by Don Shift
“Generator is down, sorry.”
“No worries. You guys too?”
“Yeah, Sergeant Hernandez is in Dispatch. I don’t know where the Chief is.”
“Thanks.” A pair of blue pants stuck out from underneath a desk. “Hi Sarge.”
“Who’s that?”
“Deputy Palmer, from Ojai. We wanted to see what was going on.”
Hernandez crawled out from underneath the desk. “Well, the power went out. Cars died and started back up, for the most part. A piece of crap Dodge one of the detectives was in crapped out, but the rest of our units are running.” He pointed up. “I figure something killed the main radio. The portables and car radios seem to be working. We could pick you guys up on the scanner occasionally. Everything else is gone. Generator tie in, gone. Every couple of minutes, someone walks in the lobby wanting to know what’s up.”
“We’ve been saying it’s EMP, you know, that’s where—”
“Yeah, yeah. I saw that TV movie Atomic Train. If that’s what happened, we’re screwed. Had a couple reports of transformer explosions. That would explain the smoke and telephone pole fires.”
“I saw county fire spraying one down. Started a grass fire in a vacant lot.”
“Hopefully we’ll get some news soon.”
“Well, if you need anything, just give us a call.”
“Copy. Stay safe.”
“You too.”
Though his mind was very far away, the sounds of radio chatter filtered through David’s ears. Other stations were coming in. With the repeaters down, the sounds were faint and raspy. A Fillmore unit was requesting additional units to set up a perimeter around the burning wreckage of a passenger jet that had gone down in a farm field.
Palmer knew that a high-speed plane crash often buried the wreckage and killed everyone on board. The fuselage never stuck out of the earth like a lawn dart. The fire department could do little and deputies much less. A morbid curiosity gripped him. He felt an urge to go and see the scene for himself, but that would make him no better than the lookie-loos. Though the pull to provide backup was strong, he resisted.
As it was now certainly an EMP, David would have to make some very hard decisions. The world would quickly fall apart. Even peaceful Ventura County would become a hellhole without modern communications, electricity, tap water, or working sewers. No food deliveries meant that the stores would be empty overnight and soon neighbors would be at each other’s throats. The danger of his job was about to increase exponentially.
His wife and mother safe at home, or at least close by, his thoughts turned to his father. Through a chance text message this morning, David knew his dad, a truck driver, was making a delivery to far-eastern LA County. The thought of his father, missing in a disabled truck or stuck in apocalyptic traffic, was too terrifying to think deeply about.
David was old enough to remember watching Reginald Denny being pulled from his truck and beaten in the intersection of Florence and Normandy during the 1992 LA Riots. It was a hell of a thing for his parents to let a child see, but from thereafter, he constantly worried about his dad falling victim to the same fate. While that feeling abated as he grew older and more rational, in the past years, with protesters blocking highways, the fear came back. His father recently obtained a CCW to carry his handgun and he and David developed an emergency communications plan.
Hurricane Katrina proved that in a grid-down emergency where policing was hopeless, many law enforcement officers would desert or look out for themselves. Even within the department, deputies talked about how they cared first about their families, then the public. This was no different with David. The safety and security of his family came first, then his partners and department second, and the public third.
His emotions were in conflict. Palmer’s devotion and obligation to duty wrestled with his concern for his family. Should he go home now, absconding when the county would need him most, or should he stay, trusting that his family was most likely safe?
The decision window was a very small one. He checked his watch. A little more than half-an-hour had passed. By nightfall, his options would be closed. Hearing a call from a unit he knew to be fifteen miles away, even though the call was broken and mostly unintelligible, stirred him out of his thoughts. Whatever phenomenon had been reducing radio range was lifting. That gave him an idea.
