by KA Hopkins
Going into a baby store, she went to the back and asked another mother near the change room if she could keep an eye on her kids for thirty seconds while she went to the bathroom. As she turned to the bathroom, she gave her eldest a prearranged signal for him to start making a fuss. Since ice cream was the reward, he was more than happy to help out. With the stranger distracted, Sara walked out of the store and changed her appearance by tossing her baseball hat and sun glasses in a nearby garbage can. She had hat head from not washing her hair that morning and that helped channel her rage.
Once out of the store, she made her way to a close by service hallway she had found on the directory. Her temporary change of appearance and absence of children confused the police for a few seconds, giving Sara the time to make it to the service hallway.
Before she entered the service hallway she made sure that the police saw her go in. Once they did, she sprinted down the hallway around the first corner. Unlike many women in the mall wearing stylish but impractical shoes, Sara wore running shoes, allowing her to move quickly and nearly silently over the concrete floors.
The police - thanks to numerous politically correct initiatives that limited the physical fitness requirements of the department in an effort to allow everyone and anyone to join the police force in the spirit of diversity - sounded like a herd of elephants as they tried to catch up. Sara was well aware of the brutish tactics now favored by so many police forces. Today they would try and use the same tactics to intimidate her. She knew if she let them arrest her she would never see her kids again. There is an old saying, “even a weak man will fight like a tiger if he has no options.” Sara was far from weak.
The thought of never seeing her children again, gave her the courage to overcome her fear and trust in her new skills. Everyone involved with our unit, both operators and family members, knew what was at stake. As such, the training had been approached with a life-or-death attitude. We trained all the family members the same way the operators were trained, no quarter given or asked. The police, used to abusing their authority by beating up handcuffed suspects with no fear of consequences and having the advantage of greater numbers when taking down lone suspects, had become pretty arrogant, despite their meager skills. After all, what could a 120 pound women do against two 250 pound male cops? That was their first mistake.
They suddenly realized they might be in for more than they bargained for when they came around the corner and Sara greeted them in a martial art fighting stance, balanced on the balls of her feet with a 50,000 volt contact Taser in her lead hand and a twenty-one inch collapsible steel baton in the other.
“Hello boys, what can I do you for?” Before she finished talking, she took the initiative and closed the eight foot distance between them. The first cop immediately escalated the fight by trying to draw his weapon with his right hand - his second mistake. He would not get a chance to make a third. Sara transferred most of the weight to her lead foot and, using the momentum, broke his arm just above the wrist with a backhand downward smash of the baton. As the cop tried to support his broken arm with his other hand, she followed up with a thrusting rear knee to his sternum, shattering it, crushing his lungs and heart.
A martial art knee is not like a knee to the groin; when delivered correctly it has your entire body weight behind it, making it by far the most powerful blow of any martial art kick or punch. Thinking that he was having a heart attack, the first cop fell back into the second cop who, despite the interference of his partner, had managed to draw his gun out of its holster. Stepping forty-five degrees off line to the right, out of the way of the gun, Sara, with a quarter turn to the left, delivered an overhead smash that broke his gun arm just below the elbow. She followed this up with a backhand slash across his throat that crushed his windpipe. For good measure, she shoved the Taser in his face and let him have a full charge. With both policemen unconscious on the floor, she smashed their phones and radios and jumped on their ankles, breaking them. Neither cop would walk, let alone patrol a beat for months.
Looking over the two police officers on the floor she said, “No one takes away my kids.” Sara walked out of the service hall, hung a sign “closed for maintenance,” and made her way back to the baby shop. She caught the eye of her eldest child and had him cause another fuss, allowing her to sneak up on the helpful mother unseen. “Thank you so much, I was positively bursting and it’s impossible to go to the bathroom with these two.” On the way out of the mall she treated her eldest with two scoops of ice cream and called a warning into the base, while carrying out escape and evade procedures to a nearby emergency pickup location.
Chapter 39 - Anarchy
Robert Briggs could directly trace his family business back several hundred years, to his great ancestors who got their start with the manufacturing of gunpowder. In their time they were the best manufacturers of gunpowder in the United States, building up a solid business that did extremely well, although limited to explosives. Since the 1850s, agents of the Grays had helped secretly in the background, without anyone’s knowledge, with chemical research that resulted in new compounds and processes that ended up being worth billions. The string of research successes had been exploited by angel bankers who seemingly arrived out of the blue, offering generous financial terms for what at the time appeared to be very high risk new business ventures. The secret assistance from the Grays’ representatives, for more than 150 years, helped what had been little more than a medium-sized North American chemical company grow into a worldwide global empire.
