SODIUM Trilogy Part One

by Stephen Arseneault

  It had been two months since the attack, and we had not detected a peep of a signal. The only conclusion I could draw was the devastation brought upon us by these invaders was worldwide in scope. For a while, with all the latest technology, the world had begun to seem smaller and smaller. It now seemed immense, and had it not been for the company of my new little family, it would have seemed very empty, too.

  With the extra time afforded by the girls tending the garden and animals, I took the time to get back to my coil gun tinkering project. The coil gun worked on the same principle as the doorbells I had designed at work.

  If the piece of iron was set on one side of the opening of the coil and a current applied for only an instant, the magnetic field would pull the piece of iron through the coil to the other side. This was the main principle behind a coil gun. When a number of coils were strung together, back to back, a piece of iron could be magnetically propelled through them. When the piece of iron got to the other side of the first coil, it would meet another coil that would again pull it through, and each successive coil afterward would accelerate the pull.

  By lining up a bunch of coils and timing when they got powered on and off, I could get the piece of iron, a BB in my case, to accelerate to potentially very high speeds. With the initial calculations I had done, and with the use of my special coil, I figured I should be able to get that BB moving as fast as a bullet from a high-powered rifle. I had a few tricks up my sleeve, along with an updated design of the old man's coil, that I hoped would take me to a point of high velocity, turning the once-hobby into a weapon.

  I had a limited amount of ammo for my guns, and it was a resource that was only going to become scarce as time progressed. There were no longer factories churning out tons of ammunition every day. But electricity was something I knew I could generate more of.

  If I could create a weapon that didn’t require gunpowder, we would be better off. I didn’t want to have to resort to using a bow if I didn’t have to. I hoped with some luck, my coil gun project could perhaps keep man from sliding back a thousand years on the weaponry front.

  Well before the attack, I had procured a modest supply of ultra-capacitors from an Orlando salvage store, which I had incorporated into my coil gun design. My ammo of choice had been BBs, of which I had a huge case in one corner of the bunker. With my tinkering, I managed to get the coil gun to launch a BB at a pretty impressive speed for a hobby toy.

  It would put a nice dent in an aluminum road sign from fifty feet. I felt if I could somehow manage to double that speed, I would have a weapon that was useful for hunting small game. With the farm I had going, we had no need of hunting anything, but I didn't know what the future might bring. The coil gun was about five feet in length and weighed in at about fifteen pounds. It was clumsy and bulky and wasn’t anything you wanted to carry into a gunfight. But it was what we had.

  I had potentiometers on each coil and a bank of mercury switches I would use to attempt to tune the timing of firing the coils. My tweaks to date had taken it from a balloon popper to a sign denter. Over the course of the next several weeks, as I continued to tinker, I was able to get the velocity up enough to punch a hole clean through the street-sign target that then sat atop what was once my home.

  I was thrilled with the results. After taking several more test shots with a similar outcome, I could no longer contain my excitement. The girls were at the Kendalls’ tending to their daily farming rituals. I went running over to tell them of my news. As I ran, I was yelling and waving my arms. They at first turned and began to run toward the woods. I guessed they still had a little of the "flight for survival" instinct in them.

  When I slowed to a walk, they stopped their run and returned to see what was happening. They were very unimpressed with my news and quickly returned to their chores. I hadn’t paused long enough to think the two young girls, who had no interest whatsoever in my coil gun project, would also have no interest in its success. So I returned to my masterpiece without a victory celebration, but with my excitement level still very high.

  I had one more innovation to try on my gun, but it would have to wait. I had surmised that, if I could somehow deliver the energy a coil needed to the whole coil at once, and not just from one end of the wire to the other, I would be able to ramp the coil’s magnetic field up far faster than normal. That would lead to not only a tighter set of coils, but a much higher-output energy transfer to the projectile. I already had an idea of how I was going to accomplish the feat, but I had no idea of how long it might take me to bring the idea to something that was usable. Since time seemed to be one thing I had plenty of, and after my own little victory celebration that evening, I would start work on it the following day.

  After the girls returned with the day's harvest, we decided we should try to go out and scavenge a larger refrigerator if possible. My little soda fridge was not adequate for storing the food needs of three. If we could find one with an automatic ice maker, all the better. My soda fridge did not have a freezer section, and some iced tea was something that was on all our minds. I had a sizable stock of teabags, but with the summer heat, none of us had any desire for warm tea, so the stockpile remained.

  Janie Lynn had managed to get milk from one of the cows. When I asked her about the effort, she said she had once milked a cow on a school field trip, and so she just did the same thing again. Other than having to push away a calf, it had come easy. We all had a good laugh over it and each enjoyed our first glass of milk in months.

  The girls had also gathered up the scattered chickens and now had them in the safety of a makeshift pen; they had been laying eggs like crazy. It seemed that man’s leftovers and nature’s abundance were providing us with all the sustenance we would need.

