EMP Resurgence (Dark New World, Book 7) - An EMP Survival Story

by J. J. Holden

  “Lieutenant, when did we receive the last report from Ethan?” Mueller asked.

  “Ten mikes. He told us to be ready to move out within the next half hour, no solid TOD on that.”

  Mueller nodded. In a fight like this, it was impossible to plan to the minute when they would be ordered to move out. Frankly, he was tired of waiting, and itched to get into the fight. Not because he enjoyed fighting, of course, but because it was preferable to this damnable waiting. Unless someone had experienced that a couple times, they’d never understand how he was feeling at that moment.

  He turned to Sturm. “What’s the latest from the company scouts?”

  Sturm picked up a sheet of paper with handwritten notes on it, and her eyes clicked back and forth as she skimmed it. “OpFor hit Ephrata beginning at the southeast corner and stretching westward. Estimated enemy force, eight hundred. Defending forces along the wall were not immediately overrun as the scouts had predicted, and they transitioned units from all over town to reinforce the point of engagement. For the last two hours, the enemy has been able to press toward the wall taking only light casualties, but Michael says they’ll finally get onto the wall within the next fifteen mikes.”

  “Good.”

  Sturm continued, “Once the enemy is up on those walls, fighting the defenders at short range or hand to hand, they won’t be able to disengage without taking massive losses. If they try, our battle cars will run them down, and that’s even assuming they can breach our infantry lines.”

  Mueller rubbed his face with both hands. She was right, of course. “The enemy will most likely be forced to increase op tempo in a desperate bid to secure the wall for themselves so that they can hold us off while they raid Ephrata’s interior supply dumps. They might be able to hold us off indefinitely, that way.”

  Sturm shook her head. “Yes sir, but we’re not going to let that happen. If we hit them all along their line as hard as we can, while they’re still pinned in place and before they can maneuver to respond with a rearguard, we’re going to decimate them.”

  The radio squawked and both Mueller and Sturm turned to look at it, waiting to see if it was for them. “September One, Charlie two.”

  Scouts to Ethan. So, not for them. He kept an ear out for the conversation anyway. It was good to keep updated on what was going on around him, but it also helped to pass the time.

  “Go for Charlie Two”

  “OpFor supply train has been located,” the voice said, followed by a string of coordinates that might be a couple miles southeast of Ephrata, he figured without looking. Logical. “Sir, I estimate that its size is not consistent with a simple supply train. We think we found a FBO to support the invasion later. Defenses are minimal, and it appears to be still under construction. They’re using earthbags. Request permission to engage.”

  “September One, affirmative. Engage at will. Take what you can and deny the rest to the enemy. Hit hard and fast, but if you can’t overwhelm defenses, exfiltrate immediately and we will begin barrage. I don’t need you locked up out there, we need you mobile.”

  “Aye aye. September One out.”

  Mueller grinned. The Clan had seized some functional artillery a year ago, and Ethan had jury-rigged the electronics to make it effective again. Ammo was priceless, but better to deny the enemy a mountain of supplies than to see it slip away to be used again later. If the depot was close enough and it came down to artillery, he might even be able to see the explosions from where he was. At least, he hoped he would, because Arty made for lovely fireworks.

  * * *

  Barry sat with a telescope and watched the battle, his frustration at having to stand by growing each minute.

  The invaders were split into two groups. One group of six hundred had been grinding away at the town’s south wall for quite a while. The other two hundred or so were mounted and had arrived from the southeast not long ago. They’d been probing other parts of the wall ever since they arrived, keeping highly mobile and forcing the defenders to try to protect everything at once. It kept Ephrata from applying overwhelming force against the largest OpFor to their south.

  He saw a group of invaders approach the wall with boxes, the rest of their unit pouring covering fire at the top to pin down the defenders. They did it just long enough for the squad to place the boxes along the base of the rubble wall. Then the defenders mowed the squad down, but it was too late. The boxes were already in place.

  He counted under his breath. When he got to seven, four massive fireballs went up, engulfing the wall in flames. When the blast faded, he saw people atop the wall on fire, running around, and about a third of the attackers charged the wall while the rest covered them with suppressive fire. In a minute, the enemy had a foothold atop the wall.

  Someone nearby said, “Looks like it’ll be our turn any minute. Who wants to pray with me?”

  Barry left them to their prayers. It bolstered their resolve. Vishnu was the day’s favored deity, he noted. Who better than the Protector against the forces of destruction? Since the Dying Times, Vishnu had gained a lot of popularity. He understood why, but he prayed quietly to Kartikeya, instead. He didn’t need protection, he needed to kill his enemies before they killed him. Kartikeya fit him better.

  When he heard them finish their prayer, he said, “Alright, brothers and sisters. Gear up, and check each other out. I don’t want to hear anyone left their spare mags in the rear, got it? Get ready to show them what a real Hindu can do against these demons.”

  A cheer went up, and he smiled again. Soon, he’d live or he’d die, but at least the damn waiting would be over.

  * * *

  The radio crackled, jolting Cassy out of her daydreaming. “Charlie One,” Ethan’s voice echoed hollowly, “begin. You know the plan.”