For years his family believed their great success was attributed to their hard work and efforts, which was true to a point. But then it’s easy to look like a genius if you know all the test answers. The Grays had been providing the answers. With the 1947 Roswell crash and others like it, his company, being one of the world’s leading chemical manufacturers, had been given even more money and support through secret black projects, to research the chemical structures of crashed alien space craft. This money and research opened up new, more profitable chemical product lines.
The astounding success and the associated wealth lead to a life of opulence, yet few in the media knew the full extent of the family’s wealth and power, as Robert ensured the family kept a low profile, operating their worldwide empire through many privately owned shell corporations and fronts. His world was everything he could ever hope for - money, power, influence, respect and the admiration of his peers. Then the Grays revealed their presence in the 1950s; it was quite the shock to learn much of his family’s success was thanks to being manipulated by the Grays. What could he do? The Grays simply pointed out how much money they had earned for his family. Going to the authorities would involve giving up all control of the family fortune, power and influence. In the end, the Grays made him an offer he could not refuse. Not only could his family keep the power and control of their chemical empire, but Gray scientists would provide new advanced research to expand it, free of charge. Within thirty years the family fortune increased to nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars, along with the ability to influence nearly every government on the planet, yet they barely made the Forbes top 500 world’s richest people. That’s real power.
The Grays asked for very little in return for their research. Like all things too good to be true, everything changed thirty years ago with the prearranged fall of the Soviet Union. The time had arrived; the Grays now felt their position on Earth strong enough that they could come out of the shadows to more actively encourage the war on drugs and terrorism. Their first order of business was to hold mandatory semi-annual meetings with the thirteen Families, where the Grays introduced their boss, His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander. He laid out the pacification plans and what happened to planets where they did not succeed. The thirteen Families were given two options: they could either help the pacification efforts, becoming the human rulers on behalf of the Draco Empire, or they were killed on the spot, along with the threat that their entire families would s
oon join them. With no one to turn to, Robert, like most of the family heads, complied. A few family heads called his Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander’s bluff. Robert would never forget the day His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander, in front of him and the other family heads, brutally tortured and murdered the holdouts.
His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander believed strongly in the carrot-and-big-stick approach.
After the initial dissenters had been taken care of, the semi-yearly meetings of the thirteen Families became more of a social event than a working forum. His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander always showed great respect to the family heads and they started to believe that they were his partners in bringing Earth into the ULIR sphere. The last several meetings, called on short notice, had shattered the “equal partners” illusion. The brutal killing of the old chairman, the first murder since the family holdouts thirty years earlier, was a rude wake-up call to the fact their partnership with the Draco was not what they had been lead to believe. The question was, what could he do about it?
Robert, as one of the more powerful members of the thirteen Families, felt as powerless as the other members. He was hesitant to openly say anything to anyone, as he suspected the expensive watch given to him by His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander was much more than what it appeared to be. That was obvious the first day he was told to put it on and then could not take it off. Despite his family’s opulent wealth and power, the new turn of events was frightening. He was on a terrifying ride with no way of getting off.
He was sitting, contemplating his new reality over a glass of Cognac, when all the lights went out throughout his mansion. Along with the lights, every electronic device stopped working. Without the everyday indoor sounds of modern living - the pumps, fans, air-conditioning, TV and radio - the silence felt deafening.
A knock on the door broke the silence. Outside his office was his head of security, Frank Kenney, a small man standing only five foot eight inches tall, dressed in a nicely cut two-piece suit, that disguised the still toned physique of an ex-Army Ranger. Frank was exceedingly good at his job, never having had a security breach during his five year watch as the chief of corporate security worldwide. Without being granted the customary permission to enter, Frank walked into the room. “Sir, excuse my boldness - as you can see the power is out.”
“Tell me something I didn’t know. The mansion has complete redundancy of all systems; the backup systems should kick in momentarily, the same as when we had the snow storm last year.”
“That's why I’m here sir - the backup systems appear to be affected as well. If you check your watch, you will find it’s probably not working.”
“My watch is working fine.”
“My watch isn’t, nor are any other electronic devices in the mansion that are not EM pulse hardened. I suspect that we have been hit with an EM pulse, most likely from a nuclear weapon. Regardless, I have ordered the staff to break out the emergency equipment stored in the Faraday cages. Unfortunately it will take several hours to get the shielded generators on line.”
“Fine. Pull my car around, gather my family, we’ll head for the country redoubt.”
“Sir, none of the cars are functioning and we have no communications with the local governor to ask for military vehicles. For the time being we are on our own.”
“What’s the problem, we have more than enough food and water stored?”
“That is the problem. We have months of emergency stores, more than enough for several hundred personnel, but the average citizen has nothing in reserve. Once the local populous misses nine consecutive meals without hope of where their next meal is coming from there is going to be wide scale public panic. When the shielded generators are on line, it will light up the mansion like a Christmas tree and draw mobs like moths to a flame.”
