Solar Storm: Homeward Bound

by Vincent Keith

  “What’s that mean for us?” asked Deputy Travis.

  No one answered for a minute, and then Jack ventured an opinion. “Mostly fallout I would think. Honestly of all the disasters I’d researched and planned for, nuclear was about the lowest on the list. I figured self-preservation would win out over hatred and stupidity… Maybe not.”

  “How big a problem is this going to be and how do we deal with it?”

  “Now that we’ve got working radios and a generator… Speaking of, where’d you find a working generator?” asked Jack.

  “Oh, it was in the container with the old radios,” said Frank. “When I moved up here, I had one of those big automatic generators put in, and so the Yamaha just found its way into storage. It runs on propane or gas, so we’ll be good for a while.”

  “Hey, you don’t have an old computer in there do you?”

  “Besides the laptop? Two or three, I have a hard time throwing anything out.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Okay, I’ll pull my prep and survival books off my laptop. I guess I should be happy I stuffed the old one in the truck, my new one got fried. Twenty-five hundred down the tubes. Anyway, I’ve got books, or e-books to be precise, and at least one of them will cover nuclear fallout.”

  “You have any idea of how valuable that computer and those books are?” asked Ralph.

  “Ah, I might, hadn’t really given it much thought. I guess I should copy over all my music as well.”

  “You’re missing my point. You keep offering to give it away, but it’s worth more than anything else you own right now. Well, except maybe the radios and the guns.”

  “True. But it costs me next to nothing to share knowledge, it’s not like I don’t have it anymore. Besides, the more people around who are better off, the better it is for me.”

  “You should think about it,” said Travis. “It’s probably enough to cover whatever you wanted from the Store and then some. Maybe a lot more, depending on the books.”

  “We have books in town Travis,” said Arnie. “Sure we can always use more, but how many working computers do you think we’re going to find. So I don’t see how a bunch of books could be so valuable.”

  “Depends,” said Jack. “If you have books on saving seeds, and jerking meat, and gardening, and building wind-powered pumps. Books on nuclear fallout, on medicine. I’ve got close to five hundred books that cover everything from Aquaponics to veterinary medicine, from tanning hides to smoking meats. It’s all geared toward living off the grid and homesteading. What I’d call frontier living. Which is a pretty good description of what we’re doing now.”

  “And you don’t think the government is going to get this fixed soon?” asked Arnie. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Arnie, almost everything we do now depends on things that take power, a lot of power. Power we don’t have anymore. The estimates for replacing parts of the power grid ran over a year when we had the energy to run factories to build replacements. Without it? I won’t say never, but I doubt any of us will be alive to see it.”

  Travis sat and pulled a thermos from his daypack. He splashed a bit of coffee in everyone’s cup. “So, about that fallout…”

  “From memory…” Jack paused, thinking. He glanced at the men and noticed Frank’s amused smile. Sure, put me on the spot again, thanks.

  “Okay, most of the fallout is caused by debris blown into the atmosphere by a ground blast. An air blast has both a fireball and radiation but the range is, I guess you’d call it short. A ground blast puts an enormous amount of irradiated dust into the air, and it takes time for that to drift back down to earth. While it’s doing that, it’s getting blown around by the prevailing winds. Most of the radiation that you need to worry about has a relatively rapid decay rate, so maybe five to ten weeks. Also, the further you are from the blast, the lower the contamination will be. The problem with fallout is the longer term contamination of water, soil, and plants.”

  Most everyone was nodding, so Jack continued.

  “If we’re only talking about China and Russia, nothing here, then with luck, most of it will get washed out in the rain before it gets here. Washing any food grown outside will be necessary. You can take potassium iodine tablets to help prevent the accumulation of radioactive iodine… Iodine-131 I think. It’s pretty short lived so unless the blasts were local, there wouldn’t be much point. Probably the most practical course of action is to seal up doors and windows, change your clothes in a sealed off area, and wash anything you bring inside.”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah, I wouldn’t bother with the potassium iodine.”

  “So, the problem is knowing when to start and how long to keep it up. Without instruments to measure the levels of radiation, you’d just be guessing. I’ve got schematics for building various tools, maybe the radio team can find enough working components around here to build something.”

  “Or,” said Frank. “We could just use mine.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” asked Ralph.

  Jack just stared, jaw hanging loose. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “Frank, do you have anything else in that magic container of yours that maybe you folks could make use of?”

  “I’ve probably got enough stuff to build two or three radios from scratch. An old oscilloscope and a bunch of old Heathkit test instruments, a couple boxes of dosimeters a—“

  “Frank? What the hell did you do before you moved here?” asked Travis.

  “I worked up at Hanford nuclear for a while, then came down to Cali to work on the Diablo Canyon plant. I’ve been doing Ham radio for nearly fifty years, and I never get rid of old hardware. Jack, I’m sort of impressed by how much you managed to remember. I have to admit I’m a bit rusty myself. Travis, how many greenhouses do you suppose we have in town?”

  “A dozen small ones. Mark out north has four big ones he picked up as salvage and haven’t been assembled. There are at least six more out west of town, and maybe twelve more up north.”

