by Schow, Ryan
His personal list was long, and he managed to get most everything, but he’d missed some things, a few of them essentials. He couldn’t get paracord, and he found an emergency blanket, but it wasn’t a tight pack like the Mylar one he was looking for. He got bug spray wipes, but he couldn’t find a poncho or water purification tablets. He did have a small container of bleach—so he could purify the water, if need be—but hopefully things didn’t get that desperate. He found a pack of emergency masks, but couldn’t find Latex gloves, and he had only one lighter instead of the three he was looking for.
This was the wild west, though, which meant what he needed, if he didn’t have it, he could take it from someone else. And if they didn’t have it, he would go house to house until he found it. He had a hunting knife, but not a multi-tool knife; and he had no camp shovel, but they were able to find a small potting shovel which—if push came to shove—would suck, but it would work.
It was like that. The things they wanted, the things they absolutely needed, and the things they needed that they didn’t have.
One catastrophe at a time, he told himself.
The point was, with what they could round up, both as The Resistance and as moles in the Chicom Army, they used the lead time they had to get what they could, and no one was crying over squat when the lights went out.
Quan knew it was go time, and they were all ready to go.
That night, after the rest stop ambush, they passed through the LA checkpoints with little suspicion using Quan’s Chicom ID. Ultimately, Los Angeles was a nightmare to get through, even though they were taking the outskirts on a pre-planned route. They knew it would be like this. At least with the darkness, for a while, they found a sort of quiet the former world had never known. It was almost peaceful.
When Longwei came over the two-way, he sounded tired. “I’m drifting off, Quan, over.”
“What do you want to do?” Quan asked.
Before Longwei could answer, Steve said, “I can drive. Just put someone in the cab with me to talk to. Otherwise I’ll be nodding off, too.”
“You want to just hop in with Longwei?” Quan asked.
“Not if he’s sleeping,” Steve said. “I need someone to talk to. Someone to keep me company.”
Keying the two-way, Quan said, “I’m going to pull over. We’ll take five, let the troops stretch, then Steve will take your spot. You can get some shut-eye in here.”
When they made the switch, Longwei got back in the truck with Quan and settled in. They got back on the road in no time, and without incident.
Quan expected his new friend to get some sleep, but he was wide awake. “I expected this to be worse,” Longwei said.
Grinning, he said, “We didn’t go right through it. We took the long way around.”
The Resistance fighter stole a glance. Suppressing a smile, Longwei said, “Given the choice between being long and not being long, I’ll take long all day.”
Quan laughed, and the night pressed on in silence, Longwei finally falling asleep.
A few times they ran into petty issues, mostly people out at night, looting, traveling in packs through the darkness. A few of the transients tried to run the trucks off the road, or flag them down in the freeway. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it was going to get, but Quan felt how on edge everyone was becoming after the EMP. Twice the guys in the back were forced to fire on a pack of morons coming through LA. In the end, they killed four of them. Quan personally popped off a warning shot when a woman wouldn’t get out of the roadway. When they finally merged onto Interstate 5, it was smooth sailing from there on out.
They drove through most of the night, passing a few other Chicom vehicles headed here or there. When the needle on the gas tank began to flirt with the bottom, Quan pulled over and emptied two five gallon cans of gas into the truck, then proceeded to the nearest exit. Nothing was open of course, but there were abandoned cars everywhere. The team cut fuel lines and siphoned several tanks of gas rather quickly, topping off both the tanks and the on board gas cans. After that, they were back on the freeway and making good time.
“Tell me about the power plants,” Longwei said.
“The Chicoms have been planning this for years now. The generators and all accompanying equipment were completed last year. We thought the Chicoms were going to strike then. It was still too early, though. They didn’t have the President. With him out of the way, the Chicoms were able to trigger the EMP. Now, if we don’t install the new generators before the old generators run out of gas, the fuel rods will melt down and you’ll have the zombie apocalypse. Total nuclear meltdown. And if by some miracle you survive, your kids will be born with three heads and they’ll be called Really, Really Longwei, instead of just Longwei, which will feel like the Shortwei to two of your kids’ three heads.”
Longwei gave him a consolation laugh, but the subject was far too grim to give in to joking. Quan continued.
“Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is the closest plant, but Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona is the most critical. The Arizona team will need the right balance of both force and diplomacy to do what they need to do.”
“I don’t envy that team,” Longwei said.
“If they fail, all of this fails,” Quan said. “So yeah, I don’t envy them either.”
“What about Washington?” Longwei asked.
“That’s Colombia Generating Station near Richland. Even though President Hu ordered it to be decommissioned, there’s an advance team coming in to assess it, if anything, for its proximity to Yale.”
“Do you know anything about this power plant?” Longwei asked.
“It’s got an early track record for having complications, but they cleaned up their act enough to double their work load. Some people say stabilization and decommissioning is the safest thing to do, but there are those who see the start of the new Chicom Empire in Washington.”