  She confirmed, then shouted out, “Gentlemen, start your engines.” Finally. Her pulse raced. Somewhere to her north, the Clan infantry was beginning to move out, too. The battlecars would clear their path and take out the two mortar teams, then rampage through the main enemy lines on their way to hunt down the enemy cavalry team.

  Clan infantry would head east and then north, enveloping the invaders and pressing them hard toward the wall. Few would escape, and the Clan infantry wouldn’t have to worry about enemy mortars barraging them from behind. Plus the enemy formations would be disrupted from the battlecars plowing through them.

  All around, she heard the car engines roar to life, fed by nothing more than wood. She loved the battlecars… In less than a minute, just as they had trained, they moved out together in a row and swept in a gentle arc to the east, where the enemy mortar teams were emplaced. The Clan had a surprise of their own for them—each car had a single, fabricated mortar strapped to the hood, activated by a lever the passenger controlled. A simple welded crosshair showed where the impact would be, with concentric rings showing scatter at different speeds.

  “Speed twenty,” she shouted to Amber. She had to shout out her speed so Amber would know which crosshair and ring to use. On the roof was another Clanner she didn’t personally know, handling the light machine gun on the roof, standing up from the back seat.

  “ETA, sixty seconds.”

  Ahead, she saw occasional flashes of light. The invaders’ mortar crews were pumping rounds into the city itself now that the walls were partly overrun. “Speed thirty and holding.”

  To her left and right, she saw the other cars spread out in a line. Within a couple seconds of each other, all twelve cars entered the range band together and fired their single-shot mortars. Cassy’s car jerked hard at the recoil, but the reinforced shocks handled it without breaking a strut, or whatever cars did.

  A glance told her Amber was on her M4 after firing the mortar. It was mounted on a spindle welded to the car’s frame, giving a 90-degree field of fire ahead and to the right. Half the cars had them mounted on the left, with the passenger in the rear.

  Two hundred yards ahead, two blast clusters marked where mortars were landing,
and huge secondary blasts a moment later engulfed the mortars and everything around them. Cassy worried she might drive into it, but the fireballs receded as the miniature mushroom clouds rose into the air. “Take that,” she muttered.

  On her lapel mic, a short range radio tying the cars together, she gave the order to veer left. The row of cars turned ninety degrees to become a column, and then the rear half angled to pull up on the left. It created two rows of six cars, with M4s covering both sides. They would plow through the enemy gathered around the town’s south wall like a nail punching through plywood, emerging on the far side and continuing on to engage the cavalry. That was where her real battle would be.

  * * *

  Barry and his two platoons had been charging east for a couple of minutes when the radio squawked to turn left. The two parallel columns stopped, rotated left, then advanced in two rows. He was breathing heavily, but these days, everyone alive was in good shape from the daily routine of surviving. They’d be at full effectiveness when they reached the enemy formations.

  His units ran right through the formations, mowing them down, and continued toward the enemy’s main body. He’d only seen one or two of his own men and women fall, back there, which wasn’t bad.

  He crested a low rise in the gently rolling terrain and saw the fierce battle up ahead. Cassy and her battlecars were just emerging on the far side after smashing through them, and the invaders were scattered like ants. Perfect.

  A whistle blew, and he dove to the ground on his belly, using the butt of his rifle to slow his fall enough that it hurt, but wouldn’t injure. Then he and the rest began pouring on a steady, rhythmic fire. He ran the mantra through his head: Breathe in. Exhale. Hold. Fire once. Finish breathing out. Repeat the cycle.

  Rows of enemy soldiers fell to the surprise attack; they were definitely not in the best positioning to receive fire from a new direction. Barry put a fighter in his sights—American conscript, it looked like—and pulled. Bang. Down she went. The woman next to Barry had dropped the man next to his own target.

  They kept firing.

  From the enemy mob, there was a commotion just to the left. He glanced over and his eyes went wide. A huge mob of fighters in jeans and tee shirts charged straight for his part of the Clan line. He could see movement behind the mob, too, and reasoned that those would be the more disciplined ISNA fighters bringing up the rear, using the Americans as a meat shield.

  He realized at least a quarter of the invader force was charging. Maybe a hundred in all. Enough to overrun him if he didn’t get real serious, real fast. He shouted at the top of his lungs, “Burst fire, burst fire! Fire for effect.” He flicked the selector switch on his AK from single fire to auto, and began tapping out short bursts, three or four rounds at a time.

  To either side, he heard shrill whistles, calling out “reinforce left,” and “reinforce right,” which told him reinforcements were on the way. He just had to hold the line until they arrived. He glanced to the enemy’s right at another sudden change in movement, and saw another cluster of enemy troops just like the one coming at him, charging a little farther east down Clan lines. He hoped that didn’t mean no reinforcements from that side…

  When the dozens of enemy men and women charging him were two hundred yards away, however, huge orange blossoms of flame began sprouting among them, sending bodies and flaming people flying in all directions. The Clan mortars! They must have shifted fire from the enemy at the wall’s base to the oncoming units. Boom. Boom. It was a beautiful sight.