  “Why don’t you get with the gardeners and see about stocking every one of those with as much useable soil as you can find? If you get it done now, if we get hit by fallout, we’ll have uncontaminated soil for growing. Not much we can do about the cows or the game around here. I’d be more worried about the fish for the next year. Ingesting contaminated food will be more of an issue for the younger kids than us old farts.”

  “Oh shit!” Jack sagged against the wall and slipped to the floor.

  “Jack?”

  “I think I just figured it out.”

  “Figured what out?” asked Travis.

  “The timing problem—maybe. Look, I’ve never read a thing about a geomagnetic storm destroying electronics that weren’t plugged in. Doesn’t mean it won’t, but nothing I read online indicated that it might. I figured the car acted like a big antenna and created a huge voltage difference between what should have been ground and plus twelve volts and just blew everything. That doesn’t explain stuff that wasn’t plugged in like Travis’s handheld radio, or maybe it does, I just don’t know for sure.”

  Dick nodded. “You think we got hit by an EMP after the geomagnetic storm?”

  “It would make sense. I suppose it could have been a secondary CME or a surge caused by one of the fractured magnetic field lines reconnecting. I guess I made up my mind from seeing the Aurora that it was just the storm. It still could have been, but with that report about nukes going off… I’m starting to think maybe someone decided to take the US out of the equation…”

  “So are you saying we got nuked?” asked Travis.

  “I just don’t know. There are maybe three things that could account for it, EMP, a second CME, or a geomagnetic surge. I know the first would do it, the other two—maybe. I just don’t know. But an EMP attack right after a geomagnetic storm takes out our satellites and fries what’s left of our power grid would be kind of ideal if you wanted to take us out of the game—I just don’t know. I’m not sure it actually matters. I mean, my tru
ck and all my stuff that wasn’t shielded died at the same time, I think it was around five o’clock, but honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  “I know the Operation Starfish test detonation was a 1.4 megaton nuclear device at two hundred and fifty miles up and created moderate effects up to nine-hundred miles away. Created a pretty good aurora too, both around the test site and clear on the other side of the planet,” said Frank.

  “Did it?” asked Jack. “I wondered about that, but honestly, a nuclear attack was so far down on my probability list of disasters that I barely did any prep for it. I’m starting to regret that lack of foresight.”

  “So do we need to worry about radiation or not?”

  No one answered for almost a full minute.

  “Plan for it, I think,” said Frank. “As much as you can anyway. Keep asking around, see if anyone actually saw a mushroom cloud. If it were just EMP bombs, then I wouldn’t sweat the radiation too much. I’ll set up the monitors, and keep an eye on them.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “That sounds about right. Look even if we can get in touch with the military, they’re not likely to tell us what’s going on. Unless we’re being invaded and I kind of doubt that.”

  “Invaded by who, Mexico?” asked Ralph.

  “China. But like I said, I doubt it. More likely it would be China and Russia consolidating territory in Asia and Europe. China wants Taiwan and parts, if not all, of Japan. I’m not sure what else, but probably as much as they can take. Certainly everything between them and the Indian Ocean along the Pacific Rim. Russia would like most of the old USSR back I think. Probably most of Europe, maybe all of it, hard to say.”

  “God knows what North Korea will do, or has done,” said Travis.

  “It’s way too complex for me to even waste time thinking about it other than how it might affect us. I’d say the US has enough problems that we won’t be looking to borrow others, which is probably the point. I mean, if I were some foreign country seeking to take over a neutral or US-allied country, I’d be looking for a moment when the US was too busy to care.”

  “Sure,” said Frank. “But the range on an EMP isn’t that big, we’d have seen them launch.”

  “Maybe I buy a bunch of land in Mexico, then move in some missile launchers. Set up with some enhanced EMP nukes and wait. I might look at pointing the finger at some terrorist organization, take my time and be thorough, just in case…”

  Jack scratched at his beard for a minute thinking.

  “Keep in mind, this is all unfounded speculation. I have my notions of what various countries might do or want, but that’s based on what I can worm out of the Internet. And the net is far from the most reliable source for that kind of information. All we’ve confirmed is that we have massive power, communications, and transportation outages covering what appears to be at least the Northern Hemisphere, or most of it. Everything else is rumor.”

  Travis nodded, “Right, I’ll get with the folks with the greenhouses. Oh, let’s not mention why just yet, at least until we’ve got some sort of confirmation. People are edgy enough thinking about being without power through the winter, no point in adding to it.” With that, he headed out.

  “He seems to be handling this pretty well,” said Jack.

  “Oh yeah Travis is a rock, always has been. I expect it was his time in Special Operations.”

  “Army?” asked Jack.

  “He was yeah, Third Special Forces Group. He served twelve years mostly in Africa. Something happened over there and he won’t talk about it, so I don’t ask,” said Ralph.

  Ralph could see the look on Jack’s face as he tried to figure out what the connection was.

  “Travis is my son,” he said.

  12

  NORTHWARD BOUND

  Jack spotted Travis crossing the street a block down and shouted. “Travis!”

  The Deputy heard the shout and saw Jack waving. He altered his path to meet Jack in the middle of the road.

