EMP Resurrection
Dark New World: Book Five
by
JJ Holden
&
Henry Gene Foster
The invaders have been repelled for now, but Cassy’s problems are far from over. Her nascent body of allies, the Confederation, may have a traitor among them. With the Empire coming from the west to “liberate” survivors and land alike, the timing couldn’t be worse. And while General Taggart has promised more aid, he has his hands full with a ’vader enemy of his own. Will he liberate New Jersey in time to help the besieged Clan and her allies? In the meantime, the General Under the Mountain and his cabal, the 20s, have plans of their own, plans which could turn the tide of America’s future one way or the other…
Copyright © 2017 by JJ Holden / Henry Gene Foster
All rights reserved.
www.jjholdenbooks.com
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
NOTE: This is the fifth book in the Dark New World series. If you are new to this series, be sure to check out BOOK ONE.
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- 1 -
0700 HOURS - ZERO DAY +186
CASSY STOOD OUTSIDE her home and once again considered whether to patch the many bullet marks on her walls, scars of several battles since EMPs destroyed the America she had known. First had come Peter and his refugees from White Stag Farms, but despite enslaving Cassy’s group of EMP refugees—the Clan, as they now called themselves—Peter had been overthrown with help from some of his own people. Then came raids by cannibals, other survivor groups, and even another enclave, or survivor settlement. All that fighting occurred before she had led the local survivor groups into a confederation of allies, and the area had become safer. For now, anyway. Maybe it really was time to patch the holes. They served as an ugly reminder of even uglier conflicts.
Frank stood beside her quietly, gazing at the wall, too. Finally he said, “Good thing you built our HQ out of sandbags. Other than the windows, it’s a tank against small arms. Thinking again about patching the walls?”
Cassy nodded, and fiddled with the rawhide thong that tied her long hair into a ponytail. “It might be time. And they’re called earthbags, not sandbags. They’ll stop a fifty-caliber round, you know. I think that maybe with the Empire looming to our west and ISNA and their North Korean overlords to our east, we should enjoy this time. It’s the first real peace we’ve had since the lights went out six months ago.”
Frank said, “You do know it’s an illusion, right? Peace. Safety. Even if you don’t count all the wars we fought in other countries, that two hundred years of peace we had at home was a historical anomaly. And if you count our wars in other countries, we’ve never been at peace for longer than a decade or two.”
Cassy pursed her lips, jaw clenched. “It never was two hundred years of peace at home. The Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War… We’re the most warlike nation in history.”
Frank shrugged. “At least since the Romans, maybe more than them. We’re a violent civilization, I guess.”
“Yes, and those ISNA bastards are finding out the hard way that we’re not the soft people their leaders told them we were. But I’ve seen enough blood to last a lifetime.”
“It’s the end of the world as we know it,” Frank said, nodding. “The Dying Time isn’t even over yet and here we are looking to fight not just invaders but other Americans, too.”
“All of which is why I don’t think reminders like these bullet holes help anyone. I’ll see if we have people available to patch these up.”
Frank used his crutch to tap the stump where Peter had cut off one foot with an axe to prove a point. “Still itches all the time,” he said with a wry grin. “There’s one reminder we can’t patch up. Anyway, I got word from Ethan, down in the bunker. He says we got radio confirmations from the Confed allies about tonight’s meeting. They’ll be here in time for the video chat with Taggart. I swear, video conferencing seems like some kind of magic, now.”
“It might as well be magic. Once the stuff that still works breaks down, we’ll be truly back where we started. The guns will last longer but they’ll stop working too. Eventually. It’ll be flintlocks and swords again, or maybe longbows and swords, by the time I hit great-grandmother status. How’s Taggart doing out there in New Jersey?”
Frank shrugged and sat with a groan of effort on a log that had been set out in front of Cassy’s house—the Clan’s HQ, as well—to serve as a bench. “He’s a colonel now, with the size of his force. Maybe even higher since Ethan last got an update. A few thousand soldiers, mostly ex-military from the Gulf War, the rest guerrillas he’s training up from the slaves he’s been freeing all over upstate New Jersey.”
“Good. The Invader cantonment in New York City will hopefully get real hungry, real soon, without their slaves to farm all that land they stole.” She glanced at Frank and saw he was shivering. “I’ll let you get back to trying to keep warm, Frank. If you see Michael before I do, tell him to make sure our guards are doubled today. We want a show of force for our visitors. Thanks for the update.”
Frank nodded, and then Cassy left to go check up on the work detail at the east pond harvesting cattails. These were long past edible now, but still made great insulating filler for the quilts some in the Clan had begun making. They made good trade goods for more gasifiers from the Falconry, or Lebanon as they used to call that tiny Pennsylvania town. Other survivor groups congregated in the trading center there and it was getting easier for everyone to find what they needed, if they came with suitable goods to trade in return. International trade and high finance had degenerated these days into bartering blankets for generators… Cassy shook her head and walked on.