David turned and headed back up Highway 150 into Santa Paula with his mind made up; family first. He needed a tall mountain. From long experience, he felt comfortable speeding up or down the winding, narrow road. The old Crown Victorias cornered much better than the top-heavy Tahoes, even with their lowered suspension. Mailboxes and driveways flew by. In the shadows at the side of the road, a man was waving his arms. The man began walking carelessly out into the middle of the road. David slammed on the brakes and ground to a stop, a few feet from where the man stood.
Before, David had a chance to “explain” how dangerous it was to run out in front of a speeding police car during an unprecedented catastrophe, the man began to yell.
“Hey, help us! My grandmother is sick. Her oxygen machine stopped.”
“Where?”
“Follow me.” The man turned and jogged down his driveway. David followed, parked, and ran into the house, clutching his trauma kit as if it might do some good.
Inside, the man’s wife and daughter were sitting on the bed next to an elderly woman who lay still. Her wrinkled skin had taken on the unnatural pale pallor of the recently dead and the underside of her body was turning a slight pink as her blood began to pool at the low points of her cardiovascular system. David touched her throat, cool to the touch, and detected no pulse.
“How long has she been without oxygen?”
“I don’t know, maybe half an hour. When did this start? She can’t breathe without her machine. Her lungs are too weak. She had lung cancer.”
David glanced at the frozen wall clock: 1:47 PM. “Has that clock always been broken?”
“No, it plugs in. Stopped when the power goes out.”
Certainly she was dead by now, David thought. He got down and looked at the oxygen generator. The batteries should have kicked on, but sure enough, the circuit breaker had popped. Someone should have known to reset it and start the machine on battery power. It would have bought enough time to say a proper goodbye. There was no point in telling this to a grieving family.
“Looks like the machine got fried by an electrical surge. Something very bad happened. Power’s out all over. We can’t talk very far on our radios, Dispatch is gone. I can’t call an ambulance, even if it would do any good. Cells and landline phones are out too.”
“We noticed that.” The man looked distraught, but calm. His eyes were looking a little wet and unfocused. “My mom and dad, they’re in Ventura.”
“Not to worry, most cars still work and I’m sure they’ll be here once they get through traffic. You know how people drive when the traffic signals are out.” David sighed. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”
The man slowly nodded and sat down. David took a field interview card from his pocket and started taking the woman’s information. Under normal circumstances, he would have summoned county fire, a sergeant, and a medical examiner. One 3x5 field interrogation card of index information and a two-sentence narrative was all that was ever likely to be formally recorded about the woman’s death, he grimly surmised. He left a few minutes later with an empty promise to inform the coroner. David ignored the increasingly desperate radio traffic and the citizens of the rural Upper Ojai waving at him as he sped down the highway.
An hour or so after the pulse, David had made it to the top of Sulphur Mountain, 2,700 feet above sea level. His family’s emergency plan was to establish radio contact via ham radio and coordinate from there. The plan assumed that the emergency in question would be something like an earthquake. Unfortunately, their experience with the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which occurred at 4:31 in the morning while everyone was still at
home, was what his family based their plans on. They didn’t anticipate the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, or whoever caused this, would attack with nuclear weapons at high altitude.
From his lofty perch, traffic was coming in from all over the county now. He could hear Simi Valley units on his scanner. David switched his radio, still buzzing with calls of medical emergencies and fires, to a rarely used search and rescue channel. The plan was, if David was working, to make contact on this frequency, accessible to anyone with a VHF ham radio. Nothing except FCC regulations prevented non-law enforcement use of the frequency.
His first priority was to his father who would in turn check on his mom and could take care of Brooke, as self-sufficient as the two women were. Of course, success depended on whether or not his dad was in radio range. If he was alive and in the county, David knew he would make contact at some point. If his father was further away though, it would be fruitless.
David called “Papa 59, David 85.” The call signs were a joke: “Papa 59” was a play on the phonetic alphabet for “P”, pronounced pa-pa, and his father’s birth year, while “David 85” included his own birth year. If someone heard them, they might mistake the call signs as bleed-over from another county.
David repeated his call for about a minute.
“Well, David 85, it was about time you called. Been waiting to hear from you.”
