by P. D. Clover
Dee just glowered at me, “I wonder why that is Henry? I wonder why you might be starting to crash, and your body is sore?”
Dee just gave me her death stare. But before she could get going, our phones started beeping. I pulled it out and looked at it,
“THIS IS AN EMERGENCY ALERT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. AS OF 9:45 AM EASTERN TIME. NOAA, US AIR FORCE, US NAVY, US SPACE COMAND AND NORAD HAVE DETECTED AND CONFIRMED THE DEBRIS OF AN UNKNOWN ASTROID OR COMET. EARTH IS EXPECTED TO START PASSING THROUGH THE DEBRIS CLOUD A 2 P.M. EASTERN. THE CLOUD CONSISTS OF MOSTLY BASEBALL SIZED REMENATS. THEY SHOULD POSE NO DANGER TO ANYTHING EARTH BOUND. IT WILL LIKELY DESTROY ALL OBJECTS IN ORBIT. ALL SATELITE COMMUNICATION AND GPS WILL BE RENDERED NON-FUNCTIONING. PLEASE TUNE IN TO YOUR LOCAL MEDIA OUTLET FOR FURTHER DETAIL”
“Fucking Kessler Syndrome…” I breathed.
“What’s that?” Matt and Dee asked, almost in unison.
“Remember that movie Gravity, with Sandra Bullock? That’s a Kessler event. Well, kind of… Those floating meteorites will destroy a bunch of satellites. Those satellites will create their own little bits of destruction as they fling off pieces and so on… It’s a cascading effect that just gets bigger and bigger. haha… this is actually worse than an EMP or solar flare…. This will be long and drawn out. I mean, cell phones, air traffic, container ships, the entire global supply chain will be down…probably for years and that’s just getting warmed up… The global economy is dead. Stock markets worldwide are done. Traffic control in many major cities relies on GPS, so does modern large-scale farming. Hell, they even use satellites to see how the crops are doing…” I said as though I was in a mental fog.
“Also, the power grid…the substations use GMT as a base time to determine when to send power to where. It’s used as a universal time stamp that is maintained by satellites. This will cause rolling brown outs and cascading substation failures,” Dee added.
Matt opened his mouth to say something, but instead just turned and went upstairs, heading to the guest room.
“Where is he going?” Dee asked.
“To get rest…same place I’m headed, just in a different room,” I said flatly.
Dee let out a giggle, “I guessed that silly. Why are you going to bed now? Now we know…Shouldn’t we …”
“Boss, he and I need to sleep. We will not make the right decisions if we are exhausted and there is no point in staying up. We know what’s going to happen. We will be safe. It’s just communications and GPS that are going to get obliterated. Not us. Best thing to do is rest. I also need a mental break, between that homeless guy and ...”
“Your family?” Dee interjected.
“Oh lord no… Mark. I had a difficult conversation with Mark. It’s weighing on me,” I confessed.
“Laura and the girls, oh no! I didn’t think about them,” Dee said.
“Neither did I. I have been so focused on running around and trying to get what we could… This is going to get hard, but we have each other and the kids. We will make it,” I said, now holding Dee and our unborn child.
“Where are the idiots?” I asked.
Dee answered with her head still pressed into my chest, “They are all sleeping in Paul’s room. They were crazy last night, so they will probably sleep till Noon.”
I took a deep breath, breathing in the smell of my wife’s hair, “I love you wife. If there is anyone you want to talk to, I suggest you use text messages. They should still get through. I am positive the voice-lines will be clogged, and the internet will probably crash… or at least the news sites will… If you need me, just shout. I love you Boss.”