* * *
Jaz put the last of their remaining supplies back into the covered wagon and shivered. Zipping up the blue quilted jacket she wore over her customary hoodie, she walked to the other side of the wagon where Choony was going through his “packing checklist.” It was a morning routine he had developed the very first morning on this horse-drawn journey. He was methodical, no doubt about it. They were well along now, heading steadily south, but she missed the Clan, her family now as she reckoned it. Their mission was more important than her homesickness, she had to remind herself.
Restive now, she decided to prod her companion. “Choon, do we gotta do that checklist thingie, like, every single day? We need to get moving. That one farm we passed on our first day out said it was only like, a few miles ahead now. Why didn’t we just keep going?”
Choony looked up, his bright, almond-shaped eyes lighting up when he saw her. They always seemed to do that and she loved seeing it. He replied, “We can’t afford to have things bounce away if we have to ride for our lives again. Unless you feel like giving stuff
away for free to the next batch of bandits or cannibals that chase us. I’m sure they’d be very grateful.” His smile gave away his fake-stern tone of voice.
Jaz grinned at him. Such a cute idiot sometimes. “Yeah, yeah. They’d probably make me their queen and cook you for dinner.”
Choony chuckled softly.
“Well,” Jaz continued. “I still want to get going. Maybe we can trade some stuff in that enclave, if they’re still alive when we get there this time. Too late for the last one.”
“No, they couldn’t drive away the bandits—but that’s why we have to make sure everything is secure before we move on. It would go faster if you helped…” He raised one eyebrow, a challenge.
“You lie! You’d double-check my double-checks,” Jaz said, laughing. “Net zero time saved and lots of time wasted. I’d rather stand here and complain, because I know how much faster you go when I entertain you.”
Choony mock-growled at her good-naturedly, then went through the rest of his checklist. She taunted and cajoled him the entire time but it didn’t really take long, maybe five minutes. They both knew there wouldn’t be much chance to joke around once the wagon got moving for the day. When traveling, you kept your eyes and ears open if you wanted to live, and these days you weren’t looking out for state troopers with speeding ticket quotas to meet.
Soon enough they scrambled aboard and the wagon got rolling, Jaz and Choony swaying back and forth on the wooden bench seat. Jaz sat on the right, keeping her rifle next to her, eyes scanning restlessly out to the horizon and back seeking movement or other signs of the living. Lots of people still survived outside the cities, not all of them friendly; other travelers they had encountered told some pretty harrowing tales about what the cities were like now for the few who still lived there.
As the wagon rolled on, the horses’ hooves clopping softly in the dirt like a metronome, Jaz let her mind wander back to Clanholme. It truly was her home now, she had decided, a new experience for this former Philly street dweller. The last time she had been at Clanholme, she had shared a lunch with Cassy, the Clan leader, in the HQ, and they had talked. Mostly it had been relaxed give-and-take about business—but before they had finished eating, they had planned the rough outline of this trip all over creation to find other survivor groups willing to join the new Confederation. She remembered some of their small talk, too. Eventually, they had gotten down to personal matters.
Poor Cassy had her leg in a brace, one of several mementos from a recent battle that finally slaughtered a small army of foreign invaders who had tried to make their home in Confed territory. The Clan and their allies had driven the unwanted settlers out. As they retreated, the ’vaders had burned Adamstown to the ground and killed most of the townspeople. The Confederation got its revenge, but it was not done without some losses. And for Cassy, not without a leg brace and a healing scar on her cheek from a bullet graze. The new scar was not by itself; Cassy’s scarred face had become a symbol of Clan toughness, an association that Cassy did nothing to discourage among Clanholme’s enemies and allies.
Jaz wondered now whether the graze had healed up yet. She totally hoped so—Cassy had been so nice to her while they talked. Whatever bad blood remained from when Jaz had first met Cassy (and robbed her) was gone, finally. They had even talked about Choony…
“Don’t wait too long to decide if you want him,” Cassy had said, “or I might make my own move.” Which was totally hilarious because Choony was Jaz’s age, or maybe twenty-four, and Cassy was totally middle aged, or whatever. At least thirty-five. That made Cassy one of the older people to have survived so far, which made her simply old as far as twenty-year-old Jaz was concerned.
Jaz glanced at Choony for a moment and he caught it, smiled, and nodded to her. She nodded back as a return smile reached her lips, and went back to scanning the horizon for threats. She really didn’t need to look at him, though, because she had memorized every line and angle of his face by now. For a second-generation Korean immigrant with more education than experience, and a pacifist Buddhist on top of that, he had a surprising appeal. But his personality and what was inside made him shine. She had never met anyone like him, not in the tough Philly streets.
