EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 19 | EMP Ranch

by Walker, Robert J.

  “You’re right about that, asshole,” Phil whispered, lining up a target in his rifle scope and easing his finger onto the trigger.

  The leader tried to get the unruly men into a semblance of order—as Phil and Wyatt had guessed, they were completely undisciplined—and then started marching them along the drive slowly. The man was looking around suspiciously and was wearing a headlamp, like many of them, so he was able to see through the gloom. He was presumably looking for tripwires and other such traps and did not notice that much of the earth along both sides of the blacktop drive had been freshly dug up. He also did not initially notice an innocuous-looking beer can laying on the side of the drive.

  The beer can was the object Phil had in the crosshairs of his scope. It was no empty piece of trash; it was, in fact, filled with primer that would ignite a fuse to a far bigger explosion. Phil and Wyatt had taken the remaining sticks of dynamite—left over from when they’d destroyed the main road—and packed them under the drive near the gate. Phil was waiting for as many of the enemy troops to walk onto the blast area as possible before he detonated the dynamite.

  The leader paused as the beer can flashed in the roving glow of his headlamp. Phil’s heart started to beat faster in his chest as he watched the man slowly walking up to the beer can, now that he had decided that it was something suspicious. There were around twenty men positioned directly in the blast area at this point, and others close by who would certainly be seriously wounded or killed. If the leader picked up the can, he would disconnect the fuse, rendering the trap useless. Phil had to act; it was now or never.

  He breathed in deeply and held the breath in his lungs, eyes focused on the can in his crosshairs. The leader started to bend down to pick up the can, and Phil squeezed the trigger. The shot was on target. There was a bright flash as the primer ignited, and the leader stumbled back in fright but didn’t have time to do anything else. The drive exploded beneath him like a volcanic eruption, with a thunderous boom that shook the ground even beneath Phil and Wyatt’s feet and sent plumes of earth and torn up bodies a hundred feet into the air.

  The men standing in the blast area didn’t even know what hit them; they were dead the instant the dynamite exploded. Others, outside the blast area, were hurled dozens of feet through the air and had limbs blown off. The ear-splitting sound of the explosion resounded in a series of echoes that bounced like a pinball around the nearby mountains and valleys.

  For a few moments after the sound of the blast faded away, Phil and Wyatt were stunned into silence. Phil could hardly believe he’d just done what he’d just done; well over twenty men had essentially been vaporized by one little squeeze of his finger, and a dozen more had had their arms and legs blown off. It was almost too horrific to even begin to process in his mind, but he knew that as gruesome as it was, it was a matter of life or death; these men had come here to kill, rape, and pillage, and they had known that their intended victims would surely attempt to fight back.

  “Pick off the survivors!” Wyatt said, snapping Phil out of this trance of thought.

  From far behind them, on the other side of the ranch, came the sound of gunfire, and the men knew the battle had started there as well. This spurred further urgency into their veins, and Phil was quickly able to get over the shock of what he’d just seen and done. He swung his rifle scope up, seeking out targets who had escaped the blast without injury. At least twenty men were uninjured, but they were staggering around in shock, holding their ears; anyone close to the blast had likely had his eardrums blown out and would now be deaf.

  Phil and Wyatt started picking them off, dispatching the men with well-placed headshots.

  As soon as the surviving invaders saw their comrades’ heads snapping back and their skulls exploding, what little fight was left in them departed. After Phil and Wyatt had shot five or six of them, the remaining survivors threw down their guns and fled, screaming into the woods.

  After that, Phil turned his scope on the wounded men who’d had their arms or legs blown off. Even though they were evil men, it was cruel to leave them to suffer like this.

  “Give ‘em a quick death, at least,” he said to Wyatt, lining up the head of a screaming, legless man in his scope. “They’re human beings, and they deserve some mercy.”

  “They don’t deserve nothin’,” Wyatt growled, “but I guess you’re right.”

  They started putting the wounded out of their misery, but soon the gunfire coming from their rear intensified, and then Phil’s walkie talkie crackled.

