Solar Storm: Homeward Bound

by Vincent Keith

  “Jack… I’m sorry. About Ray I mean.”

  “Yeah, me too. I guess I should have expected him to try something. He seemed the vindictive kind.”

  Aaron considered correcting him. What he’d meant was that he was sorry no one had solved the Ray problem long before Jack got to town. Ray had been enough of a thorn in Aaron’s side he’d considered moving just to be rid of him. Rather than continue to poke at a sensitive topic, Aaron decided to change the subject.

  “Rachael says you have a concussion, how’s your head?”

  “Hurts. Headache. Not surprising I guess. I remember Rachael keeping me awake all night after she worked on my leg. I just wanted to sleep. Never had a concussion before. Hell, everything hurts, but at least I don’t feel like I’m going to lose my lunch.”

  “Do you feel up to looking at the welds on the MG-42s if we bring them over?”

  “Sure. It’ll give me something to do. I might try reading, but I suspect it’ll make my headache worse. Remind me, where are we, what’s left?”

  “The M1 Garands are all done. This was the last of the 1911s. You got two of the Tommy guns stripped down, but we’re not sure what you were planning for them. We stripped down the others. The fifty cals are finished. So is the 1917 and the all four of the 1919s. We’ve finished welding one the receivers for the MG-42s and Jimmy Fisher is checking it against the specs as we speak. All the parts are soaking in solvent, but I think once Jimmy’s sure the dimensions are right, we should try to attach the barrel. We’ll need your help to put the first one together and make sure everything works before we try another one. We haven't touched the Lewis guns.”

  “Wasn’t… Oh, the M2 carbines? Anything on that?”

  “Jim Ellis has sixteen of them torn down, cleaned and ready to put back together. There’s some visible wear, but he thinks everything fits fine. He put two of them together, and they work.”

  “Okay, let Jim handle that, be sure he checks for rust and cracks in the receiver and chamber. Oh and if you don’t have go-no-go gauges for the chambers, we should make some. If he’s not sure about something, bring it down, and I’ll look at it, but I’d guess they’re fine. Any luck on ammo?”

  “Nope. Eli sent someone back up to John Day to work some trades. He also sent a bunch of the recent refugees too. Anyway, he has the info, so we’ll see when they get back.”

  Rachael came into the room and chased Aaron away. “I know you’re bored, but I don’t want you straining for at least another couple days. I’m more worried about that concussion than that hole in your leg. At least I can see what’s happening with your leg. Besides, I need to change your bandage.”

  JACK’S HEADACHE receded as the week wore on. His leg hurt and physical therapy was agony. He relented and took some more of the Vicodin an hour before his session. It helped, but made him nauseous five or six hours after taking one.

  Lexi came in and sat on the bed. “I was talking with Henry.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah, he wants to send Denny and a few other guys down to pick us up.”

  Jack didn’t respond.

  “Jack?”

  “Hmm… I’d like to avoid that if we can. He’d need to send four or five bikes, at least two with side cars for the dogs. Or a truck, probably two. That's a lot of fuel."

  “He suspected you’d say that. He told me to remind you, riding a bicycle with a hole in your leg won’t be any fun.”

  “I’m not sure it’ll even be possible, at least not for quite a while. Don’t suppose you and your mom know how to ride a horse?”

  “Sure. Can we get horses?”

  “I don’t know. It would be slower than the bikes, and I’m not sure how much easier it will be on my leg, if at all.”

  “Why don’t we let them send the trucks?”

  “Did you hear anything about anyone getting a refinery working?”

  “No.”

  “So, the fuel they have is all the fuel they have. I’d rather walk than use that up. We’ll want it for generators, as long as it lasts.”

  Lexi considered the problem. “We still have about three hundred miles to go, right?”

  “What with avoiding big towns and cities, maybe closer to four hundred.”

  “If we walk, how many miles a day can we do?”

  “Maybe twelve. Depends on hills, and my leg. After a couple weeks of regular walking, maybe as much as fifteen, but probably not. Even with the dogs, we’re dragging a lot of weight.”