“How many reactors are in the EMP zone?” Longwei asked.
“Only three,” Quan said. “That’s why only the western US was hit with an EMP. There would be no way to contain a meltdown in the eastern half of the United States if you had to transport the one hundred and fifty-five ton step-down transformers through a freaking wasteland.”
“So EMPs are not being used there?” Longwei asked. “Because it’s been a topic of discussion amongst all of us.”
“Most of the west coast reactors were decommissioned and successfully shut down more than a decade ago. New, self-sufficient power plants have taken the place of the old ones, and power is delivered just to the cities now, not the outlying areas. That’s part of the Smart Cities Initiative the state governments rolled out in the last decade. The EMPs took out critical components of these power plants, but the effects aren’t going to be toxic the way Fukushima was toxic, or Chernobyl.”
“What else is coming from China?” Longwei asked.
“Food, medical supplies, weapons and vehicles. Driving this big piece of crap, I’d see why they’d want to decommission it and get something from this century. They’re a bitch to drive, all hard plastics and metal surfaces, and they’re loud as hell.”
“But they’re EMP proof,” Longwei said.
“That they are.”
“What do you think is in the supply truck?” Quan said.
“Crates full of weapons and food, along with both field and medical supplies. The usual. It’s going to be things you see in disaster relief, along with the kinds of gear you’d expect to see in the staging of a strong military offensive.”
“What about Washington?” he asked.
“The ports in Seattle and Tacoma are smaller,” Quan said. “There are barges headed there now, but they’re much smaller than the ones docking in LA and Long Beach. I expect these boats to have the normal fare, plus all the luxuries China has to offer.”
“Is that because of this supposed paradise they’re building in Yale?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it exactly?” Lo
ngwei asked.
“It’s situated between Portland and Mount Saint Helens in a lush valley bordered by three hillsides and the Yale Lake.”
“If they’re anything like the Nazis,” Longwei said, eyes forward on the dark road unfolding ahead, “they’ll build their bases into the hillsides.”
“While the city itself looks completely normal,” Quan said, completing Longwei’s sentence, “just like any other town.”
“So before all that happens, they have to bring in the base power foundation, which is an EMP proof power plant that’s self-cooling and not dependent on electricity, right?”
“That’s my guess,” Quan said. “Another reason for choosing Yale is that it’s next to the rock-fill hydro-electric Yale Dam.”
Shaking his head, almost like he was discouraged that the Chicoms had every directive mapped out, Longwei said, “They haven’t missed anything, have they?”
Quan said, “They haven’t factored in people like you and me.”
He let the statement roll off him, almost like he couldn’t give the notion any credence. Instead, he said, “So when is their rollout?”
“Once the Columbia Generating Station is stabilized, and once they figure out what they’re going to do with it, they’ll decommission part or all of it,” Quan answered. “In the meantime, like I said earlier, they’ll level California, and then they’ll do the same to Oregon. With Washington, however, they need to preserve some of its key infrastructure, as well as its environment. Tacoma will be the main port, but Interstate 5 is critical for transport to and from Yale.”
“Will they have any other utopias, or just the one in Washington?”
“I think just Washington for now,” Quan said. Longwei fell quiet, so Quan continued. “This is the culmination of a decades long project that’s being implemented now. Think of this as year one.”
“Why do this, though?” Longwei asked, clearly perplexed. “Why not find a place in mainland China to occupy? Why destroy everything here?”
“The United States represented the last bastion of true freedom. Communism isn’t about freedom. You can’t make your own decisions under their rule. That’s not freedom. On a wider scale though, the US was the last piece on the chessboard keeping them from world domination. Conquering the US will be the greatest defeat in human history. So the idea is to destroy the great capitalist cities, kill most of the defiant American population, then let the earth swallow up their bodies, their ideology, their ways of life.”
“That’s horrendous,” Longwei said, his voice breaking. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”
“The new dream is not concrete, steel and glass, but earth, water, blue skies, self-sufficiency.”
“Could they not just depress the economy, or maybe level one of the financial cities? They now have their own Wall Street in Hong Kong, so why not just control the markets that America used to control?”
“Communism is absolute control. There are no half measures, and there are no shared powers. Anything other than totalitarian dominance is considered a catastrophic failure by the state. Americans and their cities must die because the people are used to having the power, not the government. In China, the power lies with the government, and the people are the slaves born to serve the state.”
“Yeah, well for those of us who escaped that, it’s been a hell of a lot better here than over there,” Longwei said, yawning again.
“Many of the cities in China are overpopulated, dirty, left to the ruin of social, political and environmental systems that were always going to fail. The government refuses to discuss the miscarriages of their policies. In the former US, they will get a fresh start. This will be their new home.”
“These people…” Longwei muttered under his breath.
