10.
Dr. Claire Boucher was a second year resident at the Lancaster General Hospital about a dozen miles west of Intercourse and the Amish furniture store. She had been training to be a radiologist, working with x-rays, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging machines, but all that was history now. There was still no electricity in the hospital, and they were caring for patients by lamplight. They were luck that it was an older hospital and the windows could be opened and were actually high and gave good light to surgeons doing emergency operations. There was no refrigeration, but they had pills and some drugs in solution that could be stored at room temperature. He greater difference, Claire had seen immediately was in the relationship to her patients. Whereas before she could diagnose quickly with internal organ scans of various kinds, now she had to spend time talking to patients, listening, examining carefully with her hands and probing fingers, the way it had been done in the 19th century.
There were some lab tests available, those that could be done on site because there was still no reliable way to send material to labs in Harrisburg the way it had been done before. There were still no phones or computers working, everything was done person to person. They had thought to hire messengers but there was no way to make it known that they needed help. It was all barely controlled chaos.
Big wagons drawn by Clydesdale horses were starting to appear, full of non-perishable food items for the bigger grocery chains. They were accompanied by mounted police as they arrived. They no longer went to Philadelphia and other big cities as they had been attacked by foot rioters there and even the police protection had not saved the food from being stolen.
“Have you noticed,” she asked her colleague Bill Burton who had been a resident in internal medicine, and now like the rest of the doctors, did everything. “—that there are no more stray dogs in the street?”
“I had. Also, I let my cat out a few days ago as I always do and haven’t seen her since—“
“Oh, so you think—“
“I can’t be sure, but people are hungry. My wife and I have a dog too, a black lab. A real sweetheart. I asked my wife jokingly if she could ever eat our dog if we got hungry enough.”
“Oh, and she took it seriously?”
“Well, she said she would prefer to trade dogs with our next door neighbor. Then we would be eating their dog, whom nobody likes, and they our lab.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Claire said. “I still have a lot of crackers and canned tuna left. I guess I’ll wait before I start eating people’s pets.”
“I saw that wagon arrive a few days ago at the market. But by the time I got in line and it was my turn there was nothing left to buy—“
“They should restrict quantities.”
“They did, but even so, there were just too many people and only one wagon. I heard some guys talking who wanted to kill one of those big draft horses and eat him.”
“How stupid! If they eat the horses there won’t be any more food deliveries!”
“Try telling that to those drunken morons. Unfortunately there is no shortage of whisky and warm beer.”
Fred Goodman was pretty sure the Amish boy had appendicitis. He and his family had been having a simple dinner after a long day of hard work in the fields, when the boy’s father had knocked on their door and asked Fred to come to the meeting room. When he arrived he found the young man stretched out in obvious pain on a wooden bench. The Bishop and several of the elders were there too. All looked very concerned.
The Amish healer was there too.
The healer, Martin Linden turned to him.
“I think it’s the boy’s appendix. If that’s true he will need surgery. We used to take people to the Lancaster General Hospital ten miles to the west, but now after all that’s happened, I’m not sure what we should do. Is there still a hospital there?”
“Well, there’s no way to check now except to go and see. May I?” he asked indicating the patient.
The boy let him palpate the area gently. When he pushed in over the lower right of the abdomen and let it spring back, the boy cried out.
“From what I know, not being a doctor of course, that’s a key test for a hot appendix. I agree we should take him to the hospital.”
They hitched up a wagon and Bishop Samuel and the father were going to go with the boy in the wagon bed.
“I think you may need someone riding shotgun,” Fred offered.
“Sorry?” Samuel said, not familiar with the expression.
“You need someone with a gun next to the driver. To protect the horses,” he clarified.
“Someone would steal our horses?” the boy’s father sounded shocked.
“Depends how desperate they are. If just a little desperate they might take them to sell for food. If things are worse than that, they will take them and eat them on the spot.”
The boy’s father said something in German to Samuel and turned away.
“We will stop by your house so you can get your shotgun,” Samuel said. “Many people in our community could never bring themselves to use violence against another person, even to protect their families or property. It’s too deep within us.”
“I understand. I’ll ride shotgun then.”
11.
No one knew what was happening anywhere. The first week after the Event, North Korea had invaded South Korea. No one’s nuclear arsenals were reliable in this environment, and tanks and planes no longer worked, but AK-47 assault rifles still worked just fine and the North Koreans had plenty of those and soldiers to carry them into battle. What they no longer had was food for all these soldiers since there were no more trucks coming from China and their own collective agriculture was a long term disaster.
South Korea sent a message to Washington asking for help against the North, but the message went by three mast schooner from Pusan and would take a month to the Panama Canal and several weeks more to Washington DC if the locks at the Canal were operating. If they were not, it was another two-month journey around the Horn and the whole length of South America to just ask for help. How any help could get to them from the USA in these circumstances was dubious, but the South Koreans hoped that by the time their message was received the Event would have abated somewhat and some things might begin to work again.