  “How much were we doing on the bikes?”

  “Thirty-five to sixty, depending on hills. We did eighty miles the day we ran into Mr. Chesney. We could average sixty on the bikes if we pushed it. Maybe 100 if we left the dogs.”

  “No!”

  Jack smiled. “Yeah, well don’t worry because I’m not even considering the idea.”

  "Good." She shifted around to sit cross-legged facing Jack.

  “Anyway, it’s pretty flat once we get out of the Columbia River Gorge, so figure an average of maybe fifty or sixty miles a day. Or we could have. Now…I just don’t know.”

  “Horses would be faster.”

  “With my leg? Maybe. A good average horse, with no remounts, perhaps thirty a day, forty at the most. You might do fifty or sixty with remounts, but that would be pushing pretty hard. If we were just pushing it for a few days we could do fifty or sixty I think. If we had horses trained for endurance rides, maybe as much as a hundred, but we'd drop before the horses did. Or at least, I would. Russ told me once that a hundred-mile endurance ride was something like seventeen hours. I can’t imagine doing that for more than one day.”

  “I thought horses would be faster than the bikes.”

  “On a given stretch, for a few miles, sure. Over days? Not even close, at least on roads. If we pared down to the minimum, left the dogs and just rode as hard as we could, we’d need a truck or something to go any faster than we could do on the bikes. I can’t leave the dogs, and with my leg, there's no point, the dogs could walk farther than I could go on a bike or walking. The big advantage to horses is that we could do a lot better cross-country than we could on bikes. That will shorten the route and might make up for the loss in daily mileage.”

  “Still, if we do only twenty a day, we only have three weeks left.”

  “I… Huh. You know, you’re right. I keep thinking in terms of walking and months.”

  BY THE MIDDLE of the second week, the headache relented. Jack spent most of his waking hours reading or looking at gun parts for the guys still working on Aaron’s collection. Rachael would help with physical therapy and stretching. Eli would stop by to give Jack updates about defenses and news about local towns. There was nothing new from Pendleton since they’d evicted all those people. The men who escaped the work detail were still asking for help to rescue their wives and daughters.

  “I’m not going to be able to hold them off for much longer. I’m not sure I even should, but I can’t see how it’s going to work out in our favor.”

  “Do we have anyone spying on Pendleton?”

  “A couple of guys have been watching the work crews. It looks like they’re coming and going from the middle school. There are just too many of Bernie’s guys walking around for them to get close enough to be sure.”

  “And the women and kids?”

  “Yeah, that’s a problem. We’ve got no idea where they are. Unless they’re keeping them in the gym with the men.”

  “That seems…unlikely.”

  “Yeah. Well, time to go make the rounds. Get some rest.”

  “All I’ve been doing is resting. I need to do something.”

  “Sorry, you’ll have to talk to the warden.”

  “Great.” Jack snorted. “Guess I’ll see ya, later.”

  Later that evening Rachael relented and said he could go back to work the next day.

  Lexi, Henry, and Eli worked out a route for the trio to take home that meandered between towns, rivers, and various terrain obsta
cles. Eli had been collecting maps from everyone in town, working with the folks up in John Day on reconnaissance.

  They needed to avoid the Tri-City area of Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland by going east, but north of Walla Walla. Then it was mostly north. They’d cross the Snake River at Lyons Ferry, which Jack supposed at one point was, in fact, a ferry, but was now a bridge. Crossing the Columbia River would be easy if they waited until they got to the town of Grand Coulee. They would cross over on the bridge just north of the dam.

  The National Guard had organized in that area to protect the workers as they tried to get some part of the system up and running. Dealing with looters and organizing resettlement of folks walking out of Spokane took up most of their time and resources. Roving gangs, riots, and arson had consumed Spokane. Fairchild Air Force Base sat abandoned after the still functioning aircraft transferred back east, presumably to protect politicians. The majority of the aircraft sat unmoved since the day of the Solar storm.