  “Phil, Wyatt!” It was Jonathan, who was in charge of holding the south section. His voice was hoarse and desperate, and the sounds of automatic gunfire and screams were loud and close in the background.

  “I’m here, Jonathan!” Phil responded.

  “There are too many of ‘em!” Jonathan yelled over the barrage of gunfire. “We’re about to be overrun. We can’t hold this section!”

  “Okay, okay,” Phil said, his heart hammering. “Retreat to the second position, retreat to the second position! Do you copy Jonathan, do you copy?”

  There was no response…only a dead hiss from Jonathan’s walkie talkie.

  “That’s not good,” Wyatt said grimly.

  “Jonathan, are you there?” Phil asked. “Jonathan, come in! Are you there?”

  Still, there was no response but silence.

  “Come on, leave these assholes,” Wyatt said, getting up from behind his boulder. “We better move.”

  “Yeah, the others need backup. Let’s go.”

  Phil slung his AR-15 over his shoulder and climbed onto the dirt bike, but just as he was about to kick it to life, the walkie talkie crackled to life.

  “Jonathan!” Phil said, scrambling to unclip the walkie talkie from his belt.

  It was not Jonathan’s voice that came through the tinny speaker, though.

  “Hello, cowboy…” Jackson said.

  36

  “Turn off the walkie talkie, Phil,” Wyatt said. “Don’t let that psychopath get inside your head.”

  “What’s the matter, cowboy?” Jackson taunted. “Cat got your tongue? Speaking of tongues, I think I’ll cut your skinny friend’s out and fry it up…or maybe I’ll just cut his whole head off and mount it with the others I’ll have on sticks by the time the sun rises. I’ll make sure you live just long enough to see your wife’s head and your boy’s head stuck on sticks, motherfucker, before I—”

  Phil turned off the walkie talkie.

  “Don’t let him get to you,” Wyatt said. “We’ll blow that son of a bitch’s brains out long before he has the chance to put anyone’s head on a stick.”

  “He’s killed one of my people,” Phil growled, his jaw clenched with rage, “but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let him kill anyone else. Let’s go!”

  They kicked the bikes to life and sped along the drive. As they rode, they saw flares being shot into the sky, but they were not only the orange flares created by Phil; there were standard pink flares too, being fired by Jackson’s men, to light up the battlefield.

  As Phil and Wyatt came over the rise, where they were able to see the farmhouse, the barn, and some of the meadows, a terrifying sight greeted them. At least a hundred men were charging across the fields, firing guns and whooping. The whole scene was lit up by the eerie, almost surreal ebb-and-flow glow of the flares drifting overhead and looked like something out of a nightmare. Phil’s small pockets of defenders were firing furiously from behind their positions of cover, and David and the women were sniping with rifles from the farmhouse, but even though many of the attackers were dropping dead, the sheer superiority of their numbers was overwhelming, and it seemed that nothing could stop their advance.

  Jonathan’s position by the stables had long since been overrun, Phil could see, and some of the attackers had dug in by the stables and were using the buildings and hay bales outside them as cover to fire on the farmhouse.

  Phil skidded to a halt and grabbed the walkie talkie. Jack
son would hear his orders, but he didn’t care; he had to save the women and children, and his remaining defenders.

  “Everyone, fall back!” Phil yelled into the walkie talkie. “I repeat, fall back to the last defensive position now!” He then glanced over at the distant pen where the cattle were. The sounds of the battle had surely got the beasts worked up into a frenzied panic, and if they were to be of any use in this battle, he needed to unleash them now. It pained him to know that many of them would be killed because they were such a valuable resource on his ranch, but this was a matter of life and death. “Doc Robertson!” Phil yelled into the walkie talkie, “do your thing! I repeat, Doc Robertson, do it now!”

  For a few seconds, there was no response, and with a sense of panic rising up within him, Phil wondered if the old veterinarian was still alive. Then, however, under the strange glow of the flares, Phil could just make out a small figure hauling open the gate to the cattle pen. Doc Robertson was still alive, and he flung fireworks into the midst of the herd to set off the animals into the stampede, which was now inevitable.