  It was late in the afternoon when the girls came running toward me, frantically talking and out of breath. A pack of dogs had circled the chicken pen and Heinz had run to their rescue. After a fierce fight with the leader of the pack, Heinz had chased the dogs back into the woods. The girls had waited anxiously for their protector, and they had called to him repeatedly, but the dog had not come back. I wasn’t sure how hard it would be on them if he didn’t return, or if he did and was somehow maimed. I cringed at the thought of possibly having to put him down.

  Heinz had been such a loyal dog, and the girls were very attached, but he remained missing. The first week without him passed slowly, with the girls breaking down in tears repeatedly. I offered what comfort I could, but not having had any children of my own, I was again unsure if what I was doing was helping or not.

  It took several weeks before the girls had turned their sadness toward their daily chores. They had been spreading some of their undelivered love for Heinz around to the cows and chickens. I knew deep down this loss, as with any loss, brought its pain. But eventually that pain would slowly give way to the toils of our daily lives.

  The day came when I decided we were in need of more protein in our diets. I hated harming animals, but a chicken would have to be sacrificed. The girls were not happy with the thought of slaughtering one of our hens. They were however, all too willing to partake in the BBQ feast we had that afternoon. Having had their first taste of chicken in months, they began to have a different perspective of what our ancestors had to go through in order to survive. They had no intention of slaughtering a hen of their own anytime soon, but if push came to shove, they knew how to do it and would do so if needed.

  The next day, we made a trip out to find a fridge. It was a hoot. I let each of the girls take turns driving Suzie. It was a skill I thought might be important to us in the future. So, I decided to get each of them as much time behind the wheel as possible.

  I enjoyed being chauffeured around, as it brought back a few good memories of Renee driving me everywhere. That girl loved to drive, and I remembered being a happy passenger, able to actually look around at the world as it went by.

  I had to make a booster seat for Janie, and she turned out to be a madman behind
the wheel. She loved weaving back and forth on the road and making the tires screech whenever she started or stopped, so much so that I had to repeatedly ask her to stop because it was making me nauseous. Rachel was the old-lady driver and was always very careful with her speed and any turns.

  It seems that quite often the first child is the responsible, cautious one, while the second seems to have no fear at all. I had noticed that many years before with Rex and myself, when we were younger, as well as with many other siblings. Rachel and Janie seemed to fit that mold perfectly.

  We had scavenged a flat trailer a few weeks earlier and had attached it to Suzie. If we were successful at finding a fridge, we would be able to take it back with us. On that day, luck was with us as we rolled through the remains of what was once an upper-class neighborhood.

  It seemed every flattened home had a pool in the backyard. We happened to luck upon one where the home had been flattened, but the pool house had only been pushed over. It had been largely demolished by the impact on the home on the other side of the pool, but had been spared from a crushing blow of its own.

  And what should happen to be sitting right in the middle of the pool house rubble? A nice, fat, side by side with an ice maker in the door. It was a scratch-and-dent special, but we weren’t particularly picky at that moment. Part of the pool house roof had lapped over the top of it, protecting it somewhat from the elements.

  It took us half an hour to back the trailer as close as we could get and to clear away enough debris so the refrigerator could be moved. We had no hand truck available, so we spent another hour tipping the refrigerator from side to side to walk it over close to the trailer. It took us another half hour to work it up a makeshift ramp and onto the trailer itself.

  We had not thought to open it up yet, and when we did, the stench of the rotten food almost bowled us over. I longed for my coconut rag for those sixty long seconds it took for us to clean it out. We decided to leave the plastic containers within it intact, as we could always clean them out later. They would no longer be making any new Tupperware, so we thought it useful to keep any of it we could find.

  Our tie-downs left something to be desired, so our trip back to the bunker was at a snail's pace. We didn’t care, because the prize we had just acquired was worth its weight in gold. Rachel had also spotted and pilfered an electric ice-cream churn from the remaining part of the pool house. We would have to look for rock salt on a future expedition if we wanted to make use of it, but the thought of ice cream brought us immediate comfort anyway. Rachel was our selected driver on the way back, as the precious cargo was in need of a careful and attentive driver.

  With the fridge cleaned up and moved into the bunker, it was time to plug our little baby in. This was once a very pricey model and even had a little HDTV screen and DVD player in the door. I had not put a TV in the bunker, as I felt it was a distraction whenever I was attempting to work on my electronics. And with no DVDs of my own, it looked like we would have to look for a stash of discs on our next venture out.

  During the next few months, we became quite the scavengers. Several times a week, we took the trailer out looking for anything we might find useful. Even though all the homes and buildings in general had been flattened, if we looked hard and long enough, they often contained just about anything we wanted.

  At one local home improvement store, we had come across a pile of metal sheds still stacked in their boxes. It didn’t take us long to make use of them as small storehouses for anything else we could find. We soon began stockpiling everything from tools to clothing to soap. It became evident, over time, that each of the items we had taken for granted for so long would someday no longer be available—items such as the deodorant used while working out in the hot sun, or underwear or shoes or shampoo.