But she couldn’t help wishing she knew where she wanted to take her friendship with Choony, the hardworking Buddhist pacifist chemical scientist and part-time combat medic, wagoner, ostler and animal-loving veterinarian. She wondered if he ever suffered an identity crisis and made an involuntary little choking sound holding down a laugh. Choony looked over, a question on his face, so she grinned, said “Never mind,” and went back to scanning the landscape. Damn. She really needed a distraction.
* * *
Ethan sat in his squeaky chair facing the small computer desk, deep in the Clan’s underground bunker. It wasn’t really a bunker in the way his own had been, back in Chesterbrook before the ’vaders found his property, but it was better than most he had seen. It also held the Clan’s communications center, and had been EMP-shielded, so the electronic and binary gear all still worked. Cassy had put the bunker in before the EMPs, when Clanholme was simply her second home, a place where she made a hobby of learning the arts of prepper readiness and permaculture gardening. Now it was home to the Clan, with over a hundred people, and had absorbed the now-vacant lands around it. The bunker wasn’t very well lit but it had sturdy walls and was fairly deep underground, so it felt like a nice, cozy cave to him. Safe. No one felt safe aboveground nowadays. Ever.
Ethan adjusted his green Ready Player One vintage gaming tee shirt—one of his prized possessions—and decided it was time to establish his data connections through HAMnet and see what was going on out in the Big Wide World. Usually he heard nothing, or very little, but every once in a while he’d connect with some distant group of survivors. It was nice to know there were still people out there, nice people who didn’t want to eat him or kill him for his stuff. Well, probably not—they were far enough away that it was never an option, so he got along famously with them. They weren’t often on at the same times he was, but they had agreed to each be online at a specific time once weekly so that they could trade news if there was any.
Ethan turned on his HAM radio and launched his HAMnet apps. At first, there was no connection and he felt a moment of panic, but then his signal strength spiked to normal, and the hourglass appeared. He waited for a few seconds while his chat app loaded and popped up on-screen. Later, he’d get on the HAM radio itself to talk with whatever HAMheads still lived, but he wasn’t thinking of them just yet. He ran through his VPN net, masking his trail as best he could, then showed up in the chatroom that someone had left up since right after the EMPs hit. It was probably some prepper type, maybe sitting alone in a cabin in West Virginia with some creative way of getting online, and hosting the chats as his way of staying social. In these chats he did away with Dark Ryder and posed as “E-Clan1,” just another survivor from just another enclave.
E-Clan1 >> Anyone on? Still alive?
He sat and waited as the minutes ticked by, wishing this chat setup had an alert when people logged in. On the bright side, when you logged in you saw whatever had been written in the last ten minutes. After that, it erased itself. At eight minutes in, he got a reply and then another—
MooseLand >> Hi 2 u both, Alaska inna hizzouse!
E-Clan1 >> lol good 2 c u both. We’re hanging on here in PA. How’s FL and AK?
MooseLand >> Still holding on. Winter made it easy for us to hold off our Chinese and Korean friends. Spring is coming, but the other round of EMPs evened up our odds a bit.
SgtFlaughter >> We got our commie bastards on the run. Normalized relations my ass, half a million Cubans and Russians still alive, holed up in Orlando. Not for long tho.
MooseLand >> Ha! Go get im FL. Soon I hope. Then u can turn to Georgia and the rest of the Gulf Coast yah?
SgtFlaughter >> That’s the plan. Kill these guyz then go north
MooseLand >> Wish we were doing as good
as u all. We got them stopped at the Calif Oregon passes, and the Cascades, but they still got south AK, western WA, and like half of OR. Got some bases in E. WA too, and Anchorage is theirs. We get a survivor once in a while wander out of there, talking crazy. But I believe it. Slave labor, people eating their kids or parents, vaders working the rest 2 death. Just bad. Go go, Free Alaska!
E-Clan1 >> Rock on Free Alaska! U can do it! We’re OK 4 now here. Good news coming from NY, guess the vaders there r hemmed up in NYC. Freedom fightrs makn a New America starting in NJ, and they say they r coming into west PA soon. Can’t wait.
SgtFlaughter >> Hope they hurry eclan, u got spring coming 2. We heard of this Empire out of Ft Wayne, u no about them?
E-Clan1 >> Yah, they r comin this way in spring. We will hold them off long as we can. Sucks they r Americans tho.
MooseLand >> No they r not! Americans fight vaders not us. We r hoping 2 get help from Colorado, there’s Army there!
E-Clan1 >> He isn’t going 2 help u much, he is working with Empire guyz
SgtFlaughter >> No way
E-Clan1 >> Way. its legit. Some of his troops scouting we talked 2 them, they told us.
SgtFlaughter >> Damn. We need 2 b careful then. CO dudes r fighting vaders in TX but not r problem 4 awhile. We got bigger probs here tho.
E-Clan1 >> Like wat?
SgtFlaughter >> Too many chefs, not enuf cooks. Evry group wants 2 b the leader here. Hope we hold it 2gether after the big push
Dark New World (Book 5): EMP Resurrection Page 1