  Phil watched with grim fascination as the huge animals, stirred up by the gunfire and now the exploding fireworks into a frenzied panic, burst out of the pen in a thunderous stampede, racing across the fields in a mad rush—the very fields that a large mass of invaders were running across.

  Even above the din of gunfire, the invaders heard the rumble of the hooves and felt the thunder of the stampeding cattle beneath their feet. The panicking beasts swept across the fields in a tightly packed wave, a living, writhing tsunami surging forward. Many of the invaders dropped their guns and turned to run, but a lot of them were simply too close to do anything but turn and shoot desperately into the charging mass of cattle before, like sandcastles on a beach, they were swallowed up and smashed to a bloody pulp beneath the pounding hooves of the stampeding herd.

  “Come on!” Wyatt urged. “The stampede is taking plenty of ‘em out, but there are a lot more of the bastards who are still fighting!”

  He and Phil raced down to the farmhouse, where David and Alice were trying to help the women out through the back door. In the front of the farmhouse, behind sandbags on the porch, Eddie, Fred, and a couple of other defenders were pinned down by heavy fire from the stables and were doing their best to squeeze off bursts of fire at groups of attackers, who kept darting from position cover to position of cover, steadily getting closer.

  From behind a tree close to the farmhouse, one of the attackers darted out to fling a Molotov cocktail at the farmhouse. Fred shot the man through his chest, but before he fell, he hurled the projectile, which hit the porch and exploded in a massive fireball.

  “Dammit!” Phil yelled. “The house is on fire!”

  Because of the intense barrage of bullets, the attackers were pouring into the house from the stables, and the rapidly spreading fire that was starting to engulf the entire porch, Eddie and his little group of defenders were now totally trapped. If they tried to move, they would get cut down by the men in the stables, but if they stayed where they were for much longer, they would be burned alive.

  “Wyatt, time to get out the big guns!” Phil yelled. “We have to take those guys in the stables out, and there’s only one way to do that! Hurry, get to the hangar!”

  They raced in a wide arc on the dirt bikes, cutting across the field between them and the farmhouse, jumping over mounds and crashing through ruts and ditches while bullets flew around them. When they got behind the farmhouse, where Alice and David had gotten the women out of the house, both men jumped off the bikes, letting them fall to the ground with the motors still running; they wouldn’t need them again.

  “Davey and Alice, lead them to the barn!” Phil commanded. “We’ll cover you while you move. You do the same for us!”

  “Got it, Dad!” David yelled.

  Phil and Wyatt knelt behind a pile of sandbags and started firing with their AR-15s while David, Alice, and the women sprinted across the open ground to the closest pile of sandbags. Phil’s mind was racing along at a million miles a minute, and it was almost as if some sort of automatic part of his mind was in control, and he was just observing as he coolly swung the sights of his rifle from one target to the next, firing until each enemy dropped dead.

  “All clear!” David yelled from the sandbags. He and Alice started laying down cover fire, and Phil and Wyatt raced across the open ground and dived behind the sandbags, with bullets whizzing around them and kicking up puffs of dust at their feet.

  “Hang in there, Eddie and Fred!” Phil shouted into his walkie talkie. “We’ll get you out of there in a minute, just hang in there!”

  “Hurry, Phil!” Fred yelled back. “These flames are getting closer, and the sons of bitches have us totally pinned down!”

  There were two more piles of sandbags between their position and the barn, and the group moved rapidly between them in the same way. Within a minute, they were in the barn.

  “You guys, take your positions!” Phil yelled to David, Alice, and the women. “You keep firing until you run out of bullets! Don’t let anyone get within a hundred feet of this barn!”

  “Where are you going?” Alice screamed, watching as Phil and Wyatt abruptly turned and ran straight back out of the barn. “Don’t leave us here!”

  “I’ll be back!” Phil yelled. “Just keep shooting!”