Almost immediately, Rachel Rosen and her country were under siege from groups who had never depended much on technology and now were anxious to take advantage of the fact that Israel’s vaunted technical superiority over its enemies was completely gone. Normally, the call for Israeli mobilization would have been sent by radio and TV for the IDF reserve forces to muster and pick up their gear at their predetermined meeting points. But the troops were smart and as it became clear that no communications networks existed any more, the half million man Israeli reserve, Shlav Bet, went by foot and bicycle to their meeting points.
No Arab governments were interested in prosecuting the war, in fact most had no way to even know about it, but their proxy armies like Hezbollah, Hamas and various fragments of other organizations decided that this was the heaven sent moment to take down a confused Israel, bereft of her Air Force, and all the technical paraphernalia of modern warfare. Governments everywhere were back to the basics of survival like everyone else.
The leaders of Hamas went to Beirut from Gaza City by sailboat to attend a joint meeting with the senior leadership of Hezbollah. They sat in a circle around a big bowl of food and each dipped in with pita bread held in his right hand, as was traditional.
At the end of the meal the leader of Hezbollah summed up: “Allah in his wisdom and mercy has destroyed the power of the infidel USA throughout the world. They may never regain even a fraction of their former power and influence in this area. He has left Israel to us to deal with and leveled the playing field so their advanced weapons systems no longer can help them, Now we will see how God is Great!”
They all stood up and cheered.
Units of Hezbollah and Hamas fighters attacked from Gaz
a and from Lebanon and even a few across the Jordan River. What their leadership hadn’t realized was Israel’s continuing advantage in being able to work along “interior lines.” As a small country they could move men by foot and bicycle easily from place to place to cover their borders. Their Galil assault rifles worked as well as the enemy’s AK-47’s, even if their vaunted Israeli Merkava tanks could only sit silently in their staging areas.
Rachel could hear distant gunfire in the great silence that pervaded the world in the absence of machines. It was far away and stayed far away and she was glad because it was the only way she could gauge who was winning. The IDF had closed the borders and the great fence built years before to keep out terrorists with bombs now served as a barrier that could be defended along interior lines by infantry who had to move as they would have in the nineteenth century, on foot, with the “cavalry” now on bicycles.
Jerusalem became a flashpoint again as people struggled with Molotov cocktails, fists and rifles for its ancient stones.
Everywhere hunger had the power to force neighbor to attack neighbor but surprisingly, this was the exception rather than the rule. After a certain point people became quite passive as their caloric intake dropped below 1,000 calories per day and their energy was sapped even by the simplest tasks. As was seen in previous long term disasters like the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw Ghetto, starvation led to passivity and lingering death rather than violence.
The City of Leningrad was under siege by Nazi forces from 1941 to 1944. A thousand people a day died from cold and hunger. The stress broke up families and many people just went inside their homes, got into bed and died quietly by themselves.
Although the Event maintained its grip on the planet, the levels of static electricity in the air were dropping and peoples’ hair no longer stood completely on end. If you put gasoline into a car with a repaired electrical system, it would now run, but if you wanted to refuel, it was necessary to find a gas station open and to haul gas up from their in-ground tanks with a bucket and a rope. Electric gas pumps were still useless. Police departments had managed to fix a few of their patrol cars and in some places prevented the gas stations from furnishing gas to private cars to avoid giving criminals an advantage over a prostrate and vulnerable population.
12.
A terrible smell had begun to fill the cities and towns. It was the smell of all the dead people who had slowly starved to death and the walking skeletons in the streets with their hands out begging would be the next to go. It was this that had prompted some to take desperate action. The cities were in fact already desperate for water since the mains were deep underground and the pumps were no longer working to bring water into people’s homes. Bottled water disappeared from stores and like everything else became almost impossible to find.
For a time there a thriving black market emerged in food and water, but soon even the black marketers could no longer find product, and if they did there was no way to get it to market.
But there were people who were ready to take aggressive action to save themselves. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, county seat of Lancaster County, a motorcycle club called the Wild Men wearing leathers with black and red colors met by lamplight in a roadside tavern to make plans. It was a month after the Event and everyone was thinner and meaner, and they had been mean enough to begin with.
Jack Kelley was their leader, a big man with dark hair tied back in a rough pony tail. Their useless motorcycles were scattered all over town and even a few were here in front of the tavern. They were safe enough—no one would bother to steal something as useless as a Harley Davidson these days.
They had arrived for the meeting on bicycles. They were good on the bikes, as they had stolen bikes of only the best quality, but still it wasn’t the same. The throb and heat and roar of a Harley engine between their legs was something they all missed. They nursed their warm beers at several tables pushed together at the back, lit by a single kerosene lamp in the middle.
