Homefront: A Story of the Future Collapse

by Matthew Gilman

  The nose of the plane continued to dip as it came closer to the runway.

  “It’s not going to make it,” Dallas said stepping forward, but not knowing what to do. It wasn’t like he could catch the plane and save it from its imminent demise.

  The plane disappeared behind the buildings and the rumble of the impact had the men running to the field. They didn’t know what they would do when they got there, but they wanted to help if they could. Other men on the base were jumping in their vehicles pressing the starter buttons and getting no spark or turnover from the motor.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  The men ran through the streets and came to the field. The plane wasn’t recognizable. A line of fire and rubble was what they found. The fuel from the tanks kept the fire going, destroying anything that looked like part of the plane.

  “Where are the trunks?” Budd asked, saying out loud what everyone was thinking.

  Dallas took charge and told the men to climb the fence to look for survivors. He ran to the tower to find out what was happening. The men made easy work of the fence and Dallas sprinted to the tower over a mile away.

  When Dallas reached the door he opened it to find a pitch black stairwell. The power was out to the tower as well. He climbed the stairs gripping the hand rail and finding the door at the top. Pushing his way in, he found the crew at the windows looking out with binoculars. One woman was on the radio trying to make calls but couldn’t get it to work. A pair of men were under the counters checking fuses to see if they had blown. The rest were staring out the windows trying to figure out what was going on.

  “The power is out all over the base.” Dallas said trying to lower the confusion then realizing he might have added to it more.

  “How do you know?” one of the operators asked.

  “Trucks won’t start, cell phones are out, power is out in all the buildings.” Dallas explained.

  Some of the operators took their cell phones out to find they were dead.

  “EMP,” one of the men said.

  “A what?”

  “Electromagnetic pulse, it happens during nuclear explosions. Knocks out electrical devices in the area.”

  “But Washington was a week ago.”

  “You can detonate a bomb in space over your target and take out a country if you wanted. We did something similar in Baghdad during ‘Shock and Awe.’ Took us weeks to get the power plant working again. Even afterwards things kept blowing on us and parts burned out for no reason. It was a mess.”

  “How do you know this?” Dallas asked.

  “I directed the flight that knocked it out,” the man said. Then the man had a look on his facing telling everyone in the room he wasn’t supposed to say anything about it.

  “So what do we do now?” the woman on the radio asked.

  The operator with the answers shrugged his shoulders and looked back at the windows.

  “Whoever did this knew what they were doing.” As he said the words another explosion rocked the mountain range miles away from the base.

  The Rangers in the field combed the fire burning on the runway for survivors. The ones that tried to get closest to the flames covered their faces with their shirts doing their best not to inhale the burning fuel.

  “Anybody?” Clive coughed out.

  “Nobody. These guys are gone,” Kelly called out.

  The men regrouped back at the tower and coughed out the smoke they had taken in.

  “It’s the apocalypse,” Budd said looking around. Smoke was now rising from all around the base. The words appeared to have some truth behind them at the moment.

  Dallas appeared from around the tower.

  “What happened? What’s going on?” the men asked.

  “Looks like we have been taken out of the fight,” Dallas started. “Power is out all over the base and whatever took the power out took the planes out as well.”

  “When does it come back on?” Kelly asked.

  “It doesn’t.” Dallas tried to give the most honest answer he could.

  “So who is coming to help us?”

  “We have to assume that everyone else is in the same shape as us,” Dallas explained. “There is no help coming. We have no radio, no planes, no trucks. We are on our own.”

  “Fuck it. We’re Rangers. This is what we do.”

  “NUTS!” Clive added with only one other person realizing what the word referenced. Dallas looked towards Clive with a smile. The one-word response the 101st Airborne gave the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge fit their situation. The notion carried through the group and the idea of their situation became a battle cry. This was what they trained for. The history of their kind proved time and time again that this was nothing to their training and their abilities. The Battle of the Bulge showed how they could continue to fight in the coldest of weather. The Lurps in Vietnam proved they could go deep in enemy territory and rain down hell without warning. The fact they were on home turf and had their equipment meant they were the biggest threat to anyone trying to start things at home.

  Chapter 5

  Plans were cancelled with her friends that night. Sophie sat on the couch wanting to relax and enjoy the day to herself. The thing she wanted from the big city was what she was starting to despise. Raised in Montana, she thought that living in a larger city like Seattle would be exciting. There would be things to do every night. Boredom would become a thing of the past. What nobody explained was that the lack of boredom came at a cost, a cost she could not afford. When you work at a café for a living handing coffee to people who make several times more than you do, one quickly realizes that the city night life is not for you, but for them.

  Months before, Sophie had driven back home to spend a week with her parents. It was hunting season and her father was determined to bring home an elk. This meant days of hiking, tracking, and waiting for the kill. If an elk smelled a human downwind the hunt was over. Hunters had to start all over again.