I released my wife, giving her a long kiss and a swat on the ass. Then I turned and walked upstairs to my bedroom to get as much rest as I could. But before I did, I opened my son’s door and checked on the little idiots. They were all dogpiled on one another and snoring. I wish I could sleep that deeply. I closed the door as silently as I could. I would not be responsible for breaking their peaceful state if I could help it. I crossed the hall to the master suite, put my gun and knifes on the top of the built-in shelves. My kids were very aware of guns and that they should never touch them unless at the range with daddy and mommy. I suppose those rules were going to need a revision soon. I stripped off my boots and fell back onto my bed, still set exactly as it was when Big Mike called. Before I knew it, I was carried off in sweet oblivion, just rest and darkness. My dreams were strange. I was standing in front of a naked and tongueless Diablo. He had blood dripping from the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were gone. I don’t mean they were closed or black or empty. They were gone, as though he was born without sockets or eyebrows or any feature that would even resemble where eyes belonged.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Diablo just smiled, I could now see his teeth were like those of a Great White Shark…rows of pointy, razor sharp things set in bloody gums, as though they were in some state of continual replacement. New sharp teeth breaking through his gums, replacing the old broken ones.
I didn’t like this, not one tiny bit.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT!?!” I shouted.
Suddenly we were standing in the air, above my town. It looked peaceful, glowing under the light of a full moon. I could feel the crispness of the winter air. Then, without warning, everything changed. The trees were blooming, the day and night kept swapping, back and forth. I understood that time was moving at an accelerated pace. Houses and building began disappearing, but everything was moving too fast to see why. Then it stopped, all that was left was my house on the top of the hill. The camper parked next to the house was burnt and destroyed, as was my shed.
Diablo and I were suddenly in my kitchen. I was filled with fear… Diablo never moved, just kept smiling with his evil shark teeth glaring. I called out for Dee and the kids. No answer. I moved cautiously upstairs and checked all the rooms, no one. Then I heard bump on the third floor, I opened the hidden door and walked up the narrow, long staircase. As I reached the top, I could hear muttering, it reminded me of a homeless schizophrenic I once saw murmuring to himself on park bench in New Your City, many years ago.
Then I saw who was making the sounds, it was a haggard looking, large man. He had his back to me, slightly rocking side to side. I stayed where I was, I didn’t dare to breath or move. I have seen enough horror movies to know what came next.
I addressed the figure, “WHO ARE YOU?”
The man just kept muttering to himself, then I caught sight of what he was doing. He had five stuffed animals, he was picking up each one and whispering to it. Then lovingly he placed each one back down, then picked up the next in line only to repeat the ritual.
I had seen enough, I slowly started to walk backwards to the staircase. Whatever was going on, I had zero interest in trying into figure it out. I would rather go downstairs and see if I could teach Diablo to whistle a tune until I woke up. Anything was better than this… I knew who this man was… I knew who those “stuffies” belonged to. I was ready to get the fuck out of this nightmare.
As I backpedaled, the man stopped whispering to the stuffed animals, he stopped rocking. He turned his head in my direction and just as I had suspected, he was me. Only my beard and hair were wild, my clothes were just rags, my face was lined with pain and scar tissue. The other Me’s eyes locked on to mine. I could feel his loss, his pain, and his animalistic rage. He stood. He may have looked like me, but he was a good six inches taller and broader. He was heavy with muscle. His rage was so palpable it felt like it was heating the air in the room. I was terrified. I decided to make a break for the stairs. He somehow read my thoughts, probably because we were both in my dream, in my own fucking head... He lunged with a speed I had recently seen in a crappy vampire movie about high school kids who looked more like they were thirty, or something like that. I didn’t really pay attention to the plot of the movie. I just remember the vampire watched a teenage girl all night by breaking into her room. The whole thing seemed kind of rapey.
The other me was fast, he shot over the stairs and hit me dead square in the chest. We both went back and then we were falling through empty, dark, nothingness. He was hitting me and yelling, I couldn’t fend off his attach and I had nothing to grab – no footing, no weapon… Blow after blow, I could do nothing but feel my nose break, my jaw break, my teeth were knocked out, he broke my cheek bone and my left eye went black... He was beating me to death, and I could do nothing to stop him. Suddenly he leaned in close and whispered, “Do not fail them.” Then he put his massive foot on my chest and kicked. I could hear my ribs break from the kick as my body was flung through the air.