“None of our long guns have slings,” he was saying, looking at the dim light. “So we can bring only pistols. But there shouldn’t be any shooting. These people are pacifists, like Quakers, see? They’ll just “quake” and run away!”
He laughed at his own joke and his buddies gave an obligatory chuckle.
“But if we run them all off who’s going to work the farms?” Tom Brown asked. He was skinny guy who everybody said thought way too much to be a good biker.
Led by Jack and Tom the bikers put together a plan to take over Amish farms in Lancaster County, and make the present owners work the land for the biker gang who would then “protect” them from other encroachers.
“It’s a sort of feudalism,” Tom commented dubiously at the end.
“Sort of,” Jack replied. I paid attention in high school when they talked about feudalism in the middle ages. It was a real good deal for the nobles and the other guys on top.”
Will and Mary watched the storm develop in the faraway hills. This one would be a bad one, anyone could see that. There had been a few thunderstorms already and the lighting had been intense, much worse than ever before because there was still so much electricity in the atmosphere from the Event. Several forest fires had started on distant hills and they had watched with binoculars as the fires cut swathes of black in the distance. The wind had been behind them then and the fires had burned over the horizon and away from them. But now they could feel a strong wind in their faces as the super cell advanced like a giant anvil towering in the sky. There was a lot of energy in the super cell, lightning racing here and there and jumping to the neighboring clouds. It was quite a show—but a noisy and terrifying one.
“This is going to be big trouble,” Will said laconically. “There are no firefighters any more, and any fires from this storm will come right at us this time.”
“Won’t we be okay in the shelter, even if we lose the house?”
Will was silent considering the implications of that. It was impossible to say what would happen if they were in the shelter and the whole hillside burned, as was now very possible. There were vents to the outside that might let in the smoke and superheated fumes and kill them. They would have no chance then—what to do?
“Let’s get the bike out and load it up,” he said. If a fire starts in front of us and is moving towards the house we should have time to get out.”
He had protected the Honda motorcycle inside the shelter during the event and replaced some wiring so that he was able to test it outside last week. The tank was full and he now attached the boot he had for a long gun. He was able to fit the Mossberg 12 gauge in, but the fit was tighter than he would have liked. The saddle bags were bulging with food and water.
“Where can we go?” Mary asked. “Isn’t everything destroyed out there?”
“There’s one place I know that shouldn’t have been much affected by all this.”
He had already told her about his Amish roots. She caught his drift immediately.
“You would go back there? Would they accept you—accept us?”
“Ordinarily, no. But these are not ordinary times. Depending on what’s out there on the roads it shouldn’t take more than a day on the Honda to find out.”
Mary’s eyes grew wide as he took a holster with a 9mm Beretta automatic pistol and nestled in inside the belt of her jeans in back.
She giggled with excitement.
“We look like Bonnie and Clyde,” she said.
“No, no,” Will laughed. “They used a Browning Automatic Rifle, not a shotgun! And not a Thompson either, like in the movie.”
He grew suddenly serious. The thunder was louder now and lighting flashing down repeatedly on nearby ridgelines.
“I have a BAR in the shelter and several full magazines. It will actually fit better in the bike boot than the shotgun does. What a great idea you had—“
She blushed. They both looked into the distance to see a line of fire coming over the hilltop less than a mile away. Will went b
ack in the shelter and retrieved the BAR and ammo.
“Time to boogie,” Will said, putting the bandolier of ammunition across his chest and adjusting the saddlebags on the big Honda. He went back and secured the house and the door to the shelter. He had bought the BAR in a private sale at a gun show last year. It was unmodified and therefore illegal to own as it would fire full automatic. Its rate of fire was slow for an automatic weapon but it was an amazing gun-- a work of genius from the famous gun maker John Browning, which had seen service since 1918, and been a favorite for area fire in Army and Marine rifle companies during WWII, Korea and Vietnam.
They mounted the bike and he looked sadly back at his house. The shelter might survive this fire but the house was a goner. Mary put her arms around him and her head against his back as the big engine rumbled and they started off down the hill.
13.
The 30 Wild Men pedaled their bikes east up PA route 30. They had not been far from their own area since the Event and even they were sobered by the vastness of the desolation. For miles they saw nothing living and they instinctively clustered closer together as they rode. Sometimes far in the distance they saw someone moving across a field, head down, walking slowly as if through thick mud.
Houses and farms were empty and abandoned, some of them burnt out but it was hard to say how or why that had happened. Of food there was nothing left to find except a few rotting bits on a table or the ground. As in Lancaster, there were no more dogs or cats to be seen. If there were any left they were hiding. On a serving platter covered by flies in one house were the bones of several smallish rodents.
“Hmm,” Jack observed. “Either very small rabbits or very big rats.”
Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) Page 4