Hard Favored Rage

by Don Shift

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  With a Whimper

  This Isn’t a Blackout

  Through the Looking Glass

  Semper Fi

  TRJ

  Arizona

  The Savior From the Third Floor

  Afternoon Aftermath

  Command Decisions

  No Day is Ever Routine

  Barstow

  God Told Me to Skin You Alive

  Shortwave Radio

  A Hero Returns

  Morning

  Coming to Terms

  New Realities

  404 in Progress

  Emergency Powers

  Road Trip

  Bigger Plans

  Pleasant Valley Sunday

  Two Trips

  A Wrong Turn

  Rank

  Gun Shopping

  Monday, Monday

  Soldier of Fortune

  Code 5

  Self-Doubt

  How Fast Things Went Downhill

  Taking Off and Moving In

  Homeless

  The Summer Sun

  Complicated Feelings

  Two Weeks After the EMP

  Zombies

  Mid-September

  What Millions Can Buy

  Living with Mom and Dad

  Two Percent of Men

  Rescue Mission

  Medieval Europe

  You Can Only Hide for So Long

  Millisieverts

  Fire

  December

  Worse Than a Horse Thief

  Love and War

  Making a Case

  Latte and Yoga Pants Morality

  Shovel and Shut Up

  Fun with Drones

  The Battle of Todd Road

  Without Regret or Remorse

  See the Elephant

  Hard Favored Rage

  an EMP apocalypse novel

  “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

  -Anonymous; incorrectly attributed to George Orwell

  In peace there's nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility:

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger;

  Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

  Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;

  -Henry V, Act III, Scene 1

  No identification with actual persons, living or deceased, nor endorsement by the offices or agencies named within, is intended or should be inferred. This is a work of fiction.

  Copyright 2019, Don Shift

  Introduction

  This book was written with the men and women of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office in mind. A note to my department colleagues before I go on: don’t look go looking for me, don’t look for yourself or anyone else in this book. It is not a roman a clef—the characters are archetypes and all products of my imagination.

  Now I don’t want any readers to think that there is a ruthless killer inside each peace officer waiting for Doomsday to indulge in an orgy of violence. In writing this book, I can imagine hysterical posts on social media and false outrage as Southern California wonders if local cops are bloodthirsty killers with illegal machine guns. Those readers in “red states” are probably already cringing over the thought of such an explanation being necessary in a work of fiction.

  On a small scale, the response to a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would resemble slightly what I have written. Local authorities would be less organized and I predict policing would collapse faster and “freelance” kinetic justice would be much rarer. The excesses by both cops, crooks, and civilians would also be more common and hardly excusable. This novel is just a suggestion of what might be and what could be done if authorities put their minds to it.

  I chose to quote Shakespeare’s stirring King Henry speech because there comes a time when peaceful, restrained ways must yield in the face of danger to martial methods. Henry called his men into a near-unrestrained bloodlust on storming the city of Harfleur. On breaking through the walls, the men sacking the city often engaged in just that until the pent-up rage within them subsided. That is not what I am suggesting by the title.

  Rather, the call to war cannot be ignored. When the war trumpets sound, even the most peaceful of men must transform themselves into a creature suited for war. In a world that has become uncivilized, the restraints of civilization we happily live under in times of peace have no place. Behavior that is an asset today is a fatal handicap in a world without the rule of law.

  In this dystopian nightmare I have created, to do any good the deputies must abandon the former way of doing things—but not their values. There come tribulations of such magnitude that the ordinary world is transcended into a lower, darker place. To try and apprehend the “bad guys” and allow the due process of law to happen is impossible in such a scenario. The attempt would be futile. Sometimes you need to be warrior instead of a peacekeeper.

  A post-apocalyptic world features no rule of law and none of the courtesies that we expect even in major disasters in America. The best analogy for the anarchy of a post-apocalyptic world is war; take the siege of Sarajevo for example. What is inexcusable in peacetime becomes necessary in war. General Sherman said “War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” Moderation is a luxury in anarchy.

  The rule of force is supreme; the threat of the government’s power ultimately backs the rule of law. Anyone with guns, men, and determination can force their will upon others for good or for ill. How they do it and why they do it is important. I present a vision of order being created from chaos as the deputies and officers reorganize to return to a somewhat stable, civil life. To do so requires to meet force with force.

  In a grid-down scenario where the police cannot function, criminals will prey on the disarmed California population like the Vikings and the Mongols. Local thugs will prey on their neighbors and more savvy gangs, or even non-gangs that adopt raiding tactics, will quickly become a major problem. Police, veterans, and civilians who believe in honor and goodness will, like our warrior ancestors of old, stand against evil and go out and do battle. But will that response to evil be quick or long in coming?

  In this book, I explore how those whom are quite possibly the finest peace officers in the world become warriors. It is an alternative vision to police simply giving up and going home to protect their families or worse. I don’t believe EMP is a probability (more likely a civil war and California’s socialist government puts the police in the middle), but again, it is novel, offered in the spirit of entertainment.