Abruptly, I awoke.
I came to with a startle and the feeling I had just fallen and landed on the bed. I slowed my breathing and listened. I could hear Dee and the band of heathen’s downstairs. I let out a long sigh of relief.
Great, fucking night terrors… What am I, twelve again? This is exactly what I do not need to be dealing with while the fucking world begins to fall apart.
Chapter 16
I threw my legs over the side of the bed and sat up. I needed a big glass of any adult beverage I could get my hands on and about two solid days of rest. My back, arms and legs screamed from over exertion. I just moved too much heavy shit yesterday, or was it last night? It all felt like a lifetime ago. Everything was a blur. My recall was foggy, my thoughts were too slow and jumbled. I knew it was too much adrenaline over too long a period of time; and all the other various chemicals that tend to accompany adrenaline when its produced under stress, clouds the mind, and burns out cognitive function. I knew from training; I could only push so hard for so long. The higher the stress, the shorter the duration of endurance.
I stood and stripped off the last of my filthy clothes and hopped into the shower. Cold…I need a cold shower to trigger recovery in my muscles, and I desperately need the cold to shake the fog from my mind. Nothing like some freezing cold-water blasting on to my naked, exposed flesh to snap my focus back into gear. My mind was starting to pick up steam like a train engine left too long on some abandoned track. Slowly but surely, I mentally ran over everything that had transpired to this point. Big Mike’s warning, getting the stuff from the range, going to Sam’s Club and all that wacky shit… Diablo. I didn’t want to think too much about Diablo at the moment, not after my dream. Then Matt showed up, we stole a truck and got as much stuff as we possibly could, which was sadly only about three quarters full. I felt like we should have done better, but stupid-ass fucking just-in-time-delivery means no one store actually has any substantial inventory on hand. The bank, poor Mark and his family, the coin shop… Yeah, the coin shop… I was probably rich, or at least I would be in a few days once the dollar collapsed. That thought brought me back to the reason for all of this – the micro meteors floating in space, poised to destroy all satellites and whatever else the various governments of the world have shot into orbit. God only knew what was really up there.
I let the cold sobering water run over my face; baptizing me into a new world, born of shit.
We have guns… Hell, right now we have more guns than some countries… We have food. We had been hard core about buying a one-year supply of dehydrated food for the whole family, every year, for a awhile. That doesn’t take into account our very well stocked pantry and 3 deep freezers. We have a natural gas backup generator that will immediately kick on when the power goes out, and it will. At least some form of rolling brown outs would hit us, sooner or later. I had installed various security measures over the years, a little at a time. We have security film on both sides of all the down stairs windows, IR security cameras and motion activated flood lights, and a hardwired security system with no wireless access. All the exterior doors were 3-inch-thick oak that were original to the house, and I had a shit load of razor wire in the basement I ordered from Amazon. We had training thanks to my cadre of friends. We have spent a lifetime preparing for the great unknown “something”. All of this, all that we had and have learned I knew meant nothing if we couldn’t somehow get the neighborhood to rally together. Otherwise, they will just band together and try to take from my family, eventually... inevitably. That outcome is unacceptable. I need to take a walk and talk to Josh today.
Josh Hawkins was a local attorney and former Naval officer. He was also one of my cadre members. He had only been prepping and training with us for the past two years. I met him at a charity event we had both volunteered for. After getting to know him and his family, I had invited him out to a “special training event”. He was a natural fit. His strong moral compass was a good augment to the group, as we definitely needed a voice crying in wilderness from time to time. Josh has a wonderful wife named Reba. She was every bit the good and moral person Josh is... Josh was a pillar in the community, even those who didn’t care for him, respected him. He was the key to getting things organized in our neighborhood, and we needed to build our tribe up. We needed to do it before someone else did.