  A minute later, amidst all the noise of gunfire and shooting, David and the women heard the sound of a large motor roaring to life. Then, a couple of seconds later came the sound of screeching tires…and after that, they saw the armored Humvee come hurtling around the side of the barn, with Wyatt at the wheel and Phil wielding an M-60 machine gun from the passenger seat.

  37

  “Just like driving a tank,” Wyatt said, grinning as he floored the Humvee’s accelerator, “except a lot faster!”

  “Swing wide!” Phil yelled, pointing to a handful of enemy fighters who had broken cover and were running to get to the farmhouse. “Those guys there, take ‘em out! If they get into the farmhouse, Eddie and Fred are dead!”

  “Hold on tight,” Wyatt growled, aiming the speeding Humvee right at the group of invaders.

  They heard the huge vehicle speeding toward them and dropped to their knees, firing at the windshield and engine block, not realizing that the entire vehicle was completely bulletproof. By the time they did realize this, it was too late, and the Humvee plowed through them, scattering them like bowling pins. Broken bodies were flung through the air and crushed under the Humvee’s heavy wheels, and the windshield was sprayed with blood. Wyatt and Phil lurched in their seats from the impact of hitting the men but were otherwise fine.

  “Get me a good shot at the stables!” Phil yelled.

  The attackers in the stables, who were keeping Fred and Eddie pinned down on the burning porch, were all in the loft, firing down out of the windows. Phil started firing the machine gun at the charging men, spraying scything arcs of bullets and cutting down any invaders who were unlucky enough to be caught on open ground.

  The men in the stables knew the Humvee was coming for them, and they turned their fire away from Fred and Eddie, focusing it on the approaching vehicle instead. Inside the Humvee, the drumming and thumping of bullets smashing into the vehicle made it sound as if they were caught in the open in a hailstorm.

  “How bulletproof is this thing?” Wyatt yelled over the din. “We’re taking some serious fire here!”

  “It’s bulletproof enough,” Phil growled back over the hammering thunder of his M-60, as he continued to sweep a spray of bullets over the battlefield. “It’ll hold, trust me! Now let’s take out those assholes in the stables!”

  “They’re dead,” Wyatt growled, skidding to a halt with a ninety-degree handbrake turn in front of the stables.

  Phil didn’t waste a single second; he swung the machine gun up and started riddling the entire roof area of the stables with bullets. From inside came the sound of men screaming in panic, and a few d
ead bodies slumped and slipped out of the windows; those who hadn’t been fast enough to take cover when Phil had started his attack.

  From behind the cover of one of the vintage tractors nearby, Jackson roared with fury as he saw his men being decimated. Phil and his defenders had fought back with far more ferocity and tenacity than he ever could have imagined…but he had come prepared for an eventuality like this.

  “All right, cowboy,” he growled, watching as Phil turned the upper portion of the stables building into something resembling a block of swiss cheese, “you wanna play with big guns? I’ve got a real nice surprise, just for you.”

  Jackson stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled to one of his men, a man armored up in SWAT gear, who was carrying a bunch of Jackson’s favorite weapons. The man was hiding behind a large tree, where gunfire from the barn was keeping him pinned down.

  “I need some cover, Jackson!” he roared.

  “Cowardly little bitch!” Jackson snarled back, but he nonetheless picked up his AK-47, popped out from behind the tractor, and started spitting bullets at the barn, causing some of the defenders there to duck behind cover, giving his man enough of a gap to sprint across the open ground between the tree and the tractor.

  Once the man reached him, Jackson dropped his AK. This was because the man, panting and gasping from the effort of sprinting in full SWAT gear, handed him a far more potent weapon: an RPG. He loaded it up, then got down onto his knees with the RPG on his shoulder, taking aim at the Humvee.

  Inside the Humvee, Phil stopped firing; he’d used up the whole ammo belt. As he scrambled to reload the machine gun, he caught a glimpse of a worrying silhouette out of the corner of his eye. He jerked his head around and saw that it was no apparition, no conjuration of his troubled mind; there really was a man aiming an RPG at the vehicle.

  “Out, out, get out!” he screamed at Wyatt.