by Rod Rayborne
"Well I suspect you've heard about as much as you can stand for one day. For now, let's join together and enjoy this meal as a family."
People began streaming from tables spread around on the dried lawn carrying plates of food prepared by the volunteers among them, setting them out potluck style while others lined up, smiles on their tired faces. For now, in the midst of unprecedented death and destruction, they were content.
Chapter Forty One
T he building was comparatively low, two stories tall amongst a sea of skyscrapers. The big yellow price tag shaped sign that once fronted it now lay in the street, cracked into several large yellow plastic shards. On it, Gordon could just make out two black B's.
Glass from the large windows along the front of the building covered the sidewalk, their metal frames bent and slipped from their brick moorings around the edges. Inside, the building was dark and quiet.
Gordon had come seeking a short wave radio. He had to know. The rest of the country might be a smoking inferno. Or the destruction might be local, perhaps a terrorist action against one city alone. The alert he'd heard that day had said there were multiple targets across the country. But the warning could have been a mistake. Warnings were written by people and people were known to make mistakes.
At 8:07 a.m. on January 13, 2018, a man working at the State of Hawaii Department of Defense accidentally pressed the wrong button on his console sending out an alert to phones across the islands of an inbound missile strike from North Korea. For 38 minutes, people were running in terror seeking shelter from an imaginary bomb.
Gordon had heard once that some radios were made to survive an EMP. Radios that came in an aluminum rather than plastic shell had a better chance of working. If he could find one with a crank handle, all the better. Cranking them for a few minutes would charge them enough to operate for a while even without batteries. Many of these emergency style radios operated in short wave frequencies, reaching around the planet to pick up other SW signals. He couldn't communicate with other people. At least not with the cheap SW radios he would find in an electronics discount store, but he could hear them. Know if what had happened here was a singular event or something much worse. He had to know.
Now he crouched, watching the store for any sign of activity. He didn't have long to wait. Staring at the entrance, a metallic bang ricocheted in the quiet, a sound like a piece of metal ceiling frame falling onto or being kicked across the hard floor. Another loud bang following the first indicated to Gordon that someone was inside and being none to careful about concealing himself from discovery by chance passersby. The lack of people on the streets had probably made the man careless. It also indicated that either the individual in question was a fool or not a human at all. Noise didn't mean people. Gordon felt a slight tingle on the back of his neck.
Pulling the binoculars from his pack, he focused it on the store front. The window was brought closer but no clearer, the inside just as dark and indistinct. Disgusted, he pushed the binoculars back into his pack and thought what he should do. He looked around once again from his hiding place behind the low wall that surrounded the parking lot and then, crouching low, ran towards the building.
He ducked once behind an overturned car and then dashed towards the store again. With the growing light as the smoke had started to clear, he felt far more exposed. Though the sky had darkened again temporarily as the day wore on, he knew that stealth was going to be a bigger issue from now on.
The store had grown quiet again. Gordon realized that someone inside could have seen him approaching if he had been looking. Reaching the building, he hugged the wall just out of sight of the windows.
He knelt behind an empty point-of-sale display that had been thrown from farther back in the store, resting at an angle handing partially through the window frame. He waited. A few minutes later, he heard another scrape of metal against the floor tiles. He was still undiscovered. Someone was dragging something along the floor, making an ungodly amount of noise. He chanced a peek around the display but could see no one behind the smashed units inside.
The building was a cacophony of debris. Merchandise lay everywhere, shelving units on their sides, walls tumbled with a few big screen TV's still hanging on them at odd angles. Gordon couldn't imagine just how he could enter the store, much less sneak up on its sole occupant, for so he concluded the man to be, undetected. In the quiet, any sound, no matter how slight, would instantly give him away. He would be a fool to try.
He waited until he heard the scraping sound again and then made his move. Tiptoeing as carefully as he could, he crept in the direction he had heard the noise come from. Whoever he was, he was bobbing around the small electronics section, perhaps trying to find something of value.
To Gordon's left was the appliance department, a tumble of washers, dryers and refrigerators. He could see a path through them and being large items, there was none of the small plastic bits to step on that the rest of the floor was covered with to give himself away. He could walk around the fellow, circle back and approach the man from behind. He wasn't planning to ambush him, but neither did he want to be ambushed. If he had a choice of which of them was going to get the jump on the other, he knew which he preferred and it wasn't the other guy.
Gordon crept slowly through the store, watching every step, circling back towards the front where the smaller items were kept. He stretched cautiously, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man but saw nothing. The intervening shelves were too tall to see over. He came within feet of the man when his foot crunched down on something in the gloom. A bit of glass from some display unit perhaps. Immediately he did so, the sound he had been following ceased.
Damn! he thought, looking down instinctively to see what he had stepped on. Suddenly thinking better of it, he quickly jerked his head back up and gaped, his mouth falling open in surprise.
A woman. Wearing a multitude of golden necklaces, bracelets and rings, staring back at him. Hanging loosely around her hips was a gun holster of the Old West variety and in her hands, a pair of gaudy pearl handled pistols. Beneath all that, a baggy pair of white shorts, hiking boots and gray socks completed the picture. Her eyes were wide, her lower lip trembling. Her pistols trembled as well.