It didn’t matter what was going on in China or the Middle East anymore, if it ever really did to begin with. What we need to focus on now was our small town. That was as macro a problem as we needed to think about. The pressing issue was our immediate area… first our neighborhood, then our city, then our county in a distant third. We need to organize and motivate as many of these people as we can into something. We need to be a tribe within the larger village that was our small mountain town. We need to get to the politicians and see what they were thinking. People knew me and Dee; but on many levels, we would always be outsiders. I had a good rapport with the local PD and Sheriff’s office. I had pulled some favors and got Magnus to agree to train their SWAT teams for a fraction of our normal pricing. That gesture allowed me to carry a certain amount of favor with the Police Chief and Sherriff, but I didn’t know exactly how much favor or if I would be seen as a possible problem or asset. This is where Josh would shine. He is universally liked and respected, a voice of reason they might listen to.
The local government needed desperately to mobilize and get people moving before food was an issue. Once it was, without established and reinforced social structure, people would be eating each other in weeks, if not days. The most important thing was information. We need to know what the local government was planning. Was aid coming? Had there been some major secondary disaster occur that could affect our area? The local elected officials would be among the first to know, and I wanted a heads up if not direct input into these things. There was a lot to do, and all the guns in the world didn’t amount to shit if the town mayor were to turn into a warlord and burn me out. He has the numbers, but if I could get wind of his plan early…welp, I knew where he lived. I just acquired a Barrett .50cal. I am confident I could solve a problem like that if I could see it coming.
Something that always boggled my mind about preppers and survivalists was that they always seemed to ignore soft skills, the power of communication. People only start killing each other when the talking stops. And they only stop killing when the talking starts again. It’s a universal truth…the ability to gain respect and earn trust was worth more than bullets any day of the week. Too many preppers and survivalists I have known in the past, would go out of their way to criticize and rebuke people. This only made them outcasts and brought a negative focus upon themselves. Instead, they should have taken the time to network or lift people up who were just starting down the path of self-reliance.
I turned off the shower, stepped out of the shower and dried off. My mind was now running at full speed. I hung up my towel and stretched out the ache from my muscles. I would be abusing them once again this evening, but at least I could skip my kettle bell work out today and that was at least something. But, with everything that needed to be done, I had no doubt that in a couple hours I would be wishing I could just swing those damn things and call it a day.
I grabbed my clothes and my soft body armor. It was a 3-A+ Kevlar vest. I also grabbed one of my duty belts. I grabbed the o
ne I had configured for discreet urban carry. It was a 5.11 duty belt with an inner Velcro belt that went through my pants’ belts loops and an outer belt that had a holster, 5 mag pouches, a knife, IFAK(individual first aid kit), radio pouch, and a dump pouch. I had configured it with this setup so I could walk and not draw too much attention but still have plenty of firepower and communication. I could also somewhat conceal it with a three quarters length jacket.
During these early days, I needed to do my best not to draw attention to myself or my family. Walking around in a full “end-of-days”, dress-up army-man kit was a sure way to get noticed. It would also make me a hell of a target, for every person who didn’t have an AR or kit. The best way to obtain one now was to just ambush some fool all loaded out. Why not, they would never see it coming, what could they do to prevent it? A truly clever person would just follow “load-out-boy”, find where he lives and watch. Assess what he had, how many were with him, and then strike at the time and place of their choosing. It’s what I would do, and I’m not very smart.
I finished putting on my clothes and covert kit. When I looked in the mirror, I just looked fat with all my shit on. My ego could live with that. I went downstairs and found Dee making snacks for the kids. I looked over at the clock on the stove, 3:48 p.m.
“Well, what’s the news?” I asked casually.
“Alright monsters! Like we talked about, off to your rooms, you can play your games, or you can play with your toys, but YOU MUST STAY IN YOUR ROOMS! Do you understand me? Daddy, Mr. Matt and I have a bunch to do in a little while and we need to do some adult talking. So, go have fun.”
Three little faces all stared back at my wife with blank expressions then nodded in unison, then they were off at warp drive… The kids all ran upstairs with bags of sliced apples and goldfish crackers.