  It also wasn’t enough. Many broke through, closing the distance to a point where mortar fire had to stop or risk hitting Clanners. Barry shouted, “Grenades!” The four fighters under him who happened to have scavenged a grenade or two stepped up and threw them into the path of the oncoming invader force, and he heard screams of pain as more people died.

  A round went ping! off his Kevlar helmet, and he reflexively ducked. The enemy fire was becoming more intense. Still, only a couple dozen enemies, mostly ISNA, had made it that far. Barry fired at full auto into the oncoming Arab soldiers and then heard the click, click of an empty magazine. It took him half a second to realize he was out of ammo, and another half to realize he didn’t have time to reload. “Fall back,” he shouted over the din, and ran down the back side of the slight hill he’d fired from—straight through the second line of Taj Mahal fighters, freshly loaded. They tore into the enemy coming up over the hill while he dropped down behind them and started to reload. He finished just as the second line was emptying their magazines. Coincidentally, the ISNA fighters stopped shooting at that time as well, reloading.

  Barry got his fresh magazine in first, and sprinted forward, firing and screaming. Others all around him followed his example, and in seconds, they’d overrun the last of the enemy sortie. He blew his whistle, four short and two long blasts, code for enemy neutralized. In the distance, Clan mortar fire began dropping again at the base of the wall.

  The battle was almost over. He had survived once again. He thanked all the gods, even some who weren’t his own, for bringing him through it alive again.

  Briefly, he wondered where the enemy cavalry had gone. He hadn’t seen them in quite a while.

  * * *

  Once the battlecars were out of sight from the main battle, Cassy ordered the unit to halt while half reloaded their mortars and the other half covered the perimeter. Then they switched off. With the unit fully reloaded, they pulled out again. The cavalry had to be around somewhere, and they couldn’t outrun battlecars. Not without a much bigger head start. “Okay,” she shouted, “wedge formation. Circle Ephrata and keep your eyes out for the cavalry. Let’s go kill some invaders.”

  The Clanners whooped and hollered and then the roar of engines drowned it out. They headed north, keeping the eastern wall on their left side. They followed the wall as it curved gently to the left, and soon found themselves north of town with no sign of the enemy cavalry. There was nothing to do but to keep going, and so they did. When they’d circled to the west of town, she still had no sign of them.

  She was beginning to wonder if the cavalry had fled. Or maybe they had somehow fought their way into Ephrata and she had missed the breach in the wall. She decided to make another circle around the town and drove onward.

  As they came around to the more southerly side of town again, her little handheld radio buzzed. “Charlie One, be advised I see a mounted unit ahead, near the wall, heading southeast. Looks like the cavalry heading back toward the battle.”

  In response, Cassy stepped on the gas and her car surged forward. The alert must’ve been from one of the outlying cars which, being farther from the wall, could see ahead better. Her heart began to speed up, anticipating another charge. She was fully in battle mode and had been for quite some time. It was liberating, in a way.

  That feeling—that battle joy—would’ve marked her as a social deviant three years ago, but now it was practically normal. Only the strong survived. It had taken the end of the world for her to lose that baggage, which “civilization” had given her. People weren’t supposed to enjoy killing, but what they didn’t know back then, or at least most of them didn’t, was that killing in battle wasn’t the same thing psychologically as looking them in the eye and doing the same thing to a neighbor.

  Her thoughts were interrupted as she saw the cavalry coming around the wall at last. They were stretched out in a long column, sweeping around the wall toward the battle. She wasn’t sure the cavalry could change the outcome, since it wasn’t like they were charging with lances—they would have to fire from horseback or dismount—but two hundred enemy soldiers smashing into the Clan’s left flank all at once would definitely cost a lot of lives. She had to stop them, and time was running out.

  Into her handheld radio, adrenaline pumping through her, she screamed, “Fire all mortars,” and grinned savagely as her car jerked wildly from the recoil.

  To her left and right, she heard the thump, thump of mortar fire going
down range. Seconds later, giant flowers of fire and shrapnel and blood erupted all along the cavalry’s line. People and horses flew through the air, and she briefly worried some of them might land on the cars further back in her unit’s V-formation. Then she remembered they were all armored, and the worry turned to a grin.

  When she got within twenty yards of the surviving cavalry, which continued to bear down on the infantry battle up ahead, she stepped on the gas pedal and pushed it all the way down. The engine roared like a dragon and her battle car surged forward again, pressing her into the seat. Every gun in her formation opened up, concentrating heavy automatic fire at the cavalry’s backside. More horses and people fell, chewed up by a hail of bullets.

  There was a deafening thump from beneath her car, and the whole vehicle rose into the air far enough for the shock absorbers to fully extend. She could hear them click as they hit their maximum extension, so she knew she had gone up at least a couple of feet. She had probably run over a horse, and spared a moment to thank Dean Jepson for figuring out how to give the battle cars solid tires.

  As she smashed into the cavalry line, some tried to split away from her deadly cattle prow. Her car pierced their lines like a hot knife through butter. She didn’t look back, but she already knew what that scene would look like behind her—as the cavalry had veered left and right away from her car, all they had done was veer into the path of the cars behind her in the flying wedge formation.