“We’ll just get the police and national guard to supplement our local security teams.”
“That is what I’m trying to tell you, we have no way to contact them. Even if we could, at best you might get a squad or two, due to the riots that are sure to break out all over the city. Once the National Guard and the police figure out no outside help is coming, it’s going to be everyone for themselves.”
“So if the crowds show up here we just defend the mansion. You have over 150 highly trained security personnel and more than enough weapons.”
“Sir, we have a security force of a 150 lightly armed personnel that have pistols, automatic and semi-automatic rifles, flash bangs and tear gas, of which only a third are on duty at anyone time. Fully two thirds of the security staff are off the grounds, with their weapons locked up here. Even those on the grounds may not stick around for long if they believe their families are in danger.”
“I don’t give a shit about their families, that’s why I pay them big bucks, I own their loyalty.”
“Sir, with all due respect you bought their loyalty, you didn’t earn it. Until some form of government order is restored, paper money just became worthless. The new semi-plastic bills being introduced into circulation are not even fit to be used as toilet paper.”
“What are you telling me? I’m one of the richest men in the world.”
“Right now being rich means that you’re just a bigger target.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“Send out runners to the Governor and set up defenses the best that we can, then hope to hell either the National Guard or your alien buddies come and get us. Don’t you have some sort of fancy alien communicator that you can get hold of them with?”
“Actually, yes and no - our meetings are only a couple of times a year, or when called at His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander’s request. I was told that there is an emergency beacon in my watch but, have never tried it.”
“No time like the present, sir.” Robert pressed the emergency button. The watch functioned as designed, sending out an emergency signal and location, along with the last twenty-four hours of recorded voice traffic to an orbiting satellite, which redirected the message to the Moon Central Surveillance AI that in turn relayed it immediately to His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander’s situation room. Unknown to Robert, the senior Draco on Earth had received similar emergency calls from nearly all the other family heads; he decided to let them fend for themselves. Thirteen Families were too many to deal with and it was time to continue their lessons on what real power looked like.
Both men looked at the watch doing nothing other than keeping time. “So much for the cavalry riding over the hill to save the day. I think I can guess Colonel Custer’s last thoughts – ‘Shit that’s a lot of Indians’.” Frank said.
Frank was wrong. It did not take three days or nine consecutively missed meals for the shit to hit the fan. After less than an hour with no news of outside help, riots broke out starting in the poorest sections of town. The only thing that stopped the rapid spreading of the mobs was the fact that they were on foot or using bicycles.
The mobs showed how irrational crowd behavior can be by breaking into shops, fighting, sometimes killing each other over electronic goods that would never work again. Others stormed food stores, clearing out the shelves within a few hours. Mobs ran rampant through shopping malls and boutique stores, taking everything not nailed down, often destroying the very goods that they needed to survive. All stores were looted unless armed guards were stationed outside; even then the guards had only pistols which are no match for those armed with semi-automatic rifles. With the police and military unable to provide order due to the widespread chaos, most simply abandoned their posts and any easily identifiable equipment or uniforms, in an effort to try and protect their own families. The loss of control was made worse by the truly crazy twenty-five percent of the population dependent upon illegal and prescription drugs or alcohol, who were suddenly forced to go cold turkey. With no working fire departments, large parts of the cities burnt to the ground as small fires grew into uncontrolled infernos.
Neighborho
ods that survived the riots did so by joining together, not fighting each other. They formed neighborhood militias and built defenses around a strategic feature that could control the access of people moving in and out. By putting up a fierce resistance, they convinced the mobs to seek easier prey elsewhere.
Military equipment by design is hardened against EM pulse, so their vehicles and radios were still operational after the EM pulse attack. Through the military command net, unit commanders determined that five cities had been hit by EM pulse attacks. The most optimistic assessment available to them estimated it would take at least four weeks before the power could be brought back online outside the targeted cities; even then it could be months before power would be restored within the cities. The main problem hindering power restoral was that when the power failures occurred, much of the antiquated power switching equipment catastrophically failed and needed to be completely replaced before restoration of power could begin. Much of this equipment is specialized, with an eighteen month manufacture lead time if spares are not available.
Armored scout elements were sent into the cities in an attempt to contact whatever was left of the local governments. The scout elements were composed of four lightly armed vehicles with thirty-six troops. The patrols encountered blocked streets filled with burning tires and abandoned cars, rendering all major city transportation corridors impassable. Any time the Stryker 8 wheeled or M3A2 Bradley reconnaissance vehicles had to stop in the confined downtown streets, they were easy targets for Molotov cocktails thrown from above. These were made of a combination of gasoline and laundry detergent. When mixed, the concoction forms a poor man’s napalm, a fiery liquid that sticks to everything. Due to the fierce street fighting, the military abandoned all attempts to reach the city cores.