won’t build up the tank pressure. The bitch won’t blow.”

  “That would be frustrating, yeah. My ex was like that.” David waited for the farmer to quit laughing, then continued, “But I might have a workaround for it. The glorified air pump seems to be running, so this sounds like the tank’s valve gasket blew out. I’ll keep an eye out for a replacement.”

  “Damn.” Joe threw his rag at the wellhead. “No more showers for me, I guess. That sucks.”

  David looked around the farm. The tank was on lower ground, level with the house it connected to, which stood a mere fifty feet behind the gravel road. With no air pressure in the tank, the wellhead would have to run continually to give him any water at all. Wellheads didn’t pump air quickly to pressurize the tank. It wasn’t meant to, or they’d have foregone the tank altogether. It slowly built tank pressure, but the tank sounded like the problem. A blown gasket would let it leak air faster than the pump could pressurize it.

  A quick glance told him Joe didn’t have a water tower to tap into, though it would have been convenient. Those were meant for fighting fires where there were no hydrants, but one supply of water under pressure was pretty much like the next, even if the tower would have used gravity rather than compressed air to provide water pressure.

  David cocked his head, an idea coming to him. “I might have a workaround. Let me think.”

  “If you can, sure.”

  He planted one elbow into his other palm and brought his free hand up to rub his chin, as he looked around the farm. While this area was laser-level, two hills rose up behind the house, offering maybe two-hundred feet of elevation at the higher peak. The two hills abutted each other. The rest of the land was hilly, rather than flat, dedicated to cows from what David could see from his vantage. All the flat land was covered by row crops.

  It was the abutting hills that drew his attention. They’d withstand tremendous pressure, one supporting the other, and given the terrain in that direction, it was possible that more hills backed those two, even if they were shorter and so couldn’t be seen from his vantage point.

  After a long silence, Joe said, “I’m hyper as a squirrel on a triple-shot mocha at one of those fancy hippie coffee shops. You’re killing me with this silence crap, mister officer-sir.”

  David nodded, slowly, as he thought through the problem. “Well, it seems to me you have a perfectly good pump, at least for moving the water. But even if it’s the pump that’s the problem, it still can move the water, even if it won’t pressurize the tank with air.”

  “For all the good that does me.” Joe spat into the dirt, near the wellhead.

  “It might. See, water doesn’t have to be stored in tanks, and water pressure doesn’t just come from compressed air. Gravity-fed systems can have great pressure, depending on the height of the drop between the water and the outlet. Back in Roman times, before the Dark Ages killed the knowledge of it in most places, they’d take water straight out of the aqueducts and let it pour into pipes that started out wide, but got slowly narrower as they dropped down. At the bottom, pressure could get high enough to use the water coming out as a torture device.”

  “Charming. But, I don’t have a tank to connect to.”

  “Oh, but you very well might,” David said, a sly smile accompanying the wink he gave Farmer Joe. “The hills behind your house, how high do they rise up?”

  Joe scratched his head, raising one eyebrow. “One’s two-hundred foot, the other’s two-fifty. Give or take a foot or two.”

  “And, how much food are you sitting on, unable to harvest?” David’s thoughts churned with a budding idea.

  “All of it. Three hundred acres or so, all heavy-planted crops. I let the whole thing go fallow every three or four years, instead of a third of it at a time, or whatever. Well, not really fallow. I found I can plant grains there, those years, and the winter wheat or reeds choke out the weeds until the spring harvest. Then, I till the chaff that’s left into the soil before spring planting. That cut my fertilizer costs by a good twenty percent.”

  David let out a low whistle of appreciation. Fertilizers were a big expense for farmers. Well, not for Fran, according to her at least, but for most farmers. “Well, I figured out how to solve your problem, though it’ll sound weird. It’ll kill two birds with one stone, too.”

  “Weird’s fine, so long as it works. I hate birds, so go ahead and kill them.”

  David grinned. Screw the HOA president, him and the horse he rode in on. “This is a two-parter. First up, you need labor, right? I got a group of people who’d work hard for food. If they don’t work, show them the door, but in the meantime, let them camp in the fields across the road, and pick your produce the rest of the time. Feed them off what they pick.”

  “That would be great, but I don’t got a market to ship it to, and no trucks to do the shipping.” Joe pursed his lips to one side. “But that fixes one problem. Seasonal workers on my farm would sure get a rise out of ol’ Hank. That bastard got a fancy new tractor this spring, and loves rubbing my nose in it. Ha! It doesn’t even work, now.”

  After a polite chuckle, David said, “That’s definitely a bonus. But I wasn’t thinking so much ‘seasonal worker’ as I was ‘permanent farmhand.’ Without anywhere to ship your food, you’ll have more of it than you know what to do with, so feed these guys until next harvest with it, to make sure you have hands to pick it next harves
t time.”

  Joe frowned, eyes narrowing. “You don’t think this C-M-E crap will last until then, do you? Seems…stupid, frankly.”

  “I do. But if it doesn’t, you just send them on their way. If things are still screwed up by then, though, you guarantee you have those farmhands in stock—and not your neighbor, Hank.”

  “Well… That would piss off Cobi, which is a definite plus. I know he’s your boss, but your boss is a prick. Just like Hank.”

  “Say what? I mean, he’s not my boss, but you want to irritate him? I thought he was universally admired, around here.”

  “Ha. Shows what you know. He keeps the city folks happy, but he only pays lip service to us farmers, and we’re the whole reason there’s any people here, at all.”

  David shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it a city, but I get your point. Just consider that another bonus.”

  “Okay,” Joe said, nodding. “I’ll think about it, talk to the missus about it, and let you know.”

  David smiled. “I hear it’s tough being in a marriage where the partner is the one who calls all the shots.”

  Joe grimaced. “She doesn’t. I call the farm shots, she calls the house shots. I figure this scheme of yours will affect the home, too, seeing as how she’ll be doing all the cooking.”

  David shook his head, emphatically. “No way. Give them a metal barrel to cut in half and let them figure out how to cook it. Then, you don’t have to wait to decide if you want your crops to rot or to get picked.”

  Joe’s shoulders slumped. “That’s a relief. I wasn’t looking forward to asking her to cook for a bunch of strangers. And a woman I know, Fran—she’s both a farmer and a townie—talks all the time about some earth-bag house crap. I’ll talk to her about it, and see about getting them roofs over their heads, come winter.”

  “Excellent. I’ll tell them right away and make introductions.” David clasped Joe on the shoulder, smiling. “I’ll be happier than you know, to tell Cobi myself.”