  “I’m going to try to connect with Henry one more time tonight. Tomorrow we’ll pack up and get out of here.”

  “The girls decided to go with you?”

  “Yeah, I can’t decide if I’m happy about that or scared. Both I suppose.”

  “I would be. Both that is.”

  “Look, you folks have been great to us, and I’ve got something here that I think will be beneficial for the whole town, you in particular.”

  Travis smiled, “Why does that make me worry?”

  “Shouldn’t. Jack held out a small stuff sack. These are for you, or the town, but…”

  “What’s this?” asked Travis, taking the bag. He reached in and pulled out a tiny radio.

  “There are two radios, a charger, and each radio has an adapter for regular batteries. There’s also a full set of rechargeable AAs.”

  “Shit. Jack, I don’t know man, can you afford to do this? These things are worth a fortune.”

  “They are, but I still have two with me, and more at home. No, between those two and the one Frank has, that’ll give you three portables. I wish I could give you the other two, but I’m going to need them.”

  “Jack, thanks, thanks a lot. With these, we can keep a radio at each end of town, and I can keep one with me. Or, do we need to keep one with the radio team out at Dicks?”

  “He has an old two-meter unit working. As far as radios go, you guys are swimming in them. Ralph’s tube rig only covers eighty, forty, and twenty meters, but his tube receiver includes almost everything. The Heathkit radios that Frank dug out cover more bands, but until Jerry came in with that little Icom radio we had nothing in two-meter except these handhelds.”

  Travis smiled. He was used to his dad talking about radio stuff, but it had never held much interest for him beyond the practical.

  “So, keep one on you, and one at each end of town. The guys will monitor their rig full time. They plan to build a real antenna for each of the three stationary positions. You’ll still be able to use them as portables, but with the big antennas you’ll get much better coverage. The hard part will be keeping them charged.”

  Jack finally raised Henry on the radio, and although the signal was poor, the news was good. Everyone was doing fine. Police had taken over the town of Omak and were keeping anyone from looting the stores. The smaller town of Riverside, which was closer to home, barricaded the roads after they shot eleven looters in one night. Jack was surprised that people were getting desperate so soon.

  Henry had talked with the Riverside police to determine their intentions.

  “The police won’t be letting anyone into town until things stabilize. They’ve been pushing recent arrivals out past the city limits. At least they’re trying to find spots for most of them on the farms and ranches. They still have nearly a hundred more to relocate. Most were folks who had left Omak because they couldn’t get food. It’s bad, but at least they’re trying.”

  “Are you taking anyone in?”

  “We all talked it over, and the kids that work at the Inn and their parents are coming. More people than we wanted but we can make it work. We’ve made it very clear to the families, everyone works.”

  “How many people total?”

  “Fourteen. I know it seems like a lot, and I guess it is, but Annie assures me the supplies will be adequate. Don’t worry we’ll make it work.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll be bringing two strays of my own. It’s a long story.”

  Jack relayed the events of the trip so far, knowing everyone would be curious.

  “Did anyone from Denny’s crew contact you? I’m a couple days south, and I planned to stop by.”

  “Oh damn, I should have told you sooner. One of Denny’s guys was on two days ago. I’ve got four kids working through the frequencies listening for contacts. We got him on the seventeen-meter band while he was working through the bands himself, so it was just dumb luck. Anyway, it’s gotten bad around Lakeview. Somebody’s taken over the town and is running things for their
own benefit. They’ve been going around confiscating food, booze, and weapons, shooting anyone who refuses. It looks like the head man has friends in some biker gang who was visiting when the lights went out. Denny’s making plans to bug out, we told him to head north.”

  “Crap, how many are coming with him?”

  “Judy for sure, and as many of the guys as they can get who can travel. At least eight, but no more than eleven.”

  “Are we going to be able to feed them?”

  “Annie says yes. The youngsters are out hunting, but they’re riding some distance out. The local game has been killed or scared off already. People not thinking ahead and hunting too close to home. We’ve got two of the old Ferguson tractors working. Between what Marty had already planted and what all the extra manpower has accomplished, we should have some crops for the winter. By next spring if nothing goes wrong we’ll have some surplus. I’ll get with Annie to be sure. Even if things get tight, we’ll make it work Jack.”

  “I guess. So you put Annie in charge of all the food?”

  Henry laughed, “No Annie put Annie in charge, we all just got out of the way. She’s the most organized person we have, so she’s really the best person for the job.”

  Jack chuckled, “Yeah that sounds about right. Did Denny say when they were leaving?”

  “Not directly, but I got the impression he was eager to get out. He’s waiting for you unless things go to hell.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to meet up with them, if it happens, it happens. It sounds like we need to avoid towns as much as possible going forward.”

  “If he’s left, you won’t catch them unless you find a truck, they’re all on motorbikes.”

  “He got his bikes working?”

  “Apparently. He said they have a few rigged with sidecars and the rest with trailers, so Denny is bringing everything that wasn’t nailed down. I’d say, stay well away from any place with more than a few hundred people. They’ll be having starvation problems already, and it’s going to just get worse.”

  “Speaking of things going wrong, we had a contact from Spain.”