  Staying up wind, Sophie and her father tracked a group of elk into a valley where they could position themselves for a kill shot. Sophie had her own rifle with her, a 30.06 bolt action similar to the older model her father carried. On a low lying ridge overlooking the valley the two of them watched the elk through binoculars.

  “That’s about three hundred yards,” Sophie’s father said.

  “You can take it.” Sophie replied. “Then I can get one of the four wheelers and quarter it back to the truck.”

  “I think you can make that shot,” he said looking over at her.

  “But it’s your elk,” she said in surprise.

  “I want to see my girl take it down.”

  Suddenly finding herself nervous, Sophie removed her rifle from the enclosed case on her hiking pack. She loaded a round into the chamber and pushed the bolt in. Popping the caps off the scope she adjusted the view and saw the elk grazing about three hundred yards out. The animal looked like a toy without the scope. In the scope the elk looked to be two hundred feet away, something she could take with iron sights if it was really that close. Thankfully she had crosshairs and a rifle with range.

  “You have it sighted in to a hundred yards?” her father asked.

  “Of course,” Sophie was already looking at the wind and trying to consider the drop. “Not much wind today.”

  “You have this.”

  The shot rang out into the valley and for a second she thought she had missed the mark. The elk ran in long strides. She could see the panic in its eyes. Then it fell face first into the grass and dirt. The animal was dead.

  A hand gently gripped Sophie’s shoulder as she looked up and away from the scope. She wanted to distance herself from the life she just took. The act was exciting when she watched her father do it. This time she took the animal’s life and it was something she couldn’t separate herself from.

  “Let’s go get dinner,” her father said.

  The only thing that made the moment feel better was seeing the smile on hi
s face. Having no sons, Sophie’s father had taught her everything he would have taught a son to do. Climbing down from the ridge and hiking to the elk took fifteen minutes.

  The elk had tied mid stride and hit the ground so hard the skin was torn, fur still embedded in the rocky soil. Sophie removed her knife and started to gut and quarter the elk by herself. Her father left his hiking pack behind while he went back to the four wheeler and drove it back.

  Sophie removed one of the last steaks from the freezer and let it thaw on the counter. She wanted to go back home and spend the summer with her parents. The view of the mountains and being in the open country was something she missed. In Seattle there was so much missing because of the hills. The landscape was hidden. Sure it was green and you had things like the market and the seafood but it wasn’t the same as feeling absolute freedom in the open sky and running fields. The salmon streams had become commercialized and organic farming was becoming a tool for corporations. She was quickly becoming disenfranchised with the Seattle scene and just wanted to go home.

  Turning the dial on the stove she waited for the coils to turn red. They never did. Reading a book on the couch of her apartment she waited a minute before checking the stove. She had made the mistake of not waiting long enough before. Hovering her hand over the stove top she noticed there was no heat coming up. She turned the dial again and noticed the red light indicating the stove was on never turned on.

  “Great.” Sophie went to the breaker box and found none of the breakers had been flipped. “So the stove is broken.”

  Sophie went back to the refrigerator and found the light wasn’t coming on. Less than a week before, Washington D.C. was all over the news. Destroyed in a nuclear attack, people were panicking about who had done it and if it would happen again. Sophie had watched 9-11 happen as a child and didn’t connect well with the events of the past or now. She remembered hurricane Katrina and how poorly the people were treated afterwards. She was almost in high school then. When she learned about D.C. her first question was, who are we going to invade next?

  Leaving the steak on the counter, Sophie went across the hallway to her neighbor’s apartment door and knocked. Clicking and turning of metal parts told her somebody was answering.

  “Hi,” she said. “Just wondering. Is your power out too?”

  The middle aged man she called Woody gave her a puzzled look. He must have been sleeping and she had forgotten he worked evenings at a local restaurant. She called him Woody because of the resemblance to Woody Harrelson, the actor. Turning his head, he looked inside the apartment and a second later turned around. “Looks that way.”

  “Ugh,” she sighed to herself. “I’ll call management. Thanks for your help.”

  The door shut with little reply and Sophie went to find her cell phone. With to power out she wished she would have gone to work that day. If she was back home in Montana something like the power being out would not have made a difference to her plans. Here power was everything.

  Outside she could hear a man yelling about his car not starting. He had good reason to be angry. Tesla cars were expensive. What she noticed a few seconds later was the lack of cars on the road and one that sat at the intersection down the street. The street lights weren’t on. The driver stepped out of his car and opened the hood.

  Looking back at the steak her stomach grumbled. Digging in the closet she took out her camping stove and cut the steak into four parts that would fit on the small burner. Sliding the door open to the balcony, Sophie turned on the stove and began cooking the steaks for an early lunch. She would wait to see how long it would take for the power to come back on.

  Chapter 6

  Things on the base were never the same again. The commanding officers had unreal expectations on men to continue their duties without the right equipment. Travel was limited to foot along with all communications. The world slowed down and the men didn’t adjust to it well. The smoke in the distance didn’t go away and in some cases spread and came closer to the base.