  What they’d do with a squadron of KC-135 tankers was a mystery to Jack. He thought it was to keep the AWACS and air support fighters flying. Jack wondered if it might be more a case of nervous politicians than anything else. Then again, they should be nervous, he thought.

  No one at the Coulee Dam was especially hopeful. Henry had sent a couple of people down to check on the rumors he’d picked up. He was glad to know the Washington Guard had regrouped at the dam, even if the news wasn’t good. There were just too many one-of-a-kind transformers and other equipment damaged by the rapid spikes, load crashes, and surges. The turbines were still producing power, but without the big distribution transformers, they had no way to connect it to the grid. With the remaining infrastructure so severely damaged, there was no way to control it even if they could connect the turbines. However, they managed to get a full machine shop working.

  Engineers at the dam were considering scavenging parts of the system for useable components and building some smaller power plants. If they went that route, it would mean a lot of hard work but might lead to some areas close to the rivers having at least some electric power to run irrigation pumps, if nothing else. They were unwilling to give up on the idea of getting the big irrigation pumps working.

  There was no real news from any of the big cities other than the now common reports of riots, arson, gangs, starvation, death, and people fleeing toward the country. Small towns closer to the major cities became battlegrounds as refugees looking for food collided with residents trying to protect their families and what food they had left.

  From reports, the military had all but evaporated. Without orders, or at least orders they felt they could follow, and with dwindling supplies, some base commanders had furloughed everyone. It was impossible to keep them without being able to feed them. Many in the military had gone AWOL, making their way home to families.

  Most attempts to call out the National Guard had proved ineffective. With no phones or radios they couldn’t call anyone in, and with most of the vehicles dead they couldn’t send people out to contact them in person. In a few places, members of the National Guard gathered simply because they knew it was their duty and that there was no way for anyone to call them up. Or perhaps because they had no better option.

  The picture only worsened when you looked at emergency services. Aside from small towns where officers lived in town, there was no police presence. Fire departments were unable to respond, or when they had a working truck, there was often no water pressure at the fire hydrants.

  THE HELP ELI had been hoping for arrived from John Day. A small Caterpillar dozer and a mid-sized excavator arrived on a large flatbed trailer. The story Jack heard was that these machines and the truck that pulled them were the only things they'd gotten working in John Day. Before they got the truck running, no one believed they’d be able to move the tracked equipment, not as far as they had to come. The team was planning every step of their use to conserve fuel. Jack wondered if there was any point. They had very few vehicles and there was a good chance the fuel would go bad before they used it all.

  One precaution Eli had implemented was locking down the one pump in town that had zero ethanol gasoline. The idea was to use up the other stuff since it would go bad first. Lexi and Art had spread the word via the radio network. Some of the rural towns would have tanks of non-ethanol gas for small tractors and other gas powered tools. They also put a priority on getting diesel engines running since they could potentially make fuel for them.

  The team Eli had sent scavenging for alternator and generator parts had succeeded. They got an old three-cylinder marine diesel running. Baxter, who owned the Shell gas station, had an old broken down twenty-four-kilowatt generator that had been sitting idle because the engine had blown a few years earlier. He and Jimmy, the machine shop owner, were working to get the diesel engine mounted to the generator. It helped explain the new activity at the machine shop.

  28

  BACK TO WORK

  Jack was up and walking with a cane. It had been almost two weeks since the shooting, and while Rachael seemed happy with his progress, Jack was not. His shoulder was mostly recovered, but Rachael insisted he use the sling when it hurt. His leg was still weak and prone to aching. Jack wanted to believe that walking every day was helping, and maybe it was. Either way, it made the effort seem worthwhile.

  As comfortable as Eli's house was, Jack had reached his limit. Despite the ache in his leg and shoulder, despite the occasional headaches, he was happy to be back in the shop, working. Jack, with the aid of Aaron, Jim, and Noel, continued working on the remaining guns.

  Jack had just arrived back at the house when he heard a vehicle. It sounded odd since he’d not heard one in such a long time. He struggled back up out of the recliner using his cane for leverage. Jack slipped his arm back into the sling and headed toward the door. He’d just reached out to turn the knob when the door swung open. Jack jerked his hand back to keep from having the knuckles bashed by the swinging door.