  I present this tale as a warning to authorities to prepare for high-impact, low-probability events and as an example to law enforcement on how they can transform into an effective force in a world turned upside down.

  The effect of an EMP is largely unknown. At the very minimum, long-term loss of grid power (and with it, phones and the Internet) would disappear. That would make ordering food and even fuel to power cars, trucks, and generators nearly impossible. We would be reduced to the frontier days without the infrastructure that made life possible then. Disclaimer: I don’t know if radios or cars would or would not behave as I have written. So just go with it; the bar is low in this genre.

  Don Shift

  With a Whimper

  The most cataclysmic moment in American history was entirely anti-climactic. The car stalled and the computer died. That was it. There was no flash, no explosion, just an unusual “click” on the Motorola police radio. For a second, Deputy David Palmer sat in silence, then smacked the steering wheel
with his palm. In a few minutes he would realize that this was not an automotive problem, but the end of the world as he knew it.

  They only sign to mark the momentous change the beautiful Southern California day had just undergone was a stalled engine. Countless disabled vehicle calls taught him one thing; if the car stops running, try turning the key again. Many times, the “dead” car fired right up when Palmer tried it, shocking the clueless motorist who didn’t think of that. Except in his case, the car didn’t turn over.

  With a groan, he hit the hood release, got out of the car, and switched on the portable radio on his belt. It was second nature anytime he got out of a vehicle. The radio beeped twice, telling him it was active. From the trunk, he dug a screwdriver out of his tool bag and keyed his shoulder mic.

  “Station 1, 3-Adam-11,” he called. No answer from dispatch. “Station 1, 3-Adam-11.”

  Silence.

  He called his partner, Sean Sibley, who responded on the second try.

  “My unit died and Dispatch can’t hear me.”

  “Your car just went 10-7 too?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Mine too. I’m on my portable.”

  Palmer grabbed his cell phone. It was on but displayed “No service.”

  “Hey, uh, I think something bad happened. I’m gonna try something to start my car. Standby.”

  “Copy.”

  Palmer opened the hood and disconnected the battery terminals. He waited a minute and reattached them before turning the key. The Tahoe cranked over as normal. The electrical system had latched up. Weird.

  “3-Adam-11 to Ojai units,” Palmer called. “Anyone else have their unit go down?”

  1-Adam-11, a car assigned to the city of Ojai, responded. “Affirm, me too.”

  City car call signs started with 1 and the letter pronounced phonetically as Adam or Boy and the unincorporated area cars, three in number, began with 3A. Like many cities in Southern California, Ojai contracted with the sheriff for police services, having shuttered its own miniscule independent force decades ago.

  “Hey David, what did you do to start your car?” someone else radioed.

  “Disconnected the battery terminals, waited a second, and started it.”

  “Copy.”

  “Ojai units,” a detective radioed, “you see all the smoke?”

  “Negative,” David replied. “I was Code 7.” So much for eating lunch today. “What’s up?”

  “Lots of smoke in the air. Nothing big, but I can see several puffs of it all over town. Kind of electrical/ozone smell, too.”

  “It’s transformers exploding,” a deputy who had once been an apprentice lineman said, without identifying himself. “The sounds like gunshots were the fused cutouts blowing.”

  David steered his car towards the Dennison Grade, which would give him an aerial view into the city of Ojai. Several units were trying to raise the substation by radio alternating with calling Dispatch in Ventura, the county seat.

  Palmer liked living in Ventura County. An hour west of Los Angeles it was a comfortable, middle class place to live with lots of open green spaces. Much of that had changed since the Palmer family arrived to farm a century ago. Now the sugar beet fields were all gone, and strawberries, citrus, and avocados were the cash crops. It was still rural enough that that the nearly one million people in three separate urban areas seemed to blend in with the landscape. Any patrol deputy knew that despite the suburbs and occasional out-of-control celebrity they were just one call away from herding loose cows from the road.

  “Anyone got a working phone? And is your computer dead too?”

  “Affirmative on the MDC,” or mobile data computer, “negative on the phone. FM radio is blank too.” The chatter was so fast, no one identified themselves properly.

  “Switch to AM radio and listen to the static. Never heard anything like that before.”

  “I can’t even hear the other West County units.”

  David found it amazing how quickly radio discipline evaporated in the absence of Dispatch. Something was definitely off. As chatty as the Ojai units were, someone from one of the other three stations on the same channel should be heard.

  “Repeaters could be down.”

  “1-Adam-11, 3-Adam-13,” one of the county cars called. Senior Deputy Kohler had radio discipline, “back before your time, we didn’t have repeaters. You could still occasionally pickup clear traffic from twenty miles away. We should be hearing weak signals.”

  “Could be EMP,” David offered.