  The year had been dry with little rainfall. This was out of the norm for the Seattle area. They were prone to long periods of rain and the idea of any kind of drought was something new and never happened before, that anybody could remember.

  The Platoon Sergeant gathered the men and ordered them to take their gear and shovels to outside of the base to build a fire break. The men worked for days digging the soil and trying to create a barrier from the flames that were less than a week away from the base. Water became an issue. In the heat the men were sweating more than they had brought in their packs. As night fell the men couldn’t see and their flashlights didn’t work. They used sticks as torches and traveled the trails back to the base. They would have to wait and see if their work had helped in stopping the fire from destroying the base.

  The next morning the men were woken early to the hand crank siren. As they filed out of the barracks the smoke was closer than it had been. The assumption was that the fire had jumped the break and was heading down on the base.

  “Where the hell are we supposed to go?” Budd asked.

  “Gather your gear, grab everything you need,” Dallas said. “We’re heading out.”

  The officers on the base had ordered everyone to march single file down the road towards town. After hearing the orders from a panicking man running by, Dallas winced and the rest of the men could tell something was wrong.

  “What is it?” Clive asked.

  “They are going the wrong way. They won’t make it. If we march east the fire will follow and they will be swallowed up in the flames. Or die from the smoke.”

  “But we have orders,” Kelly mentioned.

  The pause from Dallas said more than the words he was about to say. “We never got the orders, from a higher rank at least. As of right now, we never heard them.”

  “Heard what?” Budd said showing that he understood what was being said.

  “Everybody grab your gear.” Dallas ordered as if they had never heard the order given before.

  “Hey. I have an idea,” Ben said. “I know this place just outside of the base that I use while hunting.”

  “What about it?” Dallas asked.

  “It’s a cave. We cover the opening and keep the air inside and the fire passes over. It’s better than being caught out in the open.”

  Dallas nodded his head while listening to the idea. He liked it, trusted the man knew what he was talking about.

  “Alright, let’s get to your hideaway and see if we can survive this little cluster fuck.”

  Smoke was starting to roll through town limiting visibility. The men exited the barracks with their packs and gear. What Dallas didn’t like is that they didn’t have any weapons.

  “We got everything?” Dallas said trying to see through the smoke.

  “I feel naked without my rifle,” Budd commented.

  “I second that,” Kelly added.

  “We can’t go into the armory, and will have to check it out after the fire rolls through. Everybody ready.”

  “Come on already. Let’s fucking move.” Budd started to march ahead without waiting for an order.

  Dallas had Ben take point and move ahead towards their destination. Once they reached the perimeter Kelly took out a pair of sneers and cut through the aluminum fence like it was butter with a hot knife. The fence was pulled aside and the men stepped through, knowing that the MPs had bigger issues to deal with and the fence would eventually melt in the oncoming fire. Outside of the fence, Ben led the group into the woods. Everyone was disappointed that the journey was going to be uphill. A few hundred yards outside of the base Ben stopped and pointed ahead.

  “There it is.” Ben said without anybody else able to see it.

  “Where?” Dallas asked, feeling the smoke burning his eyes.

  Ben climbed and pulled some dangling moss aside. It was like something out of the movie First Blood.

  “Was this a mine or something?” Clive asked.

  “No�
� Ben said. “Natural formation from what I can tell.”

  Inside the cave there was a cooler and small bench that Ben had made from a fallen log. The cave itself was small for the five men. The walls were 7-10 feet apart depending on where one stood and went back about thirty feet. It was possible that the cave went back further, but the lack of light from smoke and the tree canopy made it impossible to see.

  “We should start a fire,” Budd said.

  “We need to conserve air,” Dallas replied, and the rest of the men agreed. “The fire outside will keep us warm enough.”

  Hours passed and the men claimed spots on the floor of the cave as their sleeping area and napped as the fire approached. Dallas hung a blanket over the opening of the cave and gathered all of the water the men had in their canteens. It wasn’t much, but it would help to seal the entrance.

  “What are you thinking?” Clive asked Dallas as he double checked the blanket.

  “We water down the blanket to keep the smoke out, most of the air in, and hope that the fire passes over quickly.”

  “The quicker the fire the hotter the flames,” Clive said.

  Outside, most of the day was gone and smoke was growing thicker in the sky. Dallas awoke to the flicker of lights and saw that the fire had arrived. Rushing to the entrance, he doused the blanket with water and tried to seal the entrance with sticks and rocks, pinning the sides against the wall and laying the rocks on the ends touching the floor. Now there was nothing to do, but wait.

  The blanket steamed from the heat and Dallas added more water to the wool as the outside world burned. The cave would shake as large trees collapsed from the flames. Small rocks fell on the heads of the Rangers as they tried to appear fearless to one another. Kelly’s foot tapped on the rock from the stress.

  “You mind stopping that? You’re making me nervous.” Budd said to Kelly, eyeing the foot.

  Kelly stopped tapping his foot and covered his head with his hat, trying to block out the world around him.