Unthinkingly, Gordon's mouth still open, he started forward. A shot exploded in the quiet. Surprised again, he stopped and looked down at himself. A small hole had appeared in his belly, blood spewing outward like a pricked water balloon. Frowning, he touched it, fingers turning red and looked back at the woman in confusion. Then he crumbled to the floor.
Chapter Forty Two
T he patrols began in earnest, as per President Lowry's orders. Armored personnel carriers that had been hardened were brought forward in their dozens, troop carrying trucks and even tanks that had survived the Blow in vast secret underground complexes across the country. They made further and further inroads into the cities, the neighborhoods, reestablishing order and sealing off those portions of the strike zones deemed too hot for people to live in. They encountered ragged looking people who poured out of the ruins begging for help, most in twos and threes, dozens in other areas. These they noted but ignored as per orders. There simply wasn't enough manpower, enough resources to assist them in any meaningful way.
In Los Angeles, the job of the soldiers was clear. To secure the city, an increasingly merciless police action that saw hundreds of still healthy looking survivors in the greater Los Angeles area swept up and forced into labor gangs, was enacted. Those who refused to be part of what many saw as a new slave movement were taken to holding camps. Unfounded rumors spread that most of them, due to insufficient manpower to guard them, were shot within the first hours of entering the camp. Whether this was true or not couldn't be confirmed.
Signs had popped up around the city. Beckman knows Best was one. Trust the Colonel was another. They were hastily painted on white-washed boards and tied to lamp posts and charred trees. These, the soldiers were ordered to look for and destroy po
st haste. If they saw anyone placing the signs, they were to capture him at all costs. This in an attempt to ascertain where Beckman was hiding.
Fear of the army spread among the survivors quickly and skirmishes began to erupt in pockets around the city. Ambushes by groups not aligned with Colonel Beckman took the lives of many of the soldiers before firepower was brought to bear to assist them in putting down the fighting.
In hot spots, a take no prisoners attitude developed. Entire neighborhoods that had been putting up a stiff resistance were wiped from the map. The soldiers encountered barricades in neighborhood after neighborhood. These they simply smashed through with their tanks, blasting past the meager opposition like so much confetti. It took only three days to recapture Anaheim and the surrounding communities.
Beckman was blamed for the uprisings even though no one had heard him calling for the use of violence. It was determined that a scapegoat was needed on whom to hang a label to set an example for others who thought to resist the new order. Beckman was it.
Many of those who did resist soon saw the folly of trying to control their own destinies and laid down their arms. Garrisons were hastily built; more impromptu barbed wire enclosures set up to receive incoming people. Often those who marched them into these holding pens were those of their own neighborhoods who had switched sides and joined the soldiers rather than being forced into the internment camps or the labor gangs themselves. If you can't beat them.
The soldiers told their prisoners that they were to be reeducated and assured them of the value of accepting the new order. They were also encouraged to turn in those family members and friends who lived on the periphery of the city trying to escape what they saw as a new tyranny. All this was accomplished in a matter of days, so quickly did the army work to reduce the threat the rouge bands represented to them.
The new conscripts went largely untrained, civilians in military gear with barely days to acquire the training that their fellows had always required months to accomplish. If some of them were a little too rough or enjoyed using their M-4's more than they should have, what of it? Their stomachs were full and order was being reestablished.
Command and control set up quick bases around the city, walling off the upper north side of Los Angeles with signs warning of death due to increased radiation. Shoot on sight orders were given to all soldiers for any who ignored the signs. A little redundant, some thought, as entry to these no go zones seem sufficiently disadvantages by themselves. But these were desperate times.
Food stores deemed less radioactive were liberated of their canned and bottled goods. These the soldiers redistributed to the surrounding communities with promise of more for any who voluntarily joined their ranks. Most if it though was sent back to headquarters to be stacked in reassigned warehouses to feed themselves. Civilians who had been relying on the canned food began to starve and many moved to new areas still free of the soldiers to live.
Some of the work gangs were put on farming duties, ploughing up any empty lot or field that happened to be close by in an attempt to grow new supplies of food. No instruction was given the city dwellers so the likely success of the effort was in question. Many speculated that they were being told to grow their own food while G.I.'s were rated the stocks of packaged goods.
Fighting with the soldiers began in earnest then, in little guerrilla groups of people sniping at them from windows and rooftops around the safe zones, as they called them, not to kill them but to frighten them away. Though some of Los Angeles was being taken back under the control of the new government with varying degrees of success, most of it even outside the hot zones, was still relatively free. There simply wasn't the manpower necessary to control so vast an area. The sudden loss of population left most of the city entirely deserted, so it wasn't much of a problem anyway.
Then the slaughter happened. Not of civilians, but by them. It was an ambush. Eight miles from the Staples Center, on Figueroa, more than twenty soldiers were pushing forward warily, spread across Clairmont Ave from side to side. One man, a sixteen year old recruit named Wilson, walked point with another, an older soldier, Baker who brought up the rear.