David broke into a smile at his father’s voice. “Been a little busy. Where are you?”
“Simi Valley. Sitting on the 118 freeway near Rocky Peak.” He was just inside the county line.
“I didn’t expect to actually reach you, Dad.”
“Where are you, son?”
“Sulphur Mountain.”
“Well up there, you can hear a long, long ways.”
It was true. David loved the view. “I can see a long, long way. Lots of smoke. Guessing plane crashes and blown transformers. Maybe a brush fire in Newbury Park.”
“Yeah, I see smoke somewhere northwest of here. It isn’t burning too bad anymore, from what I can tell. Do you know if anyone is responding to it?”
“No idea, Dad.”
“Shame. Hey, it looks like I’m gonna have to walk home. The freeway is blocked at Kuehner Drive by a pile up. People coming down the hill here panicked, I guess, when their cars stalled out. Just so you know, I had to swerve to miss some jerk who stalled just around the curve and crashed. At least thirty cars up here, more than I can count down there,” Mr. Palmer said calmly.
If there was a crash of that magnitude on the relatively small commuter freeway, then CHP must be facing a nightmare at the bottom of the Conejo Grade in Camarillo where US 101 came north out of the greater LA area. It was the steepest grade in the entire American freeway system. Contrary to rumor, it was nothing like a Nepalese death road, but for cars unable to stop, the gentle curve at the bottom would be hard for most drivers to navigate without brakes.
“Are you okay Dad?”
“I’m fine, just not going anywhere.”
“Truck still run?” David asked.
“Oh yeah, these diesels are amazing. Not a hiccup. But not to worry, someone ran into the back of my truck. I’m boxed in tight. I need you to come get me.”
“Well sit tight, I’ll be on my way.”
“Not going to get in trouble for that, are you?” Mr. Palmer asked.
“That’s the least of our worries right now,” David said. “I’m on my way. Sit tight.”
“Copy.”
David took a long last look out along the horizon. Ordinarily, this was one of his favorite views that surveyed the entire county from deep into the mountains, north to Santa Barbara County, and out to the Channel Islands. Larry Hagman built his house up here. It was an unusually clear summer day with hardly any haze at all. Columns of smoke rose here and there, some large, some small. Not a single plane or jet contrail was visible in the sky. With a sigh, David turned away from his seventy-mile view and once again started down the mountain.
Using an innocuous sounding “public service” call, David figured he had a little longer than an hour before anyone really started to suspect he was missing. Given the chaos and poor communication, he could disappear for a bit. Using back roads to skirt any areas where his partners might be, he got down into Santa Paula again. Creeping through town was a little harder this time. Lights and siren might attract too much attention, so he simply rolled through stop signs and ignored requests for help.
After crossing the city, traffic was very light and that made it easy for him to race up the steep and twisting road up the other side of the valley. Ironically, even though it was called “car crash canyon” the road was less winding than its neighbor, enabling David to climb the hill at a reckless 55 miles per hour. Still, he had miles to go through orchards and farms. Out there it seemed like a normal day. Many of the farm workers wouldn’t notice anything beyond a silent radio until dark.
The only danger was traffic related. At any second, someone on a horse or a tractor might pull out in front of the speeding unit. In Moorpark the state highway was empty. Usually, truck traffic and commuters clogged the main thoroughfare. Not one to complain, David hit the siren and rolled Code 3 through town, setting a weekday speed record crossing from city limits to the freeway. He hoped no Moorpark deputies recognized him.
The freeway was also strangely empty of moving traffic. It had more to do with the time of day and nature of Ventura County commuters than anything else. David blew by a car on the shoulder and easily negotiated the ones that were abandoned in lanes. Stranded motorists waved at him, jumped up and down, and ran out behind him, begging for a ride. Sorry folks, it’s me and mine right now.