  “True.” Kohler paused for a second before keying the mic again. “To those of you who don’t know, EMP is an electromagnetic pulse, from a high-altitude nuke or solar flare. It shorts out all electric circuits. Definitely would fry the grid and it would explain why the computers, cell networks, and repeaters are down.”

  “That would explain this transformer I’m watching burn,” 5-Boy-6, a detective, radioed

  “Did you call county fire?”

  “Affirm, Engine 23 advises they’re driving to visual reports of smoke. Same radio problems as us.” David could see wisps of smoke rising from over a dozen different places.

  “Guys, so if this is EMP, why do our cars and radios work? Couldn’t this be a power outage or cyber-attack?”

  David spoke up again. “Who knows what happened. Somebody want to 10-19 to the station and check in with Sarge?”

  Senior Kohler, the ranking supervisor, spoke up. “Ojai units, here’s the plan. Everybody patrol your area, start asking people what’s up. Let’s see if we can find working phones, TV, radio, etc. See if someone with solar panels has Internet or not. I’m going by the station. Palmer, drive down to Santa Paula PD and see what they know, then head back. In the meantime, patrol neighborhoods and give any help you can.”

  Everyone took turns radioing in “Copy.”

  David knew that his wife, Brooke, would be at home sleeping. Gonna have to go by and wake her up since her alarm won’t go off. As a brand-new obstetrical nurse she was stuck working night shifts for the foreseeable future and would be dead to the world for several more hours. His sister Carlie, also a nurse, was probably safe at work and her husband could check up on her.

  Working for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office had been a lifelong dream of Palmer’s. He always wanted to be a cop, but in high school when he learned the distinction between the local city cops, the deputies, and the Highway Patrol, he had to go with the agency that truly did it all. Unlike many sheriff’s departments across the country, in California they did everything from policing the unincorporated areas to contract cities, search and rescue, the usual civil process serving and bailiff duties, to even traffic enforcement. And there were five contract cities and seven distinct county areas to work.

  It wasn’t as exciting as the office’s bigger brother to the south, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, but Ventura County still had part of Malibu and some fine-looking helicopters. A lot of it was institutional pride, but Palmer thought he had the best job in the world. The county was just big enough to keep busy, but still small and rural enough to be fun. It was also nice working for an agency that was well-respected professionally and by the public as well.

  On his way down the hill into Santa Paula, a landscaper from Thomas Aquinas College, a small university tucked in the hills, stopped David to ask what was going on. All David could do was shrug; nothing reassuring from a man who people expected to have all the answers. His own self-doubt and urge to deny his worst fears created an emotional and rational log-jam but he hid it well.

  If an EMP blast did occur, things would quickly become dire. Dire enough to require making drastic choices. Palmer was a prepper and took the time to learn about these things and prepare accordingly. But did an EMP actually happen? Fiction and documentaries always portrayed EMP as able to kill cars, watches, radios, and fry cell phones. It was odd that, as far as he could tell, the pulse didn’t disable the VHF radios and even left the cell phones on, even if they had no
service. The power was out and auxiliary generators didn’t seem to work. The facts didn’t fit what he expected, but nothing else would explain his observations. Cyber-attacks didn’t make cars randomly stop running or fill AM airwaves with static that popped and rolled in waves.

  Shock and denial aside, he knew beyond a reasonable doubt that an EMP event had occurred. Nothing else could explain the mass failure of the power system, complete with transformer fires, short-outs, and voltage surges, plus the loss of broadcast commercial radio, FM/VHF radio attenuation, and vehicles stalling.

  He burst out laughing; his best friends Sean Sibley and Sam Church, were right. An EMP had finally happened. Church and the Sibleys were also preppers, complete with years’ worth of food, ammo, and even gas masks. Palmer and his family concentrated on different calamities, like earthquakes, that were lower risk, but of higher probability. Living in earthquake country, it seemed prudent.

  Palmer was seasoned enough that panic or fear did not immediately set in. He figured he should have a deep sense of foreboding, but instead he was laughing. The lack of some tangible effect bordering on the supernatural left him in a state of semi-disbelief. His observations confirmed what his intellect told him, but the EMP was far less powerful than his expectations. The reality of the event not living up to his “back to the 1800s” hype combined with the sunny, warm summer day to produce a feeling that it was nothing more than a fluke.

  Coming into Santa Paula, he had to swerve around two cars stopped in the middle of the road. Everyone else had the good sense to coast to the curb. A few people waved at him wanting something, but he kept driving. Bewildered people stood on corners, in yards, and in front of business talking. Here too smoke hung in the air and there was a smell of ozone that pervaded everything. On one side street, a fire truck was fighting a grass fire that spread from the base of a charred electric pole.

  David parked in front of the police station and walked inside. Santa Paula was one of two small towns in the county that had an independent force. Instead of buzzing open the door, the receptionist walked over and opened it