Identical units combed adjacent streets a quarter mile around their location. They were looking for the sniper who had shot a man six hours earlier. The soldier had gone on his own, something they had been expressly told not to do. He said he needed to take a leak. Shy bladder. What began as a solo performance became his final act. When the shot rang out, the other soldiers came running.
They found themselves engulfed in an ambush as gunfire opened up on them from windows on either side of the wide avenue. They fired back as they ran. None of them made it out alive. It was only an hour later when another unit found them. The unit commander shouted for his men to stop when they started running towards the downed soldiers. They pulled back while a man, using one of the hardened radios all the soldiers had been equipped with, called for reinforcements. An hour later, more than two hundred infantry and three tanks had surrounded the area. A half hour after that, every house, apartment and business within a three block radius of the massacre had been reduced to rubble. By the time the shooting stopped, dozens of people had been slaughtered. Among the dead, women and children.
Relations with survivors deteriorated rapidly after that. It was only a matter of hours before the lower south side had begun to merge into their own ragtag armies, presenting the first formidable resistance to the soldiers. The impromptu bands were outgunned and out maneuvered but there was more of them.
At this point, the soldiers began to retreat, falling back in ever increasing numbers to the safety of already captured neighborhoods. There they dug in for what they thought could be a lengthy battle. Word spread rapidly from there and more and more civilians came to join the fight. It was a sad fight, one neither side wanted. For winning a battle against their own countrymen and women was a hollow victory.
Chapter Forty Three
H e sat on the old wooden porch in a tall, rattan backed rocking chair. Beside him lay Ol' Blue, a mutt colored Rhodesian Ridgeback, grunting in sleep, as old dogs will.
The man took a beat up pipe out of his shirt pocket and examined the empty bowl with disgust. Holding it by the stem, he turned it over in his hand and beat it against his left palm, knocking out the leafy remnants. After blowing it out, he pulled the little sleeve of blueberry flavored tobacco out of the same pocket, refilled the bowl, tamped it down with a finger, placed the stem between his lips and held his hand over it against the breeze, lighting it once more. He puffed on it, letting the smoke slip between his lips in small puffs. Then he pulled the pipe away and stared out at the gray expanse of ocean before him.
The dim light was imperfectly reflected in his bleary, cataract covered eyes. He wished now he'd had the surgery done when he'd had the chance, but he contented himself with the knowledge that he probably didn't have much longer to live anyway. And his eyes could still make out most things well enough to get around, feed himself and keep the house up.
Blue's eyes were worse. He had been afflicted with cataracts as well but he'd also had the misfortune of being outside during the big flash. What cataracts began, the flash finished. Now he spent most of his time shuffling around, bumping into things and sleeping. But he never complained about his new handicap and by golly neither would his old man.
The screen door banged closed behind a much younger man carrying a towel. He wiped his hands on it, walking towards the old man. Stopping next to the rocking chair, he looked out at the horizon, wondering what the old man could see. He looked down watching the old man's gaze. Probably not much, he decided.
"I got that drain pipe fixed, Pops," he said. "You want me to tackle the shower next or the refuse pile out back?"
"Neither, Derek. They can wait. Why don't you pull up a chair and have a sit down with me. I haven't had much in the way of conversation since Millie passed. I'm dying for a little back and forth."
Eager for a break, Derek walked
across the porch, grabbed another tall backed chair and plopped down next to the old man's rocker. Blue lifted his head wearily and pretended to look at Derek then dropped it again onto his paws.
"What's up Pop?" he asked, searching the old man's face. "Hope we're not wearing out our welcome."
"Nothing like that, Derek. You'll always be welcome here, you and Suzy. Where is she, by the way?"
"Whipping up a dessert of some kind, last I checked. Using a few of your eggs. I hope that's ok."
"Fine, fine. She's a wonderful cook, Derek. You're awfully lucky to have her. If I was a few years younger…"
"Thankfully for me, you're not. She's awfully sweet on you."
"I like her too. They don't make 'em like her anymore. I know. I've been around the block a few times. Count your blessings." His voice was old, high, singsong.
"She's the only girl in town, Pops." He smiled at his own joke but the old man just continued to stare out at the sea.
"I will, dad." he said then, sensing the man's serious mood. "Best thing that ever happened to me."
Just then the screen door creaked open and a slim woman with short, close cropped blond hair stepped out onto the porch. She had a dirty towel tied about her waist and a light dusting of flour in her hair. Smiling, she carried a pizza pan with three bowls of vanilla pudding on it. She stopped next to the men and passed out the bowls.
"Here you are, boys," she said. "Dig in. Until the chickens start laying again, I'm afraid that'll be it for the dessert."
"You're spoiling us, Suzy," the old man protested. But that didn't stop him from grabbing his spoon and shoveling the gooey yellow mixture into his mouth. When he did, he exposed nearly toothless gums. That along with his long wispy white hair and craggy weather beaten face gave him an ancient but not disagreeable look. A sea salt.