  I sometimes wondered just how long it would take us to revert back to the smelly, half-naked barbarians we had once been. Would we be the last educated generation for the next thousand years? We stockpiled all the how-to books we could get our hands on, but would future generations be able to read them? I pondered if we would have to be the teachers of any offspring and then began to wonder if there would ever be any.

  We were just three people on this gigantic planet. Had anyone else survived? Probably so, but would we ever meet up with any of them, or were they a thousand miles away? All these questions made for an easy road to follow to Depressionville.

  I often caught myself contemplating a variety of scenarios of possible futures and my best deterrent was to stay busy with our survival. Scavenging was a good distraction from depressing thoughts as well, and we were getting good at it; we had added more storehouses along with a wide variety of other equipment and machinery.

  The scavenging had been a godsend in establishing our little colony, but we had no doubt it would not last and we would slowly be confronted with a much more difficult existence. It was to be an existence in which each day something of value was lost or further diminished. I contemplated who the lucky ones were as a result of this human malady. I feared our struggle to survive was only just beginning.

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  We celebrated our new fridge and ice maker for two days. The freezer would allow us to stockpile more food. The storage was needed because we were getting well into the fall weather; the growing season for our vegetable farm was getting short. We had taken to drying many of our extra vegetables in an attempt to have seeds for the next spring.

  Winter was short lived in Central Florida, but it brought enough cold snaps to kill off many of the plants we had going. We hoped our attempt at drying was correct, as none of us had any experience with a garden. We could cultivate, stake, and pick what was there, but the thought of growing the plants from seeds made the three of us a bit nervous.

  A lady I had worked with at the factory had once told me about her own farming experience. She had tilled a small plot, bought the seeds, fertilized, and weeded, but was struggling to get anything to really grow that had any resemblance to store-bought produce.

  Her uncle and cousin, who also had small gardens, were starting to harvest after just six weeks. They would repeatedly offer up some of their goods, as they knew she was still struggling. After a good bit of ribbing, they finally revealed their secret. They purchased seedlings for only a little more than the seeds themselves and, with the healthy head start, were already weeks ahead of her. While the seedlings idea sounded great, they were not available to us; we were going to have to do it the hard way.

  We had all enjoyed our diet and had taken steps to make it better when we had the chance. The thought of going backward on the food front made us a little uneasy. But we would cope with and overcome any hardship that came our way. That was one thing I was growing certain of.

  These two girls were like extensions of my own arms, and both learned very quickly about what was needed to get any job not only done but done right. Under the circumstance, I was extremely happy with my new family. Neither girl seemed to have a lazy bone in her, nor did either back down from trying to figure out what was needed for the task at hand.

  The bunker always stayed clean and the fields and animals well tended. Janie had even taken to helping me service the transmission on ole Suzie. She seemed to have a fascination for all things mechanical, and I was eager to share with her what I knew.

  I found out a few weeks later that what she really wanted was to be able to resurrect a car of her own. One she could then take out joyriding. There was no way I would let her go out on her own, and there was no way I was riding with that madwoman if she got her own car, but it didn’t hurt to let her have her fantasies. It was good she dreamed of things besides chickens and cows.

  Rachel was definitely becoming the domestic type. In some ways, it was like having my mother back around, in that she was always cleaning or preparing something and constantly telling us to pick up after ourselves. I think it gave her a sense of responsibility and purpose, and it gave Janie and me a sense of
home and comfort.

  Despite our luck at finding what we had that summer and fall, it was still hard on the three of us. You could only keep yourself so busy before your mind wandered back to what was. On one of our scavenger trips, we had come across a nice stash of videos. We were eager to get them back and into the fridge TV for viewing. Our glee at having a movie night soon turned to sorrow, as all it did was remind us of what was gone. The people, the places, all that man had accomplished in the last few thousand years—it had all been destroyed in the space of a few days.

  It had been nine months since the attack. We had not seen hide nor hair of any alien ships nor any other craft in the air for that matter, and no TV or radio signals, either. It was just us and the big, empty earth.

  I was amazed at how quickly Mother Nature was reclaiming what had been taken from her. Without the constant mowing, the sides of the roadways were overgrown. What had once been finely manicured lawns now struggled to hold back the wild shrubs and small trees.

  The birds and small mammals had seen a population explosion. We were constantly fighting to keep the raccoons, possums, and armadillos out of our garden. And the foxes and wild dogs were a constant harassment to our chickens and cows.

  We lost several of our cows and a half dozen of our chickens that winter, not to the cold but to the predators. The makeshift chicken coop had been raided by foxes one night, and we found two of our cows dead in the pasture. I surmised one had passed from just being old, but for the other I didn’t have a clue as to why.

  I was hoping some disease was not going to ravage our small herd. The milk and the potential for beef, if we needed it, were precious resources I did not want to do without. When spring came, the remaining animals were still healthy, and as such my fears of a cattle epidemic waned.

  On one of our excursions, we managed to salvage a front loader that had not been flattened. With a little TLC, we were able to get it working quite well, and it became our farm tractor. It did a great job of tilling the soil in our garden, which would otherwise have been a very laborious task.