The very thought of what he was doing made him feel an emotion like guilt. It was a fear of getting caught, that something lesser than EMP had occurred and he would pay dearly for what he was doing. Since society hadn’t collapsed yet, he couldn’t excuse the feeling of duty caused by the emergencies occurring all over the place. His dilemma was rooted in the fact that he felt like the only one who know the ship was sinking. What would people have thought if Captain Smith departed the Titanic the moment the iceberg struck?
No more time for such thoughts, he was closing on Kuehner Drive at well over 100 miles per hour. David keyed his mic. “Papa 59, David 85.”
“Go ahead,” Mr. Palmer answered.
“Hey, is the underpass clear for me to turn around?”
“Yeah, the wreck is in the westbound lanes east of the overpass. You’re good. Just watch out for people in the shade underneath.”
“Okay, I’ll be there in two minutes. Meet me at the westbound on-ramp entrance.”
“I’ll hustle,” his father replied.
Mr. Palmer was sitting a few hundred yards from where he needed to be. He grabbed his cooler and bug out bag, then ran as fast as he could off the freeway. A sheriff’s patrol car screaming in at high speed with the siren blaring was going to get a lot of attention, and the last thing he and David needed was for everyone to see David waiting for his dad to jump in.
David turned on the siren as he approached the ramp, pumping the brakes and downshifting the transmission to slow down quickly. He killed the siren before he went under the freeway; he didn’t want the concrete to amplify the sound and deafen those sitting underneath in the shade. As he predicted, as soon as he came into sight people stood up and started moving towards his car like zombies to human flesh. Mr. Palmer was not waiting at the on-ramp as he promised. David stopped the car in the intersection. He looked to his right and saw his dad running pell-mell down the off-ramp, his cooler and bag swinging wildly in each arm.
“Go, go, go, go!” Mr. Palmer shouted as he dove into the passenger seat.
“Hold on,” David said.
At 130 miles per hour, the fastest he could go under the circumstances and just below what the Tahoe was capable of, the road noise was unbearably loud.
“Are you doing alright?” David asked.
“
Fine. Just shocked by how surreal it all feels.”
“So, how’d you get to Simi?” David asked in a yell.
“I drove,” his dad said with a grin.
“Smart ass.”
“I’m your father.” Mr. Palmer shouted his story of what happened.
He had been making a delivery to eastern LA County and was on his way back to the yard when the EMP happened. Just after he got on the 118 freeway, there was a loud pop on the AM radio before it turned to static. Cars started slowing down. A minority quite obviously lost power and coasted to the side of the road while most others who experienced less critical problems gently braked and pulled to the side. Many of the vehicles that stalled started back up and resumed driving. It took about fifteen minutes for the instant traffic jam to clear, all the while he slowly drove his truck through the mess.
“Some of them were just standing there, scratching their heads until someone came up and suggested turning the key again. No one ever thinks of that. It was kind of hilarious.”
“How do the cars still work?” David shouted over the road noise.
When it came to electronics, Mr. Palmer was fairly knowledgeable as a ham radio operator. He had qualified for his license when detailed knowledge of electronics and Morse Code was required. For him, studying the science of his hobby was a hobby unto itself. The knowledge of electronics was especially helpful chasing down bugs in the cars he and his son often restored together.
“Cars are pretty good at cutting down on radio frequency emissions from their wiring and electronics. It would mess up your radio reception. So, all the shielding and the metal bodywork of the car serves as good insulation against the airborne electric charge. That and none of the wires are really long enough to pick-up any induced current like a high voltage power line would. But as you can see, every car is different. If one critical component is able to pick up the charge, it’ll get fried. I suppose we lucked out on this one, somehow.”
“So how is it possible the radios are still working at all?”
“At the frequencies we’re using, over 100 MHZ, the blast puts out much less energy than at lower frequencies. The electronics we’re using are pretty robust, so as long as they were in an off-state, underground, shielded, in a building, grounded, etc. they survived. It’s the high frequency—that’s the technical term, it’s AM radio basically—you have to be worried about.”