  “Oh! Hey, Jack.”

  “Eli, was that a car I heard?”

  "In a manner of speaking. Come on out. There's someone here to see you."

  “Me?”

  They walked out to the driveway.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Jack. “Humvees?”

  “The Captain wants to talk to you.”

  A tall, broad-shouldered man stepped out of the closest Humvee.

  “Hi, Jack.”

  Jack looked, then checked the name tag, not believing his own eyes. O’Neil. It said, O’Neil.

  “Brian?”

  “Surprise.”

  “I… what… how… How the hell did you know I was here, and what the hell are you doing here?”

  "Dad, of course. Your friend Henry got Dad in touch with the base commander. Dad told me you folks were having some serious trouble with a county Sheriff. The Colonel suggested I bring my team down and fix it."

  “Fix it?” Jack shook his head trying to clear the cobwebs. He stepped forward and grabbed Brian in a hug. “Damn, it’s good to see you again.”

  Brian hugged back then held Jack at arm’s length.

  “You look better, except that hole in your leg, and your arm?”

  “Shoulder—Yeah. Shit happens, you know?”

  Brian laughed, “Awfully cavalier about being shot aren’t we?”

  “We are. Okay, not really. It sucked. I can move around by myself now, so that’s good. You know your mom and dad are at my place right?”

  “Yeah, we chatted on the radio, and…thanks, Jack. I’m not sure where they’d be if you hadn’t planned ahead and told them they could come stay.”

  “Judging from what I saw—dead. The biker gang that took over Lakeview torched the Inn. It’s partially gutted, looks like something or someone put the fire out. I suspect it was your neighbor Jose.”

  “Did you see Jose? Is he okay?”

  “I didn’t see him, but his house was fine, so he’s probably okay. The bikers were at the shop scavengi
ng, maybe a dozen of them. Anyway, I found the letter your dad left, and then we bailed.”

  “Dad didn’t mention a note.”

  Jack shrugged. “No one was at the Inn, but there were signs of fighting, and I figured if they were still up and walking, they’d have bugged out. I was sitting there trying to figure out where he’d have left word. You remember what he said every time he did something he knew Judy wouldn’t like?”

  Brian laughed. “Sure. I say it too—I’ll be sleeping in the dog house tonight.”

  “Yeah, so I figured I’d check. Sure enough.”

  “That figures. Well, I’m glad they got out okay. We’d just rotated back from the Stan when it went to shit.”

  “Man, you have no idea how happy I am that you did, I was sure you were stuck over there with no way home.”

  “Hey, we’re Rangers. There is no such thing as no way.”

  Jack smiled, sure that Brian's statement was about as true as anything could be. "Let's go in. This cold air is killing my leg."

  “Right. LT, take the team and set up where the Sheriff suggested, put out a recon team toward Pendleton, let’s get some eyes-on intel.”

  “Hooah! Sir” The lieutenant signaled a Sergeant, who fell in next to Captain O’Neil, while the others got the trucks turned around and moving.

  Eli had gone with the troops to help get them set up and relay all the current intel he had. Lexi was in the kitchen making tea.

  “Did you guys come all the way down here just to help out because I was stuck here?”

  "No. I would have if it were up to me, but no. The staff at Lewis needed recon and passed it to the Seventy-Fifth Rangers. The Colonel was organizing teams and missions when we got word from Dad. We're covering all of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. I requested eastern Washington. The Colonel agreed. Given the intel we got from Dad, he thought it was critical that we deal with this ASAP. He sent me down here with a nearly full company.

  “Considering everything we're trying to accomplish out West, it's a significant number of resources. Since each platoon will be operating independently, we've assigned new designators: Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Echo. Echo will stay and cover eastern Oregon. When we're through here, we'll link up with the Guard unit at Coulee. Delta and Bravo will base at Grand Coulee Dam, and Charlie will move on to Idaho.