“In fifty years, the Empire will rule from what they will call The Northwest Seat. From here, they will eventually do to China what they’ve done to America. For now, however, Yale will symbolize both a world victory and the future of the Chicom regime.”
“Do you have contacts at the Port of Seattle?” Longwei asked. “Or the Port of Tacoma?”
“Yes, but with communications down, I’ll have to make physical contact. I’m not sure that will happen right away.”
“What they’re doing is wholesale execution,” Longwei muttered.
“It will be the worst genocide this earth has ever seen,” Quan said, certain he was not overestimating the planned outcome.
“What about the SAA?”
“I hope the SAA makes it hard for them,” Quan said. “Or at the very least, I hope they thin the Chicom numbers.”
“What if they win the war?”
“They won’t.”
“Has anyone really confirmed Shao Xiao Chen’s death?” Longwei asked.
“I am only hypothesizing when I say such an event occurred,” Quan answered. “And I’m truly speculating when I add that it could very well have happened in Five Falls. No one knows for sure. What we do know is that Da Xiao Zheng is working on the assumption that Five Falls killed General Chen, and that is the reason for the convoy we cannot seem to catch.”
“How do they even know this happened in Five Falls?” Longwei asked, getting into his go bag and pulling out a package of beef jerky.
He offered some of the seasoned meat to Quan, but he politely declined. His stomach was in knots over this, so much so that he’d lost his appetite.
“They’ve got a spy for the Chicoms already embedded in the community,” Quan said.
“Really?” Longwei asked, astounded.
“There are spies everywhere. As for Shao Xiao Chen, all they know for sure was that he was taken out somewhere between the Oregon border—where his convoy passed through check points—and Roseburg, where there is another check point and an eventual settlement zone.”
“How is Roseburg significant to them?”
“It’s not yet,” Quan said. “But it will be. I just don’t know how. Personnel are already moving in. There will be a weapons drop and troops on the ground once Washington is ready. Boats are pulling into the two northwestern ports as we speak.”
“God help us all,” he muttered under his breath.
“What I’m telling you sounds bad, but I assure you, this is good news,” Quan said. “Five Falls sits outside the Chicom scope. It resides in that dead zone between their most northern influence in California and their most southern interests in Oregon. This is where Hu’s army is most vulnerable. And the chatter, I’m told, revolves around this being the weak point. A dead zone, if you will. And if what they say about Shao Xiao Chen and his missing convoy is true, that they were neutralized, then the hot war with American forces has already begun.”
“Better late than never,” Longwei mused.
“If that’s the case, if there’s positive confirmation that Five Falls was involved, then Da Xiao Zheng will unleash the full weight of the People’s Liberation Army upon them. I’m talking wholesale extermination of the town, and uninhabitable lands for the next century.”
“When is he coming?” Longwei asked, swallowing hard.
Quan looked at him. “He’s already here.”
Chapter Seventeen
That morning, the entire town met in the center of Interstate 5, which was shut down from the south and protected at the northern entrance. Families, friends, people few of the residents knew personally—guys like Noah, who enjoyed the peace and quiet of his own company—were there to batten down the hatches and dig in for war. They were also there to say good-bye. A dozen fleeing families had packed what they could on what means of transport they had and were heading out of town. Before leaving, each of the families handed Boone the keys to their home. All the resources these families had they were pledging to those in need.
The love the community had for those departing brought many of them to tears. The good-byes were hard, but there was also a surge of emotion for what lay ahead. Not everyone would survive this war. Maybe none of them would survive.
After those families set out to be with families in other towns, and in two cases, other states, the remaining residents gathered around.
“First thing we need to do is get this mess cleaned up!” Boone announced, hooking a thumb over his shoulder denoting the roasted caravan as the topic of discussion. “We need tow trucks, bodies, maybe even Ed Groot’s tractor.”
“Whatever you need from me,” Ed spoke up, “you’ve got it.”
Gary Winehouse said, “I’ve got the tow-truck converted over now, so we’re good to go.”
Boone nodded his head, looking around.
“We’re about to be at war, folks. But we’re a community, we’ve got fighters and survivors here, which is why I think we can do this.”
“What about Sheriff Hall and Deputy Don?” someone asked. “Who’s gonna be the law around here now?”
“Do you think we’ll really need it?” Boone asked.
Several people looked around and started nodding their heads. Boone followed their eyes, spotting a few shady characters even he didn’t know having lived there all his life.
“Alright, who are you thinking?” he asked, finally spotting Sally Breen, the woman who’d asked the question.
“I was thinking of you, Boone,” she said. More than half the residents voiced their support, enough that he had to raise a hand to quiet them.
“Is it a trust factor or a competence factor?” he asked.
Apparently it was a mix of both.
“So you trust me then?” he asked aloud. People nodded. “In that case, I want to nominate the one person I trust most in life, the one person more capable to handle this than me, the one person in town who will be impartial to our social leanings. My brother Clay is who I’d like to nominate.”
